Part 3 (2/2)
I looked at Forbes with some amus.e.m.e.nt; it was gratifying, remembering the rodomontade with which Wallace and had been crushed on the night of the _White Lady_, to see him wince under Miss Bretherton's liking of the worst art in England! Is the critical spirit worth something, or is it superfluous in theatrical matters and only indispensable in matters of painting! I think he caught the challenge in my eye, for he evidently felt himself in some little difficulty.
'”Oh, you couldn't,” he said with a groan, ”you couldn't like that ballroom,--and that troubadour, Heaven forgive us! Well, there must be something in it,--there must be something in it, if it really gives you pleasure,--I daresay there is; we're so confoundedly uppish in the way we look at things. If either of them had a particle of drawing or a sc.r.a.p of taste, if both of them weren't as bare as a broomstick of the least vestige of gift, or any suspicion of knowledge, there might be a good deal to say for them! Only, my dear Miss Bretherton, you see it's really not a matter of opinion; I a.s.sure you it isn't. I could prove to you as plain as that two and two make four, that Halford's figures don't join in the middle, and that Forth's men and women are as flat as my hand--there isn't a back among them! And then the taste, and the colour, and the clap-trap idiocy of the sentiment! No, I don't think I can stand it. I am all for people getting enjoyment where they can,” with a defiant look at me, ”and snapping their fingers at the critics. But one must draw the line somewhere. There's some art that's out of court from the beginning.”
'I couldn't resist it.
'”Don't listen to him, Miss Bretherton,” I cried. ”If I were you I wouldn't let him spoil your pleasure; the great thing is to _feel_; defend your feeling against him! It's worth more than his criticisms.”
'Forbes's eyes looked laughing daggers at me from under his s.h.a.ggy white brows. Mrs. Stuart and Wallace kept their countenances to perfection; but I had him, there's no denying it.
'”Oh, I know nothing about it,” said Isabel Bretherton, divinely unconscious of the little skirmish going on around her. ”You must teach me, Mr. Forbes. I only know what touches me, what I like--that's all I know in anything.”
'”It's all we any of us know,” said Wallace airily. ”We begin with 'I like' and 'I don't like,' then we begin to be proud, and make distinctions and find reasons; but the thing beats us, and we come back in the end to 'I like' and 'I don't like.'”
'The lunch over, we strolled out along the common, through heather which as yet was a mere brown expanse of flowerless undergrowth, and copses which overhead were a canopy of golden oak-leaf, and carpeted underneath with primroses and the young up-curling bracken. Presently through a little wood we came upon a pond lying wide and blue before us under the breezy May sky, its sh.o.r.es fringed with scented fir-wood and the whole air alive with birds. We sat down under a pile of logs fresh-cut and fragrant, and talked away vigorously. It was a little difficult often to keep the conversation on lines which did not exclude Miss Bretherton.
Forbes, the Stuarts, Wallace, and I are accustomed to be together, and one never realises what a freemasonry the intercourse even of a capital is until one tries to introduce an outsider into it. We talked the theatre, of course, the ways of different actors, the fortunes of managers. Isabel Bretherton naturally has as yet seen very little; her comments were mainly personal, and all of a friendly, enthusiastic kind, for the profession has been very cordial to her. A month or five weeks more and her engagement at the _Calliope_ will be over. There are other theatres open to her, of course, and all the managers are at her feet; but she has set her heart upon going abroad for some time, and has, I imagine, made so much money this season that the family cannot in decency object to her having her own way. ”I am wild to get to Italy,” she said to me in her emphatic, impetuous way. ”Sir Walter Rutherford has talked to me so much about it that I am beginning to dream of it. I long to have done with London and be off! This English sun seems to me so chilly,” and she drew her winter cloak about her with a little s.h.i.+ver, although the day was really an English summer day, and Mrs. Stuart was in cotton. ”I come from such warmth, and I loved it. I have been making acquaintance with all sorts of horrors since I came to London--face-ache and rheumatism and colds!--I scarcely knew there were such things in the world. And I never knew what it was to be tired before. Sometimes I can hardly drag through my work. I hate it so: it makes me cross like a naughty child!”
'”Do you know,” I said, flinging myself down beside her on the gra.s.s and looking up at her, ”that it's altogether wrong? Nature never meant you to feel tired; it's monstrous, it's against the natural order of things!”
'”It's London,” she said, with her little sigh and the drooping lip that is so prettily pathetic. ”I have the roar in my ears all day, and it seems to be humming through my sleep at night. And then the crowd, and the hurry people are in, and the quickness and sharpness of things! But I have only a few weeks more,” she added, brightening, ”and then by October I shall be more used to Europe--the climate and the life.”
'I am much impressed, and so is Mrs. Stuart, by the struggle her nervous strength is making against London. All my nursing of you, Marie, and of our mother has taught me to notice these things in women, and I find myself taking often a very physical and medical view of Miss Bretherton.
You see, it is a case of a northern temperament and const.i.tution relaxed by tropical conditions, and then exposed once more in an exceptional degree to the strain and stress of northern life. I rage when I think of such a piece of physical excellence marred and dimmed by our harsh English struggle. And all for what? For a commonplace, make-believe art, vulgarising in the long run both to the artist and the public! There is a sense of tragic waste about it. Suppose London destroys her health--there are some signs of it--what a futile, ironical pathos there would be in it. I long to step in, to ”have at” somebody, to stop it.
