Mrs. Mansfield had helped her, with sober love and devotion.

Now at last the house was ready, four servants were engaged, and the ceremony of hanging the cremaillere was being duly accomplished.

The Heaths' house-warming had brought together Charmian's friends. Heath, true to his secret determination to break away from his old life, had wished that it should be so. His few intimates in London were not in the Mansfields' set, and would not "mix in" very well with Kit and Margot Drake, the Elliots, the Burningtons, Paul Lane, and the many other people with whom Charmian was intimate; who went where she had always been accustomed to go, and who spoke her language. So it was Charmian's party and Heath played the part of host to about fifty people, most of whom were almost, or quite, strangers to him.

And he played it well, though perhaps with a certain anxiety which he could not quite conceal. For he was in a new country with people to all of whom it was old.

Late in the evening he at last had a few minutes alone with his mother-in-law. The relief to him was great. As he sat with her on a sofa in the second of the two small drawing-rooms under a replica of the Winged Victory, and a tiny full-length portrait of Charmian as a child in a white frock, standing against a pale blue background, by Burne-Jones, he felt like a man who had been far away from himself, and who was suddenly again with himself. Mrs. Mansfield's quiet tenderness flowed over him, but unostentatiously. She had much to conceal from Claude now; her understanding of the struggle, the fear, the almost desperate determination within him, her deep sympathy with him in his honorable conduct, her anxiety about his future with her child, her painful comprehension of Charmian, which did not abate her love for the girl, but perhaps strengthened it, giving it wings of pity. She was one of those middle-aged people of great intelligence, who have learned through deep experience, to divine. Her power had not failed her during the period of her daughter's engagement to Heath. If she had not acted strongly it was because she was supremely delicate in mind, and had a great respect for personal liberty. She disliked intensely those elderly people who are constantly trying to interfere with the happiness of youth. Perhaps she was overscrupulous in her reserve. Perhaps she should have acted on the prompting of her quick understanding. She did not. It seemed to her that she could not.

She could not tell her child that Claude Heath was not really in love. Nor could she tell Charmian that an affection threaded through and through with a personal, and rather vulgar, ambition is not the kind of affection likely to form a firm basis for the building of happiness.

So she had to hide her understanding, her regret, her anxiety. She alone knew whether pride helped her, perhaps had helped to prompt her, to reticence, to concealment. She had been Claude Heath's great friend. The jealousies of women are strong. She knew herself free from jealousy. But another woman, even her own daughter, might misunderstand. It was bitter to think so, but she did think so. And her lips were sealed. Beneath the more human fears in her crouched a fear that seemed apart, almost curiously isolated and very definite, the fear for Claude Heath's strange talent.

On the night of the house-warming, as they sat together hearing the laughter, the buzz of talk, from those near them; as, a moment later, they heard those sounds diminish upon the narrow staircase, when everybody but themselves trooped down gaily to "play with a little food unceremoniously," as Charmian expressed it, Mrs. Mansfield found herself thinking of her first visit to the big studio in Mullion House, and of those Kings of the East whom the man beside her had made to live in her warm imagination.

"What is it?" Claude said, when the human sounds in the house came up from under their feet.

"From to-morrow!" she answered, looking at him with her strong, intense eyes.

"From to-morrow—yes, Madre?"

She put her thin and firm hand on his.

"Life begins again, the life of work put off for a time. To-morrow you take it up once more."

"Yes—yes!"

He glanced about the pretty room, listened to the noise of the gaieties below them. Distinctly he heard Max Elliot's genial laugh.

"Of course," he said. "I must start again on something. The question is, what on?"

"Surely you have something in hand?"

"I had. But—well, I've left it for so long that I don't know whether I could get back into the mood which enabled me to start it. I don't believe I could somehow. I think it would be best to begin on something quite fresh."

"You know that. Do you think you will like the new workroom?"

"Charmian has made it very pretty and cozy," he answered.

His imaginative eyes looked suddenly distressed, almost persecuted, and he raised his eyebrows.

"She is very clever at creating prettiness around her," he continued, after an instant of silence, during which Mrs. Mansfield looked down. "It is quite wonderful. And how energetic she is!"

"Yes, Charmian can be very energetic when she likes. Adelaide Shiffney never turned up to-night."

"She telegraphed this morning that she had to go over unexpectedly to Paris. Something to do with the Senniers probably. You know how devoted she is to him. And now he is the rage in America, Charmian says. Every day I expect to hear that Mrs. Shiffney had sailed for New York."

He laughed, but not quite naturally.

"What a change in his life that evening at Covent Garden made!" he added.

"And what a change in yours!" was Mrs. Mansfield's thought.

"He found himself, as people call it, on that night, I suppose," she said. "He is one of those men with a talent made for the great public. And he knew it, perhaps, for the first time that night. He is launched now on his destined career."

"You believe in destiny?"

She detected the sadness she had surprised in his eyes in his voice now.

"Perhaps in our making of it."

"Rather than in some great Power's imposing of it upon us?"

"Ah, it's so difficult to know! When I was a child we had a game we loved. We went into a large room which was pitch dark. A person was hidden in it who had a shilling. Whichever child found that person had the shilling. There were terror and triumph in that game. It was scarcely like a game, it roused our feelings so strongly."

"It is not everyone's destiny to find the holder of the shilling," said Claude.

For a moment their eyes met. Claude suddenly reddened.

"Have I? Does she suspect? Does she know?" went through his mind. And even Mrs. Mansfield felt embarrassed. For in that moment it was as if they had spoken to each other with a terrible frankness despite the silence of their lips.

"Shan't we go down?" said Claude. "Surely you want something to eat, Madre?"

"No, really. And I like a quiet talk with my new son."

He said nothing, but she saw the strong affection in his face, lighting it, and she knew Claude loved her almost as a son may love a perfect mother. She wished that she dared to trust that love completely. But the instinctive reserve of the highly civilized held her back. And she only said:

"You must not let marriage interfere too much with your work, Claude. I care very much for that. For years your work was everything to you. It can't be that, it oughtn't to be that now. But I want your marriage with Charmian to help, not to hinder you. Be true to your own instinct in your art and surely all must go well."

"Yes, yes. To-morrow I must make a fresh start. I could never be an idler. I must—I must try to use life as food for my art!"

He was speaking out his thought of the night when he wrote his letter to Charmian. But how cold, how doubtful it seemed when clothed in words.

"Some can do that," said Mrs. Mansfield. "But, as I remember saying on the night of Charmian's return from Algiers, Swinburne's food was Putney. There is no rule. Follow your instinct."

She spoke with a sort of strong pressure. And again their eyes met.

"How well she understands me!" he thought. "Does she understand me too well?"

He became hot, then cold, at the thought that perhaps she had divined his lack of love for her daughter.

For marriage with Charmian, and three months of intimate intercourse with her, had not made Claude love her. He admired her appearance. He felt, sometimes strongly, her physical attraction. Her slim charm did not leave him unmoved. Often he felt obliged to respect her energy, her vitality. But anything that is not love is far away from love. In marrying Charmian, Claude had made a secret sacrifice on the altar of honor. He had done "the decent thing." Impulse had driven him into a mistake and he had "paid for it" like a man without a word of complaint to anyone. He had hoped earnestly, almost angrily, that love would be suddenly born out of marriage, that thus his mistake would be cancelled, his right dealing rewarded beautifully.

It had not been so. So he walked in the vast solitude of secrecy. He had become a fine humbug, he who by nature was rather drastically sincere. And he knew not how to face the future with hope, seeing no outlet from the cage into which he had walked. To-night, as Mrs. Mansfield spoke, with that peculiar firm pressure, he thought: "Perhaps I shall find salvation in work." If she had divined the secret he could never tell her perhaps she had seen the only way out. The true worker, the worker who is great, uses the troubles, the sorrows, even the great tragedies of life as material, combines them in a whole that is precious, lays them as balm, or as bitter tonic on the wounds of the world. And so all things in his life work together for good.

"May it be so with me!" was Claude's silent prayer that night.

When their guests were gone, Charmian sat down on a very low chair before the wood fire—she insisted on wood instead of coal—in the first drawing-room.

"Don't let us go to bed for a few minutes yet, Claude," she said. "You aren't sleepy, are you?"

"Not a bit."

He sat down on the chintz-covered sofa near her.

"It went off well, didn't it?"

