'They don't, Clara. They don't.'

'You must be sensible, Charles. You're not safe. You can't take risks until you are successful.'

'Then I won't succeed. I won't go on.... A most unfortunate thing has happened. Clott has vanished with all the money in the bank.... I let him sign the cheques.'

'Oh! Oh! you fool, Charles.'

'He kept getting cheques out of me.'

'How?'

'He said he'd tell the police.'

Clara stamped her foot. Abominable! How abominable people were.... She had to protect Charles, but if she was with him she exposed him to the most fearful risk. Was ever a girl in so maddening a position?

What made it worse was that her attitude towards him had changed. She was no longer so utterly absorbed in him that she could only see life through his eyes. Apart from him she had grown and had developed her own independent existence.

'How much did he take?'

'Two hundred and ten pounds. We can't prosecute him, or he'll tell. He knows that, or he wouldn't have done it.'

'Where is he?'

'I don't know. Laverock met him the other day, and asked him about some committee business. He had the impudence to say that he had resigned, and had come into money, so that his name was now no longer Clott but Cumberland.'

And again Clara found herself in her heart saying, 'It is my fault.'

It was all very well for Charles to believe that the world was governed by magic. Art is magic, but she ought to have known that it is a magic which operates only among a very few, and that the many who are moved only by cunning are always taking advantage of them.... Poor Charles! Betrayed at every turn by his own simplicity, betrayed even by her eagerness to help him!

'It is too bad,' said Clara, with tears in her eyes. 'We can't do anything. Besides I would never send any one to prison, whatever they did. But what a dirty mean little toad.... How did he find out?'

'I don't know. He's the kind of man who hangs about the theatre and borrows five shillings on Friday night.'

Gone was the magic of the stage, gone the power in Charles. He looked just a tired, seedy fellow, more than a little ashamed of himself. He hung his head and muttered,—

'This always happens when I am rich. I've been terribly unhappy about it. I didn't think I could tell you. I went into a shop yesterday to buy a revolver, but I bought a photograph frame instead, because the man was so pleasant that I couldn't bear the idea of his helping me to end my life.... I seem to muddle everything I touch, and yet no one has ever dared to say that I am not a great artist.'

Clara walked away from him across the stage. There had been muddles before, but nothing so bad as this.

As she walked, she found that in watching him she had learned the art of treading the stage, and of becoming that something more than herself which is necessary for dramatic presentation. This sudden acquisition gave her a delighted thrill, and once again her life was flooded with magic, so that this new trouble, like her old, seemed very remote, and she could understand Charles's pretending that he must end his life even to the point of attempting to buy a revolver, which became impossible directly some one spoke pleasantly to him. She felt confident and secure and of the theatre which was a sanctuary that nothing in the outside world could violate.

'Don't worry, Carlo,' she said. 'I'll see that it is put straight.'

'Then you'll come back and stop this nonsense about living alone?'

'When The Tempest is done we'll see about it. I don't want to risk that. The Tempest is what matters now.'

'Are you going to play in it?'

'I don't know yet.... Will you go out into the auditorium and tell me what you think of my voice?'

Charles went up into the dress circle, and Clara, practising her newly-acquired art, turned to an imaginary Ferdinand—more vivid and actual to her now—and declaimed,—

'I do not know One of my sex! no woman's face remember, Save, from my glass, mine own; nor have I seen More that I may call men, than you, good friend, And my dear father: how features are abroad, I am skilless of; but, by my modesty,— The jewel in my dower,—I would not wish Any companion in the world but you.'

She stopped. The vivid, actual Ferdinand of her imagination changed into the form of the lean, hungry-looking man of the book-shop. He turned towards her, and his face was noble in its suffering, powerful and strong to bear the burden upon the mind behind it. Very sweet and gentle was the expression in his eyes, in most pathetic contrast to the rugged hardness which a passionate self-control had shaped upon his features.... Her heart ached under this astonishment that in this phantom she could see and know and love his face upon which in life her eyes had never fallen.

'Go on,' called Charles, from the dress circle.... 'Admirable.... I never thought you could do it.'

'That's enough,' she replied, with a violent effort to shake free of her bewilderment and sweet anguish.

'If I meet him,' she said in her heart, 'I shall love him and there will be nothing else.'

Aloud she said,—

'I must not.'

She had applied herself to the task of furthering Charles's ambition, and until she had succeeded she would not yield, nor would she seek for herself in life any advantage or even any natural fulfilment.

Charles came back in a state of excitement.

'It was wonderful,' he said. 'What has happened to you? Your voice is so full and round. You lose yourself entirely, you speak with a voice that has in it all the colour and beauty and enchantment of my island. You move simply, inevitably, so that every gesture is rhythmical, and like a musical accompaniment to the words.... You'll be an artist. You are an artist. There has been nothing like it since the old days.... Duse could not do more with her voice.'

'I didn't know,' she said. 'I didn't know.'

'But I did,' he cried. 'I did. I knew you would become a wonder.... Bother money, bother Butcher, bother Clott, and damn the committee. Together we shall be irresistible—as we have been. You didn't tell me you were practising. If that is why you want to be alone I have nothing to say against it. I've been a selfish brute.'

She was deeply moved. Never before had Charles shown the slightest thought for her. Human beings as such were nothing to him, but for an artist, as for art, no trouble was too great, no sacrifice too extreme for him.

He seized her hands and kissed them over and over again.

'I've been your first audience,' he said. 'Come out now, and I'll buy you flowers; your room shall be so full of flowers that you can hardly move through them. As for Verschoyle, he shall pay. It shall be his privilege to pay for us while we give the world the priceless treasure that is in us.'

His words rather repelled and hurt her, and in her secret mind she protested,—

'But I am a woman. But I am a woman.'

It hurt her cruelly that Charles should be blind to that, blind to the cataclysmic change in her, blind to her new beauty and to her newly gathered force of character. After all, the magic of the stage was only illusion, a trick that, if it were not a flowering of the deeper magic of the heart, was empty, vain, contemptible, a thing of darkness and cajolery.

'Perhaps it was just an accident,' said Clara.

'Do it again!' said Charles, in a tone of command.

'What?'

'Do it again!'

'I can't.'

'Do it again, I tell you. When you do a thing like that you have to find out how you did it. Art isn't a thing of chance. You must do it again now.'

'No.'

To her horror and amazement he pounced on her, seized her roughly by the shoulders, and shook her until her head rolled from side to side and her teeth chattered. He was beside himself with passion, ruthless, impersonal in his fury to catch and hold this treasure of art which had so suddenly appeared in the child whom hitherto he had regarded as about as important as his hat or his walking-stick.

'By Jove,' he said, 'I might have known it was not for nothing that I fished you out of Picquart's studio....'

'How dare you speak to me like that?'

She knocked his hands away and stood quivering in an outraged fury, and lashed out at him with her tongue.

'I'm not paint that you can squeeze out of a tube,' she said. 'You treat people as though they were just that and then you complain if they round on you.... I know what you want. You want to squeeze out of me what your own work lacks....'

Charles reeled under this assault and his arms fell limply by his side.

'Forgive me,' he said, 'I didn't know what I was doing. I was knocked out with my astonishment and delight.... Really, really I forgot the stage was empty. I thought we were working....'

Clara stared at him. Could he really so utterly lose himself in the play as that? Or was he only persuading himself that it was so? ... With a sudden intuition she knew that in all innocence he was lying to her, and that what had enraged him was the knowledge, which he could never admit, that she was no longer a child living happily in his imagination but a human being and an artist who had entered upon a royal possession of her own. She had outstripped him. She had become an artist without loss of humanity. Henceforth she must deal with realities, leaving him to his painted mummery... She could understand his frenzy, his fury, his despair.

'That will do, Charles,' she said very quietly. 'I will see what can be done about Mr Clott, and whatever happens I will see that you are not harmed.... If you like, you can dine with Verschoyle and me to-night. You can come home with me now, while I dress. I am to meet him at the Carlton and then we are going on to the Opera.'

'Does Verschoyle know?'

'He knows that you are you and that I am I—that is all he cares about... He is a good man. If people must have too much money, he is the right man to have it. He would never let a man down for want of money—if the man was worth it.'

'Ah!' said Charles, reassured. This was like the old Clara speaking, but with more assurance, a more certain knowledge and less bewildering intuition and guess-work.



X

THE ENGLISH LAKES

A few weeks later, with Verschoyle and a poor relation of his, a Miss Vibart Withers, for chaperone, Clara left London in a 60 h.p. Fiat, which voraciously ate up the Bath Road at the rate of a mile every minute and a half.... It was good to be out of the thick heat of London, invaded by foreigners and provincials and turned into a city of pleasure and summer-frocks, so that its normal life was submerged, its character hidden. The town became as lazy and drowsy a spectacle as a field of poppies over which danced gay and brilliant butterflies. Very sweet was it then to turn away from it, and all that was happening in it, to the sweet air and to fly along between green fields and orchards, through little towns, at intervals to cross the Thames and to feel that with each crossing London lay so much farther away. Henley, Oxford, Lechlade, and the Cotswolds—that was the first day, and, breathing the clover-scented air, gazing over the blue plains to the humpy hills of Malvern, Clara flung back her head and laughed in glee.... How wonderful in one day to shake free of everything, to leave behind all trammels!

