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"It was simply heavenly going off--all standing in the hall in evening
dress while the servants blew for hansoms. I wore my bridesmaid's dress
with a piece of tulle arranged round the top of the bodice. It was wrong
at the back so I had to sit very carefully the whole evening to prevent
it going up like a muffler, but never mind; it was heavenly I tell you.
We bowled off down through the west-end in three hansoms one behind the
other, in the dark. You know the gleam and shine inside a hansom
sprinting along a dark empty street where the lamps are few and dim;
(see 'The Organist's Daughter') and then came the bright streets all
alight and full of dinner and theatre people in evening dress in hansoms
and you kept getting wedged in between other hansoms with people talking
and laughing all round you; and it took about ten minutes to get from
the end of Regent Street across to the other side of Piccadilly where we
dined in wicked Rupert Street. Just as the caviare was brought in we
heard that the Prince of Wales had won the Derby. Shakespeare is
extraordinary. I had no idea Hamlet was so full of quotations."
Miriam flushed heavily as the last words ran automatically from her pen.
The sense of the richly moving picture that had filled her all the
morning and now kept her sitting happily under the hot roof at her small
dusty table in the full breadth of Saturday afternoon would be gone if
she left that sentence. She felt a curious painful shock at the tips of
her fingers as she re-read it; a current singing within her was driven
back by it.... Mrs. Orly's face had been all alive and alight when she
had leant forward across Mr. Hancock and said the words that had seemed
so meaningless and irritating. Perhaps she too had felt something she
wanted to express and had lost it at that moment. Certainly both she and
Mr. Orly would feel the beauty of Shakespeare. But the words had
shattered the spell of Shakespeare and writing them down like that was
spoiling the description of the evening, though Harriett would not think
so.
But anyhow the letter would not do for Harriett--even if words could be
found to express "Shakespeare." That would not interest Harriett. She
would think the effort funny and Miriamish but it would not mean
anything to her. She had been to Shakespeare because she adored Ellen
Terry and put up with Irving for her sake.... People in London seemed to
think that Irving was just as great as Ellen Terry.... Perhaps now
Irving would seem different. Perhaps Irving was great.... I will go and
hear Irving in Shakespeare ... no money and no theatres except with
other people.... The rest of the letter would simply hurt Harriett,
because it would seem like a reflection on theatres with her. Theatres
with her had had a magic that last night could not touch ... sitting in
the front row of the pit, safely in after the long wait, the walls of
the theatre going up, softly lit buff and gold, fluted and decorated and
bulging with red curtained boxes, the clear view across the empty stalls
of the dim height of fringed curtain hanging in long straight folds, the
certainty that Harriett shared the sense of the theatre, that for her
too when the orchestra began the great motionless curtain shut them in
in a life where everything else in the world faded away and was
forgotten, the sight of the perfection of happiness on Harriett's little
buff-shadowed face, the sudden running ripple, from side to side, of the
igniting footlights ... the smoothly clicking rustle of the withdrawing
curtain ... the magic square of the lit scene ... the daily growth of
the charm of these things during that week when they had gone to a
theatre every night, so that on looking back the being in the theatre
with the certainty of the moving changing scenes ahead was clearer than
either of the plays they had seen.... She sat staring through the open
lattice.... The sound of the violin from the house down the street that
had been a half-heard obbligato to her vision of last night came in
drearily, filling the space whence the vision had departed, with uneasy
questions. She turned to her letter to recapture the impulse with which
she had sat down.... If she turned it into a letter to Eve, all the
description of the evening would have to be changed; Eve knew all about
grandeurs, with the Greens' large country house and their shooting-boxes
and visits to London hotels; the bright glories must go--overwhelming
and unexpressed. Why did that make one so sad? Was it because it
suggested that one cared more for the gay circumstances than for the
thing seen? What was it they had seen? Why had they gone? What _was_
Shakespeare? Her vision returned to her as she brooded on this fresh
problem. The whole scene of the theatre was round her once more; she was
sitting in the half darkness gazing at the stage. What had it been for
her? What was it that came from the stage? Something--_real_ ... to say
that drove it away. She looked again and it clustered once more, alive.
The gay flood of the streets, the social excitements and embarrassments
of the evening were a conflagration; circling about the clear bright
kernel of moving lights and figures on the stage. She gazed at the
bright stage. Moments came sharply up, grouped figures, spoken words.
She held them, her contemplation aglow with the certainty that something
was there that set her alight with love, making her whole in the midst
of her uncertainty and ignorance. Words and phrases came, a sentence
here and there that had suddenly shaped and deepened a scene. Perhaps it
was only in seeing Shakespeare acted that one could appreciate him? But
it was _not_ the acting. No one could act. They all just missed it. It
was all very well for Mag to laugh. They _did_ just miss it.... "Why, my
child? In what way?" "They act at the audience, they take their cues too
quickly and have their emotions too abruptly; and from outside not
inside." "But if they felt at all, all the time, they would go mad or
die." "No, they would not. But even if they did not feel it, if they
looked, it would be enough. They don't _look_ at the thing they are
doing." It was not the acting. Nor the play. The characters of the story
were always tiresome. The ideas, the wonderful quotations if you looked
closely at them were everyone's ideas; things that everybody knew. To
read Shakespeare carefully all through would only be to find all the
general things somewhere or other. But that did not matter. Being
ignorant of him and of history did not matter, as long as you heard him.
Poetry! The poetry of Shakespeare...? Primers of literature told one
that. It did not explain the charm. Just the sound. Music. Like
Beethoven. Bad acting cannot spoil Shakespeare. Bad playing cannot
destroy Beethoven. It was the _sound_ of Shakespeare that made the
scenes real--that made Winter's Tale, so long ago and so bewildering,
remain in beauty.... "Dear Eve, Shakespeare is a sound ..." She tore up
the letter. The next time she wrote to Eve she must remember to say
that. The garret was stifling. Away from the brilliant window the room
was just as hot; the close thick smell of dust sickened her. She came
back to the table, sitting as near as possible to the open. The
afternoon had been wasted trying to express her evening and nothing had
been expressed. The thought of last night was painful now. She had
spoiled it in some way. Her heart beat heavily in the stifling room. Her
head ached and her eyes were tired. She was too tired to walk; and there
was no money; barely enough for next week's A.B.C. suppers. There was no
comfort. It was May ... in a stuffy dusty room. May. Her face quivered
and her head sank upon the hot table.