She was looking into the fire. Her narrow, long-fingered hands were clasped round her knees. She wore a pale yellow dress, and there was a yellow band in her dark hair, which was arranged in such a way that it looked, Claude thought, like a careless cloud, and which gave to her face a sort of picturesquely tragic appearance.

"Yes, I think it did."

"They all liked you."

"I'm glad!"

"You make an excellent host, Claudie; you are so ready, so sympathetic! You listen so well, and look as if you really cared, whether you do or not. It's such a help to a man in his career to have a manner like yours. But I remember noticing it the first time I ever met you in Max Elliot's music-room. What a shame of Adelaide Shiffney not to come!"

Her voice had suddenly changed.

"Did you want Mrs. Shiffney to come so particularly?" Claude asked, not without surprise.

"Yes, I did. Not for myself, of course. I don't pretend to be fond of her, though I don't dislike her! But she ought to have come after accepting. People thought she was coming to-night. I wonder why she rushed off to Paris like that?"

"I should think it was probably something to do with the Senniers. Max Elliot told me just now that she lives and breathes Sennier."

Claude spoke with a quiet humor, and quite without anger.

"Max does exactly the same," said Charmian. "It really becomes rather silly—in a man."

"But Sennier is worth it. Nothing spurious about him."

"I never said there was. But still—Margot is rather tiresome, too, with her rages first for this person and then for the other."

"Who is it now?"

"Oh, she's Sennier-mad like the others."

"Still?"

"Yes, after all these months. She's actually going over to America, I believe, just to hear the Paradis once at the Metropolitan. Five days out, five back, and one night there. Isn't it absurd? She's had it put in the Daily Mail. And then she says she can't think how things about her get into the papers! Margot really is rather a humbug!"

"Still, she admires the right thing when she admires Sennier's talent," said Claude, with a sort of still decision.

Charmian turned her eyes away from the fire and looked at him.

"How odd you are!" she said, after a little pause.

"Why? In what way am I odd?"

"In almost every way, I think. But it's all right. You ought to be odd."

"What do you mean, Charmian?"

"Jacques Sennier's odd, extraordinary. People like that always are. You are."

She was examining him contemplatively, as a woman examines a possession, something that the other women have not. Her look made him feel very restive and intensely reserved.

"I doubt if I am the least like Jacques Sennier," he said.

"Oh, yes, you are. I know."

His rather thin and very mobile lips tightened, as if to keep back a rush of words.

"You don't know yourself," Charmian continued, still looking at him with those contemplative and possessive eyes. "Men don't notice what is part of themselves."

"Do women?"

"What does it matter? I am thinking about you, about my man."

There was a long pause, which Claude filled by getting up and lighting a cigarette. A hideous, undressed sensation possessed him, the undressed sensation of the reserved nature that is being stared at. He said to himself: "It is natural that she should look at me like this, speak to me like this. It is perfectly natural." But he hated it. He even felt as if he could not endure it much longer, and would be obliged to do something to stop it.

"Don't sit down again," said Charmian, as he turned with the cigarette in his mouth.

She got up with lithe ease, like one uncurling.

"Let's go and look at your room, where you're going to begin work to-morrow."

She put her hand on his arm. And her hand was possessive as her eyes had been.

Claude's workroom was at the back of the house on the floor above the drawing-room. An upright piano replaced the grand piano of Mullion House, now dedicated to the drawing-room. There was a large flat writing-table in front of the window, where curtains of Irish frieze, dark green in color, hung shutting out the night and the ugliness at the back of Kensington Square. The walls were nearly covered with books. At the bottom of the bookcases were large drawers for music. A Canterbury held more music, and was placed beside the writing-table. The carpet was dark green without any pattern. In the fireplace were some curious Morris tiles, representing AEneas carrying Anchises, with Troy burning in the background. There were two armchairs, and a deep sofa covered in dark green. A photograph of Charmian stood on the writing-table. It showed her in evening dress, holding her Conder fan, and looking out with half-shut eyes. There was in it a hint of the assumed dreaminess which very sharp-witted modern maidens think decorative in photographs, the "I follow an ideal" expression, which makes men say, "What a charming girl! Looks as if she'd got something in her, too!"

"It's a dear little room, isn't it, Claude?" said Charmian.

"Yes, very."

"You really like it, don't you? You like its atmosphere?"

"I think you've done it delightfully. I was saying to Madre only this evening how extraordinarily clever you are in creating prettiness around you."

"Were you? How nice of you."

She laid her cheek against his shoulder.

"You'll be able to work here?"

"Why not?"

"Let's shut the door, and just feel the room for a minute."

"All right."

He shut the door.

"Don't let us speak for a moment," she whispered.

She was sitting now on the deep sofa just beyond the writing-table. Claude stood quite still. And in the silence which followed her words he strove to realize whether he would be able to work in the little room. Would anything come to him here? His eyes rested on Anchises, crouched on the back of his son, on the burning city of Troy. He felt confused, strange, and then depayse. That word alone meant what he felt just then. Ah, the little house with the one big room looking out on to the scrap of garden, yellow-haired Fan, Harriet discreet unto dumbness, Mrs. Searle with her scraps of wisdom—he with his freedom!

The room was a cage, wire bars everywhere. Never could he work in it!

"It is good for work, isn't it, Claudie? Even poor little I can feel that. What wonderful things you are going to do here. As wonderful as—" She checked herself abruptly.

"As what?" he asked, striving to force an interest, to banish his secret desperation.

"I won't tell you now. Some day—in a year, two years—I'll tell you."

Her eyes shone. He thought they looked almost greedy.

"When my man's done something wonderful!"



CHAPTER XV

In Charmian's conception of the perfect helpmate for a great man self-sacrifice shone out as the first of the virtues. She must sacrifice herself to Claude, must regulate her life so that his might glide smoothly, without any friction, to the appointed goal. She must be patient, understanding, and unselfish. But she must also be firm at the right moment, be strong in judgment, be judicious, the perfect critic as well as the ardent admirer. During her life among clever and well-known men she had noticed how the mere fact of marriage often seems to make a man think highly of the intellect of his chosen woman. Again and again she had heard some distinguished writer or politician, wedded to somebody either quite ordinary, or even actually stupid, say: "I'd take my wife's judgment before anyone's," or "My wife sees more clearly for a man than anyone I know." She had known painters and sculptors submit their works to the criticism of women totally ignorant in the arts, simply because those women had had the faultless taste to marry them. If such women exercised so strong an influence over their men, what should hers be over Claude? For she had been well educated, was trained in music, had always moved in intellectual and artistic sets, and was certainly not stupid. Indeed, now that the main stream of her life was divided from her mother's, she often felt as if she were decidedly clever. Susan Fleet, long ago, had roused up her will. Since that day she had never let it sleep. And her success in marrying Claude had made her rely on her will, rely on herself. She was a girl who could "carry things through," a girl who could make of life a success. As a young married woman she showed more of assurance than she had showed as an unmarried girl. There was more of decision in her expression and her way of being. She was resolved to impress the world, of course for her husband's sake.

Life in the house in Kensington had to be arranged for Claude with every elaborate precaution. That must be the first move in the campaign secretly planned out by Charmian, and now about to be carried through.

On the morning after the house-warming, when a late breakfast was finished, but while they were still at the breakfast-table in the long and narrow dining-room, which looked out on the quiet square, Charmian said to her husband:

"I've been speaking to the servants, Claude. I've told them about being very quiet to-day."

He pushed his tea-cup a little away from him.

"Why?" he asked. "I mean why specially to-day?"

"Because of your composing. Alice is a good girl, but she is a little inclined to be noisy sometimes. I've spoken to her seriously about it."

Alice was the parlor-maid. Charmian would have preferred to have a man to answer the door, but she had sacrificed to economy, or thought she had done so, by engaging a woman. As Claude said nothing, Charmian continued:

"And another thing! I've told them all that you're never to be disturbed when you're in your own room, that they're never to come to you with notes, or the post, never to call you to the telephone. I want you to feel that once you are inside your own room you are absolutely safe, that it is sacred ground."

"Thank you, Charmian."

He pushed his cup farther away, with a movement that was rather brusque, and got up.

"What about lunch to-day? Do you eat lunch when you are composing? Do you want something sent up to you?"

"Well, I don't know. I don't think I shall want any lunch to-day. You see we've breakfasted late. Don't bother about me."

"It isn't a bother. You know that, Claudie. But would you like a cup of coffee, tea, anything at one o'clock?"