'No one need have any troubles now,' she said, with the bewitching smile that made all her discoveries so entrancing. 'When people get tied up in knots, they can just get into a car and go away. The world is big enough for everybody.'

'But people love their troubles,' replied Verschoyle. 'I have been looking for trouble all my life, but I can't find it. That's my trouble.'

'Everybody ought to be happy,' she said.

'In their own way. Most people are very happy with their troubles. They will take far more trouble over them than they will over their pleasures or making other people happy.'

'Do you remember the birds and fishes?'

'Do I not? It was the birds and fishes who introduced you to me.'

'I think this was what Charles meant by them—escape, irrelevance, holiday.'

'That's quite true. Nothing ought to be as serious as it is, for nothing is so serious as it looks when you really come to grips with it. Life always looks like a blank wall until you come up to it and then there is a little door which was invisible at a distance.... I found that out when I met you.'

'And did you go through it?'

'Straight through and out to the other side.'

Clara took his hand affectionately, and their eyes met in a happy smile. They were friends for ever, the relationship most perfectly suited to his temperament, most needed by hers.

From that she passed on to a frank discussion of her own situation with regard to Charles, and the hole he was in through the absconding Mr Clott.

'I knew that fellow was a scoundrel,' said Verschoyle. 'He tried to borrow money from me, and to pump me about the form of my horses. How on earth did he ever become secretary to a committee for the furtherance of dramatic art?'

'He turned up. Everything in Charles's life turns up. I turned up.'

'And is your name really Day?'

'It was my grandfather's name.... I never had any one else. I remember no one else except an Italian nurse, with a very brown face and very white teeth. He died in Paris four years ago. My people were in India.'

'Ah! Families get lost sometimes in the different parts of the British Empire. It is so big, you know. I'm sure the English will lose themselves in it one of these fine days.'

He passed over without a word her position as wife and no wife, but became only the kinder and more considerate. It had eased and relieved her to talk of it. Every impediment to their friendship was removed, but sometimes as they walked through fields he would grip his stick very tight and lash out at a hemlock or a dog-daisy, and sometimes when he was driving he would jam his foot down on the accelerator and send the car whirling along. If they had met Charles walking along the road it would have gone ill with him.

They were six days on their journey up through Shropshire, Cheshire, and the murk of South Lancashire. They stayed in pleasant inns, and made many strange acquaintances, bagmen, tourists, young men with knapsacks on their backs escaping from the big towns, and sometimes they helped these young men over dreary stretches of road.

'The happiest six days of my life,' said Verschoyle, as they approached the mountains. 'I haven't toured in England before. Somehow in London one knows nothing of England. One is bored and one goes over to Homburg or Aix-les-bains. How narrow life is even with a car and a yacht!'

How narrow life could be Clara soon discovered at the Butchers', where London life was simply continued in a lovely valley at the bottom of which lay a little lake shining like a mirror and vividly reflecting the hills above it.

The Butchers had a long, low house in an exquisite garden, theatrically arranged so that the flowers looked as if they were painted and the trees had no roots, but were as though clamped and ironed to the earth. From their garden the very hills had the semblance of a back-cloth.

The house was full of the elegant young men and women who ran in and out of the theatre and had no compunction about interrupting even rehearsals. They chaffed Sir Henry, and fed Lady Butcher with scandal for the pleasure of hearing her say witty biting things, which, as she had no mercy, came easily to her lips. She studiously treated Clara as though she were part and parcel of Verschoyle, and to be accommodated like his car or his chauffeur.... Except as a social asset, Lady Butcher detested the theatre, and she loathed actresses.

As the days floated by—for once in a way the weather in Westmoreland was delicious—it became apparent to Clara that Lady Butcher hated the project of Charles's production of The Tempest. She never missed an opportunity of stabbing at him with her tongue. She regarded him as a vagabond.

Living herself in a very close and narrow set, she respected cliques more than persons. Verschoyle was rich enough to live outside a clique, but that a man with a career to make should live and work alone was in her eyes a kind of blasphemy. As for Clara—Lady Butcher thought of her as a minx, a designing actress, one of the many who had attempted to divert Sir Henry from the social to the professional aspect of the theatre, which, in few words, Lady Butcher regarded as her own, a kind of salon which gave her a unique advantage over her rivals in the competition of London's hostessry.

It was the more annoying to Lady Butcher that Clara and Verschoyle should turn up when they did as two Cabinet Ministers were due to motor over to lunch one day, and a famous editor was to stay for a couple of nights, while her dear friends the Bracebridges (Earl and Countess), with their son and daughter, were due for their annual visit.

Distressed by this atmosphere of social calculation, Clara spent most of her time with Verschoyle, walking about the hills or rowing on the lake; but unfortunately she roused the boyish jealousy in Sir Henry, who, as he had 'discovered' her, regarded her as his property, and considered that any romance she might desire should be through him.... He infuriated his wife by preferring Clara to all the other young ladies, and one night when, after dinner, he took her for a moon-light walk, she created a gust of laughter by saying,—

'Henry can no more resist the smell of grease-paint than a dog can resist that of a grilled bone.'

This was amusing but unjust, for Sir Henry regarded his desire for Clara's society as a healthy impulse towards higher things—at least, he told her so as he led her out through the orchard and up the stony path, down which trickled a little stream, to the crag that dominated the house and garden. It was covered with heather and winberries, and just below the summit grew two rowan-trees. So bright was the moon that the colour of the berries was almost perceptible. Sir Henry stood moon-gazing and presently heaved a great sigh,—

'A-a-ah!'

'What a perfect night!' said Clara.

'On such a night as this——'

'On such a night——'

'I've forgotten,' said Sir Henry. 'It is in the Merchant of Venice. Something about moonlight when Lorenzo and Jessica eloped. You would make a perfect Jessica.... I played Lorenzo once.'

Clara wanted to laugh. It was one of the most delightful elements in Sir Henry's character that he could never see himself as old, or as anything but romantically heroic.

'Yes,' he said; 'you have made all the difference in the world. It was remarkable how you shone out among the players in my theatre.... It is even more remarkable among all these other masqueraders in that house down there. All the world's a stage——'

'Oh, no,' said Clara. 'It is beautiful. I didn't know England was so lovely. As we came north in the car I thought each county better than the last—and I forgot London altogether.'

'It is some years since I toured,' said Sir Henry. 'My wife does not approve of it, but there is nothing like it for keeping you up to the mark. The real audiences are out of London. A couple of years' touring would do you a world of good. You shall make your name first.... There aren't any actors and actresses now simply because they won't tour. They want money in London—money in New York—the pity of it is that they get it.'

Clara scrambled up to the highest point of the crag and stood with the gentle wind playing through her thick hair, caressing her parted lips, her white neck, liquefying her light frock about her limbs.

'Oh, my God!' cried Sir Henry, gazing at her enraptured. 'Ariel!'

As she stood there she was caught up in the wonder of the night, became one with it, a beam in the moonlight, a sigh in the wind, a star winking, a little tiny cloud floating over the tops of the mountains. So lightly poised was she that it seemed miraculous that she did not take to flight, almost against nature that she could stand so still. Her lips parted, and she sang as she used to sing when she was a child,—

Come unto these yellow sands And then take hands.'

A little young voice she had, sweet and low, a boyish voice, nothing of woman in it at all.

She leaned forward and gazed over the edge of the crag, and Sir Henry, who was so deeply moved that all his ordinary mental processes were dislocated, thought with a horrid alarm that she was going to throw herself down. Such perfection might rightly end in tragedy, and he thought with anguish of Mann and Verschoyle, thought that they had besmirched and dishonoured this loveliness, thought that this sudden exaltation and abstraction must come from the anguish that was betrayed in her eyes so often and so frequently.

'Take care! Take care!' called Sir Henry.

She leaped down into the heather by his side, and he said,—

'It seems a crime to take you back into the house. What have you to do with whether or no we are asked to the next garden-party in Downing Street? You are Ariel and can put a girdle round the earth.... I am almost afraid of you. Can't we run away and become strolling players? You may think I am to be envied but my life has been a very unhappy one.... I want to help you....'

It was obvious to Clara that he did not know what he was saying, and indeed he was light-hearted and moonstruck, lifted outside his ordinary range of experience. He babbled on,—

'If I could feel that I had done the smallest thing to help you, I should be prouder of it than of any other thing in my career.'

'But I don't want help....'

'Ah! You think so now. But wait three years.... You think an actor can know nothing of life, but who knows more? Has he not in himself to reproduce every fine shade of emotion, the effect of every variety of experience.... The people who know nothing of life are your cloistered artists like Mann, or your Verschoyle drowned in money.... You have not known me yet.'

Really he was getting rather ridiculous with his boyish romanticism. He had been married twice and his two families numbered seven. But Clara, too, was under the spell of the moon, and his gauche response to her mood had touched her.

'Life is a miserable business for a woman,' said Sir Henry. 'I live in dread lest you should be dragged down into the common experience.'

(Did he or did he not know about Charles?)

Clara laughed. This was taking her too seriously.

'Ah, you can laugh now while you are young, but youth attracts, it is drawn into the whirlpool and is lost.... Is there more in you than youth?'

