A few days after the performance of the _White Lady_, Kendal, in the
course of his weekly letter to his sister, sent her a fairly-detailed
account of the evening, including the interview with her after the play,
which had left two or three very marked impressions upon him. 'I wish,'
he wrote, 'I could only convey to you a sense of her personal charm such
as might balance the impression of her artistic defects, which I suppose
this account of mine cannot but leave on you. When I came away that night
after our conversation with her I had entirely forgotten her failure as
an actress, and it is only later, since I have thought over the evening
in detail, that I have returned to my first standpoint of wonder at the
easy toleration of the English public. When you are actually with her,
talking to her, looking at her, Forbes's attitude is the only possible
and reasonable one. What does art, or cultivation, or training matter!--I
found myself saying, as I walked home, in echo of him,--so long as Nature
will only condescend once in a hundred years to produce for us a creature
so perfect, so finely fashioned to all beautiful uses! Let other people
go through the toil to acquire; their aim is truth: but here is beauty in
its quintessence, and what is beauty but three parts of truth? Beauty is
harmony with the universal order, a revelation of laws and perfections of
which, in our common groping through a dull world, we find in general
nothing to remind us. And if so, what folly to ask of a human creature
that it should be more than beautiful! It is a messenger from the gods,
and we treat it as if it were any common traveller along the highway of
life, and cross-examine it for its credentials instead of raising our
altar and sacrificing to it with grateful hearts!
'That was my latest impression of Friday night. But, naturally, by
Saturday morning I had returned to the rational point of view. The mind's
morning climate is removed by many degrees from that of the evening; and
the critical revolt which the whole spectacle of the _White Lady_ had
originally roused in me revived in all its force. I began, indeed, to
feel as if I and humanity, with its long laborious tradition, were on one
side, holding our own against a young and arrogant aggressor--namely,
beauty, in the person of Miss Bretherton! How many men and women, I
thought, have laboured and struggled and died in the effort to reach a
higher and higher perfection in one single art, and are they to be
outdone, eclipsed in a moment, by something which is a mere freak of
nature, something which, like the lilies of the field, has neither toiled
nor spun, and yet claims the special inheritance and reward of those who
have! It seemed to me as though my feeling in her presence of the night
before, as if the sudden overthrow of the critical resistance in me had
been a kind of treachery to the human cause. Beauty has power enough, I
found myself reflecting with some fierceness,--let us withhold from her a
sway and a prerogative which are not rightfully hers; let us defend
against her that store of human sympathy which is the proper reward, not
of her facile and heaven-born perfections, but of labour and
intelligence, of all that is complex and tenacious in the workings of the
human spirit.
'And then, as my mood cooled still further, I began to recall many an
evening at the _Français_ with you, and one part after another, one actor
after another, recurred to me, till, as I realised afresh what dramatic
intelligence and dramatic training really are, I fell into an angry
contempt for our lavish English enthusiasms. Poor girl! it is not her
fault if she believes herself to be a great actress. Brought up under
misleading conditions, and without any but the most elementary education,
how is she to know what the real thing means? She finds herself the rage
within a few weeks of her appearance in the greatest city of the world.
Naturally, she pays no heed to her critics,--why should she?
'And she is indeed a most perplexing mixture. Do what I will I cannot
harmonise all my different impressions of her. Let me begin again. Why is
it that her acting is so poor? I never saw a more dramatic personality!
Everything that she says or does is said or done with a warmth, a force,
a vivacity that make her smallest gesture and her lightest tone impress
themselves upon you. I felt this very strongly two or three times after
the play on Friday night. In her talk with Forbes, for instance, whom she
has altogether in her toils, and whom she plays with as though he were
the gray-headed Merlin and she an innocent Vivien, weaving harmless
spells about him. And then, from this mocking war of words and looks,
this gay camaraderie, in which there was not a scrap of coquetry or
self-consciousness, she would pass into a sudden outburst of anger as to
the impertinence of English rich people--the impertinence of rich
millionaires who have tried once or twice to "order" her for their
evening parties as they would order their ices, or the impertinence of
the young "swell about town" who thinks she has nothing to do behind the
scenes but receive his visits and provide him with entertainment. And, as
the quick impetuous words came rushing out, you felt that here for once
was a woman speaking her real mind to you, and that with a flashing eye
and curving lip, an inborn grace and energy which made every word
memorable. If she would but look like that or speak like that on the
stage! But there, of course, is the rub. The whole difficulty of art
consists in losing your own personality, so to speak, and finding it
again transformed, and it is a difficulty which Miss Bretherton has never
even understood.