"Oh, I scarcely know. I'll ring if I do."

He made a movement. Charmian got up.

"I do long to know what you are going to work on," she said, in a changed, almost mysterious, voice, which was not consciously assumed.

She came up to him and put her hands on his shoulders.

"Ever since I first heard your music—you remember, two days after we were engaged—I've longed to be able to do a little something to help you on. You know what I mean. In the woman's way, by acting as a sort of buffer between you and all the small irritations of life. We who can't create can sometimes be of use to those who can. We can keep others from disturbing the mystery. Let me do that. And, in return, let me be in the secret, won't you?"

Claude stood rather stiffly under her hands.

"You are kind, good. But—but don't make any bother about me in the house. I'd rather you didn't. Let everything just go on naturally. I don't want to be a nuisance."

"You couldn't be. And you will let me?"

"Perhaps—when I know it myself."

He made a little rather constrained laugh.

"One's got to think, try. One doesn't always know directly what one wishes to do, can do."

"No, of course not."

She took away her hands gently.

"Now I don't exist till you want me to again."

Claude went up to the little room at the back of the house. At this moment he would gladly, thankfully, have gone anywhere else. But he felt that he was expected to go there. Five women, his wife and the four maids, expected him to go there. So he went. He shut himself in, and remained there, caged.

It was a still and foggy day of frost. In the air, even within the house, there was a feeling of snow, light, thin, and penetrating. London seemed peculiarly silent. And the silence seemed to have something to do with the fog, the frost, and the coming snow. When the door of his room was shut Claude stood by his table, then before the fire, feeling curiously empty headed, almost light headed. He stared at the fire, listened to its faint crackling, and felt as if his life were a hollow shell.

Probably he had stood thus for a considerable time—he did not know whether for five minutes or an hour—when he was made self-conscious by an event in the house. He heard two women's voices in conversation, apparently on the staircase.

One of them said:

"The duster, I tell you!"

The other replied:

"Well, I didn't leave it. Ask Fanny, can't you!"

"Fanny doesn't know."

"She ought to know, then!"

"Ought yourself! Fanny's no business with the duster no more than—"

At this point a third voice intervened in the dialogue. It was Charmian's, reduced to a sort of intense whisper. It said:

"Alice! Alice! I specially told you not to make a sound in the house. Your master is at work. The least noise disturbs him. Pray be quiet. If you must speak, go downstairs."

There was silence, then the sound of rustling, of a door shutting, then again silence.

Claude came away from the fire.

"Your master is at work."

He dashed down his hands on the big writing-table, with a gesture almost of despair. Self-consciousness now was like an iron band about him, the devilish thing that constricts a talent. The hideous knowledge that he was surrounded by women, intent on him and what he was supposed to be doing, benumbed his intellect. He imagined the cook in the kitchen discussing his talent with a rolling-pin in her hand, Charmian's maid musing over his oddities, with a mouth full of pins, and patterns on her lap. And he ground his teeth.

"I can't—I can't—I never shall be able to!"

He leaned his elbows on the writing-table and put his head in his hands. When he looked up, after some minutes, he met Charmian's half-closed, photographed eyes.

Between twelve and one o'clock the noise of a piano organ playing vigorously, almost angrily, "You are Queen of my heart to-night," came up to him from the square, softened, yet scarcely ameliorated, by distance and intervening walls. With bold impertinence it began, continued for perhaps three minutes, then abruptly ceased in the middle of a phrase.

Claude knew why. One of the four maids, incited thereto by Charmian, had rushed out to control the swarthy Italian who was earning his living in the land without light.

The master was working.

But the master was not working.

Day followed day, and Claude kept his secret, the secret that he was doing, could do, nothing in the room arranged by Charmian, in the atmosphere created by Charmian.

One thing specially troubled him.

So long as he had lived alone he had never felt as if his art, or perhaps rather his method of giving himself to it, had any trait of effeminacy. It had seemed quite natural to him to be shut up in his own "diggings," isolated, with only a couple of devoted servants, and golden-haired Fan in the distance, being as natural as he was. It had never occurred to him that his life was specially odd.

But now he often did feel as if there were something effeminate in the young composer at home, perpetually in the house, with his wife and a lot of women. The smallness of the house, of his workroom, emphasized this feeling. Although an almost dreadful silence was preserved whenever he was supposed to be working his very soul seemed to hear the perpetual rustle of skirts. The fact that five women were keeping quiet on his account made him feel as if he were an effeminate fool, feel that if his art was a thing unworthy of a man's devotion, that in following it, in sacrificing to it, he was doing himself harm, was undermining his own masculinity.

This sensation grew in him. He envied the men whose work took them from home. He longed, after breakfast, to put on hat and coat and sally out. He thought of the text, "Man goeth forth to his work and to his labor until the evening." If only he could go forth! If only he could forget the existence of his intent wife, of those four hushed and wondering maids every day for six or eight hours. He fell into deep despondencies, sometimes into silent rages which seemed to eat into his heart.

During this time Charmian was beginning to "put out feelers." Her work for Claude, that is, her work outside the little house in Kensington Square, was to be social. Women can do very much in the social way. And she knew herself well equipped for the task in hand. Her heart was in it, too. She felt sure of that. Even to herself she never used the words "worldly ambition." The task was a noble one, to make the career of the man she believed in and loved glorious, to bring him to renown. While he was shut up, working in the little room she had made so cozy, so "atmospheric," she would be at work for him in the world they were destined to conquer.

All the "set" had come to call in Kensington Square. Most of them were surprised at the match. They recognized the worldly instinct in Charmian, which many of them shared, and could not quite understand why she had chosen Claude Heath as her husband. They had not heard much of him. He never went anywhere, was personally unknown to them. It seemed rather odd. They had scarcely thought Charmian Mansfield would make that kind of marriage. Of course he was a thorough gentleman, and a man with pleasant, even swiftly attractive manners. But still—! The general verdict was that Charmian must have fallen violently in love with the man.

She felt the feelings of the "set." And she felt that she must justify her choice as soon as possible. To the set Claude Heath was simply a nobody. Charmian meant to turn him into a somebody.

This turning of Claude into a somebody was to be the first really important step in her campaign on his behalf. It must be done subtly, delicately, but it must be done swiftly. She was secretly impatient to justify her choice.

She had at first relied on Max Elliot to help her. He was an enthusiastic man and had influence. Unluckily she soon found that for the moment he was so busy adoring Jacques Sennier that he had no time to beat the big drum for another. Sennier had carried him off his feet, and Madame Sennier had "got hold of him." The last phrase was Charmian's. It was speedily evident to her that, womanlike, the Frenchwoman was not satisfied with the fact of her husband's immense success. She was determined that no rival should spring up to divide adorers into camps. No doubt she argued that there is in the musical world only a limited number of discriminating enthusiasts, capable of forming and fostering public opinion, of "giving a lead" to the critics, and through them to the world. She wanted them all for her husband. And their allegiance must be undivided. Although she was in New York, she had Max Elliot "in her pocket" in London. It was a feat which won Charmian's respect, but which irritated her extremely. Max Elliot was charming, of course, when she spoke of her husband's talent. But she saw at once that he was concentrated on Sennier. She felt at once that he did not at the moment want to "go mad" over any other composer. If Claude had been a singer, a pianist, or a fiddler, things would have been different. Max Elliot had taken charge of the Frenchman's financial affairs, solely out of friendship, and was investing the American and other gains in various admirable enterprises. Madame Sennier, who really was, as Paul Lane had said, an extraordinary woman, had a keen eye to the main chance. She acted as a sort of agent to her husband, and was reported on all hands to be capable of driving a very hard bargain. She and Max Elliot were perpetually cabling to each other across the Atlantic, and Max was seriously thinking of imitating Margot Drake and "running over" to New York on the Lusitania. Only his business in London detained him. He spoke of Sennier invariably as "Jacques," of Madame Sennier as "Henriette." Living English composers scarcely existed any more in his sight. France was the country of music. Only from France could one expect anything of real value to the truly cultured.

Charmian began to hate this absurd entente cordiale.