'Much, much more,' said Clara exultantly. 'There has never been anybody like me before.'

'By Heaven!' swore Sir Henry. 'That is true.... You have bewitched me—and we had better be going back to the house.... Will you let me carry you down?'

Without waiting for her permission, he lifted her, and she suffered him to carry her down the last stony path, because her flimsy shoes were already wet through. He did not guess that she had good reason, and his heart thumped in his large bosom.

It had been a night of nights for him. Years of uneasy distraction had melted away. Not even at the height of his success had he felt so confident, so entirely superior to the rest of mankind as both to command and to deserve their homage. In no play had he ever devised a more romantic finale than this in which he carried his conquered sprite—for so he thought her—back to earth. As he put her down, he threw out his chest and turned to the stars as it was his habit to turn to his audiences, and bowed thrice, to the right, to the left, to the centre, with his hand upon his heart.

Verschoyle was very angry with her when she returned.

'You know how these people think of such things,' he said.

'What they think and what I do are very different,' retorted Clara, her eyes shining, her cheeks glowing from the night air. 'It makes him happy, and, if you are happy with me, he doesn't see why he shouldn't be. Pourquoi pas moi aussi? Men are all alike.'

'It is not the same.... What a child you are! Some day you will love and then you will see very differently.... The old fool thinks you are——'

'No. He said I was Ariel. So I am. So I am.... I wonder I never thought of it before. I shall never be a woman as women have been——'

'There have been good women.'

'Tra la la! The good women have done far more harm in the world than all the bad women put together. Lady B is a good woman.'

'A painted tigress. She won't forgive you in a hurry. She thinks—that, too.'

'People can't think beyond what they are. You can't expect me to be what other people think.'

'I want you to be yourself.'

'So I am.... You shall take me away in a day or two. I want to see the Bracebridges just for fun, and the Cabinet Ministers, and then I want to drown their memories one by one in the lakes as we pass them. We are going to see them all, aren't we?'

'I want to get away. I can't bear being with you in this atmosphere of money.'

'Now, now. You promised me you would never behave like a lover.'

'I thought I was behaving like an angry brother.'

She was pleased with him for that. She knew that part of his trouble was due to his being an only son.

The Bracebridges were disappointing: a very dull man, a hard and raffish woman, but apparently to Lady Butcher they were the wonder of all wonders. She and Lady Bracebridge were to each other 'dear Ethel' and 'dearest Madge.' Together they made a single dominant and very formidable personality, which must be obeyed. They flung themselves upon the house-party, sifted the affairs of every member of it, and in three days had arranged for two engagements and one divorce. They commanded Verschoyle—by suggestion—to marry a Mrs Slesinger, who was plain but almost as rich as himself, and in his distress he very nearly succumbed; but Clara swooped in to save him, and found that her position was made almost impossible by whispered tittle-tattle, cold looks, and downright rudeness. She was distinctly left out of picnic and boating parties, and almost in contempt she was partnered with Sir Henry who, after Lady Bracebridge's arrival, was no longer master in his own house.... When the Cabinet Ministers arrived the situation became impossible for they produced chaos. The household was dislocated, and in the confusion Clara packed, had her trunks carried to the garage, and slipped away with Verschoyle.

Said he,—

'These damned politicians can't get off the platform. Did you see how that old fool sawed the air when he talked of Ireland, and did you hear how the other bleated when he mouthed of Poor Law Reform? They're on show—always on show.... So are these infernal lakes. I can't stand scenery that has stared at me for hours in a railway carriage.'

'It doesn't matter,' said Clara. 'You may be unjust to Lady Butcher, but you mustn't be unjust to Rydal.'

'It is so still and out of date.... I can't think of it without thinking of Wordsworth, and I don't want to think of Wordsworth.... Being with you makes me want to get on into the future, and there's something holding us all back.'

All the same, their holiday swept up to a triumphant conclusion, and they forgot the Butchers and their London elegance in going from inn to inn in the lovely valleys, taking the car up and down breakneck hills and making on foot the ascent of Great Gable and Scafell, upon whose summit in the keen air and the gusty wind Clara let fly and danced about, wildly gay, crying out with joy to be so high above the earth, where human beings spied upon each other with jealous eyes lest one should have more happiness than another.

'They can't spoil this,' she said.

'Who?'

'Oh, all the people down there. They can spoil Charles, and you and me and silly old Sir Henry, but they can't spoil this.'

'In Switzerland,' said Verschoyle, 'there are mountains higher than this, and they make railways up them, and at the top of the railways English governesses buy Alpenstocks, and have the name of the mountain burned into the wood.'

'If I were a mountain,' said Clara, 'and they did that to me I should turn into a volcano and burn them all up, all the engineers and all the English governesses.... I'm sure Lady Bracebridge was a governess.'

'Right in once,' said Verschoyle, staring at her with round boyish eyes, as though he half expected her at once to turn into a volcano. With Clara anything might happen, and her words came from so deep a recess of her nature as almost to have the force of a prophecy.



XI

CHARING CROSS ROAD

If there is one street that more than another has in it the spirit of London it is Charing Cross Road. It begins with pickles and ends with art; it joins Crosse and Blackwell to the National Gallery. In between the two are bookshops, theatres, and music halls, and yet it is a street without ostentation. No one in Charing Cross Road can be assuming: no one could be other than genial and neighbourly. All good books come there at last to find the people who will read them long after they have been forgotten by the people who only talk about them. Books endure while readers and talkers fade away, and Charing Cross Road by its trade in books keeps alive the continuity of London's life and deserves its fame. The books that reach this haven are for the most part honest, and therefore many a weary soul turns out of the streets where men and women swindle into this place where the thoughts of honest men are piled on shelves, or put out in the open air in boxes, marked twopence, fourpence, sixpence.... A real market this! A fair without vanity. There are pictures to look at in the windows, mementoes of dead artists and writers, and there is a constant stream of people, the oddest mixture to be found anywhere on earth.... Everybody who has nothing very much to do goes to Charing Cross Road to meet everybody who has dropped out of the main stream of humanity to have a look at it as it goes by.

You can buy food in this delectable retreat—the best holiday ground in England—and you can eat it in the ferocious book-shop kept by the mildly-mannered man who called Clara's name blessed, and had her photograph in his little dark room at the back of the shop.

Adnor Rodd always took his holidays in Charing Cross Road, for when he went into the country he worked harder even than he did in London. He wrote plays, and kept himself alive as best he could, because he hated the theatre so much that he could never force himself through a stage door. Silent, taciturn, he went on his way, caring for nothing but his work, and sparing neither himself nor any one else in pursuing it.

He had started in London with money and friends, but work became such a vice with him that he lost both, except just enough to keep him alive—to go on working. Every now and then he was 'discovered' by a playwright, a critic, or a literary man, but as he never returned a compliment in his life 'discovery' never led very far.... A few people knew that there was a strange man, called Rodd, who wrote masterpieces, but simply would not or could not take advantage of the ordinary commercial machinery to turn them into money or fame; but these few raised their eyebrows or wagged their heads when he was mentioned. Poor chap! He was out of the running, and never likely to become a member of the Thespic Club, election to which makes a man a real dramatist, whose name may be considered good for a week's business.

Rodd never thought in terms of business. He thought in terms of human relationships, and out of them composed—never ceased composing—dramas, vivid, ruthless, terrible. It was very bad for him, of course, because it forced him into a strained detachment from the life all around him, and when he met people he was always bent on finding out what they were really thinking, instead of accepting what they wished him to think was in their minds. He could no more do that than he could use his considerable technical powers to concoct the confectionery which in the theatre of those days passed, God save us, for a play. He wanted to come in contact with the dramatic essence of the people he met, but every one withheld it or protected him or herself against him, and so he lived alone. For the sake of his work he discarded the ordinary social personality which his education had taught him to acquire, and he walked through the world exposed, rather terrifying to meet; but so exquisitely sensitive that one acute pleasure—a flower, a woman's smile, a strong man shaking hands with his friend, a lovers' meeting, a real quarrel between two men who hated each other, the attention of a friendly dog—could obliterate all the horror and disgust with which most of what he saw and felt inspired him. He was sure of himself as a wind is sure of itself, but he was without conceit.... When he was very young, he had been discovered by one or two women. That was enough. He knew that the desire of women is not worth satisfying, and he left them alone unless they were in distress, and then he helped them generally at the cost of their thinking he was in love with them. Then he had to explain that he had helped them as he would help a child or a sick man. Generally they would weep and say he was a liar and a deceiver, but he knew what women's tears are worth, and when they got that far left them to prevent them going any further.... But he always had women to look after him, women who were grateful, women who, having once tasted his sympathy, could not do without it. His sympathy was passionate and to some natures like strong drink. Very few men could stand it because it went straight to the secret places of the heart, and men, unlike women, do not care to face their own secrets.

He lived in three rooms at the top of a house in Bloomsbury, one for his books, one for his work, and one for himself—for sleeping and bathing. Unlike most men who are indifferent to the outside world he was clean, because he found that slovenliness impaired his efficiency, and took the edge off his energy. He was as fastidious mentally as a trained athlete is physically.

He accepted good-humouredly the apparently unalterable incompatibility between the theatre and the drama.

