The Tragic Muse Part 53

"Doesn't _he_ speak well?"--and Nash appealed with radiance to their companion.

She took no notice of him, only repeating to Nick that she hadn't forgotten his friendly att.i.tude in Paris; and when he answered that he surely had done very little she broke out, first resting her eyes on him with a deep, reasonable smile and then springing up quickly; "Ah well, if I must justify myself I liked you!"

"Fancy my appearing to challenge you!" laughed Nick in deprecation. "To see you again is to want tremendously to try something. But you must have an infinite patience, because I'm an awful duffer."

She looked round the walls. "I see what you've done--_bien des choses_."

"She understands--she understands," Gabriel dropped. And he added to their visitor: "Imagine, when he might do something, his choosing a life of shams! At bottom he's like you--a wonderful artistic nature."

"I'll have patience," said the girl, smiling at Nick.

"Then, my children, I leave you--the peace of the Lord be with you."

With which words Nash took his departure.

The others chose a position for the young woman's sitting after she had placed herself in many different att.i.tudes and different lights; but an hour had elapsed before Nick got to work--began, on a large canvas, to "knock her in," as he called it. He was hindered even by the fine element of agitation, the emotion of finding himself, out of a clear sky, confronted with such a subject and launched in such a task. What could the situation be but incongruous just after he had formally renounced all manner of "art"?--the renunciation taking effect not a bit the less from the whim he had all consciously treated himself to _as_ a whim (the last he should ever descend to!) the freak of a fortnight's relapse into a fingering of old sketches for the purpose, as he might have said, of burning them up, of clearing out his studio and terminating his lease. There were both embarra.s.sment and inspiration in the strange chance of s.n.a.t.c.hing back for an hour a relinquished joy: the jump with which he found he could still rise to such an occasion took away his breath a little, at the same time that the idea--the idea of what one might make of such material--touched him with an irresistible wand. On the spot, to his inner vision, Miriam became a rich result, drawing a hundred formative forces out of their troubled sleep, defying him where he privately felt strongest and imposing herself triumphantly in her own strength. He had the good fortune, without striking matches, to see her, as a subject, in a vivid light, and his quick attempt was as exciting as a sudden gallop--he might have been astride, in a boundless field, of a runaway horse.

She was in her way so fine that he could only think how to "do" her: that hard calculation soon flattened out the consciousness, lively in him at first, that she was a beautiful woman who had sought him out of his retirement. At the end of their first sitting her having done so appeared the most natural thing in the world: he had a perfect right to entertain her there--explanations and complications were engulfed in the productive mood. The business of "knocking her in" held up a lamp to her beauty, showed him how much there was of it and that she was infinitely interesting. He didn't want to fall in love with her--that _would_ be a sell, he said to himself--and she promptly became much too interesting for it. Nick might have reflected, for simplification's sake, as his cousin Peter had done, but with more validity, that he was engaged with Miss Rooth in an undertaking which didn't in the least refer to themselves, that they were working together seriously and that decent work quite gainsaid sensibility--the humbugging sorts alone had to help themselves out with it. But after her first sitting--she came, poor girl, but twice--the need of such exorcisms pa.s.sed from his spirit: he had so thoroughly, so practically taken her up. As to whether his visitor had the same bright and still sense of co-operation to a definite end, the sense of the distinctively technical nature of the answer to every question to which the occasion might give birth, that mystery would be lighted only were it open to us to regard this young lady through some other medium than the mind of her friends. We have chosen, as it happens, for some of the great advantages it carries with it, the indirect vision; and it fails as yet to tell us--what Nick of course wondered about before he ceased to care, as indeed he intimated to her--why a budding celebrity should have dreamed of there being something for her in so blighted a spot. She should have gone to one of the regular people, the great people: they would have welcomed her with open arms. When Nick asked her if some of the R.A.'s hadn't expressed a wish for a crack at her she replied: "Oh dear no, only the tiresome photographers; and fancy _them_ in the future. If mamma could only do _that_ for me!" And she added with the charming fellowship for which she was conspicuous at these hours: "You know I don't think any one yet has been quite so much struck with me as you."

"Not even Peter Sherringham?" her host jested while he stepped back to judge of the effect of a line.

"Oh Mr. Sherringham's different. You're an artist."

"For pity's sake don't say that!" he cried. "And as regards _your_ art I thought Peter knew more than any one."

"Ah you're severe," said Miriam.

"Severe--?"

"Because that's what the poor dear thinks. But he does know a lot--he has been a providence to me."

"Then why hasn't he come over to see you act?"

She had a pause. "How do you know he hasn't come?"

"Because I take for granted he'd have called on me if he had."

"Does he like you very much?" the girl asked.

"I don't know. I like _him_."

"He's a gentleman--_pour cela_," she said.

"Oh yes, for that!" Nick went on absently, labouring hard.

"But he's afraid of me--afraid to see me."

"Doesn't he think you good enough?"

"On the contrary--he believes I shall carry him away and he's in a terror of my doing it."

"He ought to like that," said Nick with conscious folly.

