I.

“I WONDERED whether you wouldn’t read it to me,” said Mrs. Alsager, as

they lingered a little near the fire before he took leave. She looked

down at the fire sideways, drawing her dress away from it and making her

proposal with a shy sincerity that added to her charm. Her charm was

always great for Allan Wayworth, and the whole air of her house, which

was simply a sort of distillation of herself, so soothing, so beguiling

that he always made several false starts before departure. He had spent

some such good hours there, had forgotten, in her warm, golden

drawing-room, so much of the loneliness and so many of the worries of his

life, that it had come to be the immediate answer to his longings, the

cure for his aches, the harbour of refuge from his storms. His

tribulations were not unprecedented, and some of his advantages, if of a

usual kind, were marked in degree, inasmuch as he was very clever for one

so young, and very independent for one so poor. He was eight-and-twenty,

but he had lived a good deal and was full of ambitions and curiosities

and disappointments. The opportunity to talk of some of these in

Grosvenor Place corrected perceptibly the immense inconvenience of

London. This inconvenience took for him principally the line of

insensibility to Allan Wayworth’s literary form. He had a literary form,

or he thought he had, and her intelligent recognition of the circumstance

was the sweetest consolation Mrs. Alsager could have administered. She

was even more literary and more artistic than he, inasmuch as he could

often work off his overflow (this was his occupation, his profession),

while the generous woman, abounding in happy thoughts, but unedited and

unpublished, stood there in the rising tide like the nymph of a fountain

in the plash of the marble basin.

The year before, in a big newspapery house, he had found himself next her

at dinner, and they had converted the intensely material hour into a

feast of reason. There was no motive for her asking him to come to see

her but that she liked him, which it was the more agreeable to him to

perceive as he perceived at the same time that she was exquisite. She

was enviably free to act upon her likings, and it made Wayworth feel less

unsuccessful to infer that for the moment he happened to be one of them.

He kept the revelation to himself, and indeed there was nothing to turn

his head in the kindness of a kind woman. Mrs. Alsager occupied so

completely the ground of possession that she would have been condemned to

inaction had it not been for the principle of giving. Her husband, who

was twenty years her senior, a massive personality in the City and a

heavy one at home (wherever he stood, or even sat, he was monumental),

owned half a big newspaper and the whole of a great many other things.

He admired his wife, though she bore no children, and liked her to have

other tastes than his, as that seemed to give a greater acreage to their

life. His own appetites went so far he could scarcely see the boundary,

and his theory was to trust her to push the limits of hers, so that

between them the pair should astound by their consumption. His ideas

were prodigiously vulgar, but some of them had the good fortune to be

carried out by a person of perfect delicacy. Her delicacy made her play

strange tricks with them, but he never found this out. She attenuated

him without his knowing it, for what he mainly thought was that he had

aggrandised _her_. Without her he really would have been bigger still,

and society, breathing more freely, was practically under an obligation

to her which, to do it justice, it acknowledged by an attitude of

mystified respect. She felt a tremulous need to throw her liberty and

her leisure into the things of the soul—the most beautiful things she

knew. She found them, when she gave time to seeking, in a hundred

places, and particularly in a dim and sacred region—the region of active

pity—over her entrance into which she dropped curtains so thick that it

would have been an impertinence to lift them. But she cultivated other

beneficent passions, and if she cherished the dream of something fine the

moments at which it most seemed to her to come true were when she saw

beauty plucked flower-like in the garden of art. She loved the perfect

work—she had the artistic chord. This chord could vibrate only to the

touch of another, so that appreciation, in her spirit, had the added

intensity of regret. She could understand the joy of creation, and she

thought it scarcely enough to be told that she herself created happiness.

She would have liked, at any rate, to choose her way; but it was just

here that her liberty failed her. She had not the voice—she had only the

vision. The only envy she was capable of was directed to those who, as

she said, could do something.

