Chapter 9 MAGIC

A friendly city seemed London to Clara as she left the shop. A fresh wind was blowing, and she stood for some moments to drink in the keen air. The sky was full of clouds, gray, white, and cinnamon against the smoky blue, as she turned south with eyes newly eager for beauty and friendliness.

Above the roofs, the statue of Lord Nelson stood perched in absurd elevation above the London that flouted his Emma, and Clara laughed to see the little gray man in cocked hat symbolising for her the delicious absurdity of London, where nothing and nobody could ever be of the smallest importance in its hugeness.... This was its charm, that an individual could in it feel the indifference of humanity exactly as on a hill the indifference of Nature can be felt. A city of strangers! Everybody was strange to everybody else. That was good and healthy. Nothing in London was on show, nothing dressed for the tourist. Living in rooms in London, one could be as lonely as in a hut in the wilderness.

She walked down to the Imperium, and, entering by the stage door, found Charles in excited converse with the scenic artist, Mr Smithson, who was looking at a drawing and scratching his head dubiously.

'It's clever, Mr Mann, but nothing like the seaside. Sir Henry's sure to want his waves "off," and the sun ought to look a bit like it.'

'That's my design, Mr Smithson. Sir Henry said you would paint it. If you won't, I'll do it myself.... Ah! Clara, do come and explain to Mr Smithson what we want.'

Smithson turned angrily.-

'He gives me a blooming drawing with purples and golds and blues and every colour but the natural colours of a sea-side place. I've painted scenery for thirty years, and I ought to know what a stage island is like by now. I've done a dozen sets for The Tempest in my time.'

'It is an enchanted island,' said Clara.

'But Prospero was Duke of Milan.... I've been to the Mediterranean to see for myself and I know what the colouring is.... I can't believe that Sir Henry has passed this. God knows what kind of lighting it will take.'

Charles threw his hat on the ground and stamped on it.

'Dolt! Fool! Idiot!' he shouted. 'Go away and paint it as I tell you to paint it.'

'Damned if I do,' said Smithson. 'My firm has painted all the scenery for this theatre since Sir Henry took it, and we've had our name on the programme, and we've got a reputation to lose. When Shakespeare says an island, he means an island, not the crater of a blooming volcano....'

Charles snatched his drawing out of Mr Smithson's hand, and with an expression of extreme agony he said.-

'Clara, you dragged me into this infernal theatre. Will you please see that I am not driven mad in it? Am I an artist?'

'You may be an artist, Mr Mann,' said Mr Smithson, 'but I'm a practical scene-painter. I was painting scenery before you were born. I was three years old in my father's workshop when I put my first dab of paint on for the Valley of Diamonds for Drury Lane in Gustus Harris's days.'

The argument might have gone on indefinitely, but fortunately Sir Henry came down the stairs with Lady Butcher. He was immaculately dressed in frock-coat and top hat, gray Cashmere trousers, and white waistcoat to attend with his wife a fashionable reception. With a low bow, he swept off his very shiny hat, and said to Lady Butcher,-

'My dear, Mr Charles Mann.'

Lady Butcher gave a curt nod.

'My dear, Miss Day....'

'Che-arming!' drawled Lady Butcher, holding out her hand very high in the air. Clara reached up to it and shook it sharply.

'Mr Smithson doesn't like Charles's drawing for the cave scene,' said Clara. 'He can't quite see it, you know, because it is a little different.'

'I won't be a moment, my dear,' said Sir Henry, and Lady Butcher sailed out into the street.

'What's the matter, Smithson?'

'We've never done anything like this before. There's nothing like it in Nature.'

'There is nothing like Caliban in Nature,' said Clara sweetly, and Sir Henry caught at her hint, scowled at Smithson, and growled,-

'I have passed it. If it needs modification we can settle it at rehearsal. Go ahead. I want to see it before I go away.'

'But there are no measurements, Sir Henry.'

'You know what we can do and what we can't.'

'Very well, Sir Henry.' Mr Smithson clapped on his bowler hat and rushed away.

Charles stooped to gather up his battered hat, and Sir Henry seized Clara's arm, squeezed it tight, looked out through the door at his magnificent wife, and heaved an enormous sigh. Clara in her amazing new happiness smiled at him, and he muttered,-

'You grow in beauty every day. A-ah! Good-day, Mann. The theatre is at your disposal.'

He fixed his eyes on Clara for a moment, then wrenched himself away.

There were one or two letters for her in the rack. She took them down, and turned to find Charles, having smoothed out his hat, standing ruefully staring through his pince-nez.

