Nona Vincent

Henry James

Nona Vincent

I

“I wondered whether you wouldn’t read it to me,” said Mrs. Alsager, as they lingered a little near the fire before he took leave.  She looked down at the fire sideways, drawing her dress away from it and making her proposal with a shy sincerity that added to her charm.  Her charm was always great for Allan Wayworth, and the whole air of her house, which was simply a sort of distillation of herself, so soothing, so beguiling that he always made several false starts before departure.  He had spent some such good hours there, had forgotten, in her warm, golden drawing-room, so much of the loneliness and so many of the worries of his life, that it had come to be the immediate answer to his longings, the cure for his aches, the harbour of refuge from his storms.  His tribulations were not unprecedented, and some of his advantages, if of a usual kind, were marked in degree, inasmuch as he was very clever for one so young, and very independent for one so poor.  He was eight-and-twenty, but he had lived a good deal and was full of ambitions and curiosities and disappointments.  The opportunity to talk of some of these in Grosvenor Place corrected perceptibly the immense inconvenience of London.  This inconvenience took for him principally the line of insensibility to Allan Wayworth’s literary form.  He had a literary form, or he thought he had, and her intelligent recognition of the circumstance was the sweetest consolation Mrs. Alsager could have administered.  She was even more literary and more artistic than he, inasmuch as he could often work off his overflow (this was his occupation, his profession), while the generous woman, abounding in happy thoughts, but unedited and unpublished, stood there in the rising tide like the nymph of a fountain in the plash of the marble basin.

The year before, in a big newspapery house, he had found himself next her at dinner, and they had converted the intensely material hour into a feast of reason.  There was no motive for her asking him to come to see her but that she liked him, which it was the more agreeable to him to perceive as he perceived at the same time that she was exquisite.  She was enviably free to act upon her likings, and it made Wayworth feel less unsuccessful to infer that for the moment he happened to be one of them.  He kept the revelation to himself, and indeed there was nothing to turn his head in the kindness of a kind woman.  Mrs. Alsager occupied so completely the ground of possession that she would have been condemned to inaction had it not been for the principle of giving.  Her husband, who was twenty years her senior, a massive personality in the City and a heavy one at home (wherever he stood, or even sat, he was monumental), owned half a big newspaper and the whole of a great many other things.  He admired his wife, though she bore no children, and liked her to have other tastes than his, as that seemed to give a greater acreage to their life.  His own appetites went so far he could scarcely see the boundary, and his theory was to trust her to push the limits of hers, so that between them the pair should astound by their consumption.  His ideas were prodigiously vulgar, but some of them had the good fortune to be carried out by a person of perfect delicacy.  Her delicacy made her play strange tricks with them, but he never found this out.  She attenuated him without his knowing it, for what he mainly thought was that he had aggrandised her.  Without her he really would have been bigger still, and society, breathing more freely, was practically under an obligation to her which, to do it justice, it acknowledged by an attitude of mystified respect.  She felt a tremulous need to throw her liberty and her leisure into the things of the soul—the most beautiful things she knew.  She found them, when she gave time to seeking, in a hundred places, and particularly in a dim and sacred region—the region of active pity—over her entrance into which she dropped curtains so thick that it would have been an impertinence to lift them.  But she cultivated other beneficent passions, and if she cherished the dream of something fine the moments at which it most seemed to her to come true were when she saw beauty plucked flower-like in the garden of art.  She loved the perfect work—she had the artistic chord.  This chord could vibrate only to the touch of another, so that appreciation, in her spirit, had the added intensity of regret.  She could understand the joy of creation, and she thought it scarcely enough to be told that she herself created happiness.  She would have liked, at any rate, to choose her way; but it was just here that her liberty failed her.  She had not the voice—she had only the vision.  The only envy she was capable of was directed to those who, as she said, could do something.

As everything in her, however, turned to gentleness, she was admirably hospitable to such people as a class.  She believed Allan Wayworth could do something, and she liked to hear him talk of the ways in which he meant to show it.  He talked of them almost to no one else—she spoiled him for other listeners.  With her fair bloom and her quiet grace she was indeed an ideal public, and if she had ever confided to him that she would have liked to scribble (she had in fact not mentioned it to a creature), he would have been in a perfect position for asking her why a woman whose face had so much expression should not have felt that she achieved.  How in the world could she express better?  There was less than that in Shakespeare and Beethoven.  She had never been more generous than when, in compliance with her invitation, which I have recorded, he brought his play to read to her.  He had spoken of it to her before, and one dark November afternoon, when her red fireside was more than ever an escape from the place and the season, he had broken out as he came in—“I’ve done it, I’ve done it!”  She made him tell her all about it—she took an interest really minute and asked questions delightfully apt.  She had spoken from the first as if he were on the point of being acted, making him jump, with her participation, all sorts of dreary intervals.  She liked the theatre as she liked all the arts of expression, and he had known her to go all the way to Paris for a particular performance.  Once he had gone with her—the time she took that stupid Mrs. Mostyn.  She had been struck, when he sketched it, with the subject of his drama, and had spoken words that helped him to believe in it.  As soon as he had rung down his curtain on the last act he rushed off to see her, but after that he kept the thing for repeated last touches.  Finally, on Christmas day, by arrangement, she sat there and listened to it.  It was in three acts and in prose, but rather of the romantic order, though dealing with contemporary English life, and he fondly believed that it showed the hand if not of the master, at least of the prize pupil.

