"It"s the compet.i.tion he dislikes," Peter laughed.
"However, he"s very good-natured; he lent mamma thirty pounds," the girl added honestly. Our young man, at this information, was not able to repress a certain small twinge noted by his companion and of which she appeared to mistake the meaning. "Of course he"ll get it back," she went on while he looked at her in silence a little. Fortune had not supplied him profusely with money, but his emotion was caused by no foresight of his probably having also to put his hand in his pocket for Mrs. Rooth.
It was simply the instinctive recoil of a fastidious nature from the idea of familiar intimacy with people who lived from hand to mouth, together with a sense that this intimacy would have to be defined if it was to go much further. He would wish to know what it was supposed to be, like Nash"s histrionics. Miriam after a moment mistook his thought still more completely, and in doing so flashed a portent of the way it was in her to strike from time to time a note exasperatingly, almost consciously vulgar, which one would hate for the reason, along with others, that by that time one would be in love with her. "Well then, he won"t--if you don"t believe it!" she easily laughed. He was saying to himself that the only possible form was that they should borrow only from him. "You"re a funny man. I make you blush," she persisted.
"I must reply with the _tu quoque_, though I"ve not that effect on you."
"I don"t understand," said the girl.
"You"re an extraordinary young lady."
"You mean I"m horrid. Well, I daresay I am. But I"m better when you know me."
He made no direct rejoinder to this, but after a moment went on: "Your mother must repay that money. I"ll give it her."
"You had better give it _him_!" cried Miriam. "If once mamma has it--!"
She interrupted herself and with another and a softer tone, one of her professional transitions, remarked: "I suppose you"ve never known any one that was poor."
"I"m poor myself. That is, I"m very far from rich. But why receive favours--?" And here he in turn checked himself with the sense that he was indeed taking a great deal on his back if he pretended already--he had not seen the pair three times--to regulate their intercourse with the rest of the world. But the girl instantly carried out his thought and more than his thought.
"Favours from Mr. Nash? Oh he doesn"t count!"
The way she dropped these words--they would have been admirable on the stage--made him reply with prompt ease: "What I meant just now was that you"re not to tell him, after all my swagger, that I consider that you and I are really required to save our theatre."
"Oh if we can save it he shall know it!" She added that she must positively get home; her mother would be in a state: she had really scarce ever been out alone. He mightn"t think it, but so it was. Her mother"s ideas, those awfully proper ones, were not all talk. She _did_ keep her! Sherringham accepted this--he had an adequate and indeed an a.n.a.lytic vision of Mrs. Rooth"s conservatism; but he observed at the same time that his companion made no motion to rise. He made none either; he only said:
"We"re very frivolous, the way we chatter. What you want to do to get your foot in the stirrup is supremely difficult. There"s everything to overcome. You"ve neither an engagement nor the prospect of an engagement."
"Oh you"ll get me one!" Her manner presented this as so certain that it wasn"t worth dilating on; so instead of dilating she inquired abruptly a second time: "Why do you think I"m so simple?"
"I don"t then. Didn"t I tell you just now that you were extraordinary?
That"s the term, moreover, that you applied to yourself when you came to see me--when you said a girl had to be a kind of monster to wish to go on the stage. It remains the right term and your simplicity doesn"t mitigate it. What"s rare in you is that you have--as I suspect at least--no nature of your own." Miriam listened to this as if preparing to argue with it or not, only as it should strike her as a sufficiently brave picture; but as yet, naturally, she failed to understand. "You"re always at concert pitch or on your horse; there are no intervals. It"s the absence of intervals, of a _fond_ or background, that I don"t comprehend. You"re an embroidery without a canvas."
"Yes--perhaps," the girl replied, her head on one side as if she were looking at the pattern of this rarity. "But I"m very honest."
"You can"t be everything, both a consummate actress and a flower of the field. You"ve got to choose."
She looked at him a moment. "I"m glad you think I"m so wonderful."
"Your feigning may be honest in the sense that your only feeling is your feigned one," Peter pursued. "That"s what I mean by the absence of a ground or of intervals. It"s a kind of thing that"s a labyrinth!"
"I know what I am," she said sententiously.
But her companion continued, following his own train. "Were you really so frightened the first day you went to Madame Carre"s?"
She stared, then with a flush threw back her head. "Do you think I was pretending?"
"I think you always are. However, your vanity--if you had any!--would be natural."
"I"ve plenty of that. I"m not a bit ashamed to own it."
"You"d be capable of trying to "do" the human peac.o.c.k. But excuse the audacity and the crudity of my speculations--it only proves my interest.
