It might already have been coming indeed, with an immense stride, when,
scarce more than ten minutes later, he was aware that the distinguished
stranger had brought the Princess straight across the room to speak
to him. He had failed in the interval of any glimpse of their closer
meeting; for the great tenor had sung another song and then stopped,
immediately on which Madame Gloriani had made his pulse quicken to a
different, if not to a finer, throb by hovering before him once more
with the man in the world he most admired, as it were, looking at him
over her shoulder. The man in the world he most admired, the greatest
then of contemporary Dramatists--and bearing, independently, the name
inscribed if not in deepest incision at least in thickest gilding on the
rich recreative roll--this prodigious personage was actually to suffer
“presentation” to him at the good lady’s generous but ineffectual hands,
and had in fact the next instant, left alone with him, bowed, in formal
salutation, the massive, curly, witty head, so “romantic” yet so modern,
so “artistic” and ironic yet somehow so civic, so Gallic yet somehow so
cosmic, his personal vision of which had not hitherto transcended that
of the possessor of a signed and framed photograph in a consecrated
quarter of a writing-table.
It was positive, however, that poor John was afterward to remember
of this conjunction nothing whatever but the fact of the great man’s
looking at him very hard, straight in the eyes, and of his not having
himself scrupled to do as much, and with a confessed intensity of
appetite. It was improbable, he was to recognise, that they had, for the
few minutes, only stared and grimaced, like pitted boxers or wrestlers;
but what had abode with him later on, none the less, was just the
cherished memory of his not having so lost presence of mind as to fail
of feeding on his impression. It was precious and precarious, that was
perhaps all there would be of it; and his subsequent consciousness was
quite to cherish this queer view of the silence, neither awkward nor
empty nor harsh, but on the contrary quite charged and brimming, that
represented for him his use, his unforgettable enjoyment in fact, of his
opportunity. Had nothing passed in words? Well, no misery of murmured
“homage,” thank goodness; though something must have been said,
certainly, to lead up, as they put it at the theatre, to John’s having
asked the head of the profession, before they separated, if he by chance
knew who the so radiantly handsome young woman might be, the one who
had so lately come in and who wore the pale yellow dress, of the strange
tone, and the magnificent pearls. They must have separated soon, it was
further to have been noted; since it was before the advance of the pair,
their wonderful dazzling charge upon him, that he had distinctly seen
the great man, at a distance again, block out from his sight the harmony
of the faded gold and the pearls--to speak only of that--and plant
himself there (the mere high Atlas-back of renown to Berridge now) as
for communion with them. He had blocked everything out, to this tune,
effectually; with nothing of the matter left for our friend meanwhile
but that, as he had said, the beautiful lady was the Princess. What
Princess, or the Princess of what?--our young man had afterward
wondered; his companion’s reply having lost itself in the prelude of an
outburst by another vocalist who had approached the piano.
It was after these things that she so incredibly came to him, attended
by her adorer--since he took it for absolute that the young Lord was her
adorer, as who indeed mightn’t be?--and scarce waiting, in her bright
simplicity, for any form of introduction. It may thus be said in a word
that this was the manner in which she made our hero’s acquaintance, a
satisfaction that she on the spot described to him as really wanting of
late to her felicity. “I’ve read everything, you know, and ‘The Heart of
Gold’ three times”: she put it all immediately on that ground, while the
young Lord now smiled, beside her, as if it were quite the sort of thing
he had done too; and while, further, the author of the work yielded to
the consciousness that whereas in general he had come at last scarce to
be able to bear the iteration of those words, which affected him as
a mere vain vocal convulsion, so not a breath of this association now
attended them, so such a person as the Princess could make of them what
she would.
Unless it was to be really what _he_ would!--this occurred to him in the
very thick of the prodigy, no single shade of possibility of which
was less prodigious than any other. It was a declaration, simply, the
admirable young woman was treating him to, a profession of “artistic
sympathy”--for she was in a moment to use this very term that made for
them a large, clear, common ether, an element all uplifted and rare, of
which they could equally partake.
