The Way of Ambition Part 49

"The devil's own ambition."

Crayford had not mistaken his man. He seldom did. Alston Lake had a will of iron and was possessed of a pa.s.sionate determination to succeed. He had a driving reason that made him resolve to "win out" as he called it.

His father, who was a prosperous banker in Wall Street, had sternly vetoed an artistic career for his only son. Alston had rebelled, then had given in for a time, and gone into Wall Street. Instead of proving his unfitness for a career he loathed, he showed a marked apt.i.tude for business, inherited no doubt from his father. He could do well what he hated doing. This fact accentuated his father's wrath when he abruptly threw up business and finally decided that he would be a singer or nothing. The Wall Street magnate stopped all supplies. Then Crayford took Alston up. For three years Alston had lived on the impresario's charity in Paris. Was it matter for wonder if he set his teeth and resolved to win out? He had in him the grit of young America, that intensity of life which sweeps through veins like a tide.

"Father's going to see presently," he often said to himself. "He's just got to, and that's all there is to it."

This young man was almost as a weapon in Charmian's hand.

He was charming, and specially charming in his enthusiasm. He had the American readiness to meet others half way, the American lack of shyness. Despite the iron of his will, the fierceness of his young determination, he was often naive almost as a schoolboy. The evil of Paris had swirled about him and had left him unstained by its blackness.

He was no fool. He was certainly not ignorant of life. But he preserved intact a delightful freshness that often seemed to partake of innocence.

And he worked, as he expressed it, "like the devil."

Charmian, genuinely liking him, but also seeing his possibilities as a lever, or weapon, was delightful to him. Claude also took to him at once. The song seemed to link them all together happily. Very soon Alston was almost as one of the Heath family. He came perpetually to the studio to "try things over." He brought various American friends there.

He ate improvised meals there at odd times, Charmian acting as cook. He had even slept there more than once, when they had been making, music very late. And Charmian had had a bed put on the platform behind the screen, and called it "the Prophet's chamber."

This young and determined enthusiast had a power of flooding others with his atmosphere. He flooded Claude with it. And his ambition made his atmosphere what it was. Here was another who meant to "produce the goods."

Never before had Claude come closely in contact with the vigor, with the sharply cut ideals, of the new world. He began to see many things in a new way, to see some things which he had never perceived before. Among them he saw the fine side of ambition. He respected Alston's determination to win out, to justify his conduct in his father's eyes, and pay back to Mr. Crayford with interest all he had received from that astute, yet not unimaginative, man. He loved the lad for his eagerness.

When Alston came to Renwick Place a wind from the true Bohemia seemed to blow through the studio, and the day seemed young and golden.

Yet Alston, quite ignorantly, did harm to Claude. For he helped to win Claude away from his genuine, his inner self, to draw him into the path which he had always instinctively avoided until his marriage with Charmian.

Although unspoiled, Alston Lake had not been unaffected by Paris, which had done little harm to his morals, but which had decidedly influenced his artistic sensibility. The brilliant city had not smirched his soul, but it had helped to form his taste. That was very modern, and very un-British. Alston had a sort of innocent love for the strange and the complex in music. He shrank from anything ba.n.a.l, and disliked the obvious, though his contact with French people had saved him from love of the cloudy. As he intended to make his career upon the stage, and as he was too young, and far too enthusiastic, not to be a bit of an egoist, he was naturally disposed to think that all real musical development was likely to take place in the direction of opera.

"Opera's going to be the big proposition!" was his art cry. There was no doubt of Jacob Crayford's influence upon him.

He was the first person who turned Claude's mind seriously toward opera, and therefore eventually toward a villa in Algeria.

Having launched the song with success, Alston Lake naturally wished to hear more of Claude's music. Claude played to him a great deal of it. He was interested in it, admired it. But--and here his wholly unconscious egoism came into play--he did not quite "believe in it." And his lack of belief probably emanated from the fact that Claude's settings of words from the Bible were not well suited to his own temperament, talent, or training. Being very frank, and already devoted to Claude, he said straight out what he thought. Charmian loved him almost for expressing her secret belief. She now said what she thought. Claude, the reserved and silent recluse of a few months ago, was induced by these two to come out into the open and take part in the wordy battles which rage about art. The instant success of his song took away from him an excuse which he might otherwise have made, when Charmian and Alston Lake urged him to compose with a view to pleasing the public taste; by which they both meant the taste of the cultivated public which was now becoming widely diffused, and which had acquired power. He could not say that his talent was one which had no appeal to the world, that he was incapable of pleasing. One song was nothing. So he declared. Charmian and Alston Lake in their enthusiasm elevated it into a great indication, lifted it up like a lamp till it seemed to shed rays of light on the way in which they urged Claude to walk.

He had long abandoned his violin concerto, and had worked on a setting of the _Belle Dame Sans Merci_ for soprano, chorus, and orchestra. But before it was finished--and during the season his time for work was limited, owing to the numerous social engagements in which Charmian and Alston Lake involved him--an event took place which had led directly to the packing of those boxes which now stood ready for a journey. Jacob Crayford reappeared in London after putting Europe through his sieve.

