by Henry James
“Tell her it doesn’t matter—it doesn’t matter a straw!” said Wayworth.
“And she’s so proud—you know how proud she is!” the old lady went on.
“Tell her I’m more than satisfied, that I accept her gratefully as she is.”
“She says she injures your play, that she ruins it,” said his interlocutress.
“She’ll improve, immensely—she’ll grow into the part,” the young man continued.
“She’d improve if she knew how—but she says she doesn’t. She has given all she has got, and she doesn’t know what’s wanted.”
“What’s wanted is simply that she should go straight on and trust me.”
“How can she trust you when she feels she’s losing you?”
“Losing me?” Wayworth cried.
“You’ll never forgive her if your play is taken off!”
“It will run six months,” said the author of the piece.
The old lady laid her hand on his arm. “What will you do for her if it does?”
He looked at Violet Grey’s aunt a moment. “Do you say your niece is very proud?”
“Too proud for her dreadful profession.”
“Then she wouldn’t wish you to ask me that,” Wayworth answered, getting up.
When he reached home he was very tired, and for a person to whom it was open to consider that he had scored a success he spent a remarkably dismal day. All his restlessness had gone, and fatigue and depression possessed him. He sank into his old chair by the fire and sat there for hours with his eyes closed. His landlady came in to bring his luncheon and mend the fire, but he feigned to be asleep, so as not to be spoken to. It is to be supposed that sleep at last overtook him, for about the hour that dusk began to gather he had an extraordinary impression, a visit that, it would seem, could have belonged to no waking consciousness. Nona Vincent, in face and form, the living heroine of his play, rose before him in his little silent room, sat down with him at his dingy fireside. She was not Violet Grey, she was not Mrs. Alsager, she was not any woman he had seen upon earth, nor was it any masquerade of friendship or of penitence. Yet she was more familiar to him than the women he had known best, and she was ineffably beautiful and consoling. She filled the poor room with her presence, the effect of which was as soothing as some odour of incense. She was as quiet as an affectionate sister, and there was no surprise in her being there. Nothing more real had ever befallen him, and nothing, somehow, more reassuring. He felt her hand rest upon his own, and all his senses seemed to open to her message. She struck him, in the strangest way, both as his creation and as his inspirer, and she gave him the happiest consciousness of success. If she was so charming, in the red firelight, in her vague, clear-coloured garments, it was because he had made her so, and yet if the weight seemed lifted from his spirit it was because she drew it away. When she bent her deep eyes upon him they seemed to speak of safety and freedom and to make a green garden of the future. From time to time she smiled and said: “I live—I live—I live.” How long she stayed he couldn’t have told, but when his landlady blundered in with the lamp Nona Vincent was no longer there. He rubbed his eyes, but no dream had ever been so intense; and as he slowly got out of his chair it was with a deep still joy—the joy of the artist—in the thought of how right he had been, how exactly like herself he had made her. She had come to show him that. At the end of five minutes, however, he felt sufficiently mystified to call his landlady back—he wanted to ask her a question. When the good woman reappeared the question hung fire an instant; then it shaped itself as the inquiry:
“Has any lady been here?”
“No, sir—no lady at all.”
The woman seemed slightly scandalised. “Not Miss Vincent?”
“Miss Vincent, sir?”
“The young lady of my play, don’t you know?”
“Oh, sir, you mean Miss Violet Grey!”
“No I don’t, at all. I think I mean Mrs. Alsager.”
“There has been no Mrs. Alsager, sir.”
“Nor anybody at all like her?”
The woman looked at him as if she wondered what had suddenly taken him. Then she asked in an injured tone: “Why shouldn’t I have told you if you’d ‘ad callers, sir?”
“I thought you might have thought I was asleep.”
“Indeed you were, sir, when I came in with the lamp—and well you’d earned it, Mr. Wayworth!”
The landlady came back an hour later to bring him a telegram; it was just as he had begun to dress to dine at his club and go down to the theatre.
“See me to-night in front, and don’t come near me till it’s over.”
It was in these words that Violet communicated her wishes for the evening. He obeyed them to the letter; he watched her from the depths of a box. He was in no position to say how she might have struck him the night before, but what he saw during these charmed hours filled him with admiration and gratitude. She WAS in it, this time; she had pulled herself together, she had taken possession, she was felicitous at every turn. Fresh from his revelation of Nona he was in a position to judge, and as he judged he exulted. He was thrilled and carried away, and he was moreover intensely curious to know what had happened to her, by what unfathomable art she had managed in a few hours to effect such a change of base. It was as if SHE had had a revelation of Nona, so convincing a clearness had been breathed upon the picture. He kept himself quiet in the entr’actes— he would speak to her only at the end; but before the play was half over the manager burst into his box.
“It’s prodigious, what she’s up to!” cried Mr. Loder, almost more bewildered than gratified. “She has gone in for a new reading—a blessed somersault in the air!”
“Is it quite different?” Wayworth asked, sharing his mystification.
