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Henry James >> Nona Vincent
This etext was scanned by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk,
from the 1893 Macmillan and Co. edition. Proofing was by Nina
Hall, Mohua Sen, Bridie, Francine Smith and David.
Nona Vincent
by Henry James
CHAPTER I.
"I wondered whether you wouldn't read it to me," said Mrs. Alsager,
as they lingered a little near the fire before he took leave. She
looked down at the fire sideways, drawing her dress away from it and
making her proposal with a shy sincerity that added to her charm.
Her charm was always great for Allan Wayworth, and the whole air of
her house, which was simply a sort of distillation of herself, so
soothing, so beguiling that he always made several false starts
before departure. He had spent some such good hours there, had
forgotten, in her warm, golden drawing-room, so much of the
loneliness and so many of the worries of his life, that it had come
to be the immediate answer to his longings, the cure for his aches,
the harbour of refuge from his storms. His tribulations were not
unprecedented, and some of his advantages, if of a usual kind, were
marked in degree, inasmuch as he was very clever for one so young,
and very independent for one so poor. He was eight-and-twenty, but
he had lived a good deal and was full of ambitions and curiosities
and disappointments. The opportunity to talk of some of these in
Grosvenor Place corrected perceptibly the immense inconvenience of
London. This inconvenience took for him principally the line of
insensibility to Allan Wayworth's literary form. He had a literary
form, or he thought he had, and her intelligent recognition of the
circumstance was the sweetest consolation Mrs. Alsager could have
administered. She was even more literary and more artistic than he,
inasmuch as he could often work off his overflow (this was his
occupation, his profession), while the generous woman, abounding in
happy thoughts, but unedited and unpublished, stood there in the
rising tide like the nymph of a fountain in the plash of the marble
basin.
The year before, in a big newspapery house, he had found himself next
her at dinner, and they had converted the intensely material hour
into a feast of reason. There was no motive for her asking him to
come to see her but that she liked him, which it was the more
agreeable to him to perceive as he perceived at the same time that
she was exquisite. She was enviably free to act upon her likings,
and it made Wayworth feel less unsuccessful to infer that for the
moment he happened to be one of them. He kept the revelation to
himself, and indeed there was nothing to turn his head in the
kindness of a kind woman. Mrs. Alsager occupied so completely the
ground of possession that she would have been condemned to inaction
had it not been for the principle of giving. Her husband, who was
twenty years her senior, a massive personality in the City and a
heavy one at home (wherever he stood, or even sat, he was
monumental), owned half a big newspaper and the whole of a great many
other things. He admired his wife, though she bore no children, and
liked her to have other tastes than his, as that seemed to give a
greater acreage to their life. His own appetites went so far he
could scarcely see the boundary, and his theory was to trust her to
push the limits of hers, so that between them the pair should astound
by their consumption. His ideas were prodigiously vulgar, but some
of them had the good fortune to be carried out by a person of perfect
delicacy. Her delicacy made her play strange tricks with them, but
he never found this out. She attenuated him without his knowing it,
for what he mainly thought was that he had aggrandised HER. Without
her he really would have been bigger still, and society, breathing
more freely, was practically under an obligation to her which, to do
it justice, it acknowledged by an attitude of mystified respect. She
felt a tremulous need to throw her liberty and her leisure into the
things of the soul--the most beautiful things she knew. She found
them, when she gave time to seeking, in a hundred places, and
particularly in a dim and sacred region--the region of active pity--
over her entrance into which she dropped curtains so thick that it
would have been an impertinence to lift them. But she cultivated
other beneficent passions, and if she cherished the dream of
something fine the moments at which it most seemed to her to come
true were when she saw beauty plucked flower-like in the garden of
art. She loved the perfect work--she had the artistic chord. This
chord could vibrate only to the touch of another, so that
appreciation, in her spirit, had the added intensity of regret. She
could understand the joy of creation, and she thought it scarcely
enough to be told that she herself created happiness. She would have
liked, at any rate, to choose her way; but it was just here that her
liberty failed her. She had not the voice--she had only the vision.
