Books: Nona Vincent
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Henry James >> Nona Vincent
He was pleased with the way the actress listened, the next day, at
the reading; he was pleased indeed with many things, at the reading,
and most of all with the reading itself. The whole affair loomed
large to him and he magnified it and mapped it out. He enjoyed his
occupation of the big, dim, hollow theatre, full of the echoes of
"effect" and of a queer smell of gas and success--it all seemed such
a passive canvas for his picture. For the first time in his life he
was in command of resources; he was acquainted with the phrase, but
had never thought he should know the feeling. He was surprised at
what Loder appeared ready to do, though he reminded himself that he
must never show it. He foresaw that there would be two distinct
concomitants to the artistic effort of producing a play, one
consisting of a great deal of anguish and the other of a great deal
of amusement. He looked back upon the reading, afterwards, as the
best hour in the business, because it was then that the piece had
most struck him as represented. What came later was the doing of
others; but this, with its imperfections and failures, was all his
own. The drama lived, at any rate, for that hour, with an intensity
that it was promptly to lose in the poverty and patchiness of
rehearsal; he could see its life reflected, in a way that was sweet
to him, in the stillness of the little semi-circle of attentive and
inscrutable, of water-proofed and muddy-booted, actors. Miss Violet
Grey was the auditor he had most to say to, and he tried on the spot,
across the shabby stage, to let her have the soul of her part. Her
attitude was graceful, but though she appeared to listen with all her
faculties her face remained perfectly blank; a fact, however, not
discouraging to Wayworth, who liked her better for not being
premature. Her companions gave discernible signs of recognising the
passages of comedy; yet Wayworth forgave her even then for being
inexpressive. She evidently wished before everything else to be
simply sure of what it was all about.
He was more surprised even than at the revelation of the scale on
which Mr. Loder was ready to proceed by the discovery that some of
the actors didn't like their parts, and his heart sank as he asked
himself what he could possibly do with them if they were going to be
so stupid. This was the first of his disappointments; somehow he had
expected every individual to become instantly and gratefully
conscious of a rare opportunity, and from the moment such a
calculation failed he was at sea, or mindful at any rate that more
disappointments would come. It was impossible to make out what the
manager liked or disliked; no judgment, no comment escaped him; his
acceptance of the play and his views about the way it should be
mounted had apparently converted him into a veiled and shrouded
figure. Wayworth was able to grasp the idea that they would all move
now in a higher and sharper air than that of compliment and
confidence. When he talked with Violet Grey after the reading he
gathered that she was really rather crude: what better proof of it
could there be than her failure to break out instantly with an
expression of delight about her great chance? This reserve, however,
had evidently nothing to do with high pretensions; she had no wish to
make him feel that a person of her eminence was superior to easy
raptures. He guessed, after a little, that she was puzzled and even
somewhat frightened--to a certain extent she had not understood.
Nothing could appeal to him more than the opportunity to clear up her
difficulties, in the course of the examination of which he quickly
discovered that, so far as she HAD understood, she had understood
wrong. If she was crude it was only a reason the more for talking to
her; he kept saying to her "Ask me--ask me: ask me everything you
can think of."
She asked him, she was perpetually asking him, and at the first
rehearsals, which were without form and void to a degree that made
them strike him much more as the death of an experiment than as the
dawn of a success, they threshed things out immensely in a corner of
the stage, with the effect of his coming to feel that at any rate she
was in earnest. He felt more and more that his heroine was the
keystone of his arch, for which indeed the actress was very ready to
take her. But when he reminded this young lady of the way the whole
thing practically depended on her she was alarmed and even slightly
scandalised: she spoke more than once as if that could scarcely be
the right way to construct a play--make it stand or fall by one poor
nervous girl. She was almost morbidly conscientious, and in theory
he liked her for this, though he lost patience three or four times
with the things she couldn't do and the things she could. At such
times the tears came to her eyes; but they were produced by her own
stupidity, she hastened to assure him, not by the way he spoke, which
was awfully kind under the circumstances. Her sincerity made her
beautiful, and he wished to heaven (and made a point of telling her
so) that she could sprinkle a little of it over Nona. Once, however,
she was so touched and troubled that the sight of it brought the
tears for an instant to his own eyes; and it so happened that,
turning at this moment, he found himself face to face with Mr. Loder.
