Books: Nona Vincent
H >>
Henry James >> Nona Vincent
Mr. Loder looked at him hard and replied after an instant: "The
play's all right!"
Wayworth hung upon his lips. "Then what's all wrong?"
"We must do something to Miss Grey."
"What's the matter with her?"
"She isn't IN it!"
"Do you mean she has failed?"
"Yes, damn it--she has failed."
Wayworth stared. "Then how can the play be all right?"
"Oh, we'll save it--we'll save it."
"Where's Miss Grey--where IS she?" the young man asked.
Loder caught his arm as he was turning away again to look for his
heroine. "Never mind her now--she knows it!"
Wayworth was approached at the same moment by a gentleman he knew as
one of Mrs. Alsager's friends--he had perceived him in that lady's
box. Mrs. Alsager was waiting there for the successful author; she
desired very earnestly that he would come round and speak to her.
Wayworth assured himself first that Violet had left the theatre--one
of the actresses could tell him that she had seen her throw on a
cloak, without changing her dress, and had learnt afterwards that she
had, the next moment, flung herself, after flinging her aunt, into a
cab. He had wished to invite half a dozen persons, of whom Miss Grey
and her elderly relative were two, to come home to supper with him;
but she had refused to make any engagement beforehand (it would be so
dreadful to have to keep it if she shouldn't have made a hit), and
this attitude had blighted the pleasant plan, which fell to the
ground. He had called her morbid, but she was immovable. Mrs.
Alsager's messenger let him know that he was expected to supper in
Grosvenor Place, and half an hour afterwards he was seated there
among complimentary people and flowers and popping corks, eating the
first orderly meal he had partaken of for a week. Mrs. Alsager had
carried him off in her brougham--the other people who were coming got
into things of their own. He stopped her short as soon as she began
to tell him how tremendously every one had been struck by the piece;
he nailed her down to the question of Violet Grey. Had she spoilt
the play, had she jeopardised or compromised it--had she been utterly
bad, had she been good in any degree?
"Certainly the performance would have seemed better if SHE had been
better," Mrs. Alsager confessed.
"And the play would have seemed better if the performance had been
better," Wayworth said, gloomily, from the corner of the brougham.
"She does what she can, and she has talent, and she looked lovely.
But she doesn't SEE Nona Vincent. She doesn't see the type--she
doesn't see the individual--she doesn't see the woman you meant.
She's out of it--she gives you a different person."
"Oh, the woman I meant!" the young man exclaimed, looking at the
London lamps as he rolled by them. "I wish to God she had known
YOU!" he added, as the carriage stopped. After they had passed into
the house he said to his companion:
"You see she WON'T pull me through."
"Forgive her--be kind to her!" Mrs. Alsager pleaded.
"I shall only thank her. The play may go to the dogs."
"If it does--if it does," Mrs. Alsager began, with her pure eyes on
him.
"Well, what if it does?"
She couldn't tell him, for the rest of her guests came in together;
she only had time to say: "It SHA'N'T go to the dogs!"
He came away before the others, restless with the desire to go to
Notting Hill even that night, late as it was, haunted with the sense
that Violet Grey had measured her fall. When he got into the street,
however, he allowed second thoughts to counsel another course; the
effect of knocking her up at two o'clock in the morning would hardly
be to soothe her. He looked at six newspapers the next day and found
in them never a good word for her. They were well enough about the
piece, but they were unanimous as to the disappointment caused by the
young actress whose former efforts had excited such hopes and on
whom, on this occasion, such pressing responsibilities rested. They
asked in chorus what was the matter with her, and they declared in
chorus that the play, which was not without promise, was handicapped
(they all used the same word) by the odd want of correspondence
between the heroine and her interpreter. Wayworth drove early to
Notting Hill, but he didn't take the newspapers with him; Violet Grey
could be trusted to have sent out for them by the peep of dawn and to
have fed her anguish full. She declined to see him--she only sent
down word by her aunt that she was extremely unwell and should be
unable to act that night unless she were suffered to spend the day
unmolested and in bed. Wayworth sat for an hour with the old lady,
who understood everything and to whom he could speak frankly. She
gave him a touching picture of her niece's condition, which was all
the more vivid for the simple words in which it was expressed: "She
feels she isn't right, you know--she feels she isn't right!"
