Nona Vincent

He became conscious, the next day, that his danger would be other than this, and yet he couldn’t have expressed to himself what it would be.  Danger was there, doubtless—danger was everywhere, in the world of art, and still more in the world of commerce; but what he really seemed to catch, for the hour, was the beating of the wings of victory.  Nothing could undermine that, since it was victory simply to be acted.  It would be victory even to be acted badly; a reflection that didn’t prevent him, however, from banishing, in his politic optimism, the word “bad” from his vocabulary.  It had no application, in the compromise of practice; it didn’t apply even to his play, which he was conscious he had already outlived and as to which he foresaw that, in the coming weeks, frequent alarm would alternate, in his spirit, with frequent esteem.  When he went down to the dusky daylit theatre (it arched over him like the temple of fame) Mr. Loder, who was as charming as Mrs. Alsager had announced, struck him as the genius of hospitality.  The manager began to explain why, for so long, he had given no sign; but that was the last thing that interested Wayworth now, and he could never remember afterwards what reasons Mr. Loder had enumerated.  He liked, in the whole business of discussion and preparation, even the things he had thought he should probably dislike, and he revelled in those he had thought he should like.  He watched Miss Violet Grey that evening with eyes that sought to penetrate her possibilities.  She certainly had a few; they were qualities of voice and face, qualities perhaps even of intelligence; he sat there at any rate with a fostering, coaxing attention, repeating over to himself as convincingly as he could that she was not common—a circumstance all the more creditable as the part she was playing seemed to him desperately so.  He perceived that this was why it pleased the audience; he divined that it was the part they enjoyed rather than the actress.  He had a private panic, wondering how, if they liked that form, they could possibly like his.  His form had now become quite an ultimate idea to him.  By the time the evening was over some of Miss Violet Grey’s features, several of the turns of her head, a certain vibration of her voice, had taken their place in the same category.  She was interesting, she was distinguished; at any rate he had accepted her: it came to the same thing.  But he left the theatre that night without speaking to her—moved (a little even to his own mystification) by an odd procrastinating impulse.  On the morrow he was to read his three acts to the company, and then he should have a good deal to say; what he felt for the moment was a vague indisposition to commit himself.  Moreover he found a slight confusion of annoyance in the fact that though he had been trying all the evening to look at Nona Vincent in Violet Grey’s person, what subsisted in his vision was simply Violet Grey in Nona’s.  He didn’t wish to see the actress so directly, or even so simply as that; and it had been very fatiguing, the effort to focus Nona both through the performer and through the “Legitimate.”  Before he went to bed that night he posted three words to Mrs. Alsager—“She’s not a bit like it, but I dare say I can make her do.”

He was pleased with the way the actress listened, the next day, at the reading; he was pleased indeed with many things, at the reading, and most of all with the reading itself.  The whole affair loomed large to him and he magnified it and mapped it out.  He enjoyed his occupation of the big, dim, hollow theatre, full of the echoes of “effect” and of a queer smell of gas and success—it all seemed such a passive canvas for his picture.  For the first time in his life he was in command of resources; he was acquainted with the phrase, but had never thought he should know the feeling.  He was surprised at what Loder appeared ready to do, though he reminded himself that he must never show it.  He foresaw that there would be two distinct concomitants to the artistic effort of producing a play, one consisting of a great deal of anguish and the other of a great deal of amusement.  He looked back upon the reading, afterwards, as the best hour in the business, because it was then that the piece had most struck him as represented.  What came later was the doing of others; but this, with its imperfections and failures, was all his own.  The drama lived, at any rate, for that hour, with an intensity that it was promptly to lose in the poverty and patchiness of rehearsal; he could see its life reflected, in a way that was sweet to him, in the stillness of the little semi-circle of attentive and inscrutable, of water-proofed and muddy-booted, actors.  Miss Violet Grey was the auditor he had most to say to, and he tried on the spot, across the shabby stage, to let her have the soul of her part.  Her attitude was graceful, but though she appeared to listen with all her faculties her face remained perfectly blank; a fact, however, not discouraging to Wayworth, who liked her better for not being premature.  Her companions gave discernible signs of recognising the passages of comedy; yet Wayworth forgave her even then for being inexpressive.  She evidently wished before everything else to be simply sure of what it was all about.

