by Henry James
“I don’t admire the way she holds her arms,” Basil Dash wood said: “like a demoiselle de magasin trying on a jacket.”
“Well, she holds them at any rate. I daresay it’s more than you do with yours.”
“Oh yes, she holds them; there’s no mistake about that. ‘I hold them, I hope, hein?’ she seems to say to all the house.” The young English professional laughed good-humouredly, and Sherringham was struck with the pleasant familiarity he had established with their brave companion. He was knowing and ready and he said in the first entr’acte—they were waiting for the second to go behind—amusing perceptive things. “They teach them to be ladylike and Voisin’s always trying to show that. ‘See how I walk, see how I sit, see how quiet I am and how I have le geste rare. Now can you say I ain’t a lady?’ She does it all as if she had a class.”
“Well, to-night I’m her class,” said Miriam.
“Oh I don’t mean of actresses, but of femmes du monde. She shows them how to act in society.”
“You had better take a few lessons,” Miriam retorted.
“Ah you should see Voisin in society,” Peter interposed.
“Does she go into it?” Mrs. Rooth demanded with interest.
Her friend hesitated. “She receives a great many people.”
“Why shouldn’t they when they’re nice?” Mrs. Rooth frankly wanted to know.
“When the people are nice?” Miriam asked.
“Now don’t tell me she’s not what one would wish,” said Mrs. Rooth to Sherringham.
“It depends on what that is,” he darkly smiled.
“What I should wish if she were my daughter,” the old woman rejoined blandly.
“Ah wish your daughter to act as well as that and you’ll do the handsome thing for her!”
“Well, she seems to feel what she says,” Mrs. Rooth piously risked.
“She has some stiff things to say. I mean about her past,” Basil Dashwood remarked. “The past—the dreadful past—on the stage!”
“Wait till the end, to see how she comes out. We must all be merciful!” sighed Mrs. Rooth.
“We’ve seen it before; you know what happens,” Miriam observed to her mother.
“I’ve seen so many I get them mixed.”
“Yes, they’re all in queer predicaments. Poor old mother—what we show you!” laughed the girl.
“Ah it will be what you show me—something noble and wise!”
“I want to do this; it’s a magnificent part,” said Miriam.
“You couldn’t put it on in London—they wouldn’t swallow it,” Basil Dashwood declared.
“Aren’t there things they do there to get over the difficulties?” the girl inquired.
“You can’t get over what she did!”—her companion had a rueful grimace.
“Yes, we must pay, we must expiate!” Mrs. Rooth moaned as the curtain rose again.
When the second act was over our friends passed out of their baignoire into those corridors of tribulation where the bristling ouvreuse, like a pawnbroker driving a roaring trade, mounts guard upon piles of heterogeneous clothing, and, gaining the top of the fine staircase which forms the state entrance and connects the statued vestibule of the basement with the grand tier of boxes, opened an ambiguous door composed of little mirrors and found themselves in the society of the initiated. The janitors were courteous folk who greeted Sherringham as an acquaintance, and he had no difficulty in marshalling his little troop toward the foyer. They traversed a low, curving lobby, hung with pictures and furnished with velvet-covered benches where several unrecognised persons of both sexes looked at them without hostility, and arrived at an opening, on the right, from which, by a short flight of steps, there was a descent to one of the wings of the stage. Here Miriam paused, in silent excitement, like a young warrior arrested by a glimpse of the battle-field. Her vision was carried off through a lane of light to the point of vantage from which the actor held the house; but there was a hushed guard over the place and curiosity could only glance and pass.
Then she came with her companions to a sort of parlour with a polished floor, not large and rather vacant, where her attention flew delightedly to a coat-tree, in a corner, from which three or four dresses were suspended—dresses she immediately perceived to be costumes in that night’s play—accompanied by a saucer of something and a much-worn powder-puff casually left on a sofa. This was a familiar note in the general impression of high decorum which had begun at the threshold—a sense of majesty in the place. Miriam rushed at the powder-puff—there was no one in the room—snatched it up and gazed at it with droll veneration, then stood rapt a moment before the charming petticoats (“That’s Dunoyer’s first underskirt,” she said to her mother) while Sherringham explained that in this apartment an actress traditionally changed her gown when the transaction was simple enough to save the long ascent to her loge. He felt himself a cicerone showing a church to a party of provincials; and indeed there was a grave hospitality in the air, mingled with something academic and important, the tone of an institution, a temple, which made them all, out of respect and delicacy, hold their breath a little and tread the shining floors with discretion.