What is it that you know you are?"
"Why, an artist. Isn"t that a canvas?"
"Yes, an intellectual, but not a moral."
"Ah it"s everything! And I"m a good girl too--won"t that do?"
"It remains to be seen," Sherringham laughed. "A creature who"s absolutely _all_ an artist--I"m curious to see that."
"Surely it has been seen--in lots of painters, lots of musicians."
"Yes, but those arts are not personal like yours. I mean not so much so.
There"s something left for--what shall I call it?--for character."
She stared again with her tragic light. "And do you think I haven"t a character?" As he hesitated she pushed back her chair, rising rapidly.
He looked up at her an instant--she seemed so "plastic"; and then rising too answered: "Delightful being, you"ve a hundred!"
XII
The summer arrived and the dense air of the Paris theatres became in fact a still more complicated mixture; yet the occasions were not few on which Sherringham, having placed a box near the stage (most often a stuffy, dusky _baignoire_) at the disposal of Mrs. Rooth and her daughter, found time just to look in, as he said, to spend a part of the evening with them and point the moral of the performance. The pieces, the successes of the winter, had entered the automatic phase: they went on by the force of the impetus acquired, deriving little fresh life from the interpretation, and in ordinary conditions their strong points, as rendered by the actors, would have been as wearisome to this student as an importunate repet.i.tion of a good story. But it was not long before he became aware that the conditions couldn"t be taken for ordinary. There was a new infusion in his consciousness--an element in his life which altered the relations of things. He was not easy till he had found the right name for it--a name the more satisfactory that it was simple, comprehensive, and plausible. A new "distraction," in the French sense, was what he flattered himself he had discovered; he could recognise that as freely as possible without being obliged to cla.s.sify the agreeable resource as a new entanglement. He was neither too much nor too little diverted; he had all his usual attention to give to his work: he had only an employment for his odd hours which, without being imperative, had over various others the advantage of a certain continuity.
And yet, I hasten to add, he was not so well pleased with it but that among his friends he maintained for the present a rich reserve about it.
He had no irresistible impulse to describe generally how he had disinterred a strange, handsome girl whom he was bringing up for the theatre. She had been seen by several of his a.s.sociates at his rooms, but was not soon to be seen there again. His reserve might by the ill-natured have been termed dissimulation, inasmuch as when asked by the ladies of the emba.s.sy what had become of the young person who had amused them that day so cleverly he gave it out that her whereabouts was uncertain and her destiny probably obscure; he let it be supposed in a word that his benevolence had scarcely survived an accidental, a charitable occasion. As he went about his customary business, and perhaps even put a little more conscience into the transaction of it, there was nothing to suggest to others that he was engaged in a private speculation of an absorbing kind. It was perhaps his weakness that he carried the apprehension of ridicule too far; but his excuse may have dwelt in his holding it unpardonable for a man publicly enrolled in the service of his country to be markedly ridiculous. It was of course not out of all order that such functionaries, their private situation permitting, should enjoy a personal acquaintance with stars of the dramatic, the lyric, or even the ch.o.r.egraphic stage: high diplomatists had indeed not rarely, and not invisibly, cultivated this privilege without its proving the sepulchre of their reputation. That a gentleman who was not a fool should consent a little to become one for the sake of a celebrated actress or singer--_cela s"etait vu_, though it was not perhaps to be recommended. It was not a tendency that was encouraged at headquarters, where even the most rising young men were not incited to believe they could never fall. Still, it might pa.s.s if kept in its place; and there were ancient worthies yet in the profession--though not those whom the tradition had helped to go furthest--who held that something of the sort was a graceful ornament of the diplomatic character. Sherringham was aware he was very "rising"; but Miriam Rooth was not yet a celebrated actress. She was only a young artist in conscientious process of formation and enc.u.mbered with a mother still more conscientious than herself. She was a _jeune Anglaise_--a "lady"
withal--very earnest about artistic, about remunerative problems. He had accepted the office of a formative influence; and that was precisely what might provoke derision. He was a ministering angel--his patience and good nature really ent.i.tled him to the epithet and his rewards would doubtless some day define themselves; but meanwhile other promotions were in precarious prospect, for the failure of which these would not even in their abundance, be a compensation. He kept an unembarra.s.sed eye on Downing Street, and while it may frankly be said for him that he was neither a pedant nor a prig he remembered that the last impression he ought to wish to produce there was that of a futile estheticism.