'After this impression of spontaneity and natural force, I think what
struck me most was the physical effect London has already exercised upon
her in six weeks. She looks superbly sound and healthy; she is tall and
fully developed, and her colour, for all its delicacy, is pure and
glowing. But, after all, she was born in a languid tropical climate, and
it is the nervous strain, the rush, the incessant occupation of London
which seem to be telling upon her. She gave me two or three times a
painful impression of fatigue on Friday--fatigue and something like
depression. After twenty minutes' talk she threw herself back against the
iron pillar behind her, her White Lady's hood framing a face so pale and
drooping that we all got up to go, feeling that it was cruelty to keep
her up a minute longer. Mrs. Stuart asked her about her Sundays, and
whether she ever got out of town. "Oh," she said, with a sigh and a look
at her uncle, who was standing near, "I think Sunday is the hardest day
of all. It is our 'at home' day, and such crowds come--just to look at
me, I suppose, for I cannot talk to a quarter of them." Whereupon Mr.
Worrall said in his bland commercial way that society had its burdens as
well as its pleasures, and that his dear niece could hardly escape her
social duties after the flattering manner in which London had welcomed
her. Miss Bretherton answered, with a sort of languid rebellion, that her
social duties would soon be the death of her. But evidently she is very
docile at home, and they do what they like with her. It seems to me that
the uncle and aunt are a good deal shrewder than the London public; it is
borne in upon me by various indications that they know exactly what their
niece's popularity depends on, and that it very possibly may not be a
long-lived one. Accordingly, they have determined on two things: first,
that she shall make as much money for the family as can by any means be
made; and, secondly, that she shall find her way into London society, and
secure, if possible, a great _parti_ before the enthusiasm for her has
had time to chill. One hears various stories of the uncle, all in this
sense; I cannot say how true they are.
'However, the upshot of the supper-party was that next day Wallace,
Forbes, and I met at Mrs. Stuart's house, and formed a Sunday League
for the protection of Miss Bretherton from her family; in other words,
we mean to secure that she has occasional rest and country air on
Sunday--her only free day. Mrs. Stuart has already wrung out of Mrs.
Worrall, by a little judicious scaring, permission to carry her off for
two Sundays--one this month and one next--and Miss Bretherton's romantic
side, which is curiously strong in her, has been touched by the
suggestion that the second Sunday should be spent at Oxford.
'Probably for the first Sunday--a week hence--we shall go to Surrey. You
remember Hugh Farnham's property near Leith Hill? I know all the farms
about there from old shooting days, and there is one on the edge of some
great commons, which would be perfection on a May Sunday. I will write
you a full account of our day. The only rule laid down by the League is
that things are to be so managed that Miss Bretherton is to have no
possible excuse for fatigue so long as she is in the hands of the
society.
'My book goes on fairly well. I have been making a long study of De
Musset, with the result that the poems seem to me far finer than I had
remembered, and the _Confessions d' un Enfant du Siècle_ a miserable
performance. How was it it impressed me so much when I read it first? His
poems have reminded me of you at every step. Do you remember how you used
to read them aloud to our mother and me after dinner, while the father
had his sleep before going down to the House?'
Ten days later Kendal spent a long Monday evening in writing the
following letter to his sister:--
'Our yesterday's expedition was, I think, a great success. Mrs. Stuart
was happy, because she had for once induced Stuart to put away his papers
and allow himself a holiday; it was Miss Bretherton's first sight of the
genuine English country, and she was like a child among the gorse and the
hawthorns, while Wallace and I amused our manly selves extremely well in
befriending the most beautiful woman in the British Isles, in drawing her
out and watching her strong naive impressions of things. Stuart, I think,
was not quite happy. It is hardly to be expected of a lawyer in the
crisis of his fortunes that he should enjoy ten hours' divorce from his
briefs; but he did his best to reach the common level, and his wife, who
is devoted to him, and might as well not be married at all, from the
point of view of marital companionship, evidently thought him perfection.