These precautions increased—Mrs. Rooth crept about like a friendly but undomesticated cat—after they entered the foyer itself, a square, spacious saloon covered with pictures and relics and draped in official green velvet, where the genius loci holds a reception every night in the year. The effect was freshly charming to Peter; he was fond of the place, always saw it again with pleasure, enjoyed its honourable look and the way, among the portraits and scrolls, the records of a splendid history, the green velvet and the waxed floors, the genius loci seemed to be “at home” in the quiet lamplight. At the end of the room, in an ample chimney, blazed a fire of logs. Miriam said nothing; they looked about, noting that most of the portraits and pictures were “old-fashioned,” and Basil Dashwood expressed disappointment at the absence of all the people they wanted most to see. Three or four gentlemen in evening dress circulated slowly, looking, like themselves, at the pictures, and another gentleman stood before a lady, with whom he was in conversation, seated against the wall. The foyer resembled in these conditions a ball-room, cleared for the dance, before the guests or the music had arrived.
“Oh it’s enough to see this; it makes my heart beat,” said Miriam. “It’s full of the vanished past, it makes me cry. I feel them here, all, the great artists I shall never see. Think of Rachel—look at her grand portrait there!—and how she stood on these very boards and trailed over them the robes of Hermione and Phèdre.” The girl broke out theatrically, as on the spot was right, not a bit afraid of her voice as soon as it rolled through the room; appealing to her companions as they stood under the chandelier and making the other persons present, who had already given her some attention, turn round to stare at so unusual a specimen of the English miss. She laughed, musically, when she noticed this, and her mother, scandalised, begged her to lower her tone. “It’s all right. I produce an effect,” said Miriam: “it shan’t be said that I too haven’t had my little success in the maison de Molière.” And Sherringham repeated that it was all right—the place was familiar with mirth and passion, there was often wonderful talk there, and it was only the setting that was still and solemn. It happened that this evening—there was no knowing in advance—the scene was not characteristically brilliant; but to confirm his assertion, at the moment he spoke, Mademoiselle Dunoyer, who was also in the play, came into the room attended by a pair of gentlemen.
She was the celebrated, the perpetual, the necessary ingénue, who with all her talent couldn’t have represented a woman of her actual age. She had the gliding, hopping movement of a small bird, the same air of having nothing to do with time, and the clear, sure, piercing note, a miracle of exact vocalisation. She chaffed her companions, she chaffed the room; she might have been a very clever little girl trying to personate a more innocent big one. She scattered her amiability about—showing Mi
riam how the children of Molière took their ease—and it quickly placed her in the friendliest communication with Peter Sherringham, who already enjoyed her acquaintance and who now extended it to his companions, and in particular to the young lady sur le point d’entrer au théâtre.
“You deserve a happier lot,” said the actress, looking up at Miriam brightly, as if to a great height, and taking her in; upon which Sherringham left them together a little and led Mrs. Rooth and young Dashwood to consider further some of the pictures.
“Most delightful, most curious,” the old woman murmured about everything; while Basil Dashwood exclaimed in the presence of most of the portraits: “But their ugliness—their ugliness: did you ever see such a collection of hideous people? And those who were supposed to be good-looking—the beauties of the past—they’re worse than the others. Ah you may say what you will, nous sommes mieux que ça!” Sherringham suspected him of irritation, of not liking the theatre of the great rival nation to be thrust down his throat. They returned to Miriam and Mademoiselle Dunoyer, and Peter asked the actress a question about one of the portraits to which there was no name attached. She replied, like a child who had only played about the room, that she was toute honteuse not to be able to tell him the original: she had forgotten, she had never asked—”Vous allez me trouver bien légère!” She appealed to the other persons present, who formed a gallery for her, and laughed in delightful ripples at their suggestions, which she covered with ridicule. She bestirred herself; she declared she would ascertain, she shouldn’t be happy till she did, and swam out of the room, with the prettiest paddles, to obtain the information, leaving behind her a perfume of delicate kindness and gaiety. She seemed above all things obliging, and Peter pronounced her almost as natural off the stage as on. She didn’t come back.
XXI
Whether he had prearranged it is more than I can say, but Mademoiselle Voisin delayed so long to show herself that Mrs. Rooth, who wished to see the rest of the play, though she had sat it out on another occasion, expressed a returning relish for her corner of the baignoire and gave her conductor the best pretext he could have desired for asking Basil Dashwood to be so good as to escort her back. When the young actor, of whose personal preference Peter was quite aware, had led Mrs. Rooth away with an absence of moroseness which showed that his striking resemblance to a gentleman was not kept for the footlights, the two others sat on a divan in the part of the room furthest from the entrance, so that it gave them a degree of privacy, and Miriam watched the coming and going of their fellow-visitors and the indefinite people, attached to the theatre, hanging about, while her companion gave a name to some of the figures, Parisian celebrities.