If she was Olympian--as in her rich and regular young beauty, that of
some divine Greek mask over-painted say by Titian, she more and more
appeared to him--this offered air was that of the gods themselves:
she might have been, with her long rustle across the room, Artemis
decorated, hung with pearls, for her worshippers, yet disconcerting them
by having, under an impulse just faintly fierce, snatched the cup of
gold from Hebe. It was to him, John Berridge, she thus publicly offered
it; and it was his over-topping _confrere_ of shortly before who was the
worshipper most disconcerted. John had happened to catch, even at its
distance, after these friends had joined him, the momentary deep,
grave estimate, in the great Dramatist’s salient watching eyes, of the
Princess’s so singular performance: the touch perhaps this, in the whole
business, that made Berridge’s sense of it most sharp. The sense of it
as _prodigy_ didn’t in the least entail his feeling abject--any more,
that is, than in the due dazzled degree; for surely there would have
been supreme wonder in the eagerness of her exchange of mature glory for
thin notoriety, hadn’t it still exceeded everything that an Olympian of
such race should have found herself bothered, as they said, to “read” at
all--and most of all to read three times!
With the turn the matter took as an effect of this meeting, Berridge was
more than once to find himself almost ashamed for her--since it seemed
never to occur to her to be so for herself: he was jealous of the
type where she might have been taken as insolently careless of it;
his advantage (unless indeed it had been his ruin) being that he could
inordinately reflect upon it, could wander off thereby into kinds of
licence of which she was incapable. He hadn’t, for himself, waited till
now to be sure of what he would do were _he_ an Olympian: he would leave
his own stuff snugly unread, to begin with; that would be a beautiful
start for an Olympian career. He should have been as unable to write
those works in short as to make anything else of them; and he
should have had no more arithmetic for computing fingers than any
perfect-headed marble Apollo mutilated at the wrists. He should have
consented to know but the grand personal adventure on the grand
personal basis: nothing short of this, no poor cognisance of confusable,
pettifogging things, the sphere of earth-grubbing questions and
two-penny issues, would begin to be, on any side, Olympian enough.
Even the great Dramatist, with his tempered and tested steel and his
immense “assured” position, even he was not Olympian: the look, full of
the torment of earth, with which he had seen the Princess turn her back,
and for such a purpose, on the prized privilege of his notice, testified
sufficiently to that. Still, comparatively, it was to be said, the
question of a personal relation with an authority so eminent on the
subject of the passions--to say nothing of the rest of his charm--might
have had for an ardent young woman (and the Princess was unmistakably
ardent) the absolute attraction of romance: unless, again, prodigy of
prodigies, she were looking for her romance very particularly elsewhere.
Yet where could she have been looking for it, Berridge was to ask
himself with private intensity, in a manner to leave her so at her ease
for appearing to offer _him_ everything?--so free to be quite divinely
gentle with him, to hover there before him in all her mild, bright,
smooth sublimity and to say: “I should be so very grateful if you’d come
to see me.”
There succeeded this a space of time of which he was afterward to lose
all account, was never to recover the history; his only coherent view
of it being that an interruption, some incident that kept them a while
separate, had then taken place, yet that during their separation, of
half an hour or whatever, they had still somehow not lost sight of each
other, but had found their eyes meeting, in deep communion, all across
the great peopled room; meeting and wanting to meet, wanting--it was the
most extraordinary thing in the world for the suppression of stages, for
confessed precipitate intensity--to use together every instant of the
hour that might be left them. Yet to use it for what?--unless, like
beautiful fabulous figures in some old-world legend, for the frankest
and almost the crudest avowal of the impression they had made on each
other. He couldn’t have named, later on, any other person she had during
this space been engaged with, any more than he was to remember in the
least what he had himself ostensibly done, who had spoken to him, whom
he had spoken to, or whether he hadn’t just stood and publicly gaped or
languished.