The day more than confirmed my liking for Mrs. Stuart; there are certain
little follies about her; she is too apt to regard every distinguished
dinner-party she and Stuart attend as an event of enormous and universal
interest, and beyond London society her sympathies hardly reach, except
in that vague charitable form which is rather pity and toleration than
sympathy. But she is kindly, womanly, soft; she has no small jealousies
and none of that petty self-consciousness which makes so many women
wearisome to the great majority of plain men, who have no wish to take
their social exercises too much _au sérieux._
'I was curious to see what sort of a relationship she and Miss Bretherton
had developed towards each other. Mrs. Stuart is nothing if not
cultivated; her light individuality floats easily on the stream of London
thought, now with this current, now with that, but always in movement,
never left behind. She has the usual literary and artistic topics at her
fingers' end, and as she knows everybody, whenever the more abstract
sides of a subject begin to bore her, she can fall back upon an endless
store of gossip as lively, as brightly-coloured, and, on the whole, as
harmless as she herself is. Miss Bretherton had till a week or two ago
but two subjects--Jamaica and the stage--the latter taken in a somewhat
narrow sense. Now, she has added to her store of knowledge a great number
of first impressions of London notorieties, which naturally throw her
mind and Mrs. Stuart's more frequently into contact with each other. But
I see that, after all, Mrs. Stuart had no need of any bridges of this
kind to bring her on to common ground with Isabel Bretherton. Her strong
womanliness and the leaven of warm-hearted youth still stirring in her
would be quite enough of themselves, and, besides, there is her critical
delight in the girl's beauty, and the little personal pride and
excitement she undoubtedly feels at having, in so creditable and natural
a manner, secured a hold on the most interesting person of the season. It
is curious to see her forgetting her own specialities, and neglecting to
make her own points, that she may bring her companion forward and set her
in the best light. Miss Bretherton takes her homage very prettily; it is
natural to her to be made much of, and she does not refuse it, but she in
her turn evidently admires enormously her friend's social capabilities
and cleverness, and she is impulsively eager to make some return for Mrs.
Stuart's kindness--an eagerness which shows itself in the greatest
complaisance towards all the Stuarts' friends, and in a constant
watchfulness for anything which will please and flatter them.
'However, here I am as usual wasting time in analysis instead of
describing to you our Sunday. It was one of those heavenly days with
which May startles us out of our winter pessimism, sky and earth seemed
to be alike clothed in a young iridescent beauty. We found a carriage
waiting for us at the station, and we drove along a great main road until
a sudden turn landed us in a green track traversing a land of endless
commons, as wild and as forsaken of human kind as though it were a region
in some virgin continent. On either hand the gorse was thick and golden,
great oaks, splendid in the first dazzling sharpness of their spring
green, threw vast shadows over the fresh moist grass beneath, and over
the lambs sleeping beside their fleecy mothers, while the hawthorns rose
into the sky in masses of rose-tinted snow, each tree a shining miracle
of white set in the environing blue.
'Then came the farmhouse--old, red-brick, red-tiled,
casemented--everything that the aesthetic soul desires--the farmer and
his wife looking out for us, and a pleasant homely meal ready in the
parlour, with its last-century woodwork.
'Forbes was greatly in his element at lunch. I never knew him more racy;
he gave us biographies, mostly imaginary, illustrated by sketches, made
in the intervals of eating, of the sitters whose portraits he has
condescended to take this year. They range from a bishop and a royalty
down to a little girl picked up in the London streets, and his
presentation of the characteristic attitudes of each--those attitudes
which, according to him, betray the "inner soul" of the bishop or the
foundling--was admirable. Then he fell upon the Academy--that respected
body of which I suppose he will soon be the President--and tore it limb
from limb. With what face I shall ever sit at the same table with him at
the Academy dinners of the future--supposing fortune ever exalts me again
as she did this year to that august meal--I hardly know. Millais's faces,
Pettie's knights, or Calderon's beauties--all fared the same. You could
not say it was ill-natured; it was simply the bare truth of things put in
the whimsical manner which is natural to Forbes.
