The Way of Ambition Part 52

It seemed to her that Claude had fallen into a dream.

That day, when Charmian rejoined Claude, she said:

"Old Robert has spoken to me of a villa."

"Old Robert!"

"The gardener. We are intimate friends. He has told me a thousand things about Algeria, his life in the army, his family. But what interests me--us--is that he knows of a villa to be let by the year, Djenan-el-Maqui. It is old but in good repair, pure Arab in style, so he says, and only eighty pounds a year. Of course it is quite small. But there is a garden. And it is only some ten or twelve minutes from here in the best part of Mustapha Inferieur. Shall we go and look at it now?"

"Isn't it rather late?"

"Then to-morrow," she said quickly.

"Yes, let us go to-morrow."

Djenan-el-Maqui proved to be suited to the needs of Charmian and Claude, and it charmed them both by its strangeness and beauty. It lay off the high road, to the left of the Boulevard Brou, a little way down the hill; and though there were many villas near it, and from its garden one could look over the town, and see cavalry exercising on the Champs de Manoeuvres, which shows like a great brown wound in the fairness of the city, it suggested secrecy, retirement, and peace, as only old Oriental houses can. Around it was a high white wall, above which the white flat-roofed house showed itself, its serene line broken by two tiny white cupolas and by one upstanding and lonely chamber built on the roof. On pa.s.sing through a doorway, which was closed by a strong wooden door, the Heaths found themselves in a small paved courtyard, which was roofed with bougainvillea, and provided with stone benches and a small stone table. The sun seemed to drip through the interstices of the bright-colored ceiling and made warm patches on the worn gray stone. The house, with its thick white walls, and windows protected by grilles, confronted them, holding its many secrets.

"We must have it, Claude," Charmian almost whispered.

"But we haven't even seen it!" he retorted, smiling.

"I know it will do."

She was right. Soon Claude loved it even more than she did; loved its mysterious pillared drawing-room with the small white arches, the faint-colored and ancient Moorish tiles, the divans strewn with multi-colored cus.h.i.+ons, the cabinets and tables of lacquer work, and the low-set windows about which the orange-hued venusta hung; the gallery running right round it from which the few small bedrooms opened by low black doors; the many nooks and recesses where, always against a background of colored tiles, more divans and tiny coffee tables suggested repose and the quiet of dreaming. He delighted in the coolness and the curious silence of this abode, which threw the mind far back into a past when the Arab was a law unto himself and to his household, when he dreamed in what he thought full liberty, when Europe concerned him not. And most of all he liked his own workroom, though this was an addition to the house, and had been made by a French painter who had been a former tenant. This was the chamber built upon the roof, which formed a flat terrace in front of it, commanding a splendid view over the town, the bay, Cap Matifou, and the distant range of the Atlas.

Moorish tiles decorated the walls to a height of some three feet, tiles purple, white, and a watery green. Above them was a cream-colored distemper. At the back of the room, opposite to the French window which opened on to the roof, was an arched recess some four feet narrower than the rest of the room, ornamented with plaques of tiles, and delicate lacelike plaster-work above low windows which came to within a foot and a half of the floor. A bra.s.s Oriental lamp with white, green, and yellow beads hung in the archway. An old carpet woven at Kairouan before the time of aniline dyes was spread over the floor. White and green curtains, and furniture covered in white and green, harmonized with the tiles and the white and cream plaster. Through the windows could be seen dark cypress trees, the bright blue of the sea, the white and faint red of the crowding houses of the town.

It was better than the small chamber in Kensington Square, better than the studio in Renwick Place.

"I ought to be able to work here!" Claude thought.

The small inner Arab court, with its fountain, its marble basin containing three goldfish, its roofed-in coffee-chamber, the little dining-room separated from the rest of the house, pleased them both. And Charmian took the garden, which ran rather wild, and was full of geraniums, orange trees, fig trees, ivy growing over old bits of wall, and untrained rose bushes, into her special charge.