“Different? Hyperion to a satyr! It’s devilish good, my boy!”
“It’s devilish good,” said Wayworth, “and it’s in a different key altogether from the key of her rehearsal.”
“I’ll run you six months!” the manager declared; and he rushed round again to the actress, leaving Wayworth with a sense that she had already pulled him through. She had with the audience an immense personal success.
When he went behind, at the end, he had to wait for her; she only showed herself when she was ready to leave the theatre. Her aunt had been in her dressing-room with her, and the two ladies appeared together. The girl passed him quickly, motioning him to say nothing till they should have got out of the place. He saw that she was immensely excited, lifted altogether above her common artistic level. The old lady said to him: “You must come home to supper with us: it has been all arranged.” They had a brougham, with a little third seat, and he got into it with them. It was a long time before the actress would speak. She leaned back in her corner, giving no sign but still heaving a little, like a subsiding sea, and with all her triumph in the eyes that shone through the darkness. The old lady was hushed to awe, or at least to discretion, and Wayworth was happy enough to wait. He had really to wait till they had alighted at Notting Hill, where the elder of his companions went to see that supper had been attended to.
“I was better—I was better,” said Violet Grey, throwing off her cloak in the little drawing-room.
“You were perfection. You’ll be like that every night, won’t you?”
She smiled at him. “Every night? There can scarcely be a miracle every day.”
“What do you mean by a miracle?”
“I’ve had a revelation.”
Wayward stared. “At what hour?”
“The right hour—this afternoon. Just in time to save me—and to save YOU.”
“At five o’clock? Do you mean you had a visit?”
“She came to me—she stayed two hours.”
“Two hours? Nona Vincent?”
“Mrs. Alsager.” Violet Grey smiled more deeply. “It’s the same thing.”
“And how did Mrs. Alsager save you?”
“By letting me look at her. By le
tting me hear her speak. By letting me know her.”
“And what did she say to you?”
“Kind things—encouraging, intelligent things.”
“Ah, the dear woman!” Wayworth cried.
“You ought to like her—she likes YOU. She was just what I wanted,” the actress added.
“Do you mean she talked to you about Nona?”
“She said you thought she was like her. She IS—she’s exquisite.”
“She’s exquisite,” Wayworth repeated. “Do you mean she tried to coach you?”
“Oh, no—she only said she would be so glad if it would help me to see her. And I felt it did help me. I don’t know what took place— she only sat there, and she held my hand and smiled at me, and she had tact and grace, and she had goodness and beauty, and she soothed my nerves and lighted up my imagination. Somehow she seemed to GIVE it all to me. I took it—I took it. I kept her before me, I drank her in. For the first time, in the whole study of the part, I had my model—I could make my copy. All my courage came back to me, and other things came that I hadn’t felt before. She was different—she was delightful; as I’ve said, she was a revelation. She kissed me when she went away—and you may guess if I kissed HER. We were awfully affectionate, but it’s YOU she likes!” said Violet Grey.
Wayworth had never been more interested in his life, and he had rarely been more mystified. “Did she wear vague, clear-coloured garments?” he asked, after a moment.
Violet Grey stared, laughed, then bade him go in to supper. “YOU know how she dresses!”
He was very well pleased at supper, but he was silent and a little solemn. He said he would go to see Mrs. Alsager the next day. He did so, but he was told at her door that she had returned to Torquay. She remained there all winter, all spring, and the next time he saw her his play had run two hundred nights and he had married Violet Grey. His plays sometimes succeed, but his wife is not in them now, nor in any others. At these representations Mrs. Alsager continues frequently to be present.
The Outcry
BOOK FIRST
I
“NO, my lord,” Banks had replied, “no stranger has yet arrived. But I’ll see if any one has come in—or who has.” As he spoke, however, he observed Lady Sandgate’s approach to the hall by the entrance giving upon the great terrace, and addressed her on her passing the threshold. “Lord John, my lady.” With which, his duty majestically performed, he retired to the quarter—that of the main access to the spacious centre of the house—from which he had ushered the visitor.
This personage, facing Lady Sandgate as she paused there a moment framed by the large doorway to the outer expanses, the small pinkish paper of a folded telegram in her hand, had partly before him, as an immediate effect, the high wide interior, still breathing the quiet air and the fair pannelled security of the couple of hushed and stored centuries, in which certain of the reputed treasures of Dedborough Place beautifully disposed themselves; and then, through ample apertures and beyond the stately stone outworks of the great seated and supported house—uplifting terrace, balanced, balustraded steps and containing basins where splash and spray were at rest—all the rich composed extension of garden and lawn and park. An ancient, an assured elegance seemed to reign; pictures and preserved “pieces,” cabinets and tapestries, spoke, each for itself, of fine selection and high distinction; while the originals of the old portraits, in more or less deserved salience, hung over the happy scene as the sworn members of a great guild might have sat, on the beautiful April day, at one of their annual feasts.