Ah, Olympians were unconventional indeed--that was a part of their
high bravery and privilege; but what it also appeared to attest in this
wondrous manner was that they could communicate to their chosen in three
minutes, by the mere light of their eyes, the same shining cynicism. He
was to wonder of course, tinglingly enough, whether he had really made
an ass of himself, and there was this amount of evidence for it that
there certainly _had_ been a series of moments each one of which glowed
with the lucid sense that, as she couldn’t like him as much as _that_
either for his acted clap-trap or for his printed verbiage, what it must
come to was that she liked him, and to such a tune, just for himself
and quite after no other fashion than that in which every goddess in
the calendar had, when you came to look, sooner or later liked some
prepossessing young shepherd. The question would thus have been, for
him, with a still sharper eventual ache, of whether he positively _had_,
as an effect of the miracle, been petrified, before fifty pair of eyes,
to the posture of a prepossessing shepherd--and would perhaps have left
him under the shadow of some such imputable fatuity if his consciousness
hadn’t, at a given moment, cleared up to still stranger things.
The agent of the change was, as quite congruously happened, none other
than the shining youth whom he now seemed to himself to have been
thinking of for ever so long, for a much longer time than he had ever in
his life spent at an evening party, as the young Lord: which personage
suddenly stood before him again, holding him up an odd object and
smiling, as if in reference to it, with a gladness that at once struck
our friend as almost too absurd for belief. The object was incongruous
by reason of its being, to a second and less preoccupied glance, a book;
and what had befallen Berridge within twenty minutes was that they--the
Princess and he, that is--had got such millions of miles, or at least
such thousands of years, away from _those_ platitudes. The book, he
found himself assuming, could only be _his_ book (it seemed also to have
a tawdry red cover); and there came to him memories, dreadfully false
notes sounded so straight again by his new acquaintance, of certain
altogether different persons who at certain altogether different parties
had flourished volumes before him very much with that insinuating
gesture, that arch expression, and that fell intention. The meaning of
these things--of all possible breaks of the charm at such an hour!--was
that he should “signature” the ugly thing, and with a characteristic
quotation or sentiment: that was the way people simpered and squirmed,
the way they mouthed and beckoned, when animated by such purposes; and
it already, on the spot, almost broke his heart to see such a type as
that of the young Lord brought, by the vulgarest of fashions, so low.
This state of quick displeasure in Berridge, however, was founded on a
deeper question--the question of how in the world he was to remain for
himself a prepossessing shepherd if he should consent to come back to
these base actualities. It was true that even while this wonderment held
him, his aggressor’s perfect good conscience had placed the matter in a
slightly different light.
“By an extraordinary chance I’ve found a copy of my friend’s novel on
one of the tables here--I see by the inscription that she has presented
it to Gloriani. So if you’d like to glance at it--!” And the young Lord,
in the pride of his association with the eminent thing, held it out to
Berridge as artlessly as if it had been a striking natural specimen
of some sort, a rosy round apple grown in his own orchard, or an
exceptional precious stone, to be admired for its weight and lustre.
