by Henry James
It was during the present solemnity that, excited by the way she came out and with a hundred stirred ideas about her wheeling through his mind, he was for the first time and most vividly visited by a perception that ended by becoming frequent with him—that of the perfect presence of mind, unconfused, unhurried by emotion, that any artistic performance requires and that all, whatever the instrument, require in exactly the same degree: the application, in other words, clear and calculated, crystal-firm as it were, of the idea conceived in the glow of experience, of suffering, of joy. He was afterwards often to talk of this with Miriam, who, however, was never to be able to present him with a neat theory of the subject. She had no knowledge that it was publicly discussed; she only ranged herself in practice on the side of those who hold that at the moment of production the artist can’t too much have his wits about him. When Peter named to her the opinion of those maintaining that at such a crisis the office of attention ceases to be filled she stared with surprise and then broke out: “Ah the poor idiots!” She eventually became, in her judgements, in impatience and the expression of contempt, very free and absolutely irreverent.
“What a splendid scolding!” the new visitor exclaimed when, on the entrance of the Pope’s legate, her companion closed the book on the scene. Peter pressed his lips to Madame Carré’s finger-tips; the old actress got up and held out her arms to Miriam. The girl never took her eyes off Sherringham while she passed into that lady’s embrace and remained there. They were full of their usual sombre fire, and it was always the case that they expressed too much anything they could express at all; but they were not defiant nor even triumphant now—they were only deeply explicative. They seemed to say, “That’s the sort of thing I meant; that’s what I had in mind when I asked you to try to do something for me.” Madame Carré folded her pupil to her bosom, holding her there as the old marquise in a comédie de moeurs might in the last scene have held her god-daughter the ingénue.
“Have you got me an engagement?”—the young woman then appealed eagerly to her friend. “Yes, he has done something splendid for me,” she went on to Madame Carré, resting her hand caressingly on one of the actress’s while the old woman discoursed with Mr. Dashwood, who was telling her in very pretty French that he was tremendously excited about Miss Rooth. Madame Carré looked at him as if she wondered how he appeared when he was calm and how, as a dramatic artist, he expressed that condition.
“Yes, yes, something splendid, for a beginning,” Peter answered radiantly, recklessly; feeling now only that he would say anything and do anything to please her. He spent on the spot, in imagination, his last penny.
“It’s such a pity you couldn’t follow it; you’d have liked it so much better,” Mr. Dashwood observed to their hostess.
“Couldn’t follow it? Do you take me for une sotte?” the celebrated artist cried. “I suspect I followed it de plus près que vous, monsieur!”
“Ah you see the language is so awfully fine,” Basil Dashwood replied, looking at his shoes.
“The language? Why she rails like a fish-wife. Is that what you call language? Ours is another business.”
“If you understood, if you understood, you’d see all the greatness of it,” Miriam declared. And then in another tone: “Such delicious expressions!”
“On dit que c’est très-fort. But who can tell if you really say it?” Madame Carré demanded.
“Ah, par exemple, I can!” Sherringham answered.
“Oh you—you’re a Frenchman.”
“Couldn’t he make it out if he weren’t?” asked Basil Dashwood.
The old woman shrugged her shoulders. “He wouldn’t know.”
“That’s flattering to me.”
“Oh you—don’t you pretend to complain,” Madame Carré said. “I prefer our imprecations—those of Camille,” she went on. “They have the beauty des plus belles choses.”
“I can say them too,” Miriam broke in.
“Insolente!” smiled Madame Carré. “Camille doesn’t squat down on the floor in the middle of them.
“For grief is proud and makes his owner stoop. To me and to the state of my great grief Let kings assemble,”
Miriam quickly declaimed. “Ah if you don’t feel the way she makes a throne of it!”
“It’s really tremendously fine, chère madame,” Sherringham said. “There’s nothing like it.”
“Vous êtes insupportables,” the old woman answered. “Stay with us. I’ll teach you Phèdre.”
“Ah Phædra, Phædra!” Basil Dashwood vaguely ejaculated, looking more gentlemanly than ever.
“You’ve learned all I’ve taught you, but where the devil have you learned what I haven’t?” Madame Carré went on.
“I’ve worked—I have; you’d call it work—all through the bright, late summer, all through the hot, dull, empty days. I’ve battered down the door—I did hear it crash one day. But I’m not so very good yet. I’m only in the right direction.”
“Malicieuse!” growled Madame Carré.
“Oh I can beat that,” the girl went on.
“Did you wake up one morning and find you had grown a pair of wings?” Peter asked. “Because that’s what the difference amounts to—you really soar. Moreover, you’re an angel,” he added, charmed with her unexpectedness, the good nature of her forbearance to reproach him for not having written to her. And it seemed to him privately that she was angelic when in answer to this she said ever so blandly:
“You know you read King John with me before you went away. I thought over immensely what you said. I didn’t understand it much at the time—I was so stupid. But it all came to me later.”