A man with a single aim seems mad in a world where aims are scattered, but Rodd suffered a double isolation. Ordinary people regarded him as a cracked fool, because he would not or could not exploit his gifts and personality; while the people who really were cracked dreaded his sanity and the humorous tolerance with which he indulged their little weaknesses.

He enjoyed Charing Cross Road because it was rather like himself: it was shovelled aside and disdained by its ignoble 'betters,' the streets imposed by cosmopolitanism upon the real English London. That London he could find in Charing Cross Road, where there still beat the heart from which Fielding and Dickens had drawn their inspiration, the brave heart that could laugh through all its sufferings and through all the indignities put upon it. In Charing Cross Road he could meet almost any day Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet, Tom Jones and Partridge, Sam Weller and Sairey Gamp, and every day their descendants walked abroad, passed in and out of shops, went about their business, little suspecting that they would be translated into the world of art when Rodd returned from his holiday to his work. He passionately loved this London, the real London, and hated everything that denied it or seemed to deny it. He loved it so greatly that he hardly needed any personal love, and he detested any loyalty which interfered with his loyalty to Shakespeare, Fielding, and Dickens, dramatists all, though Fielding's drama had been too vital for the theatre of his time and had blown it into atoms, so that since his day the actors had had to scramble along as best they could and had done so well that they had forgotten the drama altogether. They had evolved a kind of theatrical bas-relief, and were so content with it that they regarded the rounded figures of dramatic sculpture with detestation.... They dared not make room in their theatre for Hedda Gabler and John Gabriel Borkman, because they destroyed by contrast the illusions with which they maintained their activities.

The Scots bookseller was a great friend of Rodd's, and a loyal admirer, though he did not in the least understand what the strange man was about. Rodd used to talk of the virtue of an ordered world, while the bookseller lived in dreams of Anarchy, men and women left alone so that the good in them could come to the top and create a millennium of kindliness. Rodd's researches into the human heart had revealed to him only too clearly the terror that burns at the sources of human life, but because the bookseller's dreams were dear to him, because they kept him happy and benevolent, Rodd could never bring himself to push argument far enough to disturb them.

One day in this fair summer of our tale, Rodd turned into the bookshop to consume the lunch he had bought at the German Delicatessen-Magasin up the road. He found the bookseller bubbling over with happiness, dusting his books, re-arranging them, emptying large parcels of new books, and not such very subversive books either except in so far as all literature is subversive.

'Hallo!' said Rodd. 'I thought this was the slack season?'

'I'm rich,' retorted the bookseller. 'The dahned publishers are crawling to me. They've had their filthy lucre, and they know I can shift the stuff, and they're on their knees to me, begging me to take their muck by the hundred—at my own price.'

(This was a pardonable exaggeration, but it was long since the bookseller had had so much new stock.)

'If I ever want a change,' said Rodd, 'I'll get you to take me on as your assistant.'

The bookseller's jaw dropped and he stared at Rodd.

'You might do worse,' he said. 'That's the second offer I've had this year.'

'Oh! who made the first?'

'Ah!' The bookseller put his finger to his nose and chuckled. 'Ah! Some one who's in love with me.'

'There are too many books,' said Rodd. 'Too much shoddy.'

He turned away to the shelves where the plays were kept—Shaw, Barker, Galsworthy, Ibsen, Schnitzler, Hauptmann, Tschekov, Andreev, Claudel, Strindberg, Wedekind, all the authors of the Sturm and Drang period, when all over Europe the attempt was made to thrust literature upon the theatre, in the endeavour, as Rodd thought, to break the tyranny of the printed word. That was a favourite idea of his, that the tyranny of print from which the world had suffered so long would be broken by the drama. The human heart alone could break the obsessions of the human mind, otherwise humanity would lose its temper and try to smash them by cracking human heads.... Rodd always thought of humanity as an unity, an organism subject to the laws of organic life. Talk about persons and nations, groups and combinations, seemed to him irrelevant. Humanity had a will, and everything had to comply with it or suffer. At present it seemed to him that the will of humanity was diseased, and that society here in London, as elsewhere, was inert. He escaped into his imagination where he could employ to the full his dramatic energy. On the whole he hated books, but his affection for the Charing Cross Road, and for the bookseller, drew him to the shop dedicated to the efforts of revolutionary idealists, whom he thought on the whole mistaken. He desired not revolution but the restoration of the health of humanity, and like so many others, he had his nostrum—the drama. However, the air was so full of theories, social and political, that he did not expect any one to understand him.

'Have you got Mann's new book?' he asked the bookseller, who produced it: forty plates of Charles's pet designs with rather irrelevant letterpress. Rodd bought it, and that moment Clara entered the shop.

Rodd paid no attention to her. The bookseller left him with his money in his hand, and he stood turning over the pages of Charles's book, and shaking his head over the freakish will o' the wisp paragraphs. Clara spoke, and he stiffened, stared at the books in front of him, turned, caught sight of her profile, and stood gazing in amazement—a girl's face that was more than pretty, a face in which there was purpose, and proof of clear perception.

After her holiday she was looking superbly well. Health shone in her. She moved, and it was with complete unconcern for her surroundings. She lived at once in Rodd's imagination, took her rightful place as of course side by side with Beatrice, Portia, Cordelia, and Sophia Western. His imagination had not to work on her at all to re-create her, or to penetrate to the dramatic essence of her personality, which she revealed in her every gesture.

He could not hear what she was saying, but her voice went thrilling to his heart. He gasped and reeled and dropped Charles Mann's book with a crash.

Clara, who had not seen him, turned, and she, too, was overcome. He moved towards her, and stood devouring her with his eyes, and hers sought his.

'This is Rodd,' said the bookseller. 'Adnor Rodd, a great friend of mine.'

'Rodd,' repeated Clara.

'He is very much interested in the theatre,' said the bookseller.

'I was just looking at Charles Mann's new book.... Will you let me give it you?'

He moved away to pick up the book and came back clutching it, took out his fountain pen and wrote in it in a small, precise hand,—

'To my friend, from Adnor Rodd.'

'My name is Clara Day,' said she,

'You can't have a name yet.... You are just you.'

She understood him. He meant that externals were of no account in the delighted shock of their meeting. As they stood gazing at each other the book-shop vanished, London disappeared, there was nothing but they two on all the earth. Neither could move. The beginning and the end were in this moment. Nothing that they could do could alter it or make the world again as it had been for them.... Consciously neither admitted it, both stubbornly clung to what they had made of their lives.

He still held the book in his hand. She had not put out hers for it. He wrote 'Clara Day,' and he wanted to write it down several times as he did with the names of the persons in his plays, to make certain that they were rightly called.

With a faintly recurrent sense of actuality he thought of his three rooms in Bloomsbury and of the hundred and fifty pounds a year on which he lived, and with a wry smile he handed her the book, took stock of her rich clothes, bowed and turned away.... For his imagination it was enough to have met and loved her in that one moment. She had broken down the intellectual detachment in which he lived: the icy solitude in which so painfully he struggled on was at an end.

So quickly had he moved that she was taken by surprise, and he had reached the threshold of the shop before she ran after him and touched him on the arm.

'Please,' she said. 'You have forgotten one thing—the date.'

He wrote the date in the book, and was for going, but she said,—

'I must know more of you if I am to accept your gift.'

'You talk such perfect English,' he said, marvelling at her. 'People do not talk like that nowadays, but a slipshod jargon.'

'I have lived abroad,' she told him, and without more they walked out into the street together, she hugging the book very dose.

They had walked some distance in silence before he spoke.

'Was it by accident that you were in that shop?'

'Oh, no,' said she. 'The old man is a friend of mine.'

(He noticed that she said 'the old' and not as most people did 'the yold.' It was this perfection in her that made her so incredible. To the very finest detail she was perfect and he knew not whether to laugh or to weep.)

'It is absurd,' he said in his heart, 'it can't happen like this. It can't be true.'

Clara had no thought of anything but to make him open up his mind and heart to her, most easily and painlessly to break the taut strain in him.

They turned into a tea-shop in Coventry Street, and he sat glowering at her. A small orchestra was crashing out a syncopated tune. The place was full of suburban people enjoying their escape into a vulgar excitement provided for them by the philanthropy of Joseph Lyons. The room was all gilt and marble and plentiful electric light. A waitress came up to them, but Rodd was so intent upon Clara that he could not collect his thoughts, and she had to order tea.

'Who are you?' he asked.

'I am an actress at the Imperium.'

He flung back his head and gave a shout of laughter.

'Is it funny?' she asked.

'Very.'

She smiled a little maliciously and asked.—

'Who are you?'

'I'm a queer fish.... I've wasted my life in expecting more from people than they had to give, and in offering them more than they needed.'

'You look tired.'

'I am tired—tired out.... You're not really an actress.'

'I'm paid for it if that makes me one.'

'I mean—you are not playing a part now. Actresses never stop. They take their cues from their husbands and lovers and go on until they drop. Their husbands and lovers generally kick them out before they do that.... The ordinary woman is an actress in her small way, but you are not so at all.... I can't place you. What are you doing in London? You ought not to be in London. You ought to leave us stewing in our own juice.'

The waitress brought them tea and the orchestra flung itself into a more outrageous effort than before.

