The Way of Ambition Part 67

"I must go! I must hear, see!"

The composer cried out.

"Come with me, my Susan, and you, Max, old person!"

There was a patter of running feet, a sound of full-throated laughter from Elliot, and presently silence but for the now very distant music.

"He is a baby," observed Madame Sennier.

She yawned, slightly blowing out her veil.

"How hot it is!"

Pierre came out carrying a tray on which were some of the famous fruit syrups, iced lemonade, cakes, and bonbons.

"These are the things your husband loves," said Charmian, pointing to the syrups. "I wonder--" She paused. "Did you make as great friends with my husband as I have made with yours?" she asked lightly.

Madame Sennier spread out her hands, which were encased in thick white kid gloves sewn with black. Her amazingly thin figure, which made ignorant people wonder whether she possessed the physical mechanism declared by anatomists to be necessary to human life, somehow proclaimed a negative.

"My husband opens his door, the window too. Yours keeps his door shut and the blinds over the window. Jacques gives all, like a child. Your husband seems to give sometimes; but he really gives nothing."

"Of course, the English temperament is very different from the French,"

said Charmian, in a constrained voice.

"Very!" said Mrs. s.h.i.+ffney.

Was she smiling behind the veil?

"You ought to go to America," said Madame Sennier. "n.o.body knows what real life is who has not seen New York in the season. Paris, London, they are sleepy villages in comparison with New York."

"I should like to see it," replied Charmian. "But we have nothing to take us there, no reason to go."

She laughed and added:

"And Claude and I are not millionaires."

Madame Sennier talked for two or three minutes of the great expense of living in a smart New York hotel, and then said:

"But some day you will surely go."

"There doesn't seem any prospect of it," said Charmian.

"D'you remember meeting a funny little man called Crayford in my house one night, an impresario?" said Mrs. s.h.i.+ffney, moving her shoulders, and pulling at one of her long gloves, as if she were bored and must find some occupation.

"Yes, I believe I do--a man with a tiny beard."

"Like a little inquiring goat's! D'you know that he's searching the world to find some composer to run against Jacques? Isn't it so, Henriette?"

"So they say in New York," said Madame Sennier. "I wish he could find one; then perhaps he would leave off bothering us with absurd proposals.

And I'm sure there is plenty of room for some more s.h.i.+ning lights. I told Crayford if he worried Jacques any more I would unearth someone for him. He doesn't know where to look."

"But surely--" began Charmian.

"Why do you think that?" asked Mrs. s.h.i.+ffney, in an uninterested voice.

Her brilliant eyes looked extraordinary, like some strange exotic bird's eyes, through her veil.

"Because he began his search with England," said Madame Sennier.

"Well, really--Henriette!" observed Mrs. s.h.i.+ffney, with a faint laugh.

"Ought I to apologize?" said Madame Sennier, turning to Charmian. "When art is in question I believe in speaking the plain truth. Oh, I know your husband is by way of writing an opera! But, of course, one sees that--well, you are here in this delicious little house, having what the Americans call a lovely time, enjoying North Africa, listening to the fountain, walking, as my old baby says, among pa.s.sion-flowers, and playing about with that joke from the Quartier Latin, Armand Gillier.

_Mais, ma chere, ce n'est pas serieux!_ One has only to look at your interesting husband, to see him in the African _milieu_, to see that.

And, of course, one realizes at once that you see through it all! A pretty game! If one is well off one can afford it. Jacques and I starved; but it was quite right that we should. The English talent is not for opera. The Te Deum, the cathedral service, the oratorio in one form or another, in fact the thing with a sacred basis, that is where the English strength lies. It is in the blood. But opera!" Her shoulders went up. "Ah, here they come! Jacques, my cabbage, you are to be petted for the last time! Here are your syrups."

Jacques Sennier came, almost running.

"Did they ever nearly starve?" Charmian asked Mrs. s.h.i.+ffney, when for a moment the attention of all the others was distracted from her by some wild joke of the composer's.

"Henriette thinks so, I believe. Perhaps that is why Jacques is eating all your biscuits now."

When the moment of parting came Jaques Sennier was almost in tears. He insisted on going into the kitchen to say farewell to "la grande Jeanne." He took Pierre in his arms, solemnly blessed Caroline, and warmly pressed his lips to Charmian's hands as he held them, squeezed one on the top of the other, in both his own.

"I shall dedicate my new opera to you and to your syrups!" he exclaimed.

"To the greengage, ah, and the pa.s.sion-flowers! Max, you old person, have you seen them, or have you not? The wonderful Was.h.i.+ngton was not more truthful than I."

His eyes twinkled.

"Were it not that I am a physical coward, I would not go even now. But to die because a man who cannot write has practised on soda-water bottles! I fly before Armand Gillier. But, madame, I fear your respectable husband is even more cowardly than I!"

"Why?" said Charmian, at length releasing her hands from his Simian grasp.

"He accepted a libretto!"

When they were gone Charmian was suddenly overcome by a sense of profound depression such as she had never felt before. With them seemed to go a world; and it was a world that some part of her loved and longed for. Sennier stood for fame, for success; his wife for the glory of the woman who aids and is crowned; Mrs. s.h.i.+ffney and Max Elliot for the joy and the power that belong to great patrons of the arts. An immense vitality went away with them all. So long as they were with her the little Arab house, the little African garden, had stood in the center of things, in the heart of vital things. The two women had troubled Charmian. Madame Sennier had almost frightened her. Yet something in both of them fascinated, must always fascinate such a mind and temperament as hers. They meant so much to the men who were known. And they had made themselves known. Both were women who stood apart from the great crowd. When their names were mentioned everyone--who counted--knew who they were.

As to Jacques Sennier, he left a creva.s.se in the life at Djenan-el-Maqui. It had been a dangerous experience for Charmian, the a.s.sociating in intimacy with the little famous man. Her secret ambitions were irritated almost to the point of nervous exasperation. But she only knew it now that he was gone.

Madame Sennier had frightened her.

"_Mais, ma chere, ce n'est pas serieux!_"

The words had been said with an air of hard and careless authority, as if the speaker knew she was expressing the obvious truth, and a truth known to both her hearers; and then the words which had followed: "One has only to look at your interesting husband, to see him in the African _milieu_, to see that!"

What had happened at Constantine? How had Claude been?

Charmian wanted so much to see him, to hear his account of the whole matter, that she telegraphed: