The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  “I know some pieces.”

  “Some pieces of the répertoire?”

  Miriam Rooth stared as if she didn’t understand. “I know some poetry.”

  “English, French, Italian, German,” said her mother.

  Madame Carré gave Mrs. Rooth a look which expressed irritation at the recurrence of this announcement. “Does she wish to act in all those tongues? The phrase-book isn’t the comedy!”

  “It’s only to show you how she has been educated.”

  “Ah, chère madame, there’s no education that matters! I mean save the right one. Your daughter must have a particular form of speech, like me, like ces messieurs.”

  “You see if I can speak French,” said the girl, smiling dimly at her hostess. She appeared now almost to have collected herself.

  “You speak it in perfection.”

  “And English just as well,” said Miss Rooth.

  “You oughtn’t to be an actress—you ought to be a governess.”

  “Oh don’t tell us that: it’s to escape from that!” pleaded Mrs. Rooth.

  “I’m very sure your daughter will escape from that,” Peter Sherringham was moved to interpose.

  “Oh if you could help her!” said the lady with a world of longing.

  “She has certainly all the qualities that strike the eye,” Peter returned.

  “You’re most kind, sir!” Mrs. Rooth declared, elegantly draping herself.

  “She knows Célimène; I’ve heard her do Célimène,” Gabriel Nash said to Madame Carré”.

  “And she knows Juliet, she knows Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra,” added Mrs. Rooth.

  “Voyons, my dear child, do you wish to work for the French stage or for the English?” the old actress demanded.

  “Ours would have sore need of you, Miss Rooth,” Sherringham gallantly threw off.

  “Could you speak to any one in London—could you introduce her?” her mother eagerly asked.

  “Dear madam, I must hear her first, and hear what Madame Carré says.”

  “She has a voice of rare beauty, and I understand voices,” said Mrs. Rooth.

  “Ah then if she has intelligence she has every gift.”

  “She has a most poetic mind,” the old lady went on.

  “I should like to paint her portrait; she’s made for that,” Nick Dormer ventured to observe to Mrs. Rooth; partly because struck with the girl’s suitability for sitting, partly to mitigate the crudity of inexpressive spectatorship.

  “So all the artists say. I’ve had three or four heads of her, if you would like to see them: she has been done in several styles. If you were to do her I’m sure it would make her celebrated.”

  “And me too,” Nick easily laughed.

  “It would indeed—a member of Parliament!” Nash declared.

  “Ah, I have the honour–-?” murmured Mrs. Rooth, looking gratified and mystified.

  Nick explained that she had no honour at all, and meanwhile Madame Carré had been questioning the girl “Chère madame, I can do nothing with your daughter: she knows too much!” she broke out. “It’s a pity, because I like to catch them wild.”

  “Oh she’s wild enough, if that’s all! And that’s the very point, the question of where to try,” Mrs. Rooth went on. “Into what do I launch her—upon what dangerous stormy sea? I’ve thought of it so anxiously.”

  “Try here—try the French public: they’re so much the most serious,” said Gabriel Nash.

  “Ah no, try the English: there’s such a rare opening!” Sherringham urged in quick opposition.

  “Oh it isn’t the public, dear gentlemen. It’s the private side, the other people—it’s the life, it’s the moral atmosphere.”

  “Je ne connais qu’une scène,—la nôtre,” Madame Carré declared. “I’m assured by every one who knows that there’s no other.”

  “Very correctly assured,” said Mr. Nash. “The theatre in our countries is puerile and barbarous.”

  “There’s something to be done for it, and perhaps mademoiselle’s the person to do it,” Sherringham contentiously suggested.

  “Ah but, en attendant, what can it do for her?” Madame Carré asked.

  “Well, anything I can help to bring about,” said Peter Sherringham, more and more struck with the girl’s rich type. Miriam Rooth sat in silence while this discussion went on, looking from one speaker to the other with a strange dependent candour.

  “Ah, if your part’s marked out I congratulate you, mademoiselle!”—and the old actress underlined the words as she had often underlined others on the stage. She smiled with large permissiveness on the young aspirant, who appeared not to understand her. Her tone penetrated, however, to certain depths in the mother’s nature, adding another stir to agitated waters.

  “I feel the responsibility of what she shall find in the life, the standards, of the theatre,” Mrs. Rooth explained. “Where is the purest tone—where are the highest standards? That’s what I ask,” the good lady continued with a misguided intensity which elicited a peal of unceremonious but sociable laughter from Gabriel Nash.

  “The purest tone—qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?” Madame Carré demanded in the finest manner of modern comedy.

  “We’re very, very respectable,” Mrs. Rooth went on, but now smiling and achieving lightness too.

  “What I want is to place my daughter where the conduct—and the picture of conduct in which she should take part—wouldn’t be quite absolutely dreadful. Now, chère madame, how about all that; how about conduct in the French theatre—all the things she should see, the things she should hear, the things she should learn?”

  Her hostess took it, as Sherringham felt, de très-haut. “I don’t think I know what you’re talking about. They’re the things she may see and hear and learn everywhere; only they’re better done, they’re better said, above all they’re better taught. The only conduct that concerns an, actress, it seems to me, is her own, and the only way for her to behave herself is not to be a helpless stick. I know no other conduct.”

