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diff --git a/21968.txt b/21968.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c25ec21 --- /dev/null +++ b/21968.txt @@ -0,0 +1,5572 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Finer Grain, by Henry James + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: The Finer Grain + +Author: Henry James + +Release Date: June 29, 2007 [EBook #21968] +File last updated on December 12, 2007 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FINER GRAIN *** + + + + +Produced by David Widger + + + + + +THE FINER GRAIN + +By Henry James + + +1910 + + +[Transcriber's Note: After posting it was discovered that there were several +missing pages from the section titled "Mora Montravers". This section has been +removed and will be replaced as soon as possible.] + + +CONTENTS + + The Velvet Glove + + [Mora Montravers] + + A Round of Visits + + Crapy Cornelia + + The Bench of Desolation + + + + + + +"THE VELVET GLOVE" + + + + +I + +HE thought he had already, poor John Berridge, tasted in their fulness +the sweets of success; but nothing yet had been more charming to him +than when the young Lord, as he irresistibly and, for greater certitude, +quite correctly figured him, fairly sought out, in Paris, the new +literary star that had begun to hang, with a fresh red light, over +the vast, even though rather confused, Anglo-Saxon horizon; positively +approaching that celebrity with a shy and artless appeal. The young Lord +invoked on this occasion the celebrity's prized judgment of a special +literary case; and Berridge could take the whole manner of it for one of +the "quaintest" little acts displayed to his amused eyes, up to now, on +the stage of European society--albeit these eyes were quite aware, in +general, of missing everywhere no more of the human scene than possible, +and of having of late been particularly awake to the large extensions of +it spread before him (since so he could but fondly read his fate) under +the omen of his prodigious "hit." It was because of his hit that he +was having rare opportunities--of which he was so honestly and humbly +proposing, as he would have said, to make the most: it was because every +one in the world (so far had the thing gone) was reading "The Heart of +Gold" as just a slightly too fat volume, or sitting out the same as just +a fifth-act too long play, that he found himself floated on a tide he +would scarce have dared to show his favourite hero sustained by, found +a hundred agreeable and interesting things happen to him which were all, +one way or another, affluents of the golden stream. + +The great renewed resonance--renewed by the incredible luck of the +play--was always in his ears without so much as a conscious turn of his +head to listen; so that the queer world of his fame was not the mere +usual field of the Anglo-Saxon boom, but positively the bottom of the +whole theatric sea, unplumbed source of the wave that had borne him +in the course of a year or two over German, French, Italian, Russian, +Scandinavian foot-lights. Paris itself really appeared for the hour the +centre of his cyclone, with reports and "returns," to say nothing of +agents and emissaries, converging from the minor capitals; though his +impatience was scarce the less keen to get back to London, where his +work had had no such critical excoriation to survive, no such lesson of +anguish to learn, as it had received at the hand of supreme authority, +of that French authority which was in such a matter the only one to be +artistically reckoned with. If his spirit indeed had had to reckon with +it his fourth act practically hadn't: it continued to make him blush +every night for the public more even than the inimitable _feuilleton_ +had made him blush for himself. + +This had figured, however, after all, the one bad drop in his cup; +so that, for the rest, his high-water mark might well have been, that +evening at Gloriani's studio, the approach of his odd and charming +applicant, vaguely introduced at the latter's very own request by their +hostess, who, with an honest, helpless, genial gesture, washed her fat +begemmed hands of the name and identity of either, but left the fresh, +fair, ever so habitually assured, yet ever so easily awkward Englishman +with his plea to put forth. There was that in this pleasant personage +which could still make Berridge wonder what conception of profit from +him might have, all incalculably, taken form in such a head--these being +truly the last intrenchments of our hero's modesty. He wondered, +the splendid young man, he wondered awfully, he wondered (it was +unmistakable) quite nervously, he wondered, to John's ardent and acute +imagination, quite beautifully, if the author of "The Heart of Gold" +would mind just looking at a book by a friend of his, a great friend, +which he himself believed rather clever, and had in fact found very +charming, but as to which--if it really wouldn't bore Mr. Berridge--he +should so like