Nona Vincent

He became conscious, the next day, that his danger would be other than this, and yet he couldn’t have expressed to himself what it would be.  Danger was there, doubtless—danger was everywhere, in the world of art, and still more in the world of commerce; but what he really seemed to catch, for the hour, was the beating of the wings of victory.  Nothing could undermine that, since it was victory simply to be acted.  It would be victory even to be acted badly; a reflection that didn’t prevent him, however, from banishing, in his politic optimism, the word “bad” from his vocabulary.  It had no application, in the compromise of practice; it didn’t apply even to his play, which he was conscious he had already outlived and as to which he foresaw that, in the coming weeks, frequent alarm would alternate, in his spirit, with frequent esteem.  When he went down to the dusky daylit theatre (it arched over him like the temple of fame) Mr. Loder, who was as charming as Mrs. Alsager had announced, struck him as the genius of hospitality.  The manager began to explain why, for so long, he had given no sign; but that was the last thing that interested Wayworth now, and he could never remember afterwards what reasons Mr. Loder had enumerated.  He liked, in the whole business of discussion and preparation, even the things he had thought he should probably dislike, and he revelled in those he had thought he should like.  He watched Miss Violet Grey that evening with eyes that sought to penetrate her possibilities.  She certainly had a few; they were qualities of voice and face, qualities perhaps even of intelligence; he sat there at any rate with a fostering, coaxing attention, repeating over to himself as convincingly as he could that she was not common—a circumstance all the more creditable as the part she was playing seemed to him desperately so.  He perceived that this was why it pleased the audience; he divined that it was the part they enjoyed rather than the actress.  He had a private panic, wondering how, if they liked that form, they could possibly like his.  His form had now become quite an ultimate idea to him.  By the time the evening was over some of Miss Violet Grey’s features, several of the turns of her head, a certain vibration of her voice, had taken their place in the same category.  She was interesting, she was distinguished; at any rate he had accepted her: it came to the same thing.  But he left the theatre that night without speaking to her—moved (a little even to his own mystification) by an odd procrastinating impulse.  On the morrow he was to read his three acts to the company, and then he should have a good deal to say; what he felt for the moment was a vague indisposition to commit himself.  Moreover he found a slight confusion of annoyance in the fact that though he had been trying all the evening to look at Nona Vincent in Violet Grey’s person, what subsisted in his vision was simply Violet Grey in Nona’s.  He didn’t wish to see the actress so directly, or even so simply as that; and it had been very fatiguing, the effort to focus Nona both through the performer and through the “Legitimate.”  Before he went to bed that night he posted three words to Mrs. Alsager—“She’s not a bit like it, but I dare say I can make her do.”

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.