Mummery Part 22

XII

RODD AT HOME

They met on the morrow, a hot August day, with the heat quivering up from the pavements and the walls of the houses.... Rodd was the first to arrive at the book-shop where they had arranged to meet. The bookseller chaffed him about the 'young leddy,' because Rodd had never been known to speak to any one--male or female, in the shop.

'That's a fine young leddy,' said the bookseller. 'She knows that to do good to others is to do good to yourself. And mind ye, that's a fact. It's not preaching. It's hard scientific fact.'

'Who is she?' asked Rodd.

'She's an actress-girl, and she is friendly with lords. How she came to find a poor shop like mine I cannot tell ye. But in she walked, and my luck turned from that day.'

Clara came in. She stood on the threshold of the shop and turned over the papers that stood there on a table. She had seen Rodd, but wished to gain a moment or two before she spoke to him, so great had been the shock of meeting him. Since leaving him the day before she had done nothing at all but wait for the time to come for her to see him again, but when the time came she had to force her way out of the brooding concentration upon him which absorbed all her energies. She dreaded the meeting. In recollection, his personality had been clearer and more precise to her than in his actual presence, when the force of his ideas obscured everything else. He was unhappy, he was poor, he was solitary, and it angered her that such a man should be any one of these things. He seemed so forceful and yet to be poor, to be unhappy, to be solitary in a world where, as she had proved, wealth and companionship were so easy of access, argued some weakness.... He waited for her to move, and that angered her. He stood still and waited for her to move.

So fierce was the gust of anger in her that she nearly walked out of the shop then and there, but she saw his eyes intent upon her and she went up to him, holding out her hand. He gripped it tightly and said,--

'I was afraid you might not come.'

'Why should I not?'

'I have so little to give you.'

'You gave me a good deal yesterday.'

'Everything.'

The bookseller looked up at the bust of William Morris on his poetry shelves and winked. Then he tip-toed away.

Clara forgave him for not moving to meet her. His directness of speech satisfied her as to his strength and honesty.

Neither was disposed to waste time. Their intimacy had begun at their first meeting.

'It is too hot in London,' he said. 'Shall we walk out to Highgate or Hampstead?'

Clara wanted to touch him, to make certain that he was really a man and not a mere perambulating mind, and she laid her hand on his arm. It was painfully thin, and she knew instinctively that he was not properly cared for, and then again she was full of mistrust. Was it only her sympathy that involved her life with his? ... The shock of it had made it perfectly clear that in Charles, as a man, she had never had the smallest interest. That had been disastrous, and she shrank from creating more trouble by her impetuosity. To hurt this man would be serious. No one could hurt Charles except himself; and even then he would always wake up in the morning singing and whistling like a happy boy or a blackbird in a cherry-tree in blossom.

They went by tube to Highgate, making no attempt to talk through the clatter and roar of the train in the tunnel.

As they walked up the long hill he said,--

'You have knocked me out. I never thought any one would do that. I never thought I should meet any one as strong as myself.... Love's a terrible thing. The impact of two personalities. It breaks everything else, leaves no room for anything else.'

'I hoped it would make you happy,' said Clara, accepting as entirely natural that they should sweep aside everything that stood between them and their desire to be together and to share thoughts, emotions, all the deep qualities in them that could be revealed to no one else. She could no more deny him than she could deny the sun rising in the morning, and for the moment she was content to forget every other element in her life.... It was so inevitably right that, having met in the heart of London, they should turn their backs on it and put themselves to the test of earth, sunshine, blue sky, and trees in their summer green, and water smiling in the sun. The furious energy in their hearts made the hot August day, the suburban scene, and the indolent suburban people seem toy-like and unreal, as though they were looking down upon it from another world, and so they were, for they had plunged to the very beginnings of Creation, and their new world was in the making. So great is the power of love that, extracting all the truth from the world as men have made it, it sweeps the rest away and begins again, discarding, destroying, but most tenderly preserving all that is vital and of worth. Love takes its chosen two, and weaves a spell about them, to preserve them from the fretting contact of the world, that they may have the power to withstand the agony of creation which sweeps through them, and never rests until they are forged into one soul, one world, or parted, broken and cast down.

Of these two it was Rodd who suffered most. The fierce will that had maintained him in his long labours for the art he worshipped would not yield. He wanted both, his work and this sudden, surprising girl who had walked into his life, and he wanted both upon his own terms. At the same time the conflict set up in him made him only the more sensitive to beauty and to the simple delights of the gardens and fields through which they pa.s.sed.... This was new for him. He had enjoyed such things before only with a remote aesthetic detachment.

This, too, he was loath to renounce, but the swift joy in the girl was too strong for him. To such beauty the sternest will must bend. No bird's song, no sudden light upon a cloud, no trembling flower in its ecstacy, no tree in full burst of blossom could tell of so high a beauty as this joy that flashed from the very depths of her soul into her eyes, upon her lips, softening her throat, liquefying her every movement, and into her voice bringing such music as no poet has ever sung, no musician's brain conceived, music sent from regions deeper than the human soul can know to go soaring far beyond the limits set to human perception.

