Gilbert Cannan

“ Sir Henry was like a man possessed. He worked in a frenzy to retrieve the situation, and to recover the ground he had lost; and he only seemed sure of himself in his scenes with Ariel, and over them he went again and again, not for a moment sparing Clara or thinking of the physical effort so much repetition entailed for her.
She did not object. It was a great relief to go to her rooms, worn out, and to lie, unable to think, incapable of calculation, lost to everything except her will to play Ariel with all the magic and youthful vitality she possessed. ”

“ It was so inevitably right that, having met in the heart of London, they should turn their backs on it and put themselves to the test of earth, sunshine, blue sky, and trees in their summer green, and water smiling in the sun. The furious energy in their hearts made the hot August day, the suburban scene, and the indolent suburban people seem toy-like and unreal, as though they were looking down upon it from another world, and so they were, for they had plunged to the very beginnings of Creation, and their new world was in the making. ”

“ Towards that this London was drifting. It had no other purpose.... Ay, this audience was Caliban, coveting Miranda, hating Ariel, lusting to murder Ferdinand—youth, enchantment, love, all were to be done to death. Clara's performance was to him like the last choking song of youth. It should have been, he knew she meant it to be, like all art, a prophecy.
What malign Fate had dogged her to trip her feet, so soon, to lead her by such strange ways to the success that kills, the success worshipped in London, the success won at the cost of every living quality. ”

“ Clara, of course, refused to believe that, and said that with a stupid woman Charles would just rot away in a studio and grow more and more unintelligible.
'Never mind, then,' said Miss Wainwright. 'I'll show you round. If you are meant for the theatre nothing can keep you away from it. The only thing I can see against you is that you're a lady.'
'Is that against me?' asked Clara, a little astonished.
'Well,' replied Miss Wainwright, 'we're different.'
And indeed Clara discovered very soon that actors and actresses were different from other people, because they concealed nothing. ”

“ A furious jealousy swept away what was left of Rodd's intellectual world and released at last his passions. His mind worked swiftly through the story, picking it up in time with every thread.
Was she only an actress? Was the perfection which he had worshipped a figment, a projection of herself in the character most pleasing to his idealism? Impossible! There can be no feigning of purity, honesty, joy. That is where the pretences of humanity collapse. In such a pretence as that simulated passion—the ultimate baseness, breaks down, creates no illusion, and is foiled. ”

“ No one in Charing Cross Road can be assuming: no one could be other than genial and neighbourly. All good books come there at last to find the people who will read them long after they have been forgotten by the people who only talk about them. Books endure while readers and talkers fade away, and Charing Cross Road by its trade in books keeps alive the continuity of London's life and deserves its fame. ”

“ The sun was shining in upon the mirror of her dressing-table, upon her silver brushes, upon the portrait of Julia in a silver frame, and upon the new frock which had come only the day before from the dressmaker. With the sun shining, and the eager thought of Charles in her heart, Clara could have no anxiety. No problem was insoluble, no obstacle, she believed, could be irresistible. Therefore she smiled as Freeland came in treading more heavily than his wont. He stood and looked down at her. ”

“ Clara delighted in the freedom of her fairy costume. Her lovely slim figure showed to perfection. She moved like the wind, like a breeze in long silvery grass. She gave the impression of movement utterly free of her body, which melted into movement, and was lost in it. The stage-island was then to her really an island, the power of Prospero was true magic, the air was drenched with sea-salt, heavy, rich, pregnant with invisible life urging into form and issuing sometimes in strange music, mysterious voices prophesying in song, and plaints of woe from life that could find no other utterance.... ”

“ Henley, Oxford, Lechlade, and the Cotswolds—that was the first day, and, breathing the clover-scented air, gazing over the blue plains to the humpy hills of Malvern, Clara flung back her head and laughed in glee.... How wonderful in one day to shake free of everything, to leave behind all trammels!
'No one need have any troubles now,' she said, with the bewitching smile that made all her discoveries so entrancing. 'When people get tied up in knots, they can just get into a car and go away. The world is big enough for everybody.'
'But people love their troubles,' replied Verschoyle. ”

