Tragic Muse — book VII, chapter XLVI
XLVI
Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood.
He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother.
He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him?
He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything.
He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place.
He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour.
Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference.
The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book.
He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out.
A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London.
His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators.
Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands.
Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick.
Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer.
But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message?
Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her.
When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast.
Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded.
Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last.
He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone.
Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her.
It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful.
He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear.
Everything was changed.
She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window.
Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again."
"What's the matter--won't you stay?"
Peter asked.
"Are you going out again at this absurd hour?
I won't hurt you," he gently urged.
And he went back and closed the garden door.
He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away."
At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her.
"I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun.
"That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh?
What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it.
That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there.
But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added.
She had remained standing in the path.
Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse.
He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did.
Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself.
However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her.
This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid.
But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him.
He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength."
"Oh I knew--I knew!
That's why I entreated you not to come!"
Miriam groaned.
She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage.
But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield.
"The fact is we must have this thing out," he said.
Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming."
She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom.
She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her.
She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting.
"Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you?
Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you?
Mamma has gone there.
I've promised to go back to them."
"You're an angel not to have let her come with you.
I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply.
"Oh she's all right, but she's nervous."
Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?"
"Whom are you talking about?"
Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed.
"The charming thing you were with this morning.
Is she so afraid of obliging me?
Oh she'd be so good for you!"
"Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said.
"I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you.
I was--I was.
But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me."
"Oh don't--_please_ don't!"
Miriam wailed at this.
She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it.
"If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?"
"It isn't only to say that.
I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me."
"And what's the whole thing?"
He had to make an effort.
"You say your mother's nervous.
Ah if you knew how nervous I am!"
"Well, I'm not.
Go on."
"Give it up--give it up!"
Peter stammered.
"Give it up?"
She fixed him like a mild Medusa.
"I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before."
"Renounce after to-night?
Do you call that a plan?"
she asked.
"Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago."
"Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air.
I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it.
My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me.
I didn't know what I could offer you.
But these last months have made a difference--I do know now.
Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated.
I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things."
She seemed to wonder.
"What sort of things?"
"The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre.
Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you.
Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you."
"You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer.
"Where were the fibres of your being then?"
"They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them.
Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent?
Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want."
"The perfection of perfections?"
the girl echoed with the strangest smile.
"I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do.
How can I give that up?"
he piteously went on.
"How can _I_, my poor friend?
I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them.
_Voyons_, they're infantile.
I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say?
Oh I was sure, I was sure!"
And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity.
"I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued.
"I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_.
Dear me, why do you like us so much?"
"Like you?
I loathe you!"
"_Je le vois parbleu bien_!"
she lightly returned.
"I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well?
I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say.
You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last.
Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!"
"Let her live?
As if I could prevent her living!"
Peter cried with unmistakable conviction.
"Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself?
Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained.
"The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you."
Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you like that?"
"Like my wife to be the most brilliant woman in Europe?
I think I can do with it."
"Aren't you afraid of me?"
"Not a bit."
"Bravely said.
How little you know me after all!"
sighed the girl.
"I tell the truth," Peter ardently went on; "and you must do me the justice to admit that I've taken the time to dig deep into my feelings.
I'm not an infatuated boy; I've lived, I've had experience, I've observed; in short I know what I mean and what I want.
It isn't a thing to reason about; it's simply a need that consumes me.
I've put it on starvation diet, but that's no use--really, it's no use, Miriam," the young man declared with a ring that spoke enough of his sincerity.
"It is no question of my trusting you; it's simply a question of your trusting me.
You're all right, as I've heard you say yourself; you're frank, spontaneous, generous; you're a magnificent creature.
Just quietly marry me and I'll manage you."
"'Manage' me?"
The girl's inflexion was droll; it made him change colour.
"I mean I'll give you a larger life than the largest you can get in any other way.
The stage is great, no doubt, but the world's greater.
It's a bigger theatre than any of those places in the Strand.
We'll go in for realities instead of fables, and you'll do them far better than you do the fables."
Miriam had listened attentively, but her face that could so show things showed her despair at his perverted ingenuity.
"Pardon my saying it after your delightful tributes to my worth," she returned in a moment, "but I've never listened to anything quite so grandly unreal.
You think so well of me that humility itself ought to keep me silent; nevertheless I _must_ utter a few shabby words of sense.
I'm a magnificent creature on the stage--well and good; it's what I want to be and it's charming to see such evidence that I succeed.
But off the stage, woe betide us both, I should lose all my advantages.
The fact's so patent that it seems to me I'm very good-natured even to discuss it with you."
"Are you on the stage now, pray?
Ah Miriam, if it weren't for the respect I owe you!"
her companion wailed.
