by Henry James
“What then did you think pocket-boroughs were?” Peter Sherringham asked.
Mr. Nash’s facial radiance rested on him. “Why, boroughs that filled your pocket. To do that sort of thing without a bribe—c’est trop fort!”
“He lives at Samarcand,” Nick Dormer explained to his mother, who flushed perceptibly. “What do you advise me? I’ll do whatever you say,” he went on to his old acquaintance.
“My dear, my dear–-!” Lady Agnes pleaded.
“See Julia first, with all respect to Mr. Nash. She’s of excellent counsel,” said Peter Sherringham.
Mr. Nash smiled across the table at his host. “The lady first—the lady first! I’ve not a word to suggest as against any idea of hers.”
“We mustn’t sit here too long, there’ll be so much to do,” said Lady Agnes anxiously, perceiving a certain slowness in the service of the boeuf braisé.
Biddy had been up to this moment mainly occupied in looking, covertly and in snatches, at Peter Sherringham; as was perfectly lawful in a young lady with a handsome cousin whom she had not seen for more than a year. But her sweet voice now took license to throw in the words: “We know what Mr. Nash thinks of politics: he told us just now he thinks them dreadful.”
“No, not dreadful—only inferior,” the personage impugned protested. “Everything’s relative.”
“Inferior to what?” Lady Agnes demanded.
Mr. Nash appeared to consider a moment. “To anything else that may be in question.”
“Nothing else is in question!” said her ladyship in a tone that would have been triumphant if it had not been so dry.
“Ah then!” And her neighbour shook his head sadly. He turned after this to Biddy. “The ladies whom I was with just now and in whom you were so good as to express an interest?” Biddy gave a sign of assent and he went on: “They’re persons theatrical. The younger one’s trying to go upon the stage.”
“And are you assisting her?” Biddy inquired, pleased she had guessed so nearly right.
“Not in the least—I’m rather choking her off. I consider it the lowest of the arts.”
“Lower than politics?” asked Peter Sherringham, who was listening to this.
“Dear no, I won’t say that. I think the Théâtre Français a greater institution than the House of Commons.”
“I agree with you there!” laughed Sherringham; “all the more that I don’t consider the dramatic art a low one. It seems to me on the contrary to include all the others.”
“Yes—that’s a view. I think it’s the view of my friends.”
“Of your friends?”
“Two ladies—old acquaintances—whom I met in Paris a week ago and whom I’ve just been spending an hour with in this place.”
“You should have seen them; they struck me very much,” Biddy said to her cousin.
“I should like to see them if they really have anything to say to the theatre.”
“It can easily be managed. Do you believe in the theatre?” asked Gabriel Nash.
“Passionately,” Sherringham confessed. “Don’t you?”
Before Nash had had time to answer Biddy had interposed with a sigh. “How I wish I could go—but in Paris I can’t!”
“I’ll take you, Biddy—I vow I’ll take you.”
“But the plays, Peter,” the girl objected. “Mamma says they’re worse than the pictures.”
“Oh, we’ll arrange that: they shall do one at the Français on purpose for a delightful little yearning English girl.”
“Can you make them?”
“I can make them do anything I choose.”
“Ah then it’s the theatre that believes in you,” said Mr. Nash.
“It would be ungrateful if it didn’t after all I’ve done for it!” Sherringham gaily opined.
Lady Agnes had withdrawn herself from between him and her other guest and, to signify that she at least had finished eating, had gone to sit by her son, whom she held, with some importunity, in conversation. But hearing the theatre talked of she threw across an impersonal challenge to the paradoxical young man. “Pray should you think it better for a gentleman to be an actor?”
“Better than being a politician? Ah, comedian for comedian, isn’t the actor more honest?”
Lady Agnes turned to her son and brought forth with spirit: “Think of your great father, Nicholas!”
“He was an honest man,” said Nicholas. “That’s perhaps why he couldn’t stand it.”
Peter Sherringham judged the colloquy to have taken an uncomfortable twist, though not wholly, as it seemed to him, by the act of Nick’s queer comrade. To draw it back to safer ground he said to this personage: “May I ask if the ladies you just spoke of are English—Mrs. and Miss Rooth: isn’t that the rather odd name?”
“The very same. Only the daughter, according to her kind, desires to be known by some nom de guerre before she has even been able to enlist.”
“And what does she call herself?” Bridget Dormer asked.
“Maud Vavasour, or Edith Temple, or Gladys Vane—some rubbish of that sort.”
“What then is her own name?”
“Miriam—Miriam Rooth. It would do very well and would give her the benefit of the prepossessing fact that—to the best of my belief at least—she’s more than half a Jewess.”
“It is as good as Rachel Felix,” Sherringham said.
“The name’s as good, but not the talent. The girl’s splendidly stupid.”
“And more than half a Jewess? Don’t you believe it!” Sherringham laughed.
