The Way of Ambition Part 31

"Did he seem interested?"

"Very much, I thought."

"Very much! Oh, Susan! But he has a manner of seeming interested. It may not mean anything. But still I do think since I have come back he sees that I am not quite a nonent.i.ty. He has been here several times, for mother of course. Even now I have never heard his music. But there is a difference. I believe in such a place as London unless one has resolution to a.s.sert oneself people think one is a sort of shadow. I have so often thought of what you said about my perhaps having to learn through Claude Heath and to teach him, too. Sometimes when I look at him I feel it must be so. But what have I to teach? D'you know since--since--well, it makes me feel humble often. And yet I know that the greatest man needs help. Men are a sort of children. I've often been surprised by the childishness of really big men. Please tell me all he said to you."

Very calmly Susan told. She had just finished, and Charmian was about to speak again, when Mrs. Mansfield opened the door. Charmian sprang up so abruptly that Caroline was startled into a husky bark.

"Oh, Madre! Susan Fleet is here!"

Mrs. Mansfield knew at once that she had broken in upon a confidential interview, not by Miss Fleet's demeanor, but by Charmian's. But she did not show her knowledge. She sat down and joined pleasantly in the talk.

She had often seen Miss Fleet in London, but she did not know her well.

At once she realized that Charmian had found an excellent friend. And she was not jealous because of the confidence given but not given to her. Youth, she knew, is wilful and must have its way. The nearest, for some inscrutable reason, are generally told the least.

When Miss Fleet went away, Mrs. Mansfield said:

"That is one of the most thoroughbred human beings I have ever seen. No wonder the greatest sn.o.bs like her. There is nothing a sn.o.b hates so much as sn.o.bbery in another. _Viva_ to your new friend, Charmian!"

She wondered a little whether Miss Fleet's perception of character was as keen as her breeding was definite, when she heard that Claude Heath had met her.

Heath told Mrs. Mansfield this. Miss Fleet had made a strong impression upon him. At the moment when he had met her he had felt specially downcast. The musical critic, with whom he had gone to the concert, had been a fellow student with him at the Royal College. Being young the critic was very critical, very sure of himself, very decisive in his wors.h.i.+p of the new idols and in his scathing contempt for the old. He spoke of Mendelssohn as if the composer of _Elijah_ had earned undying shame, of Gounod as if he ought to have been hanged for creating his _Faust_. His glorification of certain modern impressionists in music depressed Heath, almost as much as his abuse of the dead who had been popular, and who were still appreciated by some thousands, perhaps millions, of n.o.bodies. He made Heath, in his discontented condition, feel as if all art were futile.

"Why give up everything," he thought, "merely to earn in the end the active contempt of men who have given up nothing? What is it that drives me on? A sort of madness, perhaps, something to be rooted out."

He almost s.h.i.+vered as the conviction came to him that he must have been composing for posterity, since he did not desire present publicity. No doubt he had tried to trick himself into the belief that he had toiled for himself alone, paid the tribute of ardent work to his own soul. Now he asked himself, with bitter scepticism: "Does any man really ever do that?" And his world seemed to fall about him like shadows dropping down into a void.

Then came his five minutes of talk with Susan Fleet.

When Heath spoke of it to Mrs. Mansfield he said:

"I was a cripple when we began. When we stopped I felt as if I could climb to a peak. And she said nothing memorable. But I had been in her atmosphere."

"And you are very susceptible to atmosphere."

"Too susceptible. That's why I keep so much to myself."

"I know--the cloister."

She looked at him earnestly, even searchingly. He slightly reddened, looked down, said slowly:

"It's not a natural life, the life of the cloister."

"Perhaps you mean to come out."

"I don't know what I mean. I am all at a loose end lately."

"Since when?"

Her eyes were still on him.

"I hardly know. Perhaps hearing about Africa, of that voyage I might have made, unsettled me. I'm a weakling, I'm afraid."

"Very strong in one way."

"Very weak in another, perhaps. It would have been better to go and have done with it, than to brood over not having gone."

"You are envying Charmian?"

"Some days I envy everyone who isn't Claude Heath," he answered evasively, with a little covering laugh. "Of one thing I am quite sure, that I wish I were a male Miss Fleet. She knows what few people know."

"What is that?"

"What is small and what is great."

"And you found that out in five minutes at a concert?"

"Elgar's is music that helps the perceptions."

Mrs. Mansfield's perceptions were very keen. Yet she was puzzled by Heath. She realized that he was disturbed and attributed that disturbance to Charmian. Had he suspected, or found out, that Charmian imagined herself to be in love with him? He came as usual to the house.

His friends.h.i.+p with Mrs. Mansfield did not seem to her to have changed.

But his relation to Charmian was not what it had been. Indeed, it was scarcely possible that it should be so. For Charmian had continued to be definite ever since her drastic remarks at dinner on the evening of her return. She bantered Heath, laughed at him, patronized him in the pretty way of a pretty London girl who takes the world for her own with the hands of youth. When she found him with her mother she did not glide away, or remain as a mere listener while they talked. She stayed to hold her own, sometimes even--so her mother thought, not without pathos--a little aggressively.

Heath's curious and deep reserve, which underlay his apparent quick and sensitive readiness to be sympathetic with those about him, to give them what they wanted of him, was not abated by Charmian's banter, her delicate impertinences, her laughing attacks. Mrs. Mansfield noticed that. He turned to her still when he wished to speak for a moment out of his heart.

But he was becoming much more at home in Charmian's company. She stirred him at moments into unexpected bursts of almost boyish gaiety. She knew how to involve him in eager arguments.

One day, as he was about to leave the house in Berkeley Square he said to Mrs. Mansfield:

"Miss Charmian ought to have some big object in life on which she could concentrate. She has powers, you know."

When he was gone Mrs. Mansfield smiled and sighed.

"And when will he find out that he is Charmian's big object in life?"

she thought.

She knew men well. Nevertheless, their stupidities sometimes surprised her. It was as if something in them obstinately refused to see.

"It's their blindness that spoils us," she said to herself. "If they could see, we should have ten commandments to obey--perhaps twenty."

CHAPTER XII

Toward the end of the London season the management of the Covent Garden Opera House startled its subscribers by announcing for production a new opera, composed by a Frenchmen called Jacques Sennier, whose name was unknown to most people. Mysteriously, as the day drew near for the first performance of this work, which was called _Le Paradis Terrestre_, the inner circles of the musical world were infected with an unusual excitement. Whispers went round that the new opera was quite extraordinary, epoch-making, that it was causing a prodigious impression at rehearsal, that it was absolutely original, that there was no doubt of its composer's genius. Then reports as to the composer's personality and habits began to get about. Mrs. s.h.i.+ffney, of course, knew him. But she had introduced him to n.o.body. He was her personal prey at present.

She, however, allowed it to be known that he was quite charming, but the strangest creature imaginable. It seemed that he had absolutely no moral sense, did not know what it meant. If he saw an insect trodden upon, or a fly killed on a window-pane, he could not work for days. But when his first wife--he had been married at sixteen--shot herself in front of him, on account of his persistent cruelty and infidelity, he showed no sign of distress, had the body carried out of his studio, and went on composing. Decidedly an original! Everybody was longing to know him. The libraries and the box-office of the Opera House were bombarded with demands for seats for the first performance, at which the beautiful Annie Meredith, singer, actress, dancer, speculator, and breeder of prize bulldogs, was to appear in the heroine's part.

Three nights before the premiere, a friend, suddenly plunged into mourning by the death of a relation, sent Mrs. Mansfield her box.