'Ragtime and you!' he went on. 'They don't blend. Ragtime is for tired brains and jaded senses, for people who have lost all instinct and intuition. What have you to do with them? You will simply beat yourself to death upon their hard indifference.... You are only a child. You should be packed off home.'

'And suppose I have none.'

He shrugged his shoulders.

'That was an impertinence. Forgive me!' He took up the book he had given her. 'This fellow Mann is like all the rest. He wants to substitute a static show for a dynamic and vital performance, to impose his own art upon the theatre. The actors have done that until they have driven anything else out. He wants to drive them out. That is all, but he has great gifts....'

'Please don't talk about other people,' said Clara. 'I want to hear about you. What were you doing in the book-shop?'

He told her then why he went to the Charing Cross Road, to find a holiday which would make life tolerable; she described her holiday touring through the country with the glorious conclusion in the Lakes. He looked rather gloomy and shook his head,—

'That wouldn't suit me. I like to go slowly and to linger over the things that please me, to drink in their real character. It is pleasant to move swiftly, but all this motor-car business seems to me to be only another dodge—running away from life.... I ought to do it if I were true to my temperament, but I love my job too much. I'm an intellectual, but I can't stand by and look on, and I can't run away.'

Clara had never met any one like him before. There was such acute misery in his face, and his words seemed only to be a cloud thrown up to disguise the retreat he was visibly making from her. She would not have that. She was sure of him. This attitude of his was a challenge to her. The force with which he spoke had made Charles and even herself seem flimsy and fantastic, and she wanted to prove that she was or could be made as solid, as definite and precise as himself.

She knew what it was to be driven by her own will. Her sympathy was with him there. He was driven to the point of exhaustion.

'I've been trying to create the woman of the future,' he said. 'Ibsen's women are all nerves. What I want to get is the woman who can detach herself from her emotional experience and accept failure, as a man does, with a belief that in the long run the human mind is stronger than Nature. If instincts are baffled, they are not to be trusted. Women have yet to learn that.... When they learn it, we can begin to get straight.'

It did not seem to matter whether she understood him or not. He had her sympathy, and he was glad to talk.

'That seems to be the heart of the problem. But it is a little disconcerting, when you have been trying to create a woman, to walk into a bookshop and find her.'

'How do you know?' she asked. 'I may be only acting. That is what women do. They find out by instinct the ideal in a man's mind and reproduce it.'

He shook his head.

'All ideals to all men? ... You have given the game away.'

'That might only be the cleverest trick of all.'

For a moment he was suspicious of her, but this coquetry was noble and designed to please and soothe him.

'I'm in for a bad time,' he said simply. 'Things have been too easy for me so far. I gave myself twenty years in which to produce what I want and what the world must have.... Things aren't so simple as all that.'

'Do drink your tea. I think you take everything too hardly. People don't know that they are indifferent. There are so many things to do, so many people to meet, they are so busy that they don't realise that they are standing still and just repeating themselves over and over again.'

'Damn the orchestra!' said Rodd. The first violin was playing a solo with muted strings. 'If people will stand this, they will stand anything. It is slow murder.'

'Do believe that they like it,' replied Clara.

'Slow murder?'

'No. The—music.'

'Same thing.' He laughed. 'Oh, well. You have robbed me of my occupation. When shall we meet again?'

'To-morrow?'

'To-morrow. You shall see how I live— If you can spare the time I would like to take you to a concert. I always test my friends with music.'

'Even the New Woman?'

His eyes twinkled and a smile played about his sensitive lips.



XII

RODD AT HOME

They met on the morrow, a hot August day, with the heat quivering up from the pavements and the walls of the houses.... Rodd was the first to arrive at the book-shop where they had arranged to meet. The bookseller chaffed him about the 'young leddy,' because Rodd had never been known to speak to any one—male or female, in the shop.

'That's a fine young leddy,' said the bookseller. 'She knows that to do good to others is to do good to yourself. And mind ye, that's a fact. It's not preaching. It's hard scientific fact.'

'Who is she?' asked Rodd.

'She's an actress-girl, and she is friendly with lords. How she came to find a poor shop like mine I cannot tell ye. But in she walked, and my luck turned from that day.'

Clara came in. She stood on the threshold of the shop and turned over the papers that stood there on a table. She had seen Rodd, but wished to gain a moment or two before she spoke to him, so great had been the shock of meeting him. Since leaving him the day before she had done nothing at all but wait for the time to come for her to see him again, but when the time came she had to force her way out of the brooding concentration upon him which absorbed all her energies. She dreaded the meeting. In recollection, his personality had been clearer and more precise to her than in his actual presence, when the force of his ideas obscured everything else. He was unhappy, he was poor, he was solitary, and it angered her that such a man should be any one of these things. He seemed so forceful and yet to be poor, to be unhappy, to be solitary in a world where, as she had proved, wealth and companionship were so easy of access, argued some weakness.... He waited for her to move, and that angered her. He stood still and waited for her to move. So fierce was the gust of anger in her that she nearly walked out of the shop then and there, but she saw his eyes intent upon her and she went up to him, holding out her hand. He gripped it tightly and said,—

'I was afraid you might not come.'

'Why should I not?'

'I have so little to give you.'

'You gave me a good deal yesterday.'

'Everything.'

The bookseller looked up at the bust of William Morris on his poetry shelves and winked. Then he tip-toed away.

Clara forgave him for not moving to meet her. His directness of speech satisfied her as to his strength and honesty.

Neither was disposed to waste time. Their intimacy had begun at their first meeting.

'It is too hot in London,' he said. 'Shall we walk out to Highgate or Hampstead?'

Clara wanted to touch him, to make certain that he was really a man and not a mere perambulating mind, and she laid her hand on his arm. It was painfully thin, and she knew instinctively that he was not properly cared for, and then again she was full of mistrust. Was it only her sympathy that involved her life with his? ... The shock of it had made it perfectly clear that in Charles, as a man, she had never had the smallest interest. That had been disastrous, and she shrank from creating more trouble by her impetuosity. To hurt this man would be serious. No one could hurt Charles except himself; and even then he would always wake up in the morning singing and whistling like a happy boy or a blackbird in a cherry-tree in blossom.

They went by tube to Highgate, making no attempt to talk through the clatter and roar of the train in the tunnel.

As they walked up the long hill he said,—

'You have knocked me out. I never thought any one would do that. I never thought I should meet any one as strong as myself.... Love's a terrible thing. The impact of two personalities. It breaks everything else, leaves no room for anything else.'

'I hoped it would make you happy,' said Clara, accepting as entirely natural that they should sweep aside everything that stood between them and their desire to be together and to share thoughts, emotions, all the deep qualities in them that could be revealed to no one else. She could no more deny him than she could deny the sun rising in the morning, and for the moment she was content to forget every other element in her life.... It was so inevitably right that, having met in the heart of London, they should turn their backs on it and put themselves to the test of earth, sunshine, blue sky, and trees in their summer green, and water smiling in the sun. The furious energy in their hearts made the hot August day, the suburban scene, and the indolent suburban people seem toy-like and unreal, as though they were looking down upon it from another world, and so they were, for they had plunged to the very beginnings of Creation, and their new world was in the making. So great is the power of love that, extracting all the truth from the world as men have made it, it sweeps the rest away and begins again, discarding, destroying, but most tenderly preserving all that is vital and of worth. Love takes its chosen two, and weaves a spell about them, to preserve them from the fretting contact of the world, that they may have the power to withstand the agony of creation which sweeps through them, and never rests until they are forged into one soul, one world, or parted, broken and cast down.

Of these two it was Rodd who suffered most. The fierce will that had maintained him in his long labours for the art he worshipped would not yield. He wanted both, his work and this sudden, surprising girl who had walked into his life, and he wanted both upon his own terms. At the same time the conflict set up in him made him only the more sensitive to beauty and to the simple delights of the gardens and fields through which they passed.... This was new for him. He had enjoyed such things before only with a remote aesthetic detachment.

This, too, he was loath to renounce, but the swift joy in the girl was too strong for him. To such beauty the sternest will must bend. No bird's song, no sudden light upon a cloud, no trembling flower in its ecstacy, no tree in full burst of blossom could tell of so high a beauty as this joy that flashed from the very depths of her soul into her eyes, upon her lips, softening her throat, liquefying her every movement, and into her voice bringing such music as no poet has ever sung, no musician's brain conceived, music sent from regions deeper than the human soul can know to go soaring far beyond the limits set to human perception.

Rodd was dazed and dizzy with it, and longed every now and then to touch her, to hold her, to make sure that in the swiftness of her joy she would not fly away.... He talked gravely and solemnly, with an intent concentration, about the persons in his life who compared so sorrily with her. He was obviously composing them into a drama, which, however, he dared not carry to any conclusion. That there could ever be such another day as this was beyond his hopes, that he could ever return to what he was beggared his endurance....

'A queer thing happened to me the other day,' he said. 'I live among strange people, hangers-on of the theatre and the newspaper press. There is a woman——'

Clara caught her breath and looked tigerish. He did not notice the change and went on.

'There is a woman. She lives immediately below me. She has two children and God knows how she lives. She used to wait for me on the stairs in the evening to watch me go up. But I never spoke to her——'

Clara smiled happily.

