The Soul of Countess Adrian/Chapter 1

, She and Another—the triangle of the human drama! He was a rich, popular, unmarried artist, now on his return from a tour in the Western States. She was a young American actress, for whom her friends prophesied a great future. The "Other" was as yet unknown. He and She were fellow-passengers on board one of the North German Lloyd boats from New York to Southampton. They had been at sea several days, but had not so far made acquaintance. The early part of the voyage was rough; and though he was a good sailor, and ate, and smoked, and paced the deck with as much ease as the motion of the vessel would allow, she had neither his courage nor his hardihood, and did not even put in an appearance in the saloon or the reading-room.

It was on the sixth evening that he was struck at dinner by the sight of a new face, and saw that the hitherto vacant chair on the left hand of the captain was filled at last. He was glad to find that its occupant was a young woman—hardly more than a girl—and, moreover, that she was very beautiful. There could not be two opinions as to her beauty, though he mentally decided that it was of a kind which would not appeal with equal force to all tastes; certainly, it would not appeal at all to admirers of the fleshly type, who prefer the charm of sense to that of soul.

It seemed to Lendon—so he was called—that this young lady's soul might he likened, as in Dryden's metaphor, to a rare and well-tempered blade fretting its too delicate scabbard, so frail was her physique, so ethereal her look. Her face was very pale, but its paleness was not that of ill health. It had no lines, and the shadows beneath her eyes and around the curve of her cheek melted into each other, so that there seemed perfect softness and no shadow. Her features were small and regular, the nose delicately curved, and the nostrils slightly distended, thus giving a look of quick sensibility. She had one of those mobile mouths—the shape of a strung bow, in which the under lip goes up to meet the curve of the upper—which are said to be a sign of histrionic genius. Her eyes were blue, very clear and wide open, with an innocent irresponsible expression; and her hair, profuse in quantity, was pale yellow, and had a sort of life of its own, each strand seeming to stand apart and to reflect the light like a filament of spun glass.

All this Lendon took in by a succession of quick glances; at last he asked his neighbour, "Who is that young lady?" The gentleman he addressed pulled out of his pocket a list of the passengers and proceeded to mark off and identify the row of people opposite, then he appealed to a ship's officer on the other side of him for information, and finally turned to Lendon.

"Her name is Brett," he said, "Miss Beatrice Brett; she's a singer or a performer of some sort, and she's going to join her relations in England and work the newspaper people over there, so that she can come back and make a boom with what they call a European reputation. As if an American reputation wasn't good enough! But that's the way with all of them. She's travelling by herself, and she's under the captain's charge. Pretty, ain't she?—but too like a ghost to suit my style."

Lendon continued to glance from time to time at Miss Brett, and, as was natural to him, theories concerning her began to shape themselves in his mind. He was quite certain that she did not want to "make a boom." He could imagine nothing more repugnant to her temperament than the vulgar process of "working the newspaper people." He was sure, too, that she was not a singer—she hadn't the sort of throat, he said to himself; and certainly she was not one of those Western lecturing women who can spout forth Art, Hygiene, or Free Love as commercial opportunities present themselves. Yet she had the expression of one absorbed in a purpose, whose mind was constantly dwelling upon her purpose, and who was determined at all labour to carry it through. He wondered what that purpose could be. The band was playing, as it always does at dinner on the German line of boats. He knew the music; it was a dreamy dance in a popular ballet, which had been new and the rage when he left London. He watched the girl's face as she bent forward a little to listen. It gave him pleasure to see how her sensitive lip trembled, how her eyes gathered intensity, and her nervous lingers clasped and unclasped each other. He admired the way in which her hair grew, and wondered if it would be possible to make a sketch of her, which later he might work up into a fancy picture.

