The Tragic Muse

He had had time to note that the man who had come in with her was Gabriel Nash, and this recognition brought a low sigh to his lips as he held out his hand to her a sigh expressive of the sud­den sense that his interest in her now could only be a gross com­munity. Of course that didn’t matter, since he had set it, at the most,

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If he was ruffl ed by some of her conditions there was thus com­fort and consolation to be drawn from others, beside the essential fascination so small the doubt of that now of the young lady’s own society. He spent the afternoon, they all spent the afternoon, and the occasion reminded him of pages in Wilhelm Meister. He himself could pass for Wilhelm, and if Mrs. Rooth had little resemblance to Mignon, Miriam was remarkably like Philina. The movable feast awaiting them luncheon, tea, dinner? was delayed two or three hours; but the interval was a source of gaiety, for they all smoked cigarettes in the garden and Miriam gave striking illustrations of the parts she was studying. Peter was in the state of a man whose toothache has suddenly stopped he was exhilarated by the cessa­tion of pain. The pain had been the effort to remain in Paris after the creature in the world in whom he was most interested had gone to London, and the balm of seeing her now was the measure of the previous soreness.

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jacent villas, and Basil Dashwood and Gabriel Nash lounged togeth­er at a convenient distance while Nick’s whimsical friend dropped polished pebbles, sometimes audibly splashing, into the deep well of the histrionic simplicity. Miriam confessed that like all comedi­ans they ate at queer hours; she sent Dashwood in for biscuits and sherry she proposed sending him round to the grocer’s in the Circus Road for superior wine. Peter judged him the factotum of the little household: he knew where the biscuits were kept and the state of the grocer’s account. When he himself congratulated her on having so useful an inmate she said genially, but as if the words disposed of him, “Oh he’s awfully handy.” To this she added, “You’re not, you know”; resting the kindest, most pitying eyes on him. The sensation they gave him was as sweet as if she had stroked his cheek, and her manner was responsive even to tenderness. She called him “Dear master” again and again, and still often “Cher maitre,” and appeared to express gratitude and reverence by every intonation.

that of thinking of no end of things to tell him. It was as if she had just returned from a long journey and had had strange adventures and made wonderful discoveries. She began to speak of this and that, then broke off to speak of something else; she talked of the theatre, of the “critics,” and above all of London, of the people she had met and the extraordinary things they said to her, of the parts she was going to take up, of lots of new ideas that had come to her about the art of comedy. She wanted to do comedy now to do the comedy of London life. She was delighted to fi nd that seeing more of the world suggested things to her; they came straight from the fact, from na­ture, if you could call it nature; she was thus convinced more than ever that the artist ought to live so as to get on with his business, gathering ideas and lights from experience ought to welcome any experience that would give him lights. But work of course was expe­rience, and everything in one’s life that was good was work. That was the jolly thing in the actor’s trade it made up for other elements that were odious: if you only kept your eyes open nothing could happen to you that wouldn’t be food for observation and grist to your mill, showing you how people looked and moved and spoke, cried and grimaced, writhed and dissimulated, in given situations. She saw all round her things she wanted to “do” London bristled with them if you had eyes to see. She was fi erce to know why people didn’t take them up, put them into plays and parts, give one a chance with them; she expressed her sharp impatience of the general literary bêtise. She had never been chary of this particular displeasure, and there were moments it was an old story and a subject of frank raillery to Sher­ringham when to hear her you might have thought there was no cleverness anywhere but in her own splendid impatience. She want­ed tremendous things done that she might use them, but she didn’t pretend to say exactly what they were to be, nor even approximately how they were to be handled: her ground was rather that if she only

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had a pen it was exasperating to have to explain! She mainly con­tented herself with the view that nothing had really been touched: she felt that more and more as she saw more of people’s goings-on.

Peter went to her theatre again that evening and indeed made no scruple of going every night for a week. Rather perhaps I should say he made a scruple, but a high part of the pleasure of his life dur­ing these arbitrary days was to overcome it. The only way to prove he could overcome it was to go; and he was satisfi ed, after he had been seven times, not only with the spectacle on the stage but with his per­fect independence. He knew no satiety, however, with the spectacle on the stage, which induced for him but a further curiosity. Miriam’s performance was a thing alive, with a power to change, to grow, to develop, to beget new forms of the same life. Peter contributed to it in his amateurish way and watched with solicitude the effect of his care and the fortune of his hints. He talked it over in Balaklava Place, sug­gested modifi cations and variations worth trying. She professed her­self thankful for any refreshment that could be administered to her interest in Yolande, and with an energy that showed large resource touched up her part and drew several new airs from it. Peter’s liber­ties bore on her way of uttering certain speeches, the intonations that would have more beauty or make the words mean more. She had her ideas, or rather she had her instincts, which she defended and illustrated, with a vividness superior to argument, by a happy picto­rial phrase or a snatch of mimicry; but she was always for trying; she liked experiments and caught at them, and she was especially thank­ful when some one gave her a showy reason, a plausible formula, in a case where she only stood on an intuition. She pretended to despise reasons and to like and dislike at her sovereign pleasure; but she al­ways honoured the exotic gift, so that Sherringham was amused with the liberal way she produced it, as if she had been a naked islander rejoicing in a present of crimson cloth.

Day after day he spent most of his time in her society, and Miss Laura Lumley’s recent habitation became the place in London to which his thoughts and his steps were most attached. He was highly conscious of his not now carrying out that principle of abstention he had brought to such maturity before leaving Paris; but he con­tented himself with a much cruder justifi cation of this lapse than he would have thought adequate in advance. It consisted simply in the idea that to be identifi ed with the fi rst fresh exploits of a young genius was a delightful experience. What was the harm of it when the genius was real? His main security was thus that his relations with Miriam had been placed under the protection of that idea of approved extravagance. In this department they made a very cred­itable fi gure and required much less watching and pruning than when it had been his effort to adjust them to a worldly plan. He had in fi ne a sense of real wisdom when he pronounced it surely enough that this momentary intellectual participation in the girl’s dawning fame was a charming thing. Charming things were not fre­quent enough in a busy man’s life to be kicked out of the way. Balak­lava Place, looked at in this philosophic way, became almost idyllic: it gave Peter the pleasantest impression he had ever had of London.

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permitted himself to become so interested in a theatrical nature. His heroism did him service, however, for the hour; it helped him by the end of the week to feel quite broken in to Miriam’s little circle. What helped him most indeed was to refl ect that she would get tired of a good many of its members herself in time; for if it was not that they were shocking very few of them shone with that intense light they could yet be thoroughly trusted in the long run to bore you.