The manager stared, glanced at the actress, who turned in the other
direction, and then smiling at Wayworth, exclaimed, with the humour
of a man who heard the gallery laugh every night:
"I say--I say!"
"What's the matter?" Wayworth asked.
"I'm glad to see Miss Grey is taking such pains with you."
"Oh, yes--she'll turn me out!" said the young man, gaily. He was
quite aware that it was apparent he was not superficial about Nona,
and abundantly determined, into the bargain, that the rehearsal of
the piece should not sacrifice a shade of thoroughness to any
extrinsic consideration.
Mrs. Alsager, whom, late in the afternoon, he used often to go and
ask for a cup of tea, thanking her in advance for the rest she gave
him and telling her how he found that rehearsal (as THEY were doing
it--it was a caution!) took it out of one--Mrs. Alsager, more and
more his good genius and, as he repeatedly assured her, his
ministering angel, confirmed him in this superior policy and urged
him on to every form of artistic devotion. She had, naturally, never
been more interested than now in his work; she wanted to hear
everything about everything. She treated him as heroically fatigued,
plied him with luxurious restoratives, made him stretch himself on
cushions and rose-leaves. They gossipped more than ever, by her
fire, about the artistic life; he confided to her, for instance, all
his hopes and fears, all his experiments and anxieties, on the
subject of the representative of Nona. She was immensely interested
in this young lady and showed it by taking a box again and again (she
had seen her half-a-dozen times already), to study her capacity
through the veil of her present part. Like Allan Wayworth she found
her encouraging only by fits, for she had fine flashes of badness.
She was intelligent, but she cried aloud for training, and the
training was so absent that the intelligence had only a fraction of
its effect. She was like a knife without an edge--good steel that
had never been sharpened; she hacked away at her hard dramatic loaf,
she couldn't cut it smooth.
CHAPTER II.
"Certainly my leading lady won't make Nona much like YOU!" Wayworth
one day gloomily remarked to Mrs. Alsager. There were days when the
prospect seemed to him awful.
"So much the better. There's no necessity for that."
"I wish you'd train her a little--you could so easily," the young man
went on; in response to which Mrs. Alsager requested him not to make
such cruel fun of her. But she was curious about the girl, wanted to
hear of her character, her private situation, how she lived and
where, seemed indeed desirous to befriend her. Wayworth might not
have known much about the private situation of Miss Violet Grey, but,
as it happened, he was able, by the time his play had been three
weeks in rehearsal, to supply information on such points. She was a
charming, exemplary person, educated, cultivated, with highly modern
tastes, an excellent musician. She had lost her parents and was very
much alone in the world, her only two relations being a sister, who
was married to a civil servant (in a highly responsible post) in
India, and a dear little old-fashioned aunt (really a great-aunt)
with whom she lived at Notting Hill, who wrote children's books and
who, it appeared, had once written a Christmas pantomime. It was
quite an artistic home--not on the scale of Mrs. Alsager's (to
compare the smallest things with the greatest!) but intensely refined
and honourable. Wayworth went so far as to hint that it would be
rather nice and human on Mrs. Alsager's part to go there--they would
take it so kindly if she should call on them. She had acted so often
on his hints that he had formed a pleasant habit of expecting it: it
made him feel so wisely responsible about giving them. But this one
appeared to fall to the ground, so that he let the subject drop.
Mrs. Alsager, however, went yet once more to the "Legitimate," as he
found by her saying to him abruptly, on the morrow: "Oh, she'll be
very good--she'll be very good." When they said "she," in these
days, they always meant Violet Grey, though they pretended, for the
most part, that they meant Nona Vincent.
"Oh yes," Wayworth assented, "she wants so to!"
Mrs. Alsager was silent a moment; then she asked, a little
inconsequently, as if she had come back from a reverie: "Does she
want to VERY much?"
"Tremendously--and it appears she has been fascinated by the part
from the first."
"Why then didn't she say so?"
"Oh, because she's so funny."
"She IS funny," said Mrs. Alsager, musingly; and presently she added:
"She's in love with you."