"That's what I mean when I say he's not an artist. However, he declares he does like it, only it appears to be not the right thing for him. Oh the right thing--he's ravenous for that. But it's not for me to blame him, since I am too. He's coming some night, however. Then," she added almost grimly, "he shall have a dose."

"Poor Peter!" Nick returned with a compa.s.sion none the less real because it was mirthful: the girl's tone was so expressive of easy unscrupulous power.

"He's such a curious mixture," she luxuriously went on; "sometimes I quite lose patience with him. It isn't exactly trying to serve both G.o.d and Mammon, but it's muddling up the stage and the world. The world be hanged! The stage, or anything of that sort--I mean one's artistic conscience, one's true faith--comes first."

"Brava, brava! you do me good," Nick murmured, still amused, beguiled, and at work. "But it's very kind of you, when I was in this absurd state of ignorance, to impute to me the honour of having been more struck with you than any one else," he continued after a moment.

"Yes, I confess I don't quite see--when the shops were full of my photographs."

"Oh I'm so poor--I don't go into shops," he explained.

"Are you very poor?"

"I live on alms."

"And don't they pay you--the government, the ministry?"

"Dear young lady, for what?--for shutting myself up with beautiful women?"

"Ah you've others then?" she extravagantly groaned.

"They're not so kind as you, I confess."

"I'll buy it from you--what you're doing: I'll pay you well when it's done," said the girl. "I've got money now. I make it, you know--a good lot of it. It's too delightful after sc.r.a.ping and starving. Try it and you'll see. Give up the base, bad world."

"But isn't it supposed to be the base, bad world that pays?"

"Precisely; make it pay without mercy--knock it silly, squeeze it dry.

That's what it's meant for--to pay for art. Ah if it wasn't for that!

I'll bring you a quant.i.ty of photographs to-morrow--you must let me come back to-morrow: it's so amusing to have them, by the hundred, all for nothing, to give away. That's what takes mamma most: she can't get over it. That's luxury and glory; even at Castle Nugent they didn't do that.

People used to sketch me, but not so much as mamma _veut bien le dire_; and in all my life I never had but one poor little carte-de-visite, when I was sixteen, in a plaid frock, with the banks of a river, at three francs the dozen."

XXVI

It was success, the member for Harsh felt, that had made her finer--the full possession of her talent and the sense of the recognition of it.

There was an intimation in her presence (if he had given his mind to it) that for him too the same cause would produce the same effect--that is would show him how being launched in the practice of an art makes strange and prompt revelations. Nick felt clumsy beside a person who manifestly, now, had such an extraordinary familiarity with the esthetic point of view. He remembered too the clumsiness that had been in his visitor--something silly and shabby, pert rather than proper, and of quite another value than her actual smartness, as London people would call it, her well-appointedness and her evident command of more than one manner. Handsome as she had been the year before, she had suggested sordid lodgings, bread and b.u.t.ter, heavy tragedy and tears; and if then she was an ill-dressed girl with thick hair who wanted to be an actress, she was already in these few weeks a performer who could even produce an impression of not performing. She showed what a light hand she could have, forbore to startle and looked as well, for unprofessional life, as Julia: which was only the perfection of her professional character.

This function came out much in her talk, for there were many little bursts of confidence as well as many familiar pauses as she sat there; and she was ready to tell Nick the whole history of her _debut_--the chance that had suddenly turned up and that she had caught, with a fierce leap, as it pa.s.sed. He missed some of the details in his attention to his own task, and some of them he failed to understand, attached as they were to the name of Mr. Basil Dashwood, which he heard for the first time. It was through Mr. Dashwood's extraordinary exertions that a hearing--a morning performance at a London theatre--had been obtained for her. That had been the great step, for it had led to the putting on at night of the play, at the same theatre, in place of a wretched thing they were trying (it was no use) to keep on its feet, and to her engagement for the princ.i.p.al part. She had made a hit in it--she couldn't pretend not to know that; but she was already tired of it, there were so many other things she wanted to do; and when she thought it would probably run a month or two more she fell to cursing the odious conditions of artistic production in such an age. The play was a more or less idiotised version of a new French piece, a thing that had taken in Paris at a third-rate theatre and was now proving itself in London good enough for houses mainly made up of ten-shilling stalls. It was Dashwood who had said it would go if they could get the rights and a fellow to make some changes: he had discovered it at a nasty little place she had never been to, over the Seine. They had got the rights, and the fellow who had made the changes was practically Dashwood himself; there was another man in London, Mr. Gushmore--Miriam didn't know if Nick had heard of him (Nick hadn't) who had done some of it. It had been awfully chopped down, to a mere bone, with the meat all gone; but that was what people in London seemed to like. They were very innocent--thousands of little dogs amusing themselves with a bone. At any rate she had made something, she had made a figure, of the woman--a dreadful stick, with what Dashwood had muddled her into; and Miriam added in the complacency of her young expansion: "Oh give me fifty words any time and the ghost of a situation, and I'll set you up somebody. Besides, I mustn't abuse poor Yolande--she has saved us," she said.

"'Yolande'--?"

"Our ridiculous play. That's the name of the impossible woman. She has put bread into our mouths and she's a loaf on the shelf for the future.