"If it weren't for that I shouldn't have come here to meet you.
My gift is the thing that takes you: could there be a better proof than that it's to-night's display of it that has brought you to this unreason?
It's indeed a misfortune that you're so sensitive to our poor arts, since they play such tricks with your power to see things as they are.
Without my share of them I should be a dull, empty, third-rate woman, and yet that's the fate you ask me to face and insanely pretend you're ready to face yourself."
"Without it--without it?"
Sherringham cried.
"Your own sophistry's infinitely worse than mine.
I should like to see you without it for the fiftieth part of a second.
What I ask you to give up is the dusty boards of the play-house and the flaring footlights, but not the very essence of your being.
Your 'gift,' your genius, is yourself, and it's because it's yourself that I yearn for you.
If it had been a thing you could leave behind by the easy dodge of stepping off the stage I would never have looked at you a second time.
Don't talk to me as if I were a simpleton--with your own false simplifications!
You were made to charm and console, to represent beauty and harmony and variety to miserable human beings; and the daily life of man is the theatre for that--not a vulgar shop with a turnstile that's open only once in the twenty-four hours.
'Without it,' verily!"
Peter proceeded with a still, deep heat that kept down in a manner his rising scorn and exasperated passion.
"Please let me know the first time you're without your face, without your voice, your step, your exquisite spirit, the turn of your head and the wonder of your look!"
Miriam at this moved away from him with a port that resembled what she sometimes showed on the stage when she turned her young back upon the footlights and then after a few steps grandly swept round again.
This evolution she performed--it was over in an instant--on the present occasion; even to stopping short with her eyes upon him and her head admirably erect.
"Surely it's strange," she said, "the way the other solution never occurs to you."
"The other solution?"
"That _you_ should stay on the stage."
"I don't understand you," her friend gloomed.
"Stay on _my_ stage.
Come off your own."
For a little he said nothing; then: "You mean that if I'll do that you'll have me?"
"I mean that if it were to occur to you to offer me a little sacrifice on your own side it might place the matter in a slightly more attractive light."
"Continue to let you act--as my wife?"
he appealed.
"Is it a real condition?
Am I to understand that those are your terms?"
"I may say so without fear, because you'll never accept them."
"Would you accept them _from_ me?"
he demanded; "accept the manly, the professional sacrifice, see me throw up my work, my prospects--of course I should have to do that--and simply become your appendage?"
She raised her arms for a prodigious fall.
"My dear fellow, you invite me with the best conscience in the world to become yours."
"The cases are not equal.
You'd make of me the husband of an actress.
I
should make of you the wife of an ambassador."
"The husband of an actress, _c'est bientot dit_, in that tone of scorn!
If you're consistent," said Miriam, all lucid and hard, "it ought to be a proud position for you."
"What do you mean, if I'm consistent?"
"Haven't you always insisted on the beauty and interest of our art and the greatness of our mission?
Haven't you almost come to blows with poor Gabriel Nash about it?
What did all that mean if you won't face the first consequences of your theory?
Either it was an enlightened conviction or it was an empty pretence.
If you were only talking against time I'm glad to know it," she rolled out with a darkening eye.
"The better the cause, it seems to me, the better the deed; and if the theatre _is_ important to the 'human spirit,' as you used to say so charmingly, and if into the bargain you've the pull of being so fond of me, I don't see why it should be monstrous of you to give us your services in an intelligent, indirect way.
Of course if you're not serious we needn't talk at all; but if you are, with your conception of what the actor can do, why is it so base to come to the actor's aid, taking one devotion with another?
If I'm so fine I'm worth looking after a bit, and the place where I'm finest is the place to look after me!"
He had a long pause again, taking her in as it seemed to him he had never done.
"You were never finer than at this minute, in the deepest domesticity of private life.
I've no conception whatever of what the actor can do, and no theory whatever about the importance of the theatre.
Any infatuation of that sort has completely dropped from me, and for all I care the theatre may go to the dogs--which I judge it altogether probably will!"
"You're dishonest, you're ungrateful, you're false!"
Miriam flashed.
"It was the theatre brought you here--if it hadn't been for the theatre I never would have looked at you.
It was in the name of the theatre you first made love to me; it's to the theatre you owe every advantage that, so far as I'm concerned, you possess."
"I seem to possess a great many!"
poor Peter derisively groaned.
"You might avail yourself better of those you have!
You make me angry, but I want to be fair," said the shining creature, "and I can't be unless you are.
You're not fair, nor candid, nor honourable, when you swallow your words and abjure your faith, when you throw over old friends and old memories for a selfish purpose."
"'Selfish purpose' is, in your own convenient idiom, _bientot dit_," Peter promptly answered.