He was more surprised even than at the revelation of the scale on which Mr. Loder was ready to proceed by the discovery that some of the actors didn’t like their parts, and his heart sank as he asked himself what he could possibly do with them if they were going to be so stupid.  This was the first of his disappointments; somehow he had expected every individual to become instantly and gratefully conscious of a rare opportunity, and from the moment such a calculation failed he was at sea, or mindful at any rate that more disappointments would come.  It was impossible to make out what the manager liked or disliked; no judgment, no comment escaped him; his acceptance of the play and his views about the way it should be mounted had apparently converted him into a veiled and shrouded figure.  Wayworth was able to grasp the idea that they would all move now in a higher and sharper air than that of compliment and confidence.  When he talked with Violet Grey after the reading he gathered that she was really rather crude: what better proof of it could there be than her failure to break out instantly with an expression of delight about her great chance?  This reserve, however, had evidently nothing to do with high pretensions; she had no wish to make him feel that a person of her eminence was superior to easy raptures.  He guessed, after a little, that she was puzzled and even somewhat frightened—to a certain extent she had not understood.  Nothing could appeal to him more than the opportunity to clear up her difficulties, in the course of the examination of which he quickly discovered that, so far as she had understood, she had understood wrong.  If she was crude it was only a reason the more for talking to her; he kept saying to her “Ask me—ask me: ask me everything you can think of.”

She asked him, she was perpetually asking him, and at the first rehearsals, which were without form and void to a degree that made them strike him much more as the death of an experiment than as the dawn of a success, they threshed things out immensely in a corner of the stage, with the effect of his coming to feel that at any rate she was in earnest.  He felt more and more that his heroine was the keystone of his arch, for which indeed the actress was very ready to take her.  But when he reminded this young lady of the way the whole thing practically depended on her she was alarmed and even slightly scandalised: she spoke more than once as if that could scarcely be the right way to construct a play—make it stand or fall by one poor nervous girl.  She was almost morbidly conscientious, and in theory he liked her for this, though he lost patience three or four times with the things she couldn’t do and the things she could.  At such times the tears came to her eyes; but they were produced by her own stupidity, she hastened to assure him, not by the way he spoke, which was awfully kind under the circumstances.  Her sincerity made her beautiful, and he wished to heaven (and made a point of telling her so) that she could sprinkle a little of it over Nona.  Once, however, she was so touched and troubled that the sight of it brought the tears for an instant to his own eyes; and it so happened that, turning at this moment, he found himself face to face with Mr. Loder.  The manager stared, glanced at the actress, who turned in the other direction, and then smiling at Wayworth, exclaimed, with the humour of a man who heard the gallery laugh every night:

“I say—I say!”

“What’s the matter?” Wayworth asked.

“I’m glad to see Miss Grey is taking such pains with you.”

“Oh, yes—she’ll turn me out!” said the young man, gaily.  He was quite aware that it was apparent he was not superficial about Nona, and abundantly determined, into the bargain, that the rehearsal of the piece should not sacrifice a shade of thoroughness to any extrinsic consideration.

Mrs. Alsager, whom, late in the afternoon, he used often to go and ask for a cup of tea, thanking her in advance for the rest she gave him and telling her how he found that rehearsal (as they were doing it—it was a caution!) took it out of one—Mrs. Alsager, more and more his good genius and, as he repeatedly assured her, his ministering angel, confirmed him in this superior policy and urged him on to every form of artistic devotion.  She had, naturally, never been more interested than now in his work; she wanted to hear everything about everything.  She treated him as heroically fatigued, plied him with luxurious restoratives, made him stretch himself on cushions and rose-leaves.  They gossipped more than ever, by her fire, about the artistic life; he confided to her, for instance, all his hopes and fears, all his experiments and anxieties, on the subject of the representative of Nona.  She was immensely interested in this young lady and showed it by taking a box again and again (she had seen her half-a-dozen times already), to study her capacity through the veil of her present part.  Like Allan Wayworth she found her encouraging only by fits, for she had fine flashes of badness.  She was intelligent, but she cried aloud for training, and the training was so absent that the intelligence had only a fraction of its effect.  She was like a knife without an edge—good steel that had never been sharpened; she hacked away at her hard dramatic loaf, she couldn’t cut it smooth.