He felt the case sufficiently important, however, when he sat behind Miriam at the play and looked over her shoulder at the stage; her observation being so keen and her comments so unexpected in their vivacity that his curiosity was refreshed and his attention stretched beyond its wont. If the exhibition before the footlights had now lost much of its annual brilliancy the fashion in which she followed it was perhaps exhibition enough. The attendance of the little party was, moreover, in most cases at the Theatre Francais; and it has been sufficiently indicated that our friend, though the child of a sceptical age and the votary of a cynical science, was still candid enough to take the serious, the religious view of that establishment the view of M.
Sarcey and of the unregenerate provincial mind. "In the trade I follow we see things too much in the hard light of reason, of calculation," he once remarked to his young charge; "but it"s good for the mind to keep up a superst.i.tion or two; it leaves a margin--like having a second horse to your brougham for night-work. The arts, the amus.e.m.e.nts, the esthetic part of life, are night-work, if I may say so without suggesting that they"re illicit. At any rate you want your second horse--your superst.i.tion that stays at home when the sun"s high--to go your rounds with. The Francais is my second horse."
Miriam"s appet.i.te for this interest showed him vividly enough how rarely in the past it had been within her reach; and she pleased him at first by liking everything, seeing almost no differences and taking her deep draught undiluted. She leaned on the edge of the box with bright voracity; tasting to the core, yet relishing the surface, watching each movement of each actor, attending to the way each thing was said or done as if it were the most important thing, and emitting from time to time applausive or restrictive sounds. It was a charming show of the critical spirit in ecstasy. Sherringham had his wonder about it, as a part of the attraction exerted by this young lady was that she caused him to have his wonder about everything she did. Was it in fact a conscious show, a line taken for effect, so that at the Comedie her own display should be the most successful of all? That question danced attendance on the liberal intercourse of these young people and fortunately as yet did little to embitter Sherringham"s share of it. His general sense that she was personating had its especial moments of suspense and perplexity, and added variety and even occasionally a degree of excitement to their commerce. At the theatre, for the most part, she was really flushed with eagerness; and with the spectators who turned an admiring eye into the dim compartment of which she pervaded the front she might have pa.s.sed for a romantic or at least an insatiable young woman from the country.
Mrs. Rooth took a more general view, but attended immensely to the story, in respect to which she manifested a patient good faith which had its surprises and its comicalities for her daughter"s patron. She found no play too tedious, no _entr"acte_ too long, no _baignoire_ too hot, no tissue of incidents too complicated, no situation too unnatural and no sentiments too sublime. She gave him the measure of her power to sit and sit--an accomplishment to which she owed in the struggle for existence such superiority as she might be said to have achieved. She could out-sit everybody and everything; looking as if she had acquired the practice in repeated years of small frugality combined with large leisure--periods when she had nothing but hours and days and years to spend and had learned to calculate in any situation how long she could stay. "Staying" was so often a saving--a saving of candles, of fire and even (as it sometimes implied a scheme for stray refection) of food.
Peter saw soon enough how bravely her shreds and patches of gentility and equanimity hung together, with the aid of whatever casual pins and other makeshifts, and if he had been addicted to studying the human mixture in its different combinations would have found in her an interesting compendium of some of the infatuations that survive a hard discipline. He made indeed without difficulty the reflexion that her life might have taught her something of the real, at the same time that he could scarce help thinking it clever of her to have so persistently declined the lesson. She appeared to have put it by with a deprecating, ladylike smile--a plea of being too soft and bland for experience.
She took the refined, sentimental, tender view of the universe, beginning with her own history and feelings. She believed in everything high and pure, disinterested and orthodox, and even at the Hotel de la Garonne was unconscious of the shabby or the ugly side of the world. She never despaired: otherwise what would have been the use of being a Neville-Nugent? Only not to have been one--that would have been discouraging. She delighted in novels, poems, perversions, misrepresentations, and evasions, and had a capacity for smooth, superfluous falsification which made our young man think her sometimes an amusing and sometimes a tedious inventor. But she wasn"t dangerous even if you believed her; she wasn"t even a warning if you didn"t. It was harsh to call her a hypocrite, since you never could have resolved her back into her character, there being no reverse at all to her blazonry. She built in the air and was not less amiable than she pretended, only that was a pretension too. She moved altogether in a world of elegant fable and fancy, and Sherringham had to live there with her for Miriam"s sake, live there in sociable, vulgar a.s.sent and despite his feeling it rather a low neighbourhood. He was at a loss how to take what she said--she talked sweetly and discursively of so many things--till he simply noted that he could only take it always for untrue. When Miriam laughed at her he was rather disagreeably affected: "dear mamma"s fine stories" was a sufficiently cynical reference to the immemorial infirmity of a parent. But when the girl backed her up, as he phrased it to himself, he liked that even less.
