Villette
her to help me. Rosine liked a bribe, so she did her best, smoothed and
plaited my hair as well as a coiffeur would have done, placed the lace
collar mathematically straight, tied the neck-ribbon accurately—in
short, did her work like the neat-handed Phillis she could be when she
chose. Having given me my handkerchief and gloves, she took the candle
and lighted me down-stairs. After all, I had forgotten my shawl; she
ran back to fetch it; and I stood with Dr. John in the vestibule,
waiting.
“What is this, Lucy?” said he, looking down at me narrowly. “Here is
the old excitement. Ha! the nun again?”
But I utterly denied the charge: I was vexed to be suspected of a
second illusion. He was sceptical.
“She has been, as sure as I live,” said he; “her figure crossing your
eyes leaves on them a peculiar gleam and expression not to be
mistaken.”
“She has _not_ been,” I persisted: for, indeed, I could deny her
apparition with truth.
“The old symptoms are there,” he affirmed: “a particular pale, and what
the Scotch call a ‘raised’ look.”
He was so obstinate, I thought it better to tell him what I really
_had_ seen. Of course with him it was held to be another effect of the
same cause: it was all optical illusion—nervous malady, and so on. Not
one bit did I believe him; but I dared not contradict: doctors are so
self-opinionated, so immovable in their dry, materialist views.
Rosine brought the shawl, and I was bundled into the carriage.
The theatre was full—crammed to its roof: royal and noble were there:
palace and hotel had emptied their inmates into those tiers so thronged
and so hushed. Deeply did I feel myself privileged in having a place
before that stage; I longed to see a being of whose powers I had heard
reports which made me conceive peculiar anticipations. I wondered if
she would justify her renown: with strange curiosity, with feelings
severe and austere, yet of riveted interest, I waited. She was a study
of such nature as had not encountered my eyes yet: a great and new
planet she was: but in what shape? I waited her rising.
She rose at nine that December night: above the horizon I saw her come.
She could shine yet with pale grandeur and steady might; but that star
verged already on its judgment-day. Seen near, it was a chaos—hollow,
half-consumed: an orb perished or perishing—half lava, half glow.
I had heard this woman termed “plain,” and I expected bony harshness
and grimness—something large, angular, sallow. What I saw was the
shadow of a royal Vashti: a queen, fair as the day once, turned pale
now like twilight, and wasted like wax in flame.
For a while—a long while—I thought it was only a woman, though an
unique woman, who moved in might and grace before this multitude.
By-and-by I recognised my mistake. Behold! I found upon her something
neither of woman nor of man: in each of her eyes sat a devil. These
evil forces bore her through the tragedy, kept up her feeble
strength—for she was but a frail creature; and as the action rose and
the stir deepened, how wildly they shook her with their passions of the
pit! They wrote HELL on her straight, haughty brow. They tuned her
voice to the note of torment. They writhed her regal face to a demoniac
mask. Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate she stood.
It was a marvellous sight: a mighty revelation.
It was a spectacle low, horrible, immoral.
Swordsmen thrust through, and dying in their blood on the arena sand;
bulls goring horses disembowelled, made a meeker vision for the
public—a milder condiment for a people’s palate—than Vashti torn by
seven devils: devils which cried sore and rent the tenement they
haunted, but still refused to be exorcised.
Suffering had struck that stage empress; and she stood before her
audience neither yielding to, nor enduring, nor, in finite measure,
resenting it: she stood locked in struggle, rigid in resistance. She
stood, not dressed, but draped in pale antique folds, long and regular
like sculpture. A background and entourage and flooring of deepest
crimson threw her out, white like alabaster—like silver: rather, be it
said, like Death.
Where was the artist of the Cleopatra? Let him come and sit down and
study this different vision. Let him seek here the mighty brawn, the
muscle, the abounding blood, the full-fed flesh he worshipped: let all
materialists draw nigh and look on.
I have said that she does not _resent_ her grief. No; the weakness of
that word would make it a lie. To her, what hurts becomes immediately
embodied: she looks on it as a thing that can be attacked, worried
down, torn in shreds. Scarcely a substance herself, she grapples to
conflict with abstractions. Before calamity she is a tigress; she rends
her woes, shivers them in convulsed abhorrence. Pain, for her, has no
result in good: tears water no harvest of wisdom: on sickness, on death
itself, she looks with the eye of a rebel. Wicked, perhaps, she is, but
also she is strong; and her strength has conquered Beauty, has overcome
Grace, and bound both at her side, captives peerlessly fair, and docile
as fair. Even in the uttermost frenzy of energy is each maenad movement
royally, imperially, incedingly upborne. Her hair, flying loose in
revel or war, is still an angel’s hair, and glorious under a halo.
Fallen, insurgent, banished, she remembers the heaven where she
rebelled. Heaven’s light, following her exile, pierces its confines,
and discloses their forlorn remoteness.
Place now the Cleopatra, or any other slug, before her as an obstacle,
and see her cut through the pulpy mass as the scimitar of Saladin clove
the down cushion. Let Paul Peter Rubens wake from the dead, let him
rise out of his cerements, and bring into this presence all the army of
his fat women; the magian power or prophet-virtue gifting that slight
rod of Moses, could, at one waft, release and re-mingle a sea
spell-parted, whelming the heavy host with the down-rush of overthrown
sea-ramparts.
