Mummery Part 23

'Was she? I didn't see her.'

'Yes. She whisked into her room when she saw me.'

He took up his ma.n.u.script from the table.

'It has stopped short.' He turned it over ruefully; fingering the pages, he began to read and was sinking into absorption in it when she dashed it out of his hand.

'How dare you read it when I am with you?' she cried. 'It was written before you knew me. It isn't any good.... I know it isn't any good.'

He was stunned by this outburst of jealousy and protested,--

'There's years of work in it.'

'But what's the good of sitting here working, if you never do anything with it?'

He pointed to the sofa and said,--

'There's my work in there: full to the brim, notes, sketches, things half finished, things that need revision.... I've been waiting for something to happen. I could never work just to please other people and to fit successful actors with parts....'

'I'm a successful actress.'

'You? Oh, no.'

'But I am. I'm engaged to appear at the Imperium in _The Tempest_.

Charles Mann is designing the production.'

'I saw something about that, but I didn't believe it.'

'Charles Mann's work was like that,' she pointed to the sofa, 'until I met him.'

'You know him?'

'Yes.... Yes.'

(She could not bring herself to tell him.)

'Butcher will be too strong for him. You see, Butcher controls the machine.'

'But money controls Butcher!'

He was enraged.

'You! You to talk of money! That is the secret of the whole criminal business. Money controls art. Money rejects art. Money's a sensitive thing, too. It rejects force, spontaneity, originality. It wants repet.i.tion, immutability, things calculable. Money... You can talk with satisfaction of money controlling Butcher after our heavenly day with the sweet air singing of our happiness!'

'One must face facts.'

'Certainly. But one need not embrace them.'

Here in this room he was another man. The humility that was his most endearing quality was submerged in his creative arrogance. Almost it seemed that he resented her intrusion as a menace to the life which he had made for himself, the world of suffering and tortured creatures with which he had surrounded himself, the creatures whom he had loved so much that contact with his fellows had come to be in some sort a betrayal of them. To an extraordinary degree the atmosphere of the room was charged with his personality, and with the immense continuous effort he had made to achieve his purpose. Here there was something demoniac and challenging in him. He presented this empty room to her as his life and seemed to hurl defiance at her to disturb it.

She had never had so fiercely stimulating a challenge to her personality. In her heart she compared this austere room with the ceremony of the Imperium, and there was no doubt which of the two contained the more vitality. Here in solitude was a man creating that which alone which could justify the elaborate and costly machinery of the great theatre which had been used for almost a generation by the bland and boyish Sir Henry Butcher to exploit his own engaging personality.

Clara was ashamed of the jealousy which had made her s.n.a.t.c.h Rodd's work out of his hand. It had set his pa.s.sion raging against her. He who had faced the hostility and indifference of the world all through his ambitious youth was inflamed by the hostility of love which had shaken but not yet uprooted his fierce will--never to compromise, but to adhere to the logic of his vision. The rage in him was intolerable.

She said,--

'You don't like it?'

What?'

'My being at the Imperium.'

'It is not for me to like or dislike. I am not the controller of your movements. I would never control the movements of any living creature.'

'Except in your work.'

'They work out their own salvation. They are nothing to do with me, any more than the woman on the stairs.'

'But you love them.'

(He had made them as real to her as they were to himself.)

'They don't leave me alone. They want to live.... But they can only live on the stage.'

He shook back his head and with supreme arrogance he said,--

'As they will when the stage is fit for them.'

She could not bear the strain any longer, and to bring him back to actuality she said,--

'How old are you?'

'Thirty-one.'

His next move horrified her. He stepped forward, seized his ma.n.u.script, and tore it into fragments.

'There!' he said, 'are you satisfied?'

'No. That was childish of you.... You will only sit down and begin all over again.'

'I swear I will not. I swear it. It is finished. All that is over.... I don't know how I shall ever begin again. Perhaps I shall not.... All last night I was struggling to get away from it, to avoid facing it.... They're all mean and ign.o.ble and pitiful; brain-sick most of them; and not fit to live in the same world as you. They're not fit to be exhibited on the public stage, these poor nervous little modern people with their dried instincts and their withered thoughts, clever and helpless, rotting in inaction.... No. It has been all wrong. I've been a fool, but I couldn't pretend.... I think I knew it in my head, but it needed you to bring it home to me.... I'm not fit to live in the same world as you. I ought not to have seen you to-day....'

'Can't you laugh at yourself?'

'Laugh! Dear G.o.d, I do nothing else.'

'I mean--happily. You wouldn't be you if you didn't make mistakes--to learn. You had to learn more about your work than just the tricks of it. Isn't it so? You despise acting. But it is just the same there.

I wanted to learn more about it than the tricks.'