Mummery Part 24

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

Clara held out her hand to him,--

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

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

Nothing was said about another meeting. As he took her down the stairs the door of the flat below was opened and a woman's face peeped out.

Near the bottom of the stairs they met a man in a tail coat and top hat who sidled past them, took off his hat and held it in front of his face, but before he did so Clara had recognised Mr c.u.mberland, erstwhile Mr Clott.

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

Rodd looked up the stairs.

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

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

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

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

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

XIII

'THE TEMPEST'

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

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

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

Sir Henry had returned to town enthusiastic and eager. Mann and Clara were a combination strong enough to break the tyranny of the social use of the front of the house over the artistic employment of the stage.

This season at all events Lady Butcher and Lady Bracebridge should not have things all their own way.

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

Clara saw him and he reproached her,--

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

'You mustn't be so angry. n.o.body takes Charles seriously except in his work. Everybody expects him to do silly things. You can easily put it right with a dignified letter.'

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

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

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

'Will that do?' he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

'I suppose so,' replied Clara.

It was extraordinary to feel the great machine of the theatre gathering momentum for the launching of the play. It was marvellous to be caught up, as the rehearsals proceeded, into the loveliest fantasy ever created by the human mind. Clara threw herself into it heart and soul.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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