Another person on whom she had secretly set high hopes was Adelaide Shiffney. It was for this reason that she had been irritated at Mrs. Shiffney's defection on the night of the house-warming. Now that she was married to a composer Charmian understood the full value of Mrs. Shiffney's influence in the fashionable world. She must get Adelaide on their side. But here again Sennier stood in her path. Mrs. Shiffney was, musically speaking of course, in love with Jacques Sennier. Since Wagner there had been nobody to play upon feminine nerves as the little Frenchman played, to take women "out of themselves." As a well-known society woman said, with almost pathetic frankness, "When one hears Sennier's music one wants to hold hands with somebody." Apparently Mrs. Shiffney wanted to hold hands with the composer himself. She had "no use" at the moment for anyone else, and had already arranged to take the Senniers on a yachting cruise after the London season, beginning with Cowes.

The "feelers" which Charmian put out found the atmosphere rather chilly.

But she remembered what battles with the world most of its great men have had to fight, how many wives of great men have had to keep the flame alive in gross darkness. She was not daunted. But she presently began to feel that, without being frank with Claude, she must try to get a certain amount of active help from him. She had intended by judicious talk to create the impression that Claude was an extraordinary man, on the way to accomplish great things. She believed this thoroughly herself. But she now realized that, owing to the absurd Sennier "boom," unless she could get Claude to show publicly something of his talent nobody would pay any attention to what she said.

"What is he doing?" people asked, when she spoke about his long hours of work, about the precautions she had to take lest he should be disturbed. She answered evasively. The truth was that she did not know what Claude was doing. What he had done, or some of it, she did know. She had heard his Te Deum, and some of his strange settings of words from the scriptures. But her clever worldly instinct told her that this was not the time when her set would be likely to appreciate things of that kind. The whole trend of the taste she cared about was setting in the direction of opera. And whenever she tried to find out from Claude what he was composing in Kensington Square she was met with evasive answers.

One afternoon she came home from a party at the Drakes' house in Park Lane determined to enlist Claude's aid at once in her enterprise, without telling him what was in her heart. And first she must find out definitely what sort of composition he was working on at the present moment. In Park Lane nothing had been heard of but Sennier and Madame Sennier. Margot had returned from America more enthusiastic, more engouee than ever.

She had been as straw to the flame of American enthusiasm. All her individuality seemed to have been burnt out of her. She was at present only a sort of receptacle for Sennier-mania. In dress, hair, manner, and even gesture, she strove to reproduce Madame Sennier. For one of the most curious features of Sennier's vogue was the worship accorded by women as well as by men to his dominating wife. They talked and thought almost as much about her as they did about him. And though his was the might of genius, hers seemed to be the might of personality. The perpetual chanting of the Frenchwoman's praises had "got upon" Charmian's nerves. She felt this afternoon as if she could not bear it much longer, unless some outlet was provided for her secret desires. And she arrived at Kensington Square in a condition of suppressed nervous excitement.

She paid the driver of the taxi-cab and rang the bell. She had forgotten to take her key. Alice answered the door.

"Is Mr. Heath in?" asked Charmian.

"He's been playing golf, ma'am. But he's just come in," answered Alice, a plump, soft-looking girl, with rather sulky blue eyes.

"Oh, of course! It's Saturday."

On Saturday Claude generally took a half-holiday, and went down to Richmond to play golf with a friend of his who lived there, an old Cornish chum called Tregorwan.

"Where is Mr. Heath?" continued Charmian, standing in the little hall.

"Having his tea in the drawing-room, ma'am."

"Oh!"

She took off her fur coat and went quickly upstairs. She did not care about golf, and to-day the mere sound of the name irritated her. Englishmen were always playing golf, she said to herself. Jacques Sennier did not waste his time on such things, she was sure. Then she remembered for how many hours every day Claude was shut up in his little room, how he always went there immediately after breakfast. And she realized the injustice of her dawning anger, and also her nervous state, and resolved to be very gentle and calm with Claude.

It was a cold day at the end of March. She found him sitting near the wood fire in knickerbockers and a Norfolk jacket, with thick, heavily nailed boots, covered with dried mud, on his feet, and thick brown and red stockings on his legs. It was almost impossible to believe he was a musician. His hair had been freshly cut, but he had not "watered" it. Since his marriage Charmian had never allowed him to do that. He jumped up when he saw his wife. Intimacy never made Claude relax in courtesy.

"I'm having tea very late," he said. "But I've only just got in."

"I know. Sit down and go on, dear old boy. I'll come and sit with you. Don't you want more light?"

"I like the firelight."

He sat down again and lifted the teapot.

"I shall spoil my dinner. But never mind."

"You remember we're dining with Madre!"

"Oh—to be sure!"

"But not till half-past eight."

She sat down with her back to the drawn window curtains at right angles to Claude. Alice had "shut up" early to make the drawing-room look cozy for Claude. The firelight played about the room, illuminating now one thing, now another, making Claude's face and head, sometimes his musical hands look Rembrandtesque, powerful, imaginative, even mysterious. Now that Charmian had sat down she lost her impression of the eternal golfer, received another impression which spurred her imagination.

"I've been at the Drakes," she began. "Only a very few to welcome Margot back from New York."

"Did she enjoy her visit?"

"Immensely. She's—as she calls it—tickled to death with the Americans in their own country. She meant to stay only one night, but she was there three weeks. It seems all New York has gone mad over Jacques Sennier."

"I'm glad they see how really fine his opera is," Claude said, seriously, even earnestly.

"Margot says when the Americans like anything they are the most enthusiastic nation in the world."

"If it is so it's a fine trait in the national character, I think."

How impersonal he sounded. She longed for the creeping music of jealousy in his voice. If only Claude would be jealous of Sennier!

She spoke lightly of other things, and presently said:

"How is the work getting on?"

There was a slight pause. Then Claude said:

"The work?"

"Yes, yours."

She hesitated. There was something in her husband's personality that sometimes lay upon her like an embargo. She was conscious of this embargo now. But her nervous irritation made her determined to defy it.

"Claudie," she went on, "you don't know, you can't know, how much I care for your work. It's part of you. It is you. You promised me once you would let me be in the secret. Don't you remember?"

"Did I? When?"

"The day after our party when you were going to begin work again. And now it's nearly two months."

She stopped. He was silent. A flame burst out of a log in the grate and lit up strongly one half of his face. She thought it looked stern, almost fierce, and very foreign. Many Cornish people have Spanish blood in them, she remembered. That foreign look made her feel for a moment almost as if she were sitting with a stranger.

"Nearly two months," she repeated in a more tentative voice.

"Is it?"

"Yes. Don't you think I've been very patient?"

"But, surely—surely—why should you want to know?"

"I do want. Your work is your life. I want it to be mine, too."

"Oh, it could never be that—the work of another."

"I want to identify myself with you."

There was another silence. And this time it was a long one. At last Claude moved, turned round to face Charmian fully, and said, with the voice of one making a strong, almost a desperate effort:

"You wish to know what I've been working on during these weeks when I've been in my room?"

"Yes."

"I haven't been working on anything."

"What?"

"I haven't been working at all."

"Not working!"

"No."

"But—you must—but we were all so quiet! I told Alice—"

"I never asked you to."

"No, but of course—but what have you been doing up there?"

"Reading Carlyle's French Revolution most of the time."

"Carlyle! You've been reading Carlyle!"

In her voice there was a sound of outrage. Claude got up and stood by the fire.

"It isn't my fault," he said. "The truth is I can't work in that room. I can't work in this house."

"But it's our home."

"I know, but I can't work in it. Perhaps it's because of the maids, knowing they're creeping about, wondering—I don't know what it is. I've tried, but I can't do anything."

"But—how dreadful! Nearly two months wasted!"

He felt that she was condemning him, and a secret anger surged through him. His reserve, too, was suffering torment.

"I'm sorry, Charmian. But I couldn't help it."

"But then, why did you go up and shut yourself in day after day?"

"I hoped to be able to do something."

"But——"

"And I saw you expected me to go."

The truth was out. Claude felt, as he spoke it, as if he were tearing off clothes. How he loathed that weakness of his, which manifested itself in the sometimes almost uncontrollable instinct to give, or to try to give, others what they expected of him.

"Expected you! But naturally—"

"Yes, I know. Well, that's how it is! I can't work in this house."

He spoke almost roughly now.

"I don't want to assume any absurd artistic pose," he continued. "I hate the affectations sometimes supposed to belong to my profession. But it's no use pretending about a thing of this kind. There are some places, some atmospheres, if you like to use the word generally used, that help anyone who tries to create, and some that hinder. It's not only a matter of place, I suppose, but of people. This house is too small, or something. There are too many people in it. I feel that they are all bothering and wondering about me, treading softly for me." He threw out his hands. "I don't know what it is exactly, but I'm paralyzed here. I suppose you think I'm half mad."