The only envy she was capable of was directed to those who, as she
said, could do something.
As everything in her, however, turned to gentleness, she was
admirably hospitable to such people as a class. She believed Allan
Wayworth could do something, and she liked to hear him talk of the
ways in which he meant to show it. He talked of them almost to no
one else--she spoiled him for other listeners. With her fair bloom
and her quiet grace she was indeed an ideal public, and if she had
ever confided to him that she would have liked to scribble (she had
in fact not mentioned it to a creature), he would have been in a
perfect position for asking her why a woman whose face had so much
expression should not have felt that she achieved. How in the world
could she express better? There was less than that in Shakespeare
and Beethoven. She had never been more generous than when, in
compliance with her invitation, which I have recorded, he brought his
play to read to her. He had spoken of it to her before, and one dark
November afternoon, when her red fireside was more than ever an
escape from the place and the season, he had broken out as he came
in--"I've done it, I've done it!" She made him tell her all about
it--she took an interest really minute and asked questions
delightfully apt. She had spoken from the first as if he were on the
point of being acted, making him jump, with her participation, all
sorts of dreary intervals. She liked the theatre as she liked all
the arts of expression, and he had known her to go all the way to
Paris for a particular performance. Once he had gone with her--the
time she took that stupid Mrs. Mostyn. She had been struck, when he
sketched it, with the subject of his drama, and had spoken words that
helped him to believe in it. As soon as he had rung down his curtain
on the last act he rushed off to see her, but after that he kept the
thing for repeated last touches. Finally, on Christmas day, by
arrangement, she sat there and listened to it. It was in three acts
and in prose, but rather of the romantic order, though dealing with
contemporary English life, and he fondly believed that it showed the
hand if not of the master, at least of the prize pupil.
Allan Wayworth had returned to England, at two-and-twenty, after a
miscellaneous continental education; his father, the correspondent,
for years, in several foreign countries successively, of a
conspicuous London journal, had died just after this, leaving his
mother and her two other children, portionless girls, to subsist on a
very small income in a very dull German town. The young man's
beginnings in London were difficult, and he had aggravated them by
his dislike of journalism. His father's connection with it would
have helped him, but he was (insanely, most of his friends judged--
the great exception was always Mrs. Alsager) INTRAITABLE on the
question of form. Form--in his sense--was not demanded by English
newspapers, and he couldn't give it to them in THEIR sense. The
demand for it was not great anywhere, and Wayworth spent costly weeks
in polishing little compositions for magazines that didn't pay for
style. The only person who paid for it was really Mrs. Alsager: she
had an infallible instinct for the perfect. She paid in her own way,
and if Allan Wayworth had been a wage-earning person it would have
made him feel that if he didn't receive his legal dues his palm was
at least occasionally conscious of a gratuity. He had his
limitations, his perversities, but the finest parts of him were the
most alive, and he was restless and sincere. It is however the
impression he produced on Mrs. Alsager that most concerns us: she
thought him not only remarkably good-looking but altogether original.
There were some usual bad things he would never do--too many
prohibitive puddles for him in the short cut to success.
