Miss Bretherton Part 9

'VENICE, _August_ 7.

'Well, I have seen her! It has been a blazing day. I was sitting in the little garden which separates one half of our rooms from the other, while Caterina was arranging the _dejeuner_ under the little acacia arbour in the centre of it. Suddenly Felicie came out from the house, and behind her a tall figure in a large hat and a white dress. The figure held out both hands to me in a cordial, un-English way, and said a number of pleasant things, rapidly, in a delicious voice; while I, with the dazzle of the sun in my eyes so that I could hardly make out the features, stood feeling a little thrilled by the advent of so famous a person. In a few moments, however, as it seemed to me, we were sitting, under the acacias, she was helping me to cut up the melon and arrange the figs, as if we had known one another for months, and I was experiencing one of those sudden rushes of liking which, as you know, are a weakness of mine. She stayed and took her meal with its. Paul, of course, was fascinated, and for once has not set her down as a _reputation surfaite_.

'Her beauty has a curious air of the place; and now I remember that her mother was Italian--Venetian actually, was it not? That accounts for it; she is the Venetian type spiritualised. At the foundation of her face, as it were, lies the face of the Burano lace-maker; only the original type has been so refined, so chiselled and smoothed away, that, to speak fancifully, only a beautiful ghost of it remains. That large stateliness of her movement, too, is Italian. You may see it in any Venetian street, and Veronese has fixed it in art.

'While we were sitting in the garden who should be announced but Edward Wallace? I knew, of course, from you that he might be here about this time, but in the hurry of our settling in I had quite forgotten his existence, so that the sight of his trim person bearing down upon us was a surprise. He and the Bretherton party, however, had been going about together for several days, so that he and she had plenty of gossip in common. Miss Bretherton's enthusiasm about Venice is of a very naive, hot, outspoken kind. It seems to me that she is a very susceptible creature. She lives her life fast, and crowds into it a greater number of sensations than most people. All this zest and pleasure must consume a vast amount of nervous force, but it makes her very refres.h.i.+ng to people as _blases_ as Paul and I are. My first feeling about her is very much what yours was. Personally, there seems to be all the stuff in her of which an actress is made; will she some day stumble upon the discovery of how to bring her own individual flame and force to bear upon her art? I should think it not unlikely, and, altogether, I feel as though I should take a more hopeful view of her intellectually than you do. You see, my dear Eustace, you men never realise how clever we women are, how fast we learn, and how quickly we catch up hints from all quarters under heaven and improve upon them. An actress so young and so sympathetic as Isabel Bretherton must still be very much of an unknown quant.i.ty dramatically. I know you think that the want of training is fatal, and that popularity will stereotype her faults. It may be so; but I am inclined to think, from my first sight of her, that she is a nature that will gather from life rather what stimulates it than what dulls and vulgarises it.

Altogether, when I compare my first impressions of her with the image of her left by your letters, I feel that I have been pleasantly surprised.

Only in the matter of intelligence. Otherwise it has, of course, been your descriptions of her that have planted and nurtured in me that strong sense of attraction which blossomed into liking at the moment of personal contact.'

'_August_ 10.

'This afternoon we have been out in the gondola belonging to this modest establishment, with our magnificent gondolier, Piero, and his boy to convey us to the Lido. I got Miss Bretherton to talk to me about her Jamaica career. She made us all laugh with her accounts of the blood-and-thunder pieces in which the audiences at the Kingston theatre revelled. She seems generally to have played the Bandit's Daughter, the Smuggler's Wife, or the European damsel carried off by Indians, or some other thrilling elemental personage of the kind. The _White Lady_ was, apparently, her first introduction to a more complicated order of play.

It is extraordinary, when one comes to think of it, how little positive dramatic knowledge she must have! She knows some Shakespeare, I think--at least, she mentions two or three plays--and I gather from something she.

said that she is now making the inevitable study of Juliet that every actress makes sooner or later; but Sheridan, Goldsmith, and, of course, all the French people, are mere names to her. When I think of the minute exhaustive training our Paris actors go through, and compare it with such a state of nature as hers, I am amazed at what she has done! For, after all, you know, she must be able to act to some extent; she must know a great deal more of her business than you and I suspect, or she could not get on at all.'