To his great surprise, she answered, in quite a different voice from the voice which had suggested outrage:

"No, no; great artists are always like that. They are always extraordinary."

There was a mysterious pleasure, almost gratification, in her voice.

"You would be like that. I should have known."

"Oh, as to that—"

"I understand, Claudie. You needn't say any more."

Claude turned rather brusquely round to face the fire. As he said nothing, Charmian continued:

"What is to be done now? We have taken this house—"

He wheeled round.

"Of course we shall stay in this house. It suits us admirably. Besides, to move simply because—"

"Your work comes before all."

He compressed his lips. He began to hate his own talent.

"I think the best thing to do," he said, "would be for me to look for a studio somewhere. I could easily find one, put a piano and a few chairs in, and go there every day to work. Lots of men do that sort of thing. It's like going to an office."

"Capital!" she said. "Then you'll be quite isolated, and you'll get on ever so fast. Won't you?"

"I think probably I could work."

"And you will. Before we married you worked so hard. I want"—she got up, came to him, and put her hand in his—"I want to feel that marriage has helped you, not hindered you, in your career. I want to feel that I urge you on, don't hold you back."

Claude longed to tell her to leave him alone. But he thought of coming isolation in the studio, and refrained. Bending down, he kissed her.

"It will be all right," he said, "when I've got a place where I can be quite alone for some hours each day."



CHAPTER XVI

With an energy that was almost feverish, Charmian threw herself into the search for a studio. The little room had been a failure, through no fault of hers. She must make a success of the studio. She and Claude set forth together, and soon bent their steps toward Chelsea. There were studios to be had in Kensington, of course. But Claude happened to mention Chelsea, and at once Charmian took up the idea. The right atmosphere—that was the object of this new quest, the end and aim of their wanderings. If it were to be found in Chelsea, then in Chelsea Claude must make his daily habitation. Charmian seconded the Chelsea proposition with an enthusiasm that was almost a little anxious. Chelsea was so picturesque, so near the river, that somber and wonderful heart of London. Such interesting and famous people lived in Chelsea now, and had lived there in the past. She wondered they had not decided to live in Chelsea instead of in Kensington. But Claude was right, unerring in his judgment. Of course the studio must be in Chelsea.

One was found not far from Glebe Place, in a large red building with an arched entrance, handsome steps, and several artistic-looking windows, with leaded panes and soda-water bottle grass. It was on the ground floor, but it was quiet, large but not enormous, and well-planned. It contained however, one unnecessary, though not unattractive, feature. At one end, on the left of the door, there was a platform reached by a flight of steps, and screened off with wood from the rest of the room. The caretaker, who had the key and showed them round, explained that this had been planned and put up by an Austrian painter, who used the chamber formed by the platform and the upper part of the screen as a bedroom, and the space below, roofed by the platform as a kitchen.

The rent was one hundred pounds a year.

This seemed too much to Claude. He felt ashamed to spend such a large sum on what must seem an unnecessary caprice to the average person, even probably to people who were above the average. If he were known as a composer, if he were popular or famous, the matter, he felt, would be quite different. Everyone understands the artistic needs of the famous man, or pretends to understand them. But Claude and his work were entirely unknown to fame. And now, as he hesitated about the payment of this hundred pounds, he regretted this, as he had never before regretted it.

But Charmian was strong in her insistence upon his having this particular studio. She saw he had taken a fancy to it.

"I know you feel there's the right atmosphere here," she said. "I can see you do. It would be fatal not to take this studio if you have that feeling. Never mind the expense. We shall get it all back in the future."

"Back in the future!" he said, as if startled. "How?"

She saw she had been imprudent, had made a sort of slip.

"Oh, I don't know. Some day when your father—But don't let's talk of that. A hundred a year is not very much. It will only mean not quite so many new hats and dresses for me."

Claude flushed, suddenly and violently.

"Charmian! You can't suppose—"

"Surely a wife has the right to do something to help her husband?"

"But I don't need—I mean, I could never consent—"

She made a face at him, drawing down her brows, and turning her eyes to the left where the caretaker stood, with a bunch of keys in his large, gouty, red hands. Claude said no more. As they went out Charmian smiled at the caretaker.

"We are going to take it. My husband likes it."

"Yes, ma'am. It's a mighty fine studio. The Baron was sorry to leave it, but he had to go back to Vi-henner."

"I see."

"Now the next thing is to furnish it," said Charmian, as they walked away.

"I shall only want my piano, a chair, and a table," said Claude.

It was only by making a very great effort that he was able to speak naturally, with any simplicity.

"Besides," he added quickly, "it's really too expensive. A hundred a year is absurd."

"If it were two hundred a year it wouldn't be a penny too much if you really like it, if you will feel happy and at home in it. I'm going to furnish it for you, quite simply, of course. Just rugs and a divan or two, and a screen to shut out the door, two or three pretty comfortable chairs, some draperies—only thin ones, nothing heavy to spoil the acoustics—a few cushions, a table or two. Oh, and you must have a spirit-lamp, a little batterie de cuisine, and perhaps a tea-basket."

"But, my dear Charmian—"

"Hush, old boy! You have genius, but you don't understand these things. These are the woman's things. I shall love getting together everything. Surely you don't want to spoil my little fun. I've made a failure of your workroom in Kensington. Do let me try to make a success of the studio."

What could Claude do but thank her, but let her have her way?

The studio was taken for three years and furnished. For days Charmian talked and thought of little else. She was prompted, carried on, by two desires—one, that Claude should be able to work hard as soon as possible; the other, that people should realize what an energetic, capable, and enthusiastic woman she was. The Madame Sennier spirit attended her in her goings out and her comings in, armed her with energy, with gaiety, with patience.

When at length all was ready, she said:

"Claude, to-morrow I want you to do something for me."

"What is it? Of course I will do it. You've been so good, giving up everything for the studio."

Charmian had really given up several parties, and explained why she could not go to them to inquiring hostesses of the "set."

"I want you to let us pendre la cremaillere to-morrow evening all alone, just you and I together."

"In the studio?"

"Of course."

"Well, but"—he smiled, then laughed rather awkwardly—"but what could we do there all alone? What is there to do? And, besides, there's that party at Mrs. Shiffney's to-morrow night. We were both going to that."

"We could go there afterward if we felt inclined. But—I don't know that I want to go to Adelaide Shiffney just now."

"But why not?"

"Perhaps—only perhaps, remember—I'll tell you to-morrow night in the studio."

She assumed in the last words that the matter was settled, and Claude raised no further objection. He saw she was set upon the carrying out of her plan. There was will in her long eyes. He could not help fancying that either she had some surprise in store for him, or that she meant to do, or say, something extremely definite, which she had already decided upon in her mind, to-morrow in the studio.

He felt slightly uneasy.

On the following morning Charmian looked distinctly mysterious, and rather as if she wished Claude to notice her mystery. He ignored it, however, though he realized that some plan must be maturing in her head. His suspicion of the day before was certainly well founded.

"What about this evening, Charmian?" he asked.

"Oh, we are going to pendre la cremaillere. You remember we decided yesterday."

"Before or after dinner? And what about Mrs. Shiffney?"

"Well, I thought we might go to the studio about half-past seven or eight. Could you meet me there—say at half-past seven?"

"Meet you?"

"Yes; I've got to go out in that direction and could take it on the way home."

"All right. But dinner? That's just at dinner-time—not that I care."

"We could have something when we get home. I can tell Alice to put something in the dining-room for us. There's that pie, and we can have a bottle of champagne to drink success to the studio, if we want it."

"And Mrs. Shiffney's given up?"

"We can see how we feel. She only asked us for eleven. We can easily dress and go, it we want to."

So it was settled.