“Don’t believe she’s a Jewess?” Biddy asked, still more interested in Miriam Rooth.
“No, no—that she’s stupid, really. If she is she’ll be the first.”
“Ah you may judge for yourself,” Nash rejoined, “if you’ll come to-morrow afternoon to Madame Carré, Rue de Constantinople, à l’entresol.”
“Madame Carré? Why, I’ve already a note from her—I found it this morning on my return to Paris—asking me to look in at five o’clock and listen to a jeune Anglaise.”
“That’s my arrangement—I obtained the favour. The ladies want an opinion, and dear old Carré has consented to see them and to give one. Maud Vavasour will recite, and the venerable artist will pass judgement.”
Sherringham remembered he had his note in his pocket and took it out to look it over. “She wishes to make her a little audience—she says she’ll do better with that—and she asks me because I’m English. I shall make a point of going.”
“And bring Dormer if you can: the audience will be better. Will you come, Dormer?” Mr. Nash continued, appealing to his friend—”will you come with me to hear an English amateur recite and an old French actress pitch into her?”
Nick looked round from his talk with his mother and Grace. “I’ll go anywhere with you so that, as I’ve told you, I mayn’t lose sight of you—may keep hold of you.”
“Poor Mr. Nash, why is he so useful?” Lady Agnes took a cold freedom to inquire.
“He steadies me, mother.”
“Oh I wish you’d take me, Peter,” Biddy broke out wistfully to her cousin.
“To spend an hour with an old French actress? Do you want to go upon the stage?” the young man asked.
“No, but I want to see something—to know something.”
“Madame Carré’s wonderful in her way, but she’s hardly company for a little English girl.”
“I’m not little, I’m only too big; and she goes, the person you speak of.”
“For a professional purpose and with her good mother,” smiled Mr. Nash. “I think Lady Agnes would hardly venture–-!”
“Oh I’ve seen her good mother!” said Biddy as if she had her impression of what the worth of that protection might be.
“Yes, but you haven’t heard her. It’s then that you measure her.”
Biddy was wistful still. “Is it the famous Honorine Carré, the great celebrity?”
“Honorine in person: the incomparab
le, the perfect!” said Peter Sherringham. “The first artist of our time, taking her altogether. She and I are old pals; she has been so good as to come and ‘say’ things—which she does sometimes still dans le monde as no one else can– in my rooms.”
“Make her come then. We can go there!”
“One of these days!”
“And the young lady—Miriam, Maud, Gladys—make her come too.”
Sherringham looked at Nash and the latter was bland. “Oh you’ll have no difficulty. She’ll jump at it!”
“Very good. I’ll give a little artistic tea—with Julia too of course. And you must come, Mr. Nash.” This gentleman promised with an inclination, and Peter continued: “But if, as you say, you’re not for helping the young lady, how came you to arrange this interview with the great model?”
“Precisely to stop her short. The great model will find her very bad. Her judgements, as you probably know, are Rhadamanthine.”
“Unfortunate creature!” said Biddy. “I think you’re cruel.”
“Never mind—I’ll look after them,” Sherringham laughed.
“And how can Madame Carré judge if the girl recites English?”
“She’s so intelligent that she could judge if she recited Chinese,” Peter declared.
“That’s true, but the jeune Anglaise recites also in French,” said Gabriel Nash.
“Then she isn’t stupid.”
“And in Italian, and in several more tongues, for aught I know.”
Sherringham was visibly interested. “Very good—we’ll put her through them all.”
“She must be most clever,” Biddy went on yearningly.
“She has spent her life on the Continent; she has wandered about with her mother; she has picked up things.”
“And is she a lady?” Biddy asked.
“Oh tremendous! The great ones of the earth on the mother’s side. On the father’s, on the other hand, I imagine, only a Jew stockbroker in the City.”
“Then they’re rich—or ought to be,” Sherringham suggested.
“Ought to be—ah there’s the bitterness! The stockbroker had too short a go—he was carried off in his flower. However, he left his wife a certain property, which she appears to have muddled away, not having the safeguard of being herself a Hebrew. This is what she has lived on till to-day—this and another resource. Her husband, as she has often told me, had the artistic temperament: that’s common, as you know, among ces messieurs. He made the most of his little opportunities and collected various pictures, tapestries, enamels, porcelains, and similar gewgaws. He parted with them also, I gather, at a profit; in short he carried on a neat little business as a brocanteur. It was nipped in the bud, but Mrs. Rooth was left with a certain number of these articles in her hands; indeed they must have formed her only capital. She was not a woman of business; she turned them, no doubt, to indifferent account; but she sold them piece by piece, and they kept her going while her daughter grew up. It was to this precarious traffic, conducted with extraordinary mystery and delicacy, that, five years ago, in Florence, I was indebted for my acquaintance with her. In those days I used to collect—heaven help me!—I used to pick up rubbish which I could ill afford. It was a little phase—we have our little phases, haven’t we?” Mr. Nash asked with childlike trust—”and I’ve come out on the other side. Mrs. Rooth had an old green pot and I heard of her old green pot. To hear of it was to long for it, so that I went to see it under cover of night. I bought it and a couple of years ago I overturned and smashed it. It was the last of the little phase. It was not, however, as you’ve seen, the last of Mrs. Rooth. I met her afterwards in London, and I found her a year or two ago in Venice. She appears to be a great wanderer. She had other old pots, of other colours, red, yellow, black, or blue—she could produce them of any complexion you liked. I don’t know whether she carried them about with her or whether she had little secret stores in the principal cities of Europe. To-day at any rate they seem all gone. On the other hand she has her daughter, who has grown up and who’s a precious vase of another kind—less fragile I hope than the rest. May she not be overturned and smashed!”
