On a day in August, in one of those swiftly-moving years which hurried
Europe towards the catastrophe awaiting it, there arrived in London a
couple of unusual appearance, striking, charming, and amusing. The man
was tall, big, and queerly compounded of sensitive beauty and stodgy
awkwardness. He entered London with an air of hostility; sniffed
distastefully the smells of the station, peered in distress through the
murky light, and clearly by his personality and his exploitation of it
in his dress challenged the uniformity of the great city which was his
home. His dress was peculiar: an enormous black hat above a shock of
wispy fair hair, an ill-cut black coat, a cloak flung back over his
shoulders, a very high starched collar, abominable trousers, and long,
pointed French boots.
'But they have rebuilt the station!' he said, in a loud voice of almost
peevish disapproval.
'I remember reading about it, Carlo,' replied his companion. 'It fell
down and destroyed a theatre.'
'A bad omen,' said Charles Mann, 'I wish we had arrived at another
station.'
'I don't think it matters,' smiled Clara Day.
'I say it does,' snapped he. 'It is a mean little station. A London
station should be grand and spacious, the magnificent ante-room to a
royal city. I must get them to let me design a station.'
'They don't often fall down,' said Clara. 'I wish you would see to the
luggage.'
All the other passengers, French and English, had collected their
baggage and had hurried away, but Charles Mann was never in a hurry,
and he stayed scowling at the station which London had had the
effrontery to erect in his absence.
'In Germany and Russia,' he muttered, 'they understand that stations
are very important.'
'Do look after the luggage,' urged Clara, and very reluctantly Charles
Mann strolled along the platform, leaving his companion to the
admiration of the passengers arriving for the next out-going train.
She deserved it, for she was extremely handsome, almost pathetically
young for the knowledge written in her eyes and on her lips, and the
charming dress of purple and old red designed for her slim figure by
Charles drew the curious and rather scandalised eyes of the women. It
was in no fashion, but the perfection of its individuality raised it
above that tyranny, just as Clara's personality, in its compact force,
and delicious free movement, raised her above the conventionalism which
makes woman mere reflections of each other. When she moved, her
clothes were liquid with her vitality. When she stood still, they were
as monumental as herself. She and they were one.
She was happy. It had taken her nearly two years to bring Charles back
to London, where, as an Englishman, and, as she knew, one of the most
gifted Englishmen of his time, his work lay, and she felt certain that
here, in London, among other artists, it would be possible to extricate
him from his own thoughts, which abroad kept him blissfully happy but
prevented his doing work which was intelligible to any one else.
He was rather a long time over the luggage, and at last she ran along
the platform to find him lost in contemplation.
'Have you decided where we are going to?' she asked.
'Eh?'
'Have you decided where we are going to?'
'I must get a secretary,' he replied, and Clara laughed. 'But I must,'
he went on. 'It is absolutely necessary for me to have a secretary. I
can do nothing without one.... He shall be a good man, and he shall be
paid four hundred a year.'
Clara approached a porter and told him to take their luggage to the
hotel.
'We can stay there while we look about us,' she said. She had learned
that when Charles talked about money it was best to ignore him. She
took cheap rooms at the top of the hotel, with a view out over the
river to the Surrey hills, and there until three o'clock in the morning
Charles smoked cigars and talked, as only he could talk, of art and
Italy and Paris--which they had left without paying their rent--and the
delights and abominations of London.
'I feel satisfied now that you were right,' he said. 'Here we are in
London and I shall begin to do my real work. I shall have a secretary
and an advertising agent, and I shall talk to London in the language it
understands.... Paris knows me, Munich knows me, St Petersburg knows
me; London shall know me. There are artists in London. All they want
is a lead.'
Clara went to bed and lay for a long time with erratic memories
streaming through her brain--days in the hills in Italy, nights of
hunger in Paris, the cross-eyed man who stared so hard at her on the
boat, the dismal port at Calais, the more dismal landing at Dover, the
detached existence of her three years with Charles, whose astonishing
vitality kindled and continually disappointed her hope.... And then
queer, ugly memories of her own wandering, homeless childhood with her
grandfather, who had died in Paris, leaving her the little money he
had, so that she had stayed among the artists in Paris, had been numbed
and dazed by them, until Charles took possession of her exactly as he
did of stray cats and dogs and birds in cages.
'This is London,' she said, 'and I am twenty-one.' So she, too,
approached London in a spirit of challenging hostility, determined if,
as she believed, there was nothing a woman could not do, that London
should acknowledge Charles as the genius of which he so constantly
remarked it stood in need.
In the morning she was up betimes, and stood at the window looking out
over the sprawl of the south side of the river to the dome of Bedlam
and the tower of Southwark Cathedral, the clustered chimneys, and the
gray litter of untidy, huddled roofs.