As Claude had not yet begun to work he took a long and solitary walk in the afternoon. He made his way to Battersea Park, and spent nearly two hours there. That day he felt as if a crisis, perhaps small but very definite, had arisen in his life. For some five months now he had been inactive. He had lost the long habit of work. He had allowed his life to be disorganized. No longer had he a grip on himself and on life. From to-morrow he must get that grip again. In the isolation of the studio he would surely be able to get it. Yet he felt very doubtful. He did not know what he wanted to do. He seemed to have drifted very far away from the days when his talent, or his genius, spoke with no uncertain voice, dictated to him what he must do. In those days he was seldom in doubt. He did not have to search. There was no vagueness in his life. The Bible, that inexhaustible mine of great literature, prompted him to music. But, then, he was living in comparative solitude. Quiet days stretched before him, empty evenings. He could give himself up to what was within him. Even now he could have quiet days. He had recently passed not a few with the French Revolution. But the evenings of course were not, could not be, empty. He often went out with Charmian. He was beginning to know something of the society in which she had always lived. There were many pleasant, some charming, people in it. He found a certain enjoyment in the little dinners, the theater parties, even in the few receptions he had been to. But he was obliged to acknowledge to himself that, when in this society, he disliked the fact that he was an unknown man. This society did not give him the incentive to do anything great. On the other hand it made him dislike being—or was it only seeming?—small. Charmian's attitude, too, had often rendered him secretly uneasy when they were among people together. He had been conscious of a lurking dissatisfaction in her, a scarcely repressed impatience. He did not know exactly what was the matter. But he felt the alert tension of the woman who is not satisfied with her position in a society. It had reacted upon him. He had felt as if he were closely connected with it, though he had not quite understood how.

All this now rose up, seemed to spread out before his mind as he walked in Battersea Park. And he said to himself, "It can't go on. I simply must get to work on something. I must get a grip on myself and my life again." He remembered the heat of his soul after he had heard Jacques Sennier's opera, the passion almost to do something great that had glowed in him, the longing for fame. Then he had said to himself: "My life shall feed my art. I'll live, and by living I'll achieve." Out of that heat no rare flower had arisen. He had come out into the world. He had married Charmian, had travelled in Italy. And that was all.

That day he was angry with himself, was sick of his idle life. But he did not feel within him the strong certainty that he would be able to take his life in hand and transform it, which drives doubt and sorrow out of a man. He kept on saying, "I must!" But he did not say, "I shall!"

The fact was that the mainspring was missing from the watch. Claude was living as if he loved, but he was not loving.

At half-past seven he passed up the handsome steps and under the arch which led to his studio.

The caretaker with gouty hands met him. This man had been a soldier, and still had a soldier's eyes, and a way of presenting himself, rather sternly and watchfully, to those arriving in "my building," as he called the house full of studios, which was military. But gout, and it is to be feared drink, had long ago made him physically flaccid, and mentally rather sulky and vague. He looked a wreck, and as if he guessed that he was a wreck. An artist on the first floor had labelled him, "The derelict looking for tips to the offing."

"The lady's here, sir," he observed, on seeing Claude.

"Is she?"

"Been 'ere"—he sometimes dropped an aitch and sometimes did not—"this half hour."

The fact apparently surprised him, almost indeed upset him.

"This 'alf hour," he repeated, this time dropping the aitch to make a change.

"Oh," said Claude, disdaining the explanation which seemed to be expected.

He walked on, leaving the guardian to his gout.

The studio was lit up, and directly Claude opened the door he smelt coffee and something else—sausages, he fancied. At once he guessed why Charmian had arranged to meet him at the studio, instead of going there with him. He shut the door slowly. Yes, certainly, sausages.

"Charmian!" he called.

She came out from behind the screen, dressed in a very plain, workmanlike black gown, over which she was wearing a large butcher blue apron. Her sleeves were turned up and her face was flushed. Claude thought she looked younger than she usually did.

"What are you doing?"

"Cooking the dinner," she replied, in a practical voice. "It will be ready in a minute. Take off your coat and sit down."

She turned round and disappeared. Something behind the screen was hissing like a snake.

Claude now saw a table laid in the middle of the studio. On a rough white cloth were plates, knives, and forks, large coffee cups with flowers coarsely painted on a gray ground with a faint tinge of blue in it, rolls of bread, butter, a cake richly brown in color. A vase of coarse, but effective pottery, full of scented wild geranium, stood in the midst. Claude took off hat and coat, hung them up on a hook, and glanced around.

Certainly Charmian had arranged the furniture well, chosen it well, too. The place looked cosy, and everything was in excellent taste. There was comfort without luxury. Claude felt that he ought to be very grateful.

"Coming!"

Her voice cried out from behind the screen, and she appeared bearing a large dish full of smoking sausages, which she set down on the table.

"Now for the eggs and the coffee!" she said.

Another moment and they were on the table, too, with a plateful of buttered toast.

"Studio fare!" she said, taking off the blue apron, pulling down her sleeves, and looking at Claude. "Are you surprised?"

"I was for the first moment."

"And then?"

"Well, I had felt sure you were up to something, that you had some scheme in your head, some plan for to-day. But I didn't connect it with sausages."

Her expression changed slightly.

"Perhaps it isn't only sausages. But it begins with them. Are you hungry?"

"Yes, very. I've been walking in Battersea Park."

"Claudie, how awful!"

They sat down and fell to—Charmian's expression. She was playing at the Vie de Boheme, but she thought she was being rather serious, that she was helping to launch Claude in a new and suitable life. And behind the light absurdity of this quite unnecessary meal there was intention, grave and intense. The wasted two months must be made up for, the hours given to the French Revolution be redeemed. This meal was only the prelude to something else.

"Is it good?" she asked, as Claude ate and drank.

"Excellent! Where have you been to-day?"

"I've seen Madre and Susan Fleet."

"Miss Fleet at last."

"Yes. It is so tiresome her moving about so much. I care for her more than for any woman in London. All this time she's been in Paris doing things for Adelaide Shiffney."

"Did Madre know about to-night?"

"No."

"Why didn't you tell her? Why not have asked her to come? We belong to her and she to us. It would have been natural."

"I love Madre. But I didn't want even her to-night."

Claude realized that he was assisting at a prelude. But he only said:

"I suppose she is going to Mrs. Shiffney's to-night?"

"Yes."

When they had finished Charmian said:

"Now I'll clear away."

"I'll help you."

"No, you mustn't. I want you to sit down in that cosy chair there, and light your cigar—oh, or your pipe! Yes, to-night you must smoke a pipe."

"I haven't brought it."

"Well, then, a cigar. I won't be long."

She began clearing the table. Claude obediently drew out his cigar-case. He still felt uneasy. What was coming? He could not tell. But he felt almost sure that something was coming which would distress his secret sensitiveness, his strong reserve.

He lit a cigar, and sat down in the armchair Charmian had indicated. She flitted in and out, removing things from the table, shook out and folded the rough white cloth, laid it away somewhere behind the screen, and at last came to sit down.

The studio was lit up with electric light.

"There's too much light," she said. "Don't move. I'll do it."

She went over to the door, and turned out two burners, leaving only one alight.

"Isn't that ever so much better?" she said, coming to sit down near Claude.

"Well, perhaps it is."

"Cosier, more intime."

She sat down with a little sigh.

"I'm going to have a cigarette."

She drew out a thin silver case, opened it.

"A teeny Russian one."

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

"That's it."

She sighed.

After a moment of silence she said:

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

"We!" thought Claude.

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

"Am I?" he said.

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

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

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

"I know. But, still, directly you did tell me, I perfectly understood. I"—she spoke with distinct pressure—"I am a wife who can understand. Don't you remember that night at Jacques Sennier's opera?"

"Yes."

"Didn't I understand then? At the end when they were all applauding? I've got your letter, the letter you wrote that night. I shall always keep it. Such a burning letter, saying I had inspired you, that my love and belief had made you feel as if you could do something great if you changed your life, if you lived with me. You remember?"

"Yes, Charmian, of course I remember."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well?" Claude said.

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

"For everybody! How do you mean?"

"Oh, I know the bad taste of the crowd. Why, Madre always laughs at me for my horror of the crowd. But there is now a big cosmopolitan public which has taste. Look at the success of Strauss, for instance, of Debussy, and now of Jacques Sennier—our own Elgar, too! What I mean is that perhaps the things you have done hitherto are for the very few. There is something terrible about them, I think. They might almost frighten people. They might almost make people dislike you."

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

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

"Strange about the Bible!"

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

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

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

"I daresay it is very absurd of me."

"Claudie, you could never be absurd."

"Anybody can be absurd."

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

As she said the last words she felt deeply conscious of her feminine intelligence, of that delicate ingenuity peculiar to women, unattainable by man.

"No, Charmian, of course not. So you think I've been pouring into a very short channel?"

"Don't you?"

"I'm afraid I've never thought about it."

"I know. It wants another to do that, I think."

"Very likely."

