Part 10 (2/2)
Peter Sherringham and Biddy Dormer listened with attention to this history, and the girl testified to the interest with which she had followed it by saying when Mr. Nash had ceased speaking: ”A Jewish stockbroker, a dealer in curiosities: what an odd person to marry--for a person who was well born! I daresay he was a German.”
”His name must have been simply Roth, and the poor lady, to smarten it up, has put in another _o_,” Sherringham ingeniously suggested.
”You're both very clever,” said Gabriel, ”and Rudolf Roth, as I happen to know, was indeed the designation of Maud Vavasour's papa. But so far as the question of derogation goes one might as well drown as starve--for what connexion is _not_ a misalliance when one happens to have the unaccommodating, the crus.h.i.+ng honour of being a Neville-Nugent of Castle Nugent? That's the high lineage of Maud's mamma. I seem to have heard it mentioned that Rudolf Roth was very versatile and, like most of his species, not unacquainted with the practice of music. He had been employed to teach the harmonium to Miss Neville-Nugent and she had profited by his lessons. If his daughter's like him--and she's not like her mother--he was darkly and dangerously handsome. So I venture rapidly to reconstruct the situation.”
A silence, for the moment, had fallen on Lady Agnes and her other two children, so that Mr. Nash, with his universal urbanity, practically addressed these last remarks to them as well as to his other auditors.
Lady Agnes looked as if she wondered whom he was talking about, and having caught the name of a n.o.ble residence she inquired: ”Castle Nugent--where in the world's that?”
”It's a domain of immeasurable extent and almost inconceivable splendour, but I fear not to be found in any prosaic earthly geography!”
Lady Agnes rested her eyes on the tablecloth as if she weren't sure a liberty had not been taken with her, or at least with her ”order,” and while Mr. Nash continued to abound in descriptive suppositions--”It must be on the banks of the Manzanares or the Guadalquivir”--Peter Sherringham, whose imagination had seemingly been kindled by the sketch of Miriam Rooth, took up the argument and reminded him that he had a short time before a.s.signed a low place to the dramatic art and had not yet answered the question as to whether he believed in the theatre.
Which gave the speaker a further chance. ”I don't know that I understand your question; there are different ways of taking it. Do I think it's important? Is that what you mean? Important certainly to managers and stage-carpenters who want to make money, to ladies and gentlemen who want to produce themselves in public by limelight, and to other ladies and gentlemen who are bored and stupid and don't know what to do with their evening. It's a commercial and social convenience which may be infinitely worked. But important artistically, intellectually? How _can_ it be--so poor, so limited a form?”
”Upon my honour it strikes me as rich and various! Do _you_ think it's a poor and limited form, Nick?” Sherringham added, appealing to his kinsman.
”I think whatever Nash thinks. I've no opinion to-day but his.”
This answer of the hope of the Dormers drew the eyes of his mother and sisters to him and caused his friend to exclaim that he wasn't used to such responsibilities--so few people had ever tested his presence of mind by agreeing with him. ”Oh I used to be of your way of feeling,”
Nash went on to Sherringham. ”I understand you perfectly. It's a phase like another. I've been through it--_j'ai ete comme ca._”
”And you went then very often to the Theatre Francais, and it was there I saw you. I place you now.”
”I'm afraid I noticed none of the other spectators,” Nash explained. ”I had no attention but for the great Carre--she was still on the stage.
Judge of my infatuation, and how I can allow for yours, when I tell you that I sought her acquaintance, that I couldn't rest till I had told her how I hung upon her lips.”
”That's just what _I_ told her,” Sherringham returned.
”She was very kind to me. She said: '_Vous me rendez des forces_.'”
”That's just what she said to me!”
”And we've remained very good friends.”
”So have we!” laughed Sherringham. ”And such perfect art as hers--do you mean to say you don't consider _that_ important, such a rare dramatic intelligence?”
”I'm afraid you read the _feuilletons_. You catch their phrases”--Nash spoke with pity. ”Dramatic intelligence is never rare; nothing's more common.”
”Then why have we so many shocking actors?”
”Have we? I thought they were mostly good; succeeding more easily and more completely in that business than in anything else. What could they do--those people generally--if they didn't do that poor thing? And reflect that the poor thing enables them to succeed! Of course, always, there are numbers of people on the stage who are no actors at all, for it's even easier to our poor humanity to be ineffectively stupid and vulgar than to bring down the house.”
”It's not easy, by what I can see, to produce, completely, any artistic effect,” Sherringham declared; ”and those the actor produces are among the most momentous we know. You'll not persuade me that to watch such an actress as Madame Carre wasn't an education of the taste, an enlargement of one's knowledge.”
”She did what she could, poor woman, but in what belittling, coa.r.s.ening conditions! She had to interpret a character in a play, and a character in a play--not to say the whole piece: I speak more particularly of modern pieces--is such a wretchedly small peg to hang anything on! The dramatist shows us so little, is so hampered by his audience, is restricted to so poor an a.n.a.lysis.”
”I know the complaint. It's all the fas.h.i.+on now. The _raffines_ despise the theatre,” said Peter Sherringham in the manner of a man abreast with the culture of his age and not to be captured by a surprise. ”_Connu, connu_!”
”It will be known better yet, won't it? when the essentially brutal nature of the modern audience is still more perceived, when it has been properly a.n.a.lysed: the _omnium gatherum_ of the population of a big commercial city at the hour of the day when their taste is at its lowest, flocking out of hideous hotels and restaurants, gorged with food, stultified with buying and selling and with all the other sordid preoccupations of the age, squeezed together in a sweltering ma.s.s, disappointed in their seats, timing the author, timing the actor, wis.h.i.+ng to get their money back on the spot--all before eleven o'clock.
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