Mummery Part 28

'Don't you mind people blackmailing you?'

'If people are made like that.'

'Ah!' Verschoyle gave an indescribable gurgle of impatience. 'Look here, Mann, do try to realise the position. You can't get rid of this woman whatever she does because you have treated marriage as though you could take a wife as if it were no more than buying a packet of cigarettes.'

'I have never thought of Clara as my wife.'

'How then?'

'As Clara,' said Charles simply. 'She is a very great artist.'

Verschoyle was baffled, but Clara forgave Charles all his folly for the sake of his simplicity. It was true. The mistake was hers. What he said was unalterably true. She was Clara Day, an artist, and he had loved her as such. As woman he had not loved her or any other....

What in the ordinary world pa.s.sed for love simply did not exist for him at all.

She turned to Verschoyle.

'Please do what you can for us,' she said. 'And Charles, please don't try to think of it in anybody else's way but your own. I won't let them send you to prison. They don't want to do that. They would much rather have you great and powerful so as to bleed you....'

'It has been very wonderful since you came, chicken,' he said. 'I'm ten times the man I was. It seems so stupid that because we went into a dingy office and gabbled a few words we shouldn't be able to be together.... I sometimes wish we were back in France or Italy in a studio, with a bird in a cage, and you dancing about, making me laugh with happiness....'

'I'll see my lawyer,' said Verschoyle.

'For Heaven's sake, don't!' cried Clara. 'Once the lawyers get hold of it, they'll heap the fire up and throw the fat on it.'

'I'm sorry I forgot myself.... You're a good fellow, Charles, but so d.a.m.ned silly that you don't deserve your luck.'

They shook hands on it and Verschoyle withdrew, leaving Charles and Clara to make what they could of the confusion in which they were plunged.... Charles's way out of it was simply to ignore it. If people would not or could not live in his fancy world, so much the worse for them. He did not believe that anything terrible could happen to him simply because, though calamities of the most serious nature had befallen him, he had hardly noticed them. He could forget so easily.

He could withdraw and live completely within himself.

He sat at the table and began to draw, and was immediately entirely absorbed.

'Don't you feel it any more than that, Charles?' she asked.

'If people like to make a fuss, let them,' he said. 'It is their way of persuading themselves that they are important.... If they put me in prison, I should just draw on the walls with a nail, and the time would soon go by. The difference between us and them is that they are in a hurry and we are not. There won't be much left of my _Tempest_ by the time they've done with it.... The electricians have secret instructions from Butcher. There was nothing about lighting in my contract, so it is to be his and not mine, as if a design could stand without the lighting planned for it.... There are to be spot-lines on Sir Henry and Miranda and you, if he is still pleased with you....'

Charles was talking in a cold, unmoved voice, but she knew that there must have been a furious tussle. She was up in arms at once,--

'It is disgraceful!' she cried. 'What is the good of his pretending to let you work in his theatre if you can have nothing as you wish it?'

'He believes in actors,' said Charles, 'People with painted faces and painted souls, people whose minds are daubed with paint, whose eyes are sealed with it, whose ears are stopped with it....'

'Am I one of them?' she asked plaintively.

'No! Never! Never!' he said, looking up from his drawing. 'They'll turn us into a success, chicken, but they won't let us do what we want to do.... I shan't go near the place again. But you are Ariel, and without you there can be no _Tempest_.'

'I'll go through with it,' she said, her will setting. 'I'll go through with it, and I'll make nonsense of everything but you....

You've done all you can, Charles. Just go on working. That's the only thing, the only thing....'

As she said these words, she thought of Rodd with an acute hostility that amounted almost to hatred. It was the meeting with him that had so confounded all her aims, that sudden plunge into humanity with him that had so exposed her to love that even Verschoyle's tone had changed towards her.... With Charles, love was as impersonal as a bird's song.

It was only a call to her swift joy and claimed nothing for himself, though, perhaps, everything for his art. That was where he was so baffling. He expected the whole world to accept service under his banner, and was so confident that in time it would do so that no rebuff ruffled him.

Clara was tempted to accept his point of view, and to run all risks to serve him; but she realised now, as he did not, the forces arrayed against him. There was no blinking the fact that what the Butcher-Bracebridge combination detested was being forced to take him seriously: him or anything else under the sun. Even the public upon which they fawned was only one of several factors in their calculations.

'It will all come right, Charles,' she said. 'I am sure it will all come right. We won't give in. They have diluted you----'

'Diluted?' he exclaimed. 'Butchered!'

She admired him for accepting even that, but, in spite of herself, it hurt her that he still had no thought for her, but to him only artistic problems were important. The problems of life must be left to solve themselves. She could not help saying,--

'You ought not to leave everything to me, Charles.'

'You can handle people. I can't. I thought I was going to be rich, but there's no money. And even if this affair is a success I shall be ashamed of it.... I think I shall write to the papers and repudiate it. But it is the same everywhere. People take my ideas and vulgarise them. Actors are the same everywhere. They will leave nothing to the audience. They want to be adored for the very qualities they have lost.'

'You don't blame me, then?'

'Blame? What's the good of blaming any one. It doesn't help. It makes one angry. There is a certain pleasure in that, but it doesn't help.'

It was brought home to her, then, that all her care for his helplessness was in vain. He neither needed nor looked for help. It was all one to him whether he lived in magnificence in a furnished house or in apartments over a cook-shop.

'I've a good mind to disown the whole production now,' he said.

'No. No. They will do all they can to hurt you then.... I think they know.'

'Know what?'

'That you have a wife.'

He brought his fist down with such a crash on the frail table that it cracked right across, and Clara was sickeningly alarmed when she saw his huge hands grip the table on either side and rend it asunder.

There was something terrible and almost miraculous in his enormous physical vitality, and his waste of it now in such a petty act of rage forced her to admit that which she had been attempting to suppress, the thought of Rodd, and she was compelled now to compare the two men. So she saw Charles more clearly, and had to acknowledge to herself how fatally he lacked moral force. She trembled as it was made plain to her that the old happy days could never come again, and that the child who had believed in him so implicitly was gone for ever. She had the frame, the mind, the instinct of a woman, and these things could no longer be denied.

When his rage was spent, she determined to give him one more chance,--

'We can win through, Charles. We have Verschoyle backing us. I accept my responsibility, and I will be a wife to you.'

'For G.o.d's sake, don't talk like that. I want you to be as you were, adorable, happy, free.'

She shook her head slowly from side to side.

Charles, offended, went out. She heard him go blundering down the stairs and out into the street.

She turned to her couch by the window and lay looking at the sun setting behind the roofs, chimneys, and towers of London. Amethyst and ruddy was the sky: smoked yellow and amber: blue and green, speckled with little dark clouds. She drank in its beauty, and lost herself in the dying day, aching at heart because there was nowhere in humanity a beauty of equal power in which she could lose herself, but everywhere barriers of egoism, intrigue, selfish calculation.... She thought of the little bookseller in the Charing Cross Road.... 'Doing good to others is doing good to yourself....' Ay, but make very sure that you are doing good and not well-intentioned harm.

She had meant to help Charles, had sacrificed herself to him, and look what had come of it! Deep within her heart she knew that she had been at fault, and that the mischief had been done when she had imposed her will on him.... As a child she had been brought up in the Catholic faith, and she had still some remnants of a religious conscience, and to this now she whispered that this was the sin against the Holy Ghost, for one person to impose his will on that of another.

XV