Their household seemed likely to be a success. As cook they had an astonis.h.i.+ngly broad-bosomed Frenchwoman, whom they called "La Grande Jeanne," and who immediately settled down like a sort of mother of the house; a tall, thin, and birdlike Frenchman named Pierre, who had been a soldier, and then for several years a servant at the Trappist Monastery at Staoueli; Charmian's maid; and an Arab boy whom everyone called Bibi, and who alternated between a demeanor full of a graceful and apparently fatalistic languor, and fits of almost monkeylike gaiety and mischief which Pierre strove to repress. A small Arab girl, dressed like a little woman in flowing cotton or muslin, with clinking bracelets and anklets, charms on her thin bosom and scarlet and yellow silk handkerchiefs on her braided hair, was also perpetually about the house and the courtyard. Neither Charmian nor Claude ever quite understood what had first led little Fatma there. She was some relation of Bibi's, had always known La Grande Jeanne, and seemed in some vague way to belong to the ancient house. Very soon they would have missed her had she gone.

She was gentle, dignified, eternally picturesque. The courtyard roofed in by the bougainvillea would have seemed sad and deserted without her.

Charmian had come away from England with enthusiasm, intent on the future. Till their departure life had been busy and complicated. She had had a thousand things to do, quant.i.ties of people to see; friends to whom she must say good-bye, acquaintances, dressmakers, modistes, tailors. Claude had been busy, too. He had been working at his orchestration for hours every day. Charmian had never interrupted him.

It was her role to keep him to his work if he showed signs of flagging.

But he had never shown such signs. London had hummed around them with its thousand suggestive voices; hinting, as if without intention and because it could not do otherwise, at a myriad interests, activities, pa.s.sions. The great city had kept their minds, and even, so it seemed to Charmian and to Claude sometimes now in Africa, their hearts occupied.

Now they confronted a solitary life in a strange country, in a _milieu_ where they had no friends, no acquaintances even, except two or three casually met in the Hotel St. George, and the British Consul-General and his wife, who had been to call on them.

Quietude, a curious sort of emptiness, seemed to descend upon them during those first days in the villa. Even Charmian felt rather "flat."

She was conscious of the romance of their situation in this old Arab house, looking out over trees to the bright-blue sea. But when she had carefully arranged and rearranged the furniture, settled on the places for the books, put flowers in the vases, and had several talks with Jeanne, she was acutely aware of a certain vagueness, a certain almost overpowering oddity. She felt rather like a person who has done in a great hurry something she did not really want to do, and who understands her true feeling abruptly.

In the course of years she had become so accustomed to the routine of a full life, a life charged with incessant variety of interests, occupations, amus.e.m.e.nts, a life offering day after day "something to look forward to," and teeming with people whom she knew, that she now confronted weeks, months even, of solitude with Claude almost in fear.

He had his work. She had never been a worker in what she considered the real sense, that is a creator striving to "arrive." She conceived of such work as filling the worker's whole life. She knew it must be so, for she had read many lives of great men. Claude, therefore, had his life in Mustapha filled up to the brim for him. But what was she going to do?

Claude, on his part, was striving to recapture in Africa the desire for popularity, the longing for fame, the wish to give people what they wanted of him in art, which he had sometimes felt of late in London. But now there were about him no people who knew anything of his art or of him. The cries of cultivated London had faded out of his ears. In Africa he felt strongly the smallness of that world, the insignificance of every little world. His true and indifferent self seemed to gather strength. He fought it. He felt that it would be a foe to the contemplated opera. He wished Alston Lake were with them, or someone who would "wake him up." Charmian, in her present condition, lacked the force which he had often felt in London, a force which had often secretly irritated and troubled him, but which had not been without tonic properties.