the verdict of some one who knew. His friend was awfully +ambitious, and he thought there was something in it--with all of which +might he send the book to any address? + +Berridge thought of many things while the young Lord thus charged upon +him, and it was odd that no one of them was any question of the possible +worth of the offered achievement--which, for that matter, was certain to +be of the quality of _all_ the books, to say nothing of the plays, and +the projects for plays, with which, for some time past, he had seen his +daily post-bag distended. He had made out, on looking at these things, +no difference at all from one to the other. Here, however, was something +more--something that made his fellow-guest's overture _independently_ +interesting and, as he might imagine, important. He smiled, he was +friendly and vague; said "A work of fiction, I suppose?" and that he +didn't pretend ever to pronounce, that he in fact quite hated, always, +to have to, not "knowing," as he felt, any better than any one else; but +would gladly look at anything, under that demur, if it would give any +pleasure. Perhaps the very brightest and most diamond-like twinkle he +had yet seen the star of his renown emit was just the light brought into +his young Lord's eyes by this so easy consent to oblige. It was easy +because the presence before him was from moment to moment, referring +itself back to some recent observation or memory; something caught +somewhere, within a few weeks or months, as he had moved about, and that +seemed to flutter forth at this stir of the folded leaves of his recent +experience very much as a gathered, faded flower, placed there for +"pressing," might drop from between the pages of a volume opened at +hazard. + +He had seen him before, this splendid and sympathetic person--whose +flattering appeal was by no means _all_ that made him sympathetic; +he had met him, had noted, had wondered about him, had in fact +imaginatively, intellectually, so to speak, quite yearned over him, in +some conjunction lately, though ever so fleet-ingly, apprehended: which +circumstance constituted precisely an association as tormenting, for +the few minutes, as it was vague, and set him to sounding, intensely +and vainly, the face that itself figured everything agreeable except +recognition. He couldn't remember, and the young man didn't; distinctly, +yes, they had been in presence, during the previous winter, by some +chance of travel, through Sicily, through Italy, through the south of +France, but his _Seigneurie_--so Berridge liked exotically to phrase +it--had then (in ignorance of the present reasons) not noticed _him_. It +was positive for the man of established identity, all the while too, +and through the perfect lucidity of his sense of achievement in an air +"conducting" nothing but the loudest bang, that this was fundamentally +much less remarkable than the fact of his being made up to in such a +quarter now. That was the disservice, in a manner, of one's having so +much imagination: the mysterious values of other types kept looming +larger before you than the doubtless often higher but comparatively +familiar ones of your own, and if you had anything of the artist's +real feeling for life the attraction and amusement of possibilities so +projected were worth more to you, in nineteen moods out of twenty, than +the sufficiency, the serenity, the felicity, whatever it might be, +of your stale personal certitudes. You were intellectually, you were +"artistically" rather abject, in fine, if your curiosity (in the grand +sense of the term) wasn't worth more to you than your dignity. What was +your dignity, "anyway," but just the consistency of your curiosity, and +what moments were ever so ignoble for you as, under the blighting breath +of the false gods, stupid conventions, traditions, examples, your lapses +from that consistency? His _Seigneurie_, at all events, delightfully, +hadn't the least real idea of what any John Berridge was talking about, +and the latter felt that if he had been less beautifully witless, and +thereby less true to his right figure, it might scarce have been +forgiven him. + +His right figure was that of life in irreflective joy and at the highest +thinkable level of prepared security and unconscious insolence. What was +the pale page of fiction compared with the intimately personal adventure +that, in almost any direction, he would have been all so stupidly, +all so gallantly, all so instinctively and, by every presumption, +so prevailingly ready for? Berridge would have given six months' +"royalties" for even an hour of his looser dormant consciousness--since +one was oneself, after all, no worm, but an heir of all the ages +too--and yet without being able to supply chapter and verse for the +felt, the huge difference. His _Seigneurie_ was tall and straight, but +so, thank goodness, was the author of "The Heart of Gold," who had no +such vulgar "mug" either; and there was no intrinsic inferiority