  “But there are characters, there are situations, which I don’t think I should like to see her undertake.”

  “There are many, no doubt, which she would do well to leave alone!” laughed the Frenchwoman.

  “I shouldn’t like to see her represent a very bad woman—a really bad one,” Mrs. Rooth serenely pursued.

  “Ah in England then, and in your theatre, every one’s immaculately good? Your plays must be even more ingenious than I supposed!”

  “We haven’t any plays,” said Gabriel Nash.

  “People will write them for Miss Rooth—it will be a new era,” Sherringham threw in with wanton, or at least with combative, optimism.

  “Will you, sir—will you do something? A sketch of one of our grand English ideals?” the old lady asked engagingly.

  “Oh I know what you do with our pieces—to show your superior virtue!” Madame Carré cried before he had time to reply that he wrote nothing but diplomatic memoranda. “Bad women? Je n’ai joué que ça, madame. ‘Really’ bad? I tried to make them real!”

  “I can say ‘L’Aventurière,’” Miriam interrupted in a cold voice which seemed to hint at a want of participation in the maternal solicitudes.

  “Allow us the pleasure of hearing you then. Madame Carré will give you the réplique,” said Peter Sherringham.

  “Certainly, my child; I can say it without the book,” Madame Carré responded. “Put yourself there—move that chair a little away.” She patted her young visitor, encouraging her to rise, settling with her the scene they should take, while the three men sprang up to arrange a place for the performance. Miriam left her seat and looked vaguely about her; then having taken off her hat and given it to her mother she stood on the designated spot with her eyes to the ground. Abruptly, however, instead of beginning the scene, Madame Carré turned to the elder lady with an air which showed that a rejoinder to this visitor’s remarks of a moment before had been gathering force in her breast.
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  “You mix things up, chère madame, and I have it on my heart to tell you so. I believe it’s rather the case with you other English, and I’ve never been able to learn that either your morality or your talent is the gainer by it. To be too respectable to go where things are done best is in my opinion to be very vicious indeed; and to do them badly in order to preserve your virtue is to fall into a grossness more shocking than any other. To do them well is virtue enough, and not to make a mess of it the only respectability. That’s hard enough to merit Paradise. Everything else is base humbug! Voilà, chère madame, the answer I have for your scruples!”

  “It’s admirable—admirable; and I am glad my friend Dormer here has had the great advantage of hearing you utter it!” Nash exclaimed with a free designation of Nick.

  That young man thought it in effect a speech denoting an intelligence of the question, yet he rather resented the idea that Gabriel should assume it would strike him as a revelation; and to show his familiarity with the line of thought it indicated, as well as to play his part appreciatively in the little circle, he observed to Mrs. Rooth, as if they might take many things for granted: “In other words, your daughter must find her safeguard in the artistic conscience.” But he had no sooner spoken than he was struck with the oddity of their discussing so publicly, and under the poor girl’s handsome nose, the conditions which Miss Rooth might find the best for the preservation of her personal integrity. However, the anomaly was light and unoppressive—the echoes of a public discussion of delicate questions seemed to linger so familiarly in the egotistical little room. Moreover, the heroine of the occasion evidently was losing her embarrassment; she was the priestess on the tripod, awaiting the afflatus and thinking only of that. Her bared head, of which she had changed the position, holding it erect, while her arms hung at her sides, was admirable; her eyes gazed straight out of the window and at the houses on the opposite side of the Rue de Constantinople.

  Mrs. Rooth had listened to Madame Carré with startled, respectful attention, but Nick, considering her, was very sure she hadn’t at all taken in the great artist’s little lesson. Yet this didn’t prevent her from exclaiming in answer to himself: “Oh a fine artistic life—what indeed is more beautiful?”

  Peter Sherringham had said nothing; he was watching Miriam and her attitude. She wore a black dress which fell in straight folds; her face, under her level brows, was pale and regular—it had a strange, strong, tragic beauty. “I don’t know what’s in her,” he said to himself; “nothing, it would seem, from her persistent vacancy. But such a face as that, such a head, is a fortune!” Madame Carré brought her to book, giving her the first line of the speech of Clorinde: “Vous ne me fuyez pas, mon enfant, aujourd’hui.” But still the girl hesitated, and for an instant appeared to make a vain, convulsive effort. In this convulsion she frowned portentously; her low forehead overhung her eyes; the eyes themselves, in shadow, stared, splendid and cold, and her hands clinched themselves at her sides. She looked austere and terrible and was during this moment an incarnation the vividness of which drew from Sherringham a stifled cry. “Elle est bien belle—ah ça,” murmured the old actress; and in the pause which still preceded the issue of sound from the girl’s lips Peter turned to his kinsman and said in a low tone: “You must paint her just like that.”

  “Like that?”

  “As the Tragic Muse.”