Berridge accepted the offer mechanically--relieved at the prompt fading
of his worst fear, yet feeling in himself a tell-tale facial blankness
for the still absolutely anomalous character of his friend’s appeal. He
was even tempted for a moment to lay the volume down without looking at
it--only with some extemporised promise to borrow it of their host and
take it home, to give himself to it at an easier moment. Then the very
expression of his fellow-guests own countenance determined in him a
different and a still more dreadful view; in fact an immediate collapse
of the dream in which he had for the splendid previous space of time
been living. The young Lord himself, in his radiant costly barbarism,
figured far better than John Berridge could do the prepossessing
shepherd, the beautiful mythological mortal “distinguished” by a
goddess; for our hero now saw that his whole manner of dealing with
his ridiculous tribute was marked exactly by the grand simplicity, the
prehistoric good faith, as one might call it, of far-off romantic and
“plastic” creatures, figures of exquisite Arcadian stamp, glorified
rustics like those of the train of peasants in “A Winter’s Tale,” who
thought nothing of such treasure-trove, on a Claude Lorrain sea-strand,
as a royal infant wrapped in purple: something in that fabulous style of
exhibition appearing exactly what his present demonstration might have
been prompted by. “The Top of the Tree, by Amy Evans”--scarce credible
words floating before Berridge after he had with an anguish of effort
dropped his eyes on the importunate title-page--represented an object
as alien to the careless grace of goddess-haunted Arcady as a washed-up
“kodak” from a wrecked ship might have been to the appreciation of some
islander of wholly unvisited seas. Nothing could have been more in the
tone of an islander deplorably diverted from his native interests and
dignities than the glibness with which John’s own child of nature went
on. “It’s her pen-name, Amy Evans”--he couldn’t have said it otherwise
had he been a blue-chinned penny-a-liner; yet marking it with a
disconnectedness of intelligence that kept up all the poetry of his own
situation and only crashed into that of other persons. The reference put
the author of “The Heart of Gold” quite into _his_ place, but left the
speaker absolutely free of Arcady. “Thanks awfully”--Berridge somehow
clutched at that, to keep everything from swimming. “Yes, I should like
to look at it,” he managed, horribly grimacing now, he believed, to say;
and there was in fact a strange short interlude after this in which he
scarce knew what had become of any one or of anything; in which he only
seemed to himself to stand alone in a desolate place where even its
desolation didn’t save him from having to stare at the greyest of
printed pages. Nothing here helped anything else, since the stamped
greyness didn’t even in itself make it impossible his eyes should follow
such sentences as: “The loveliness of the face, which was that of the
glorious period in which Pheidias reigned supreme, and which owed its
most exquisite note to that shell-like curl of the upper lip which
always somehow recalls for us the smile with which windblown Astarte
must have risen from the salt sea to which she owed her birth and her
terrible moods; or it was too much for all the passionate woman in her,
and she let herself go, over the flowering land that had been, but was
no longer their love, with an effect of blighting desolation that might
have proceeded from one of the more physical, though not more awful,
convulsions of nature.”
He seemed to know later on that other and much more natural things
had occurred; as that, for instance, with now at last a definite
intermission of the rare music that for a long time past, save at the
briefest intervals, had kept all participants ostensibly attentive
and motionless, and that in spite of its high quality and the supposed
privilege of listening to it he had allowed himself not to catch a note
of, there was a great rustling and shifting and vociferous drop to a
lower plane, more marked still with the quick clearance of a way to
supper and a lively dispersal of most of the guests. Hadn’t he made out,
through the queer glare of appearances, though they yet somehow all came
to him as confused and unreal, that the Princess was no longer
there, wasn’t even only crowded out of his range by the immediate
multiplication of her court, the obsequious court that the change
of pitch had at once permitted to close round her; that Gloriani had
offered her his arm, in a gallant official way, as to the greatest lady
present, and that he was left with half a dozen persons more knowing
than the others, who had promptly taken, singly or in couples, to a
closer inspection of the fine small scattered treasures of the studio?
He himself stood there, rueful and stricken, nursing a silly red-bound
book under his arm very much as if he might have been holding on tight
to an upright stake, or to the nearest piece of furniture, during some
impression of a sharp earthquake-shock or of an attack of dyspeptic
dizziness; albeit indeed that he wasn’t conscious of this absurd, this
instinctive nervous clutch till the thing that was to be more wonderful
than any yet suddenly flared up for him--the sight of the Princess again
on the threshold of the room, poised there an instant, in her
exquisite grace, for recovery of some one or of something, and then, at
recognition of him, coming straight to him across the empty place as if
he alone, and nobody and nothing else, were what she incredibly wanted.