Allan Wayworth had returned to England, at two-and-twenty, after a miscellaneous continental education; his father, the correspondent, for years, in several foreign countries successively, of a conspicuous London journal, had died just after this, leaving his mother and her two other children, portionless girls, to subsist on a very small income in a very dull German town.  The young man’s beginnings in London were difficult, and he had aggravated them by his dislike of journalism.  His father’s connection with it would have helped him, but he was (insanely, most of his friends judged—the great exception was always Mrs. Alsager) intraitable on the question of form.  Form—in his sense—was not demanded by English newspapers, and he couldn’t give it to them in their sense.  The demand for it was not great anywhere, and Wayworth spent costly weeks in polishing little compositions for magazines that didn’t pay for style.  The only person who paid for it was really Mrs. Alsager: she had an infallible instinct for the perfect.  She paid in her own way, and if Allan Wayworth had been a wage-earning person it would have made him feel that if he didn’t receive his legal dues his palm was at least occasionally conscious of a gratuity.  He had his limitations, his perversities, but the finest parts of him were the most alive, and he was restless and sincere.  It is however the impression he produced on Mrs. Alsager that most concerns us: she thought him not only remarkably good-looking but altogether original.  There were some usual bad things he would never do—too many prohibitive puddles for him in the short cut to success.

For himself, he had never been so happy as since he had seen his way, as he fondly believed, to some sort of mastery of the scenic idea, which struck him as a very different matter now that he looked at it from within.  He had had his early days of contempt for it, when it seemed to him a jewel, dim at the best, hidden in a dunghill, a taper burning low in an air thick with vulgarity.  It was hedged about with sordid approaches, it was not worth sacrifice and suffering.  The man of letters, in dealing with it, would have to put off all literature, which was like asking the bearer of a noble name to forego his immemorial heritage.  Aspects change, however, with the point of view: Wayworth had waked up one morning in a different bed altogether.  It is needless here to trace this accident to its source; it would have been much more interesting to a spectator of the young man’s life to follow some of the consequences.  He had been made (as he felt) the subject of a special revelation, and he wore his hat like a man in love.  An angel had taken him by the hand and guided him to the shabby door which opens, it appeared, into an interior both splendid and austere.  The scenic idea was magnificent when once you had embraced it—the dramatic form had a purity which made some others look ingloriously rough.  It had the high dignity of the exact sciences, it was mathematical and architectural.  It was full of the refreshment of calculation and construction, the incorruptibility of line and law.  It was bare, but it was erect, it was poor, but it was noble; it reminded him of some sovereign famed for justice who should have lived in a palace despoiled.  There was a fearful amount of concession in it, but what you kept had a rare intensity.  You were perpetually throwing over the cargo to save the ship, but what a motion you gave her when you made her ride the waves—a motion as rhythmic as the dance of a goddess!  Wayworth took long London walks and thought of these things—London poured into his ears the mighty hum of its suggestion.  His imagination glowed and melted down material, his intentions multiplied and made the air a golden haze.  He saw not only the thing he should do, but the next and the next and the next; the future opened before him and he seemed to walk on marble slabs.  The more he tried the dramatic form the more he loved it, the more he looked at it the more he perceived in it.  What he perceived in it indeed he now perceived everywhere; if he stopped, in the London dusk, before some flaring shop-window, the place immediately constituted itself behind footlights, became a framed stage for his figures.  He hammered at these figures in his lonely lodging, he shaped them and he shaped their tabernacle; he was like a goldsmith chiselling a casket, bent over with the passion for perfection.  When he was neither roaming the streets with his vision nor worrying his problem at his table, he was exchanging ideas on the general question with Mrs. Alsager, to whom he promised details that would amuse her in later and still happier hours.  Her eyes were full of tears when he read her the last words of the finished work, and she murmured, divinely—

“And now—to get it done, to get it done!”

“Yes, indeed—to get it done!” Wayworth stared at the fire, slowly rolling up his type-copy.  “But that’s a totally different part of the business, and altogether secondary.”

“But of course you want to be acted?”

“Of course I do—but it’s a sudden descent.  I want to intensely, but I’m sorry I want to.”

“It’s there indeed that the difficulties begin,” said Mrs. Alsager, a little off her guard.

“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.

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