  She began to speak; a long, strong, colourless voice quavered in her young throat. She delivered the lines of Clorinde in the admired interview with Célie, the gem of the third act, with a rude monotony, and then, gaining confidence, with an effort at modulation which was not altogether successful and which evidently she felt not to be so. Madame Carré sent back the ball without raising her hand, repeating the speeches of Célie, which her memory possessed from their having so often been addressed to her, and uttering the verses with soft, communicative art. So they went on through the scene, which, when it was over, had not precisely been a triumph for Miriam Rooth. Sherringham forbore to look at Gabriel Nash, and Madame Carré said: “I think you’ve a voice, ma fille, somewhere or other. We must try and put our hand on it.” Then she asked her what instruction she had had, and the girl, lifting her eyebrows, looked at her mother while her mother prompted her.

  “Mrs. Delamere in London; she was once an ornament of the English stage. She gives lessons just to a very few; it’s a great favour. Such a very nice person! But above all, Signor Ruggieri—I think he taught us most.” Mrs. Rooth explained that this gentleman was an Italian tragedian, in Rome, who instructed Miriam in the proper manner of pronouncing his language and also in the art of declaiming and gesticulating.

  “Gesticulating I’ll warrant!” declared their hostess. “They mimic as for the deaf, they emphasise as for the blind. Mrs. Delamere is doubtless an epitome of all the virtues, but I never heard of her. You travel too much,” Madame Carré went on; “that’s very amusing, but the way to study is to stay at home, to shut yourself up and hammer at your scales.” Mrs. Rooth complained that they had no home to stay at; in reply to which the old actress exclaimed: “Oh you English, you’re d’une légèreté à faire frémir. If you haven’t a home you must make, or at least for decency pretend to, one. In our profession it’s the first requisite.”

  “But where? That’s what I ask!” said Mrs. Rooth.

  “Why not here?” Sherringham threw out.

  “Oh here!” And the good lady shook her head with a world of sad significance.

  “Come and live in London and then I shall be able to paint your daughter,” Nick Dormer interposed.

  “Is that all it will take, my dear fellow?” asked Gabriel Nash.

  “Ah, London’s full of memories,” Mrs. Rooth went on. “My father had a great house there—we always came up. But all that’s over.”

  “Study here and then go to London to appear,” said Peter, feeling frivolous even as he spoke.

  “To appear in French?”

  “No, in the language of Shakespeare.”

  “But we can’t study that here.”

  “Mr. Sherringham means that he will give you lessons,” Madame Carré explained. “Let me not fail to say it—he’s an excellent critic.”

  “How do you know that—you who’re beyond criticism and perfect?” asked Sherringham: an inquiry to which the answer was forestalled by the girl’s rousing herself to make it public that she could recite the “Nights” of Alfred de Musset.

  “Diable!” said the actress: “that’s more than I can! By all means give us a specimen.”

  The girl again placed herself in position and rolled out a fragment of one of the splendid conversations of Musset’s poet with his muse—rolled it loudly and proudly, tossed it and tumbled it about the room. Madame Carré watched her at first, but after a few moments she shut her eyes, though the best part of the business was to take in her young candidate’s beauty. Sherringham had supposed Miriam rather abashed by the flatness of her first performance, but he now saw how little she could have been aware of this: she was rather uplifted and emboldened. She made a mush of the divine verses, which in spite of certain sonorities and cadences, an evident effort to imitate a celebrated actress, a comrade of Madame Carré, whom she had heard declaim them, she produced as if she had been dashing blindfold at some playfellow she was to “catch.” When she had finished Madame Carré passed no judgement, only dropping: “Perhaps you had better say something English.” She suggested some little piece of verse—some fable if there were fables in English. She appeared but scantily surprised to hear that there were not—it was a language of which one expected so little. Mrs. Rooth said: “She knows her Tennyson by heart. I think he’s much deeper than La Fontaine”; and after some deliberation and delay Miriam broke into “The Lotus-Eaters,” from which she passed directly, almost breathlessly, to “Edward Gray.” Sherringham had by this time heard her make four different attempts, and the only generalisation very present to him was that she uttered these dissimilar compositions in e
xactly the same tone—a solemn, droning, dragging measure suggestive of an exhortation from the pulpit and adopted evidently with the “affecting” intention and from a crude idea of “style.” It was all funereal, yet was artlessly rough. Sherringham thought her English performance less futile than her French, but he could see that Madame Carré listened to it even with less pleasure. In the way the girl wailed forth some of her Tennysonian lines he detected a faint gleam as of something pearly in deep water. But the further she went the more violently she acted on the nerves of Mr. Gabriel Nash: that also he could discover from the way this gentleman ended by slipping discreetly to the window and leaning there with his head out and his back to the exhibition. He had the art of mute expression; his attitude said as clearly as possible: “No, no, you can’t call me either ill-mannered or ill-natured. I’m the showman of the occasion, moreover, and I avert myself, leaving you to judge. If there’s a thing in life I hate it’s this idiotic new fashion of the drawing-room recitation and of the insufferable creatures who practise it, who prevent conversation, and whom, as they’re beneath it, you can’t punish by criticism. Therefore what I’m doing’s only too magnanimous—bringing these benighted women here, paying with my person, stifling my just repugnance.”