Rodd was dazed and dizzy with it, and longed every now and then to touch her, to hold her, to make sure that in the swiftness of her joy she would not fly away.... He talked gravely and solemnly, with an intent concentration, about the persons in his life who compared so sorrily with her. He was obviously composing them into a drama, which, however, he dared not carry to any conclusion. That there could ever be such another day as this was beyond his hopes, that he could ever return to what he was beggared his endurance....

'A queer thing happened to me the other day,' he said. 'I live among strange people, hangers-on of the theatre and the newspaper press.

There is a woman----'

Clara caught her breath and looked tigerish. He did not notice the change and went on.

'There is a woman. She lives immediately below me. She has two children and G.o.d knows how she lives. She used to wait for me on the stairs in the evening to watch me go up. But I never spoke to her----'

Clara smiled happily.

'She used to do me little services. She would darn my socks, and sometimes cook me some dainty and lay it outside my door. This went on for months, I never spoke to her, because she has a terrible mother who lives with her.... A week or two ago, she met me as I came upstairs in the evening, and told me one of her children was ill, and asked me to go for the doctor.... I did so, and she looked so exhausted that I went in and helped her. The mother was no use at all; a fat, lazy beast of a woman who drinks, swears, eats, and sleeps.... We wrestled with death for the life of the child, but we were beaten.... It died.

She waits for me now, and tries to talk to me, but I will not do it.

She is frenzied in her attentions. She wants sympathy. She has it, but wants more than that. A word from me, and I should never be able to shake her off. She would cling to me, and because she clung she would believe that she loved me, but she would have nothing but my weakness.... It has happened before. They seem to find some bitter triumph in a man's weakness.'

The humility of his confession touched Clara deeply. It was the humility of the man's feeling, in contrast with his ferocious, intellectual arrogance, that moved her to a compa.s.sion which steadied her in her swift joy. His story revealed his life to her so vividly that she felt that without more she knew him through and through.

Everything else was detail with which she had no particular concern.

They walked along in silence for some time, he brooding, she smiling happily, and she pictured the two sides of his life, the rich and powerful imaginative activity, and the simple tenderness of his solitude.

It seemed to be her turn to confess, but she could not. The day's perfection would be marred for them, and that she would not have. He would understand. Yes, he would understand, but men have illusions which are very dear to them. She must protect them, and let him keep them until the dear reality made it necessary for him to discard them.

At Hampstead they came on a holiday throng and mingled with them, glad once again to be in contact with simple people taking the pleasures for which they lived. There were swing-boats, merry-go-rounds, cocoa-nut shies, penny-in-the-slot machines.... The proprietor of the merry-go-round was rather like Sir Henry Butcher in appearance, and Clara realised with a start that the Imperium and this gaily painted machine were both parts of the same trade. The people paid their twopence or their half-guineas and were given a certain excitement, a share in a game, a pleasure which without effort on their part broke the monotony of existence.... Of the two on this August day she preferred the merry-go-round. It was in the open air, and it was simple and unpretentious; and it was surely better that the people should be amused with wooden horses than with human beings as mechanical and as miserably driven by machinery.... She was annoyed with Rodd because he was exasperated by the silly giggling of the servant-girls and the raffish capers of the young man.

'I hate the pleasures of the people,' he said. 'They give the measure of the quality of their work--lazy, slovenly, monotonous repet.i.tion, producing nothing splendid but machines, wonderful engines, marvellous ships, miraculous motor-cars, but dull, listless, sodden people--inert.

It is the inertia of London that is so appalling.'

Clara made him take her on the wooden horses, and they went round three times. He admitted reluctantly that he had enjoyed it.

'But only because you did.'

To try him still further she made him have tea in the yard of an inn, at a long table with a number of East Enders, whole families, courting couples, and young men and maidens who had selected each other out of the crowd. They stared at the remarkable pair, the elegant young woman and the moody, handsome man, but they made no impertinent comment except that when they left a girl shrieked,--

'My! look at her shoes.'

And another girl said mournfully,--

'I wisht I 'ad legs like _that_ and silk stockings.'

It was near evening. The haze over the heath shimmered with an apricot glow. Windows, catching the low sun, blazed like patches of fire. The people on the heath dwindled and seemed to sink away into the landscape, and their movements were hardly perceptible.

Rodd asked,--

'Has it been a good day for you?'

'A wonderful day. I want to see where you live.'

He took her home. Down in London, after the Heath, the air seemed thick and stifling. The square in which he lived was surrounded with unsavoury streets from which smells that were almost overpowering were wafted in. His house was a once fashionable mansion now cut up into flats. He had what were once the servants' quarters under the roof, three rooms and a bathroom. The windows of his front room looked out on the tops of trees. Here he worked. The room contained nothing but a table, a chair, a piano, and a sofa.

'This is the only room,' he said.

'That woman was waiting for you,' said Clara.