in +being a bit inordinately, and so it might have seemed a bit strikingly, +black-browed instead of being fair as the morning. Again while his new +friend delivered himself our own tried in vain to place him; he +indulged in plenty of pleasant, if rather restlessly headlong sound, the +confessed incoherence of a happy mortal who had always many things "on," +and who, while waiting at any moment for connections and consummations, +had fallen into the way of talking, as they said, all artlessly, and +a trifle more betrayingly, against time. He would always be having +appointments, and somehow of a high "romantic" order, to keep, and the +imperfect punctualities of others to wait for--though who would be of +a quality to make such a pampered personage wait very much our young +analyst could only enjoy asking himself. There were women who might be +of a quality--half a dozen of those perhaps, of those alone, about the +world; our friend was as sure of this, by the end of four minutes, as if +he knew all about it. + +After saying he would send him the book the young Lord indeed dropped +that subject; he had asked where he might send it, and had had an "Oh, +I shall remember!" on John's mention of an hotel; but he had made no +further dash into literature, and it was ten to one that this would be +the last the distinguished author might hear of the volume. Such again +was a note of these high existences--that made one content to ask +of them no whit of other consistency than that of carrying off the +particular occasion, whatever it might be, in a dazzle of amiability +and felicity and leaving _that_ as a sufficient trace of their passage. +Sought and achieved consistency was but an angular, a secondary motion; +compared with the air of complete freedom it might have an effect +of deformity. There was no placing this figure of radiant ease, for +Berridge, in any relation that didn't appear not good enough--that is +among the relations that hadn't been too good for Berridge himself. He +was all right where he was; the great Gloriani somehow made that law; +his house, with his supreme artistic position, was good enough for any +one, and to-night in especial there were charming people, more charming +than our friend could recall from any other scene, as the natural +train or circle, as he might say, of such a presence. For an instant he +thought he had got the face as a specimen of imperturbability watched, +with wonder, across the hushed rattle of roulette at Monte-Carlo; but +this quickly became as improbable as any question of a vulgar +_table d'hote_, or a steam-boat deck, or a herd of fellow-pilgrims +cicerone-led, or even an opera-box serving, during a performance, for +frame of a type observed from the stalls. One placed young gods and +goddesses only when one placed them on Olympus, and it met the case, +always, that they were of Olympian race, and that they glimmered +for one, at the best, through their silver cloud, like the visiting +apparitions in an epic. + +This was brief and beautiful indeed till something happened that gave +it, for Berridge, on the spot, a prodigious extension--an extension +really as prodigious, after a little, as if he had suddenly seen the +silver clouds multiply and then the whole of Olympus presently open. +Music, breaking upon the large air, enjoined immediate attention, and in +a moment he was listening, with the rest of the company, to an eminent +tenor, who stood by the piano; and was aware, with it, that his +Englishman had turned away and that in the vast, rich, tapestried room +where, in spite of figures and objects so numerous, clear spaces, wide +vistas, and, as they might be called, becoming situations abounded, +there had been from elsewhere, at the signal of unmistakable song, a +rapid accession of guests. At first he but took this in, and the way +that several young women, for whom seats had been found, looked charming +in the rapt attitude; while even the men, mostly standing and grouped, +"composed," in their stillness, scarce less impressively, under the sway +of the divine voice. It ruled the scene, to the last intensity, and yet +our young man's fine sense found still a resource in the range of the +eyes, without sound or motion, while all the rest of consciousness was +held down as by a hand mailed in silver. It was better, in this way, +than the opera--John alertly thought of that: the composition sung might +be Wagnerian, but no Tristram, no Iseult, no Parsifal and, no Kundry of +them all could ever show, could ever "act" to the music, as our friend +had thus the power of seeing his dear contemporaries of either sex +(armoured _they_ so otherwise than in cheap Teutonic tinsel!) just +continuously and inscrutably sit to it. + +It made, the whole thing together, an enchantment amid which he had in +truth, at a given moment, ceased to distinguish parts--so that he was +himself certainly at last soaring as high as the singer's voice and +forgetting, in a lost gaze at the splendid