“I wish you could see yourself,” Peter returned.
“My dear fellow, I do. What sort of a dunce do you take me for? I didn’t miss a vibration of my voice, a fold of my robe.”
“Well, I didn’t see you troubling about it,” Peter handsomely insisted.
“No one ever will. Do you think I’d ever show it?”
“Ars celare artem,” Basil Dashwood jocosely dropped.
“You must first have the art to hide,” said Sherringham, wondering a little why Miriam didn’t introduce her young friend to him. She was, however, both then and later perfectly neglectful of such cares, never thinking, never minding how other people got on together. When she found they didn’t get on she jeered at them: that was the nearest she came to arranging for them. Our young man noted in her from the moment she felt her strength an immense increase of this good-humoured inattention to detail—all detail save that of her work, to which she was ready to sacrifice holocausts of feelings when the feelings were other people’s. This conferred on her a large profanity, an absence of ceremony as to her social relations, which was both amusing because it suggested that she would take what she gave, and formidable because it was inconvenient and you mightn’t care to give what she would take.
“If you haven’t any art it’s not quite the same as if you didn’t hide it, is it?” Basil Dashwood ingeniously threw out.
“That’s right—say one of your clever things!” Miriam sweetly responded.
“You’re always acting,” he declared in English and with a simple-minded laugh, while Sherringham remained struck with his expressing just what he himself had felt weeks before.
“And when you’ve shown them your fish-wife, to your public de là-bas, what will you do next?” asked Madame Carré.
“I’ll do Juliet—I’ll do Cleopatra.”
“Rather a big bill, isn’t it?” Mr. Dashwood volunteered to Sherringham in a friendly but discriminating manner.
“Constance and Juliet—take care you don’t mix them,” said Sherringham.
“I want to be various. You once told me I had a hundred characters,” Miriam returned.
“Ah, vous en êtes là?” cried the old actress. “You may have a hundred characters, but you’ve only three plays. I’m told that’s all there are in English.”
Miriam, admirably indifferent to th
is charge, appealed to Peter. “What arrangements have you made? What do the people want?”
“The people at the theatre?”
“I’m afraid they don’t want King John, and I don’t believe they hunger for Antony and Cleopatra,” Basil Dashwood suggested. “Ships and sieges and armies and pyramids, you know: we mustn’t be too heavy.”
“Oh I hate scenery!” the girl sighed.
“Elle est superbe,” said Madame Carré. “You must put those pieces on the stage: how will you do it?”
“Oh we know how to get up a play in London, Madame Carré”—Mr. Dashwood was all geniality. “They put money on it, you know.”
“On it? But what do they put in it? Who’ll interpret them? Who’ll manage a style like that—the style of which the rhapsodies she has just repeated are a specimen? Whom have you got that one has ever heard of?”
“Oh you’ll hear of a good deal when once she gets started,” Dashwood cheerfully contended.
Madame Carré looked at him a moment; then, “I feel that you’ll become very bad,” she said to Miriam. “I’m glad I shan’t see it.”
“People will do things for me—I’ll make them,” the girl declared. “I’ll stir them up so that they’ll have ideas.”
“What people, pray?”
“Ah terrible woman!” Peter theatrically groaned.
“We translate your pieces—there will be plenty of parts,” Basil Dashwood said.
“Why then go out of the door to come in at the window?—especially if you smash it! An English arrangement of a French piece is a pretty woman with her back turned.”
“Do you really want to keep her?” Sherringham asked of Madame Carré—quite as if thinking for a moment that this after all might be possible.
She bent her strange eyes on him. “No, you’re all too queer together. We couldn’t be bothered with you and you’re not worth it.”
“I’m glad it’s ‘together’ that we’re queer then—we can console each other.”
“If you only would; but you don’t seem to! In short I don’t understand you—I give you up. But it doesn’t matter,” said the old woman wearily, “for the theatre’s dead and even you, ma toute-belle, won’t bring it to life. Everything’s going from bad to worse, and I don’t care what becomes of you. You wouldn’t understand us here and they won’t understand you there, and everything’s impossible, and no one’s a whit the wiser, and it’s not of the least consequence. Only when you raise your arms lift them just a little higher,” Madame Carré added.
“My mother will be happier chez nous” said Miriam, throwing her arms straight up and giving them a noble tragic movement.
“You won’t be in the least in the right path till your mother’s in despair.”
“Well, perhaps we can bring that about even in London,” Sherringham patiently laughed.
“Dear Mrs. Rooth—she’s great fun,” Mr. Dashwood as imperturbably dropped.
Miriam transferred the dark weight of her gaze to him as if she were practising. “You won’t upset her, at any rate.” Then she stood with her beautiful and fatal mask before her hostess. “I want to do the modern too. I want to do le drame, with intense realistic effects.”
