"That's flattering to me."
"Oh you--don't you pretend to complain," Madame Carre said. "I prefer
_our_ imprecations--those of Camille," she went on. "They have the
beauty _des plus belles choses_."
"I can say them too," Miriam broke in.
"_Insolente_!" smiled Madame Carre. "Camille doesn't squat down on the
floor in the middle of them.
"For grief is proud and makes his owner stoop.
To me and to the state of my great grief
Let kings assemble,"
Miriam quickly declaimed. "Ah if you don't feel the way she makes a
throne of it!"
"It's really tremendously fine, _chere madame_," Sherringham said.
"There's nothing like it."
"_Vous etes insupportables_," the old woman answered. "Stay with us.
I'll teach you Phedre."
"Ah Phaedra, Phaedra!" Basil Dashwood vaguely ejaculated, looking more
gentlemanly than ever.
"You've learned all I've taught you, but where the devil have you
learned what I haven't?" Madame Carre went on.
"I've worked--I have; you'd call it work--all through the bright, late
summer, all through the hot, dull, empty days. I've battered down the
door--I did hear it crash one day. But I'm not so very good yet. I'm
only in the right direction."
"_Malicieuse_!" growled Madame Carre.
"Oh I can beat that," the girl went on.
"Did you wake up one morning and find you had grown a pair of wings?"
Peter asked. "Because that's what the difference amounts to--you really
soar. Moreover, you're an angel," he added, charmed with her
unexpectedness, the good nature of her forbearance to reproach him for
not having written to her. And it seemed to him privately that she _was_
angelic when in answer to this she said ever so blandly:
"You know you read _King John_ with me before you went away. I thought
over immensely what you said. I didn't understand it much at the time--I
was so stupid. But it all came to me later."
"I wish you could see yourself," Peter returned.
"My dear fellow, I do. What sort of a dunce do you take me for? I didn't
miss a vibration of my voice, a fold of my robe."
"Well, I didn't see you troubling about it," Peter handsomely insisted.
"No one ever will. Do you think I'd ever show it?"
"_Ars celare artem_," Basil Dashwood jocosely dropped.
"You must first have the art to hide," said Sherringham, wondering a
little why Miriam didn't introduce her young friend to him. She was,
however, both then and later perfectly neglectful of such cares, never
thinking, never minding how other people got on together. When she found
they didn't get on she jeered at them: that was the nearest she came to
arranging for them. Our young man noted in her from the moment she felt
her strength an immense increase of this good-humoured inattention to
detail--all detail save that of her work, to which she was ready to
sacrifice holocausts of feelings when the feelings were other people's.
This conferred on her a large profanity, an absence of ceremony as to
her social relations, which was both amusing because it suggested that
she would take what she gave, and formidable because it was inconvenient
and you mightn't care to give what she would take.
"If you haven't any art it's not quite the same as if you didn't hide
it, is it?" Basil Dashwood ingeniously threw out.
"That's right--say one of your clever things!" Miriam sweetly responded.
"You're always acting," he declared in English and with a simple-minded
laugh, while Sherringham remained struck with his expressing just what
he himself had felt weeks before.
"And when you've shown them your fish-wife, to your public _de la-bas_,
what will you do next?" asked Madame Carre.
"I'll do Juliet--I'll do Cleopatra."
"Rather a big bill, isn't it?" Mr. Dashwood volunteered to Sherringham
in a friendly but discriminating manner.
"Constance and Juliet--take care you don't mix them," said Sherringham.
"I want to be various. You once told me I had a hundred characters,"
Miriam returned.
"Ah, _vous en etes la_?" cried the old actress. "You may have a hundred
characters, but you've only three plays. I'm told that's all there are
in English."
Miriam, admirably indifferent to this charge, appealed to Peter. "What
arrangements have you made? What do the people want?"
"The people at the theatre?"
"I'm afraid they don't want _King John_, and I don't believe they hunger
for _Antony and Cleopatra_," Basil Dashwood suggested. "Ships and sieges
and armies and pyramids, you know: we mustn't be too heavy."
"Oh I hate scenery!" the girl sighed.
"_Elle est superbe_," said Madame Carre. "You must put those pieces on
the stage: how will you do it?"
"Oh we know how to get up a play in London, Madame Carre"--Mr. Dashwood
was all geniality. "They put money on it, you know."
"On it? But what do they put _in_ it? Who'll interpret them? Who'll
manage a style like that--the style of which the rhapsodies she has just
repeated are a specimen? Whom have you got that one has ever heard of?"
"Oh you'll hear of a good deal when once she gets started," Dashwood
cheerfully contended.
