Читать книгу The Way of Ambition - Robert Hichens - Страница 5

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"We want a new note in English music," said Charmian, in her clear and slightly authoritative voice. "The Hallelujah Chorus era has gone at last to join all the Victorian relics. And the nation is drifting musically. Of course we have a few composers who are being silly in the attempt to be original, and a few others who still believe that all the people can stand in the way of home-grown products is a ballad or a Te Deum. But what we want is an English composer with a soul. I'm getting quite sick of heads. They are bearable in literature. But when it comes to music, one's whole being clamors for more."

"I have heard a new note in English music," observed a middle-aged, bald and lively-looking man, who was sitting on the opposite side of the drawing-room in Berkeley Square.

"Oh, but, Max, you always—"

"An absolutely new note," interrupted Max Elliot with enthusiastic emphasis, turning to the man with the sarcastic mouth who had just spoken. "Your French blood makes you so inclined to incredulity, Paul, that you are incapable of believing anything but that I am carried away."

"As usual!"

"As sometimes happens, I admit. But you will allow that in matters musical my opinion is worth something, my serious and deliberately formed opinion."

"How long has this opinion been forming?"

"Some months."

"Some months!" exclaimed Charmian. "You've kept your new note to yourself all that time! Is it a woman? But of course it can't be. I don't believe there will ever be a great woman composer."

"It is not a woman."

"Was it born in the gutter?" asked Paul Lane.

"No."

"Don't say it's aristocratic!" said Charmian, slightly screwing up her rather Japanese-looking eyes. "I cannot believe that anything really original in soul, really intense, could emanate from the British peerage. I know it too well."

"It is neither aristocratic nor from the gutter. It is of the middle classes. Its father is a banker in the West of England."

"A banker!" said Charmian in a deplorable voice.

"It is Cornish."

"Cornish! That's better. Strange things sometimes come out of Cornwall."

"It has a little money of its own."

"And its name—"

"Is Claude Heath."

"Claude Heath," slowly repeated Charmian. "The name means nothing to me. Do you know it, Mr. Lane?"

Paul Lane shook his smooth black head.

"Heath has not published anything," said Max Elliot, quite unmoved by the scepticism with which the atmosphere of Mrs. Mansfield's drawing-room was obviously charged.

"Not even a Te Deum?" asked Charmian.

"No, though I confess he has composed one."

"If he has composed a Te Deum I give him up. He is vieux jeu. He should go and live in the Crystal Palace."

"And it's superb!" added Max Elliot. "Till I heard it I never realized what the noble words of the Te Deum meant."

Suddenly he got up and moved toward the window murmuring, "All the Earth doth worship Thee, the Father Everlasting."

There was a silence in the room. Charmian's eyes suddenly filled with tears, she scarcely knew why. She felt as if a world was opening out before her, as if there were wide horizons to call to the gaze of those fitted to look upon them, and as if, perhaps, she were one of these elect.

"Father Everlasting!" The words, and the way in which Max Elliot had spoken them, struck into her heart, and so made her feel keenly that she was a girl who had a heart that was not hard, that was eager, desirous, perhaps deep. As to Paul Lane, he stared at his remarkably perfect boots, and drew down the corners of his lips, and his white face seemed to darken as if a cloud floated through his mind and cast a shadow outward.

In the pause the drawing-room door opened, and a woman with blazing dark eyes and snow-white hair, wearing a white tea-gown and a necklace of very fine Egyptian scarabs, came in, with an intense, self-possessed and inquiring look. This was Mrs. Mansfield, "my only mother," as Charmian sometimes absurdly called her.

"You are talking, or you were talking, of something or somebody interesting," she said at once, looking round her at the three occupants of the room.

Max Elliott turned eagerly toward her. He rejoiced in Mrs. Mansfield, and often came to her to "warm his hands at her delightful blaze."

"Of somebody very interesting."

"Whom we don't know?"

"Whom very few people in London know."

"A composer, my only mother, who never publishes, and who is the son of a banker in the West of England."

Charmian seemed suddenly to have recovered her former mood, but she blinked away two tears as she spoke.

