Chapter 8

'Never mind, Charles,' she said. 'Let us go and look at the stage, and you can tell me what you have planned, and then we will go out and talk, and decide what we will do during the holidays. I have promised to go to Sir Henry's in the Lakes for a few days, and Verschoyle has promised to motor me up there.'

Charles's fingers fumbled rather weakly round his lips, and she saw to her distress that he had been biting his nails again.

'Aren't you ever coming back, my chicken, my love? ... I'm sorry we came to London now. We should have gone to Sicily as I wanted. One can live in such places. Here everybody is so business-like, so set, so used to doing and thinking in one particular way.'

'Has anything happened?' asked Clara, knowing that he was never critical without a cause.

'No,' he replied, rather shortly, 'no.'

She was rather irritated by him. He had no right to be as foolish and helpless as to have let her humiliate him by extricating him from his argument with Smithson, upon which he ought never to have entered. Smithson was only a kind of tradesman after all.

They went on to the stage and Charles waxed eloquent over the scenery he had designed. Eloquence with Charles was rather an athletic performance. He took a tape measure from his pocket, and raced about with it, making chalk marks on the boards.

The scenery door was open, and the sunlight poured in in a great shaft upon him, and Clara, watching him, was suddenly most painfully sorry for him. He worked himself up into a throbbing enthusiasm, torrents of words poured from his lips, as with strange gesticulations he described the towering rocks, the wind-twisted trees, the tangle of lemons, the blue light illuminating the magician's grotto, the golden light that should hang about the rocky island jutting up from the sea. All this he talked of, while the sun shone through his long yellow hair and revealed its streaks of silver.... At last he stood in the sunlight, with his arms outstretched, as though he were evoking his vision from the heavens to take shape upon the stage.

Clara, watching him, perceived that he was a born actor. He trod the stage with loving feet, and with a movement entirely different from that which he used in the street or among people who were not of the theatre. This surely was the real Charles. The light of the sun upon him was inappropriate. It mocked him and inexorably revealed the fact that he was no longer young. The scenery door was closed and the discordance ceased, but more clearly than ever was Charles revealed as an actor treading easily and affectionately his native elevation. The influence of the place affected even himself, and after he had constructed his imaginary scenery round himself, he said,--

'One of the first parts I ever played was Ferdinand staggering beneath logs of wood.'

He assumed an imaginary log and recited,--

'This my mean task would be As heavy to me as 'tis odious; but The mistress which I serve quickens what's dead And makes my labours pleasures: Oh, she is Ten times more gentle than her father's crabbed; And he's composed of harshness. I must remove Some thousands of these logs and pile them up, Upon a sore injunction: my sweet mistress Weeps when she sees me work; and says such baseness Had never like executor.

He produced the illusion of youth, and his voice was so entrancing that Clara, like Miranda, wept to see him.... He threw off his part with a great shout, rushed at her and caught her up in a hug.

'Chicken,' he said, 'don't let us be silly any more. We have won through. Here we are in the theatre. We've conquered the stage, and soon all those seats out there will be full of eager people saying, "Who are these wonders? Can it be? Surely they are none other than Charles and Clara Mann?"'

'Day,' said she.

He stamped his foot impatiently.

'What's in a name? Day, if you like. Artists can and must do as they please. This is our real life, here where we make beauty. The rest is for city clerks and stockbrokers who can't trust themselves to behave decently unless they have a perfect net of rules from which they cannot escape.'

'I don't want to talk about it. Go on with your work, Charles.'

'I've finished for to-day.... Will you let me take you out to dinner?'

'No. I've promised Verschoyle.'

'Damn! You oughtn't to be seen with him so much. People will say you have left me for his money.'

'I thought artists didn't care what people say.'

'They don't, Clara. They don't.'

'You must be sensible, Charles. You're not safe. You can't take risks until you are successful.'

'Then I won't succeed. I won't go on.... A most unfortunate thing has happened. Clott has vanished with all the money in the bank.... I let him sign the cheques.'