Mrs. Rooth was very fond of a moral and had never lost her taste for edification. She delighted in a beautiful character and was gratified to find so many more than she had supposed represented in the contemporary French drama. She never failed to direct Miriam"s attention to them and to remind her that there is nothing in life so grand as a sublime act, above all when sublimely explained. Peter made much of the difference between the mother and the daughter, thinking it singularly marked--the way one took everything for the sense, or behaved as if she did, caring only for the plot and the romance, the triumph or defeat of virtue and the moral comfort of it all, and the way the other was alive but to the manner and the art of it, the intensity of truth to appearances. Mrs.
Rooth abounded in impressive evocations, and yet he saw no link between her facile genius and that of which Miriam gave symptoms. The poor lady never could have been accused of successful deceit, whereas the triumph of fraud was exactly what her clever child achieved. She made even the true seem fictive, while Miriam"s effort was to make the fictive true.
Sherringham thought it an odd unpromising stock (that of the Neville-Nugents) for a dramatic talent to have sprung from, till he reflected that the evolution was after all natural: the figurative impulse in the mother had become conscious, and therefore higher, through finding an aim, which was beauty, in the daughter. Likely enough the Hebraic Mr. Rooth, with his love of old pots and Christian altar-cloths, had supplied in the girl"s composition the esthetic element, the sense of colour and form. In their visits to the theatre there was nothing Mrs. Rooth more insisted on than the unprofitableness of deceit, as shown by the most distinguished authors--the folly and degradation, the corrosive effect on the spirit, of tortuous ways. Their companion soon gave up the futile task of piecing together her incongruous references to her early life and her family in England. He renounced even the doctrine that there was a residuum of truth in her claim of great relationships, since, existent or not, he cared equally little for her ramifications. The principle of this indifference was at bottom a certain desire to disconnect and isolate Miriam; for it was disagreeable not to be independent in dealing with her, and he could be fully so only if she herself were.
The early weeks of that summer--they went on indeed into August--were destined to establish themselves in his memory as a season of pleasant things. The amba.s.sador went away and Peter had to wait for his own holiday, which he did during the hot days contentedly enough--waited in s.p.a.cious halls and a vast, dim, bird-haunted garden. The official world and most other worlds withdrew from Paris, and the Place de la Concorde, a larger, whiter desert than ever, became by a reversal of custom explorable with safety. The Champs Elysees were dusty and rural, with little creaking booths and exhibitions that made a noise like gra.s.shoppers; the Arc de Triomphe threw its cool, thick shadow for a mile; the Palais de l"Industrie glittered in the light of the long days; the cabmen, in their red waistcoats, dozed inside their boxes, while Sherringham permitted himself a "pot" hat and rarely met a friend. Thus was Miriam as islanded as the chained Andromeda, and thus was it possible to deal with her, even Perseus-like, in deep detachment. The theatres on the boulevard closed for the most part, but the great temple of the Rue de Richelieu, with an esthetic responsibility, continued imperturbably to dispense examples of style. Madame Carre was going to Vichy, but had not yet taken flight, which was a great advantage for Miriam, who could now solicit her attention with the consciousness that she had no engagements _en ville_.
"I make her listen to me--I make her tell me," said the ardent girl, who was always climbing the slope of the Rue de Constantinople on the shady side, where of July mornings a smell of violets came from the moist flower-stands of fat, white-capped _bouquetieres_ in the angles of doorways. Miriam liked the Paris of the summer mornings, the clever freshness of all the little trades and the open-air life, the cries, the talk from door to door, which reminded her of the south, where, in the multiplicity of her habitations, she had lived; and most of all, the great amus.e.m.e.nt, or nearly, of her walk, the enviable baskets of the laundress piled up with frilled and fluted whiteness--the certain luxury, she felt while she pa.s.sed with quick prevision, of her own dawn of glory. The greatest amus.e.m.e.nt perhaps was to recognise the pretty sentiment of earliness, the particular congruity with the hour, in the studied, selected dress of the little tripping women who were taking the day, for important advantages, while it was tender. At any rate she mostly brought with her from her pa.s.sage through the town good humour enough--with the penny bunch of violets she always stuck in the front of her dress--for whatever awaited her at Madame Carre"s. She declared to her friend that her dear mistress was terribly severe, giving her the most difficult, the most exhausting exercises, showing a kind of rage for breaking her in.