As soon as dinner was over, Miss Brett got up and went into her cabin. The next day the weather was very fine, and during the band promenade nearly all the sick people found their way up on deck. Among them was Miss Brett. She came up leaning on the arm of the captain, who, having seated her in her long armchair and covered her with her buffalo robe, left her to the company of her books. She had two, Lendon noticed—one, a new novel with the pages uncut, the other a worn-looking volume which, from its sober Russia leather binding and quiet lettering, might have been taken for either the Bible or Shakespeare. Lendon jumped to the conclusion that it was Shakespeare, and, as it proved, was right.

For a German band, the music that morning was distinctly uninteresting. The noisy march, to which most of the promenaders kept time with a. cheerful effort, seemed no more to Miss Brett's taste than it was to Lendon's. She lay back for a little while and listened impatiently. Then she tried Shakespeare: he had stolen along the bulwarks, and a furtive glance had told him that the play was Macbeth. Presently she closed the volume with a sigh, and began to turn over the leaves of the novel. The paper-cutter slipped from her lap, and was carried along the deck. This was Lendon's opportunity; he picked it up, and handed it back to her. She thanked him with a smile that was very sweet and childlike. She began to cut the leaves, but her muffiings embarrassed her.

"Allow me," said Lendon, deferentially. He took the book from her, and began to cut it with great deliberation. As he did so, he made some observations on the weather and the aspect of the sea, which broke the ice between them. He ventured to inquire if she had suffered much during the rough weather.

"Oh! I am never ill," she answered. "I like the sea; I like it even when it is rough."

He remarked that he had not seen her in the saloon till yesterday.

"Oh," she answered, with a charming little blush, "I was very lazy. I had an interesting book, and felt a little shy. I have never crossed alone before. My people are to meet me at Southampton." She went on to say that she had enjoyed lying quiet is her cabin and being waited upon. "Before I left America I had scarcely a moment to myself; I had worked very hard."

He glanced at the book in the sober binding. "You are a student of Shakespeare, I see?

"I am an actress," she answered, as though the one thing implied the other. "Of course I study Shakespeare; I study a great many dramatists."

"And?" … he asked, and added, "I wonder if theoretical knowledge is of much use?"

"Oh, well," she replied, laughing slightly, "I am bound to confess that my theories don't serve me at critical moments. It is something outside oneself that really helps. But I always remember what a great actress told me once. Inspiration is a capricious goddess, and it is well to have knowledge ready to take her place in case she should desert one in the hour of need."

"Does she ever desert in the hour of need? It always seemed to me that inspiration came with the desperate need."

"Ah, you know all about it," she said, and went on with the questioning air of a child. "The captain told me your name. You are the artist, are you not?"

He could not help being pleased at the indirect compliment which her use of the definite article conveyed.

"I know all about you," she went on. "My uncle, Professor Viall, bought one of your pictures two years ago from a dealer in England. It is a desolate little hit of landscape—an autumn evening, a wintry-looking pool, with sedges and rushes bending over it, and dying leaves floating upon its surface. I like the picture, but it always makes me melancholy."

"I think the picture is called 'A Pool of Melancholy,'" he said. "I remember it very well. I am glad that your uncle liked it, and still more glad that it pleases you; but I am sorry that it makes you sad."

"I like everything that is sad," she answered. "It is my temperament. I adore moonlight; I love grey skies, and wintry effects, and autumnal tints, and melancholy music—all that is flickering, vague, and suggestive. It is the temperament of the artist. You have it too."

"How do you know that?" he asked.

"By your face—your eyes—something—I can't tell you what. I have my intuitions I can always tell beforehand whether I shall like people or things."

"Is it your intuition that you will like England and the English, might one ask? Or perhaps you have been there already?"

"No, I have never yet been there."

"Shall you like it?"

"Like it? I love it!"

"But you don't know England."

"Don't I? Yes, indeed I do. Why it's the home and the cradle of all my race—the old dead-and-gone ones I mean. I feel like a girl going home."

"I knew a scholar once," said Lendon gravely, "who said that when he first went to Greece—and he wasn't a young man then, far from it—he felt that he had long been an exile, and that now he had come home."