With very great difficulty, with a heavy reluctance of which he was ashamed, he exerted his will, he forced himself to begin the appointed task. With renewed and anxious attention he re-studied the libretto. He laid out his music-paper, closed his door, and hoped for a stirring of inspiration, or at least of some power within him which would enable him to make a start. By experience he knew that once he was in a piece of work something helped him, often drove him. He must get to that something. He recalled those dreadful first days in Kensington Square, when he read Carlyle's _French Revolution_ and sometimes felt criminal.

There must be nothing of that kind here. And, thank Heaven, this was not Kensington Square. Peace and beauty were here. All the social ties were broken. If he could not compose an opera here it was certain that he could never compose one anywhere. As inspiration was slow in coming he began to write almost at haphazard, uncritically, carelessly. "I will do a certain amount every day," he said to himself, "whether I feel inclined to or not."

Inevitably, as the days went by, he and Charmian grew more at ease in, more accustomed to, the new way of life. They fell into habits of living. Claude was at last beginning to "feel" his opera. The complete novelty of his task puzzled him, put a strain on his nerves and his brain. But at the same time it roused perforce his intellectual activities. Even the tug at his will which he was obliged frequently to give, seemed to strengthen certain fibers of his intellect. This opera was not going to be easy in its coming. But it must, it should come!

Charmian decided to take up a course of reading and wrote to Susan Fleet, who was in London, begging her to send out a series of books on theosophical practice and doctrine suitable to a totally ignorant inquirer. Charmian chose to take a course of reading on theosophy simply because of her admiration and respect for Susan Fleet. Ever since she had known Susan, and made that confession to her, she had been "going"

to read something about the creed which seemed to make Susan so happy and so attractive. But she had never found the time. At length the opportunity presented itself.

Susan Fleet sent out a parcel of manuals by Annie Besant and Leadbeater, among them _The Astral Plane_, _Reincarnation_, _Death--and After?_ and _The Seven Principles of Man_. She also sent bigger books by Sinnet, Blavatsky, and Steiner. But she advised Charmian to begin with the manuals, and to read slowly, and only a little at a time. Susan was no propagandist, but she was a sensible woman. She hated "scamping." If Charmian were in earnest she had best be put in the right way. The letter which accompanied the books was long and calmly serious. When Charmian had read it she felt almost alarmed at the gravity of the task which she had chosen to confront. It had been easy to have energy for Claude in London. She feared it would be less easy to have energy for herself in Mustapha. But she resolved not to shrink back now. Rather vaguely she imagined that through theosophy lay the path to serenity and patience. Just now--indeed, for a long time to come, she needed, would need above all things, patience. In calm must be made the long preparations for that which some day would fill her life and Claude's with excitement, with glory, with the fever of fame. For the first time she really understood something of the renunciation which must make up so large a part of every true artist's life. Sometimes she wondered what Madame Sennier's life had been while Jacques Sennier was composing _Le Paradis Terrestre_, how long he had taken in the creation of that stupendous success. Then resolutely she turned to her little manuals.

She had begun with _The Seven Principles of Man_. The short preface had attracted her. "Life easier to bear--death easier to face." If theosophy helped men and women to the finding of that its value was surely inestimable. Charmian was not obsessed by any dark thoughts of death.

But she considered that she knew quite well the weight of time's burden in life. She needed help to make the waiting easier. For sometimes, when she was sitting alone, the prospect seemed almost intolerable. The crowded Opera House, the lights, the thunder of applause, the fixed attention of the world--they were all so far away.

Resolutely she read _The Seven Principles of Man_.