'These people are altogether too busy for me,' he said. 'All the work I've put in seems to be nothing to them. I had a terrible turn with Butcher two days ago, and now this man Smithson has been too much for me. They treat me like a tailor, and expect me to cut my scenery to fit their theatre.... I wish you'd come back, chicken. I'm in a dreadful muddle. I've been working till I can't see, and I've been reading The Tempest till my mind is as salt as a dried haddock.... But I've drawn a marvellous Caliban, part fish, part frog, part man ... Life emerging from the sea. I'm sure now that we're all spawned from the sea, and that life on the earth is only what has been left after the sun has dried it up....'

Clara looked at him apprehensively. She still felt responsible for him, but she was no longer part and parcel of him. She was free of his imagination and could be critical of it.

'Never mind, Charles,' she said. 'Let us go and look at the stage, and you can tell me what you have planned, and then we will go out and talk, and decide what we will do during the holidays. I have promised to go to Sir Henry's in the Lakes for a few days, and Verschoyle has promised to motor me up there.'

Charles's fingers fumbled rather weakly round his lips, and she saw to her distress that he had been biting his nails again.

'Aren't you ever coming back, my chicken, my love? ... I'm sorry we came to London now. We should have gone to Sicily as I wanted. One can live in such places. Here everybody is so business-like, so set, so used to doing and thinking in one particular way.'

'Has anything happened?' asked Clara, knowing that he was never critical without a cause.

'No,' he replied, rather shortly, 'no.'

She was rather irritated by him. He had no right to be as foolish and helpless as to have let her humiliate him by extricating him from his argument with Smithson, upon which he ought never to have entered. Smithson was only a kind of tradesman after all.

They went on to the stage and Charles waxed eloquent over the scenery he had designed. Eloquence with Charles was rather an athletic performance. He took a tape measure from his pocket, and raced about with it, making chalk marks on the boards.

The scenery door was open, and the sunlight poured in in a great shaft upon him, and Clara, watching him, was suddenly most painfully sorry for him. He worked himself up into a throbbing enthusiasm, torrents of words poured from his lips, as with strange gesticulations he described the towering rocks, the wind-twisted trees, the tangle of lemons, the blue light illuminating the magician's grotto, the golden light that should hang about the rocky island jutting up from the sea. All this he talked of, while the sun shone through his long yellow hair and revealed its streaks of silver.... At last he stood in the sunlight, with his arms outstretched, as though he were evoking his vision from the heavens to take shape upon the stage.

Clara, watching him, perceived that he was a born actor. He trod the stage with loving feet, and with a movement entirely different from that which he used in the street or among people who were not of the theatre. This surely was the real Charles. The light of the sun upon him was inappropriate. It mocked him and inexorably revealed the fact that he was no longer young. The scenery door was closed and the discordance ceased, but more clearly than ever was Charles revealed as an actor treading easily and affectionately his native elevation. The influence of the place affected even himself, and after he had constructed his imaginary scenery round himself, he said,-

'One of the first parts I ever played was Ferdinand staggering beneath logs of wood.'

He assumed an imaginary log and recited,-

'This my mean task would be

As heavy to me as 'tis odious; but

The mistress which I serve quickens what's dead

And makes my labours pleasures: Oh, she is

Ten times more gentle than her father's crabbed;

And he's composed of harshness. I must remove

Some thousands of these logs and pile them up,

Upon a sore injunction: my sweet mistress

Weeps when she sees me work; and says such baseness

Had never like executor.

He produced the illusion of youth, and his voice was so entrancing that Clara, like Miranda, wept to see him.... He threw off his part with a great shout, rushed at her and caught her up in a hug.

'Chicken,' he said, 'don't let us be silly any more. We have won through. Here we are in the theatre. We've conquered the stage, and soon all those seats out there will be full of eager people saying, "Who are these wonders? Can it be? Surely they are none other than Charles and Clara Mann?"'

'Day,' said she.

He stamped his foot impatiently.

'What's in a name? Day, if you like. Artists can and must do as they please. This is our real life, here where we make beauty. The rest is for city clerks and stockbrokers who can't trust themselves to behave decently unless they have a perfect net of rules from which they cannot escape.'

'I don't want to talk about it. Go on with your work, Charles.'

'I've finished for to-day.... Will you let me take you out to dinner?'

'No. I've promised Verschoyle.'

'Damn! You oughtn't to be seen with him so much. People will say you have left me for his money.'

'I thought artists didn't care what people say.'

'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.