"Tell her it doesn't matter--it doesn't matter a straw!" said
Wayworth.
"And she's so proud--you know how proud she is!" the old lady went
on.
"Tell her I'm more than satisfied, that I accept her gratefully as
she is."
"She says she injures your play, that she ruins it," said his
interlocutress.
"She'll improve, immensely--she'll grow into the part," the young man
continued.
"She'd improve if she knew how--but she says she doesn't. She has
given all she has got, and she doesn't know what's wanted."
"What's wanted is simply that she should go straight on and trust
me."
"How can she trust you when she feels she's losing you?"
"Losing me?" Wayworth cried.
"You'll never forgive her if your play is taken off!"
"It will run six months," said the author of the piece.
The old lady laid her hand on his arm. "What will you do for her if
it does?"
He looked at Violet Grey's aunt a moment. "Do you say your niece is
very proud?"
"Too proud for her dreadful profession."
"Then she wouldn't wish you to ask me that," Wayworth answered,
getting up.
When he reached home he was very tired, and for a person to whom it
was open to consider that he had scored a success he spent a
remarkably dismal day. All his restlessness had gone, and fatigue
and depression possessed him. He sank into his old chair by the fire
and sat there for hours with his eyes closed. His landlady came in
to bring his luncheon and mend the fire, but he feigned to be asleep,
so as not to be spoken to. It is to be supposed that sleep at last
overtook him, for about the hour that dusk began to gather he had an
extraordinary impression, a visit that, it would seem, could have
belonged to no waking consciousness. Nona Vincent, in face and form,
the living heroine of his play, rose before him in his little silent
room, sat down with him at his dingy fireside. She was not Violet
Grey, she was not Mrs. Alsager, she was not any woman he had seen
upon earth, nor was it any masquerade of friendship or of penitence.
Yet she was more familiar to him than the women he had known best,
and she was ineffably beautiful and consoling. She filled the poor
room with her presence, the effect of which was as soothing as some
odour of incense. She was as quiet as an affectionate sister, and
there was no surprise in her being there. Nothing more real had ever
befallen him, and nothing, somehow, more reassuring. He felt her
hand rest upon his own, and all his senses seemed to open to her
message. She struck him, in the strangest way, both as his creation
and as his inspirer, and she gave him the happiest consciousness of
success. If she was so charming, in the red firelight, in her vague,
clear-coloured garments, it was because he had made her so, and yet
if the weight seemed lifted from his spirit it was because she drew
it away. When she bent her deep eyes upon him they seemed to speak
of safety and freedom and to make a green garden of the future. From
time to time she smiled and said: "I live--I live--I live." How
long she stayed he couldn't have told, but when his landlady
blundered in with the lamp Nona Vincent was no longer there. He
rubbed his eyes, but no dream had ever been so intense; and as he
slowly got out of his chair it was with a deep still joy--the joy of
the artist--in the thought of how right he had been, how exactly like
herself he had made her. She had come to show him that. At the end
of five minutes, however, he felt sufficiently mystified to call his
landlady back--he wanted to ask her a question. When the good woman
reappeared the question hung fire an instant; then it shaped itself
as the inquiry:
"Has any lady been here?"
"No, sir--no lady at all."
The woman seemed slightly scandalised. "Not Miss Vincent?"
"Miss Vincent, sir?"
"The young lady of my play, don't you know?"
"Oh, sir, you mean Miss Violet Grey!"
"No I don't, at all. I think I mean Mrs. Alsager."
"There has been no Mrs. Alsager, sir."
"Nor anybody at all like her?"
The woman looked at him as if she wondered what had suddenly taken
him. Then she asked in an injured tone: "Why shouldn't I have told
you if you'd 'ad callers, sir?"
"I thought you might have thought I was asleep."
"Indeed you were, sir, when I came in with the lamp--and well you'd
earned it, Mr. Wayworth!"
The landlady came back an hour later to bring him a telegram; it was
just as he had begun to dress to dine at his club and go down to the
theatre.
"See me to-night in front, and don't come near me till it's over."