'Oh! Oh! you fool, Charles.'

'He kept getting cheques out of me.'

'How?'

'He said he'd tell the police.'

Clara stamped her foot. Abominable! How abominable people were.... She had to protect Charles, but if she was with him she exposed him to the most fearful risk. Was ever a girl in so maddening a position?

What made it worse was that her attitude towards him had changed. She was no longer so utterly absorbed in him that she could only see life through his eyes. Apart from him she had grown and had developed her own independent existence.

'How much did he take?'

'Two hundred and ten pounds. We can't prosecute him, or he'll tell. He knows that, or he wouldn't have done it.'

'Where is he?'

'I don't know. Laverock met him the other day, and asked him about some committee business. He had the impudence to say that he had resigned, and had come into money, so that his name was now no longer Clott but Cumberland.'

And again Clara found herself in her heart saying, 'It is my fault.'

It was all very well for Charles to believe that the world was governed by magic. Art is magic, but she ought to have known that it is a magic which operates only among a very few, and that the many who are moved only by cunning are always taking advantage of them.... Poor Charles! Betrayed at every turn by his own simplicity, betrayed even by her eagerness to help him!

'It is too bad,' said Clara, with tears in her eyes. 'We can't do anything. Besides I would never send any one to prison, whatever they did. But what a dirty mean little toad.... How did he find out?'

'I don't know. He's the kind of man who hangs about the theatre and borrows five shillings on Friday night.'

Gone was the magic of the stage, gone the power in Charles. He looked just a tired, seedy fellow, more than a little ashamed of himself. He hung his head and muttered,--

'This always happens when I am rich. I've been terribly unhappy about it. I didn't think I could tell you. I went into a shop yesterday to buy a revolver, but I bought a photograph frame instead, because the man was so pleasant that I couldn't bear the idea of his helping me to end my life.... I seem to muddle everything I touch, and yet no one has ever dared to say that I am not a great artist.'

Clara walked away from him across the stage. There had been muddles before, but nothing so bad as this.

As she walked, she found that in watching him she had learned the art of treading the stage, and of becoming that something more than herself which is necessary for dramatic presentation. This sudden acquisition gave her a delighted thrill, and once again her life was flooded with magic, so that this new trouble, like her old, seemed very remote, and she could understand Charles's pretending that he must end his life even to the point of attempting to buy a revolver, which became impossible directly some one spoke pleasantly to him. She felt confident and secure and of the theatre which was a sanctuary that nothing in the outside world could violate.

'Don't worry, Carlo,' she said. 'I'll see that it is put straight.'

'Then you'll come back and stop this nonsense about living alone?'

'When _The Tempest_ is done we'll see about it. I don't want to risk that. _The Tempest_ is what matters now.'

'Are you going to play in it?'

'I don't know yet.... Will you go out into the auditorium and tell me what you think of my voice?'

Charles went up into the dress circle, and Clara, practising her newly-acquired art, turned to an imaginary Ferdinand--more vivid and actual to her now--and declaimed,--

'I do not know One of my sex! no woman's face remember, Save, from my glass, mine own; nor have I seen More that I may call men, than you, good friend, And my dear father: how features are abroad, I am skilless of; but, by my modesty,-- The jewel in my dower,--I would not wish Any companion in the world but you.'

She stopped. The vivid, actual Ferdinand of her imagination changed into the form of the lean, hungry-looking man of the book-shop. He turned towards her, and his face was noble in its suffering, powerful and strong to bear the burden upon the mind behind it. Very sweet and gentle was the expression in his eyes, in most pathetic contrast to the rugged hardness which a passionate self-control had shaped upon his features.... Her heart ached under this astonishment that in this phantom she could see and know and love his face upon which in life her eyes had never fallen.

'Go on,' called Charles, from the dress circle.... 'Admirable.... I never thought you could do it.'

