Jervase Marion fixed his eyes, the eyes of the spirit particularly, upon
Lady Tal, as he sat opposite her, the next day, at the round dinner
table, in Palazzo Bragadin.
He was trying to make out how on earth this woman had come to write the
novel he had been reading. That Lady Tal should possess considerable
knowledge of the world, and of men and women, did not surprise him in
the least. He had recognised, in the course of various conversations,
that this young lady formed an exception to the rule that splendid big
creatures with regular features and superb complexions are invariably
idiots.
That Lady Tal should even have a certain talent--about as cultivated as
that of the little boys who draw horses on their copy books--for plot and
dialogue, was not astonishing at all, any more than that her sentences
invariably consisted either of three words, or of twenty-seven lines,
and that her grammar and spelling were nowhere. All this was quite
consonant with Lady Tal's history, manner, talk, and with that particular
beauty of hers--the handsome aquiline features, too clean-cut for
anything save wood or stone, the bright, cold, blue eyes, which looked
you in the face when you expected it least, and which looked away from
you when you expected it least, also; the absence of any of those little
subtle lines which tell of feeling and thought, and which complete
visible beauty, while suggesting a beauty transcending mere visible
things. There was nothing at all surprising in this. But Jervase Marion
had found in this manuscript something quite distinct and unconnected
with such matters: he had found the indications of a soul, a very
decided and unmistakable soul.
And now, looking across the fruit and flowers, and the set out of old
Venetian glass on Miss Vanderwerf's hospitable table, he asked himself
in what portion of the magnificent person of Lady Atalanta Walkenshaw
that soul could possibly be located.
Lady Tal was seated, as I have remarked, immediately opposite Marion,
and between a rather battered cosmopolitan diplomatist and the young
millionaire who had been in distress about a sideboard. Further along
was the Roumanian Princess, and opposite, on the other side of Marion,
an elderly American siren, in an extremely simple white muslin frock, at
the first glance the work of the nursery maid, at the second of Worth,
and symbolising the strange, dangerous fascination of a lady whom you
took at first for a Puritan and a frump. On the other sat Miss Gertrude
Ossian, Lady Tal's cousin, a huge young woman with splendid arms and
shoulders and atrocious manners, who thought Venice such a bore because
it was too hot to play at tennis and you couldn't ride on canals, and
consoled herself by attempting to learn the guitar from various effete
Italian youths, whom she alarmed and delighted in turn.
Among this interesting company Lady Tal was seated with that indefinable
look of being a great deal too large, too strong, too highly connected,
and too satisfied with herself and all things, for this miserable,
effete, plebeian, and self-conscious universe.
She wore a beautifully-made dress of beautifully-shining silk, and her
shoulders and throat and arms were as beautifully made and as shining as
her dress; and her blond hair was as elaborately and perfectly arranged
as it was possible to conceive. That blond hair, verging upon golden,
piled up in smooth and regular plaits and rolls till it formed a kind of
hard and fantastic helmet about her very oval face, and arranged in a
close row of symmetrical little curls upon the high, white, unmarked
forehead, and about the thin, black, perfectly-arched eyebrows--that
hair of Lady Tal's symbolised, in the thought of Marion, all that was
magnificent, conventional, and impassive in this creature. Those blue
eyes also, which looked at you and away from you, when you expected each
least, were too large, under the immense arch of eyebrow, to do more
than look out indifferently upon the world. The mouth was too small in
its beautiful shape for any contraction or expression of feeling, and
when she smiled, those tiny white teeth seemed still to shut it. And
altogether, with its finely-moulded nostrils, which were never dilated,
and its very oval outline, the whole face affected Marion as a huge
and handsome mask, as something clapped on and intended to conceal. To
conceal what? It seemed to the novelist, as he listened to the stream of
animated conventionalities, of jokes unconnected with any high spirits,
that the mask of Lady Atalanta's face, like those great stone masks in
Roman galleries and gardens, concealed the mere absence of everything.
As Marion contemplated Lady Tal, he reviewed mentally that manuscript
novel written in a hand as worn down as that of a journalist, and with
rather less grammar and spelling than might be expected from a nursery
maid; and he tried to connect the impression it had left on his mind
with the impression which its author was making at the present moment.
The novel had taken him by surprise by its subject, and even more by its
particular moral attitude. The story was no story at all, merely the
unnoticed martyrdom of a delicate and scrupulous woman tied to a vain,
mean, and frivolous man; the long starvation of a little soul which
required affections and duties among the unrealities of the world. Not
at all an uncommon subject nowadays; in fact, Marion could have counted
you off a score of well-known novels on similar or nearly similar
themes.
There was nothing at all surprising in the novel, the surprising point
lay in its having this particular author.