Such was the setting confirmed by generous time, but the handsome woman of considerably more than forty whose entrance had all but coincided with that of Lord John either belonged, for the eye, to no such complacent company or enjoyed a relation to it in which the odd twists and turns of history must have been more frequent than any dull avenue or easy sequence. Lady Sandgate was shiningly modern, and perhaps at no point more so than by the effect of her express repudiation of a mundane future certain to be more and more offensive to women of real quality and of formed taste. Clearly, at any rate, in her hands, the clue to the antique confidence had lost itself, and repose, however founded, had given way to curiosity—that is to speculation—however disguised. She might have consented, or even attained, to being but gracefully stupid, but she would presumably have confessed, if put on her trial for restlessness or for intelligence, that she was, after all, almost clever enough to be vulgar. Unmistakably, moreover, she had still, with her fine stature, her disciplined figure, her cherished complexion, her bright important hair, her kind bold eyes and her large constant smile, the degree of beauty that might pretend to put every other question by.
Lord John addressed her as with a significant manner that he might have had—that of a lack of need, or even of interest, for any explanation about herself: it would have been clear that he was apt to discriminate with sharpness among possible claims on his attention. “I luckily find you at least, Lady Sandgate—they tell me Theign’s off somewhere.”
She replied as with the general habit, on her side, of bland reassurance; it mostly had easier consequences—for herself—than the perhaps more showy creation of alarm. “Only off in the park—open to-day for a school-feast from Dedborough, as you may have made out from the avenue; giving good advice, at the top of his lungs, to four hundred and fifty children.”
It was such a scene, and such an aspect of the personage so accounted for, as Lord John could easily take in, and his recognition familiarly smiled. “Oh he’s so great on such occasions that I’m sorry to be missing it.”
“I’ve had to miss it,” Lady Sandgate sighed—”that is to miss the peroration. I’ve just left them, but he had even then been going on for twenty minutes, and I dare say that if you care to take a look you’ll find him, poor dear victim of duty, still at it.”
“I’ll warrant—for, as I often tell him, he makes the idea of one’s duty an awful thing to his friends by the extravagance with which he always overdoes it.” And the image itself appeared in some degree to prompt this particular edified friend to look at his watch and consider. “I should like to come in for the grand finale, but I rattled over in a great measure to meet a party, as he calls himself—and calls, if you please, even me!—who’s motoring down by appointment and whom I think I should be here to receive; as well as a little, I confess, in the hope of a glimpse of Lady Grace: if you can perhaps imagine that!”
“I can imagine it perfectly,” said Lady Sandgate, whom evidently no perceptions of that general order ever cost a strain. “It quite sticks out of you, and every one moreover has for some time past been waiting to see. But you haven’t then,” she added, “come from town?”
“No, I’m for three days at Chanter with my mother; whom, as she kindly lent me her car, I should have rather liked to bring.”
Lady Sandgate left the unsaid, in this connection, languish no longer than was decent. “But whom you doubtless had to leave, by her preference, just settling down to bridge.”
“Oh, to sit down would imply that my mother at some moment of the day gets up–-!”
“Which the Duchess never does?”—Lady Sand-gate only asked to be allowed to show how she saw it. “She fights to the last, invincible; gathering in the spoils and only routing her friends?” She abounded genially in her privileged vision. “Ah yes—we know something of that!”
Lord John, who was a young man of a rambling but not of an idle eye, fixed her an instant with a surprise that was yet not steeped in compassion. “You too then?”
She wouldn’t, however, too meanly narrow it down. “Well, in this house generally; where I’m so often made welcome, you see, and where–-“
“Where,” he broke in at once, “your jolly good footing quite sticks out of you, perhaps you’ll let me say!”
She clearly didn’t mind his seeing her ask herself how she should deal with so much rather juvenile intelligence; and indeed she could only decide to deal quite simply.
“You can’t say more than I feel—and am proud to feel!—at being of comfort when they’re worried.”
This but fed the light flame of his easy perception—which lighted for him, if she would, all the facts equally. “And they’re worried now, you imply, because my terrible mother is capable of heavy gains and of making a great noise if she isn’t paid? I ought to mind speaking of that truth,” he went on as with a practised glance in the direction of delicacy; “but I think I should like you to know that I myself am not a bit ignorant of why it has made such an impression here.”
Lady Sandgate forestalled his knowledge. “Because poor Kitty Imber—who should either never touch a card or else learn to suffer in silence, as I’ve had to, goodness knows!—has thrown herself, with her impossible big debt, upon her father? whom she thinks herself entitled to ‘look to’ even more as a lovely young widow with a good jointure than she formerly did as the mere most beautiful daughter at home.”
She had put the picture a shade interrogatively, but this was as nothing to the note of free inquiry in Lord John’s reply. “You mean that our lovely young widows—to say nothing of lovely young wives—ought by this time to have made out, in predicaments, how to turn round?”
His temporary hostess, even with his eyes on her, appeared to decide after a moment not wholly to disown his thought. But she smiled for it. “Well, in that set–-!”