The Portable Henry James (81 page)

Newman had been accompanied on his present errand by a slight sentiment, I will not say of defiance—a readiness for aggression or defense, as they might prove needful—but of reflective, good-humored suspicion. He took from his pocket, while he stood on the portico, a card upon which, under his name, he had written the words “San Francisco,” and while he presented it he looked warily at his interlocutor. His glance was singularly reassuring; he liked the young man’s face; it strongly resembled that of Madame de Cintré. He was evidently her brother. The young man, on his side, had made a rapid inspection of Newman’s person. He had taken the card and was about to enter the house with it when another figure appeared on the threshold—an older man, of a fine presence, wearing evening dress. He looked hard at Newman, and Newman looked at him. “Madame de Cintré,” the younger man repeated, as an introduction of the visitor. The other took the card from his hand, read it in a rapid glance, looked again at Newman from head to foot, hesitated a moment, and then said, gravely but urbanely, “Madame de Cintré is not at home.”

The younger man made a gesture, and then, turning to Newman, “I am very sorry, sir,” he said.

Newman gave him a friendly nod, to show that he bore him no malice, and retraced his steps. At the porter’s lodge he stopped; the two men were still standing on the portico.

“Who is the gentleman with the dog?” he asked of the old woman who reappeared. He had begun to learn French.

“That is Monsieur le Comte.”

“And the other?”

“That is Monsieur le Marquis.”

“A marquis?” said Christopher in English, which the old woman fortunately did not understand. “Oh, then he’s not the butler!”

 

“Hanged if I should want to have a greedy little adventuress like that know I was giving myself such pains about her!” said Newman.

“A pretty woman is always worth one’s pains,” objected Valentin. “Mademoiselle Nioche is welcome to be tickled by my curiosity, and to know that I am tickled that she is tickled. She is not so much tickled, by the way.”

“You had better go and tell her,” Newman rejoined. “She gave me a message for you of some such drift.”

“Bless your quiet imagination,” said Valentin, “I have been to see her—three times in five days. She is a charming hostess; we talk of Shakespeare and the musical glasses. She is extremely clever and a very curious type; not at all coarse or wanting to be coarse; determined not to be. She means to take very good care of herself. She is extremely perfect; she is as hard and clear-cut as some little figure of a sea-nymph in an antique intaglio, and I will warrant that she has not a grain more of sentiment or heart than if she were scooped out of a big amethyst. You can’t scratch her even with a diamond. Extremely pretty,—really, when you know her, she is wonderfully pretty,—intelligent, determined, ambitious, unscrupulous, capable of looking at a man strangled without changing color, she is, upon my honor, extremely entertaining.”

“It’s a fine list of attractions,” said Newman; “they would serve as a police-detective’s description of a favorite criminal. I should sum them up by another word than ‘entertaining.’ ”

“Why, that is just the word to use. I don’t say she is laudable or lovable. I don’t want her as my wife or my sister. But she is a very curious and ingenious piece of machinery; I like to see it in operation.”

“Well, I have seen some very curious machines, too,” said Newman; “and once, in a needle factory, I saw a gentleman from the city, who had stepped too near one of them, picked up as neatly as if he had been prodded by a fork, swallowed down straight, and ground into small pieces.”

 

The Comédie Française has been “taken up,” collectively and individually, with a warmth which must have taxed the preconceptions of the French imagination, and which does great honour to English courtesy. How the French imagination may have reconciled all this—especially in some of its phases—with the familiar traditions about English stiffness and coldness, English prudery and false delicacy, it profits not to enquire. It is enough that it must occasionally have been sorely puzzled, and have carried away a considerable store of tough problems, to be solved at leisure. One of these, for instance, will be connected, as we may surmise, with the extraordinary vogue of Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt, and will concern itself with enquiring into the sources of the tender interest excited by this lady. I speak of her “vogue” for want of a better word; it would require some ingenuity to give an idea of the intensity, the ecstasy, the insanity as some people would say, of curiosity and enthusiasm provoked by Mlle. Bernhardt. I spoke just now of topics, and what they were worth in the London system. This remarkable actress has filled this function with a completeness that leaves nothing to be desired; her success has been altogether the most striking and curious, although by no means, I think, the most gratifying, incident of the visit of the Comédie. It has not been the most gratifying, because it has been but in a very moderate degree an artistic success. It has been the success of a celebrity, pure and simple, and Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt is not, to my sense, a celebrity because she is an artist. She is a celebrity because, apparently, she desires with an intensity that has rarely been equalled to be one, and because for this end all means are alike to her. She may flatter herself that, as regards the London public, she has compassed her end with a completeness which makes of her a sort of fantastically impertinent
victrix
poised upon a perfect pyramid of ruins—the ruins of a hundred British prejudices and proprieties. Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt has remarkable gifts; her success is something quite apart as the woman herself is something quite apart; but her triumph has little to do with the proper lines of the Comédie Française. She is a child of her age—of her moment—and she has known how to profit by the idiosyncrasies of the time. The trade of a celebrity, pure and simple, had been invented, I think, before she came to London; if it had not been, it is certain she would have discovered it. She has in a supreme degree what the French call the
génie de la réclame
—the advertising genius; she may, indeed, be called the muse of the newspaper. Brilliantly as she had already exercised her genius, her visit to London has apparently been a revelation to her of the great extension it may obtain among the Anglo-Saxon peoples, and the
dénoûment
of this latest chapter in the history of the Comédie Française is that Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt has resigned her place as
sociétaire.
You will, of course, have heard long before this reaches you that she has formed projects, more or less definite, for visiting the United States. I strongly suspect that she will find a triumphant career in the Western world. She is too American not to succeed in America. The people who have brought to the highest development the arts and graces of publicity will recognize a kindred spirit in a figure so admirably adapted for conspicuity. Mlle. Bernhardt will be a loss to the Comédie Française, but she will not be a fatal one.

