Nona Vincent

“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 encyclopædic 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 réchauffé, 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.