For himself, he had never been so happy as since he had seen his way,
as he fondly believed, to some sort of mastery of the scenic idea,
which struck him as a very different matter now that he looked at it
from within. He had had his early days of contempt for it, when it
seemed to him a jewel, dim at the best, hidden in a dunghill, a taper
burning low in an air thick with vulgarity. It was hedged about with
sordid approaches, it was not worth sacrifice and suffering. The man
of letters, in dealing with it, would have to put off all literature,
which was like asking the bearer of a noble name to forego his
immemorial heritage. Aspects change, however, with the point of
view: Wayworth had waked up one morning in a different bed
altogether. It is needless here to trace this accident to its
source; it would have been much more interesting to a spectator of
the young man's life to follow some of the consequences. He had been
made (as he felt) the subject of a special revelation, and he wore
his hat like a man in love. An angel had taken him by the hand and
guided him to the shabby door which opens, it appeared, into an
interior both splendid and austere. The scenic idea was magnificent
when once you had embraced it--the dramatic form had a purity which
made some others look ingloriously rough. It had the high dignity of
the exact sciences, it was mathematical and architectural. It was
full of the refreshment of calculation and construction, the
incorruptibility of line and law. It was bare, but it was erect, it
was poor, but it was noble; it reminded him of some sovereign famed
for justice who should have lived in a palace despoiled. There was a
fearful amount of concession in it, but what you kept had a rare
intensity. You were perpetually throwing over the cargo to save the
ship, but what a motion you gave her when you made her ride the
waves--a motion as rhythmic as the dance of a goddess! Wayworth took
long London walks and thought of these things--London poured into his
ears the mighty hum of its suggestion. His imagination glowed and
melted down material, his intentions multiplied and made the air a
golden haze. He saw not only the thing he should do, but the next
and the next and the next; the future opened before him and he seemed
to walk on marble slabs. The more he tried the dramatic form the
more he loved it, the more he looked at it the more he perceived in
it. What he perceived in it indeed he now perceived everywhere; if
he stopped, in the London dusk, before some flaring shop-window, the
place immediately constituted itself behind footlights, became a
framed stage for his figures. He hammered at these figures in his
lonely lodging, he shaped them and he shaped their tabernacle; he was
like a goldsmith chiselling a casket, bent over with the passion for
perfection. When he was neither roaming the streets with his vision
nor worrying his problem at his table, he was exchanging ideas on the
general question with Mrs. Alsager, to whom he promised details that
would amuse her in later and still happier hours. Her eyes were full
of tears when he read her the last words of the finished work, and
she murmured, divinely -
"And now--to get it done, to get it done!"
"Yes, indeed--to get it done!" Wayworth stared at the fire, slowly
rolling up his type-copy. "But that's a totally different part of
the business, and altogether secondary."
"But of course you want to be acted?"
"Of course I do--but it's a sudden descent. I want to intensely, but
I'm sorry I want to."
"It's there indeed that the difficulties begin," said Mrs. Alsager, a
little off her guard.
"How can you say that? It's there that they end!"
"Ah, wait to see where they end!"
"I mean they'll now be of a totally different order," Wayworth
explained. "It seems to me there can be nothing in the world more
difficult than to write a play that will stand an all-round test, and
that in comparison with them the complications that spring up at this
point are of an altogether smaller kind."
"Yes, they're not inspiring," said Mrs. Alsager; "they're
discouraging, because they're vulgar. The other problem, the working
out of the thing itself, is pure art."
"How well you understand everything!" The young man had got up,
nervously, and was leaning against the chimney-piece with his back to
the fire and his arms folded. The roll of his copy, in his fist, was
squeezed into the hollow of one of them. He looked down at Mrs.
Alsager, smiling gratefully, and she answered him with a smile from
eyes still charmed and suffused. "Yes, the vulgarity will begin
now," he presently added.
"You'll suffer dreadfully."
"I shall suffer in a good cause."
"Yes, giving THAT to the world! You must leave it with me, I must
read it over and over," Mrs. Alsager pleaded, rising to come nearer
and draw the copy, in its cover of greenish-grey paper, which had a
generic identity now to him, out of his grasp. "Who in the world
will do it?--who in the world CAN?" she went on, close to him,
turning over the leaves. Before he could answer she had stopped at
one of the pages; she turned the book round to him, pointing out a
speech. "That's the most beautiful place--those lines are a
perfection." He glanced at the spot she indicated, and she begged
him to read them again--he had read them admirably before. He knew
them by heart, and, closing the book while she held the other end of
it, he murmured them over to her--they had indeed a cadence that
pleased him--watching, with a facetious complacency which he hoped
was pardonable, the applause in her face. "Ah, who can utter such
lines as THAT?" Mrs. Alsager broke out; "whom can you find to do
HER?"