Wayworth stared, blushed very red, then laughed out. "What is there
funny in that?" he demanded; but before his interlocutress could
satisfy him on this point he inquired, further, how she knew anything
about it. After a little graceful evasion she explained that the
night before, at the "Legitimate," Mrs. Beaumont, the wife of the
actor-manager, had paid her a visit in her box; which had happened,
in the course of their brief gossip, to lead to her remarking that
she had never been "behind." Mrs. Beaumont offered on the spot to
take her round, and the fancy had seized her to accept the
invitation. She had been amused for the moment, and in this way it
befell that her conductress, at her request, had introduced her to
Miss Violet Grey, who was waiting in the wing for one of her scenes.
Mrs. Beaumont had been called away for three minutes, and during this
scrap of time, face to face with the actress, she had discovered the
poor girl's secret. Wayworth qualified it as a senseless thing, but
wished to know what had led to the discovery. She characterised this
inquiry as superficial for a painter of the ways of women; and he
doubtless didn't improve it by remarking profanely that a cat might
look at a king and that such things were convenient to know. Even on
this ground, however, he was threatened by Mrs. Alsager, who
contended that it might not be a joking matter to the poor girl. To
this Wayworth, who now professed to hate talking about the passions
he might have inspired, could only reply that he meant it couldn't
make a difference to Mrs. Alsager.
"How in the world do you know what makes a difference to ME?" this
lady asked, with incongruous coldness, with a haughtiness indeed
remarkable in so gentle a spirit.
He saw Violet Grey that night at the theatre, and it was she who
spoke first of her having lately met a friend of his.
"She's in love with you," the actress said, after he had made a show
of ignorance; "doesn't that tell you anything?"
He blushed redder still than Mrs. Alsager had made him blush, but
replied, quickly enough and very adequately, that hundreds of women
were naturally dying for him.
"Oh, I don't care, for you're not in love with HER!" the girl
continued.
"Did she tell you that too?" Wayworth asked; but she had at that
moment to go on.
Standing where he could see her he thought that on this occasion she
threw into her scene, which was the best she had in the play, a
brighter art than ever before, a talent that could play with its
problem. She was perpetually doing things out of rehearsal (she did
two or three to-night, in the other man's piece), that he as often
wished to heaven Nona Vincent might have the benefit of. She
appeared to be able to do them for every one but him--that is for
every one but Nona. He was conscious, in these days, of an odd new
feeling, which mixed (this was a part of its oddity) with a very
natural and comparatively old one and which in its most definite form
was a dull ache of regret that this young lady's unlucky star should
have placed her on the stage. He wished in his worst uneasiness
that, without going further, she would give it up; and yet it soothed
that uneasiness to remind himself that he saw grounds to hope she
would go far enough to make a marked success of Nona. There were
strange and painful moments when, as the interpretress of Nona, he
almost hated her; after which, however, he always assured himself
that he exaggerated, inasmuch as what made this aversion seem great,
when he was nervous, was simply its contrast with the growing sense
that there WERE grounds--totally different--on which she pleased him.
She pleased him as a charming creature--by her sincerities and her
perversities, by the varieties and surprises of her character and by
certain happy facts of her person. In private her eyes were sad to
him and her voice was rare. He detested the idea that she should
have a disappointment or an humiliation, and he wanted to rescue her
altogether, to save and transplant her. One way to save her was to
see to it, to the best of his ability, that the production of his
play should be a triumph; and the other way--it was really too queer
to express--was almost to wish that it shouldn't be. Then, for the
future, there would be safety and peace, and not the peace of death--
the peace of a different life. It is to be added that our young man
clung to the former of these ways in proportion as the latter
perversely tempted him. He was nervous at the best, increasingly and
intolerably nervous; but the immediate remedy was to rehearse harder
and harder, and above all to work it out with Violet Grey. Some of
her comrades reproached him with working it out only with her, as if
she were the whole affair; to which he replied that they could afford
to be neglected, they were all so tremendously good. She was the
only person concerned whom he didn't flatter.
The author and the actress stuck so to the business in hand that she
had very little time to speak to him again of Mrs. Alsager, of whom
indeed her imagination appeared adequately to have disposed.
Wayworth once remarked to her that Nona Vincent was supposed to be a
good deal like his charming friend; but she gave a blank "Supposed by
whom?" in consequence of which he never returned to the subject. He
confided his nervousness as freely as usual to Mrs. Alsager, who
easily understood that he had a peculiar complication of anxieties.