'She used to do me little services. She would darn my socks, and sometimes cook me some dainty and lay it outside my door. This went on for months, I never spoke to her, because she has a terrible mother who lives with her.... A week or two ago, she met me as I came upstairs in the evening, and told me one of her children was ill, and asked me to go for the doctor.... I did so, and she looked so exhausted that I went in and helped her. The mother was no use at all; a fat, lazy beast of a woman who drinks, swears, eats, and sleeps.... We wrestled with death for the life of the child, but we were beaten.... It died. She waits for me now, and tries to talk to me, but I will not do it. She is frenzied in her attentions. She wants sympathy. She has it, but wants more than that. A word from me, and I should never be able to shake her off. She would cling to me, and because she clung she would believe that she loved me, but she would have nothing but my weakness.... It has happened before. They seem to find some bitter triumph in a man's weakness.'

The humility of his confession touched Clara deeply. It was the humility of the man's feeling, in contrast with his ferocious, intellectual arrogance, that moved her to a compassion which steadied her in her swift joy. His story revealed his life to her so vividly that she felt that without more she knew him through and through. Everything else was detail with which she had no particular concern.

They walked along in silence for some time, he brooding, she smiling happily, and she pictured the two sides of his life, the rich and powerful imaginative activity, and the simple tenderness of his solitude.

It seemed to be her turn to confess, but she could not. The day's perfection would be marred for them, and that she would not have. He would understand. Yes, he would understand, but men have illusions which are very dear to them. She must protect them, and let him keep them until the dear reality made it necessary for him to discard them.

At Hampstead they came on a holiday throng and mingled with them, glad once again to be in contact with simple people taking the pleasures for which they lived. There were swing-boats, merry-go-rounds, cocoa-nut shies, penny-in-the-slot machines.... The proprietor of the merry-go-round was rather like Sir Henry Butcher in appearance, and Clara realised with a start that the Imperium and this gaily painted machine were both parts of the same trade. The people paid their twopence or their half-guineas and were given a certain excitement, a share in a game, a pleasure which without effort on their part broke the monotony of existence.... Of the two on this August day she preferred the merry-go-round. It was in the open air, and it was simple and unpretentious; and it was surely better that the people should be amused with wooden horses than with human beings as mechanical and as miserably driven by machinery.... She was annoyed with Rodd because he was exasperated by the silly giggling of the servant-girls and the raffish capers of the young man.

'I hate the pleasures of the people,' he said. 'They give the measure of the quality of their work—lazy, slovenly, monotonous repetition, producing nothing splendid but machines, wonderful engines, marvellous ships, miraculous motor-cars, but dull, listless, sodden people—inert. It is the inertia of London that is so appalling.'

Clara made him take her on the wooden horses, and they went round three times. He admitted reluctantly that he had enjoyed it.

'But only because you did.'

To try him still further she made him have tea in the yard of an inn, at a long table with a number of East Enders, whole families, courting couples, and young men and maidens who had selected each other out of the crowd. They stared at the remarkable pair, the elegant young woman and the moody, handsome man, but they made no impertinent comment except that when they left a girl shrieked,—

'My! look at her shoes.'

And another girl said mournfully,—

'I wisht I 'ad legs like that and silk stockings.'

It was near evening. The haze over the heath shimmered with an apricot glow. Windows, catching the low sun, blazed like patches of fire. The people on the heath dwindled and seemed to sink away into the landscape, and their movements were hardly perceptible.

Rodd asked,—

'Has it been a good day for you?'

'A wonderful day. I want to see where you live.'

He took her home. Down in London, after the Heath, the air seemed thick and stifling. The square in which he lived was surrounded with unsavoury streets from which smells that were almost overpowering were wafted in. His house was a once fashionable mansion now cut up into flats. He had what were once the servants' quarters under the roof, three rooms and a bathroom. The windows of his front room looked out on the tops of trees. Here he worked. The room contained nothing but a table, a chair, a piano, and a sofa.

'This is the only room,' he said.

'That woman was waiting for you,' said Clara.

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

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

He took up his manuscript 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 repetition, 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 snatch Rodd's work out of his hand. It had set his passion 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 manuscript, 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 ignoble 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 God, 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.'

'Ay, that's it; to learn the tricks and keep decent. That is what one stands out for.'

Clara held out her hand to him,—

'Very well, then. We understand each other and there is nothing so very terrible in my being at the Imperium. Is there?'

He held her hand. She wanted him to draw her to him, to hold her close to him, to comfort him for all that he had lost; but once again he was governed by his humility, and he just bowed low, and thanked her warmly for her generosity in giving so poor a devil as himself so exquisite a day.

Nothing was said about another meeting. As he took her down the stairs the door of the flat below was opened and a woman's face peeped out. Near the bottom of the stairs they met a man in a tail coat and top hat who sidled past them, took off his hat and held it in front of his face, but before he did so Clara had recognised Mr Cumberland, erstwhile Mr Clott.

'Does that man live here?' she asked Rodd at the door.

Rodd looked up the stairs.

'No-o,' he said. 'No. I think I have seen him before, but there are many people living in the house. Strange people. They come and go, but I sit there in my room upstairs gazing at the tree-tops, working....'

'You should get in touch with the theatre,' said Clara; 'swallow your scruples, and find out that we are not so very bad after all.'

They stood for some moments on the wide doorstep. It was night now and the lamps were lit. Lovers strolled by under the trees, and against the railings of the garden opposite couples were locked together.

'You turn an August day into Spring,' said Rodd.

Clara tapped his hand affectionately, and, to tear herself away, ran down the square and round the corner. She was quivering in every nerve from the strain of so much conflict, and she was angry with herself for having taken so high a hand with him. He was more to be respected than any man she had ever met, and yet she had—or so she thought—treated him as though he were another Charles. She could not measure the immensity of what had happened to her and her thoughts flew to practical details. What ages it seemed since she had walked blithely crooning: 'This is me in London!' And how odd, how menacing, it was that on the stairs she should have met Mr Clott or Cumberland!



XIII

'THE TEMPEST'

There were still seasons in those days: Autumn, Christmas Holidays, and Spring. In August when the rest of the world was at holiday the theatres, cleaned and renewed for a fresh attempt at the conquest of the multitude (which is unconquerable, going its million different ways), were filled with hopeful, busy people, hoping for success to give them the tranquil easy time and the security which, always looked for, never comes.

The Imperium had been re-upholstered and redecorated, and the fact was duly advertised. Mr Smithson, in the leisure given him by his being relieved of full responsibility for the scenery, had painted a new act-drop, photographs of which appeared in the newspapers. Mr Gillies was interviewed. Sir Henry was interviewed, Charles Mann was interviewed. The ball of publicity was kept rolling merrily. Even Mr Halford Bunn, the famous author whose new play had been put back, lent a hand by attacking the new cranky scenery in the columns of a respectable daily paper, and giving rise to a lengthy correspondence in which Charles came in for a good deal of hearty abuse on the ground that he had given to other countries the gifts that belonged to his own. He plunged into the fray, and pointed out that he had left his own country because it was pleasanter to starve in a sunny climate.

He was intoxicated with anticipation of his triumph. The practical difficulties which he had created, and those which had been put in his way by Mr Gillies and Mr Smithson had been surmounted, and to see his designs in being, actually realised in the large on back-cloths, wings, and gauzes, gave him the sense of solidity which, had it come into his life before, might have made him almost a normal person.... Clara was to be Ariel. The beloved child was to bring the magic of her personality to kindle the beauty he had created in form and colour. He was almost reconciled to the idea of the characters in the fantasy being impersonated by men and women.

Sir Henry had returned to town enthusiastic and eager. Mann and Clara were a combination strong enough to break the tyranny of the social use of the front of the house over the artistic employment of the stage. This season at all events Lady Butcher and Lady Bracebridge should not have things all their own way.

There was a slight set back and disappointment. An upstart impresario brought over from Germany a production in which form and design had broken down naturalism. This was presented at one of the Halls, and was an instantaneous success, and Charles, in a fit of jealousy, wrote an unfortunately spiteful attack on the German producer, accusing him of stealing his ideas. Sir Henry, a born publicist, was enraged, and threatened to abandon his project. The proper line to take was to welcome the German product and, with an appropriate reference to Perkins and aniline dyes, to point bashfully to what London could do.... He was so furious with Charles that he shut himself up in the aquarium and refused to call rehearsals.

Clara saw him and he reproached her,—

'Why did you bring that dreadful man into my beautiful theatre? He has upset everybody from Gillies to the call-boy, and now he has made us a laughing-stock, and this impresario person is in a position to say that we are jealous. We artists have to hold together or the business men will bowl us out like a lot of skittles, and where will the theatre be then?... Where would you be, my dear? They'd make you take off your clothes and run about the stage with a lot of other young women, and call that—art.... The theatre is either a temple or it is in Western Civilisation what the slave-market is in the East. This damned fool of yours can't see anything outside his own scenery. He thinks he is more important than me; but is a bookbinder more important than John Galsworthy?'

'You mustn't be so angry. Nobody takes Charles seriously except in his work. Everybody expects him to do silly things. You can easily put it right with a dignified letter.'

'But I can't say my own scene-painter is a confounded idiot.'

'You needn't mention him,' said Clara. 'Just say how much you admire the German production and talk about the renaissance of the theatre.'