As everything in her, however, turned to gentleness, she was admirably

hospitable to such people as a class. She believed Allan Wayworth could

do something, and she liked to hear him talk of the ways in which he

meant to show it. He talked of them almost to no one else—she spoiled

him for other listeners. With her fair bloom and her quiet grace she was

indeed an ideal public, and if she had ever confided to him that she

would have liked to scribble (she had in fact not mentioned it to a

creature), he would have been in a perfect position for asking her why a

woman whose face had so much expression should not have felt that she

achieved. How in the world could she express better? There was less

than that in Shakespeare and Beethoven. She had never been more generous

than when, in compliance with her invitation, which I have recorded, he

brought his play to read to her. He had spoken of it to her before, and

one dark November afternoon, when her red fireside was more than ever an

escape from the place and the season, he had broken out as he came

in—“I’ve done it, I’ve done it!” She made him tell her all about it—she

took an interest really minute and asked questions delightfully apt. She

had spoken from the first as if he were on the point of being acted,

making him jump, with her participation, all sorts of dreary intervals.

She liked the theatre as she liked all the arts of expression, and he had

known her to go all the way to Paris for a particular performance. Once

he had gone with her—the time she took that stupid Mrs. Mostyn. She had

been struck, when he sketched it, with the subject of his drama, and had

spoken words that helped him to believe in it. As soon as he had rung

down his curtain on the last act he rushed off to see her, but after that

he kept the thing for repeated last touches. Finally, on Christmas day,

by arrangement, she sat there and listened to it. It was in three acts

and in prose, but rather of the romantic order, though dealing with

contemporary English life, and he fondly believed that it showed the hand

if not of the master, at least of the prize pupil.

Allan Wayworth had returned to England, at two-and-twenty, after a

miscellaneous continental education; his father, the correspondent, for

years, in several foreign countries successively, of a conspicuous London

journal, had died just after this, leaving his mother and her two other

children, portionless girls, to subsist on a very small income in a very

dull German town. The young man’s beginnings in London were difficult,

and he had aggravated them by his dislike of journalism. His father’s

connection with it would have helped him, but he was (insanely, most of

his friends judged—the great exception was always Mrs. Alsager)

_intraitable_ on the question of form. Form—in his sense—was not

demanded by English newspapers, and he couldn’t give it to them in

_their_ sense. The demand for it was not great anywhere, and Wayworth

spent costly weeks in polishing little compositions for magazines that

didn’t pay for style. The only person who paid for it was really Mrs.

Alsager: she had an infallible instinct for the perfect. She paid in her

own way, and if Allan Wayworth had been a wage-earning person it would

have made him feel that if he didn’t receive his legal dues his palm was

at least occasionally conscious of a gratuity. He had his limitations,

his perversities, but the finest parts of him were the most alive, and he

was restless and sincere. It is however the impression he produced on

Mrs. Alsager that most concerns us: she thought him not only remarkably

good-looking but altogether original. There were some usual bad things

he would never do—too many prohibitive puddles for him in the short cut

to success.