Madame Carre looked at him a moment; then, "I feel that you'll become
very bad," she said to Miriam. "I'm glad I shan't see it."
"People will do things for me--I'll make them," the girl declared. "I'll
stir them up so that they'll have ideas."
"What people, pray?"
"Ah terrible woman!" Peter theatrically groaned.
"We translate your pieces--there will be plenty of parts," Basil
Dashwood said.
"Why then go out of the door to come in at the window?--especially if
you smash it! An English arrangement of a French piece is a pretty woman
with her back turned."
"Do you really want to keep her?" Sherringham asked of Madame
Carre--quite as if thinking for a moment that this after all might be
possible.
She bent her strange eyes on him. "No, you're all too queer together. We
couldn't be bothered with you and you're not worth it."
"I'm glad it's 'together' that we're queer then--we can console each
other."
"If you only would; but you don't seem to! In short I don't understand
you--I give you up. But it doesn't matter," said the old woman wearily,
"for the theatre's dead and even you, _ma toute-belle_, won't bring it
to life. Everything's going from bad to worse, and I don't care what
becomes of you. You wouldn't understand us here and they won't
understand you there, and everything's impossible, and no one's a whit
the wiser, and it's not of the least consequence. Only when you raise
your arms lift them just a little higher," Madame Carre added.
"My mother will be happier _chez nous_" said Miriam, throwing her arms
straight up and giving them a noble tragic movement.
"You won't be in the least in the right path till your mother's in
despair."
"Well, perhaps we can bring that about even in London," Sherringham
patiently laughed.
"Dear Mrs. Rooth--she's great fun," Mr. Dashwood as imperturbably
dropped.
Miriam transferred the dark weight of her gaze to him as if she were
practising. "_You_ won't upset her, at any rate." Then she stood with
her beautiful and fatal mask before her hostess. "I want to do the
modern too. I want to do _le drame_, with intense realistic effects."
"And do you want to look like the portico of the Madeleine when it's
draped for a funeral?" her instructress mocked. "Never, never. I don't
believe you're various: that's not the way I see you. You're pure
tragedy, with _de grands eclats de voix_ in the great style, or you're
nothing."
"Be beautiful--be only that," Peter urged with high interest. "Be only
what you can be so well--something that one may turn to for a glimpse of
perfection, to lift one out of all the vulgarities of the day."
Thus apostrophised the girl broke out with one of the speeches of
Racine's Phaedra, hushing her companions on the instant. "You'll be the
English Rachel," said Basil Dashwood when she stopped.
"Acting in French!" Madame Carre amended. "I don't believe in an English
Rachel."
"I shall have to work it out, what I shall be," Miriam concluded with a
rich pensive effect.
"You're in wonderfully good form to-day," Sherringham said to her; his
appreciation revealing a personal subjection he was unable to conceal
from his companions, much as he wished it.
"I really mean to do everything."
"Very well; after all Garrick did."
"Then I shall be the Garrick of my sex."
"There's a very clever author doing something for me; I should like you
to see it," said Basil Dashwood, addressing himself equally to Miriam
and to her diplomatic friend.
"Ah if you've very clever authors----!" And Madame Carre spun the sound
to the finest satiric thread.
"I shall be very happy to see it," Peter returned.
This response was so benevolent that Basil Dashwood presently began:
"May I ask you at what theatre you've made arrangements?"
Sherringham looked at him a moment. "Come and see me at the embassy and
I'll tell you." Then he added: "I know your sister, Mrs. Lovick."
"So I supposed: that's why I took the liberty of asking such a
question."
"It's no liberty, but Mr. Sherringham doesn't appear to be able to tell
you," said Miriam.
"Well, you know, it's a very curious world, all those theatrical people
over there," Peter conceded.
"Ah don't say anything against them when I'm one of them," Basil
Dashwood laughed.
"I might plead the absence of information," Peter returned, "as Miss
Rooth has neglected to make us acquainted."
Miriam vaguely smiled. "I know you both so little." But she presented
them with a great stately air to each other, and the two men shook hands
while Madame Carre observed them.
"_Tiens_! you gentlemen meet here for the first time? You do right to
become friends--that's the best thing. Live together in peace and mutual
confidence. _C'est de beaucoup le plus sage_."
"Certainly, for yoke-fellows," said Sherringham.
He began the next moment to repeat to his new acquaintance some of the
things he had been told in London; but their hostess stopped him off,
waving the talk away with charming overdone stage horror and the young
hands of the heroines of Marivaux. "Ah wait till you go--for that! Do
you suppose I care for news of your mountebanks' booths?"