Part 26 (1/2)

'There's no one to write them.'

'I should scour the country for imaginative people and make them think in terms of the theatre. Besides, there are people!'

'Oh!'

'Yes. There are people who love the drama so much that they can't go near the theatre.'

He roared with laughter, and to convince him she told him about Adnor Rodd and his bare room, where without any hope of an audience he wrote his plays and lived in them more pa.s.sionately than it was possible to do in life.

Sir Henry shook his head.

'I don't mind betting,' he said, 'that he's got something wrong with him. Either he drinks, or has an impossible wife, or he likes low company, or-- No. There aren't such people.'

'But there are.' And she told him how she had spent a whole day with Rodd and had gone home with him to see his rooms.

'Alone?' asked Sir Henry.

'Yes.'

'Then if you were my girl I should put you on bread and water for a week.'

To convince him, she tried to tell him how she had struggled to overcome Charles's objections to the practical use of his talent, and had forced him to come to London.... In her eagerness and in her happiness at having brought him to his senses, she lost sight of the fact that she was revealing her own history. He brought her up sharp with,--

'Are you married to Charles Mann?'

'Ye-es,' she said, her heart fluttering.

'I didn't know,' he replied nonchalantly. His manner towards her changed. He was still soft and kind, and bland in his impish wit, but beneath the surface he was brutal, revengeful, cruel, and she felt the force of the ruthless egoism that had won him his position in spite of disabilities which would have hampered and even checked a less forceful man.... In the same moment she understood that what had been a glorious and lovely reality to her had been a game to him; and that he designed without the slightest compunction to turn both Charles and herself to his own profit.... Well, she thought, he might try, but he could not prevent either of them from making their reputations, and neither would ever sink to the mechanical docility of London players.

Sir Henry lit a large cigar and moved over to the fire.

'What does Verschoyle think of it?'

She knew that he was insolently referring to her marriage with Charles, but she turned the shaft by saying,--

'He is delighted with it all. He believes in Charles.'

'Hm.... Even the birds and fishes?'

'Who told you about that?'

'London doesn't let a good story die.'

'Verschoyle was present....'

'Oh!'

The situation was becoming unbearable. Sir Henry was as hard, as satisfied, and as unconscionable as a successful company-promoter.

This sudden revelation of his egoism, his wariness to protect the ideal which in his own person he had achieved, shocked Clara out of her youthful innocence and into a painful realisation that the facts of her life forbade the impersonalism which had made so much achievement possible.... It was quite clear to her that Sir Henry was intent upon a personal relations.h.i.+p if she were to keep what she had won, and it was as clear that he could not credit her, or Charles, or anybody else with any other motive than personal ambition. He knew his world, he knew his theatre. A fulfilled ambition has its price, and he had never yet met the successful man or woman who did not pay with a good grace, as he himself had done.

Her brain worked quickly on this new intractable material, this disconcerting revelation of the fact that success and art are in the modern world two very different things, the one belonging to the crowd, the other to solitude.... This old man might have waited. He might have given her her chance. It was not true. She would not accept that it could be true that she could only have her success at his price, the price that he had paid, he and all the others, Julia Wainwright, Freeland Moore, and the loss of respect and simple humanity.... So this was why Charles had run away from the theatre. Certain things, certain elements in human character were too holy to be set before the crowd.