'That's enough,' she replied, with a violent effort to shake free of her bewilderment and sweet anguish.

'If I meet him,' she said in her heart, 'I shall love him and there will be nothing else.'

Aloud she said,--

'I must not.'

She had applied herself to the task of furthering Charles's ambition, and until she had succeeded she would not yield, nor would she seek for herself in life any advantage or even any natural fulfilment.

Charles came back in a state of excitement.

'It was wonderful,' he said. 'What has happened to you? Your voice is so full and round. You lose yourself entirely, you speak with a voice that has in it all the colour and beauty and enchantment of my island. You move simply, inevitably, so that every gesture is rhythmical, and like a musical accompaniment to the words.... You'll be an artist. You are an artist. There has been nothing like it since the old days.... Duse could not do more with her voice.'

'I didn't know,' she said. 'I didn't know.'

'But I did,' he cried. 'I did. I knew you would become a wonder.... Bother money, bother Butcher, bother Clott, and damn the committee. Together we shall be irresistible--as we have been. You didn't tell me you were practising. If that is why you want to be alone I have nothing to say against it. I've been a selfish brute.'

She was deeply moved. Never before had Charles shown the slightest thought for her. Human beings as such were nothing to him, but for an artist, as for art, no trouble was too great, no sacrifice too extreme for him.

He seized her hands and kissed them over and over again.

'I've been your first audience,' he said. 'Come out now, and I'll buy you flowers; your room shall be so full of flowers that you can hardly move through them. As for Verschoyle, he shall pay. It shall be his privilege to pay for us while we give the world the priceless treasure that is in us.'

His words rather repelled and hurt her, and in her secret mind she protested,--

'But I am a woman. But I am a woman.'

It hurt her cruelly that Charles should be blind to that, blind to the cataclysmic change in her, blind to her new beauty and to her newly gathered force of character. After all, the magic of the stage was only illusion, a trick that, if it were not a flowering of the deeper magic of the heart, was empty, vain, contemptible, a thing of darkness and cajolery.

'Perhaps it was just an accident,' said Clara.

'Do it again!' said Charles, in a tone of command.

'What?'

'Do it again!'

'I can't.'

'Do it again, I tell you. When you do a thing like that you have to find out how you did it. Art isn't a thing of chance. You must do it again now.'

'No.'

To her horror and amazement he pounced on her, seized her roughly by the shoulders, and shook her until her head rolled from side to side and her teeth chattered. He was beside himself with passion, ruthless, impersonal in his fury to catch and hold this treasure of art which had so suddenly appeared in the child whom hitherto he had regarded as about as important as his hat or his walking-stick.

'By Jove,' he said, 'I might have known it was not for nothing that I fished you out of Picquart's studio....'

'How dare you speak to me like that?'

She knocked his hands away and stood quivering in an outraged fury, and lashed out at him with her tongue.

'I'm not paint that you can squeeze out of a tube,' she said. 'You treat people as though they were just that and then you complain if they round on you.... I know what you want. You want to squeeze out of me what your own work lacks....'

Charles reeled under this assault and his arms fell limply by his side.

'Forgive me,' he said, 'I didn't know what I was doing. I was knocked out with my astonishment and delight.... Really, really I forgot the stage was empty. I thought we were working....'

Clara stared at him. Could he really so utterly lose himself in the play as that? Or was he only persuading himself that it was so? ... With a sudden intuition she knew that in all innocence he was lying to her, and that what had enraged him was the knowledge, which he could never admit, that she was no longer a child living happily in his imagination but a human being and an artist who had entered upon a royal possession of her own. She had outstripped him. She had become an artist without loss of humanity. Henceforth she must deal with realities, leaving him to his painted mummery... She could understand his frenzy, his fury, his despair.

'That will do, Charles,' she said very quietly. 'I will see what can be done about Mr Clott, and whatever happens I will see that you are not harmed.... If you like, you can dine with Verschoyle and me to-night. You can come home with me now, while I dress. I am to meet him at the Carlton and then we are going on to the Opera.'