For himself, he had never been so happy as since he had seen his way, as

he fondly believed, to some sort of mastery of the scenic idea, which

struck him as a very different matter now that he looked at it from

within. He had had his early days of contempt for it, when it seemed to

him a jewel, dim at the best, hidden in a dunghill, a taper burning low

in an air thick with vulgarity. It was hedged about with sordid

approaches, it was not worth sacrifice and suffering. The man of

letters, in dealing with it, would have to put off all literature, which

was like asking the bearer of a noble name to forego his immemorial

heritage. Aspects change, however, with the point of view: Wayworth had

waked up one morning in a different bed altogether. It is needless here

to trace this accident to its source; it would have been much more

interesting to a spectator of the young man’s life to follow some of the

consequences. He had been made (as he felt) the subject of a special

revelation, and he wore his hat like a man in love. An angel had taken

him by the hand and guided him to the shabby door which opens, it

appeared, into an interior both splendid and austere. The scenic idea

was magnificent when once you had embraced it—the dramatic form had a

purity which made some others look ingloriously rough. It had the high

dignity of the exact sciences, it was mathematical and architectural. It

was full of the refreshment of calculation and construction, the

incorruptibility of line and law. It was bare, but it was erect, it was

poor, but it was noble; it reminded him of some sovereign famed for

justice who should have lived in a palace despoiled. There was a fearful

amount of concession in it, but what you kept had a rare intensity. You

were perpetually throwing over the cargo to save the ship, but what a

motion you gave her when you made her ride the waves—a motion as rhythmic

as the dance of a goddess! Wayworth took long London walks and thought

of these things—London poured into his ears the mighty hum of its

suggestion. His imagination glowed and melted down material, his

intentions multiplied and made the air a golden haze. He saw not only

the thing he should do, but the next and the next and the next; the

future opened before him and he seemed to walk on marble slabs. The more

he tried the dramatic form the more he loved it, the more he looked at it

the more he perceived in it. What he perceived in it indeed he now

perceived everywhere; if he stopped, in the London dusk, before some

flaring shop-window, the place immediately constituted itself behind

footlights, became a framed stage for his figures. He hammered at these

figures in his lonely lodging, he shaped them and he shaped their

tabernacle; he was like a goldsmith chiselling a casket, bent over with

the passion for perfection. When he was neither roaming the streets with

his vision nor worrying his problem at his table, he was exchanging ideas

on the general question with Mrs. Alsager, to whom he promised details

that would amuse her in later and still happier hours. Her eyes were

full of tears when he read her the last words of the finished work, and

she murmured, divinely—

“And now—to get it done, to get it done!”

“Yes, indeed—to get it done!” Wayworth stared at the fire, slowly rolling

up his type-copy. “But that’s a totally different part of the business,

and altogether secondary.”

“But of course you want to be acted?”

“Of course I do—but it’s a sudden descent. I want to intensely, but I’m

sorry I want to.”

“It’s there indeed that the difficulties begin,” said Mrs. Alsager, a

little off her guard.

“How can you say that? It’s there that they end!”

“Ah, wait to see where they end!”

“I mean they’ll now be of a totally different order,” Wayworth explained.

“It seems to me there can be nothing in the world more difficult than to

write a play that will stand an all-round test, and that in comparison

with them the complications that spring up at this point are of an

altogether smaller kind.”

“Yes, they’re not inspiring,” said Mrs. Alsager; “they’re discouraging,

because they’re vulgar. The other problem, the working out of the thing

itself, is pure art.”

“How well you understand everything!” The young man had got up,

nervously, and was leaning against the chimney-piece with his back to the

fire and his arms folded. The roll of his copy, in his fist, was

squeezed into the hollow of one of them. He looked down at Mrs. Alsager,

smiling gratefully, and she answered him with a smile from eyes still

charmed and suffused. “Yes, the vulgarity will begin now,” he presently

added.

“You’ll suffer dreadfully.”

“I shall suffer in a good cause.”

“Yes, giving _that_ to the world! You must leave it with me, I must read

it over and over,” Mrs. Alsager pleaded, rising to come nearer and draw

the copy, in its cover of greenish-grey paper, which had a generic

identity now to him, out of his grasp. “Who in the world will do it?—who

in the world _can_?” she went on, close to him, turning over the leaves.

Before he could answer she had stopped at one of the pages; she turned

the book round to him, pointing out a speech. “That’s the most beautiful

place—those lines are a perfection.” He glanced at the spot she

indicated, and she begged him to read them again—he had read them

admirably before. He knew them by heart, and, closing the book while she

held the other end of it, he murmured them over to her—they had indeed a

cadence that pleased him—watching, with a facetious complacency which he

hoped was pardonable, the applause in her face. “Ah, who can utter such

lines as _that_?” Mrs. Alsager broke out; “whom can you find to do

_her_?”

“We’ll find people to do them all!”

“But not people who are worthy.”

“They’ll be worthy enough if they’re willing enough. I’ll work with

them—I’ll grind it into them.” He spoke as if he had produced twenty

plays.

“Oh, it will be interesting!” she echoed.

“But I shall have to find my theatre first. I shall have to get a

manager to believe in me.”

“Yes—they’re so stupid!”

“But fancy the patience I shall want, and how I shall have to watch and

wait,” said Allan Wayworth. “Do you see me hawking it about London?”

“Indeed I don’t—it would be sickening.”

“It’s what I shall have to do. I shall be old before it’s produced.”

“I shall be old very soon if it isn’t!” Mrs. Alsager cried. “I know one

or two of them,” she mused.

“Do you mean you would speak to them?”

“The thing is to get them to read it. I could do that.”