"Why shouldn't he be?" said Mrs. Mansfield, sitting down on a large sofa which stood at right angles to the wood fire.

"I know, but it doesn't seem right."

"Don't be ridiculously conventional, my only child."

Charmian laughed, showing lovely, and very small teeth. She was not unlike her mother in feature, but she was taller, more dreamy, less vivid, less straightforward in expression. At times there was a hint of the minx in her. She emerged from her dreams to be impertinent. A certain shrewdness mingled with her audacity. At such moments, as men sometimes said, "you never knew where to have her." She was more self-conscious and more worldly than her mother. Secret ambition worried at her mind, and made her restless in body. When she looked at a crowd she sometimes felt an almost sick sensation as of one near to drowning. "Oh, to rise, to be detached from all these myriads!" she thought. "To be apart and recognized as apart! Only that can make life worth the living." She had been heard to say, "I would rather sink forever in the sea than in the sea of humanity. I would rather die than be one of the unknown living." Charmian sometimes exaggerated. But she was genuinely tormented by the modern craze for notoriety. Only she called it fame.

Once she had said something to her mother of her intense desire to emerge from the crowd. Mrs. Mansfield's reply was: "Do you believe you have creative force in you then?" "How can I know?" Charmian had answered. "I'm so young." "Try to create something and probably you'll soon find out," returned her mother. Since that day Charmian had tried to create something, and had found out. But she had not told Mrs. Mansfield. She was now twenty-one, and had been just eighteen when her mother's advice had driven her into the energy which had proved futile.

Max Elliot crossed the room and sat down on the sofa by Mrs. Mansfield. He adored her quite openly, as many men did. The fact that she was a widow and would never marry again made adoration of her agreeably uncomplex. Everybody knew that Mrs. Mansfield would never marry again, but nobody perhaps could have given a perfectly clear explanation of how, or why, that knowledge had penetrated him. The truth was that she was a woman with a great heart, and had given that heart to the husband who was dead, and for whom she had never worn "weeds."

"What are we to do for Charmian, my dear Max?" continued Mrs. Mansfield, throwing a piteous look into her mobile face, a piteous sound into her voice. "What can anyone do for a young woman of twenty-one who, when she is thinking naturally, thinks it impossible for a West of England banker to cause the birth of a son talented in an art?"

"I always said there was intellectual cruelty in mother," said Charmian, drawing her armchair nearer to the fire.

"It's bracing, tones up the mind," said Paul Lane. "But what about this new note? All we know is a Cornish extraction, a banker papa and a Te Deum."

"Oh—a Te Deum!" observed Mrs. Mansfield, looking suddenly sceptical.

"I know! I know!" said Max Elliot. "I didn't want to hear it till I had heard it. And then I wanted to hear nothing else. The touch of genius startles everything into life."

"Another genius!" said Paul Lane.

And thereupon, as if acting on a sudden impulse, he got up, said good-bye, and went away with his curiosity, if he had any, ungratified.

"He's spoilt by the French blood his mother gave him," said Mrs. Mansfield as the door closed. "If he had been all French, one might have delighted in him, taken him on the intellectual side, known where one was, skipped the coldness and the irony, clung to the wit, vivacity and easy charm. But he's a modern Frenchman, boxing with an Englishman and using his feet half the time. And that's dreadful. In an English drawing-room I don't like the Savate. Now tell us, tell us! I am so thankful he is not a celebrity."

"Nor ever likely to be unless he marries the wrong woman."

"What do you mean by that?" asked Charmian with curiosity.

"A woman who is ambitious for him and pushes him."

"But if this Claude Heath has so much talent, surely it would be a fine thing to make him give it to the world."

"That depends on his temperament, I daresay," said Mrs. Mansfield. "I believe there are people who ought to hide their talents in a napkin."

"Oh, mother! Explain!"

"Some plants can only grow in darkness."

"Very nasty ones, I should think! Deadly nightshade! That sort of thing!"

"Poor dear! I gave her light in a vulgar age. She can't help it," said Mrs. Mansfield to Max Elliot. "We are her refined seniors. But sheer weight of years has little influence. Never mind. Go on. You and I at least can understand."