'A little incident later on threw a curious light upon her. We had moved on to the other side of the pond and were basking in the fir-wood. The afternoon sun was slanting through the branches on to the bosom of the pond; a splendid Scotch fir just beside us tossed out its red-limbed branches over a great bed of green reeds, starred here and there with yellow irises. The woman from the keeper's cottage near had brought us out some tea, and most of us had fallen into a sybaritic frame of mind in which talk seemed to be a burden on the silence and easeful peace of the scene. Suddenly Wallace and Forbes fell upon the question of Balzac, of whom Wallace has been making a study lately, and were soon landed in a discussion of Balzac's method of character-drawing. Are Eugene de Rastignac, le Pere Goriot, and old Grandet real beings or mere incarnations of qualities, mathematical deductions from a given point? At last I was drawn in, and the Stuarts: Stuart has trained his wife in Balzac, and she has a dry original way of judging a novel, which is stimulating and keeps the ball rolling. It was the first time that the talk had not centred in one way or another round Miss Bretherton, who, of course, was the first consideration throughout the day in all our minds.
We grew vehement and forgetful, till at last a little movement of hers diverted the general current. She had taken off her hat and was leaning back against the oak under which she sat, watching with parted lips and a gaze of the purest delight and wonder the movements of a nut-hatch overhead, a creature of the woodp.e.c.k.e.r kind, with delicate purple gray plumage, who was tapping the branch above her for insects with his large disproportionate bill, and then skimming along to a sand-bank a little distance off, where he disappeared with his prey into his nest.
'”Ha!” said Wallace, who is a bird-lover, ”a truce to Balzac, and let us watch those nut-hatches! Miss Bretherton's quite right to prefer them to French novels.”
'”French novels!” she said, withdrawing her eyes from the branch above her, and frowning a little at Wallace as she spoke. ”Please don't expect me to talk about them--I know nothing about them--I have never wished to.”
'Her voice had a tone almost of hauteur in it. I have noticed it before.
It is the tone of the famous actress accustomed to believe in herself and her own opinion. I connected it, too, with all one hears of her determination to look upon herself as charged with a mission for the reform of stage morals. French novels and French actresses! apparently she regards them all as so many unknown horrors, standing in the way of the purification of dramatic art by a beautiful young person with a high standard of duty. It is very odd! Evidently she is the Scotch Presbyterian's daughter still, for all her profession, and her success, and her easy ways with the Sabbath! Her remark produced a good deal of unregenerate irritation in me. If she were a first-rate artist to begin with, I was inclined to reflect, this moral enthusiasm would touch and charm one a good deal more; as it is, considering her position, it is rather putting the cart before the horse. But, of course, one can understand that it is just these traits in her that help her to make the impression she does on London society and the orthodox public in general.
'Wallace and I went off after the nut-hatches, enjoying a private laugh by the way over Mrs. Stuart's little look of amazement and discomfort as Miss Bretherton delivered herself. When we came back we found Forbes sketching her--she sitting rather flushed and silent under the tree, and he drawing away and working himself at every stroke into a greater and greater enthusiasm. And certainly she was as beautiful as a dream, sitting against that tree, with the brown heather about her and the young oak-leaves overhead. But I returned in an antagonistic frame of mind, a little out of patience with her and her beauty, and wondering why Nature always blunders somewhere!
'However, on the way home she had another and a pleasanter surprise for me. A carriage was waiting for us on the main road, and we strolled towards it through the gorse and the trees and the rich level evening lights. I dropped behind for some primroses still lingering in bloom beside a little brook; she stayed too, and we were together, out of ear-shot of the rest.
'”Mr. Kendal,” she said, looking straight at me, as I handed the flowers to her, ”you may have misunderstood something just now. I don't want to pretend to what I haven't got. I don't know French, and I can't read French novels if I wished to ever so much.”
'What was I to say? She stood looking at me seriously, a little proudly, having eased her conscience, as it seemed to me, at some cost to herself.
I felt at first inclined to turn the thing off with a jest, but suddenly I thought to myself that I too would speak my mind.
'”Well,” I said deliberately, walking on beside her; ”you lose a good deal. There are hosts of French novels which I would rather not see a woman touch with the tips of her fingers; but there are others, which take one into a bigger world than we English people with our parochial ways of writing and seeing have any notion of. George Sand carries you full into the mid-European stream--you feel it flowing, you are brought into contact with all the great ideas, all the big interests; she is an education in herself. And then Balzac! he has such a range and breadth, he teaches one so much of human nature, and with such conscience, such force of representation! It's the same with their novels as with their theatre. Whatever other faults he may have, a first-rate Frenchman of the artistic sort takes more pains over his work than anybody else in the world. They don't s.h.i.+rk, they throw their life-blood into it, whether it's acting, or painting, or writing. You've never seen Desforets, I think?--no, of course not, and you will be gone before she comes again.
What a pity!”
'Miss Bretherton picked one of my primroses ruthlessly to pieces, and flung it away from her with one of her nervous gestures. ”I am not sorry,” she said. ”Nothing would have induced me to go and see her.”
<script>