"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 Carre, 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 Carre 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 pres 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 tres-fort_. But who can tell if you really say it?"
Madame Carre 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 Carre 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 Carre. "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 a.s.semble,"
Miriam quickly declaimed. "Ah if you don"t feel the way she makes a throne of it!"
"It"s really tremendously fine, _chere madame_," Sherringham said.
"There"s nothing like it."
"_Vous etes insupportables_," the old woman answered. "Stay with us.
I"ll teach you Phedre."
"Ah Phaedra, Phaedra!" Basil Dashwood vaguely e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, 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 Carre 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 Carre.
"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 la-bas_, what will you do next?" asked Madame Carre.
"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 etes la_?" 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 this 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.