“ No enchanted illusion had been established. Charles Mann's scenery remained only—scenery. Sir Henry Butcher and the rest of his company were only actors—acting. A troupe of performing animals would have been more entertaining: indeed, in her bitter disappointment, Clara felt that she was one of such a troupe, the lady in tights who holds the hoops through which the dogs and monkeys jump.... So powerful was this anger in her that after a while she began to burlesque herself, to exaggerate her movement, and to keep her voice down to a childish treble, and the audience adored her. ”

“ Above the roofs, the statue of Lord Nelson stood perched in absurd elevation above the London that flouted his Emma, and Clara laughed to see the little gray man in cocked hat symbolising for her the delicious absurdity of London, where nothing and nobody could ever be of the smallest importance in its hugeness.... This was its charm, that an individual could in it feel the indifference of humanity exactly as on a hill the indifference of Nature can be felt. ”

“ After all, the magic of the stage was only illusion, a trick that, if it were not a flowering of the deeper magic of the heart, was empty, vain, contemptible, a thing of darkness and cajolery.
'Perhaps it was just an accident,' said Clara.
'Do it again!' said Charles, in a tone of command.
'What?'
'Do it again!'
'I can't.'
'Do it again, I tell you. When you do a thing like that you have to find out how you did it. Art isn't a thing of chance. ”

“ It was quite clear to her that Sir Henry was intent upon a personal relationship if she were to keep what she had won, and it was as clear that he could not credit her, or Charles, or anybody else with any other motive than personal ambition. He knew his world, he knew his theatre. A fulfilled ambition has its price, and he had never yet met the successful man or woman who did not pay with a good grace, as he himself had done. ”

“ Charles was astonished to find how much he liked Sir Henry, upon whose doings in his exile he had brooded bitterly.
Verschoyle said,—
'I'm only astonished that more men in my position don't go in for the theatre. There are so many of us and we can't think of anything better than racing and polo and big game.'
As they were all so pleased with themselves, Clara swallowed her chagrin, and more happily accepted their homage when Sir Henry toasted her as the presiding Muse of the Imperium. ”

“ Thinking of the money restored his sense of serenity. Wonderful money that can swamp so many ills: money that means work done somewhere—work, the sole solace of human misery. But Charles had no notion of the relation between work and money, or that in using up large quantities of it he was diverting to his own uses more than his fair share of the comfort of humanity. He had so much to give if only humanity would take—and pay for it. What he had to give was beyond price, wherefore he had no qualms in setting his price high.... From The Tempest boundless wealth would flow. ”

“ I'm hurt because I thought you wanted Charles and me for the theatre and not for yourself.'
'L'etat c'est moi,' smiled Sir Henry. 'I am the theatre.... All the immense machinery is my creation. My brain here is the power that keeps it going. If I were to die to-morrow there would be four walls and Mr Gillies.... Do you think he could do anything with it? Could Charles Mann? Could you?'
'Yes,' said Clara, and he laughed. He had never been in such entrancing company. If she did not want his love-making—well and good. ”

“ Rodd used to talk of the virtue of an ordered world, while the bookseller lived in dreams of Anarchy, men and women left alone so that the good in them could come to the top and create a millennium of kindliness. Rodd's researches into the human heart had revealed to him only too clearly the terror that burns at the sources of human life, but because the bookseller's dreams were dear to him, because they kept him happy and benevolent, Rodd could never bring himself to push argument far enough to disturb them. ”

“ Clara sat in a corner by the door and looked from face to face, trying in vain to find in any something of the fire and eagerness that was in her Charles's, who, radiant and bubbling over with confidence, sat at a little table in the centre of the room with his papers in front of him, two enormous candles on either side, and his watch in his hand.
After formalities, Professor Laverock called upon Mr Mann to read his scheme to the committee.... Rarely can a room have contained so much eager idealism, rarely can so many mighty brains have been keyed up to take their tune from one. ”

