'Who are you?'
'I'm a queer fish.... I've wasted my life in expecting more from
people than they had to give, and in offering them more than they
needed.'
'You look tired.'
'I am tired--tired out.... You're not really an actress.'
'I'm paid for it if that makes me one.'
'I mean--you are not playing a part now. Actresses never stop. They
take their cues from their husbands and lovers and go on until they
drop. Their husbands and lovers generally kick them out before they do
that.... The ordinary woman is an actress in her small way, but you
are not so at all.... I can't place you. What are you doing in
London? You ought not to be in London. You ought to leave us stewing
in our own juice.'
The waitress brought them tea and the orchestra flung itself into a
more outrageous effort than before.
'Ragtime and you!' he went on. 'They don't blend. Ragtime is for
tired brains and jaded senses, for people who have lost all instinct
and intuition. What have you to do with them? You will simply beat
yourself to death upon their hard indifference.... You are only a
child. You should be packed off home.'
'And suppose I have none.'
He shrugged his shoulders.
'That was an impertinence. Forgive me!' He took up the book he had
given her. 'This fellow Mann is like all the rest. He wants to
substitute a static show for a dynamic and vital performance, to impose
his own art upon the theatre. The actors have done that until they
have driven anything else out. He wants to drive them out. That is
all, but he has great gifts....'
'Please don't talk about other people,' said Clara. 'I want to hear
about you. What were you doing in the book-shop?'
He told her then why he went to the Charing Cross Road, to find a
holiday which would make life tolerable; she described her holiday
touring through the country with the glorious conclusion in the Lakes.
He looked rather gloomy and shook his head,--
'That wouldn't suit me. I like to go slowly and to linger over the
things that please me, to drink in their real character. It is
pleasant to move swiftly, but all this motor-car business seems to me
to be only another dodge--running away from life.... I ought to do it
if I were true to my temperament, but I love my job too much. I'm an
intellectual, but I can't stand by and look on, and I can't run away.'
Clara had never met any one like him before. There was such acute
misery in his face, and his words seemed only to be a cloud thrown up
to disguise the retreat he was visibly making from her. She would not
have that. She was sure of him. This attitude of his was a challenge
to her. The force with which he spoke had made Charles and even
herself seem flimsy and fantastic, and she wanted to prove that she was
or could be made as solid, as definite and precise as himself.
She knew what it was to be driven by her own will. Her sympathy was
with him there. He was driven to the point of exhaustion.
'I've been trying to create the woman of the future,' he said.
'Ibsen's women are all nerves. What I want to get is the woman who can
detach herself from her emotional experience and accept failure, as a
man does, with a belief that in the long run the human mind is stronger
than Nature. If instincts are baffled, they are not to be trusted.
Women have yet to learn that.... When they learn it, we can begin to
get straight.'
It did not seem to matter whether she understood him or not. He had
her sympathy, and he was glad to talk.
'That seems to be the heart of the problem. But it is a little
disconcerting, when you have been trying to create a woman, to walk
into a bookshop and find her.'
'How do you know?' she asked. 'I may be only acting. That is what
women do. They find out by instinct the ideal in a man's mind and
reproduce it.'
He shook his head.
'All ideals to all men? ... You have given the game away.'
'That might only be the cleverest trick of all.'
For a moment he was suspicious of her, but this coquetry was noble and
designed to please and soothe him.
'I'm in for a bad time,' he said simply. 'Things have been too easy
for me so far. I gave myself twenty years in which to produce what I
want and what the world must have.... Things aren't so simple as all
that.'
'Do drink your tea. I think you take everything too hardly. People
don't know that they are indifferent. There are so many things to do,
so many people to meet, they are so busy that they don't realise that
they are standing still and just repeating themselves over and over
again.'
'Damn the orchestra!' said Rodd. The first violin was playing a solo
with muted strings. 'If people will stand this, they will stand
anything. It is slow murder.'
'Do believe that they like it,' replied Clara.
'Slow murder?'
'No. The--music.'
'Same thing.' He laughed. 'Oh, well. You have robbed me of my
occupation. When shall we meet again?'
'To-morrow?'
'To-morrow. You shall see how I live-- If you can spare the time I
would like to take you to a concert. I always test my friends with
music.'
'Even the New Woman?'
His eyes twinkled and a smile played about his sensitive lips.