II

“Certainly my leading lady won’t make Nona much like you!” Wayworth one day gloomily remarked to Mrs. Alsager.  There were days when the prospect seemed to him awful.

“So much the better.  There’s no necessity for that.”

“I wish you’d train her a little—you could so easily,” the young man went on; in response to which Mrs. Alsager requested him not to make such cruel fun of her.  But she was curious about the girl, wanted to hear of her character, her private situation, how she lived and where, seemed indeed desirous to befriend her.  Wayworth might not have known much about the private situation of Miss Violet Grey, but, as it happened, he was able, by the time his play had been three weeks in rehearsal, to supply information on such points.  She was a charming, exemplary person, educated, cultivated, with highly modern tastes, an excellent musician.  She had lost her parents and was very much alone in the world, her only two relations being a sister, who was married to a civil servant (in a highly responsible post) in India, and a dear little old-fashioned aunt (really a great-aunt) with whom she lived at Notting Hill, who wrote children’s books and who, it appeared, had once written a Christmas pantomime.  It was quite an artistic home—not on the scale of Mrs. Alsager’s (to compare the smallest things with the greatest!) but intensely refined and honourable.  Wayworth went so far as to hint that it would be rather nice and human on Mrs. Alsager’s part to go there—they would take it so kindly if she should call on them.  She had acted so often on his hints that he had formed a pleasant habit of expecting it: it made him feel so wisely responsible about giving them.  But this one appeared to fall to the ground, so that he let the subject drop.  Mrs. Alsager, however, went yet once more to the “Legitimate,” as he found by her saying to him abruptly, on the morrow: “Oh, she’ll be very good—she’ll be very good.”  When they said “she,” in these days, they always meant Violet Grey, though they pretended, for the most part, that they meant Nona Vincent.

“Oh yes,” Wayworth assented, “she wants so to!”

Mrs. Alsager was silent a moment; then she asked, a little inconsequently, as if she had come back from a reverie: “Does she want to very much?”

“Tremendously—and it appears she has been fascinated by the part from the first.”

“Why then didn’t she say so?”

“Oh, because she’s so funny.”

“She is funny,” said Mrs. Alsager, musingly; and presently she added: “She’s in love with you.”

Wayworth stared, blushed very red, then laughed out.  “What is there funny in that?” he demanded; but before his interlocutress could satisfy him on this point he inquired, further, how she knew anything about it.  After a little graceful evasion she explained that the night before, at the “Legitimate,” Mrs. Beaumont, the wife of the actor-manager, had paid her a visit in her box; which had happened, in the course of their brief gossip, to lead to her remarking that she had never been “behind.”  Mrs. Beaumont offered on the spot to take her round, and the fancy had seized her to accept the invitation.  She had been amused for the moment, and in this way it befell that her conductress, at her request, had introduced her to Miss Violet Grey, who was waiting in the wing for one of her scenes.  Mrs. Beaumont had been called away for three minutes, and during this scrap of time, face to face with the actress, she had discovered the poor girl’s secret.  Wayworth qualified it as a senseless thing, but wished to know what had led to the discovery.  She characterised this inquiry as superficial for a painter of the ways of women; and he doubtless didn’t improve it by remarking profanely that a cat might look at a king and that such things were convenient to know.  Even on this ground, however, he was threatened by Mrs. Alsager, who contended that it might not be a joking matter to the poor girl.  To this Wayworth, who now professed to hate talking about the passions he might have inspired, could only reply that he meant it couldn’t make a difference to Mrs. Alsager.

“How in the world do you know what makes a difference to me?” this lady asked, with incongruous coldness, with a haughtiness indeed remarkable in so gentle a spirit.