It was in these words that Violet communicated her wishes for the
evening. He obeyed them to the letter; he watched her from the
depths of a box. He was in no position to say how she might have
struck him the night before, but what he saw during these charmed
hours filled him with admiration and gratitude. She WAS in it, this
time; she had pulled herself together, she had taken possession, she
was felicitous at every turn. Fresh from his revelation of Nona he
was in a position to judge, and as he judged he exulted. He was
thrilled and carried away, and he was moreover intensely curious to
know what had happened to her, by what unfathomable art she had
managed in a few hours to effect such a change of base. It was as if
SHE had had a revelation of Nona, so convincing a clearness had been
breathed upon the picture. He kept himself quiet in the entr'actes--
he would speak to her only at the end; but before the play was half
over the manager burst into his box.
"It's prodigious, what she's up to!" cried Mr. Loder, almost more
bewildered than gratified. "She has gone in for a new reading--a
blessed somersault in the air!"
"Is it quite different?" Wayworth asked, sharing his mystification.
"Different? Hyperion to a satyr! It's devilish good, my boy!"
"It's devilish good," said Wayworth, "and it's in a different key
altogether from the key of her rehearsal."
"I'll run you six months!" the manager declared; and he rushed round
again to the actress, leaving Wayworth with a sense that she had
already pulled him through. She had with the audience an immense
personal success.
When he went behind, at the end, he had to wait for her; she only
showed herself when she was ready to leave the theatre. Her aunt had
been in her dressing-room with her, and the two ladies appeared
together. The girl passed him quickly, motioning him to say nothing
till they should have got out of the place. He saw that she was
immensely excited, lifted altogether above her common artistic level.
The old lady said to him: "You must come home to supper with us: it
has been all arranged." They had a brougham, with a little third
seat, and he got into it with them. It was a long time before the
actress would speak. She leaned back in her corner, giving no sign
but still heaving a little, like a subsiding sea, and with all her
triumph in the eyes that shone through the darkness. The old lady
was hushed to awe, or at least to discretion, and Wayworth was happy
enough to wait. He had really to wait till they had alighted at
Notting Hill, where the elder of his companions went to see that
supper had been attended to.
"I was better--I was better," said Violet Grey, throwing off her
cloak in the little drawing-room.
"You were perfection. You'll be like that every night, won't you?"
She smiled at him. "Every night? There can scarcely be a miracle
every day."
"What do you mean by a miracle?"
"I've had a revelation."
Wayward stared. "At what hour?"
"The right hour--this afternoon. Just in time to save me--and to
save YOU."
"At five o'clock? Do you mean you had a visit?"
"She came to me--she stayed two hours."
"Two hours? Nona Vincent?"
"Mrs. Alsager." Violet Grey smiled more deeply. "It's the same
thing."
"And how did Mrs. Alsager save you?"
"By letting me look at her. By letting me hear her speak. By
letting me know her."
"And what did she say to you?"
"Kind things--encouraging, intelligent things."
"Ah, the dear woman!" Wayworth cried.
"You ought to like her--she likes YOU. She was just what I wanted,"
the actress added.
"Do you mean she talked to you about Nona?"
"She said you thought she was like her. She IS--she's exquisite."
"She's exquisite," Wayworth repeated. "Do you mean she tried to
coach you?"
"Oh, no--she only said she would be so glad if it would help me to
see her. And I felt it did help me. I don't know what took place--
she only sat there, and she held my hand and smiled at me, and she
had tact and grace, and she had goodness and beauty, and she soothed
my nerves and lighted up my imagination. Somehow she seemed to GIVE
it all to me. I took it--I took it. I kept her before me, I drank
her in. For the first time, in the whole study of the part, I had my
model--I could make my copy. All my courage came back to me, and
other things came that I hadn't felt before. She was different--she
was delightful; as I've said, she was a revelation. She kissed me
when she went away--and you may guess if I kissed HER. We were
awfully affectionate, but it's YOU she likes!" said Violet Grey.
Wayworth had never been more interested in his life, and he had
rarely been more mystified. "Did she wear vague, clear-coloured
garments?" he asked, after a moment.
Violet Grey stared, laughed, then bade him go in to supper. "YOU
know how she dresses!"
He was very well pleased at supper, but he was silent and a little
solemn. He said he would go to see Mrs. Alsager the next day. He
did so, but he was told at her door that she had returned to Torquay.
She remained there all winter, all spring, and the next time he saw
her his play had run two hundred nights and he had married Violet
Grey. His plays sometimes succeed, but his wife is not in them now,
nor in any others. At these representations Mrs. Alsager continues
frequently to be present.