"You care for strange things. One can see that by your choice of words. But there are strange and wonderful words not in the Bible. The other day I was looking into Rossetti's poems. I read Staff and Scrip again and Sister Helen. There are marvellous passages in both of those. I wish sometimes you'd let me come in here, when you're done working, and make tea for you, and just read aloud to you anything interesting I come across."

That was the beginning of a new connection between husband and wife, the beginning also of a new epoch in Claude's life as a composer.

When they left the studio that night he had agreed to Charmian's proposal that she should spend some of her spare time in looking out words that might be suitable for a musical setting, "in your peculiar vein," as she said. By doing this he had abandoned his complete liberty as a creator. So at least he felt. Yet he also felt unable to refuse his wife's request. To do so, after all her beneficent energies employed on his behalf, would be churlish. He might have tried to explain that the something within him which was really valuable could not brook bridle or spur, that unless it were left to range where it would in untrammelled liberty, it was worth very little to the world. He knew this. But a man may deny his knowledge even to himself, deny it persistently through long periods of time. And there was the weakness in Claude which instinctively wished to give to others what they expected of him, or strongly desired from him. On that evening in the studio Charmian's definiteness gained a point for her. She was encouraged by this fact to become more definite.

They were in Kensington by ten o'clock that night. Charmian was in high spirits. A strong hope was dawning in her. Already she felt almost like a collaborator with Claude.

"Don't let us go to bed!" she exclaimed. "Let us dress and go to Adelaide Shiffney's."

"Very well," replied Claude. "By the way, what were you going to tell me about her?"

"Oh, nothing!" she said.

And they went up to dress.

There was a crowd in Grosvenor Square. A good many people were still abroad, but there were enough in London to fill Mrs. Shiffney's drawing-rooms. And notorieties, beauties, and those mysterious nobodies who "go everywhere" until they almost succeed in becoming somebodies, were to be seen on every side. Charmian perceived at once that this was one of Adelaide's non-exclusive parties. Mrs. Shiffney seldom entertained on a very large scale.

"One bore, or one frump, can ruin a party," was a favorite saying of hers. But even she, now and then, condescended to "clear people off." Charmian realized that Adelaide was making a clearance to-night.

Since her marriage with Claude she had not been invited to No. 14 B—Mrs. Shiffney's number in the Square—before.

As she came in to the first drawing-room and looked quickly round she thought:

"She is clearing off me and Claude."

And for a moment she wished they had not come. Her old horror of being numbered with the great crowd of the undistinguished came upon her once more. Then she thought of the conversation in the studio, and she hardened herself in resolve.

"He shall be famous. I will make him famous, whether he wishes it, cares for it, or not."

Mrs. Shiffney was not standing close to the first door to "receive" solemnly. She could not "be bothered" to do that. The Heaths presently came upon her, looking very large and Roman, in the middle of the second drawing-room.

In the room just beyond a small orchestra was playing. This was a sure sign of a "clearance" party. Mrs. Shiffney never had an orchestra playing alone, and steadily, through an evening unless bores and frumps were present. "Hungarians in distress" she called these uniformed musicians, "trying to help bores in distress and failing inevitably."

She held out her hand to Charmian with a faintly ironic smile.

"I'm so glad to see you. Ah, Mr. Heath—Benedick as the married man. I expect you are doing something wonderful as one hears nothing about you. The deep silence fills me with expectation."

She smiled again, and turned to speak to an old lady with fuzzy white hair.

"One of the fuzzywuzzies who go to private views, and who insist on knowing me once a year for my sins."

Charmian's lips tightened as she walked slowly on.

She met many people whom she knew, too many; and that evening she felt peculiarly aware of the insignificance of Claude and herself, combined as a "married couple," in the eyes of this society. What were they? Just two people with fifteen hundred a year and a little house near Kensington High Street. As an unmarried girl in Berkeley Square, with a popular mother, possibilities had floated about her. Clever, rising men came to that house. She had charm. She was "in" everything. Now she felt that a sort of fiat had been pronounced, perhaps by Adelaide Shiffney, and her following, "Charmian's dropping out."

No doubt she exaggerated. She was half conscious that she was exaggerating. But there was surely a change in the attitude people adopted toward her. She attributed it to Mrs. Shiffney. "Adelaide hates Claude," she said to herself, adding a moment later the woman's reason, "because she was in love with him before he married me, and he wouldn't look at her." Such a hatred of Adelaide's would almost have pleased her, had not Adelaide unfortunately been so very influential.

Claude caught sight of Mrs. Mansfield and went to join her, while Charmian spoke to Lady Mildred Burnington, and then to Max Elliot.

Lady Mildred, whose eyes looked more feverish even than usual, and whose face was ravaged, as if by some passion or sorrow for ever burning within her, had a perfunctory manner which fought with her expression. Her face was too much alive. Her manner was half dead. Only when she played the violin was the whole woman in accord, harmonious. Then truth, vigor, intention emerged from her, and she conquered. To-night she spoke of the prospects for the opera season, looking about her as if seeking fresh causes for dissatisfaction.

"It's going to be dull," she said. "Covent Garden has things all its own way, and therefore it goes to sleep. But in June we shall have Sennier. That is something. Without him it would really not be worth while to take a box. I told Mr. Brett so."

"What did he say?" asked Charmian.

"One Sennier makes a summer."

It was at this moment that Max Elliot came up, looking as he nearly always did, cheerful and ready to be kind.

"I know," he said to Lady Mildred, "you're complaining about the opera. I've just been with the Admiral."

"Hilary knows less about music than even the average Englishman."

"Well, he's been swearing, and even—saving your presence—cursing by Strauss."

"He thinks that places him with the connoisseurs. It's his ambition to prove to the world that one may be an Admiral and yet be quite intelligent, even have what is called taste. He declines to be a sea-dog."

"I think it's only living up to you. But have you really no hope of the opera?"

"Very little—unless Sennier saves the situation."

"Has he anything new?" asked Charmian.

Max Elliot looked happily evasive.

"Madame Sennier says he hasn't."

"We ought to have a rival enterprise here as they have in New York at present," said Lady Mildred.

"Sennier's success at the Metropolitan has nearly killed the New Era," said Elliot. "But Crayford has any amount of pluck, and a purse that seems inexhaustible. I suppose you know he's to be here to-night."

"Mr. Jacob Crayford, the Impresario!" exclaimed Charmian. "He's in England?"

"Arrived to-day by the Lusitania in search of talent, of someone who can 'produce the goods' as he calls it. Adelaide sent a note to meet him at the Savoy, and he's coming. Shows his pluck, doesn't it? This is the enemy's camp."

Max Elliot laughed gaily. He loved the strong battles of art, backed by "commercial enterprise," and was friends with everyone though he could be such a keen and concentrated partisan.

"Crayford would give a hundred thousand dollars without a murmur to get Jacques away from the Metropolitan," he continued.

"Won't he go for that?" asked Lady Mildred, in her hollow voice. "Is Madame Sennier holding out for two hundred thousand?"

Again Max Elliot looked happily evasive.

"Henriette! Has she anything to do with it?"

"Mr. Elliot! You know she arranges everything for her husband."

"Do I? Do I really? Ah, there is Crayford!"

"Where?" said Charmian, turning round rather sharply.

"He's going up to Adelaide now. He's taking her hand, just over there. Margot Drake is speaking to him."

"Margot—of course! But I can't see them."

Max Elliot moved.

"If you stand here. Are you so very anxious to see him?"

Charmian saw that he was slightly surprised.

"Because I've heard so much about the New York battle from Margot."

"To be sure!"

"What—that little man!"

"Why not?"

"With the tiny beard! It's the tiniest beard I ever saw."

"More brain than beard," said Max Elliot. "I can assure you Mr. Crayford is one of the most energetic, determined, enterprising, and courageous men on either side of the Atlantic. Diabolically clever, too, in his way, but an idealist at heart. Some people in America think that last fact puts him at a disadvantage as a manager. It certainly gives him point and even charm as a man."

"I should like very much to know him," said Charmian. "Of course you know him?"

"Yes."

"Do introduce me to him."

She had seen a faintly doubtful expression flit rapidly across his face, and noticed that Mr. Crayford was already surrounded. Adelaide Shiffney kept him in conversation. Margot Drake stood close to him, and fixed her dark eyes upon him with an expression of still determination. Paul Lane had come up to the group. Three or four well-known singers were converging upon it from different parts of the room. Charmian quite understood. But she thought of the conversation in the studio which marked the beginning of a new epoch in her life with Claude, and she repeated quietly, but with determination:

"Please introduce me to him."