'Miss Bretherton listened to and laughed at it all, finding her way
through the crowd of unfamiliar names and allusions with a woman's
cleverness, looking adorable all the time in a cloak of some brown velvet
stuff, and a large hat also of brown velvet. She has a beautiful hand,
fine and delicate, not specially small, but full of character; it was
pleasant to watch it playing with her orange, or smoothing back every now
and then the rebellious locks which will stray, do what she will, beyond
the boundaries assigned to them. Presently Wallace was ill-advised enough
to ask her which pictures she had liked best at the Private View; she
replied by picking out a ballroom scene of Forth's and an unutterable
mawkish thing of Halford's--a troubadour in a pink dressing-gown,
gracefully intertwined with violet scarves, singing to a party of robust
young women in a "light which never was on sea or land." "You could count
all the figures in the first," she said, "it was so lifelike, so real;"
and then Halford was romantic, the picture was pretty, and she liked it.
I looked at Forbes with some amusement; it was gratifying, remembering
the rodomontade with which Wallace and had been crushed on the night of
the _White Lady_, to see him wince under Miss Bretherton's liking of the
worst art in England! Is the critical spirit worth something, or is it
superfluous in theatrical matters and only indispensable in matters of
painting! I think he caught the challenge in my eye, for he evidently
felt himself in some little difficulty.
'"Oh, you couldn't," he said with a groan, "you couldn't like that
ballroom,--and that troubadour, Heaven forgive us! Well, there must be
something in it,--there must be something in it, if it really gives you
pleasure,--I daresay there is; we're so confoundedly uppish in the way we
look at things. If either of them had a particle of drawing or a scrap of
taste, if both of them weren't as bare as a broomstick of the least
vestige of gift, or any suspicion of knowledge, there might be a good
deal to say for them! Only, my dear Miss Bretherton, you see it's really
not a matter of opinion; I assure you it isn't. I could prove to you as
plain as that two and two make four, that Halford's figures don't join in
the middle, and that Forth's men and women are as flat as my hand--there
isn't a back among them! And then the taste, and the colour, and the
clap-trap idiocy of the sentiment! No, I don't think I can stand it. I am
all for people getting enjoyment where they can," with a defiant look at
me, "and snapping their fingers at the critics. But one must draw the
line somewhere. There's some art that's out of court from the beginning."
'I couldn't resist it.
'"Don't listen to him, Miss Bretherton," I cried. "If I were you I
wouldn't let him spoil your pleasure; the great thing is to _feel_;
defend your feeling against him! It's worth more than his criticisms."
'Forbes's eyes looked laughing daggers at me from under his shaggy white
brows. Mrs. Stuart and Wallace kept their countenances to perfection; but
I had him, there's no denying it.
'"Oh, I know nothing about it," said Isabel Bretherton, divinely
unconscious of the little skirmish going on around her. "You must teach
me, Mr. Forbes. I only know what touches me, what I like--that's all I
know in anything."
'"It's all we any of us know," said Wallace airily. "We begin with 'I
like' and 'I don't like,' then we begin to be proud, and make
distinctions and find reasons; but the thing beats us, and we come back
in the end to 'I like' and 'I don't like.'"
'The lunch over, we strolled out along the common, through heather which
as yet was a mere brown expanse of flowerless undergrowth, and copses
which overhead were a canopy of golden oak-leaf, and carpeted underneath
with primroses and the young up-curling bracken. Presently through a
little wood we came upon a pond lying wide and blue before us under the
breezy May sky, its shores fringed with scented fir-wood and the whole
air alive with birds. We sat down under a pile of logs fresh-cut and
fragrant, and talked away vigorously. It was a little difficult often to
keep the conversation on lines which did not exclude Miss Bretherton.