“That’s the utmost I ask. But it’s even for that I shall have to wait.”

She looked at him with kind sisterly eyes. “You sha’n’t wait.”

“Ah, you dear lady!” Wayworth murmured.

“That is _you_ may, but _I_ won’t! Will you leave me your copy?” she

went on, turning the pages again.

“Certainly; I have another.” Standing near him she read to herself a

passage here and there; then, in her sweet voice, she read some of them

out. “Oh, if _you_ were only an actress!” the young man exclaimed.

“That’s the last thing I am. There’s no comedy in _me_!”

She had never appeared to Wayworth so much his good genius. “Is there

any tragedy?” he asked, with the levity of complete confidence.

She turned away from him, at this, with a strange and charming laugh and

a “Perhaps that will be for you to determine!” But before he could

disclaim such a responsibility she had faced him again and was talking

about Nona Vincent as if she had been the most interesting of their

friends and her situation at that moment an irresistible appeal to their

sympathy. Nona Vincent was the heroine of the play, and Mrs. Alsager had

taken a tremendous fancy to her. “I can’t _tell_ you how I like that

woman!” she exclaimed in a pensive rapture of credulity which could only

be balm to the artistic spirit.

“I’m awfully glad she lives a bit. What I feel about her is that she’s a

good deal like _you_,” Wayworth observed.

Mrs. Alsager stared an instant and turned faintly red. This was

evidently a view that failed to strike her; she didn’t, however, treat it

as a joke. “I’m not impressed with the resemblance. I don’t see myself

doing what she does.”

“It isn’t so much what she _does_,” the young man argued, drawing out his

moustache.

“But what she does is the whole point. She simply tells her love—I

should never do that.”

“If you repudiate such a proceeding with such energy, why do you like her

for it?”

“It isn’t what I like her for.”

“What else, then? That’s intensely characteristic.”

Mrs. Alsager reflected, looking down at the fire; she had the air of

having half-a-dozen reasons to choose from. But the one she produced was

unexpectedly simple; it might even have been prompted by despair at not

finding others. “I like her because _you_ made her!” she exclaimed with

a laugh, moving again away from her companion.

Wayworth laughed still louder. “You made her a little yourself. I’ve

thought of her as looking like you.”

“She ought to look much better,” said Mrs. Alsager. “No, certainly, I

shouldn’t do what _she_ does.”

“Not even in the same circumstances?”

“I should never find myself in such circumstances. They’re exactly your

play, and have nothing in common with such a life as mine. However,”

Mrs. Alsager went on, “her behaviour was natural for _her_, and not only

natural, but, it seems to me, thoroughly beautiful and noble. I can’t

sufficiently admire the talent and tact with which you make one accept

it, and I tell you frankly that it’s evident to me there must be a

brilliant future before a young man who, at the start, has been capable

of such a stroke as that. Thank heaven I can admire Nona Vincent as

intensely as I feel that I don’t resemble her!”

“Don’t exaggerate that,” said Allan Wayworth.

“My admiration?”

“Your dissimilarity. She has your face, your air, your voice, your

motion; she has many elements of your being.”

“Then she’ll damn your play!” Mrs. Alsager replied. They joked a little

over this, though it was not in the tone of pleasantry that Wayworth’s

hostess soon remarked: “You’ve got your remedy, however: have her done by

the right woman.”

“Oh, have her ‘done’—have her ‘done’!” the young man gently wailed.

“I see what you mean, my poor friend. What a pity, when it’s such a

magnificent part—such a chance for a clever serious girl! Nona Vincent

is practically your play—it will be open to her to carry it far or to

drop it at the first corner.”

“It’s a charming prospect,” said Allan Wayworth, with sudden scepticism.