"We'll find people to do them all!"
"But not people who are worthy."
"They'll be worthy enough if they're willing enough. I'll work with
them--I'll grind it into them." He spoke as if he had produced
twenty plays.
"Oh, it will be interesting!" she echoed.
"But I shall have to find my theatre first. I shall have to get a
manager to believe in me."
"Yes--they're so stupid!"
"But fancy the patience I shall want, and how I shall have to watch
and wait," said Allan Wayworth. "Do you see me hawking it about
London?"
"Indeed I don't--it would be sickening."
"It's what I shall have to do. I shall be old before it's produced."
"I shall be old very soon if it isn't!" Mrs. Alsager cried. "I know
one or two of them," she mused.
"Do you mean you would speak to them?"
"The thing is to get them to read it. I could do that."
"That's the utmost I ask. But it's even for that I shall have to
wait."
She looked at him with kind sisterly eyes. "You sha'n't wait."
"Ah, you dear lady!" Wayworth murmured.
"That is YOU may, but _I_ won't! Will you leave me your copy?" she
went on, turning the pages again.
"Certainly; I have another." Standing near him she read to herself a
passage here and there; then, in her sweet voice, she read some of
them out. "Oh, if YOU were only an actress!" the young man
exclaimed.
"That's the last thing I am. There's no comedy in ME!"
She had never appeared to Wayworth so much his good genius. "Is
there any tragedy?" he asked, with the levity of complete confidence.
She turned away from him, at this, with a strange and charming laugh
and a "Perhaps that will be for you to determine!" But before he
could disclaim such a responsibility she had faced him again and was
talking about Nona Vincent as if she had been the most interesting of
their friends and her situation at that moment an irresistible appeal
to their sympathy. Nona Vincent was the heroine of the play, and
Mrs. Alsager had taken a tremendous fancy to her. "I can't TELL you
how I like that woman!" she exclaimed in a pensive rapture of
credulity which could only be balm to the artistic spirit.
"I'm awfully glad she lives a bit. What I feel about her is that
she's a good deal like YOU," Wayworth observed.
Mrs. Alsager stared an instant and turned faintly red. This was
evidently a view that failed to strike her; she didn't, however,
treat it as a joke. "I'm not impressed with the resemblance. I
don't see myself doing what she does."
"It isn't so much what she DOES," the young man argued, drawing out
his moustache.
"But what she does is the whole point. She simply tells her love--I
should never do that."
"If you repudiate such a proceeding with such energy, why do you like
her for it?"
"It isn't what I like her for."
"What else, then? That's intensely characteristic."
Mrs. Alsager reflected, looking down at the fire; she had the air of
having half-a-dozen reasons to choose from. But the one she produced
was unexpectedly simple; it might even have been prompted by despair
at not finding others. "I like her because YOU made her!" she
exclaimed with a laugh, moving again away from her companion.
Wayworth laughed still louder. "You made her a little yourself.
I've thought of her as looking like you."
"She ought to look much better," said Mrs. Alsager. "No, certainly,
I shouldn't do what SHE does."
"Not even in the same circumstances?"
"I should never find myself in such circumstances. They're exactly
your play, and have nothing in common with such a life as mine.
However," Mrs. Alsager went on, "her behaviour was natural for HER,
and not only natural, but, it seems to me, thoroughly beautiful and
noble. I can't sufficiently admire the talent and tact with which
you make one accept it, and I tell you frankly that it's evident to
me there must be a brilliant future before a young man who, at the
start, has been capable of such a stroke as that. Thank heaven I can
admire Nona Vincent as intensely as I feel that I don't resemble
her!"
"Don't exaggerate that," said Allan Wayworth.
"My admiration?"
"Your dissimilarity. She has your face, your air, your voice, your
motion; she has many elements of your being."