Forbes, the Stuarts, Wallace, and I are accustomed to be together, and
one never realises what a freemasonry the intercourse even of a capital
is until one tries to introduce an outsider into it. We talked the
theatre, of course, the ways of different actors, the fortunes of
managers. Isabel Bretherton naturally has as yet seen very little; her
comments were mainly personal, and all of a friendly, enthusiastic kind,
for the profession has been very cordial to her. A month or five weeks
more and her engagement at the _Calliope_ will be over. There are other
theatres open to her, of course, and all the managers are at her feet;
but she has set her heart upon going abroad for some time, and has, I
imagine, made so much money this season that the family cannot in decency
object to her having her own way. "I am wild to get to Italy," she said
to me in her emphatic, impetuous way. "Sir Walter Rutherford has talked
to me so much about it that I am beginning to dream of it. I long to have
done with London and be off! This English sun seems to me so chilly," and
she drew her winter cloak about her with a little shiver, although the
day was really an English summer day, and Mrs. Stuart was in cotton. "I
come from such warmth, and I loved it. I have been making acquaintance
with all sorts of horrors since I came to London--face-ache and
rheumatism and colds!--I scarcely knew there were such things in the
world. And I never knew what it was to be tired before. Sometimes I can
hardly drag through my work. I hate it so: it makes me cross like a
naughty child!"
'"Do you know," I said, flinging myself down beside her on the grass and
looking up at her, "that it's altogether wrong? Nature never meant you to
feel tired; it's monstrous, it's against the natural order of things!"
'"It's London," she said, with her little sigh and the drooping lip that
is so prettily pathetic. "I have the roar in my ears all day, and it
seems to be humming through my sleep at night. And then the crowd, and
the hurry people are in, and the quickness and sharpness of things! But I
have only a few weeks more," she added, brightening, "and then by October
I shall be more used to Europe--the climate and the life."
'I am much impressed, and so is Mrs. Stuart, by the struggle her nervous
strength is making against London. All my nursing of you, Marie, and of
our mother has taught me to notice these things in women, and I find
myself taking often a very physical and medical view of Miss Bretherton.
You see, it is a case of a northern temperament and constitution relaxed
by tropical conditions, and then exposed once more in an exceptional
degree to the strain and stress of northern life. I rage when I think of
such a piece of physical excellence marred and dimmed by our harsh
English struggle. And all for what? For a commonplace, make-believe art,
vulgarising in the long run both to the artist and the public! There is a
sense of tragic waste about it. Suppose London destroys her health--there
are some signs of it--what a futile, ironical pathos there would be in
it. I long to step in, to "have at" somebody, to stop it.
'A little incident later on threw a curious light upon her. We had moved
on to the other side of the pond and were basking in the fir-wood. The
afternoon sun was slanting through the branches on to the bosom of the
pond; a splendid Scotch fir just beside us tossed out its red-limbed
branches over a great bed of green reeds, starred here and there with
yellow irises. The woman from the keeper's cottage near had brought us
out some tea, and most of us had fallen into a sybaritic frame of mind in
which talk seemed to be a burden on the silence and easeful peace of the
scene. Suddenly Wallace and Forbes fell upon the question of Balzac, of
whom Wallace has been making a study lately, and were soon landed in a
discussion of Balzac's method of character-drawing. Are Eugène de
Rastignac, le Père Goriot, and old Grandet real beings or mere
incarnations of qualities, mathematical deductions from a given point? At
last I was drawn in, and the Stuarts: Stuart has trained his wife in
Balzac, and she has a dry original way of judging a novel, which is
stimulating and keeps the ball rolling. It was the first time that the
talk had not centred in one way or another round Miss Bretherton, who, of
course, was the first consideration throughout the day in all our minds.
We grew vehement and forgetful, till at last a little movement of hers
diverted the general current. She had taken off her hat and was leaning
back against the oak under which she sat, watching with parted lips and a
gaze of the purest delight and wonder the movements of a nut-hatch
overhead, a creature of the woodpecker kind, with delicate purple gray
plumage, who was tapping the branch above her for insects with his large
disproportionate bill, and then skimming along to a sand-bank a little
distance off, where he disappeared with his prey into his nest.
'"Ha!" said Wallace, who is a bird-lover, "a truce to Balzac, and let us
watch those nut-hatches! Miss Bretherton's quite right to prefer them to
French novels."
'"French novels!" she said, withdrawing her eyes from the branch above
her, and frowning a little at Wallace as she spoke. "Please don't expect
me to talk about them--I know nothing about them--I have never wished
to."
