The Tragic Muse (London & New York: Macmillan & Co., 1890)/Volume 3/Chapter 16
XVI.
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, so that 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 were many occasions on which it was represented to her that she could not be disobliging without damaging 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 irreducible 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 yet more marvellous publicity was cleverly caught by rival versions, surpassing 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, when he went 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 that Julia Dallow would probably hear of that and triumph with a fresh sense of how right she had been; but this reflection 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 was visibly fidgety: he felt the contagion of Miriam's rapid pace, 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 second picture much better than the other one, but somehow it ought by that time to be before the public. Having a great deal of familiar proverbial wisdom, he put forth with vehemence the idea that in every great crisis there is nothing like striking while the iron is hot. He even betrayed a sort of impression that with a little good-will 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 a largeness of view in the way he jumped to the conviction that in this position 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 a hint of knowledge 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 about her affairs at that moment at least, than she herself had communicated, contributing strongly to our young man's impression that one by one every element of a great destiny was being dropped into her cup. Nick himself tasted of success vicariously for the hour. Miriam let Dashwood 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 irritated him—a circumstance in which poor Julia, if it had come to her knowledge, would doubtless have found a damning eloquence. Miriam was more pleased with herself than ever: she now made no scruple of admitting that she enjoyed all her advantages. She was beginning to have 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; she had a hundred distinguished names on her lips and wonderful tales about the people who were making up to her. She struck Nick as less serious than she had been hitherto, as making even an aggressive show of frivolity; but he was conscious of no obligation to reprehend 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 an immense interest in her career, because in fact he didn't; she remained to him primarily and essentially a pictorial subject, 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 twist of her life would say most? so possible was it even that complete failure or some incalculable perversion would only make her, for his particular purpose, more magnificent.
After she had left him, at any rate, the day she came with Basil Dashwood, and still more on a later occasion, as he turned back to his work when he had put her into her carriage, the last time, for that year, that he saw her—after she had left him it occurred to him, in the light of her quick distinction, that there were mighty differences in the famous artistic life. Miriam was already in the glow of a glory which moreover was probably but a faint spark in relation to the blaze to come; and as he closed the door upon 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 wofully cold and gray and mean. It was lonely, and yet it peopled with unfriendly shadows (so thick he saw them gathering 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 clumsy obscurity, the poor explanations, the foolishness that he foresaw in having to ask people to wait, and wait longer, and wait again, for a fruition which, to their sense at least, would be an anti-climax. He cared enough for it, whatever it would be, to feel that his pertinacity might enter into comparison even with such a productive force as Miriam's. This was, after all, in his bare studio, the most collective dim presence, the one that was most sociable to him as he sat there and that made it the right place however wrong it was—the sense that it was to the thing in itself he was attached. This was Miriam's case, but the contrast, which she showed him she also felt, was in the number of other things that she got with the thing in itself.
I hasten to add that our young man had hours when this fine substance struck him as requiring, for a complete appeal, 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 didn't go); but he was liable to accidental deflections from this theory—liable in particular to want to take a look at one of the great portraits of the past. These were the things that were the most inspiring, in the sense that they were the things that, while generations, while worlds had come and gone, seemed most to survive and testify. As he stood before them sometimes the perfection of their survival struck him as the supreme eloquence, the reason 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 ages had only sweetened their freshness. The same faces, the same figures looked out at different centuries, knowing a deal the century 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 10th of August, immediately after which she was to start, with the company, on a tremendous tour of the provinces. They to were 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 of it. She was visibly restless and preoccupied, and though Nick had not waited till now to discover that she had more moods than he had tints on his palette, he had never yet seen her fitfulness at this particular angle. It was a trifle unbecoming and he was ready to let her go. She looked round the place as if she were suddenly tired of it, and then she 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 dare say 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, before the glass, arranging her hat.
"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 brute? I can easily believe it; I haven't talked to you—I haven't amused you as I might. The truth is, painting people is a very absorbing, exclusive occupation. You can't do much to them besides."
"Yes, it's a cruel honour."
"Cruel—that's too much," Nick objected.
"I mean it's one you shouldn't confer on people you like, for when it's over it's over: it kills your interest in them and after you've finished them you don't like them any more."
"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," said Miriam, smiling at him now and 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 confrères—fellow-artists and people of that sort? Don't they come near you?"
"I don't know them much, I've always been afraid of them, and how can they take me seriously?"
"Well, I've got confrères, and sometimes I wish I hadn't! But does your sister never come near you any more, or is it only the fear of meeting me?"
Nick was aware that his mother had a 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 if the child had been suffered to stay; but the explanation he gave his present visitor was nearer the truth. He reminded Miriam that he had already told her (he had been careful to do this, so as not to let it appear she was avoided) that her 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 it." And when Nick had pronounced the word with a reluctance he doubtless failed sufficiently to conceal (he hated to talk about Mrs. Dallow; he didn't know what business Miriam had with her), she exclaimed: "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 will write me a comedy of manners? There it is! The trouble would be, no doubt, that I should push her à la charge."
Nick listened to these remarks in silence, saying to himself that if Miriam should have the bad taste (she seemed trembling on the brink of it) to make an allusion to what had passed between the lady in question and himself, he should dislike her utterly. 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, àpropos of comrades and visitors, what had become of Gabriel Nash, whom she had not encountered 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? Why, you've only just begun."
