When Max Elliot came back they gathered round the fire, no longer split
up into duets, and the conversation was general. Heath joined in
frequently, and with the apparent eagerness which was evidently
characteristic of him. He had facility in speaking, great quickness of
utterance, and energy of voice. When he listened he suggested to
Charmian a mind so alive as to be what she called "on the pounce." He
had an odd air of being swayed, carried away, by what those around him
were saying, even by what they were thinking, as if something in his
nature demanded to acquiesce. Yet she fancied that he was secretly
following his own line of thought with a persistence that was almost
cold.
Lane led the talk at first, and displayed less of his irony than usual.
He was probably not a happy man, though he never spoke of being unhappy.
His habitual expression was of discontent, and he was too critical of
life, endeavor, character, to be easily satisfied. But to-night he
seemed in a softer mood than usual. Perhaps he had an object in seeming
so. He was a man very curious in the arts. Elliot, who knew him well,
was conscious that something in Heath's personality had made a strong
impression upon him, and thought he was trying to create a favorable
atmosphere in the hope that music might come of it. If this was so, he
labored in vain. And soon doubtless he knew it. For he, too, pleaded
another engagement, and, like Mrs. Shiffney, got up to go.
Directly the door shut behind him Charmian was conscious of relief and
excitement. She even, almost despite herself, began to hope for a Te
Deum; and, hoping, she found means to be wise. She effaced herself, so
she believed, by withdrawing a little into a corner near the fire,
holding up her Conder fan open to shield her face from the glow, and
taking no part in the conversation, while listening to it with a pretty
appearance of dreaminess. She was conscious of her charming attitude,
of the line made by her slender upraised arm, and not unaware of the
soft and almost transparent beauty the light of a glowing fire gives to
delicate flesh. Nevertheless, she really tried, in a perhaps
half-hearted way, to withdraw her personality into the mist. And this
she did because she knew well that her mother, not she, was en rapport
with Claude Heath.
"I'm out of it," she said to herself, "and mother's in it."
Mrs. Shiffney had been a restraint, Lane had been a restraint. It would
be dreadful if she were the third restraining element. She would have
liked to be triumphantly active in bringing things about. Since that was
evidently quite out of the question she was resolved to go to the other
extreme.
"My only chance is to be a mouse!" she thought.
At least she would be a graceful mouse.
She gazed at the delicate figures on her Conder fan. They, those three a
little way from her, were talking now, really talking.
Mrs. Mansfield was speaking of the endeavor of certain Londoners to
raise the theater out of the rut into which it had fallen, and to make
of it something worthy to claim the attention of those who did not use
it merely for digestive purposes. She related a story of a disastrous
theater-party which she had once joined, and which had been arranged by
an aspiring woman with little sense of fitness.
"We dined with her first. She had, somehow, persuaded Burling, the
Oxford historian, Mrs. Hartford, the dear poetess who never smiles, and
her husband, and Cummerbridge, the statistician, to be of the party.
After dinner where do you think she took us?"
"To the Oxford?" said Elliot, flinging his hands round his knee and
beginning to smile.
"To front row stalls at the Criterion, where they were giving a
knockabout farce called _My Little Darling_ in which a clergyman was put
into a boiler, a guardsman hidden in a linen cupboard, and a penny
novelette duchess was forced to retreat into a shower-bath in full
activity. I confess that I laughed more than I had ever done in my life.
I sat between Burling, who looked like a terrified hen, and Mr.
Hartford, who was seriously attentive from beginning to end, and kept
murmuring, 'Really! Really!' And I had the poetess's sibylline profile
in full view. I was almost hysterical when it was over. As we were
coming out Mr. Hartford said to his wife, 'Henrietta, I'm glad we came.'
She rolled an eye on him and answered, with tears in the voice, 'Why?'
'It's a valuable lesson. We now know what the British public needs.' Her
reply was worthy of her."
"What was it?" said Elliot, eagerly.
"'There are many human needs, Gabriel, which it is criminal to gratify.'
Burling went home in a four-wheeler. Cummerbridge had left after the
first act--a severe attack of neuralgia in the right eye."
Elliot's full-throated laugh rang through the room. Heath was smiling,
but almost sadly, Charmian thought.
"Perhaps it was _My Little Darling_ which brought about the attempt at
better things you were speaking of," he said to Mrs. Mansfield.
"Ah, but their prophet is not mine!" she answered.
An almost feverish look of vitality had come into her face, which was
faintly pencilled by the fingers of sorrow.