"Then she'll damn your play!" Mrs. Alsager replied. They joked a
little over this, though it was not in the tone of pleasantry that
Wayworth's hostess soon remarked: "You've got your remedy, however:
have her done by the right woman."
"Oh, have her 'done'--have her 'done'!" the young man gently wailed.
"I see what you mean, my poor friend. What a pity, when it's such a
magnificent part--such a chance for a clever serious girl! Nona
Vincent is practically your play--it will be open to her to carry it
far or to drop it at the first corner."
"It's a charming prospect," said Allan Wayworth, with sudden
scepticism. They looked at each other with eyes that, for a lurid
moment, saw the worst of the worst; but before they parted they had
exchanged vows and confidences that were dedicated wholly to the
ideal. It is not to be supposed, however, that the knowledge that
Mrs. Alsager would help him made Wayworth less eager to help himself.
He did what he could and felt that she, on her side, was doing no
less; but at the end of a year he was obliged to recognise that their
united effort had mainly produced the fine flower of discouragement.
At the end of a year the lustre had, to his own eyes, quite faded
from his unappreciated masterpiece, and he found himself writing for
a biographical dictionary little lives of celebrities he had never
heard of. To be printed, anywhere and anyhow, was a form of glory
for a man so unable to be acted, and to be paid, even at
encyclopaedic rates, had the consequence of making one resigned and
verbose. He couldn't smuggle style into a dictionary, but he could
at least reflect that he had done his best to learn from the drama
that it is a gross impertinence almost anywhere. He had knocked at
the door of every theatre in London, and, at a ruinous expense, had
multiplied type-copies of Nona Vincent to replace the neat
transcripts that had descended into the managerial abyss. His play
was not even declined--no such flattering intimation was given him
that it had been read. What the managers would do for Mrs. Alsager
concerned him little today; the thing that was relevant was that they
would do nothing for HIM. That charming woman felt humbled to the
earth, so little response had she had from the powers on which she
counted. The two never talked about the play now, but he tried to
show her a still finer friendship, that she might not think he felt
she had failed him. He still walked about London with his dreams,
but as months succeeded months and he left the year behind him they
were dreams not so much of success as of revenge. Success seemed a
colourless name for the reward of his patience; something fiercely
florid, something sanguinolent was more to the point. His best
consolation however was still in the scenic idea; it was not till now
that he discovered how incurably he was in love with it. By the time
a vain second year had chafed itself away he cherished his fruitless
faculty the more for the obloquy it seemed to suffer. He lived, in
his best hours, in a world of subjects and situations; he wrote
another play and made it as different from its predecessor as such a
very good thing could be. It might be a very good thing, but when he
had committed it to the theatrical limbo indiscriminating fate took
no account of the difference. He was at last able to leave England
for three or four months; he went to Germany to pay a visit long
deferred to his mother and sisters.