"Precisely, and at bottom he doesn't like to see me begin. He's afraid I'll do something."
"Do you mean he's jealous?"
"Not in the least, for from the moment one does anything one ceases to compete with him. It leaves him the field more clear. But that's just the discomfort, for him—he feels, as you said just now, kind of lonely; he feels rather abandoned and even, I think, a little betrayed. So far from being jealous he yearns for me and regrets me. The only thing he really takes seriously is to speculate and understand, to talk about the reasons and the essence of things: the people who do that are the highest. The applications, the consequences, the vulgar little effects belong to a lower plane, to which one must doubtless be tolerant and indulgent, but which is after all an affair of comparative accidents and trifles. Indeed he'll probably tell me frankly, the next time I see him, that he can't but feel that to come down to the little questions of action—the little prudences and compromises and simplifications of practice—is for the superior person a really fatal descent. One may be inoffensive and even commendable after it, but one can scarcely pretend to be interesting. Il en faut comme ça, but one doesn't haunt them. He'll do his best for me; he'll come back again, but he'll come back sad, and finally he'll fade away altogether. He'll go off to Granada, or somewhere."
"The simplifications of practice?" cried Miriam. "Why, they are just precisely the most blessed things on earth. What should we do without them?"
"What indeed?" Nick echoed. "But if we need them it's because we're not superior persons. We're awful Philistines."
"I'll be one with you," the girl smiled. "Poor Nash isn't worth talking about. What was it but a little question of action when he preached to you, as I know he did, to give up your seat?"
"Yes, he has a weakness for giving up—he'll go with you as far as that. But I'm not giving up any more, you see. I'm pegging away, and that's gross."
"He's an idiot—n'en parlons plus!" Miriam dropped, gathering up her parasol, but lingering.
"Ah, never for me! He helped me at a difficult time."
"You ought to be ashamed to confess it."
"Oh, you are a Philistine," said Nick.
"Certainly I am," Miriam returned going toward the door, "if it makes me one to be sorry, awfully sorry and even rather angry, that I haven't before me a period of the same sort of unsociable pegging away that you have. For want of it I shall never really be good. However, if you don't tell people I've said so, they'll never know. Your conditions are far better than mine and far more respectable: you can do as many things as you like, in patient obscurity, while I'm pitchforked into the mêlée, and into the most improbable fame, upon the back of a solitary cheval de bataille, a poor broken-winded screw. I foresee that I shall be condemned for the greater part of the rest of my days (do you see that?) to play the stuff I'm acting now. I'm studying Juliet and I want awfully to do her, but really I'm mortally afraid lest, if I should succeed, I should find myself in such a box. Perhaps they'd want Juliet for ever, instead of my present part. You see amid what delightful alternatives one moves. What I want most I never shall have had—five quiet years of hard, all-round work, in a perfect company, with a manager more perfect still, playing five hundred parts and never being heard of. I may be too particular, but that's what I should have liked. I think I'm disgusting, with my successful crudities. It's discouraging; it makes one not care much what happens. What's the use, in such an age, of being good?"
"Good? Your haughty claim is that you're bad."
"I mean good, you know—there are other ways. Don't be stupid." And Nick's visitor tapped him—he was at the door with her—with her parasol. "I scarcely know what to say to you, for certainly it's your fault if you get on so fast."
"I'm too clever—I'm a humbug."
"That's the way I used to be," said Nick.
Miriam rested her wonderful eyes on him; then she turned them over the room, slowly, after which she attached them again, kindly, musingly, on his own. "Ah, the pride of that—the sense of purification! He 'used' to be, forsooth! Poor me! Of course you'll say: 'Look at the sort of thing I've undertaken to produce, compared with what you have.' So it's all right. Become great in the proper way and don't expose me." She glanced back once more into the studio, as if she were leaving it for ever, and gave another last look at the unfinished canvas on the easel. She shook her head sadly. "Poor Mr. Sherringham—with that!" she murmured.
"Oh, I'll finish it—it will be very decent," said Nick.
"Finish it by yourself?"
"Not necessarily. You'll come back and sit when you return to London."
"Never, never, never again."
Nick stared. "Why, you've made me the most profuse offers and promises."
"Yes, but they were made in ignorance, and I've backed out of them. I'm capricious too—faites la part de ça. I see it wouldn't do—I didn't know it then. We're too far apart—I am, as you say, a Philistine." And as Nick protested with vehemence against this unscrupulous bad faith, she added: "You'll find other models; paint Gabriel Nash."
"Gabriel Nash—as a substitute for you?"
"It will be a good way to get rid of him. Paint Mrs. Dallow too," Miriam went on as she passed out of the door which Nick had opened for her—"paint Mrs. Dallow if you wish to eradicate the last possibility of a throb."
It was strange that since only a moment before Nick had been in a state of mind to which the superfluity of this reference would have been the clearest thing about it, he should now have been moved to receive it, quickly, naturally, irreflectively, with the question: "The last possibility? Do you mean in her or in me?"
"Oh, in you. I don't know anything about her."
"But that wouldn't be the effect," rejoined Nick, with the same supervening candour. "I believe that if she were to sit to me the usual law would be reversed."
"The usual law?"
"Which you cited awhile since and of which I recognize the general truth. In the case you speak of I should probably make a frightful picture."
"And fall in love with her again? Then, for God's sake, risk the daub!" Miriam laughed out, floating away to her victoria.