They had time for no more talk between the drawing-room and the dinner
table, and when Miss Hernshaw’s chair had been pushed in behind her, and
she sat down, she turned instantly to the man on her right and began
speaking to him, and left Hewson to make conversation with any one he
liked or could.
He did not get on very well, not because there were not enough amusing
people beside him and over against him, but because he was all the time
trying to eavesdrop what was saying between Miss Hernshaw and the man on
her right. It seemed to be absolute trivialities they were talking; so
far as Hewson made out they got no deeper than the new play which was
then commanding the public favor apparently for the reason that it was
altogether surface, with no measure upwards or downwards. Upon this
surface the comment of the man on Miss Hernshaw’s right wandered
indefatigably.
Hewson could not imagine of her sincerity a deliberate purpose of letting
the poor fellow show all the shallowness that was in him, and of amusing
itself with his satisfaction in turning his empty mind inside out for her
inspection. She seemed, if not genuinely interested, to be paying him an
unaffected attention; but when the lady across the table addressed a word
to him, Miss Hernshaw, as if she had been watching for some such chance,
instantly turned to Hewson.
“What do you think of ‘Ghosts’?” she asked, with imperative suddenness.
“Ghosts?” he echoed.
“Or perhaps you didn’t go?” she suggested, and he perceived that she
meant Ibsen’s tragedy. But he did not answer at once. He had had a shock,
and for a timeless space he had been back in his room at St. Johnswort,
with that weird figure seated at his table. It seemed to vanish again
when he gave a second glance, as it had vanished before, and he drew a
long sigh, and looked a little haggardly at Miss Hernshaw. “Ah, I see you
did! Wasn’t it tremendous? I think the girl who did Regina was simply
awful, don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” said Hewson, still so trammeled in his own involuntary
associations with the word as not fully to realize the strangeness of
discussing “Ghosts” with a young lady. But he pulled himself together,
and nimbly making his reflection that the latitude of the stage gave room
for the meeting of cultivated intelligences in regions otherwise tabooed,
if they were of opposite sexes, he responded in kind. “I think that the
greatest miracle of the play--and to me it was altogether miraculous”--
“Oh, I’m glad to hear you say that!” cried the girl. “It was the greatest
experience of my life. I can’t bear to have people undervalue it. I want
to hit them. But go on!”
Hewson went on as gravely as he could in view of her potential violence:
he pictured Miss Hernshaw beating down the inadequate witnesses of
“Ghosts” with her fan, which lay in her lap, with her cobwebby
handkerchief, drawn through its ring, and her long limp gloves looking
curiously like her pretty young arms in their slenderness. “I was merely
going to say that the most prodigious effect of the play was among the
actors--I won’t venture on the spectators--”
“No, don’t! It isn’t speakable.”
“It’s astonishing the effect a play of Ibsen’s has with the actors. They
can’t play false. It turns the merest theatrical sticks into men and
women, and it does it through the perfect honesty of the dramatist. He
deals so squarely with himself that they have to deal squarely with
themselves. They have to be, and not just _seem_.”
Miss Hernshaw sighed deeply. “I’m glad you think that,” she said, and
Hewson felt very glad too that he thought that.
“Why?” he asked.
“Why? Because that is what I always want to do; and it’s what I always
shall do, I don’t care what they say.”
“But I don’t know whether I understand exactly.”
“Deal squarely with everybody. Say what I really feel. Then they say what
they really feel.”
There was an obscure resentment unworthily struggling at the bottom of
Hewson’s heart for her long neglect of him in behalf of the man on her
left. “Yes,” he said, “if they are capable of really feeling anything.”
“What do you mean? Everybody really feels.”
“Well, then, thinking anything.”
She drew herself up a little with an air of question. “I believe
everybody really thinks, too, and it’s your duty to let them find out
what they’re thinking, by truly saying what you think.”
“Then _she_ isn’t dealing quite honestly with him,” said Hewson, with a
malicious smile.
The man at Miss Hernshaw’s left was still talking about the play, and he
was at that moment getting off a piece of pure parrotry about it to the
lady across the table: just what everybody had been saying about it from
the first.
“No, I should think she was not,” said the girl, gravely. She looked
hurt, as if she had been unfairly forced to the logic of her postulate,
and Hewson was not altogether pleased with himself; but at least he had
had his revenge in making her realize the man’s vacuity.
He tried to get her back to talk about “Ghosts,” again, but she answered
with indifference, and just then he was arrested by something a man was
saying near the head of the table.