He saw Violet Grey that night at the theatre, and it was she who spoke first of her having lately met a friend of his.

“She’s in love with you,” the actress said, after he had made a show of ignorance; “doesn’t that tell you anything?”

He blushed redder still than Mrs. Alsager had made him blush, but replied, quickly enough and very adequately, that hundreds of women were naturally dying for him.

“Oh, I don’t care, for you’re not in love with her!” the girl continued.

“Did she tell you that too?” Wayworth asked; but she had at that moment to go on.

Standing where he could see her he thought that on this occasion she threw into her scene, which was the best she had in the play, a brighter art than ever before, a talent that could play with its problem.  She was perpetually doing things out of rehearsal (she did two or three to-night, in the other man’s piece), that he as often wished to heaven Nona Vincent might have the benefit of.  She appeared to be able to do them for every one but him—that is for every one but Nona.  He was conscious, in these days, of an odd new feeling, which mixed (this was a part of its oddity) with a very natural and comparatively old one and which in its most definite form was a dull ache of regret that this young lady’s unlucky star should have placed her on the stage.  He wished in his worst uneasiness that, without going further, she would give it up; and yet it soothed that uneasiness to remind himself that he saw grounds to hope she would go far enough to make a marked success of Nona.  There were strange and painful moments when, as the interpretress of Nona, he almost hated her; after which, however, he always assured himself that he exaggerated, inasmuch as what made this aversion seem great, when he was nervous, was simply its contrast with the growing sense that there were grounds—totally different—on which she pleased him.  She pleased him as a charming creature—by her sincerities and her perversities, by the varieties and surprises of her character and by certain happy facts of her person.  In private her eyes were sad to him and her voice was rare.  He detested the idea that she should have a disappointment or an humiliation, and he wanted to rescue her altogether, to save and transplant her.  One way to save her was to see to it, to the best of his ability, that the production of his play should be a triumph; and the other way—it was really too queer to express—was almost to wish that it shouldn’t be.  Then, for the future, there would be safety and peace, and not the peace of death—the peace of a different life.  It is to be added that our young man clung to the former of these ways in proportion as the latter perversely tempted him.  He was nervous at the best, increasingly and intolerably nervous; but the immediate remedy was to rehearse harder and harder, and above all to work it out with Violet Grey.  Some of her comrades reproached him with working it out only with her, as if she were the whole affair; to which he replied that they could afford to be neglected, they were all so tremendously good.  She was the only person concerned whom he didn’t flatter.

The author and the actress stuck so to the business in hand that she had very little time to speak to him again of Mrs. Alsager, of whom indeed her imagination appeared adequately to have disposed.  Wayworth once remarked to her that Nona Vincent was supposed to be a good deal like his charming friend; but she gave a blank “Supposed by whom?” in consequence of which he never returned to the subject.  He confided his nervousness as freely as usual to Mrs. Alsager, who easily understood that he had a peculiar complication of anxieties.  His suspense varied in degree from hour to hour, but any relief there might have been in this was made up for by its being of several different kinds.  One afternoon, as the first performance drew near, Mrs. Alsager said to him, in giving him his cup of tea and on his having mentioned that he had not closed his eyes the night before:

“You must indeed be in a dreadful state.  Anxiety for another is still worse than anxiety for one’s self.”

“For another?” Wayworth repeated, looking at her over the rim of his cup.

“My poor friend, you’re nervous about Nona Vincent, but you’re infinitely more nervous about Violet Grey.”

“She is Nona Vincent!”

“No, she isn’t—not a bit!” said Mrs. Alsager, abruptly.

“Do you really think so?” Wayworth cried, spilling his tea in his alarm.

“What I think doesn’t signify—I mean what I think about that.  What I meant to say was that great as is your suspense about your play, your suspense about your actress is greater still.”

“I can only repeat that my actress is my play.”

Mrs. Alsager looked thoughtfully into the teapot.

“Your actress is your—”

“My what?” the young man asked, with a little tremor in his voice, as his hostess paused.