She was there, she was radiantly _at_ him, as if she had known and loved
him for ten years--ten years during which, however, she had never quite
been able, in spite of undiscouraged attempts, to cure him, as goddesses
_had_ to cure shepherds, of his mere mortal shyness.
“Ah no, not _that_ one!” she said at once, with her divine familiarity;
for she had in the flash of an eye “spotted” the particular literary
production he seemed so very fondly to have possessed himself of and
against which all the Amy Evans in her, as she would doubtless have put
it, clearly wished on the spot to discriminate. She pulled it away from
him; he let it go; he scarce knew what was happening--only made out that
she distinguished the right one, the one that should have been shown
him, as blue or green or purple, and intimated that her other friend,
her fellow-Olympian, as Berridge had thought of him from the
first, really did too clumsily bungle matters, poor dear, with his
officiousness over the red one! She went on really as if she had come
for that, some such rectification, some such eagerness of reunion with
dear Mr. Berridge, some talk, after all the tiresome music, of questions
really urgent; while, thanks to the supreme strangeness of it, the high
tide of golden fable floated him afresh, and her pretext and her plea,
the queerness of her offered motive, melted away after the fashion of
the enveloping clouds that do their office in epics and idylls. “You
didn’t perhaps know I’m Amy Evans,” she smiled, “or even perhaps that
I write in English--which I love, I assure you, as much as you can
yourself do, and which gives one (doesn’t it? for who should know if
not you?) the biggest of publics. I ‘just love’--don’t they say?--your
American millions; and all the more that they really _take_ me for Amy
Evans, as I’ve just wanted to be taken, to be loved too for myself,
don’t you know?--that they haven’t seemed to try at all to ‘go behind’
(don’t you say?) my poor dear little _nom de guerre_. But it’s the new
one, my last, ‘The Velvet Glove,’ that I should like you to judge me
by--if such a _corvee_ isn’t too horrible for you to think of; though
I admit it’s a move straight in the romantic direction--since after
all (for I might as well make a clean breast of it) it’s dear old
discredited romance that I’m most in sympathy with. I’ll send you ‘The
Velvet Glove’ to-morrow, if you _can_ find half an hour for it; and
then--and _then_--!” She paused as for the positive bright glory of her
meaning.
It could only be so extraordinary, her meaning, whatever it was,
that the need in him that would--whatever it was again!--meet it most
absolutely formed the syllables on his lips as: “Will you be very,
_very_ kind to me?”
“Ah ‘kind,’ dear Mr. Berridge? ‘Kind,’” she splendidly laughed, “is
nothing to what--!” But she pulled herself up again an instant. “Well,
to what I want to be! Just _see_,” she said, “how I want to be!” It
was exactly, he felt, what he couldn’t _but_ see--in spite of books and
publics and pen-names, in spite of the really “decadent” perversity,
recalling that of the most irresponsibly insolent of the old Romans
and Byzantines, that could lead a creature so formed for living and
breathing her Romance, and so committed, up to the eyes, to the constant
fact of her personal immersion in it and genius for it, the dreadful
amateurish dance of ungrammatically scribbling it, with editions and
advertisements and reviews and royalties and every other futile item:
since what was more of the deep essence of throbbing intercourse itself
than this very act of her having broken away from people, in the other
room, to whom he was as nought, of her having, with her _crânerie_ of
audacity and indifference, just turned her back on them all as soon as
she had begun to miss him? What was more of it than her having forbidden
them, by a sufficient curt ring of her own supremely silver tone, to
attempt to check or criticise her freedom, than her having looked him
up, at his distance, under all the noses he had put out of joint, so as
to let them think whatever they might--not of herself (much she troubled
to care!) but of the new champion to be reckoned with, the invincible
young lion of the day? What was more of it in short than her having
perhaps even positively snubbed for him the great mystified Sculptor and
the great bewildered Dramatist, treated to this queer experience for the
first time of their lives?
