The Finer Grain | Page 6

possibility of which was
less prodigious than any other. It was a declaration, simply, the
admirable young woman was treating him to, a profession of "artistic
sympathy"--for she was in a moment to use this very term that made for
them a large, clear, common ether, an element all uplifted and rare, of
which they could equally partake.

If she was Olympian--as in her rich and regular young beauty, that of
some divine Greek mask over-painted say by Titian, she more and
more appeared to him--this offered air was that of the gods themselves:
she might have been, with her long rustle across the room, Artemis
decorated, hung with pearls, for her worshippers, yet disconcerting
them by having, under an impulse just faintly fierce, snatched the cup
of gold from Hebe. It was to him, John Berridge, she thus publicly
offered it; and it was his over-topping confrere of shortly before who
was the worshipper most disconcerted. John had happened to catch,
even at its distance, after these friends had joined him, the momentary
deep, grave estimate, in the great Dramatist's salient watching eyes, of
the Princess's so singular performance: the touch perhaps this, in the
whole business, that made Berridge's sense of it most sharp. The sense
of it as prodigy didn't in the least entail his feeling abject--any more,
that is, than in the due dazzled degree; for surely there would have been
supreme wonder in the eagerness of her exchange of mature glory for
thin notoriety, hadn't it still exceeded everything that an Olympian of
such race should have found herself bothered, as they said, to "read" at
all--and most of all to read three times!
With the turn the matter took as an effect of this meeting, Berridge was
more than once to find himself almost ashamed for her--since it seemed
never to occur to her to be so for herself: he was jealous of the type
where she might have been taken as insolently careless of it; his
advantage (unless indeed it had been his ruin) being that he could
inordinately reflect upon it, could wander off thereby into kinds of
licence of which she was incapable. He hadn't, for himself, waited till
now to be sure of what he would do were he an Olympian: he would
leave his own stuff snugly unread, to begin with; that would be a
beautiful start for an Olympian career. He should have been as unable
to write those works in short as to make anything else of them; and he
should have had no more arithmetic for computing fingers than any
perfect-headed marble Apollo mutilated at the wrists. He should have
consented to know but the grand personal adventure on the grand
personal basis: nothing short of this, no poor cognisance of confusable,
pettifogging things, the sphere of earth-grubbing questions and
two-penny issues, would begin to be, on any side, Olympian enough.

Even the great Dramatist, with his tempered and tested steel and his
immense "assured" position, even he was not Olympian: the look, full
of the torment of earth, with which he had seen the Princess turn her
back, and for such a purpose, on the prized privilege of his notice,
testified sufficiently to that. Still, comparatively, it was to be said, the
question of a personal relation with an authority so eminent on the
subject of the passions--to say nothing of the rest of his charm--might
have had for an ardent young woman (and the Princess was
unmistakably ardent) the absolute attraction of romance: unless, again,
prodigy of prodigies, she were looking for her romance very
particularly elsewhere. Yet where could she have been looking for it,
Berridge was to ask himself with private intensity, in a manner to leave
her so at her ease for appearing to offer him everything?--so free to be
quite divinely gentle with him, to hover there before him in all her mild,
bright, smooth sublimity and to say: "I should be so very grateful if
you'd come to see me."
There succeeded this a space of time of which he was afterward to lose
all account, was never to recover the history; his only coherent view of
it being that an interruption, some incident that kept them a while
separate, had then taken place, yet that during their separation, of half
an hour or whatever, they had still somehow not lost sight of each other,
but had found their eyes meeting, in deep communion, all across the
great peopled room; meeting and wanting to meet, wanting--it was the
most extraordinary thing in the world for the suppression of stages, for
confessed precipitate intensity--to use together every instant of the hour
that might be left them. Yet to use it for what?--unless, like beautiful
fabulous figures in some old-world legend, for the