“Fancy poor Dashwood cooped up there with mamma!” the girl exclaimed whimsically.
“You’re awfully cruel to him; but that’s of course,” said Sherringham.
“It seems to me I’m as kind as you; you sent him off.”
“That was for your mother; she was tired.”
“Oh gammon! And why, if I were cruel, should it be of course?”
“Because you must destroy and torment and wear out—that’s your nature. But you can’t help your type, can you?”
“My type?” she echoed.
“It’s bad, perverse, dangerous. It’s essentially insolent.”
“And pray what’s yours when you talk like that? Would you say such things if you didn’t know the depths of my good nature?”
“Your good nature all comes back to that,” said Sherringham. “It’s an abyss of ruin—for others. You’ve no respect. I’m speaking of the artistic character—in the direction and in the plentitude in which you have it. It’s unscrupulous, nervous, capricious, wanton.”
“I don’t know about respect. One can be good,” Miriam mused and reasoned.
“It doesn’t matter so long as one’s powerful,” he returned. “We can’t have everything, and surely we ought to understand that we must pay for things. A splendid organisation for a special end, like yours, is so rare and rich and fine that we oughtn’t to grudge it its conditions.”
“What do you call its conditions?” Miriam asked as she turned and looked at him.
“Oh the need to take its ease, to take up space, to make itself at home in the world, to square its elbows and knock, others about. That’s large and free; it’s the good nature you speak of. You must forage and ravage and leave a track behind you; you must live upon the country you traverse. And you give such delight that, after all, you’re welcome—you’re infinitely welcome!”
“I don’t know what you mean. I only care for the idea,” the girl said.
“That’s exactly what I pretend—and we must all help you to it. You use us, you push us about, you break us up. We’re your tables and chair, the simple furniture of your life.”
“Whom do you mean by ‘we’?”
Peter gave an ironic laugh. “Oh don’t be afraid—there will be plenty of others!”
She made no return to this, but after a moment broke out again. “Poor Dashwood immured with mamma—he’s like a lame chair that one has put into the corner.”
“Don’t break him up before he has served. I really believe something will come out of him,” her companion went on. “However, you’ll break me up first,” he added, “and him probably never at all.”
“And why shall I honour you so much more?”
“Because I’m a better article and you’ll feel that.”
“You’ve the superiority of modesty—I see.”
“I’m better than a young mountebank—I’ve vanity enough to say that.”
She turned on him with a flush in her cheek and a splendid dramatic face. “How you hate us! Yes, at bottom, below your little cold taste, you hate us!” she repeated.
He coloured too, met her eyes, looked into them a minute, seemed to accept the imputation and then said quickly: “Give it up: come away with me.”
“Come away with you?”
“Leave this place. Give it up.”
“You brought me here, you insisted it should be only you, and now you must stay,” she declared with a head-shake and a high manner. “You should know what you want, dear Mr. Sherringham.”
“I do—I know now. Come away before you see her.”
“Before–-?” she seemed to wonder.
“She’s success, this wonderful Voisin, she’s triumph, she’s full accomplishment: the hard, brilliant realisation of what I want to avert for you.” Miriam looked at him in silence, the cold light still in her face, and he repeated: “Give it up—give it up.”
Her eyes softened after a little; she smiled and then said: “Yes, you’re better than poor Dashwood.”
“Give it up and we’ll live for ourselves, in ourselves, in something that can have a sanctity.”
“All the same you do hate us,” the girl went on.
“I don’t want to be conceited, but I mean that I’m sufficiently fine and complicated to tempt you. I’m an expensive modern watch with a wonderful escapement—therefore you’ll smash me if you can.”
“Never—never!” she said as she got up. “You tell me the hour too well.” She quitted her companion and stood looking at Gérôme’s fine portrait of the pale Rachel invested with the antique attributes of tragedy. The rise of the curtain had drawn away most of the company. Peter, from his bench, watched his friend a little, turning his eyes from her to the vivid image of the dead actress and thinking how little she suffered by the juxtaposition. Presently he came over and joined her again and she resumed: “I wonder if that’s what your cousin had in his mind.”
“My cousin–-?”
“What was his name? Mr. Dormer; that first day at Madame Carré’s. He offered to paint my portrait.”
“I remember. I put him up to it.”
“Was he thinking of this?”
“I doubt if he has ever seen it. I daresay I was.”
“Well, when we go to London he must do it,” said Miriam.
“Oh there’s
no hurry,” Peter was moved to reply.
“Don’t you want my picture?” asked the girl with one of her successful touches.
“I’m not sure I want it from him. I don’t know quite what he’d make of you.”
“He looked so clever—I liked him. I saw him again at your party.”