As she spoke she laid her hand, on which shone several curious rings, over Charmian's, and she kept it there while Max Elliot gave some account of Claude Heath.

"He's not particularly handsome in features. He's quite conventional in dress. His instinct would probably be to use the shell as a close hiding-place for anything strange, unusual that it contains. He crops his hair, and, I should think, wets it two or three times a day for fear people should see that it has a natural wave in it. His neckties are the most humdrum that can be discovered in the shops."

"Does he dislike his appearance?" asked Charmian.

"I daresay. The worst of it is that he has eyes that give the whole thing away to a Mrs. Mansfield."

"What, and not to me?" said Charmian, in an injured note.

"She's fairly sharp, poor dear!" observed Mrs. Mansfield, in a rescuing voice. "You mustn't be too hard on her."

Max Elliot smiled.

"And a Charmian Mansfield."

"What color are his eyes?" inquired Charmian.

"I really can't tell you for certain, but I should think dark gray."

"And where does he live?"

"In a little house not far from St. Petersburg Place on the north side of the Park, Mullion House he calls it. He's got a studio there which opens into a pocket-handkerchief of a garden. He keeps two women servants."

"Any dogs?" said Charmian.

"No."

"Cats?"

"Not that I know of."

"I don't feel as if I should like him. Does he compose at the piano?"

"No, away from it."

"He's unsympathetic. Cropped hair watered down, humdrum neckties, composing away from the piano, no animals—it's all against me except the little house."

"Because you take the wholly conventional view of the musician," said her mother. "If I dared to say such a thing to my own child I might add, without telling a dangerous lie, because you are so old-fashioned in your views. You can't forget having read the Vie de Bohême, and having heard, and unfortunately seen, Paderewski when you were a schoolgirl at Brighton."

"It is my beloved mother's fault that I ever was a schoolgirl at Brighton."

"Ah, don't press down that burden of crime upon my soul! Lift it, by freeing yourself from the Brighton tradition, which I ought to have kept for ever from you. And now, Max, tell us, whom does Mr. Heath know?"

"I know very little about his acquaintance. I met him first at Wonderland."

"What's that?" asked Charmian. "It sounds more promising."

"It's gone now, but it was a place in Whitechapel, where they had boxing competitions, Conky Joe against the Nutcracker—that kind of thing."

"I give him up, Te Deum, Conky Joe and all!" she exclaimed in despair.

"Do you mean me to meet him, Max?" asked Mrs. Mansfield.

"Yes. I can't keep him to myself any longer. I must share him with someone who understands. Come to-morrow evening, won't you, after dinner? Heath is dining with me."

"Yes. Is Charmian invited?"

Max Elliot looked at Charmian, and she steadily returned his gaze.

"You know," he said after a pause, "that you've got a certain hankering after lions?"

"Hankering! Don't, don't!"

"But you really have!"

"I will not be put with the vulgar crowd like that. I do not care for lions. Tigers are my taste."

He laughed.

"Do come then. But remember, there are plants which can only grow in darkness. And I believe this is one of them."

When Max Elliot had gone, Charmian sat for two or three minutes looking into the fire, where pale, steely-blue lights played against the prevailing gold and red. All the absurdity, the nonsense, had dropped away from her.

"Max Elliot seems quite afraid of me," she said at last. "Am I so very vulgar?"

"Not more so than most intelligent young women who are rather 'in it' in London," returned her mother.

"Surely I'm not a climber, without knowing it!"

"No, I don't think so. But your peculiar terror of mixing with the crowd naturally makes you struggle a little, and puff and blow in the effort to keep your head above water."

"How very awful! I don't know why it is, but your head always is well above water without your making any effort."

"I don't bother as to whether it is or not, you see."

"No. But what has it all to do with this Mr. Heath?"

"Perhaps we shall find out to-morrow night. Max may think you'll be inclined to rave about him."

"Rave about a cropped head that composes away from the piano!"

"Ah, that Brighton tradition!" said Mrs. Mansfield, taking up Steiner's Teosofia.