His suspense varied in degree from hour to hour, but any relief there
might have been in this was made up for by its being of several
different kinds. One afternoon, as the first performance drew near,
Mrs. Alsager said to him, in giving him his cup of tea and on his
having mentioned that he had not closed his eyes the night before:
"You must indeed be in a dreadful state. Anxiety for another is
still worse than anxiety for one's self."
"For another?" Wayworth repeated, looking at her over the rim of his
cup.
"My poor friend, you're nervous about Nona Vincent, but you're
infinitely more nervous about Violet Grey."
"She IS Nona Vincent!"
"No, she isn't--not a bit!" said Mrs. Alsager, abruptly.
"Do you really think so?" Wayworth cried, spilling his tea in his
alarm.
"What I think doesn't signify--I mean what I think about that. What
I meant to say was that great as is your suspense about your play,
your suspense about your actress is greater still."
"I can only repeat that my actress IS my play."
Mrs. Alsager looked thoughtfully into the teapot.
"Your actress is your--"
"My what?" the young man asked, with a little tremor in his voice, as
his hostess paused.
"Your very dear friend. You're in love with her--at present." And
with a sharp click Mrs. Alsager dropped the lid on the fragrant
receptacle.
"Not yet--not yet!" laughed her visitor.
"You will be if she pulls you through."
"You declare that she WON'T pull me through."
Mrs. Alsager was silent a moment, after which she softly murmured:
"I'll pray for her."
"You're the most generous of women!" Wayworth cried; then coloured as
if the words had not been happy. They would have done indeed little
honour to a man of tact.
The next morning he received five hurried lines from Mrs. Alsager.
She had suddenly been called to Torquay, to see a relation who was
seriously ill; she should be detained there several days, but she had
an earnest hope of being able to return in time for his first night.
In any event he had her unrestricted good wishes. He missed her
extremely, for these last days were a great strain and there was
little comfort to be derived from Violet Grey. She was even more
nervous than himself, and so pale and altered that he was afraid she
would be too ill to act. It was settled between them that they made
each other worse and that he had now much better leave her alone.
They had pulled Nona so to pieces that nothing seemed left of her--
she must at least have time to grow together again. He left Violet
Grey alone, to the best of his ability, but she carried out
imperfectly her own side of the bargain. She came to him with new
questions--she waited for him with old doubts, and half an hour
before the last dress-rehearsal, on the eve of production, she
proposed to him a totally fresh rendering of his heroine. This
incident gave him such a sense of insecurity that he turned his back
on her without a word, bolted out of the theatre, dashed along the
Strand and walked as far as the Bank. Then he jumped into a hansom
and came westward, and when he reached the theatre again the business
was nearly over. It appeared, almost to his disappointment, not bad
enough to give him the consolation of the old playhouse adage that
the worst dress-rehearsals make the best first nights.
The morrow, which was a Wednesday, was the dreadful day; the theatre
had been closed on the Monday and the Tuesday. Every one, on the
Wednesday, did his best to let every one else alone, and every one
signally failed in the attempt. The day, till seven o'clock, was
understood to be consecrated to rest, but every one except Violet
Grey turned up at the theatre. Wayworth looked at Mr. Loder, and Mr.