Little by little, as the impression of the book became fainter, and
the impression of the writer more vivid, Marion began to settle his
psychological problem. Or rather he began to settle that there was
no psychological problem at all. This particular theme was in vogue
nowadays, this particular moral view was rife in the world; Lady Tal
had read other people's books, and had herself written a book which was
extremely like theirs. It was a case of unconscious, complete imitation.
The explanation of Lady Tal's having produced a novel so very different
from herself, was simply that, as a matter of fact, she had not produced
that novel at all. It was unlike herself because it belonged to other
people, that was all.
"Tell me about my novel," she said after dinner, beckoning Marion into
one of the little gothic balconies overhanging the grand canal; the
little balconies upon whose cushions and beneath whose drawn-up awning
there is room for two, just out of earshot of any two others on the
other balconies beyond.
Places for flirtation. But Lady Tal, Marion had instinctively understood,
was not a woman who flirted. Her power over men, if she had any, or
chose to exert it, must be of the sledge-hammer sort. And how she could
possibly have any power over anything save a mere gaping masher, over
anything that had, below its starched shirt front, sensitiveness,
curiosity, and imagination, Marion at this moment utterly failed to
understand.
The tone of this woman's voice, the very rustle of her dress, as she
leaned upon the balcony and shook the sparks from her cigarette into the
dark sky and the dark water, seemed to mean business and nothing but
business.
She said:
"Tell me all about my novel. I don't intend to be put off with mere
remarks about grammar and stops. One may learn all about that; or can't
all that, and style, and so forth, be put in for one, by the printer's
devil? I haven't a very clear notion what a printer's devil is, except
that he's a person with a thumb. But he might see to such details, or
somebody else of the same sort."
"Quite so. A novelist of some slight established reputation would do as
well, Lady Tal."
Marion wondered why he had made that answer; Lady Tal's remark was
impertinent only inasmuch as he chose to admit that she could be
impertinent to him.
Lady Tal, he felt, but could not see, slightly raised one of those
immensely curved eyebrows of hers in the darkness.
"I thought that you, for instance, might get me through all that,"
she answered; "or some other novelist, as you say, of established
reputation, who _was_ benevolently inclined towards a poor, helpless
ignoramus with literary aspirations."
"Quite apart from such matters--and you are perfectly correct in
supposing that there must be lots of professed novelists who would most
gladly assist you with them--quite apart from such matters, your novel,
if you will allow me to say a rude thing, is utterly impossible. You are
perpetually taking all sorts of knowledge for granted in your reader.
Your characters don't sufficiently explain themselves; you write as if
your reader had witnessed the whole thing and merely required reminding.
I almost doubt whether you have fully realized for yourself a great part
of the situation; one would think you were repeating things from
hearsay, without quite understanding them."
Marion felt a twinge of conscience: that wasn't the impression left by
the novel, but the impression due to the discrepancy between the novel
and its author. That hateful habit of studying people, of turning them
round, prodding and cutting them to see what was inside, why couldn't he
leave it behind for awhile? Had he not come to Venice with the avowed
intention of suspending all such studies?
Lady Tal laughed. The laugh was a little harsh. "You say that because
of the modelling of my face--I know all about modelling of faces, and
facial angles, and cheek-bones, and eye cavities: I once learned to
draw--people always judge of me by the modelling of my face. Perhaps
they are right, perhaps they are wrong. I daresay I _have_ taken too
much for granted. One ought never to take anything for granted, in the
way of human insight, ought one? Anyhow, perhaps you will show me when
I have gone wrong, will you?"
"It will require a good deal of patience----" began Marion.
"On your part, of course. But then it all turns to profit with you
novelists; and it's men's business to be patient, just because they
never are."
"I meant on your part, Lady Tal. I question whether you have any notion
of what it means to recast a novel--to alter it throughout, perhaps not
only once, but twice, or three times."
"Make me a note of the main wrongness, and send me the MS., will you?
I'll set about altering it at once, you'll see. I'm a great deal more
patient than you imagine, Mr. Marion, when I want a thing--and I do
want this--I want to write novels. I want the occupation, the interest,
the excitement. Perhaps some day I shall want the money too. One makes
pots of money in your business, doesn't one?"
Lady Atalanta laughed. She threw her cigarette into the canal, and with
a crackle and a rustle of her light dress, straightened her huge person,
and after looking for a moment into the blue darkness full of dim houses
and irregularly scattered lights, she swept back into the hum of voices
and shimmer of white dresses of Miss Vanderwerf's big drawing-room.
Jervase Marion remained leaning on the balcony, listening to the plash
of oar and the bursts of hoarse voices and shrill fiddles from the
distant music boats.