He laid his stick on the table, and folded his hands. “I’m an actor,” he repeated, and his face assumed the appearance of a mask. “My profession involves my representing human nature at its moments of extreme expressiveness. The fascination of the process consists in the artificial concentration of passion, its immediate projection, and the assigning to it of consequences that reality rarely or never affords. And so it naturally happens—and this deception is the fatal law of the actor’s life—that my person, this Edgar Lorm who faces you here, is surrounded by a frame that suits him about as well as a Gothic cathedral window would suit a miniature. A further consequence is that I lack all power of adjustment to any ordered social life, and all my attempts to bring myself in harmony with such a life have been pitiable failures. I struggle and dance in a social vacuum. My art is beaten foam.
“I’ve been told of people who have a divided personality. Well, mine is doubled, quadrupled. The real me is extinct. I detest the whole business; I practise my profession because I haven’t any other. I’d like to be a librarian in the service of a king or a rich man who didn’t bother me, or own a farm in some Swiss valley. I’m not talking about the accidental miseries of the theatre, disgusting and repulsive as they are—the masquerading, the lies and vanities. And I don’t want you to believe either that I’m uttering the average lament of the spoiled mime, which is made up of inordinate self-esteem and of coquettish fishing for flattering contradiction.
“My suffering lies a little deeper. Its cause is, if you will try to understand me, the spoken word. It has caused a process within me that has poisoned my being and destroyed my soul. What word, you may ask? The words that pass between man and man, husband and wife, friend and friend, myself and others. Language, which you utter quite naturally, has in my case passed through all the gamuts of expression and all the temperatures of the mind. You use it as a peasant uses his scythe, the tailor his needle, the soldier his weapon. To me it is a property and a ghost, a mollusk and an echo, a thing of a thousand transformations, but lacking outline and kernel. I cry out words, whisper them, stammer them, moan, flute, distend them, and fill the meaningless with meaning, and am depressed to the earth by the sublime. And I’ve been doing that for five and twenty years. It has worn me thin; it has split my gums and hollowed out my chest.
“Hence all words, sincere as they may be on others’ lips, are untrue on mine, untrue to me. They tyrannise over me and torment me, flicker through the walls, recall to me my powerlessness and unrewarded sacrifices, and change me into a helpless puppet. Can I ever, without being ashamed to the very marrow, say: I love? How many meanings have not those words! How many have I been forced to give them! If I utter them I practise merely the old trick of my trade, and make the pasteboard device upon my head look like a golden crown. Consider me closely and you will see the meaning of literal despair. Words have been my undoing. It sounds queer, I know; but it is true. It may be that the actor is the absolute example of hopeless despair.”
Judith looked at him rather emptily. “I don’t suppose that we’ll torture each other much with words,” she said, merely to say something.
But Edgar Lorm gave to this saying a subtle interpretation, and nodded gratefully. “What an infinitely desirable condition that would be,” he answered, in his stateliest manner; “because, you see, words and emotions are like brothers and sisters. The thing that I detest saying is mouldy and flat to me in the realm of feeling too. One should be silent as fate. It may be that I am spoiled for any real experience—drained dry. I have damned little confidence in myself, and nothing but pity for any hand stretched out to save me. However that may be,” he ended, and arose with elastic swiftness, “I am willing to try.”
He held out his hand as to a comrade. Charmed by the vividness and knightly grace of his gesture, Judith took his hand and smiled.
“Where are you stopping?” he asked.
“In this hotel.”
Chatting quite naturally he accompanied her to the door of her room.