The Way of Ambition Part 34

What was Jacques Sennier's strongest instinct?

Madame Sennier had made a powerful impression on Heath, and he had been greatly flattered by the deep attention with which she had listened to what he had to say about her husband's opera.

"Here's a man who knows what he is talking about," she exclaimed, when he finished speaking. When he got up to leave the box she had looked full into his eyes and said: "You are going to do something, too."

Could Jacques Sennier have won his triumph alone?

Impulse was boiling up in Heath. After all that had happened that night he felt as if he could not go to bed without accomplishing some decisive action. Powers were on tiptoe within him surely ready for the giant leap.

He got up, went to the piano, went to his writing-table, fingered the ma.n.u.script paper covered with tiny notes which lay scattered upon it.

But, no, it would be absurd, mad, to begin to work at such an hour. And, beside, he could not work. He could not be patient. He wanted to do something with a rush, to change his life in a moment, to take a leap forward, as Sennier had done that night, a leap from shadow into light.

He wanted to grasp something, to have a new experience. All the long refusal of his life, which had not seemed to cost him very much till this moment, abruptly, revengefully attacked him in the very soul, crying: "You must pay for me! Pay! Pay!" He hated the thought of his remote and solitary life. He hated the memory of the lonely evenings pa.s.sed in the study of scores, or in composition, by the lamp that shed a restricted light.

The dazzle of the Covent Garden lamps was still in his eyes. He longed, he l.u.s.ted for fame.

Afterwards he said to himself: "That night I was 'out' of myself."

Charmian had spurred his nature. It tingled still. There had been something that was almost like venom in that whisper of hers, which yet surely showed her love. Perhaps instinctively she knew that he needed venom, and that she alone could supply it.

The strangest thing of all was that she had never heard his music, knew nothing at first hand of his talent, yet believed in it with such vital force, such completeness. There was something almost great in that. She was a woman who absolutely trusted her instinct. And her instinct must have told her that in him, Claude Heath, there was some particle of greatness.

He loved her just then for that.

"Oh--and good-night, Mr. Heath."

Claude's cheeks burned as if Paul Lane had laid a whip across them.

Again, as when he first entered it that night, he looked at the big room. How had he ever been able to think it cosy, home-like? It was dreary, forbidding, the sad hermitage of one who was resolved to turn his back on life, on the true life of close human relations, of inspiring intimacies, of that intercourse which should be as bread of Heaven to the soul. It was a hateful room. Nothing great, nothing to reach the hearts of men could be conceived, brought to birth in its atmosphere. Jacques Sennier, shut in alone, could never have written his opera here. In vain to try.

With an impulse of defiant anger Claude went to the writing-table, s.n.a.t.c.hed up the music sheets which lay scattered upon it, tore them across and across. There should be an end to it, an end to austere futilities which led, which could lead, to nothing. In that moment of unnatural excitement he saw all his past as a pale eccentricity. He was bitterly ashamed of it. He regretted it with his whole soul, and he resolved to have done with it.

Brushing the fragments of ma.n.u.script off on to the floor he sat quickly down at the table. Something within him was trying to think, to reason, but he would not let it. He saw Charmian's eyes, he heard her quick whisper through the applause. She knew for him, as Madame Sennier had known for her husband. Often others know us better than we know ourselves. The true wisdom is to banish the conceit of self, to trust to the instinct of love.

He took a pen, leaned over the table, wrote a letter swiftly, violently even. His pen seemed to form the words by itself. He was unconscious of guiding it. The letter was not long, only two sides of a sheet. He blotted it, thrust it into an envelope, addressed, closed, and stamped it, got up, took his hat, and went out of the studio.

In a moment he was in the deserted road. The large policeman, who had eyed him with such grave suspicion, was gone. No one was in sight. The silver of the moonlight had given place to a faint grayness, a weariness of the night falling toward the arms of dawn.

Claude walked swiftly on, turned the corner, and came into the thoroughfare which skirts Kensington Gardens and the Park. Some fifty yards away there was a letter box. He hurried toward it, driven on by defiance of that within him which would fain have held him back, by the blind instinct to trample which sometimes takes hold of a strong and emotional nature in a moment of unusual excitement.

"The great refuser! No, I'll not be that any longer."

As he drew near to the letter box he felt that till now he had been a composer. Henceforth he would be a man. He had lived for an art.

Henceforth he would live for life, and would make life feel his art.

He dropped his letter into the box.

In falling out of his sight it made a faint, uneasy noise.

Claude stood there like one listening.

The grayness seemed to grow slightly more livid over the tree-tops and behind the branches. The letter did not speak again. So he thought of that tiny noise, as the speech of the dropping letter. It must have slid down against the side of the box. Now it was lying still. There was nothing more for him to do but to go home. Yet he waited before the letter box, with his eyes fixed upon the small white plaque on which was printed the time of the next delivery--eight-forty A.M.

Was it the sound, or was it the movement preceding the sound, which had worked a cold change in his heart? He felt almost stunned by what he had done, like a man who strikes and sees the result of his blow, who has not measured its force, and sees his victim measure it. Eight-forty A.M.

A step sounded. He looked, and saw in the distance the large policeman slowly advancing.

When he was again in his house he closed the front door softly, and went once more to the studio. He looked round it, examining the familiar objects: the piano, his work table, the books, the deep, well-worn, homely chairs, the rugs which Mrs. Mansfield had liked. On the floor, by his table, lay the fragments of ma.n.u.script music. How had he come to tear it, his last composition?