'Does Verschoyle know?'

'He knows that you are you and that I am I--that is all he cares about... He is a good man. If people must have too much money, he is the right man to have it. He would never let a man down for want of money--if the man was worth it.'

'Ah!' said Charles, reassured. This was like the old Clara speaking, but with more assurance, a more certain knowledge and less bewildering intuition and guess-work.

X

THE ENGLISH LAKES

A few weeks later, with Verschoyle and a poor relation of his, a Miss Vibart Withers, for chaperone, Clara left London in a 60 h.p. Fiat, which voraciously ate up the Bath Road at the rate of a mile every minute and a half.... It was good to be out of the thick heat of London, invaded by foreigners and provincials and turned into a city of pleasure and summer-frocks, so that its normal life was submerged, its character hidden. The town became as lazy and drowsy a spectacle as a field of poppies over which danced gay and brilliant butterflies. Very sweet was it then to turn away from it, and all that was happening in it, to the sweet air and to fly along between green fields and orchards, through little towns, at intervals to cross the Thames and to feel that with each crossing London lay so much farther away. Henley, Oxford, Lechlade, and the Cotswolds--that was the first day, and, breathing the clover-scented air, gazing over the blue plains to the humpy hills of Malvern, Clara flung back her head and laughed in glee.... How wonderful in one day to shake free of everything, to leave behind all trammels!

'No one need have any troubles now,' she said, with the bewitching smile that made all her discoveries so entrancing. 'When people get tied up in knots, they can just get into a car and go away. The world is big enough for everybody.'

'But people love their troubles,' replied Verschoyle. 'I have been looking for trouble all my life, but I can't find it. That's my trouble.'

'Everybody ought to be happy,' she said.

'In their own way. Most people are very happy with their troubles. They will take far more trouble over them than they will over their pleasures or making other people happy.'

'Do you remember the birds and fishes?'

'Do I not? It was the birds and fishes who introduced you to me.'

'I think this was what Charles meant by them--escape, irrelevance, holiday.'

'That's quite true. Nothing ought to be as serious as it is, for nothing is so serious as it looks when you really come to grips with it. Life always looks like a blank wall until you come up to it and then there is a little door which was invisible at a distance.... I found that out when I met you.'

'And did you go through it?'

'Straight through and out to the other side.'

Clara took his hand affectionately, and their eyes met in a happy smile. They were friends for ever, the relationship most perfectly suited to his temperament, most needed by hers.

From that she passed on to a frank discussion of her own situation with regard to Charles, and the hole he was in through the absconding Mr Clott.

'I knew that fellow was a scoundrel,' said Verschoyle. 'He tried to borrow money from me, and to pump me about the form of my horses. How on earth did he ever become secretary to a committee for the furtherance of dramatic art?'

'He turned up. Everything in Charles's life turns up. _I_ turned up.'

'And is your name really Day?'

'It was my grandfather's name.... I never had any one else. I remember no one else except an Italian nurse, with a very brown face and very white teeth. He died in Paris four years ago. My people were in India.'

'Ah! Families get lost sometimes in the different parts of the British Empire. It is so big, you know. I'm sure the English will lose themselves in it one of these fine days.'

He passed over without a word her position as wife and no wife, but became only the kinder and more considerate. It had eased and relieved her to talk of it. Every impediment to their friendship was removed, but sometimes as they walked through fields he would grip his stick very tight and lash out at a hemlock or a dog-daisy, and sometimes when he was driving he would jam his foot down on the accelerator and send the car whirling along. If they had met Charles walking along the road it would have gone ill with him.

They were six days on their journey up through Shropshire, Cheshire, and the murk of South Lancashire. They stayed in pleasant inns, and made many strange acquaintances, bagmen, tourists, young men with knapsacks on their backs escaping from the big towns, and sometimes they helped these young men over dreary stretches of road.