'_August_ 16.

'It is almost a week, I see, since I wrote to you last. During that time we have seen a great deal more of Miss Bretherton, sometimes in company with her belongings, sometimes without them, and my impressions of her have ripened very fast. Oh, my dear Eustace, you have been hasty,--all the world has been hasty! Isabel Bretherton's _real_ self is only now coming to the front, and it is a self which, as I say to myself with astonishment, not even your keen eyes have ever seen--hardly suspected even. Should I, myself a woman, have been as blind to a woman's capabilities, I wonder? Very likely! These sudden rich developments of youth are often beyond all calculation.

'Mr. Wallace's att.i.tude makes me realise more than I otherwise could the past and present condition of things. He comes and talks to me with amazement of the changes in her tone and outlook, of the girl's sharpening intellect and growing sensitiveness, and as he recalls incidents and traits of the London season--confessions or judgments or blunders of hers, and puts them beside the impression which he sees her to be making on Paul and myself--I begin to understand from his talk and his bewilderment something of the real nature of the case.

Intellectually, it has been "the ugly duckling" over again. Under all the crude, unfledged imperfection of her young performance, you people who have watched her with your trained critical eyes seem to me never to have suspected the coming wings, the strange nascent power, which is only now a.s.serting itself in the light of day.

'"What has Eustace been about?" said Paul to me last night, after we had all returned from rambling round and round the moonlit Piazza, and he had been describing to me his talk with her. "He ought to have seen farther ahead. That creature is only just beginning to live--and it will be a life worth having! He has kindled it, too, as much as anybody. Of course we have not seen her act yet, and ignorant--yes, she is certainly ignorant,--though not so much as I imagined. But as for natural power and delicacy of mind, there can be no question at all about them!"

'"I don't know that Eustace did question them," I said; "he thought simply that she had no conception of what her art really required of her, and never would have because of her popularity."

'To which Paul replied that, as far as he could make out, n.o.body thought more meanly of her popularity than she did, and he has been talking a great deal to her about her season.

'"I never saw a woman at a more critical or interesting point of development," he exclaimed at last, striding up and down, and so absorbed in the subject that I could have almost laughed at his eagerness.

"Something or other, luckily for her, set her on the right track three months ago, and it is apparently a nature on which nothing is lost. One can see it in the way in which she takes Venice: there isn't a sc.r.a.p of her--little as she knows about it--that isn't keen and interested and wide-awake!"

'"Well, after all," I reminded him as he was settling down to his books, "we know nothing about her as an actress."

'"We shall see," he said; "I will find out something about that too before long."'

'_August_ 17-19.

'And so he has!

'Paul has been devoting himself more and more to the beauty, Mr. Wallace and I looking on with considerable amus.e.m.e.nt and interest; and this afternoon, finding it intolerable that Miss Bretherton has not even a bowing acquaintance with any of his favourite plays, Augier, Dumas, Victor Hugo, or anything else, he has been reading aloud to us in the garden, running on from scene to scene and speech to speech, translating as he went--she in rapt attention, and he gesticulating and spouting, and, except for an occasional queer rendering that made us laugh, getting on capitally with his English. She was enchanted; the novelty and the excitement of it absorbed her; and every now and then she would stop Paul with a little imperious wave of her hand, and repeat the substance of a speech after him with an impetuous _elan_, an energy, a comprehension, which drew little nods of satisfaction out of him, and sometimes produced a strong and startling effect upon myself and Mr. Wallace. However, Mr.