'Her voice had a tone almost of hauteur in it. I have noticed it before.
It is the tone of the famous actress accustomed to believe in herself and
her own opinion. I connected it, too, with all one hears of her
determination to look upon herself as charged with a mission for the
reform of stage morals. French novels and French actresses! apparently
she regards them all as so many unknown horrors, standing in the way of
the purification of dramatic art by a beautiful young person with a high
standard of duty. It is very odd! Evidently she is the Scotch
Presbyterian's daughter still, for all her profession, and her success,
and her easy ways with the Sabbath! Her remark produced a good deal of
unregenerate irritation in me. If she were a first-rate artist to begin
with, I was inclined to reflect, this moral enthusiasm would touch and
charm one a good deal more; as it is, considering her position, it is
rather putting the cart before the horse. But, of course, one can
understand that it is just these traits in her that help her to make the
impression she does on London society and the orthodox public in general.
'Wallace and I went off after the nut-hatches, enjoying a private laugh
by the way over Mrs. Stuart's little look of amazement and discomfort as
Miss Bretherton delivered herself. When we came back we found Forbes
sketching her--she sitting rather flushed and silent under the tree, and
he drawing away and working himself at every stroke into a greater and
greater enthusiasm. And certainly she was as beautiful as a dream,
sitting against that tree, with the brown heather about her and the young
oak-leaves overhead. But I returned in an antagonistic frame of mind, a
little out of patience with her and her beauty, and wondering why Nature
always blunders somewhere!
'However, on the way home she had another and a pleasanter surprise for
me. A carriage was waiting for us on the main road, and we strolled
towards it through the gorse and the trees and the rich level evening
lights. I dropped behind for some primroses still lingering in bloom
beside a little brook; she stayed too, and we were together, out of
ear-shot of the rest.
'"Mr. Kendal," she said, looking straight at me, as I handed the flowers
to her, "you may have misunderstood something just now. I don't want to
pretend to what I haven't got. I don't know French, and I can't read
French novels if I wished to ever so much."
'What was I to say? She stood looking at me seriously, a little proudly,
having eased her conscience, as it seemed to me, at some cost to herself.
I felt at first inclined to turn the thing off with a jest, but suddenly
I thought to myself that I too would speak my mind.
'"Well," I said deliberately, walking on beside her; "you lose a good
deal. There are hosts of French novels which I would rather not see a
woman touch with the tips of her fingers; but there are others, which
take one into a bigger world than we English people with our parochial
ways of writing and seeing have any notion of. George Sand carries you
full into the mid-European stream--you feel it flowing, you are brought
into contact with all the great ideas, all the big interests; she is an
education in herself. And then Balzac! he has such a range and breadth,
he teaches one so much of human nature, and with such conscience, such
force of representation! It's the same with their novels as with their
theatre. Whatever other faults he may have, a first-rate Frenchman of the
artistic sort takes more pains over his work than anybody else in the
world. They don't shirk, they throw their life-blood into it, whether
it's acting, or painting, or writing. You've never seen Desforêts, I
think?--no, of course not, and you will be gone before she comes again.
What a pity!"
'Miss Bretherton picked one of my primroses ruthlessly to pieces, and
flung it away from her with one of her nervous gestures. "I am not
sorry," she said. "Nothing would have induced me to go and see her."
'"Indeed!" I said, waiting a little curiously for what she would say
next.
'"It's not that I am jealous of her," she exclaimed, with a quick proud
look at me; "not that I don't believe she's a great actress; but I can't
separate her acting from what she is herself. It is women like that who
bring discredit on the whole profession--it is women like that who make
people think that no good woman can be an actress. I resent it, and I
mean to take the other line. I want to prove, if I can, that a woman may
be an actress and still be a lady, still be treated just as you treat the
women you know and respect! I mean to prove that there need never be a
word breathed against her, that she is anybody's equal, and that her
private life is her own, and not the public's! It makes my blood boil to
hear the way people--especially men--talk about Madame Desforêts; there
is not one of you who would let your wife or your sister shake hands with
her, and yet how you rave about her, how you talk as if there were
nothing in the world but genius--and French genius!"