And Claude was introduced to him by Alston Lake, who insisted on his patron hearing Claude's song.

Mr. Crayford did not care very much about the song. A song was not a big proposition, and he was accustomed to think in operas. But his fondness for Lake, and Lake's boyish enthusiasm for Claude, led him to pay some attention to the latter. He was a busy man and did not waste much time.

But he was a sharp man and a man on the look-out for talent. Apparently this Claude Heath had some talent, not much developed perhaps as yet.

But then he was young. In Claude's appearance and personality there was something arresting. "Looks as if there might be something there," was Crayford's silent comment. And then he admired Charmian and thought her "darned cute." He openly chaffed her on her careful silence about her husband's profession when they had met at Mrs. Shiffney's. "So you wanted to know the great fighter, did you?" he said, pulling at the little beard with a nervous hand, and twitching his eyebrows. "And if he hadn't happened to have one opera house, and to be thinking about running up another, much you'd have cared about his fighting."

"My husband is not a composer of operas, Mr. Crayford," observed Charmian demurely.

From Alston Lake had come the urgent advice to Claude to try his hand on an opera.

Jacques Sennier and his wife, fresh from their triumphs in America, had come to London again in June. The _Paradis Terrestre_ had been revived at Covent Garden, and its success had been even greater than before.

"Claude, you've simply got to write an opera!" Lake had said one night in his studio.

Charmian, Claude, and he had all been at Covent Garden that night, and had dropped in, as they sometimes did, at the studio to spend an hour on their way home. Lake loved the studio, and if there were any question of his going either there or to the house in Kensington, he always "plumped for the studio." They "sat around" now, eating sandwiches and drinking lemonade and whisky-and-soda, and discussing the events of the evening.

"I couldn't possibly write an opera," Claude said.

"Why not?"

"I have no bent toward the theater."

Alston Lake, who was long-limbed, very blond, clean-shaved, with gray eyes, extraordinarily smooth yellow hair, and short, determined and rather blunt features, stretched out one large hand to the cigar-box, and glanced at Charmian.

"What is your bent toward?" he said, in his strong and ringing baritone voice.

Claude's forehead puckered, and the sudden distressed look, which Mrs.

Mansfield had sometimes noticed, came into his eyes.

"Well--" he began, in a hesitating voice. "I hardly know--now."

"Now, old chap?"

"I mean I hardly know."

"Then for all you can tell it may be toward opera?" said Alston triumphantly.

Charmian touched the wreath of green leaves which shone in her dark hair. Her face had grown more decisive of late. She looked perhaps more definitely handsome, but she looked just a little bit harder. She glanced at her husband, glanced away, and lit a cigarette. That evening she had again seen Madame Sennier, had noticed, with a woman's almost miraculous sharpness, the crescendo in the Frenchwoman's formerly dominant personality. She puffed out a tiny ring of pale smoke and said nothing. It seemed to her that Alston was doing work for her.

"I don't think it is," Claude said, after a pause. "I'm twenty-nine, and up to now I've never felt impelled to write anything operatic."

"That's probably because you haven't been in the way of meeting managers, opera singers, and conductors. Every man wants the match that fires him."

"That's just what I think," said Charmian.

Claude smiled. In the recent days he had heard so much talk about music and musicians. And he had noticed that Alston and his wife were nearly always in agreement.

"What was the match that fired you, Alston?" he asked, looking at the big lad--he looked little more than a lad--good-naturedly.

"Well, I always wanted to sing, of course. But I think it was Crayford."

He puffed almost furiously at his cigar.

"Crayford's a marvellous man. He'll lick the Metropolitan crowd yet.

He's going to make me."

"You mean you're going to make yourself?" interrupted Claude.

"Takes two to do it!"

Again he looked over to Charmian.

"Without Crayford I should never have believed I could be a big opera singer. As it is, I mean to be. And, what is more, I know I shall be.

Now, Claude, old fellow, don't get on your hind legs, but just listen to me. Every man needs help when he's a kid, needs somebody who knows--_knows_, mind you--to put him in the right way. What is wanted nowadays is operatic stuff, first-rate operatic stuff. Now, look here, I'm going to speak out straight, and that's all there is to it. I wanted Crayford to hear your big things"--Claude shifted in his chair, stretched out his legs and drew them up--"I told him about them and how strong they were. 'What subjects does he treat?' he said. I told him. At least, I began to tell him. 'Oh, Lord!' he said, stopping me on the nail--but you know how busy he is. He can't waste time. And he's out for the goods, you know--'Oh, Lord!' he said. 'Don't bother me with the Bible. The time for oratorio has gone to join Holy Moses!' I tried to explain that your stuff was no more like old-fashioned oratorio than Chicago is like Stratford-on-Avon, but he wouldn't listen. All he said was, 'Gone to join Holy Moses, my boy! Tell that chap Heath to bring me a good opera and I'll make him more famous than Sennier. For I know how to run him, or any man that can produce the goods, twice as well as Sennier's run.' There, old chap! I've given it you straight. Look what a success we've had with the song!"

"And _I_ found him that!" Charmian could not help saying quickly.