It all came back again to the really great ease of really great ladies,
and to the perfect facility of everything when once they were great
enough. _That_ might become the delicious thing to him, he more and more
felt, as soon as it should be supremely attested; it was ground he had
ventured on, scenically, representation-ally, in the artistic sphere,
but without ever dreaming he should “realise” it thus in the social.
Handsomely, gallantly just now, moreover, he didn’t so much as let it
occur to him that the social experience would perhaps on some future
occasion richly profit further scenic efforts; he only lost himself in
the consciousness of all she invited him to believe. It took licence,
this consciousness, the next moment, for a tremendous further throb,
from what she had gone on to say to him in so many words--though indeed
the words were nothing and it was all a matter but of the implication
that glimmered through them: “Do you _want_ very much your supper here?”
And then while he felt himself glare, for charmed response, almost to
the point of his tears rising with it: “Because if you don’t----!”
“Because if I don’t--?” She had paused, not from the faintest shade of
timidity, but clearly for the pleasure of making him press.
“Why shouldn’t we go together, letting me drive you home?”
“You’ll come home with me?” gasped John Berridge while the perspiration
on his brow might have been the morning dew on a high lawn of Mount Ida.
“No--you had better come with _me_. That’s what I mean; but I certainly
will come to you with pleasure some time if you’ll let me.”
She made no more than that of the most fatuous of freedoms, as he felt
directly he had spoken that it might have seemed to her; and before
he had even time to welcome the relief of not having then himself, for
beastly contrition, to make more of it, she had simply mentioned, with
her affectionate ease, that she wanted to get away, that of the bores
there she might easily, after a little, have too much, and that if he’d
but say the word they’d nip straight out together by an independent door
and be sure to find her motor in the court. What word he had found to
say, he was afterward to reflect, must have little enough mattered;
for he was to have kept, of what then occurred, but a single other
impression, that of her great fragrant rustle beside him over the rest
of the ample room and toward their nearest and friendliest resource, the
door by which he had come in and which gave directly upon a staircase.
This independent image was just that of the only other of his
fellow-guests with whom he had been closely concerned; he had thought
of him rather indeed, up to that moment, as the Princess’s
fellow-Olympian--but a new momentary vision of him seemed now to qualify
it.
The young Lord had reappeared within a minute on the threshold, that
of the passage from the supper-room, lately crossed by the Princess
herself, and Berridge felt him there, saw him there, wondered about him
there, all, for the first minute, without so much as a straight look
at him. He would have come to learn the reason of his friend’s
extraordinary public demonstration--having more right to his curiosity,
or his anxiety or whatever, than any one else; he would be taking in
the remarkable appearances that thus completed it, and would perhaps be
showing quite a different face for them, at the point they had reached,
than any that would have hitherto consorted with the beautiful security
of his own position. So much, on our own young man’s part, for this
first flush of a presumption that he might have stirred the germs of ire
in a celestial breast; so much for the moment during which nothing
would have induced him to betray, to a possibly rueful member of an
old aristocracy, a vulgar elation or a tickled, unaccustomed glee. His
inevitable second thought was, however, it has to be confessed, another
matter, which took a different turn--for, frankly, all the conscious
conqueror in him, as Amy Evans would again have said, couldn’t forego a
probably supreme consecration. He treated himself to no prolonged reach
of vision, but there was something he nevertheless fully measured for
five seconds--the sharp truth of the fact, namely, of how the interested
observer in the doorway must really have felt about him. Rather
disconcertingly, hereupon, the sharp truth proved to be that the most
amused, quite the most encouraging and the least invidious of smiles
graced the young Lord’s handsome countenance--forming, in short, his
final contribution to a display of high social candour unprecedented in
our hero’s experience. No, he wasn’t jealous, didn’t do John Berridge
the honour to be, to the extent of the least glimmer of a spark of it,
but was so happy to see his immortal mistress do what she liked that he
could positively beam at the odd circumstance of her almost lavishing
public caresses on a gentleman not, after all, of negligible importance.