Overlooked. Baring Maurice
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asked him whether he had been to Russia. Not in the flesh, he said, but in the spirit he had lived there for years.
Perhaps he wanted to see how much the second-hand impressions of a blind man were worth.
He soon reverted to the original subject of our talk.
"Why is Miss Brandon not married?" he said.
I said I knew nothing about her, nothing about her life. I presumed her parents were dead. She was travelling with her aunt. They came here every year for her aunt's rheumatism. Mrs. Lennox had a house in London. She was a widow, not very well off, I thought. I told him I knew nothing of London life. I have lived in Italy for the last twenty years. I very seldom went to London, only, in fact, to see Kennaway. I told him he must find out about Miss Brandon's early history himself.
"She is very silent," he said.
"Mrs. Lennox is very talkative," I told him.
"What can I call it?" he asked, in an agony of impatience. "She has every beauty, every grace, except that of expression."
"The Dumb Belle?" The words escaped me and I immediately regretted them.
"No," he said, quite seriously, "she is not dumb, that is just the point. She talks, but she cannot express herself. Or rather, she has nothing to express. At least, I think she has nothing to express: or what she has got to express is not what we think it is. I imagine a story like Pygmalion and Galatea. Somebody waking her to life and then finding her quite different from what the stone image seemed to promise, from what it did promise. At any rate I have got my subject and I am extremely grateful. It is a wonderful subject."
"Henry James," I ventured.
"Ah, James," said Rudd, "yes, James, a wonderful intellect, but a critic, not a novelist. The French could do it. What would they have called it? La Princesse désenchantée, or La Belle revenue du Bois? You can't say that in English."
"Nor in French either," I thought to myself, but I said aloud, "Out of the Wood would suggest quite a different kind of book."
"A very different kind of book," said Rudd, quite gravely. "The kind of book that sells by the million."
Rudd then left me. He was enchanted with the idea of having something to write about. I felt that a good title for his novel would be Eurydice Half-regained, but I was diffident about suggesting a title to him, besides which I felt he would not like it. Miss Brandon, he would explain, was not like Eurydice, and if she was, she had forgotten her experiences beyond the Styx.
CHAPTER II
I am going to divide my record into chapters just as if I were writing a novel. The length of the chapters will be entirely determined by my inclination at the moment of writing. When I am tired the chapter will end. I don't know if this is what novelists do. It does not matter, as I am not writing a novel. I know it is not what Rudd does. He told me he planned out his novel before writing a line, and decided beforehand on the length of each chapter, but that he often made them longer in the first draft, and then eliminated. If you want to be terse, he said, you must not start by trying to be terse, by leaving out. You must say everything first. You can rub out afterwards. He told me he worked in charcoal, as it were, at first.
I shall not work in charcoal. I have no plan.
I asked Princess Kouragine what Rudd was like. She said he had something rather prim and dapper about him. I was quite wrong about his appearance. He wears a black tie. Princess Kouragine said, "Il a l'air comme tout le monde, plutôt comme un médecin de campagne."
I asked her if she liked him. She said she did not know. She said he was agreeable, but she found no real pleasure in his society.
"You see," she said, "I like the society of my equals, I hate being with my superiors; that is why I hate being with royalties, authors and artists. Mr. Rudd can talk of nothing except his art, and I like Tauchnitz novels that one can read without any trouble. I hate realistic novels, especially in English."
I told her his novels were more often fantastic, with a certain amount of psychology in them.
"That is worse," she said, "I am old-fashioned. It is no use to try and convert me. I like Trollope and Ouida."
I offered to lend her a novel by Rudd, but she refused.
"I would rather not have read it," she said. "It would make me uncomfortable when I talked to him. As it is, as the idiot who has read nothing newer than Ouida, I am quite comfortable."
I said he was writing something now which I thought would interest her. I told her how Rudd was making Miss Brandon the pivot of a story.
"Ah!" she said. "He told me he was writing something for his own pleasure. I will read that book."
I said he did not intend to publish it.
"He will publish it," she said. "It will be very interesting. I wonder what he will make of Jean Brandon. I know her well. I have known her for five years. They come here every year. They stay a long time. It is economical. She is a good girl. I like her. Elle me plaît."
I asked whether she was pretty.
The Princess said she was changeable —journalière, "Elle a souvent mauvaise mine." Not tall enough. A beautiful skin like ivory, but too pale. Eyes. Yes, she had eyes. Most remarkable eyes. You could not tell whether they were blue or grey. Graceful. Pretty hands. Badly dressed, but from poverty and economy more than from mauvais goût. A very English beauty. "You will probably tell me she is Scotch or Irish. I don't care. I don't mean Keapsake or Gainsborough, nor Burne-Jones, but English all the same. But I can't describe her. She has charm and it escapes one. She has beauty, but it doesn't fit into any of the categories.
"One feels there is a lamp inside her which has gone out, for the time being, at any rate. She reminds me of some lines of Victor Hugo:
"Et les plus sombres d'entre nous
Ont eu leur aube éblouissante."
"I can imagine her having been quite dazzling when she was a young girl. I can imagine her still being dazzling now if someone were to light the lamp. It could be lit, I know. Once, two years ago, at the races here at Bavigny, I saw her excited. She wanted a friend to win a steeplechase and he won. She was transfigured. At that moment I thought I had seldom seen anyone more éblouissante. Her face shone as though it had been transparent."
Of course the poor girl was unhappy, and why was she unhappy? The reason was a simple one, she was poor, and Mrs. Lennox economized and used her as an economy.
"You see that the poor girl is obliged to make de petites économies in her clothes. She suffers from it I'm sure. Who wouldn't? This all comes from your silly system of marriage in England. You let two totally inexperienced beings with nothing to help them settle the question on which the whole of their lives is to depend. You let a girl marry her first love. It is too absurd. It never lasts. I do not say that marriages in our country do not often turn out very badly. No one knows that better than I do, Heaven knows; but I say that at least we give the poor children a chance. We at least do not build marriages on a foundation which we know to be unsound beforehand, or not there at all. We do not let two people marry when we know that the circumstances cannot help leading to disaster."
I said I did not think there was much to choose between the two systems. In France the young people had the chance of making a satisfactory marriage; in our country the young people had the chance of marrying whom they chose, of making the right choice. It was sometimes successful. Besides, when there were real obstacles the marriages did not as a rule come off. Mrs. Lennox had told me that Miss Brandon had been engaged when she was nineteen to a man in the army. He was too poor. The engagement had been broken off. The man had left the army and gone to the colonies, and there the matter had remained. I didn't think she would have been happier if she had been married off to a parti.
"She would not have been poor," said Princess Kouragine. "And she would have been more independent. She would have had a home."
She said she did not attach an enormous importance to riches, but she did attach great importance