 

On the other side, across the street, was an old house that was called the Dutch House—a peculiar structure dating from the earliest colonial time, composed of bricks that had been painted yellow, crowned with a gable that was pointed out to strangers, defended by a rickety wooden paling and standing sidewise to the street. It was occupied by a primary school for children of both sexes, kept or rather let go, by a demonstrative lady of whom Isabel’s chief recollection was that her hair was fastened with strange bedroomy combs at the temples and that she was the widow of some one of consequence. The little girl had been offered the opportunity of laying a foundation of knowledge in this establishment; but having spent a single day in it, she had protested against its laws and had been allowed to stay at home, where, in the September days, when the windows of the Dutch House were open, she used to hear the hum of childish voices repeating the multiplication-table—an incident in which the elation of liberty and the pain of exclusion were indistinguishably mingled. The foundation of her knowledge was really laid in the idleness of her grandmother’s house, where, as most of the other inmates were not reading people, she had uncontrolled use of a library full of books with frontispieces, which she used to climb upon a chair to take down. When she had found one to her taste—she was guided in the selection chiefly by the frontispiece—she carried it into a mysterious apartment which lay beyond the library and which was called, traditionally, no one knew why, the office. Whose office it had been and at what period it had flourished, she never learned; it was enough for her that it contained an echo and a pleasant musty smell and that it was a chamber of disgrace for old pieces of furniture whose infirmities were not always apparent (so that the disgrace seemed unmerited and rendered them victims of injustice) and with which, in the manner of children, she had established relations almost human, certainly dramatic. There was an old haircloth sofa in especial, to which she had confided a hundred childish sorrows. The place owed much of its mysterious melancholy to the fact that it was properly entered from the second door of the house, the door that had been condemned, and that it was secured by bolts which a particularly slender little girl found it impossible to slide. She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper she might have looked out upon the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side—a place which became to the child’s imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or of terror.

 

“That is very crude of you. When you have lived as long as I, you will see that every human being has his shell, and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we are each of us made up of a cluster of appurtenances. What do you call one’s self? Where does it begin? where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us—and then it flows back again. I know that a large part of myself is in the dresses I choose to wear. I have a great respect for
things
! One’s self—for other people—is one’s expression of one’s self; and one’s house, one’s clothes, the book one reads, the company one keeps—these things are all expressive.”

This was very metaphysical; not more so, however, than several observations Madame Merle had already made. Isabel was fond of metaphysics, but she was unable to accompany her friend into this bold analysis of the human personality.

“I don’t agree with you,” she said. “I think just the other way. I don’t know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; on the contrary, it’s a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one. Certainly, the clothes which, as you say, I choose to wear, don’t express me; and heaven forbid they should!”

“You dress very well,” interposed Madame Merle, skilfully.

“Possibly; but I don’t care to be judged by that. My clothes may express the dressmaker, but they don’t express me. To begin with, it’s not my own choice that I wear them; they are imposed upon me by society.”

“Should you prefer to go without them?” Madame Merle inquired, in a tone which virtually terminated the discussion.

 

. . . what Basil Ransom actually perceived was that Miss Chancellor was a signal old maid. That was her quality, her destiny; nothing could be more distinctly written. There are women who are unmarried by accident, and others who are unmarried by option; but Olive Chancellor was unmarried by every implication of her being. She was a spinster as Shelley was a lyric poet, or as the month of August is sultry. She was so essentially a celibate that Ransom found himself thinking of her as old, though when he came to look at her (as he said to himself) it was apparent that her years were fewer than his own. He did not dislike her, she had been so friendly; but, little by little, she gave him an uneasy feeling—the sense that you could never be safe with a person who took things so hard. It came over him that it was because she took things hard she had sought his acquaintance; it had been because she was strenuous, not because she was genial; she had had in her eye—and what an extraordinary eye it was!—not a pleasure, but a duty. She would expect him to be strenuous in return; but he couldn’t—in private life, he couldn’t; privacy for Basil Ransom consisted entirely in what he called “laying off.” She was not so plain on further acquaintance as she had seemed to him at first; even the young Mississippian had culture enough to see that she was refined. Her white skin had a singular look of being drawn tightly across her face; but her features, though sharp and irregular, were delicate in a fashion that suggested good breeding. Their line was perverse, but it was not poor. The curious tint of her eyes was a living colour; when she turned it upon you, you thought vaguely of the glitter of green ice. She had absolutely no figure, and presented a certain appearance of feeling cold. With all this, there was something very modern and highly developed in her aspect; she had the advantages as well as the drawbacks of a nervous organisation. She smiled constantly at her guest, but from the beginning to the end of dinner, though he made several remarks that he thought might prove amusing, she never once laughed. Later, he saw that she was a woman without laughter; exhilaration, if it ever visited her, was dumb. Once only, in the course of his subsequent acquaintance with her, did it find a voice; and then the sound remained in Ransom’s ear as one of the strangest he had heard.