"I suppose you consider that if I truly esteemed you I should be ashamed to deprive the world of the light of your genius.
Perhaps my esteem isn't of the right quality--there are different kinds, aren't there?
At any rate I've explained to you that I propose to deprive the world of nothing at all.
You shall be celebrated, _allez_!"
"Vain words, vain words, my dear!"
and she turned off again in her impatience.
"I know of course," she added quickly, "that to befool yourself with such twaddle you must be pretty bad."
"Yes, I'm pretty bad," he admitted, looking at her dismally.
"What do you do with the declaration you made me the other day--the day I found my cousin here--that you'd take me if I should come to you as one who had risen high?"
Miriam thought of it.
"I remember--the chaff about the honours, the orders, the stars and garters.
My poor foolish friend, don't be so painfully literal.
Don't you know a joke when you see it?
It was to worry your cousin, wasn't it?
But it didn't in the least succeed."
"Why should you wish to worry my cousin?"
"Because he's so provoking!"
she instantly answered; after which she laughed as if for her falling too simply into the trap he had laid.
"Surely, at all events, I had my freedom no less than I have it now.
Pray what explanations should I have owed you and in what fear of you should I have gone?
However, that has nothing to do with it.
Say I did tell you that we might arrange it on the day you should come to me covered with glory in the shape of little tinkling medals: why should you anticipate that transaction by so many years and knock me down such a long time in advance?
Where's the glory, please, and where are the medals?"
"Dearest girl, am I not going to strange parts--a capital promotion--next month," he insistently demanded, "and can't you trust me enough to believe I speak with a real appreciation of the facts (that I'm not lying to you in short) when I tell you I've my foot in the stirrup?
The glory's dawning.
_I_'m all right too."
"What you propose to me, then, is to accompany you _tout bonnement_ to your new post.
What you propose to me is to pack up and start?"
"You put it in a nutshell."
But Peter's smile was strained.
"You're touching--it has its charm.
But you can't get anything in any of the Americas, you know.
I'm assured there are no medals to be picked up in those parts--which are therefore 'strange' indeed.
That's why the diplomatic body hate them all."
"They're on the way, they're on the way!"
--he could only feverishly hammer.
"The people here don't keep us long in disagreeable places unless we want to stay.
There's one thing you can get anywhere if you've ability, and nowhere if you've not, and in the disagreeable places generally more than in the others; and that--since it's the element of the question we're discussing--is simply success.
It's odious to be put on one's swagger, but I protest against being treated as if I had nothing to offer--to offer a person who has such glories of her own.
I'm not a little presumptuous ass; I'm a man accomplished and determined, and the omens are on my side."
Peter faltered a moment and then with a queer expression went on: "Remember, after all, that, strictly speaking, your glories are also still in the future."
An exclamation at these words burst from Miriam's lips, but her companion resumed quickly: "Ask my official superiors, ask any of my colleagues, if they consider I've nothing to offer."
He had an idea as he ceased speaking that she was on the point of breaking out with some strong word of resentment at his allusion to the contingent nature of her prospects.
But it only deepened his wound to hear her say with extraordinary mildness: "It's perfectly true that my glories are still to come, that I may fizzle out and that my little success of to-day is perhaps a mere flash in the pan.
Stranger things have been--something of that sort happens every day.
But don't we talk too much of that part of it?"
she asked with a weary patience that was noble in its effect.
"Surely it's vulgar to think only of the noise one's going to make--especially when one remembers how utterly _betes_ most of the people will be among whom one makes it.
It isn't to my possible glories I cling; it's simply to my idea, even if it's destined to betray me and sink me.
I like it better than anything else--a thousand times better (I'm sorry to have to put it in such a way) than tossing up my head as the fine lady of a little coterie."
"A little coterie?
I don't know what you're talking about!"
--for this at least Peter could fight.
"A big coterie, then!
It's only that at the best.
A nasty, prim, 'official' woman who's perched on her little local pedestal and thinks she's a queen for ever because she's ridiculous for an hour!
Oh you needn't tell me, I've seen them abroad--the dreariest females--and could imitate them here.
I could do one for you on the spot if I weren't so tired.
It's scarcely worth mentioning perhaps all this while--but I'm ready to drop."
She picked up the white mantle she had tossed off, flinging it round her with her usual amplitude of gesture.
"They're waiting for me and I confess I'm hungry.
If I don't hurry they'll eat up all the nice things.
Don't say I haven't been obliging, and come back when you're better.
Good-night."
"I quite agree with you that we've talked too much about the vulgar side of our question," Peter returned, walking round to get between her and the French window by which she apparently had a view of leaving the room.
"That's because I've wanted to bribe you.