"Yes," she said, thoughtfully, "I think I can understand. I think I shall perhaps feel like that when I stand by some quiet English stream."

"What do you most wish to see in England?"

"A stream, a country churchyard—the churchyard in Stratford perhaps, or the Gray's Elegy one—and an old castle. And I want to hear the nightingale—Matthew Arnold's nightingale."

"Don't you want to see the Queen, and to be presented at Court?" he asked, with a smile.

"Oh no; I haven't thought about it. Why should I?"

"I thought that every American girl was like that."

"I am not every American girl. But you must not believe in the caricatures of American girls. You must not disparage my countrywomen."

"I greatly admire your countrywomen."

"I am glad," she said simply.

"Well, tell me what other things you want to see and hear in England."

"No; we have got out of tune, I think." She sank back in her chair with a little sigh as if she were disappointed. He felt a pang of something like guilt. How had he jarred upon her? He wondered if he ought to go away. In fact, he moved a few steps towards the bulwarks, and then came back. A movement of hers, an ineffectual effort to tuck her buffalo robe a little more closely round her, gave him an excuse for going to her aid. "Thank you," she said, and was silent again. He lingered. Presently she asked abruptly, "Do you know Miravoglia?"

"Miravoglia?" he repeated.

"The artist, the musician, the person who trains young actresses. I am going to him. He saw me act once, at Philadelphia, and he was impressed. He advised me. Now I am going to take his advice. Then I was not of age, and my guardian, Professor Viall, had an objection to my going on the stage; but during these two years I have done my best to train myself."

"And your guardian has relented?"

"Oh, he had no very rooted objection; it was on psychological grounds. My uncle is a great psychologist. Lately he has been so much occupied with his new invention that he has not thought much of me."

"And what is the invention?"

"You haven't heard of it? But you soon will, and I won't forestall my uncle's pleasure in describing it to you. We are sure to meet in London."

"There are many eddies and currents in London society," said Lendon. "How can I be certain of such good fortune?"

"But you, are an artist; and I—I am an artist, Miravoglia is an artist. All artists know each other in London—at least, so Mrs. Walcot Valbry tells me—"

"Ah, I know Mrs. Walcot Valbry," said Lendon.

"There. Did I not say? We shall meet at Mrs. Walcot Valbry's. I have known her in America, of course. She adores artists, and she is interested in everything that is mystic and out of the common. Therefore, naturally, she is interested in my uncle."

"And you?" asked Lendon. "Are you a mystic too?"

The girl seemed to consider for a moment, and looked at him seriously with a certain questioning in her eyes.

It was clear to him, however, that she was not in doubt as to her own views on the subject, but rather as to the manner in which ho might receive them.

"Everyone is a mystic," she answered gravely. "Everyone, that is, who feels and thinks, and analyzes feelings and thoughts—artists most peculiarly so. Surely you must often have been conscious of forces within you which base come from outside yourself?"

"Ah!" he said, "that is true; and more than once I have solved the mystery of some unaccountable impulse, some prompting to evil, by the exploded theory of ghostly possession. Ghosts! Do you know Ibsen's fine lines?"

"Yes;" and she recited, with a dramatic intensity which took him by surprise, Mrs. Alving's speech to the Pastor.

"Well," he said, "it is the ghosts of dead faiths, dead conventions, dead traditions, which turn us this way and that, and more or less determine our lives."

"I did not mean such forces as those," she replied. "No, I would allow no dead faith to rule my life. I meant, Mr. Lendon, that you and I ought to be proud and happy that we are artists; for Art is the door through which the undying dead ones can come into our lives and teach us how to move our world as they themselves once moved theirs. If ever I am a great actress, as indeed I think I shall be some day, it will not be I myself who have any power, but the ghosts who have given to me of theirs."

"That is a fanciful theory, Miss Brett," said Lendon. "Don't you think that it may be a morbid one?"