Sir Henry pettishly took pen and paper, wrote a letter, and handed it to her.

'Will that do?' he asked.

She read it, approved, and admired its adroitness. There were compliments to everybody and Charles was not mentioned.

'These things are important,' said Sir Henry. 'The smooth running of the preliminary advertising is half the battle. It gives you your audiences for the first three weeks, and it inspires confidence in the Press. That is most important.... I really was within an ace of throwing the whole thing up. Lady Butcher would like nothing better.'

'I think Verschoyle would be offended if you did.'

'Ah! Verschoyle....' Sir Henry looked suspiciously at her. Though he wanted to be, he was never quite at his ease with her. She was not calculable like the women he had known. What they wanted were things definite and almost always material, while her purposes were secret, subtle, and, as he sometimes half suspected, beyond his range. She was new. That was her fascination. She belonged to this strange world that was coming into being of discordant rhythmic music, of Russian ballet and novels, of a kind of poetry that anybody could write, of fashions that struck him as indecent, of a Society more riotous and rowdy than ever the Bohemia of his day had been, because women—ladies too—were the moving spirit in it and women never did observe the rules of any game.... And yet, in his boyish, sentimental way, he adored her, and clung to her as though he thought she could take him into this new world.

'I can't go on with Mann,' he said almost tearfully. 'It is too disturbing. You never know what he is going to do, and, after all, the theatre is a business, isn't it?— Isn't it?'

'I suppose so,' replied Clara.

It was extraordinary to feel the great machine of the theatre gathering momentum for the launching of the play. It was marvellous to be caught up, as the rehearsals proceeded, into the loveliest fantasy ever created by the human mind. Clara threw herself into it heart and soul. Life outside the play ceased for her. She lived entirely between her rooms and the stage of the theatre. Unlike the other players, when she was not wanted she was watching the rest of the piece, surrendered herself to it completely, and was continually discovering a vast power of meaning in words that had been so familiar to her as to have become like remembered music, an habitual thought without conscious reference to anything under the sun.... And as her sense of the beauty of the play grew more living to her, so she saw the apparatus that kept it in motion as more and more comic.... Mr Gillies had a thousand and one points on which he consulted his chief with the most ruthless disregard of the work going forward on the stage. Lady Butcher would come bustling in, take Sir Henry aside and whisper to him, and words like Bracebridge—Sir George—Lady Amabel—Prime Minister—Chancellor—would come hissing out. Then when the rehearsal was resumed she would stay surveying it with the indulgent smile of a vicar's wife at a school treat.... During the exquisite scene between Prospero and Miranda one day the scenery door was flung open, and Mr Smithson arrived with a small army of men, who dumped paint-pots on the boards, threw hammers down, and rushed across the stage with flats and fly-cloths. Yet, in spite of all these accidents introducing the spirit of burlesque, the play survived. Sir Henry would tolerate interruptions up to a point, but, when a charwoman in the auditorium started brushing or turned on a sudden light, he would turn and roar into the darkness,—

'Stop that din! How can I rehearse if I am continually distracted! Go away and clean somewhere else! We can't be clean now.... Please go on.'

The cast was a good one of very distinguished and highly paid players, all the principals being ladies and gentlemen who would rather not work than accept less than twenty or twenty-five pounds a week. One or two were superior young people who affected to despise the Imperium, but confessed with a smile that the money was very useful. They were also rather scornful of Charles because he was not intellectual.

Charles at first attended rehearsals and attempted to interfere, but was publicly rebuked and told to mind his own business. There would have been a furious quarrel, but Clara went up to him and dragged him away just in time. He stayed away for some days, but returned and sat gloomily in the auditorium. He had moved from his furnished house, and was in rooms above a ham and beef shop, which, he said, had the advantage of being warm.

'It isn't a production,' he grumbled, 'it's a scramble. He's ruining the whole thing with his acting, which is mid-Victorian. He should key the whole thing up from you, chicken.... You know what I want. You understand me. The technique of the rest is all wrong. It is a technique to divert attention from the scenery, raw, unmitigated barn-storming.... Do, do ask him to let me help! What can he do, popping in and out of the play and discussing a hundred and one things with all these fools who keep running in?'

'You should have stipulated for it in your contract,' she said. 'It is too late now. He does know his business, Charles, if only people would leave him alone.'

So rehearsals went on for a few more days. Clara was more and more absorbed. The magical reality of Ariel surpassed everything else in her life except the memory of Rodd in his empty room, and that also she wished to obliterate, for she was full of a premonition of danger, and was convinced that by this dedication of herself to the theatre she could dominate it. She could not define the danger, but it threatened Charles, and it menaced Rodd, whom she had decided not to see again.

Sir Henry was delighted with her, and said she had rejuvenated his own art.

'I used to play Caliban,' he said. 'But Prospero is the part if there is to be an Ariel who can move as you can move and speak in a fairy voice as you can speak.... The rest of the play is all in the day's work....

'Go make thyself like a nymph of the sea: be subject To no sight but thine and mine, invisible To every eyeball else.'

And for Clara it was almost literally true. She felt that she was like a spirit moving among these people marooned on this island of the West End of London, all spell-bound by the money of this great roaring city, all enslaved, all amphibious, living between two elements, the actual and the imagined, but in neither, because of the spell that bound them, fully and passionately.... Living in the play she saw Sir Henry merged in Prospero, and when he said,—

'Thou shalt be as free As mountain winds: but then exactly do All points of my command,'

she took that also literally, and was blissfully happy to surrender to a will more potent than her own.... She did not know that the will she was acknowledging was Shakespeare's, and that with her rare capacity for living in the imagination she was creeping into his and accepting life, gaining her freedom, upon his terms.

After some time her spirit began to affect the whole company. She created an enchantment in which all moved, and Charles, watching, began to understand more fully the art he had first perceived in her on the day when he had attempted to force her, like a practised hand, to capture and fix an apparently accidental effect.... It was no accident. The girl was possessed with a rare dramatic genius, entirely unspoiled—pure enough and strong enough to subsist and to move in the theatrical atmosphere of the Imperium.... What was more, Charles understood that she was fighting for his ideas, and was, before his eyes, making their fulfilment possible.

You might talk and argue with Sir Henry until you were blue in the face, but give him a piece of real acting and he understood at once, was kindled and became fertile in invention, even courageous in innovation. Give him that, and he would drop all thought of the public and the newspapers, and sacrifice even the prominence of his own personality to the service of this art that he adored. As the rehearsals proceeded, therefore, he became more intent, was less patient with interruptions, and at last stopped them altogether. He became interested in his own part, and tussled with the players who shared his scenes with him.

'Never,' he said to Clara, 'have I enjoyed rehearsals so much as these. I am only afraid they are going too smoothly. We shall be over-ripe by production....'

He resumed cordial relations with Charles, and threw out a suggestion or two as to scenery and costumes which Charles, who had begun to learn the elements of diplomacy, pretended to note down. Sir Henry was magnanimous. He avoided his wife and his usual cronies, and devoted himself to Charles and Clara, whom his showman's eye had marked down as potentially a very valuable property.

'This should be the beginning of great things for you, my boy,' he said to Charles. 'You will have all the managers at your feet, but the Imperium is the place for big work, the bold attack, the sweeping line....'

Charles was a little suspicious of such whole-hearted conversion. He knew these enthusiasms for the duration of rehearsals, and he was ill-at-ease because his anticipation of boundless wealth had not come true. He had spent his advance and could not get another out of Mr Gillies, who detested him and regarded his invasion of the theatre as a ruinous departure from its traditions. Clara Mr Gillies considered to be merely one of his Chief's infatuations. They never lasted very long. He had seen his Chief again and again rush to the very brink of disaster, but always he had withdrawn in the nick of time.... Mr Gillies was like a perpetual east wind blowing upon Charles's happiness. But for Mr Gillies there would have been boundless wealth.... It was monstrous: Verschoyle had backed Charles's talent and Mr Gillies was sitting on the money. Butcher could spend it royally, but Charles had often to go to Clara and ask her for the price of his lunch. At the very height of his fame, with success almost within his grasp, he had to go almost hungry because genius has no credit.

There was nothing to be done about it. He borrowed here and there, but knew it was no real help. It simply sent rumours flying as to his financial position, and he did not want either Butcher or Verschoyle to know that money trickled through his fingers. He wanted their support after this success to advance his schemes. Therefore he borrowed from Clara, and she, entirely indifferent to all but the engrossing development of the play, allowed Sir Henry to pay for her food, to give her meals alone with him in the aquarium, and even to buy her clothes and jewels. She took not the slightest interest in them, but, as it seemed to give him pleasure to shower gifts and attentions upon her, she suffered it, and never for a moment dreamed of the turn his infatuation was taking.

As she progressed in her work she felt that she was achieving what she desired, a passion for her art equal to Rodd's. For a time she had thrust all thought of him aside, but as she gained in mastery and power over the whole activity of the stage, he crept back into her mind, and she could face him with a greater sense of equality, with more understanding and without that jealousy the memory of which hurt her.... She had acquired a sense of loyalty to art which was a greater thing than loyalty to Charles. She had saved him, helped him, brought him thus far. Henceforth he must learn to stand on his own feet. She was glad that she had left him.

