The Way of Ambition Part 43

"Well, perhaps it is."

"Cosier, more intime."

She sat down with a little sigh.

"I'm going to have a cigarette."

She drew out a thin silver case, opened it.

"A teeny Russian one."

Claude struck a match. She put the cigarette between her lips, and leaned forward to the tiny flame.

"That's it."

She sighed.

After a moment of silence she said:

"I'm glad you couldn't work in the little room. If you had been able to we should never have had this."

"We!" thought Claude.

"And," she continued, "I feel this is the beginning of great things for you. I feel as if, without meaning to, I'd taken you away from your path, as if now I understood better. But I don't think it was quite my fault if I didn't understand. Claudie, do you know you're terribly reserved?"

"Am I?" he said.

He shifted in his chair, took the cigar out of his mouth, and put it back again.

"Well, aren't you? Two whole months, and you never told me you couldn't work."

"I hated to, after you'd taken so much trouble with that room."

"I know. But, still, directly you did tell me, I perfectly understood.

I"--she spoke with distinct pressure--"I am a wife who can understand.

Don't you remember that night at Jacques Sennier's opera?"

"Yes."

"Didn't I understand then? At the end when they were all applauding?

I've got your letter, the letter you wrote that night. I shall always keep it. Such a burning letter, saying I had inspired you, that my love and belief had made you feel as if you could do something great if you changed your life, if you lived with me. You remember?"

"Yes, Charmian, of course I remember."

Claude strove with all his might to speak warmly, impetuously, to get back somehow the warmth, the impulse that had driven him to write that letter. But he remembered, too, his terrible desire to get that letter back out of the box. And he felt guilty. He was glad just then that Charmian had turned out those two burners.

"In these months I think we seem to have got away from that letter, from that night."

Claude became cold. Dread overtook him. Had she detected his lack of love? Was she going to tax him with it?

"Oh, surely not! But how do you mean?" he broke in anxiously. "That was a special night. We were all on fire. One cannot always live at that high pressure. If we could we should wear ourselves out."

"Yes, perhaps. But geniuses do live at high pressure. And you are a genius."

At that moment the peculiar sense of being less than the average man, which is characteristic of greatly talented men in their periods of melancholy and reaction, was alive in Claude. Charmian's words intensified it.

"If you reckon on having married a genius, I'm afraid you're wrong," he said, with a bluntness not usual in him.

"It isn't that!" she said quickly, almost sharply. "But I can't forget things Max Elliot has said about you--long ago. And Madre thinks--I know that, though she doesn't say anything. And, besides, I have heard some of your things."

"And what did you really think of them?" he asked abruptly.

He had never before asked his wife what she thought of his music. She had often spoken about it, but never because he had asked her to. But this apparently was to be an evening of a certain frankness. Charmian had evidently planned that it should be so. He would try to meet her.

"That's partly what I wanted to talk about to-night."

Claude felt as if something in him suddenly curled up. Was Charmian about to criticize his works unfavorably, severely perhaps? At once he felt within him a sort of angry contempt for her judgment.

Charmian was faintly conscious of his fierce independence, as she had been on the night of their first meeting; of the something strong and permanent which his manner so often contradicted, a mental remoteness which was disagreeable to her, but which impressed her. To-night, however, she was resolved to play the Madame Sennier to her husband, to bring up battalions of will.

"Well?" Claude said.

"I think, just as I know Madre does, that your things are wonderful. But I don't think they are for everybody."

"For everybody! How do you mean?"

"Oh, I know the bad taste of the crowd. Why, Madre always laughs at me for my horror of the crowd. But there is now a big cosmopolitan public which has taste. Look at the success of Strauss, for instance, of Debussy, and now of Jacques Sennier--our own Elgar, too! What I mean is that perhaps the things you have done hitherto are for the very few.

There is something terrible about them, I think. They might almost frighten people. They might almost make people dislike you."

She was thinking of the Burningtons, the Drakes, of other Sennier-worshippers.

"I believe it is partly because of the words you set," she added. "Great words, of course. But where can they be sung? Not everywhere. And people are so strange about the Bible."

"Strange about the Bible!"

"English people, and even Americans, at any rate. There is a sort of queer, absurd tradition. One begins to think of oratorio."

She paused. Claude said nothing. He was feeling hot all over.

"I can't help wishing, for your own sake, that you wouldn't always go to the Bible for your inspiration."

"I daresay it is very absurd of me."

"Claudie, you could never be absurd."

"Anybody can be absurd."

"I could never think you absurd. But I suppose everyone can make a mistake. It seems to me as if there are a lot of channels, some short, ending abruptly, some long, going almost to the center of things. And genius is like a liquid poured into them. I only want you to pour yours into a long channel. Is it very stupid, or perverse, of me?"