“And do you want to look like the portico of the Madeleine when it’s draped for a funeral?” her instructress mocked. “Never, never. I don’t believe you’re various: that’s not the way I see you. You’re pure tragedy, with de grands éclats de voix in the great style, or you’re nothing.”
“Be beautiful—be only that,” Peter urged with high interest. “Be only what you can be so well—something that one may turn to for a glimpse of perfection, to lift one out of all the vulgarities of the day.”
Thus apostrophised the girl broke out with one of the speeches of Racine’s Phædra, hushing her companions on the instant. “You’ll be the English Rachel,” said Basil Dashwood when she stopped.
“Acting in French!” Madame Carré amended. “I don’t believe in an English Rachel.”
“I shall have to work it out, what I shall be,” Miriam concluded with a rich pensive effect.
“You’re in wonderfully good form to-day,” Sherringham said to her; his appreciation revealing a personal subjection he was unable to conceal from his companions, much as he wished it.
“I really mean to do everything.”
“Very well; after all Garrick did.”
“Then I shall be the Garrick of my sex.”
“There’s a very clever author doing something for me; I should like you to see it,” said Basil Dashwood, addressing himself equally to Miriam and to her diplomatic friend.
“Ah if you’ve very clever authors–-!” And Madame Carré spun the sound to the finest satiric thread.
“I shall be very happy to see it,” Peter returned.
This response was so benevolent that Basil Dashwood presently began: “May I ask you at what theatre you’ve made arrangements?”
Sherringham looked at him a moment. “Come and see me at the embassy and I’ll tell you.” Then he added: “I know your sister, Mrs. Lovick.”
“So I supposed: that’s why I took the liberty of asking such a question.”
“It’s no liberty, but Mr. Sherringham doesn’t appear to be able to tell you,” said Miriam.
“Well, you know, it’s a very curious world, all those theatrical people over there,” Peter conceded.
“Ah don’t say anything against them when I’m one of them,” Basil Dashwood laughed.
“I might plead the absence of information,” Peter returned, “as Miss Rooth has neglected to make us acquainted.”
Miriam vaguely smiled. “I know you both so little.” But she presented them with a great stately air to each other, and the two men shook hands while Madame Carré observed them.
“Tiens! you gentlemen meet here for the first time? You do right to become friends—that’s the best thing. Live together in peace and mutual confidence. C’est de beaucoup le plus sage.”
“Certainly, for yoke-fellows,” said Sherringham.
He began the next moment to repeat to his new acquaintance some of the things he had been told in London; but their hostess stopped him off, waving the talk away with charming overdone stage horror and the young hands of the heroines of Marivaux. “Ah wait till you go—for that! Do you suppose I care for news of your mountebanks’ booths?”
XX
As many people know, there are not, in the famous Théâtre Français, more than a dozen good seats accessible to ladies.[*] The stalls are forbidden them, the boxes are a quarter of a mile from the stage and the balcony is a delusion save for a few chairs at either end of its vast horseshoe. But there are two excellent baignoires d’avant-scène, which indeed are by no means always to be had. It was, however, into one of them that, immediately after his return to Paris, Sherringham ushered Mrs. Rooth and her daughter, with the further escort of Basil Dashwood. He had chosen the evening of the reappearance of the celebrated Mademoiselle Voisin—she had been enjoying a congé of three months—an actress whom Miriam had seen several times before and for whose method she professed a high though somewhat critical esteem. It was only for the return of this charming performer that Peter had been waiting to respond to Miriam’s most ardent wish—that of spending an hour in the foyer des artistes of the great theatre. She was the person whom he knew best in the house of Molière; he could count on her to do them the honours some night when she was in the “bill,” and to make the occasion sociable. Miriam had been impatient for it—she was so convinced that her eyes would be opened in the holy of holies; but wishing as particularly as he did to participate in her impression he had made her promise she wouldn’t taste of this experience without him—not let Madame Carré, for instance, take her in his absence. There were questions the girl wished to put to Mademoiselle Voisin—questions which, having admired her from the balcony, she felt she was exactly the person to answer. She was more “in it” now, after all, than Madame Carré, in spite of her slenderer
talent: she was younger, fresher, more modern and—Miriam found the word—less academic. She was in fine less “vieux jeu.” Peter perfectly foresaw the day when his young friend would make indulgent allowances for poor Madame Carré, patronising her as an old woman of good intentions.
[*: 1890]
The play to-night was six months old, a large, serious, successful comedy by the most distinguished of authors, with a thesis, a chorus embodied in one character, a scène à faire and a part full of opportunities for Mademoiselle Voisin. There were things to be said about this artist, strictures to be dropped as to the general quality of her art, and Miriam leaned back now, making her comments as if they cost her less, but the actress had knowledge and distinction and pathos, and our young lady repeated several times: “How quiet she is, how wonderfully quiet! Scarcely anything moves but her face and her voice. Le geste rare, but really expressive when it comes. I like that economy; it’s the only way to make the gesture significant.”