The Way of Ambition Part 24

Between the two parts of the not long concert there was a pause. During it Mrs. Mansfield and Claude left their seats and strolled about in the corridor, talking. They were both of them heated by music and ready for mental intimacy. But they did not discuss the works they had just heard.

Combinations of melody and harmony turned them toward life and humanity.

The voices of the great orchestral family called them toward the dim avenues where in the shadows destiny wanders. Some music enlarges the borders, sets us free in regions whose confines we cannot perceive. They spoke of aims, of ideals, of goals which are very far off.

"Fine music gives me the conception of great distances," Mrs. Mansfield said presently. "It makes me feel that the soul is born for travel."

Heath stood still.

"The winding white road over the hills that loses itself in the vagueness which, in a picture, only some shade of blue can suggest. The road! The road!"

He stood leaning against the wall. As she stood by him Mrs. Mansfield felt strangely, almost cruelly, young. It was as if student days had come for them both. She could hardly believe that her hair was snow-white, and that Charmian had been going to parties for nearly four years.

"The worst of it is," Claude continued, "that it is so hard sometimes not to wander from it."

"It seems to me you never wander."

"Because I know that, if I did, I should probably never come back to the road. What you perhaps consider my strength takes its rise, I believe, in my knowledge of my weakness. Things that are right for others aren't right for me."

No one was near them. The music seemed to have abolished for the moment the difference in age between them. Claude spoke to her as he had seldom spoken to her before, with an almost complete unreserve of manner.

"Do you know why some men enter the cloister?" he continued. "It's because they feel that if they are not monks they will be libertines.

Mullion House is my cloister. I haven't got the power of apportioning my life with sweet reason, so much work, so much play, so much retirement, so much society, so much restraint, so much license. I could never pursue my art through wildness, as so many men have done, women too. I don't believe I could even stick to it in the midst of the ordinary life of pleasures and distractions. It's like a bone that I have to seize and take away into a cave where no one can see me gnaw it. Isn't that a beastly simile?"

"Is that why you won't go to Max Elliot's, that you refused Mrs.

s.h.i.+ffney? Do you think that the sort of thing which inspires many men--the audience, let us say, watching the combat--would unnerve you?"

"I don't say that. But I think it might lead me into wild extravagance, or into complete idleness. And I think, I know, that I might be tempted irresistibly to give an audience what it wanted. There's something in me which is ready to rush out to satisfy expectation. I hate it, but it's there."

"And yet you're so uncompromising."

"That's my armor. I daren't wear ordinary clothes, lest every arrow should pierce me."

A bell sounded. They returned to the concert room. When the second part was over Heath looked at Mrs. Mansfield and said:

"Where are we going?"

They were in the midst of the crowd pa.s.sing out. Women were winding soft things about their necks, men were b.u.t.toning up their coats. For a March wind was about in the great city. She returned his look and smiled.

"Ah! You guessed! It's the gallery, I suppose. I'm not accustomed to all this fun. Isn't it amazing what a groove one lives in? Berkeley Square shadows the whole of my life I begin to believe."

"Don't say the motor is waiting!"

"No, it isn't."

"Shall we go to some preposterous place--to the Monico?"

"Where you like. It's just tea time, or coffee time."

They walked to the Monico in the March wind, and went in with a group of Italians, pa.s.sing the woman who sells foreign papers, and seeing names that transported them to Paris, to Milan, to Rome, to Berlin. A vastness of marble contained a myriad of swarthy strangers, releasing souls astoundingly foreign in vivid gesture and talk. They had coffee with cream like a burgeoning cloud floating airily on the top.

"The only word to describe the effect of all this upon me is spree,"

said Mrs. Mansfield. "I am out on the spree."

"Capital! And if I stepped right in to your sort of life," said Heath, "would it have the same kind of effect upon me?"

"I don't think it could. It's too conscious, too critical, too fastidious. There's nothing fastidious in a spree. I like the March wind outside, too--the thought of it."

Suddenly her mind went to Charmian and Algiers.

"Charmian's in the sun," she said.

Directly she said this Heath looked slightly self-conscious.

"Have you heard from her?"

"This morning. She has made great friends with Susan Fleet."

"Yes?"

"Oh, a woman we all like, who often helps Adelaide s.h.i.+ffney with things."

"We all like," he repeated.

"A _cliche_! And indeed I scarcely know Susan Fleet. You see what an absurd close borough I live in, have always lived in. And I never thoroughly realized that till I met you."

"And I live in loneliness, outside of it all, of everything almost."

Lightly she answered:

"With Mrs. s.h.i.+ffney and others holding open the door, holding up the lamp, and imploring you to come in, to come right in as they say on the other side of the Atlantic."

"You don't do that."

"Do you wish me to?"

"I don't know what I wish. But I am dissatisfied."

He frowned, moving his chair, lit a cigarette, pushed away his coffee cup.

"What is it like at Algiers?"

"Very beautiful, Charmian says. Adelaide and the others have gone off to a desert place called Bou-Saada--"

"Bou-Saada!" he said slowly.

"And Charmian and Susan Fleet are up on the hill at Mustapha Superieur.

They've left the yacht for a few days. They are visiting Arab villas and exploring tropical gardens."

She watched him and sipped her coffee. All the student feeling had gone from her. And now she was deeply aware of the difference between her age and Heath's.