Wallace might stare as he liked; the two people concerned were totally unconscious of the rest of us, until at last, after the great death-scene in the _Nuit Blanche_, Paul threw down the book almost with a sob, and she, rising in a burst of feeling, held out her white arms towards an imaginary lover, and with extraordinary skill and memory repeated the substance of the heroine's last speeches:--

'"_Achille, beloved! my eyes are dim--the mists of death are gathering. O Achille! the white cottage by the river--the nest in the reeds--your face and mine in the water--the blue heaven below us in the stream--O joy, quick! those hands, those lips! But listen, listen! it is the cruel wind rising, rising: it chills me to the bone, it chokes, it stifles me! I cannot see the river, and the cottage is gone, and the sun. O Achille, it is dark, so dark! Gather me close, beloved!--closer, closer! O death is kind--tender, like your touch! I have no fears--none!"_

'She sank back into her chair. Anything more pathetic, more n.o.ble than her intonation of those words, could not have been imagined. Desforets herself could not have spoken them with a more simple, a more piercing tenderness. I was so confused by a mult.i.tude of conflicting feelings--my own impressions and yours, the realities of the present position and the possibilities of her future--that I forgot to applaud her. It was the first time I had had any glimpse at all of her dramatic power, and, rough and imperfect as the test was, it seemed to me enough. I have not been so devoted to the _Francais_, and to some of the people connected with it, for ten years, for nothing! One gets a kind of insight from long habit which, I think, one may trust. Oh, you blind Eustace, how could you forget that for a creature so full of primitive energy, so rich in the _stuff_ of life, nothing is irreparable! Education has pa.s.sed her by.

Well, she will go to find her education. She will make a teacher out of every friend, out of every sensation. Incident and feeling, praise and dispraise, will all alike tend to mould the sensitive plastic material into shape. So far she may have remained outside her art; the art, no doubt, has been a conventional appendage, and little more. Training would have given her good conventions, whereas she has only picked up bad and imperfect ones. But no training could have given her what she will evidently soon develop for herself, that force and flame of imagination which fuses together instrument and idea in one great artistic whole. She has that imagination. You can see it in her responsive ways, her quick sensitive emotion. Only let it be roused and guided to a certain height, and it will overleap the barriers which have hemmed it in, and pour itself into the channels made ready for it by her art.

'There, at least, you have my strong impression. It is, in many ways, at variance with some of my most cherished principles; for both you and I are perhaps inclined to overrate the value of education, whether technical or general, in its effect on the individuality. And, of course, a better technical preparation would have saved Isabel Bretherton an immense amount of time; would have prevented her from contracting a host of bad habits--all of which she will have to unlearn. But the root of the matter is in her; of that I am sure; and whatever weight of hostile circ.u.mstance may be against her, she will, if she keeps her health--as to which I am sometimes, like you, a little anxious--break through it all and triumph.

'But if you did not understand her quite, you have enormously helped her; so much I will tell you for your comfort. She said to me yesterday abruptly--we were alone in our gondola, far out on the lagoon--"Did your brother ever tell you of a conversation he and I had in the woods at Nuneham about Mr. Wallace's play?"

'"Yes," I answered with outward boldness, but a little inward trepidation; "I have not known anything distress him so much for a long time. He thought you had misunderstood him."

'"No," she said quietly, but as it seemed to me with an undercurrent of emotion in her voice; "I did not misunderstand him. He meant what he said, and I would have forced the truth from him, whatever happened. I was determined to make him show me what he felt. That London season was sometimes terrible to me. I seemed to myself to be living in two worlds--one a world in which there was always a sea of faces opposite to me, or crowds about me, and a praise ringing in my ears which was enough to turn anybody's head, but which after a while repelled me as if there was something humiliating in it; and then, on the other side, a little inner world of people I cared for and respected, who looked at me kindly, and thought for me, but to whom as an actress I was just of no account at all! It was your brother who first roused that sense in me; it was so strange and painful, for how could I help at first believing in all the hubbub and the applause?"

'"Poor child!" I said, reaching out my hand for one of hers. "Did Eustace make himself disagreeable to you?"

'"It was more, I think," she answered, as if reflecting, "the standard he always seemed to carry about with him than anything connected with my own work. At least, of course, I mean before that Nuneham day. Ah, that Nuneham day! It cut deep."