'The happiest six days of my life,' said Verschoyle, as they approached the mountains. 'I haven't toured in England before. Somehow in London one knows nothing of England. One is bored and one goes over to Homburg or Aix-les-bains. How narrow life is even with a car and a yacht!'

How narrow life could be Clara soon discovered at the Butchers', where London life was simply continued in a lovely valley at the bottom of which lay a little lake shining like a mirror and vividly reflecting the hills above it.

The Butchers had a long, low house in an exquisite garden, theatrically arranged so that the flowers looked as if they were painted and the trees had no roots, but were as though clamped and ironed to the earth. From their garden the very hills had the semblance of a back-cloth.

The house was full of the elegant young men and women who ran in and out of the theatre and had no compunction about interrupting even rehearsals. They chaffed Sir Henry, and fed Lady Butcher with scandal for the pleasure of hearing her say witty biting things, which, as she had no mercy, came easily to her lips. She studiously treated Clara as though she were part and parcel of Verschoyle, and to be accommodated like his car or his chauffeur.... Except as a social asset, Lady Butcher detested the theatre, and she loathed actresses.

As the days floated by--for once in a way the weather in Westmoreland was delicious--it became apparent to Clara that Lady Butcher hated the project of Charles's production of _The Tempest_. She never missed an opportunity of stabbing at him with her tongue. She regarded him as a vagabond.

Living herself in a very close and narrow set, she respected cliques more than persons. Verschoyle was rich enough to live outside a clique, but that a man with a career to make should live and work alone was in her eyes a kind of blasphemy. As for Clara--Lady Butcher thought of her as a minx, a designing actress, one of the many who had attempted to divert Sir Henry from the social to the professional aspect of the theatre, which, in few words, Lady Butcher regarded as her own, a kind of salon which gave her a unique advantage over her rivals in the competition of London's hostessry.

It was the more annoying to Lady Butcher that Clara and Verschoyle should turn up when they did as two Cabinet Ministers were due to motor over to lunch one day, and a famous editor was to stay for a couple of nights, while her dear friends the Bracebridges (Earl and Countess), with their son and daughter, were due for their annual visit.

Distressed by this atmosphere of social calculation, Clara spent most of her time with Verschoyle, walking about the hills or rowing on the lake; but unfortunately she roused the boyish jealousy in Sir Henry, who, as he had 'discovered' her, regarded her as his property, and considered that any romance she might desire should be through him.... He infuriated his wife by preferring Clara to all the other young ladies, and one night when, after dinner, he took her for a moon-light walk, she created a gust of laughter by saying,--

'Henry can no more resist the smell of grease-paint than a dog can resist that of a grilled bone.'

This was amusing but unjust, for Sir Henry regarded his desire for Clara's society as a healthy impulse towards higher things--at least, he told her so as he led her out through the orchard and up the stony path, down which trickled a little stream, to the crag that dominated the house and garden. It was covered with heather and winberries, and just below the summit grew two rowan-trees. So bright was the moon that the colour of the berries was almost perceptible. Sir Henry stood moon-gazing and presently heaved a great sigh,--

'A-a-ah!'

'What a perfect night!' said Clara.

'On such a night as this----'

'On such a night----'

'I've forgotten,' said Sir Henry. 'It is in the _Merchant of Venice_. Something about moonlight when Lorenzo and Jessica eloped. You would make a perfect Jessica.... I played Lorenzo once.'

Clara wanted to laugh. It was one of the most delightful elements in Sir Henry's character that he could never see himself as old, or as anything but romantically heroic.

'Yes,' he said; 'you have made all the difference in the world. It was remarkable how you shone out among the players in my theatre.... It is even more remarkable among all these other masqueraders in that house down there. All the world's a stage----'

'Oh, no,' said Clara. 'It is beautiful. I didn't know England was so lovely. As we came north in the car I thought each county better than the last--and I forgot London altogether.'