An Opera and Lady Grasmere/Book 2/Chapter 7

ARVEY did not stay in the theatre. He wanted to be alone, to be unobserved; the load of the present was more than he could openly support. The unfamiliar walls repelled, the enclosed space stifled him; every face that he encountered was a new constraint; and his feelings must have free play, his frame fresh air, or he would suffocate.

He crossed the hall and went out into the street, escaping the light and the oppressive contact of the audience; turning away into a dark and empty passage, one of the many that open out on to the great market. Here he was undisturbed, only one other pedestrian disputed the seclusion.

This alley of Merceron's was by night an almost lifeless place, a strip of asphalt running between the huge bulk of a row of warehouses and a blank wall of the opera house that adjoined a similar wall belonging to one of the market buildings. These many-storied warehouses were dark and tenantless, only less sombre than the opposing masonry; and through these two silences ran the narrow passage, its feeble gas-lamps waging hopeless warfare with a darkness enclosed, hemmed in, and black with shadow.

At the mouth of this byway there gleamed the misty radiance of two opposing public-houses; yet between lay a more than sufficient desert of gloomy asphalt. This, Harvey could pace uninterrupted, alone with the resurgent flood that had taken him by the throat and forced him out of doors.

The man in front of Merceron reached the yellow glare from the two corners, but, instead of continuing across the market, checked himself and turned. They passed each other in the dim passage, and Harvey, unaware of the retracement, went on to the public-house lights, then back again. Once more they met on their opposing beats.

The even footfalls in the empty street merged imperceptibly into the rhythm of Harvey's thoughts. In later years he never recalled this interval of refuge, without an accompanying understrain of steady footfalls. The man repassed him, and he looked up. They were near one of the gas-lamps.

"It's no go," said Merceron, "you're in for it."

His imaginary conversation with Sopwith was now replaced by a more real interview.

The composer halted, recognised the speaker, with mind zigzaging [sic] till it reached a position that enabled it to grasp Harvey's remark, and, approximately, his attitude.

"It breaks down, goes from bad to worse as the story intensifies," continued Merceron, very calmly, with the tone and manner of a man facing an already accomplished fact.

"Do you really think so?" asked Sopwith uneasily. His voice acknowledged all the old ascendency, the old instinctive faith in Merceron's judgment—the exaggerated belief of the consciously unoriginal artist in the man of convictions.

"It must fail, there's nothing more for it to live on, the rest's all limp—soft as butter."

"But they seemed pleased, they were clapping all over the house just now and after the overture," urged Sopwith.

"There was that one thing of Lorenzo's—but there's nothing else left, it can't go on."

The composer listened like one doomed. Merceron's words fell with a finality that overpowered even the most laggard of his hopes.

"But you thought it good—you were pleased with it," he protested.

"I was when I wrote it—the workmanship is good, good enough to be proud of—but there's no real life in it, the workmanship's all wasted on unreal emotion," returned Harvey, patiently dissecting Isabella, more for his own delectation than for Sopwith's. He continued, evenly as before, with an exasperating calm, "I had no real experience, I was writing about things I did not understand—it's all ineffectual, not a natural emotion in it except that glimmer of a one they sang just now."

"But" Sopwith attempted. He could get no further, could find no objection; even suspicion of Harvey's disinterestedness was disarmed by the business-like exposition with which he had just been favoured.

"But?" questioned Merceron who was waiting.

"It may come through?" hazarded Sopwith, more to supply an evident demand than from any latent hopefulness.

Harvey shook his head.

"No, not this, perhaps the next, the next may; but you don't understand, you never will understand." The futile words, the unintelligence of his questioner, were wearying him. He had said all he had to say.

Yet Sopwith remained, breaking out desperately with:

"Why did you believe in it then—why did you believe in it!"

"You know how I used to live, shut up from everything, feeling everything with my head instead of—but you don't understand," replied Merceron. He was growing impatient, the interview was being needlessly prolonged.

"But what shall I do—what am I to do?" demanded Sopwith in the voice of a drowning man. "What shall I do!"

Harvey shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't know—it's your own fault."

But Sopwith defended himself.

"It isn't. I never meant to do this," he whined; "I never meant to do this!"

Harvey took a pace forward, but the composer followed him.

"You think me a thief?" he said, clutching at a lapel of Harvey's coat.

"I could—but I'm not bothering about that!"

"But I'm not—I'm not a thief! I was trapped!"

Merceron looked wonderingly at his erstwhile friend. Was the man demented?

"Trapped," repeated Sopwith, "trapped! You don't know what I 've had to put up with all these months; and now—and now it's going all wrong!" and he burst into tears, breaking down completely, weeping hysterically in that narrow passage, that strip of walled-in asphalt, running back to where the yellow lights shone from the two public-houses that overlooked the great market.

Harvey had severed himself from his own thoughts, was trying to follow the obscure accusations of the abject wretch at his side.

"I don't understand," he said.

A faint sound as of a distant orchestra floated on to the silence.