“Your very dear friend.  You’re in love with her—at present.”  And with a sharp click Mrs. Alsager dropped the lid on the fragrant receptacle.

“Not yet—not yet!” laughed her visitor.

“You will be if she pulls you through.”

“You declare that she won’t pull me through.”

Mrs. Alsager was silent a moment, after which she softly murmured: “I’ll pray for her.”

“You’re the most generous of women!” Wayworth cried; then coloured as if the words had not been happy.  They would have done indeed little honour to a man of tact.

The next morning he received five hurried lines from Mrs. Alsager.  She had suddenly been called to Torquay, to see a relation who was seriously ill; she should be detained there several days, but she had an earnest hope of being able to return in time for his first night.  In any event he had her unrestricted good wishes.  He missed her extremely, for these last days were a great strain and there was little comfort to be derived from Violet Grey.  She was even more nervous than himself, and so pale and altered that he was afraid she would be too ill to act.  It was settled between them that they made each other worse and that he had now much better leave her alone.  They had pulled Nona so to pieces that nothing seemed left of her—she must at least have time to grow together again.  He left Violet Grey alone, to the best of his ability, but she carried out imperfectly her own side of the bargain.  She came to him with new questions—she waited for him with old doubts, and half an hour before the last dress-rehearsal, on the eve of production, she proposed to him a totally fresh rendering of his heroine.  This incident gave him such a sense of insecurity that he turned his back on her without a word, bolted out of the theatre, dashed along the Strand and walked as far as the Bank.  Then he jumped into a hansom and came westward, and when he reached the theatre again the business was nearly over.  It appeared, almost to his disappointment, not bad enough to give him the consolation of the old playhouse adage that the worst dress-rehearsals make the best first nights.

The morrow, which was a Wednesday, was the dreadful day; the theatre had been closed on the Monday and the Tuesday.  Every one, on the Wednesday, did his best to let every one else alone, and every one signally failed in the attempt.  The day, till seven o’clock, was understood to be consecrated to rest, but every one except Violet Grey turned up at the theatre.  Wayworth looked at Mr. Loder, and Mr. Loder looked in another direction, which was as near as they came to conversation.  Wayworth was in a fidget, unable to eat or sleep or sit still, at times almost in terror.  He kept quiet by keeping, as usual, in motion; he tried to walk away from his nervousness.  He walked in the afternoon toward Notting Hill, but he succeeded in not breaking the vow he had taken not to meddle with his actress.  She was like an acrobat poised on a slippery ball—if he should touch her she would topple over.  He passed her door three times and he thought of her three hundred.  This was the hour at which he most regretted that Mrs. Alsager had not come back—for he had called at her house only to learn that she was still at Torquay.  This was probably queer, and it was probably queerer still that she hadn’t written to him; but even of these things he wasn’t sure, for in losing, as he had now completely lost, his judgment of his play, he seemed to himself to have lost his judgment of everything.  When he went home, however, he found a telegram from the lady of Grosvenor Place—“Shall be able to come—reach town by seven.”  At half-past eight o’clock, through a little aperture in the curtain of the “Renaissance,” he saw her in her box with a cluster of friends—completely beautiful and beneficent.  The house was magnificent—too good for his play, he felt; too good for any play.  Everything now seemed too good—the scenery, the furniture, the dresses, the very programmes.  He seized upon the idea that this was probably what was the matter with the representative of Nona—she was only too good.  He had completely arranged with this young lady the plan of their relations during the evening; and though they had altered everything else that they had arranged they had promised each other not to alter this.  It was wonderful the number of things they had promised each other.  He would start her, he would see her off—then he would quit the theatre and stay away till just before the end.  She besought him to stay away—it would make her infinitely easier.  He saw that she was exquisitely dressed—she had made one or two changes for the better since the night before, and that seemed something definite to turn over and over in his mind as he rumbled foggily home in the four-wheeler in which, a few steps from the stage-door, he had taken refuge as soon as he knew that the curtain was up.  He lived a couple of miles off, and he had chosen a four-wheeler to drag out the time.