'She turned away from me, and leant over the side of the boat, so that I could not see her face.

'"You forced it out of Eustace, you know," I said, trying to laugh at her, "you uncompromising young person! Of course, he flattered himself that you forgot all about his preaching the moment you got home. Men always make themselves believe what they want to believe."

'"Why should he want to believe so?" she replied quickly. "I had half foreseen it, I had forced it from him, and yet I felt it like a blow! It cost me a sleepless night, and some--well, some very bitter tears. Not that the tears were a new experience. How often, after all that noise at the theatre, have I gone home and cried myself to sleep over the impossibility of doing what I wanted to do, of moving those hundreds of people, of making them feel, and of putting my own feeling into shape!

But that night, and with my sense of illness just then, I saw myself--it seemed to me quite in the near future--grown old and ugly, a forgotten failure, without any of those memories which console people who have been great when they must give up. I felt myself struggling against such a weight of ignorance, of bad habits, of unfavourable surroundings. How was I ever to get free and to reverse that judgment of Mr. Kendal's? My very success stood in my way, How was 'Miss Bretherton' to put herself to school?"

'"But now," I said to her warmly, "you have got free; or, rather, you are on the way to freedom."

'She thought a little bit without speaking, her chin resting on her hand, her elbow on her knee. We were pa.s.sing the great red-brown ma.s.s of the Armenian convent. She seemed to be drinking in the dazzling harmonies of blue and warm brown and pearly light. When she did speak again it was very slowly, as though she were trying to give words to a number of complex impressions.

'"Yes," she said; "it seems to me that I am different; but I can't tell exactly how or why. I see all sorts of new possibilities, new meanings everywhere: that is one half of it! But the other, and the greater, half is--how to make all these new feelings and any new knowledge which may come to me tell on my art." And then she changed altogether with one of those delightful swift transformations of hers, and her face rippled over with laughter. "At present the chief result of the difference, whatever it may be, seems to be to make me most unmanageable at home. I am for ever disagreeing with my people, saying I can't do this and I won't do that. I am getting to enjoy having my own way in the most abominable manner." And then she caught my hand, that was holding hers, between both her own, and said half laughing and half in earnest--

'"Did you ever realise that I don't know any single language besides my own--not even French? That I can't read any French book or any French play?"

'"Well," I said, half laughing too, "it is very astonis.h.i.+ng. And you know it can't go on if you are to do what I think you will do. French you positively must learn, and learn quickly. I don't mean to say that we haven't good plays and a tradition of our own; but for the moment France is the centre of your art, and you cannot remain at a distance from it!

The French have organised their knowledge; it is available for all who come. Ours is still floating and amateurish--"

'And so on. You may imagine it, my dear Eustace; I spare you any more of it verbatim. After I had talked away for a long time and brought it all back to the absolute necessity that she should know French and become acquainted with French acting and French dramatic ideals, she pulled me up in the full career of eloquence, by demanding with a little practical air, a twinkle lurking somewhere in her eyes--

'"Explain to me, please; how is it to be done?"

'"Oh," I said, "nothing is easier. Do you know anything at all?"

'"Very little. I once had a term's lessons at Kingston."

'"Very well, then," I went on, enjoying this little comedy of a neglected education; "get a French maid, a French master, and a novel: I will provide you with _Consuelo_ and a translation to-morrow."

'"As for the French maid," she answered dubiously, shaking her head, "I don't know. I expect my old black woman that I brought with me from Jamaica would ill-treat her--perhaps murder her. But the master can be managed and the novel. Will none of you laugh at me if you see me trailing a French grammar about?"

'And so she has actually begun to-day. She makes a pretence of keeping her novel and a little dictionary and grammar in a bag, and hides them when any one appears. But Paul has already begun to tease her about her new and mysterious occupation, and I foresee that he will presently spend the greater part of his mornings in teaching her. I never saw anybody attract him so much; she is absolutely different from anything he has seen before; and, as he says, the mixture of ignorance and genius in her--yes, genius; don't be startled!--is most stimulating to the imagination.'