Then she dipped into _Reincarnation_ and _Death--and After?_

Although she did not at all fully understand much of what she read, she received from these three books two dominant impressions. One was of illimitable vastness, the other of an almost horrifying smallness. She read, re-read, and, for the moment, that is when she was shut in alone with the books, her life with Claude presented itself to her like a mote in s.p.a.ce. Of what use was it to concentrate, to strive, to plan, to renounce, to build as if for eternity, if the soul were merely a rapid traveller, pa.s.sing hurriedly on from body to body, as a feverish and unsatisfied being, homeless and alone, pa.s.ses from hotel to hotel? Were she and Claude only joined together for a moment? She tried to realize thoroughly the theosophical att.i.tude of mind, to force herself to regard her existence with Claude from the theosophical standpoint--as, say, Mrs. Besant might, probably must, regard her life with anyone. She certainly did not succeed in this effort. But she attained to a sort of nightmare conception of the futility of pa.s.sing relations with other hurrying lives. And she tried to imagine herself alone without Claude in her life.

Instantly her mind began to concern itself with Claude's talent, and she began to imagine herself without her present aim in her life.

One day while she was doing this she heard the distant sound of a piano above her. Claude was playing over a melody which he had just composed for the opening scene of the opera. Charmian got up, went to the window, leaned out, and listened. And immediately the nightmare sensation dropped from her. She was, or felt as if she were, conscious of permanence, stability. Her connection with that man above her, who was playing upon the piano, suddenly seemed durable, almost as if it would be everlasting. Claude was "her man," his talent belonged to her. She could not conceive of herself deprived of them, of her life without them.

Early in the New Year the Heaths received a visit from Armand Gillier, the writer of Claude's libretto. He had come over from Paris to see his family, who lived at St. Eugene. Charmian had met him in Paris, but Claude had never seen him, though he had corresponded with him, and sent him a cheque of 100 for his work.

Armand Gillier was a small, rather square built man of thirty-two, with a very polite manner and a decidedly brusque mind. His face was handsome, with a straight nose, strong jaw, and large, widely opened, and very expressive dark eyes. A vigorous and unusually broad moustache curled upward above his sensual mouth. And the dark hair which closely covered his well-shaped head was drenched with eau de quinine.

Gillier was not a gentleman. His father was a small vinegrower and cultivator, who had been rather disgusted by the fugues of his eldest son, but who was now resigned to the latter's _etranges folies_. The fact that Armand, after preposterously joining the Foreign Legion, and then preposterously leaving it, had actually been paid a hundred pounds down for a piece of literary work, had made his father have some hopes of him.

When he arrived at Djenan-el-Maqui Claude was at work, and Charmian received him. She was delighted to have such a visitor. Here was a denizen of the real Bohemia, and one who, by the strange ties of ambition, was closely connected with Claude and herself. She sat with the writer in the cool and secretive drawing-room, smoking cigarettes with him, and preparing him for Claude.

This man must "fire" Claude.

Gillier had been born and brought up in Algeria. All that was strange to the Heaths was commonplace to him. But he had an original and forcible mind and a keen sense of the workings of environment and circ.u.mstance upon humanity. At first he was very polite and formal, a mere bundle of good manners. But under Charmian's carefully calculated influence, he changed. He perhaps guessed what her object was, guessed that success for him might be involved in it. And, suddenly abandoning his formality, he exclaimed:

"_Eh bien_, madame! And of what nature is your husband?"

Charmian looked at him and hesitated.

"Is he bold, strong, fierce, open-hearted? Has he lived, loved, and suffered? Or is he gentle, closed, retiring, subtle, morbid perhaps?

Does he live in the dreams of his soul, in the twilight of his beautiful imaginings?"

Lifting his rather coa.r.s.e and powerful hands to his moustache, he pulled at the upward-pointing ends.

"I wish to know this," he exclaimed. "Because it is important for me. My libretto was written by one who has lived, and the man who sets it to music must have lived also to do it justice."

There was a fierceness, characteristic of Algerians of a certain cla.s.s, in his manner now that he had got rid of his first formality.

Charmian felt slightly embarra.s.sed. At that moment she hoped strongly that her husband would not come down. For the first time she realized the gulf fixed between Claude and the libretto which she had found for him. But he must bridge that gulf out here. She looked hard at this short, brusque, and rather violent young man. Armand Gillier must help Claude to bridge that gulf.