"They 're beginning again," said Sopwith. He had pulled himself together, was listening eagerly. "Isn't it any good? It must be some good—it must be some good, or else they wouldn't play it!" he exclaimed with growing conviction. The genuineness of the performance must have some equally genuine justification, some raison d'être proportionately vigorous.

But Harvey's gesture shattered the fugitive assumption. The former tone returned, an even greater degree of desperation than before.

"What am I to do afterwards? I'm quite ruined!" Sopwith's hand still clutched the lapel. "I 've put money into it—every cent I 've got, and I 've borrowed, and my reputation's clean gone. I can't disclaim it and say it's yours; you won't say it's yours, and if you did" The distracted wretch paused, speechless and dazed, as he began to realise the multiplied hopelessness of his position, the completeness of this checkmating. "What am I to do—whatever am I to do?" he was sobbing afresh. "And all these months, as though they weren't enough—why did you ask me to come that evening, and why weren't you in? I didn't want to take it! I hadn't meant to take anything! I never took anything in my life before or since! It's your doing, you and that man who let me in—yours and his!"

Harvey's perplexity was growing. The spectacle at which he was assisting had swamped his own private drama.

"What do you mean by all this?" he asked. "What man, and who let you in? I know nothing about either of you, unless" He paused. Was Sopwith referring to Hutchinson's brother officer and his own former suspect? "What had the man to do with you?" he asked abruptly.

"Didn't he tell you, and don't you know? You must have asked him. You knew it was I who took the music, didn't you?" Sopwith's voice rose with each question; his companion's ignorance seemed incredible. "You must have asked him, and you knew it was I?" he repeated. "Why, you wrote me an insulting letter—called me an idiot twice!"

"I didn't. I only found you out to-night. I told you I hadn't worried," Harvey briefly replied.

"But you saw how I was keeping out of your way, month after month; and didn't that man tell you that he let me in as he was leaving?"

"He was a friend of a friend, and I 've never even seen him."

"And I made sure that he would tell you; that you knew all the time. I've been miserable ever since, wondering what was going to happen; and yet I couldn't go back. You don't know what I 've had to put up with; and now, my God! this is more than I deserve! I'm going to be paid out further, as though I hadn't had enough already!" and the miserable victim shook and swayed in a very passion of remorse as the uselessness of all his plotting drove deeper.

Harvey steadied him against the wall.

"Boot laces, buy a pair" but the man passed on without concluding his appeal. Sopwith's face had silenced him. "Toffs!" he muttered; "toffs! No, 'tweren't booze—nor ill. Gawd bless you, sir!" Harvey had flung him a coin. He shuffled off towards the lights at the corner.

The distant orchestra, itself tragi-comical, still murmured, whispered its accompaniment to the tragi-comedy that was being enacted in this remote byway of Central London.

So Hutchinson's friend had waited, and Sopwith had met him as he was leaving the Down Street Chambers. The door had been open and Sopwith had walked in.

He was still discoursing, raging against misfortune, the tears beading his cheeks:

"Trapped! trapped by you two!"

He repeated the charge a dozen times.

"Supposing you consider your own share of the business?" suggested Harvey at last.

But Sopwith flared up:

"He let me in, didn't he? and you had asked me to come.... He wanted to know if I were you first, and when I said I wasn't he went downstairs, leaving your door open for me to walk in; and no one knew I had come, and he didn't know who I was."

"Well?"

"Don't you see how I was tempted?... I was alone in your rooms, and nobody had seen me come in except that man who didn't know me from a crow. I sat down and waited for you, meaning no harm; and then suddenly the temptation came.... I knew how you'd worked on the thing, and that it was finished.... I thought you were a genius, and that that opera was a work of genius.... Don't you see how I was tempted?... And it was in the cabinet, and no one knew I was there.... I could get it put on if I had it, I was almost sure of that; I knew all the right people.... And if you had it you would never do any good with it; you would never have troubled to get it produced. You weren't the man to make up to the management, to ask for favours, and bother about all sorts of useful people. The lock was almost rotten, it gave as soon as I touched it... and no one had seen me come in, and no one saw me go out. That's all.... And what else could I have done? You know how poor I am, and that I am not specially clever. What could I do but take it?... It wasn't stealing... I never thought of it till I'd been there quite a time... and I'd come up because you'd asked me to.... Everything helped to make me take it—any musician would have taken it!... It was almost an invitation ... And here am I punished and you two allowed to go scot free!... And now you say it's no good—you say it's no good—and I 've put money into it; and there's my name!... Perhaps I deserve something... but not this!... I 've been miserable all these nine months.... There was that letter I wrote you saying I'd been up the river... I thought that man would upset it... a perfect hell it's been!... And I 've still got to pay the man who altered your libretto... I believe he suspects... And now—what's that!"

Sopwith's lamentations had ceased, he had started back, was listening eagerly, madly, with the face of a famished beast awakening to the distant plash of water.

"They're clapping—they're clapping!" he cried. "You devil—you lying hound!" Then he made off, escaping by various narrow streets to the stage-door.

Harvey was alone. The muffled sound of far-away applause had replaced the droning of the distant orchestra.