All these considerations seemed very remote as she worked her way deeper and deeper into the play, which contained for her a reality nowhere to be found in life. She became Ariel, a pure imagination, moving in an enchanted air, singing of freedom and of a beauty beyond all things visible.

'You are three men of sin, whom Destiny That hath to instrument this lower world And what is in't, the never-surfeited sea Hath caused to belch up you; and on this island Where man doth not inhabit...'

Casting spells upon others, she seemed to cast them upon her own life; and it was incredible to her to think that she was the same Clara Day who had come so gaily to London with Charles Mann to help him to conquer his kingdom. The stage of the Imperium was to her, in truth, a magic island where wonders were performed, and she by an inspiration, more powerful than her own will, could with a touch transform all things and persons around her; and when Sir Henry, rehearsing the character of Prospero, said to her.—

'Then to the elements Be free and fare you well.'

the words sounded deep in her heart, and she took them as a real bidding to be free of all that had entangled and cramped her own life. So she dreamed.

She had a rude awakening one night when, after a supper in the aquarium alone with Sir Henry, he broke a long moody silence by laying his hand on hers, drawing her out of her chair and clasping her to his heart while he kissed her arms, shoulders, face, hair, and cried,—

'You wonderful, wonderful child. I love you. I love you. I have loved you since I first saw you. I knew then that the love of my life had come.... You wonderful untouched child——'

He tried to make her kiss him, to force her to meet his eyes, but she wrestled with him and thrust him back to relinquish his hold.

'How could you? How could you! How could you?' she asked.

'I have never forgotten that marvellous moonlit night——'

'Please be sensible,' she said. 'Does a man never know when a woman loves him or not?'

'They don't help one much,' replied Sir Henry, with a nervous grin. 'You were so happy.... I thought. Don't be angry with me! I have thought of nothing but you since then....'

'A moonlight night and champagne supper,' said she. 'Are they the same thing to you?'

'Love conquers all,' said Sir Henry, a little sententiously. He was disgusted. She was not playing the right dramatic part; but she never did any of the expected things. The ordinary conventions of women did not exist for her.

She had moved as far away from him as possible and was standing over by the portrait of Teresa Chesney.

'You must never talk like that again,' she said, 'or I shall not stay in the theatre.... It is not only the vulgarity of it that I hate, but that you should have misunderstood.... I was happy to be working with you in the play. Everything outside that is unimportant.'

'Not love.... Not love,' protested Sir Henry.

'Even love,' she said.

'I thought you liked me,' he mumbled. 'I was so happy giving you presents. I thought you liked me.... A man in my position doesn't often find people to like him.'

'So I do,' said Clara. 'You are very like Charles. That is why I understand you.'

Sir Henry winced. In his heart he thoroughly despised Charles Mann. He drank a glass of champagne and said nervously,—

'I'm glad we're not going to quarrel.... Forgive me.'

'You have spoiled it all for me,' she said. 'Everything is spoiled.'

She clenched her fists, and her eyes blazed fury at him.

'How dare you treat me as a woman when I had never revealed myself to you? Isn't that where a man should have some honour? ... You must understand me if I am to remain in the theatre. If a woman reveals herself to a man, then she is responsible. She has nothing to say if—I don't think you understand.'

'No.' And indeed she might have been talking Greek to him. The insulted woman he knew, the virtuous woman he knew, the fraudulent coquette he knew, the extravagant self-esteem of women he knew, but never before had he met a woman who was simple and sincere, who could brush aside all save essentials and talk to him as a man might have done, with detachment from the thing that had happened.

'If you think I'm a blackguard, why don't you say so? Why don't you hit me?'

'I don't think you are anything of the kind. I think you have been spoiled and that everything has been too easy for you.... I'm hurt because I thought you wanted Charles and me for the theatre and not for yourself.'

'L'etat c'est moi,' smiled Sir Henry. 'I am the theatre.... All the immense machinery is my creation. My brain here is the power that keeps it going. If I were to die to-morrow there would be four walls and Mr Gillies.... Do you think he could do anything with it? Could Charles Mann? Could you?'

'Yes,' said Clara, and he laughed. He had never been in such entrancing company. If she did not want his love-making—well and good. At least she gave him the benefit of her frankness and he needed no pose with her. He was glad she was going to be a sensible girl.... She might alter her mind and every day only made her more adorable.

'Sit down and have some chocolates.' He spoke to her as though she were a child and like a child she obeyed him, for she was alarmed that he should exert his capricious prerogative and throw over The Tempest at the last moment.

'What would you do with the theatre?'

'I should dismiss Mr Gillies.'

'An excellent man of business.'

'For stocks and shares or boots, but not for art.'

'He's a steadying influence.'

'Art is steady enough, if it is art.'

'My dear child!'

'If you don't know that then you are not an artist.'

'Oh! Would you call Charles Mann steady?'

'I should think of the play first and last.'

'There's no one to write them.'

'I should scour the country for imaginative people and make them think in terms of the theatre. Besides, there are people!'

'Oh!'

'Yes. There are people who love the drama so much that they can't go near the theatre.'

He roared with laughter, and to convince him she told him about Adnor Rodd and his bare room, where without any hope of an audience he wrote his plays and lived in them more passionately than it was possible to do in life.

Sir Henry shook his head.

'I don't mind betting,' he said, 'that he's got something wrong with him. Either he drinks, or has an impossible wife, or he likes low company, or— No. There aren't such people.'

'But there are.' And she told him how she had spent a whole day with Rodd and had gone home with him to see his rooms.

'Alone?' asked Sir Henry.

'Yes.'

'Then if you were my girl I should put you on bread and water for a week.'

To convince him, she tried to tell him how she had struggled to overcome Charles's objections to the practical use of his talent, and had forced him to come to London.... In her eagerness and in her happiness at having brought him to his senses, she lost sight of the fact that she was revealing her own history. He brought her up sharp with,—

'Are you married to Charles Mann?'

'Ye-es,' she said, her heart fluttering.

'I didn't know,' he replied nonchalantly. His manner towards her changed. He was still soft and kind, and bland in his impish wit, but beneath the surface he was brutal, revengeful, cruel, and she felt the force of the ruthless egoism that had won him his position in spite of disabilities which would have hampered and even checked a less forceful man.... In the same moment she understood that what had been a glorious and lovely reality to her had been a game to him; and that he designed without the slightest compunction to turn both Charles and herself to his own profit.... Well, she thought, he might try, but he could not prevent either of them from making their reputations, and neither would ever sink to the mechanical docility of London players.

Sir Henry lit a large cigar and moved over to the fire.

'What does Verschoyle think of it?'

She knew that he was insolently referring to her marriage with Charles, but she turned the shaft by saying,—

'He is delighted with it all. He believes in Charles.'

'Hm.... Even the birds and fishes?'

'Who told you about that?'

'London doesn't let a good story die.'

'Verschoyle was present....'

'Oh!'

The situation was becoming unbearable. Sir Henry was as hard, as satisfied, and as unconscionable as a successful company-promoter. This sudden revelation of his egoism, his wariness to protect the ideal which in his own person he had achieved, shocked Clara out of her youthful innocence and into a painful realisation that the facts of her life forbade the impersonalism which had made so much achievement possible.... It was quite clear to her that Sir Henry was intent upon a personal relationship if she were to keep what she had won, and it was as clear that he could not credit her, or Charles, or anybody else with any other motive than personal ambition. He knew his world, he knew his theatre. A fulfilled ambition has its price, and he had never yet met the successful man or woman who did not pay with a good grace, as he himself had done.

Her brain worked quickly on this new intractable material, this disconcerting revelation of the fact that success and art are in the modern world two very different things, the one belonging to the crowd, the other to solitude.... This old man might have waited. He might have given her her chance. It was not true. She would not accept that it could be true that she could only have her success at his price, the price that he had paid, he and all the others, Julia Wainwright, Freeland Moore, and the loss of respect and simple humanity.... So this was why Charles had run away from the theatre. Certain things, certain elements in human character were too holy to be set before the crowd.

She remembered her early struggles when she first went into the theatre. She had won through them and had thought herself victorious only to find herself confronted once more with the hard actualities: either to accept the intrusion of the personal element into what should be impersonal service or to acknowledge defeat.... She could do neither the one nor the other.

If only she could weep. The woman in her calculated. If only she could weep! But where another woman would have wept she could not. She could only turn to her will and draw further strength from that. It was so maddening, so silly, that play acting should entail such a price. It was making it all too serious. What after all was it? Just the instinct of play organised, and what was play without a happy joy? If only she would weep, the obstinate old man clinging to his success would melt; he would be kind; he would forgo all this nonsense that had been buzzing in his scatter brain.... What he could not stand was sincerity and a will diverted to other purposes than his own.... It made her tremble with rage to think that all his enthusiasm for the play, the real work he had put into rehearsals, his snubbing of Mr Gillies and his wife, had all been only because he fancied himself in his blown vanity to be in love with her. It was too ridiculous, and despising him, hating herself, she decided that if it was acting he wanted, acting he should have, and she burst into a torrent of tears conjured up out of an entirely fictitious emotion.... At once Sir Henry had the cue he was waiting for.... He leaped up and came over to her with his hand on his heart.