The Tragic Muse Part 43

"_Elle est superbe_," said Madame Carre. "You must put those pieces on the stage: how will you do it?"

"Oh we know how to get up a play in London, Madame Carre"--Mr. Dashwood was all geniality. "They put money on it, you know."

"On it? But what do they put _in_ it? Who'll interpret them? Who'll manage a style like that--the style of which the rhapsodies she has just repeated are a specimen? Whom have you got that one has ever heard of?"

"Oh you'll hear of a good deal when once she gets started," Dashwood cheerfully contended.

Madame Carre looked at him a moment; then, "I feel that you'll become very bad," she said to Miriam. "I'm glad I shan't see it."

"People will do things for me--I'll make them," the girl declared. "I'll stir them up so that they'll have ideas."

"What people, pray?"

"Ah terrible woman!" Peter theatrically groaned.

"We translate your pieces--there will be plenty of parts," Basil Dashwood said.

"Why then go out of the door to come in at the window?--especially if you smash it! An English arrangement of a French piece is a pretty woman with her back turned."

"Do you really want to keep her?" Sherringham asked of Madame Carre--quite as if thinking for a moment that this after all might be possible.

She bent her strange eyes on him. "No, you're all too queer together. We couldn't be bothered with you and you're not worth it."

"I'm glad it's 'together' that we're queer then--we can console each other."

"If you only would; but you don't seem to! In short I don't understand you--I give you up. But it doesn't matter," said the old woman wearily, "for the theatre's dead and even you, _ma toute-belle_, won't bring it to life. Everything's going from bad to worse, and I don't care what becomes of you. You wouldn't understand us here and they won't understand you there, and everything's impossible, and no one's a whit the wiser, and it's not of the least consequence. Only when you raise your arms lift them just a little higher," Madame Carre added.

"My mother will be happier _chez nous_" said Miriam, throwing her arms straight up and giving them a n.o.ble tragic movement.

"You won't be in the least in the right path till your mother's in despair."

"Well, perhaps we can bring that about even in London," Sherringham patiently laughed.

"Dear Mrs. Rooth--she's great fun," Mr. Dashwood as imperturbably dropped.

Miriam transferred the dark weight of her gaze to him as if she were practising. "_You_ won't upset her, at any rate." Then she stood with her beautiful and fatal mask before her hostess. "I want to do the modern too. I want to do _le drame_, with intense realistic effects."

"And do you want to look like the portico of the Madeleine when it's draped for a funeral?" her instructress mocked. "Never, never. I don't believe you're various: that's not the way I see you. You're pure tragedy, with _de grands eclats de voix_ in the great style, or you're nothing."

"Be beautiful--be only that," Peter urged with high interest. "Be only what you can be so well--something that one may turn to for a glimpse of perfection, to lift one out of all the vulgarities of the day."

Thus apostrophised the girl broke out with one of the speeches of Racine's Phaedra, hus.h.i.+ng her companions on the instant. "You'll be the English Rachel," said Basil Dashwood when she stopped.

"Acting in French!" Madame Carre amended. "I don't believe in an English Rachel."

"I shall have to work it out, what I shall be," Miriam concluded with a rich pensive effect.

"You're in wonderfully good form to-day," Sherringham said to her; his appreciation revealing a personal subjection he was unable to conceal from his companions, much as he wished it.

"I really mean to do everything."

"Very well; after all Garrick did."

"Then I shall be the Garrick of my s.e.x."

"There's a very clever author doing something for me; I should like you to see it," said Basil Dashwood, addressing himself equally to Miriam and to her diplomatic friend.

"Ah if you've very clever authors----!" And Madame Carre spun the sound to the finest satiric thread.

"I shall be very happy to see it," Peter returned.

This response was so benevolent that Basil Dashwood presently began: "May I ask you at what theatre you've made arrangements?"

Sherringham looked at him a moment. "Come and see me at the emba.s.sy and I'll tell you." Then he added: "I know your sister, Mrs. Lovick."

"So I supposed: that's why I took the liberty of asking such a question."

"It's no liberty, but Mr. Sherringham doesn't appear to be able to tell you," said Miriam.

"Well, you know, it's a very curious world, all those theatrical people over there," Peter conceded.

"Ah don't say anything against them when I'm one of them," Basil Dashwood laughed.

"I might plead the absence of information," Peter returned, "as Miss Rooth has neglected to make us acquainted."

Miriam vaguely smiled. "I know you both so little." But she presented them with a great stately air to each other, and the two men shook hands while Madame Carre observed them.

"_Tiens_! you gentlemen meet here for the first time? You do right to become friends--that's the best thing. Live together in peace and mutual confidence. _C'est de beaucoup le plus sage_."

"Certainly, for yoke-fellows," said Sherringham.

He began the next moment to repeat to his new acquaintance some of the things he had been told in London; but their hostess stopped him off, waving the talk away with charming overdone stage horror and the young hands of the heroines of Marivaux. "Ah wait till you go--for that! Do you suppose I care for news of your mountebanks' booths?"

XX

As many people know, there are not, in the famous Theatre Francais, more than a dozen good seats accessible to ladies.[*] The stalls are forbidden them, the boxes are a quarter of a mile from the stage and the balcony is a delusion save for a few chairs at either end of its vast horseshoe. But there are two excellent _baignoires d'avant-scene_, which indeed are by no means always to be had. It was, however, into one of them that, immediately after his return to Paris, Sherringham ushered Mrs. Rooth and her daughter, with the further escort of Basil Dashwood.

He had chosen the evening of the reappearance of the celebrated Mademoiselle Voisin--she had been enjoying a _conge_ of three months--an actress whom Miriam had seen several times before and for whose method she professed a high though somewhat critical esteem. It was only for the return of this charming performer that Peter had been waiting to respond to Miriam's most ardent wish--that of spending an hour in the _foyer des artistes_ of the great theatre. She was the person whom he knew best in the house of Moliere; he could count on her to do them the honours some night when she was in the "bill," and to make the occasion sociable. Miriam had been impatient for it--she was so convinced that her eyes would be opened in the holy of holies; but wis.h.i.+ng as particularly as he did to partic.i.p.ate in her impression he had made her promise she wouldn't taste of this experience without him--not let Madame Carre, for instance, take her in his absence. There were questions the girl wished to put to Mademoiselle Voisin--questions which, having admired her from the balcony, she felt she was exactly the person to answer. She was more "in it" now, after all, than Madame Carre, in spite of her slenderer talent: she was younger, fresher, more modern and--Miriam found the word--less academic. She was in fine less "_vieux jeu_." Peter perfectly foresaw the day when his young friend would make indulgent allowances for poor Madame Carre, patronising her as an old woman of good intentions.

[*: 1890]

The play to-night was six months old, a large, serious, successful comedy by the most distinguished of authors, with a thesis, a chorus embodied in one character, a _scene a faire_ and a part full of opportunities for Mademoiselle Voisin. There were things to be said about this artist, strictures to be dropped as to the general quality of her art, and Miriam leaned back now, making her comments as if they cost her less, but the actress had knowledge and distinction and pathos, and our young lady repeated several times: "How quiet she is, how wonderfully quiet! Scarcely anything moves but her face and her voice.

_Le geste rare_, but really expressive when it comes. I like that economy; it's the only way to make the gesture significant."

"I don't admire the way she holds her arms," Basil Dash wood said: "like a _demoiselle de magasin_ trying on a jacket."