'It struck me that I had got to something very much below the surface in
Miss Bretherton. It was a curious outburst; I remembered how often her
critics had compared her to Desforêts, greatly to her disadvantage. Was
this championship of virtue quite genuine? or was it merely the best
means of defending herself against a rival by the help of British
respectability?
'"Mme. Desforêts," I said, perhaps a little drily, "is a riddle to her
best friends, and probably to herself; she does a thousand wild,
imprudent, _bad_ things if you will, but she is the greatest actress the
modern world has seen, and that's something to have done for your
generation. To have moved the feelings and widened the knowledge of
thousands by such delicate, such marvellous, such conscientious work as
hers--there is an achievement so great, so masterly, that I for one will
throw no stones at her!"
'It seemed to me all through as though I were speaking perversely; I
could have argued on the other side as passionately as Isabel Bretherton
herself; but I was thinking of her dialogue with the Prince, of that
feeble, hysterical death-scene, and it irritated me that she, with her
beauty, and with British Philistinism and British virtue to back her,
should be trampling on Desforêts and genius. But I was conscious of my
audacity. If a certain number of critics have been plain-spoken, Isabel
Bretherton has none the less been surrounded for months past with people
who have impressed upon her that the modern theatre is a very doubtful
business, that her acting is as good as anybody's, and that her special
mission is to regenerate the manners of the stage. To have the naked,
artistic view thrust upon her--that it is the actress's business to
_act_, and that if she does that well, whatever may be her personal
short-comings, her generation has cause to be grateful to her--must be
repugnant to her. She, too, talks about art, but it is like a child who
learns a string of long words without understanding them. She walked on
beside me while I cooled down and thought what a fool I had been to
endanger a friendship which had opened so well,--her wonderful lips
opening once or twice as though to speak, and her quick breath coming and
going as she scattered the yellow petals of the flowers far and wide with
a sort of mute passion which sent a thrill through me. It was as though
she could not trust herself to speak, and I waited awkwardly on
Providence, wishing the others were not so far off. But suddenly the
tension of her mood seemed to give way. Her smile flashed out, and she
turned upon me with a sweet, eager graciousness, quite indescribable.
'"No, we won't throw stones at her! She _is_ great, I know, but that
other feeling is so strong in me. I care for my art; it seems to me
grand, magnificent!--but I think I care still more for making people
feel it is work a good woman can do, for holding my own in it, and
asserting myself against the people who behave as if all actresses had
done the things that Madame Desforêts has done. Don't think me narrow and
jealous. I should hate you and the Stuarts to think that of me. You have
all been so kind to me--such good, real friends! I shall never forget
this day--Oh! look, there is the carriage standing up there. I wish it
was the morning and not the evening, and that it might all come again! I
hate the thought of London and that hot theatre to-morrow night. Oh, my
primroses! What a wretch I am! I've lost them nearly all. Look, just that
bunch over there, Mr. Kendal, before we leave the common."
'I sprang to get them for her, and brought back a quantity. She took them
in her hand--how unlike other women she is after all, in spite of her
hatred of Bohemia!--and, raising them to her lips, she waved a farewell
through them to the great common lying behind us in the evening sun. "How
beautiful! how beautiful! This English country is so kind, so friendly!
It has gone to my heart. Good-night, you wonderful place!"
'She had conquered me altogether. It was done so warmly--with such a
winning, spontaneous charm. I cannot say what pleasure I got out of those
primroses lying in her soft ungloved hand all the way home. Henceforward,
I feel she may make what judgments and draw what lines she pleases; she
won't change me, and I have some hopes of modifying her; but I am not
very likely to feel annoyance towards her again. She is like some frank,
beautiful, high-spirited child playing a game she only half understands.
I wish she understood it better. I should like to help her to understand
it--but I won't quarrel with her, even in my thoughts, any more!
* * * * *
'On looking over this letter it seems to me that if
you were not you, and I were not I, you might with
some plausibility accuse me of being--what?--in love
with Miss Bretherton? But you know me too well.
You know I am one of the old-fashioned people who
believe in community of interests--in belonging to the
same world. When I come coolly to think about it, I
can hardly imagine two worlds, whether outwardly or
inwardly, more wide apart than mine and Miss
Bretherton's.'