Vashti was not good, I was told; and I have said she did not look good:
though a spirit, she was a spirit out of Tophet. Well, if so much of
unholy force can arise from below, may not an equal efflux of sacred
essence descend one day from above?
What thought Dr. Graham of this being?
For long intervals I forgot to look how he demeaned himself, or to
question what he thought. The strong magnetism of genius drew my heart
out of its wonted orbit; the sunflower turned from the south to a
fierce light, not solar—a rushing, red, cometary light—hot on vision
and to sensation. I had seen acting before, but never anything like
this: never anything which astonished Hope and hushed Desire; which
outstripped Impulse and paled Conception; which, instead of merely
irritating imagination with the thought of what _might_ be done, at the
same time fevering the nerves because it was _not_ done, disclosed
power like a deep, swollen winter river, thundering in cataract, and
bearing the soul, like a leaf, on the steep and steelly sweep of its
descent.
Miss Fanshawe, with her usual ripeness of judgment, pronounced Dr.
Bretton a serious, impassioned man, too grave and too impressible. Not
in such light did I ever see him: no such faults could I lay to his
charge. His natural attitude was not the meditative, nor his natural
mood the sentimental; _impressionable_ he was as dimpling water, but,
almost as water, _unimpressible:_ the breeze, the sun, moved him—metal
could not grave, nor fire brand.
Dr. John _could_ think and think well, but he was rather a man of
action than of thought; he _could_ feel, and feel vividly in his way,
but his heart had no chord for enthusiasm: to bright, soft, sweet
influences his eyes and lips gave bright, soft, sweet welcome,
beautiful to see as dyes of rose and silver, pearl and purple, imbuing
summer clouds; for what belonged to storm, what was wild and intense,
dangerous, sudden, and flaming, he had no sympathy, and held with it no
communion. When I took time and regained inclination to glance at him,
it amused and enlightened me to discover that he was watching that
sinister and sovereign Vashti, not with wonder, nor worship, nor yet
dismay, but simply with intense curiosity. Her agony did not pain him,
her wild moan—worse than a shriek—did not much move him; her fury
revolted him somewhat, but not to the point of horror. Cool young
Briton! The pale cliffs of his own England do not look down on the
tides of the Channel more calmly than he watched the Pythian
inspiration of that night.
Looking at his face, I longed to know his exact opinions, and at last I
put a question tending to elicit them. At the sound of my voice he
awoke as if out of a dream; for he had been thinking, and very intently
thinking, his own thoughts, after his own manner. “How did he like
Vashti?” I wished to know.
“Hm-m-m,” was the first scarce articulate but expressive answer; and
then such a strange smile went wandering round his lips, a smile so
critical, so almost callous! I suppose that for natures of that order
his sympathies _were_ callous. In a few terse phrases he told me his
opinion of, and feeling towards, the actress: he judged her as a woman,
not an artist: it was a branding judgment.
That night was already marked in my book of life, not with white, but
with a deep-red cross. But I had not done with it yet; and other
memoranda were destined to be set down in characters of tint indelible.
Towards midnight, when the deepening tragedy blackened to the
death-scene, and all held their breath, and even Graham bit his
under-lip, and knit his brow, and sat still and struck—when the whole
theatre was hushed, when the vision of all eyes centred in one point,
when all ears listened towards one quarter—nothing being seen but the
white form sunk on a seat, quivering in conflict with her last, her
worst-hated, her visibly-conquering foe—nothing heard but her throes,
her gaspings, breathing yet of mutiny, panting still defiance; when, as
it seemed, an inordinate will, convulsing a perishing mortal frame,
bent it to battle with doom and death, fought every inch of ground,
sold every drop of blood, resisted to the latest the rape of every
faculty, _would_ see, _would_ hear, _would_ breathe, _would_ live, up
to, within, well-nigh _beyond_ the moment when death says to all sense
and all being—“Thus far and no farther!”—
Just then a stir, pregnant with omen, rustled behind the scenes—feet
ran, voices spoke. What was it? demanded the whole house. A flame, a
smell of smoke replied.
“Fire!” rang through the gallery. “Fire!” was repeated, re-echoed,
yelled forth: and then, and faster than pen can set it down, came
panic, rushing, crushing—a blind, selfish, cruel chaos.
And Dr. John? Reader, I see him yet, with his look of comely courage
and cordial calm.
“Lucy will sit still, I know,” said he, glancing down at me with the
same serene goodness, the same repose of firmness that I have seen in
him when sitting at his side amid the secure peace of his mother’s
hearth. Yes, thus adjured, I think I would have sat still under a
rocking crag: but, indeed, to sit still in actual circumstances was my
instinct; and at the price of my very life, I would not have moved to
give him trouble, thwart his will, or make demands on his attention. We
were in the stalls, and for a few minutes there was a most terrible,
ruthless pressure about us.
“How terrified are the women!” said he; “but if the men were not almost
equally so, order might be maintained. This is a sorry scene: I see
fifty selfish brutes at this moment, each of whom, if I were near, I
could conscientiously knock down. I see some women braver than some
men. There is one yonder—Good God!”
While Graham was speaking, a young girl who had been very quietly and