CHAPTER XVII

A woman knows in a moment whether a man is susceptible to woman's charm, to sex charm, or not. There are men who love, who have loved, or who will love, a woman. And there are men who love women. Charmian had not been with Mr. Jacob Crayford for more than two minutes before she knew that he belonged to the latter class. She only spent some five minutes in his company, after Max Elliot had introduced them to each other. But she came away from Grosvenor Square with a very definite conception of his personality.

Mr. Crayford was small, thin, and wiry-looking, with large keen brown eyes, brown and gray hair, growing over a well-formed and artistic head which was slightly protuberant at the back, and rather large, determined features. At a first glance he looked "Napoleonic." Perhaps this was intentional on his part. His skin was brown, and appeared to be unusually dry. He wore the tiny beard noticed by Charmian, and a carefully trained and sweeping moustache. His ears slightly suggested a faun. His hands were nervous, and showed energy, and the tendency to grasp and to hold. His voice was a thin tenor, with occasional, rather surprisingly deep chest notes, when he wished to be specially emphatic. His smart, well-cut clothes, and big emerald shirt stud, and sleeve links, suggested the successful impresario. His manner was, on a first introduction, decidedly business-like, cool, and watchful. But in his eyes there were sometimes intense flashes which betokened a strong imagination, a temperament capable of emotion and excitement. His eyelids were large and rounded. And on the left one there was a little brown wart. When he was introduced to Charmian he sent her a glance which she interpreted as meaning, "What does this woman want of me?" It showed her how this man was bombarded, how instinctively ready he was to be alertly on the defensive if he judged defense to be necessary.

"I've heard so much of your battles, Mr. Crayford," she said, "that I wanted to know the great fighter."

She had assumed her very self-possessed manner, the minx-manner as some people called it. Claude had known it well in the "early days." It gave her a certain very modern charm in the eyes of some men. And it suggested a woman who lived in and for the world, who had nothing to do with any work. There was daintiness in it, and a hint of impertinence.

Mr. Crayford smiled faintly. He had a slight tic, moving his eyebrows sometimes suddenly upward.

"A good set-to now and then does no one any harm that I know of," he said, speaking rapidly.

"They say over here you've got the worst of it this season."

"Do they indeed? Very kind and obliging of them, I'm sure."

"I hope it isn't true."

"Are you an enemy of the great and only Jacques then?" said Mr. Crayford.

"Monsieur Sennier? Oh, no! I was at the first performance of his Paradis Terrestre, and it altered my whole life."

"Well, they like it over in New York. And I've got to find another Paradise to put up against it just as quick as I know how."

"I do hope you'll be successful."

"I'll put Europe through my sieve anyway," said Mr. Crayford. "No man can do more. And very few men know the way to do as much. Are you interested in music?"

"Intensely."

She paused, looking at the little man before her. She was hesitating whether to tell him that she had married a musician or to refrain. Something told her to refrain, and she added:

"I've always lived among musical people and heard the best of everything."

"Well, opera's the only thing nowadays, the only really big proposition. And it's going to be a bigger proposition than most people dream of."

His eyes flashed.

"Wait till I build an opera house in London, something better than that old barn of yours over against the Police Station."

"Are you going to build an opera house here?"

"Why not? But I've got to find some composers. They're somewhere about. Bound to be. The thing is to find them. It was a mere chance Sennier coming up. If he hadn't married his wife he'd be starving at this minute, and I'd be licking the Metropolitan into a cocked hat."

Charmian longed to put her hand on the little man's arm and to say:

"I've married a musician, I've married a genius. Take him up. Give him his chance."

But she looked at those big brown eyes which confronted her under the twitching eyebrows. And now that the flash was gone she saw in them the soul of the business man. Claude was not a "business proposition." It was useless to speak of him yet.

"I hope you'll find your composer," she said quietly, almost with a dainty indifference.

Then someone came up and claimed Crayford with determination.

"That's a pretty girl," he remarked. "Is she married? I didn't catch her name."

"Oh, yes, she's married to an unknown man who composes."

"The devil she is!"

The lips above the tiny beard stretched in a smile that was rather sardonic.

Before going away Charmian wanted to have a little talk with Susan Fleet, who was helping Mrs. Shiffney with the "fuzzywuzzies." She found her at length standing before a buffet, and entertaining a very thin and angular woman, dressed in black, with scarlet flowers growing out of her toilet in various unexpected places. Miss Fleet welcomed Charmian with her usual unimpassioned directness, and introduced her quietly to Miss Gretch, as her companion was called, surprisingly.

Miss Gretch, who was drinking claret cup, and eating little rolls which contained hidden treasure of pate de foie gras, bowed and smiled with anxious intensity, then abruptly became unnaturally grave, and gazed with a sort of piercing attention at Charmian's hair, jewels, gown, fan, and shoes.

"She seems to be memorizing me," thought Charmian, wondering who Miss Gretch was, and how she came to be there.

"Stay here just a minute, will you?" said Susan Fleet. "Adelaide wants me, I see. I'll be back directly."

"Please be sure to come. I want to talk to you," said Charmian.

As Susan Fleet was going she murmured:

"Miss Gretch writes for papers."

Charmian turned to the angular guest with a certain alacrity. They talked together with animation till Susan Fleet came back.

A week later, on coming down to breakfast before starting for the studio, Claude found among his letters a thin missive, open at the ends, and surrounded with yellow paper. He tore the paper, and three newspaper cuttings dropped on to his plate.

"What's this?" he said to Charmian, who was sitting opposite to him. "Romeike and Curtice! Why should they send me anything?"

He picked up one of the cuttings.

"It's from a paper called My Lady."

"What is it about?"

"It seems to be an account of Mrs. Shiffney's party, with something marked in blue pencil, 'Mrs. Claude Heath came in late with her brilliant husband, whose remarkable musical compositions have not yet attained to the celebrity which will undoubtedly be theirs within no long time. The few who have heard Mr. Heath's music place him with Elgar, Max Reger, and Delius.' Then a description of what you were wearing. How very ridiculous and objectionable!"

Claude looked furious and almost ashamed.

"Here's something else! 'A Composer's Studio,' from The World and His Wife. It really is insufferable."

"Why? What can it say?"

"'Mr. Claude Heath, the rising young composer, who recently married the beautiful Miss Charmian Mansfield, of Berkeley Square, has just rented and furnished elaborately a magnificent studio in Renwick Place, Chelsea. Exquisite Persian rugs strew the floor——'"

Claude stopped, and with an abrupt movement tore the cuttings to pieces and threw them on the carpet.

"What can it mean? Who on earth——? Charmian, do you know anything of this?"

"Oh," she said, with a sort of earnest disgust, mingled with surprise, "it must be that dreadful Miss Gretch!"

"Dreadful Miss Gretch! I never heard of her. Who is she?"

"At Adelaide Shiffney's the other night Susan Fleet introduced me to a Miss Gretch. I believe she sometimes writes, for papers or something. I had a little talk with her while I was waiting for Susan to come back."

"Did you tell her about the studio?"

"Let me see! Did I? Yes, I believe I did say something. You see, Claude, it was the night of——"

"I know it was. But how could you——?"

"How could I suppose things said in a private conversation would ever appear in print? I only said that you had a studio because you composed and wanted quiet, and that I had been picking up a few old things to make it look homey. How extraordinary of Miss Gretch!"

"It has made me look very ridiculous. I am quite unknown, and therefore it is impossible for the public to be interested in me. Miss Gretch is certainly a very inefficient journalist. Elgar! Delius too! I wonder she didn't compare me with Scriabine while she was about it. How hateful it is being made a laughing-stock like this."

"Oh, nobody reads those papers, I expect. Still, Miss Gretch——"

"Gretch! What a name!" said Claude.

His anger vanished in an abrupt fit of laughter, but he started for the studio in half an hour looking decidedly grim. When he had gone Charmian picked up the torn cuttings which were lying on the carpet. She had been very slow in finishing breakfast that day.

Since her meeting with Jacob Crayford her mind had run perpetually on opera. She could not forget his words, spoken with the authority of the man who knew, "Opera's the only thing nowadays, the only really big proposition." She could not forget that he had left England to "put Europe through his sieve" for a composer who could stand up against Jacques Sennier. What a chance there was now for a new man. He was being actively searched for. If only Claude had written an opera! If only he would write an opera now!