XLVIII

Miriam had mounted at a bound, in her new part, several steps in the

ladder of fame, and at the climax of the London season this fact was

brought home to her from hour to hour. It produced a thousand

solicitations and entanglements, and she rapidly learned that to be

celebrated takes up almost as much of one's own time as of other

people's. Even though, as she boasted, she had reduced to a science the

practice of "working" her mother--she made use of the good lady socially

to the utmost, pushing her perpetually into the breach--there was many a

juncture at which it was clear that she couldn't too much disoblige

without hurting her cause. She made almost an income out of the

photographers--their appreciation of her as a subject knew no

bounds--and she supplied the newspapers with columns of characteristic

copy. To the gentlemen who sought speech of her on behalf of these

organs she poured forth, vindictively, floods of unscrupulous romance;

she told them all different tales, and, as her mother told them others

more marvellous yet, publicity was cleverly caught by rival versions,

which surpassed each other in authenticity. The whole case was

remarkable, was unique; for if the girl was advertised by the

bewilderment of her readers she seemed to every sceptic, on his going to

see her, as fine as if he had discovered her for himself. She was still

accommodating enough, however, from time to time, to find an hour to

come and sit to Nick Dormer, and he helped himself further by going to

her theatre whenever he could. He was conscious Julia Dallow would

probably hear of this and triumph with a fresh sense of how right she

had been; but the reflexion only made him sigh resignedly, so true it

struck him as being that there are some things explanation can never

better, can never touch.

Miriam brought Basil Dashwood once to see her portrait, and Basil, who

commended it in general, directed his criticism mainly to two

points--its not yet being finished and its not having gone into that

year's Academy. The young actor audibly panted; he felt the short breath

of Miriam's rapidity, the quick beat of her success, and, looking at

everything now from the standpoint of that speculation, could scarcely

contain his impatience at the painter's clumsy slowness. He thought the

latter's second attempt much better than his first, but somehow it ought

by that time to be shining in the eye of the public. He put it to their

friend with an air of acuteness--he had those felicities--that in every

great crisis there is nothing like striking while the iron is hot. He

even betrayed the conviction that by putting on a spurt Nick might wind

up the job and still get the Academy people to take him in. Basil knew

some of them; he all but offered to speak to them--the case was so

exceptional; he had no doubt he could get something done. Against the

appropriation of the work by Peter Sherringham he explicitly and loudly

protested, in spite of the homeliest recommendations of silence from

Miriam; and it was indeed easy to guess how such an arrangement would

interfere with his own conception of the eventual right place for the

two portraits--the vestibule of the theatre, where every one going in

and out would see them suspended face to face and surrounded by

photographs, artistically disposed, of the young actress in a variety of

characters. Dashwood showed superiority in his jump to the contention

that so exhibited the pictures would really help to draw. Considering

the virtue he attributed to Miriam the idea was exempt from narrow

prejudice.

Moreover, though a trifle feverish, he was really genial; he repeated

more than once, "Yes, my dear sir, you've done it this time." This was a

favourite formula with him; when some allusion was made to the girl's

success he greeted it also with a comfortable "This time she _has_ done

it." There was ever a hint of fine judgement and far calculation in his

tone. It appeared before he went that this time even he himself had done

it--he had taken up something that would really answer. He told Nick

more about Miriam, more certainly about her outlook at that moment, than

she herself had communicated, contributing strongly to our young man's

impression that one by one every gage of a great career was being

dropped into her cup. Nick himself tasted of success vicariously for the

hour. Miriam let her comrade talk only to contradict him, and

contradicted him only to show how indifferently she could do it. She

treated him as if she had nothing more to learn about his folly, but as

if it had taken intimate friendship to reveal to her the full extent of

it. Nick didn't mind her intimate friendships, but he ended by disliking

Dashwood, who gave on his nerves--a circumstance poor Julia, had it come

to her knowledge, would doubtless have found deplorably significant.