"Sometimes I think I hate the disintegrating drama more than I despise
the vulgar idiocies which, after all, never really touch human life,"
she continued. "No doubt it is sheer weakness on my part to be affected
by it. But I am. Only last week Charmian and I saw the play that
they--the superior ones--are all flocking to. The Premier has seen it
five times already. I loathed its cleverness. I loathed the element of
surprise in it. I laughed, and loathed my own laughter. The man who
wrote it would put cap and bells on St. Francis of Assisi and make a
mock of OEdipus."
She paused, then, leaning forward, in a low and thrilling voice she
quoted, "'For we are in Thy hand; and man's noblest task is to help
others by his best means and powers.'"
Claude Heath gazed at her while she was speaking, and in his eyes
Charmian, glancing over her fan, saw what she thought of as two torches
gleaming.
"I came out of the theater," continued Mrs. Mansfield, "and I confess it
with shame, feeling as if I should never find again the incentive to a
noble action, as if the world were turned to chaff. And yet I had
laughed--how I had laughed!"
Suddenly she began to laugh at the mere recollection of something in the
play.
"The wretch is terribly clever!" she exclaimed. "But he seems to me
destructive."
"Well, but--" began Elliot. "Some such accusation has been brought
against many really great men. The Empress Frederick told a friend of
mine that no one who had not lived in Germany, and observed German life
closely, could understand the evil spread through the country by
Wagner's _Tristan_."
"Then the fault, the sin if you like, was in the hearers," said Heath,
almost with excitement.
He got up and stood by the fire.
"Wagner was a builder. I believe Germany is the better for a _Tristan_,
and I believe we should be the better for an English _Tristan_. But I
doubt if we gain essentially by the drama in cap and bells."
Elliot, who was fond of defending his friends, came vigorously to the
defense of the playwright, to whom he was devoted and whose first nights
he seldom missed. In the discussion which followed Charmian saw more
clearly how peculiarly in tune her mother's mind was with Heath's.
"This is the beginning of a great intimacy," she said to herself. "One
of mother's great intimacies."
And, for the first time she consciously envied her mother, consciously
wished that she had her mother's brains, temperament, and unintentional
fascination. The talk went on, and presently she drifted into it, took
her small part in it. But she felt herself too brainless, too ignorant
to be able to contribute to it anything of value. Her usually happy and
innocent self-conceit has deserted her, with all her audacities. She was
oddly subdued, was almost sad.
"How old is he really?" she thought more than once as she looked at
Claude Heath.
There was no mention of music, and at last Mrs. Mansfield got up to go.
As they said good-night she looked at Heath and remarked:
"We shall meet again?"
He clasped her hand, and answered, slightly reddening:
"Oh, I hope so! I do hope so!"
That was all. There was no mention of the Red Book, of being at home on
Thursdays, no "If you're ever near Berkeley Square," etc. All that was
unnecessary. Charmian touched a long-fingered hand and uttered a cold
little "Good-night." A minute more and her mother and she were in the
motor gliding through damp streets in the murky darkness.
After a short silence Mrs. Mansfield said:
"Well, Charmian, you escaped! Are you very thankful?"
"Escaped!" said a rather plaintive voice from the left-hand corner of
the car.
"The dreaded Te Deum."
"Is he a musician at all? I believe Max Elliot has been humbugging us."
"He warned you not to expect too much in the way of hair."
"It isn't that. How old do you think he is?"
"Certainly not thirty."
"What did you tell him about me?"
"About you? I don't remember telling him anything."
"Oh, but you did, mother!"
"What makes you think so?"
"I know you did, when I was sitting near the piano with Max Elliot."
"Perhaps I did then. But I can't remember what it was. It must have been
something very trifling."
"Oh, of course I know that!" said Charmian almost petulantly.
Mrs. Mansfield realized that the girl had not enjoyed her evening, but
she was too wise to ask her why. Indeed she was not much given to the
putting of intimate questions to Charmian. So she changed the subject
quietly, and they were soon at home.
Twelve o'clock was striking as they entered the house. The evening, Mrs.
Mansfield thought, had passed quickly. She was a bad sleeper, and seldom
went to bed before one, but she never kept a maid sitting up for her.
"I'm going to read a book," she said to Charmian, with her hand on the
door of the small library on the first floor, where she usually sat when
she was alone.
Charmian, taller than she was, bent a little and kissed her.
"Wonderful mother!"
"What nonsense you talk; but only to me, I know!"
"Other people know it without my telling them. You jump into minds and
hearts, and poor little I remain outside, squatting like a hungry
child."
"And that is greater nonsense still. Come and sit up with me for a
little."
"No, not to-night, you darling!"
Almost with violence Charmian kissed her again, released her, and went
away up the stairs between white walls to bed.