He went over to the window, opened a square of the gla.s.s, sat down on the window-seat, and looked out to the tiny garden. A faint smell, as of dewy earth, rose from it, fresh, delicate, and--somehow--pathetic. As Claude leaned on the window-sill this frail scent, which seemed part of the dying night, connected itself in his mind with his past life. He drew it in through his nostrils, he thought of it, and vaguely it floated about the long days and nights of his work-filled loneliness, making them sad, yet sweet. He had had an ideal and he had striven to guard it carefully. He had lived for it. To-night he had cast it out in a moment of strange excitement. Had he done wrong? Had he been false to himself?

The mere fact that he was sitting and forming such questions in his mind at such a moment proved to him that he had acted madly when he had written and posted his letter. And he was overcome by a sense of dread.

He feared himself, that man who could act on a pa.s.sionate impulse, brushing aside all the restraints that his reason would oppose. And he feared now almost unspeakably the result of what he had done. He had given himself to the life which till now he had always avoided. He had broken with the old life.

At eight-forty that morning his letter would be taken out of the box and would start on its journey. Before night it would have been read and probably answered. Sweat broke out on his face--a feeling of desperation seized him. He loved his complete command of his own life, complete, that is, in the human sense. He had never known how much he loved it, clung to it, till now. And he must part from it. He had invited another to join with him in the directing of his life. He had written burning words. The thought of Madame Sennier and all she had done for her husband had winged his pen.

The delicate smell from the little garden recalled him to the center. He had been, he felt, crazily travelling along some broken edge. The earth poured forth sobriety, truth dew-laden. He had to accept the influence.

No longer, in this grayness that grew, that would soon melt in rose and in gold, did the dazzle of the Covent Garden lamps blind his eyes. In this coolness of the approaching morning l.u.s.t for anything was impossible to him. Fame was but a shadow when the breast of the great mother heaved under the least of her children. A bird chirped. Its little voice meant more to Claude than the tempest of applause which had carried him away in the theater.

Nature took him in the dawn and carried him back to himself. And that was terrible. For when he was himself he knew that he wished he had never written that letter of love to Charmian.

The dawn broke. The light, creeping in through the lattice, touched the fragments of music paper which lay scattered over the floor. Claude looked at them, and thought:

"If only my letter lay there instead!"

CHAPTER XIV

It was the end of January in the following year, and Charmian and Claude Heath had been married for three months. The honeymoon was over. The new strangeness of being husband and wife had worn away a little from both of them. Life had been disorganized. Now it had to be rearranged, if possible, be made compact, successful, beautiful.

For three months Claude had done no work. Charmian and he had been to Italy for their honeymoon, and had visited, among other places, Milan, Florence, Siena, Perugia, Rome, and Naples. They had not stayed their feet at the Italian lakes. Charmian had said:

"Every ba.n.a.l couple who want to pump up a feeling of romance go there.

Don't let us join the round-eyed, open-mouthed crowd, and be smirked at by German waiters. I couldn't bear it!"

Her horror of being included in the crowd pursued her even to the church door of St. Paul's, Knightsbridge.

Now she was secretly obsessed by one idea, one great desire. She and Claude must emerge from the crowd with all possible rapidity. The old life of obscurity must be left behind, the new life of celebrity, of fame, be entered upon. Both of them must settle down now to work, Claude to his composition, she to her campaign on his behalf. Of this latter she did not breathe a word to anyone. Her instinct told her to keep her ambition as secret as possible for the present. Later on she would emerge into the open as an English Madame Sennier. But the time for laurel crowns was not yet ripe. All the spade work had yet to be done, with discretion, abnegation, a thousand delicate precautions. She must not be a young wife in a hurry. She must be, or try to be, patient.

The little old house near St. Petersburg Place had been got rid of, and Charmian and Claude had just settled in Kensington Square.

Charmian thought of this house in Kensington Square as a compromise.

Claude had wished to give up Mullion House on his marriage. Seeing the obligation to enter upon a new way of life before him he had resolved, almost with fierceness, to break away from his austere past, to destroy, so far as was possible, all a.s.sociations that linked him with it. With an intensity that was honorable, he set out to make a success of his life with Charmian. To do that, he felt that he must create a great change in himself. He had become wedded to habits. Those habits must all be divorced from him. An atmosphere had enfolded him, had become as it were part of him, drowning his life in its peculiar influence. He must emerge from it. But he would never be able to emerge from it in the little old house which he loved. So he got rid of his lease, with Charmian's acquiescence.

She did not really want to live on the north side of the Park. And the neighborhood was "Bayswatery." But she guessed that Claude was not quite happy in deserting his characteristic roof-tree, and she eagerly sought for another. It was found in Kensington Square. Several interesting and even famous persons lived there. The houses were old, not large, compact. They had a "flavor" of culture, which set them apart from the new and mushroom dwellings of London, and from all flats whatsoever.

They were suitable to "artistic" people. A great actress, much sought after in the social world, had lived for years in this square. A famous musician was opposite to her. A baronet, who knew how to furnish, and whose wife gave delightful small parties, was next door but three. A noted novelist had just moved there from a flat in Queen Anne's Mansions. In fact, there was a cachet on Kensington Square.