Miriam was more pleased with herself than ever: she now made no scruple

of admitting that she enjoyed all her advantages. She had a fuller

vision of how successful success could be; she took everything as it

came--dined out every Sunday and even went into the country till the

Monday morning; kept a hundred distinguished names on her lips and

abounded in strange tales of the people who were making up to her. She

struck Nick as less strenuous than she had been hitherto, as making even

an aggressive show of inevitable laxities; but he was conscious of no

obligation to rebuke her for it--the less as he had a dim vision that

some effect of that sort, some irritation of his curiosity, was what she

desired to produce. She would perhaps have liked, for reasons best known

to herself, to look as if she were throwing herself away, not being able

to do anything else. He couldn't talk to her as if he took a deep

interest in her career, because in fact he didn't; she remained to him

primarily and essentially a pictorial object, with the nature of whose

vicissitudes he was concerned--putting common charity and his personal

good nature of course aside--only so far as they had something to say in

her face. How could he know in advance what turn of her experience,

twist of her life, would say most?--so possible was it even that

complete failure or some incalculable perversion (innumerable were the

queer traps that might be set for her) would only make her for his

particular purpose more precious.

When she had left him at any rate, the day she came with Basil Dashwood,

and still more on a later occasion, that of his turning back to his work

after putting her into her carriage, and otherwise bare-headedly

manifesting, the last time, for that year apparently, that he was to see

her--when she had left him it occurred to him in the light of her quick

distinction that there were deep differences in the famous artistic

life. Miriam was already in a glow of glory--which, moreover, was

probably but a faint spark in relation to the blaze to come; and as he

closed the door on her and took up his palette to rub it with a dirty

cloth the little room in which his own battle was practically to be

fought looked woefully cold and grey and mean. It was lonely and yet at

the same time was peopled with unfriendly shadows--so thick he foresaw

them gather in winter twilights to come--the duller conditions, the

longer patiences, the less immediate and less personal joys. His late

beginning was there and his wasted youth, the mistakes that would still

bring forth children after their image, the sedentary solitude, the grey

mediocrity, the poor explanations, the effect of foolishness he dreaded

even from afar of in having to ask people to wait, and wait longer, and

wait again, for a fruition which to their sense at least might well

prove a grotesque anti-climax. He yearned enough over it, however it

should figure, to feel that this possible pertinacity might enter into

comparison even with such a productive force as Miriam's. That was after

all in his bare studio the most collective dim presence, the one that

kept him company best as he sat there and that made it the right place,

however wrong--the sense that it was to the thing in itself he was

attached. This was Miriam's case too, but the sharp contrast, which she

showed him she also felt, was in the number of other things she got with

the thing in itself.

I hasten to add that our young man had hours when this last mystic value

struck him as requiring for its full operation no adjunct whatever--as

being in its own splendour a summary of all adjuncts and apologies. I

have related that the great collections, the National Gallery and the

Museum, were sometimes rather a series of dead surfaces to him; but the

sketch I have attempted of him will have been inadequate if it fails to

suggest that there were other days when, as he strolled through them, he

plucked right and left perfect nosegays of reassurance. Bent as he was

on working in the modern, which spoke to him with a thousand voices, he

judged it better for long periods not to haunt the earlier masters,

whose conditions had been so different--later he came to see that it

didn't matter much, especially if one kept away; but he was liable to

accidental deflexions from this theory, liable in particular to feel the

sanctity of the great portraits of the past. These were the things the

most inspiring, in the sense that while generations, while worlds had

come and gone, they seemed far most to prevail and survive and testify.

As he stood before them the perfection of their survival often struck

him as the supreme eloquence, the virtue that included all others,

thanks to the language of art, the richest and most universal. Empires

and systems and conquests had rolled over the globe and every kind of

greatness had risen and passed away, but the beauty of the great

pictures had known nothing of death or change, and the tragic centuries

had only sweetened their freshness. The same faces, the same figures

looked out at different worlds, knowing so many secrets the particular

world didn't, and when they joined hands they made the indestructible

thread on which the pearls of history were strung.

Miriam notified her artist that her theatre was to close on the tenth of

August, immediately after which she was to start, with the company, on a

tremendous tour of the provinces. They were to make a lot of money, but

they were to have no holiday, and she didn't want one; she only wanted

to keep at it and make the most of her limited opportunities for

practice; inasmuch as at that rate, playing but two parts a year--and

such parts: she despised them!--she shouldn't have mastered the

rudiments of her trade before decrepitude would compel her to lay it by.