"Morbid! Oh! morbid!" she repeated with fine scorn. "I hate that word morbid. It is such a cant phrase. I suppose that all the people of genius, in the world or out of it, who ever moved souls to enthusiasm were told at some time or other, by some wise person or other, that they were—morbid. Pray Heaven give me morbidness! That is all I say."

"No! no!" he exclaimed; "I won't say Amen to that impious supplication."

She laughed. "Well," she said, "I think I shall go down to my cabin, for I am feeling a little shivery; and if you will take me as far as the companion, I shall be grateful."

He gave her his arm, and took charge of her rug and various other belongings.

"But you will let me convince you, some time soon, that I meant no disrespect to genius by refusing to allow that it is morbid?"

She nodded and laughed again. "You don't mean it; you don't mean it!" she cried. "You mean just what I mean, only you call it by another name. You are just as bad as the worst of them, if you like to put it in that way. You're just as open to—to influences and impulses and misdirected enthusiasms as the people you pretend to despise. Why, you are utterly morbid, or you could never have painted 'The Pool of Melancholy.’"

"There's something in that," said Lendon to himself, as he paced the deck, after he had seen her to the door of her cabin. "The curse of the artist temperament is on me as fatally almost as upon Miss Beatrice Brett herself."

He watched for the young actress for the rest of the day, but she did not reappear. Nor was she on deck at promenade time the following morning. It irked him to remember that in forty-eight hours they were due at Southampton. He put artfully veiled questions to his communicative neighbour at table d'hote; and having set him on the trail, very soon elicited through him the information that Miss Brett had caught a slight cold, and was not likely to show herself above while the weather continued stormy. It had come on to blow again, and Lendon began to think the Fates were against any practical outcome from his already strong interest in the young actress.

He found her at last, however, in the reading-room, where she was sitting very becomingly, muffled in furs and with a book in her hand. She smiled and bowed, and, in answer to his inquiries, told him she was better, and that she had caught cold, and was suffering from hoarseness. "And you know," she added, "an actress is bound to be careful of her voice, for it is the best part of her stock in trade."

She asked him when they should get in, and he told her that it would be late that night, and ventured to inquire whether any one would meet her, and if he might presume on his acquaintanceship with her friend Mrs. Walcot Valbry, and offer his help in the Custom Rouse, which, as he put it, was an awkward business for a lady who was not very strong.

"Oh," she answered, "my people will be there to meet me, and they will arrange everything; but thank you all the same."

"I hope," he said, a little shyly, "that I may look forward to being presented to Professor Flail."

"Why, certainly," she answered: "if you know Mrs. Walcot Valbry, you will see a great deal of my uncle. She has a high opinion of the Professor and of his discovery."

"Don't think me very ignorant," said Lendon, "but will you tell me what is your uncle's particular field of scientific investigation. I don't go in much for that sort of thing," he went on apologetically; "I think we painters are, of all people, the narrowest in our sympathies and interests; we shut ourselves up in our studios, or potter along through æsthetic by-ways, or else cut ourselves off from everything, as I have done this last year or so, and go of to the wilds in search of a new sensation."

She looked at him a little wistfully. "I should have thought," she said, "that you would have found plenty of sensations in London."

He laughed. "Well, but your uncle, the Professor, what is his line?"

"Magnetic-Dynamics," she answered seriously, and then suddenly laughed like a child at his puzzled look. "Oh, you will find out all about it soon enough. It is something very important, I assure you."

"I have no doubt of that. May I call upon you in London? and perhaps," he went on eagerly, "if you care for pictures and sights, and that sort of thing, I have friends who would be delighted—and I should like to show you my studio when it is in order again, if you would let me."

"I am going to be dreadfully hard at work," she answered; "but you are very kind, and, if there's time, I should like it very much. I should like in any case to see your studio."

He was obliged to be content with this sort of indefinite promise; and just then the captain came up and began talking to Miss Brett in German—a language which she appeared to speak fluently. He had no further conversation with her before the arrival at Southampton, and in the hurry and confusion of landing he lost sight of her, and to his infinite regret had not even the satisfaction of bidding her good-by.