Loder looked in another direction, which was as near as they came to
conversation. Wayworth was in a fidget, unable to eat or sleep or
sit still, at times almost in terror. He kept quiet by keeping, as
usual, in motion; he tried to walk away from his nervousness. He
walked in the afternoon toward Notting Hill, but he succeeded in not
breaking the vow he had taken not to meddle with his actress. She
was like an acrobat poised on a slippery ball--if he should touch her
she would topple over. He passed her door three times and he thought
of her three hundred. This was the hour at which he most regretted
that Mrs. Alsager had not come back--for he had called at her house
only to learn that she was still at Torquay. This was probably
queer, and it was probably queerer still that she hadn't written to
him; but even of these things he wasn't sure, for in losing, as he
had now completely lost, his judgment of his play, he seemed to
himself to have lost his judgment of everything. When he went home,
however, he found a telegram from the lady of Grosvenor Place--"Shall
be able to come--reach town by seven." At half-past eight o'clock,
through a little aperture in the curtain of the "Renaissance," he saw
her in her box with a cluster of friends--completely beautiful and
beneficent. The house was magnificent--too good for his play, he
felt; too good for any play. Everything now seemed too good--the
scenery, the furniture, the dresses, the very programmes. He seized
upon the idea that this was probably what was the matter with the
representative of Nona--she was only too good. He had completely
arranged with this young lady the plan of their relations during the
evening; and though they had altered everything else that they had
arranged they had promised each other not to alter this. It was
wonderful the number of things they had promised each other. He
would start her, he would see her off--then he would quit the theatre
and stay away till just before the end. She besought him to stay
away--it would make her infinitely easier. He saw that she was
exquisitely dressed--she had made one or two changes for the better
since the night before, and that seemed something definite to turn
over and over in his mind as he rumbled foggily home in the four-
wheeler in which, a few steps from the stage-door, he had taken
refuge as soon as he knew that the curtain was up. He lived a couple
of miles off, and he had chosen a four-wheeler to drag out the time.
When he got home his fire was out, his room was cold, and he lay down
on his sofa in his overcoat. He had sent his landlady to the dress-
circle, on purpose; she would overflow with words and mistakes. The
house seemed a black void, just as the streets had done--every one
was, formidably, at his play. He was quieter at last than he had
been for a fortnight, and he felt too weak even to wonder how the
thing was going. He believed afterwards that he had slept an hour;
but even if he had he felt it to be still too early to return to the
theatre. He sat down by his lamp and tried to read--to read a little
compendious life of a great English statesman, out of a "series." It
struck him as brilliantly clever, and he asked himself whether that
perhaps were not rather the sort of thing he ought to have taken up:
not the statesmanship, but the art of brief biography. Suddenly he
became aware that he must hurry if he was to reach the theatre at
all--it was a quarter to eleven o'clock. He scrambled out and, this
time, found a hansom--he had lately spent enough money in cabs to add
to his hope that the profits of his new profession would be great.
His anxiety, his suspense flamed up again, and as he rattled
eastward--he went fast now--he was almost sick with alternations. As
he passed into the theatre the first man--some underling--who met
him, cried to him, breathlessly:
"You're wanted, sir--you're wanted!" He thought his tone very
ominous--he devoured the man's eyes with his own, for a betrayal:
did he mean that he was wanted for execution? Some one else pressed
him, almost pushed him, forward; he was already on the stage. Then
he became conscious of a sound more or less continuous, but seemingly
faint and far, which he took at first for the voice of the actors
heard through their canvas walls, the beautiful built-in room of the
last act. But the actors were in the wing, they surrounded him; the
curtain was down and they were coming off from before it. They had
been called, and HE was called--they all greeted him with "Go on--go
on!" He was terrified--he couldn't go on--he didn't believe in the
applause, which seemed to him only audible enough to sound half-
hearted.
"Has it gone?--HAS it gone?" he gasped to the people round him; and
he heard them say "Rather--rather!" perfunctorily, mendaciously too,
as it struck him, and even with mocking laughter, the laughter of
defeat and despair. Suddenly, though all this must have taken but a
moment, Loder burst upon him from somewhere with a "For God's sake
don't keep them, or they'll STOP!" "But I can't go on for THAT!"
Wayworth cried, in anguish; the sound seemed to him already to have
ceased. Loder had hold of him and was shoving him; he resisted and
looked round frantically for Violet Grey, who perhaps would tell him
the truth. There was by this time a crowd in the wing, all with
strange grimacing painted faces, but Violet was not among them and
her very absence frightened him. He uttered her name with an accent
that he afterwards regretted--it gave them, as he thought, both away;
and while Loder hustled him before the curtain he heard some one say
"She took her call and disappeared." She had had a call, then--this
was what was most present to the young man as he stood for an instant
in the glare of the footlights, looking blindly at the great vaguely-
peopled horseshoe and greeted with plaudits which now seemed to him
at once louder than he deserved and feebler than he desired. They
sank to rest quickly, but he felt it to be long before he could back
away, before he could, in his turn, seize the manager by the arm and
cry huskily--"Has it really gone--REALLY?"