The first time she came to the studio after her visit with Dashwood she

sprang up abruptly at the end of half an hour, saying she could sit no

more--she had had enough and to spare of it. She was visibly restless

and preoccupied, and though Nick had not waited till now to note that

she had more moods in her list than he had tints on his palette he had

never yet seen her sensibility at this particular pitch. It struck him

rather as a waste of passion, but he was ready to let her go. She looked

round the place as if suddenly tired of it and then said mechanically,

in a heartless London way, while she smoothed down her gloves, "So

you're just going to stay on?" After he had confessed that this was his

dark purpose she continued in the same casual, talk-making manner: "I

daresay it's the best thing for you. You're just going to grind, eh?"

"I see before me an eternity of grinding."

"All alone by yourself in this dull little hole? You _will_ be

conscientious, you _will_ be virtuous."

"Oh my solitude will be mitigated--I shall have models and people."

"What people--what models?" Miriam asked as she arranged her hat before

the glass.

"Well, no one so good as you."

"That's a prospect!" the girl laughed--"for all the good you've got out

of me!"

"You're no judge of that quantity," said Nick, "and even I can't measure

it just yet. Have I been rather a bore and a brute? I can easily believe

it; I haven't talked to you--I haven't amused you as I might. The truth

is that taking people's likenesses is a very absorbing, inhuman

occupation. You can't do much to them besides."

"Yes, it's a cruel honour to pay them."

"Cruel--that's too much," he objected.

"I mean it's one you shouldn't confer on those you like, for when it's

over it's over: it kills your interest in them. After you've finished

them you don't like them any more at all."

"Surely I like _you_," Nick returned, sitting tilted back before his

picture with his hands in his pockets.

"We've done very well: it's something not to have quarrelled"--and she

smiled at him now, seeming more "in" it. "I wouldn't have had you slight

your work--I wouldn't have had you do it badly. But there's no fear of

that for you," she went on. "You're the real thing and the rare bird. I

haven't lived with you this way without seeing that: you're the sincere

artist so much more than I. No, no, don't protest," she added with one

of her sudden, fine transitions to a deeper tone. "You'll do things that

will hand on your name when my screeching is happily over. Only you do

seem to me, I confess, rather high and dry here--I speak from the point

of view of your comfort and of my personal interest in you. You strike

me as kind of lonely, as the Americans say--rather cut off and isolated

in your grandeur. Haven't you any confreres--fellow-artists and people

of that sort? Don't they come near you?"

"I don't know them much," Nick humbly confessed. "I've always been

afraid of them, and how can they take me seriously?"

"Well, _I_'ve got confreres, and sometimes I wish I hadn't! But does

your sister never come near you any more," she asked, "or is it only the

fear of meeting me?"

He was aware of his mother's theory that Biddy was constantly bundled

home from Rosedale Road at the approach of improper persons: she was as

angry at this as if she wouldn't have been more so had her child

suffered exposure; but the explanation he gave his present visitor was

nearer the truth. He reminded her that he had already told her--he had

been careful to do this, so as not to let it appear she was

avoided--that his sister was now most of the time in the country,

staying with an hospitable relation.

"Oh yes," the girl rejoined to this, "with Mr. Sherringham's sister,

Mrs.--what's her name? I always forget." And when he had pronounced the

word with a reluctance he doubtless failed sufficiently to conceal--he

hated to talk of Julia by any name and didn't know what business Miriam

had with her--she went on: "That's the one--the beauty, the wonderful

beauty. I shall never forget how handsome she looked the day she found

me here. I don't in the least resemble her, but I should like to have a

try at that type some day in a comedy of manners. But who the devil will

write me a comedy of manners? There it is! The danger would be, no

doubt, that I should push her _a la charge_."

Nick listened to these remarks in silence, saying to himself that if she

should have the bad taste--which she seemed trembling on the brink

of--to make an allusion to what had passed between the lady in question

and himself he should dislike her beyond remedy. It would show him she

was a coarse creature after all. Her good genius interposed, however, as

against this hard penalty, and she quickly, for the moment at least,

whisked away from the topic, demanding, since they spoke of comrades and

visitors, what had become of Gabriel Nash, whom she hadn't heard of for

so many days.

"I think he's tired of me," said Nick; "he hasn't been near me either.

But after all it's natural--he has seen me through."

"Seen you through? Do you mean," she laughed, "seen through you? Why

you've only just begun."

"Precisely, and at bottom he doesn't like to see me begin. He's afraid I

shall do something."