Part 11 (1/2)
Fancy putting the exquisite before such a tribunal as that! There's not even a question of it. The dramatist wouldn't if he could, and in nine cases out of ten he couldn't if he would. He has to make the basest concessions. One of his princ.i.p.al canons is that he must enable his spectators to catch the suburban trains, which stop at 11.30. What would you think of any other artist--the painter or the novelist--whose governing forces should be the dinner and the suburban trains? The old dramatists didn't defer to them--not so much at least--and that's why they're less and less actable. If they're touched--the large loose men--it's only to be mutilated and trivialised. Besides, they had a simpler civilisation to represent--societies in which the life of man was in action, in pa.s.sion, in immediate and violent expression. Those things could be put upon the playhouse boards with comparatively little sacrifice of their completeness and their truth. To-day we're so infinitely more reflective and complicated and diffuse that it makes all the difference. What can you do with a character, with an idea, with a feeling, between dinner and the suburban trains? You can give a gross, rough sketch of them, but how little you touch them, how bald you leave them! What crudity compared with what the novelist does!”
”Do you write novels, Mr. Nash?” Peter candidly asked.
”No, but I read them when they're extraordinarily good, and I don't go to plays. I read Balzac for instance--I encounter the admirable portrait of Valerie Marneffe in _La Cousine Bette_.”
”And you contrast it with the poverty of Emile Augier's Seraphine in _Les Lionnes Pauvres_? I was awaiting you there. That's the _cheval de bataille_ of you fellows.”
”What an extraordinary discussion! What dreadful authors!” Lady Agnes murmured to her son. But he was listening so attentively to the other young men that he made no response, and Peter Sherringham went on:
”I've seen Madame Carre in things of the modern repertory, which she has made as vivid to me, caused to abide as ineffaceably in my memory, as Valerie Marneffe. She's the Balzac, as one may say, of actresses.”
”The miniaturist, as it were, of whitewashers!” Nash offered as a subst.i.tute.
It might have been guessed that Sherringham resented his d.a.m.ned freedom, yet could but emulate his easy form. ”You'd be magnanimous if you thought the young lady you've introduced to our old friend would be important.”
Mr. Nash lightly weighed it. ”She might be much more so than she ever will be.”
Lady Agnes, however, got up to terminate the scene and even to signify that enough had been said about people and questions she had never so much as heard of. Every one else rose, the waiter brought Nicholas the receipt of the bill, and Sherringham went on, to his interlocutor: ”Perhaps she'll be more so than you think.”
”Perhaps--if you take an interest in her!”
”A mystic voice seems to exhort me to do so, to whisper that though I've never seen her I shall find something in her.” On which Peter appealed.
”What do you say, Biddy--shall I take an interest in her?”
The girl faltered, coloured a little, felt a certain embarra.s.sment in being publicly treated as an oracle. ”If she's not nice I don't advise it.”
”And if she _is_ nice?”
”You advise it still less!” her brother exclaimed, laughing and putting his arm round her.
Lady Agnes looked sombre--she might have been saying to herself: ”Heaven help us, what chance has a girl of mine with a man who's so agog about actresses?” She was disconcerted and distressed; a mult.i.tude of incongruous things, all the morning, had been forced upon her attention--displeasing pictures and still more displeasing theories about them, vague portents of perversity on Nick's part and a strange eagerness on Peter's, learned apparently in Paris, to discuss, with a person who had a tone she never had been exposed to, topics irrelevant and uninteresting, almost disgusting, the practical effect of which was to make light of her presence. ”Let us leave this--let us leave this!”
she grimly said. The party moved together toward the door of departure, and her ruffled spirit was not soothed by hearing her son remark to his terrible friend: ”You know you don't escape me; I stick to you!”
At this Lady Agnes broke out and interposed. ”Pardon my reminding you that you're going to call on Julia.”
”Well, can't Nash also come to call on Julia? That's just what I want--that she should see him.”
Peter Sherringham came humanely to his kinswoman's a.s.sistance. ”A better way perhaps will be for them to meet under my auspices at my 'dramatic tea.' This will enable me to return one favour for another. If Mr. Nash is so good as to introduce me to this aspirant for honours we estimate so differently, I'll introduce him to my sister, a much more positive quant.i.ty.”
”It's easy to see who'll have the best of it!” Grace Dormer declared; while Nash stood there serenely, impartially, in a graceful detached way which seemed characteristic of him, a.s.senting to any decision that relieved him of the grossness of choice and generally confident that things would turn out well for him. He was cheerfully helpless and sociably indifferent; ready to preside with a smile even at a discussion of his own admissibility.
”Nick will bring you. I've a little corner at the emba.s.sy,” Sherringham continued.
”You're very kind. You must bring _him_ then to-morrow--Rue de Constantinople.”
”At five o'clock--don't be afraid.”
”Oh dear!” Biddy wailed as they went on again and Lady Agnes, seizing his arm, marched off more quickly with her son. When they came out into the Champs Elysees Nick Dormer, looking round, saw his friend had disappeared. Biddy had attached herself to Peter, and Grace couldn't have encouraged Mr. Nash.
V