'He gives me a blooming drawing with purples and golds and blues and
every colour but the natural colours of a sea-side place. I've painted
scenery for thirty years, and I ought to know what a stage island is
like by now. I've done a dozen sets for _The Tempest_ in my time.'
'It is an enchanted island,' said Clara.
'But Prospero was Duke of Milan.... I've _been_ to the Mediterranean
to see for myself and I know what the colouring is.... I can't believe
that Sir Henry has passed this. God knows what kind of lighting it
will take.'
Charles threw his hat on the ground and stamped on it.
'Dolt! Fool! Idiot!' he shouted. 'Go away and paint it as I tell you
to paint it.'
'Damned if I do,' said Smithson. 'My firm has painted all the scenery
for this theatre since Sir Henry took it, and we've had our name on the
programme, and we've got a reputation to lose. When Shakespeare says
an island, he means an island, not the crater of a blooming volcano....'
Charles snatched his drawing out of Mr Smithson's hand, and with an
expression of extreme agony he said.--
'Clara, you dragged me into this infernal theatre. Will you please see
that I am not driven mad in it? Am I an artist?'
'You may be an artist, Mr Mann,' said Mr Smithson, 'but I'm a practical
scene-painter. I was painting scenery before you were born. I was
three years old in my father's workshop when I put my first dab of
paint on for the Valley of Diamonds for Drury Lane in Gustus Harris's
days.'
The argument might have gone on indefinitely, but fortunately Sir Henry
came down the stairs with Lady Butcher. He was immaculately dressed in
frock-coat and top hat, gray Cashmere trousers, and white waistcoat to
attend with his wife a fashionable reception. With a low bow, he swept
off his very shiny hat, and said to Lady Butcher,--
'My dear, Mr Charles Mann.'
Lady Butcher gave a curt nod.
'My dear, Miss Day....'
'Che-arming!' drawled Lady Butcher, holding out her hand very high in
the air. Clara reached up to it and shook it sharply.
'Mr Smithson doesn't like Charles's drawing for the cave scene,' said
Clara. 'He can't quite see it, you know, because it is a little
different.'
'I won't be a moment, my dear,' said Sir Henry, and Lady Butcher sailed
out into the street.
'What's the matter, Smithson?'
'We've never done anything like this before. There's nothing like it
in Nature.'
'There is nothing like Caliban in Nature,' said Clara sweetly, and Sir
Henry caught at her hint, scowled at Smithson, and growled,--
'I have passed it. If it needs modification we can settle it at
rehearsal. Go ahead. I want to see it before I go away.'
'But there are no measurements, Sir Henry.'
'You know what we can do and what we can't.'
'Very well, Sir Henry.' Mr Smithson clapped on his bowler hat and
rushed away.
Charles stooped to gather up his battered hat, and Sir Henry seized
Clara's arm, squeezed it tight, looked out through the door at his
magnificent wife, and heaved an enormous sigh. Clara in her amazing
new happiness smiled at him, and he muttered,--
'You grow in beauty every day. A-ah! Good-day, Mann. The theatre is
at your disposal.'
He fixed his eyes on Clara for a moment, then wrenched himself away.
There were one or two letters for her in the rack. She took them down,
and turned to find Charles, having smoothed out his hat, standing
ruefully staring through his pince-nez.
'These people are altogether too busy for me,' he said. 'All the work
I've put in seems to be nothing to them. I had a terrible turn with
Butcher two days ago, and now this man Smithson has been too much for
me. They treat me like a tailor, and expect me to cut my scenery to
fit their theatre.... I wish you'd come back, chicken. I'm in a
dreadful muddle. I've been working till I can't see, and I've been
reading _The Tempest_ till my mind is as salt as a dried haddock....
But I've drawn a marvellous Caliban, part fish, part frog, part man ...
Life emerging from the sea. I'm sure now that we're all spawned from
the sea, and that life on the earth is only what has been left after
the sun has dried it up....'
Clara looked at him apprehensively. She still felt responsible for
him, but she was no longer part and parcel of him. She was free of his
imagination and could be critical of it.
'Never mind, Charles,' she said. 'Let us go and look at the stage, and
you can tell me what you have planned, and then we will go out and
talk, and decide what we will do during the holidays. I have promised
to go to Sir Henry's in the Lakes for a few days, and Verschoyle has
promised to motor me up there.'
Charles's fingers fumbled rather weakly round his lips, and she saw to
her distress that he had been biting his nails again.
'Aren't you ever coming back, my chicken, my love? ... I'm sorry we
came to London now. We should have gone to Sicily as I wanted. One
can live in such places. Here everybody is so business-like, so set,
so used to doing and thinking in one particular way.'
'Has anything happened?' asked Clara, knowing that he was never
critical without a cause.
'No,' he replied, rather shortly, 'no.'
She was rather irritated by him. He had no right to be as foolish and
helpless as to have let her humiliate him by extricating him from his
argument with Smithson, upon which he ought never to have entered.
Smithson was only a kind of tradesman after all.
They went on to the stage and Charles waxed eloquent over the scenery
he had designed. Eloquence with Charles was rather an athletic
performance. He took a tape measure from his pocket, and raced about
with it, making chalk marks on the boards.
The scenery door was open, and the sunlight poured in in a great shaft
upon him, and Clara, watching him, was suddenly most painfully sorry
for him. He worked himself up into a throbbing enthusiasm, torrents of
words poured from his lips, as with strange gesticulations he described
the towering rocks, the wind-twisted trees, the tangle of lemons, the
blue light illuminating the magician's grotto, the golden light that
should hang about the rocky island jutting up from the sea. All this
he talked of, while the sun shone through his long yellow hair and
revealed its streaks of silver.... At last he stood in the sunlight,
with his arms outstretched, as though he were evoking his vision from
the heavens to take shape upon the stage.
Clara, watching him, perceived that he was a born actor. He trod the
stage with loving feet, and with a movement entirely different from
that which he used in the street or among people who were not of the
theatre. This surely was the real Charles. The light of the sun upon
him was inappropriate. It mocked him and inexorably revealed the fact
that he was no longer young. The scenery door was closed and the
discordance ceased, but more clearly than ever was Charles revealed as
an actor treading easily and affectionately his native elevation. The
influence of the place affected even himself, and after he had
constructed his imaginary scenery round himself, he said,--
'One of the first parts I ever played was Ferdinand staggering beneath
logs of wood.'