Shortly before the time he had fixed for his return he received from
Mrs. Alsager a telegram consisting of the words: "Loder wishes see
you--putting Nona instant rehearsal." He spent the few hours before
his departure in kissing his mother and sisters, who knew enough
about Mrs. Alsager to judge it lucky this respectable married lady
was not there--a relief, however, accompanied with speculative
glances at London and the morrow. Loder, as our young man was aware,
meant the new "Renaissance," but though he reached home in the
evening it was not to this convenient modern theatre that Wayworth
first proceeded. He spent a late hour with Mrs. Alsager, an hour
that throbbed with calculation. She told him that Mr. Loder was
charming, he had simply taken up the play in its turn; he had hopes
of it, moreover, that on the part of a professional pessimist might
almost be qualified as ecstatic. It had been cast, with a margin for
objections, and Violet Grey was to do the heroine. She had been
capable, while he was away, of a good piece of work at that foggy old
playhouse the "Legitimate;" the piece was a clumsy rechauffe, but she
at least had been fresh. Wayworth remembered Violet Grey--hadn't he,
for two years, on a fond policy of "looking out," kept dipping into
the London theatres to pick up prospective interpreters? He had not
picked up many as yet, and this young lady at all events had never
wriggled in his net. She was pretty and she was odd, but he had
never prefigured her as Nona Vincent, nor indeed found himself
attracted by what he already felt sufficiently launched in the
profession to speak of as her artistic personality. Mrs. Alsager was
different--she declared that she had been struck not a little by some
of her tones. The girl was interesting in the thing at the
"Legitimate," and Mr. Loder, who had his eye on her, described her as
ambitious and intelligent. She wanted awfully to get on--and some of
those ladies were so lazy! Wayworth was sceptical--he had seen Miss
Violet Grey, who was terribly itinerant, in a dozen theatres but only
in one aspect. Nona Vincent had a dozen aspects, but only one
theatre; yet with what a feverish curiosity the young man promised
himself to watch the actress on the morrow! Talking the matter over
with Mrs. Alsager now seemed the very stuff that rehearsal was made
of. The near prospect of being acted laid a finger even on the lip
of inquiry; he wanted to go on tiptoe till the first night, to make
no condition but that they should speak his lines, and he felt that
he wouldn't so much as raise an eyebrow at the scene-painter if he
should give him an old oak chamber.
He became conscious, the next day, that his danger would be other
than this, and yet he couldn't have expressed to himself what it
would be. Danger was there, doubtless--danger was everywhere, in the
world of art, and still more in the world of commerce; but what he
really seemed to catch, for the hour, was the beating of the wings of
victory. Nothing could undermine that, since it was victory simply
to be acted. It would be victory even to be acted badly; a
reflection that didn't prevent him, however, from banishing, in his
politic optimism, the word "bad" from his vocabulary. It had no
application, in the compromise of practice; it didn't apply even to
his play, which he was conscious he had already outlived and as to
which he foresaw that, in the coming weeks, frequent alarm would
alternate, in his spirit, with frequent esteem. When he went down to
the dusky daylit theatre (it arched over him like the temple of fame)
Mr. Loder, who was as charming as Mrs. Alsager had announced, struck
him as the genius of hospitality. The manager began to explain why,
for so long, he had given no sign; but that was the last thing that
interested Wayworth now, and he could never remember afterwards what
reasons Mr. Loder had enumerated. He liked, in the whole business of
discussion and preparation, even the things he had thought he should
probably dislike, and he revelled in those he had thought he should
like. He watched Miss Violet Grey that evening with eyes that sought
to penetrate her possibilities. She certainly had a few; they were
qualities of voice and face, qualities perhaps even of intelligence;
he sat there at any rate with a fostering, coaxing attention,
repeating over to himself as convincingly as he could that she was
not common--a circumstance all the more creditable as the part she
was playing seemed to him desperately so. He perceived that this was
why it pleased the audience; he divined that it was the part they
enjoyed rather than the actress. He had a private panic, wondering
how, if they liked THAT form, they could possibly like his. His form
had now become quite an ultimate idea to him. By the time the
evening was over some of Miss Violet Grey's features, several of the
turns of her head, a certain vibration of her voice, had taken their
place in the same category. She WAS interesting, she was
distinguished; at any rate he had accepted her: it came to the same
thing. But he left the theatre that night without speaking to her--
moved (a little even to his own mystification) by an odd
procrastinating impulse. On the morrow he was to read his three acts
to the company, and then he should have a good deal to say; what he
felt for the moment was a vague indisposition to commit himself.
Moreover he found a slight confusion of annoyance in the fact that
though he had been trying all the evening to look at Nona Vincent in
Violet Grey's person, what subsisted in his vision was simply Violet
Grey in Nona's. He didn't wish to see the actress so directly, or
even so simply as that; and it had been very fatiguing, the effort to
focus Nona both through the performer and through the "Legitimate."
Before he went to bed that night he posted three words to Mrs.
Alsager--"She's not a bit like it, but I dare say I can make her do."