'That is not London,' said Charles from the bed, as she cried
ecstatically. 'London is a very small circle, the centre of which is
to the cultivated the National Gallery, and to the vulgar Piccadilly
Circus.... Piccadilly Circus we can ignore. What we have to do is to
stand on the dome of the National Gallery and sing our gospel. Then if
we can make the cultured hear us, we shall have the vulgar gaping and
opening their pockets.'
'I don't want you to be applauded by people who can't appreciate you,'
said Clara.
'No?' grumbled Charles. 'Well, I'm going to have bath and breakfast
and then I shall astonish you.'
'You always do that,' cried Clara. 'Darling Charles!'
She rang the bell, and sat on the bed, and in a few minutes they were
enjoying their continental breakfast of coffee, rolls, and honey.
'I sometimes feel,' said Charles, 'that I have merely taken the place
of your grandfather.... You are the only creature I have ever met who
is younger than myself. That is why you can do as you like with me....
But you can't make me grow a beard.'
'I wish you would.'
'And then I should be like your grandfather?'
'No. You would be more like you.'
'You adorable child,' he said. 'You would reform me out of existence
if you had your way.'
Charles got up, had his bath, shaved, and went out, leaving Clara to
unpack and make out a list of clothes that he required before she could
consider him fit to go out into that London whose centre is the
National Gallery.
As he did not return for lunch, she set out alone to explore the region
which he designed to conquer. She wandered in a dream of delight,
first of all through the galleries and then through the streets, as far
as Westminster on the one side, and as Oxford Street on the other, and
fixed in her mind the location of every one of the theatres. She was
especially interested in the women, and was both hurt and pleased by
the dislike and suspicion with which they regarded her originality....
Every now and then she saw a face which made her want to go up to its
owner and say: 'I'm Clara Day; I've just come to London,' but she
forebore; and when people smiled at her, as many did, she returned
their smile, and hurried on in her eagerness to explore and to
understand the kingdom which was to be Charles Mann's--a kingdom, like
others, of splendour and misery, but overwhelmingly rich with its huge
hotels, great blocks of offices, vast theatres and music-halls,
enormous shops full of merchandise of the finest quality; jewels,
clothes, furs, napery, silver, cutlery; its monuments, its dense
traffic; its flower-sellers and innumerable newsvendors; its glimpses
through the high-walled streets of green trees, its dominating towers;
its lounging men and women. Jews, with gold chains and diamond rings,
Americans with large cigars and padded shoulders, painted women,
niggers, policemen, match-sellers, boot-blacks; its huge coloured
advertisements; its sudden holes, leading to regions underground; its
sluggish, rich self-satisfaction.... It overawed Clara a little, and
as she sped along she whispered to herself, 'This is me in London.'
On her way back to the hotel she bought a paper, and, on opening it,
found that it contained an interview with Mr Charles Mann on his return
to London, an announcement that a dinner was to be given in his honour,
and that he intended to hold an exhibition; and then Charles's views on
many subjects were set out at some length, and he had thrown out a
suggestion that a committee of artists should be formed to supervise
the regeneration of London and to defeat the Americanisation which
threatened it.
Clara hurried back to the hotel and found Charles in a great state of
excitement, talking to a thin, weedy little man whom he introduced as
Mr Clott--his secretary.
'It has begun, child,' said Charles. 'Have you seen the papers?
Things move quickly nowadays.... This evening I shall be very busy.'
'But you mustn't do anything without me,' Clara protested. 'You
promised you wouldn't. You are sure to make a mess of it.'
'Clott,' said Charles magnificently, 'please send a copy of the letter
I have dictated to the Press Association.'
'At once,' replied Mr Clott, with the alacrity of a man in a new job,
and he darted from the room.
'He's a fool,' said Clara angrily, 'a perfect fool.'
'Of course he is,' answered Charles, 'or he would not be a secretary.
He has undertaken that by the end of this week we shall be in a
comfortable furnished house.'
'But who is to pay for it?'
'There is plenty of money in the world,' said Charles, who was so
pleased with himself that Clara had not the heart to pursue the
argument any further. 'London,' he continued, 'is a great talking
shop. At present they haven't anything much to discuss so they shall
talk about me.'
For a moment Clara felt that he had become as external to her as the
people in the streets of the kingdom he designed to conquer, but she
recollected that whenever he was at work he always was abstracted from
her and entirely absorbed in what he was doing, only, however, to
return like a giant refreshed to enter into her world again and make it
more delightful than before. He was absorbed now, and she thought with
a queer pang of alarm of the women with their dull, suspicious eyes,
and, without realising the connection between what she thought and what
she said, she broke into his absorption with,--
'Carlo, dear, I shall have to marry you.'