They looked at each other with eyes that, for a lurid moment, saw the

worst of the worst; but before they parted they had exchanged vows and

confidences that were dedicated wholly to the ideal. It is not to be

supposed, however, that the knowledge that Mrs. Alsager would help him

made Wayworth less eager to help himself. He did what he could and felt

that she, on her side, was doing no less; but at the end of a year he was

obliged to recognise that their united effort had mainly produced the

fine flower of discouragement. At the end of a year the lustre had, to

his own eyes, quite faded from his unappreciated masterpiece, and he

found himself writing for a biographical dictionary little lives of

celebrities he had never heard of. To be printed, anywhere and anyhow,

was a form of glory for a man so unable to be acted, and to be paid, even

at encyclopædic rates, had the consequence of making one resigned and

verbose. He couldn’t smuggle style into a dictionary, but he could at

least reflect that he had done his best to learn from the drama that it

is a gross impertinence almost anywhere. He had knocked at the door of

every theatre in London, and, at a ruinous expense, had multiplied

type-copies of _Nona Vincent_ to replace the neat transcripts that had

descended into the managerial abyss. His play was not even declined—no

such flattering intimation was given him that it had been read. What the

managers would do for Mrs. Alsager concerned him little today; the thing

that was relevant was that they would do nothing for _him_. That

charming woman felt humbled to the earth, so little response had she had

from the powers on which she counted. The two never talked about the

play now, but he tried to show her a still finer friendship, that she

might not think he felt she had failed him. He still walked about London

with his dreams, but as months succeeded months and he left the year

behind him they were dreams not so much of success as of revenge.

Success seemed a colourless name for the reward of his patience;

something fiercely florid, something sanguinolent was more to the point.

His best consolation however was still in the scenic idea; it was not

till now that he discovered how incurably he was in love with it. By the

time a vain second year had chafed itself away he cherished his fruitless

faculty the more for the obloquy it seemed to suffer. He lived, in his

best hours, in a world of subjects and situations; he wrote another play

and made it as different from its predecessor as such a very good thing

could be. It might be a very good thing, but when he had committed it to

the theatrical limbo indiscriminating fate took no account of the

difference. He was at last able to leave England for three or four

months; he went to Germany to pay a visit long deferred to his mother and

sisters.

Shortly before the time he had fixed for his return he received from Mrs.

Alsager a telegram consisting of the words: “Loder wishes see you—putting

_Nona_ instant rehearsal.” He spent the few hours before his departure

in kissing his mother and sisters, who knew enough about Mrs. Alsager to

judge it lucky this respectable married lady was not there—a relief,

however, accompanied with speculative glances at London and the morrow.

Loder, as our young man was aware, meant the new “Renaissance,” but

though he reached home in the evening it was not to this convenient

modern theatre that Wayworth first proceeded. He spent a late hour with

Mrs. Alsager, an hour that throbbed with calculation. She told him that

Mr. Loder was charming, he had simply taken up the play in its turn; he

had hopes of it, moreover, that on the part of a professional pessimist

might almost be qualified as ecstatic. It had been cast, with a margin

for objections, and Violet Grey was to do the heroine. She had been

capable, while he was away, of a good piece of work at that foggy old

playhouse the “Legitimate;” the piece was a clumsy _réchauffé_, but she

at least had been fresh. Wayworth remembered Violet Grey—hadn’t he, for

two years, on a fond policy of “looking out,” kept dipping into the

London theatres to pick up prospective interpreters? He had not picked

up many as yet, and this young lady at all events had never wriggled in

his net. She was pretty and she was odd, but he had never prefigured her

as Nona Vincent, nor indeed found himself attracted by what he already

felt sufficiently launched in the profession to speak of as her artistic

personality. Mrs. Alsager was different—she declared that she had been

struck not a little by some of her tones. The girl was interesting in

the thing at the “Legitimate,” and Mr. Loder, who had his eye on her,

described her as ambitious and intelligent. She wanted awfully to get

on—and some of those ladies were so lazy! Wayworth was sceptical—he had

seen Miss Violet Grey, who was terribly itinerant, in a dozen theatres

but only in one aspect. Nona Vincent had a dozen aspects, but only one

theatre; yet with what a feverish curiosity the young man promised

himself to watch the actress on the morrow! Talking the matter over with

Mrs. Alsager now seemed the very stuff that rehearsal was made of. The

near prospect of being acted laid a finger even on the lip of inquiry; he

wanted to go on tiptoe till the first night, to make no condition but

that they should speak his lines, and he felt that he wouldn’t so much as

raise an eyebrow at the scene-painter if he should give him an old oak

chamber.

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.