“ She had progressed so far with this great London of Butcher and Verschoyle only to find through the bookshop another London suddenly opened up before her—the London of the poor.... Poverty she had never known, except the poverty of the world of art which is created rather by indifference to money than by the grim lack of it. With Charles days had been so busy, nights so happy, that it was a small thing that every now and then she had to go hungry for a day in order that he might not lack. ”

“ To both Verschoyle and Clara the bookshop was a place of escape, a holiday ground where they could play with ideas which to Verschoyle were a new kind of toy. With Mann there was always a certain strain for him, because Mann wanted something definite; but with the bookseller and his young friends, he was at his ease, for they were very like himself, without ambition, and outside all the press and hurry of society. Like himself they wanted nothing except to be amused, and like himself they hated amusement which entailed effort. ”

“ Already he had interfered and there was no knowing what Claude's spite might lead to.... O God, what a tangle! What should be done, what could be done, for Clara? No one mattered but she. Mann, Verschoyle, himself, what did any of them matter? She was the unique, irreplaceable personality. Of that he was sure. It was through her glorious innocence that all these strange things had happened to her. A less generous, a more experienced and calculating woman would have known instinctively that there was some queer story behind Charles Mann.... She could leap into a man's heart through his mind. ”

“ Groping with his imagination into the vitals of the society into which he had been born, Rodd had consoled himself with the assurance that a cataclysm would come to smash the odious system by which the old enslaved the young, and that then there would be a cleaner atmosphere in which his ideas could live, and his words would be intelligible to all, because in it that deeper consciousness which was released in his imagined world would come into play to sweep away all falsehoods and stale ideas.... ”

“ 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 knew perfectly well that nothing could shift them out of it, that any awakening was too painful for them to endure, and that there was no means of avoiding this constant sacrifice of personality after personality, talent after talent, victim after victim. He had hoped against hope that Clara, being what she was, would save herself in time, but he had decided that he had no right to interfere, or to offer his assistance. Against a machine like the Imperium, what could youth do? ”

“ No bird's song, no sudden light upon a cloud, no trembling flower in its ecstacy, no tree in full burst of blossom could tell of so high a beauty as this joy that flashed from the very depths of her soul into her eyes, upon her lips, softening her throat, liquefying her every movement, and into her voice bringing such music as no poet has ever sung, no musician's brain conceived, music sent from regions deeper than the human soul can know to go soaring far beyond the limits set to human perception. ”

“ We have won through. Here we are in the theatre. We've conquered the stage, and soon all those seats out there will be full of eager people saying, "Who are these wonders? Can it be? Surely they are none other than Charles and Clara Mann?"'
'Day,' said she.
He stamped his foot impatiently.
'What's in a name? Day, if you like. Artists can and must do as they please. This is our real life, here where we make beauty. ”

“ Their eyes met. Again there was nothing but they two. All pretence, all mummery had vanished. Life had become pure and strong, more rich and wonderful even than the play in which, baffled by the chances of life, she had striven to live.
'To-morrow,' she said, 'I am going to the bookshop at half-past twelve.'
He bowed and left her, and meeting Mr Clott or Cumberland on the stairs of his house he had the satisfaction of shaking him until his teeth rattled, and of telling him that Mr Charles Mann had gone abroad for an indefinite period. ”

“ He had been approached many times by persons interested in plays, theatres, and schemes, but being that rare and unhappy creature, a rich man with good taste, he had avoided them as hotly as the mammas of Mayfair and Belgravia.
He met Charles at his exhibition and was introduced to him. Charles at once bellowed at him at the top of his voice on the great things that would be achieved through the realisation of his dreams, and Lord Verschoyle had in his society the exhilarated sense of playing truant, and wanted more of it. ”