Peter Sherringham and Biddy Dormer listened with attention to this history, and the girl testified to the interest with which she had followed it by saying when Mr. Nash had ceased speaking: “A Jewish stockbroker, a dealer in curiosities: what an odd person to marry—for a person who was well born! I daresay he was a German.”
“His name must have been simply Roth, and the poor lady, to smarten it up, has put in another o,” Sherringham ingeniously suggested.
“You’re both very clever,” said Gabriel, “and Rudolf Roth, as I happen to know, was indeed the designation of Maud Vavasour’s papa. But so far as the question of derogation goes one might as well drown as starve—for what connexion is not a misalliance when one happens to have the unaccommodating, the crushing honour of being a Neville-Nugent of Castle Nugent? That’s the high lineage of Maud’s mamma. I seem to have heard it mentioned that Rudolf Roth was very versatile and, like most of his species, not unacquainted with the practice of music. He had been employed to teach the harmonium to Miss Neville-Nugent and she had profited by his lessons. If his daughter’s like him—and she’s not like her mother—he was darkly and dangerously handsome. So I venture rapidly to reconstruct the situation.”
A silence, for the moment, had fallen on Lady Agnes and her other two children, so that Mr. Nash, with his universal urbanity, practically addressed these last remarks to them as well as to his other auditors. Lady Agnes looked as if she wondered whom he was talking about, and having caught the name of a noble residence she inquired: “Castle Nugent—where in the world’s that?”
“It’s a domain of immeasurable extent and almost inconceivable splendour, but I fear not to be found in any prosaic earthly geography!” Lady Agnes rested her eyes on the tablecloth as if she weren’t sure a liberty had not been taken with her, or at least with her “order,” and while Mr. Nash continued to abound in descriptive suppositions—”It must be on the banks of the Manzanares or the Guadalquivir”—Peter Sherringham, whose imagination had seemingly been kindled by the sketch of Miriam Rooth, took up the argument and reminded him that he had a short time before assigned a low place to the dramatic art and had not yet answered the question as to whether he believed in the theatre. Which gave the speaker a further chance. “I don’t know that I understand your question; there are different ways of taking it. Do I think it’s important? Is that what you mean? Important certainly to managers and stage-carpenters who want to make money, to ladies and gentlemen who want to produce themselves in public by limelight, and to other ladies and gentlemen who are bored and stupid and don’t know what to do with their evening. It’s a commercial and social convenience which may be infinitely worked. But important artistically, intellectually? How can it be—so poor, so limited a form?”
“Upon my honour it strikes me as rich and various! Do you think it’s a poor and limited form, Nick?” Sherringham added, appealing to his kinsman.
“I think whatever Nash thinks. I’ve no opinion to-day but his.”
This answer of the hope of the Dormers drew the eyes of his mother and sisters to him and caused his friend to exclaim that he wasn’t used to such responsibilities—so few people had ever tested his presence of mind by agreeing with him. “Oh I used to be of your way of feeling,” Nash went on to Sherringham. “I understand you perfectly. It’s a phase like another. I’ve been through it—j’ai été comme ça.”
“And you went then very often to the Théâtre Français, and it was there I saw you. I place you now.”
“I’m afraid I noticed none of the other spectators,” Nash explained. “I had no attention but for the great Carré—she was still on the stage. Judge of my infatuation, and how I can allow for yours, when I tell you that I sought her acquaintance, that I couldn’t rest till I had told her how I hung upon her lips.”
“That’s just what I told her,” Sherringh
am returned.
“She was very kind to me. She said: ‘Vous me rendez des forces.’”
“That’s just what she said to me!”
“And we’ve remained very good friends.”
“So have we!” laughed Sherringham. “And such perfect art as hers—do you mean to say you don’t consider that important, such a rare dramatic intelligence?”
“I’m afraid you read the feuilletons. You catch their phrases”—Nash spoke with pity. “Dramatic intelligence is never rare; nothing’s more common.”
“Then why have we so many shocking actors?”