ceiling, everything of the +occasion but what his intelligence poured into it. This, as happened, +was a flight so sublime that by the time he had dropped his eyes again +a cluster of persons near the main door had just parted to give way to a +belated lady who slipped in, through the gap made for her, and stood for +some minutes full in his view. It was a proof of the perfect hush that +no one stirred to offer her a seat, and her entrance, in her high +grace, had yet been so noiseless that she could remain at once immensely +exposed and completely unabashed. For Berridge, once more, if the scenic +show before him so melted into the music, here precisely might have +been the heroine herself advancing to the foot-lights at her cue. The +interest deepened to a thrill, and everything, at the touch of his +recognition of this personage, absolutely the most beautiful woman now +present, fell exquisitely together and gave him what he had been wanting +from the moment of his taking in his young Englishman. + +It was there, the missing connection: her arrival had on the instant +lighted it by a flash. Olympian herself, supremely, divinely Olympian, +she had arrived, could _only_ have arrived, for the one person present +of really equal race, our young man's late converser, whose flattering +demonstration might now stand for one of the odd extravagant forms taken +by nervous impatience. This charming, this dazzling woman had been one +member of the couple disturbed, to his intimate conviction, the autumn +previous, on his being pushed by the officials, at the last moment, +into a compartment of the train that was to take him from Cremona to +Mantua--where, failing a stop, he had had to keep his place. The other +member, by whose felt but unseized identity he had been haunted, was +the unconsciously insolent form of guaranteed happiness he had just been +engaged with. The sense of the admirable intimacy that, having taken +its precautions, had not reckoned with his irruption--this image had +remained with him; to say nothing of the interest of aspect of the +associated figures, so stamped somehow with rarity, so beautifully +distinct from the common occupants of padded corners, and yet on the +subject of whom, for the romantic structure he was immediately to raise, +he had not had a scrap of evidence. + +If he had imputed to them conditions it was all his own doing: it came +from his inveterate habit of abysmal imputation, the snatching of the +ell wherever the inch peeped out, without which where would have been +the tolerability of life? It didn't matter now what he had imputed--and +he always held that his expenses of imputation were, at the worst, a +compliment to those inspiring them. It only mattered that each of the +pair had been then what he really saw each now--full, that is, of the +pride of their youth and beauty and fortune and freedom, though at +the same time particularly preoccupied: preoccupied, that is, with the +affairs, and above all with the passions, of Olympus. Who had they been, +and what? Whence had they come, whither were they bound, what tie united +them, what adventure engaged, what felicity, tempered by what peril, +magnificently, dramatically attended? These had been his questions, all +so inevitable and so impertinent, at the time, and to the exclusion of +any scruples over his not postulating an inane honeymoon, his not taking +the "tie," as he should doubtless properly have done, for the mere blest +matrimonial; and he now retracted not one of them, flushing as they did +before him again with their old momentary life. To feel his two friends +renewedly in presence--friends of the fleeting hour though they had but +been, and with whom he had exchanged no sign save the vaguest of salutes +on finally relieving them of his company--was only to be conscious that +he hadn't, on the spot, done them, so to speak, half justice, and that, +for his superior entertainment, there would be ever so much more of them +to come. + + + + +II + +It might already have been coming indeed, with an immense stride, when, +scarce more than ten minutes later, he was aware that the distinguished +stranger had brought the Princess straight across the room to speak +to him. He had failed in the interval of any glimpse of their closer +meeting; for the great tenor had sung another song and then stopped, +immediately on which Madame Gloriani had made his pulse quicken to a +different, if not to a finer, throb by hovering before him once more +with the man in the world he most admired, as it were, looking at him +over her shoulder. The man in the world he most admired, the greatest +then of contemporary Dramatists--and bearing, independently, the name +inscribed if not in deepest incision at least in thickest gilding on the +rich recreative roll--this prodigious personage was actually to suffer +"presentation" to him at the good lady's generous but ineffectual hands, +and had in fact the next instant, left alone with him, bowed, in formal +salutation, the massive, curly, witty head, so "romantic" yet so modern, +so "artistic" and ironic yet somehow so civic, so Gallic yet somehow so +cosmic, his personal vision of which had not hitherto transcended that +of the possessor of a signed and framed photograph in a consecrated +quarter of a writing-table. + +It was positive, however, that poor John was afterward to remember +of this conjunction nothing whatever but the fact of the great man's +looking at him very hard, straight in the eyes, and of his not having +himself scrupled to do as much, and with a confessed intensity of +appetite. It was improbable, he was to recognise, that they had, for the +few minutes, only stared and grimaced, like pitted boxers or wrestlers; +but what had abode with him later on, none the less, was just the +cherished memory of his not having so lost presence of mind as to fail +of feeding on his impression. It was precious and precarious, that was +perhaps all there would be of it; and his subsequent consciousness was +quite to cherish this queer view of the silence, neither awkward nor +empty nor harsh, but on the contrary quite charged and brimming, that +represented for him his use, his unforgettable enjoyment in fact, of his +opportunity. Had nothing passed in words? Well, no misery of murmured +"homage," thank goodness; though something must have been said, +certainly, to lead up, as they put it at the theatre, to John's having +asked the head of the profession, before they separated, if he by chance +knew who the so radiantly handsome young woman might be, the one who +had so lately come in and who wore the pale yellow dress, of the strange +tone, and the magnificent pearls. They must have separated soon, it was +further to have been noted; since it was before the advance of the pair, +their wonderful dazzling charge upon him, that he had distinctly seen +the great man, at a distance again, block out from his sight the harmony +of the faded gold and the pearls--to speak only of that--and plant +himself there (the mere high Atlas-back of renown to Berridge now) as +for communion with them. He had blocked everything out, to this tune, +effectually; with nothing of the matter left for our friend meanwhile +but that, as he had said, the beautiful lady was the Princess. What +Princess, or the Princess of what?--our young man had afterward +wondered; his companion's reply having lost itself in the prelude of an +outburst by another vocalist who had approached the piano. + +It was after these things that she so incredibly came to him, attended +by her adorer--since he took it for absolute that the young Lord was her +adorer, as who indeed mightn't be?--and scarce waiting, in her bright +simplicity, for any form of introduction. It may thus be said in a word +that this was the manner in which she made our hero's acquaintance, a +satisfaction that she on the spot described to him as really wanting of +late to her felicity. "I've read everything, you know, and 'The Heart of +Gold' three times": she put it all immediately on that ground, while the +young Lord now smiled, beside her, as if it were quite the sort of thing +he had done too; and while, further, the author of the work yielded to +the consciousness that whereas in general he had come at last scarce to +be able to bear the iteration of those words, which affected him as +a mere vain vocal convulsion, so not a breath of this association now +attended them, so such a person as the Princess could make of them what +she would. + +Unless it was to be really what _he_ would!--this occurred to him in the +very thick of the prodigy, no single shade of 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 frankest +and almost the crudest avowal of the impression they had made on each +other. He couldn't have named, later on, any other person she had during +this space been engaged with, any more than he was to remember in the +least what he had himself ostensibly done, who had spoken to him, whom +he had spoken to, or whether he hadn't just stood and publicly gaped or +languished. + +Ah, Olympians were unconventional indeed--that was a part of their +high bravery and privilege; but what it also appeared to attest in this +wondrous manner was that they could communicate to their chosen in three +minutes, by the mere light of their eyes, the same shining cynicism. He +was to wonder of course, tinglingly enough, whether he had really made +an ass of himself, and there was this amount of evidence for it that +there certainly _had_ been a series of moments each one of which glowed +with the lucid sense that, as she couldn't like him as much as _that_ +either for his acted clap-trap or for his printed verbiage, what it must +come to was that she liked him, and to such a tune, just for himself +and quite after no other fashion than that in which every goddess in +the calendar had, when you came to look, sooner or later liked some +prepossessing young shepherd. The question would thus have been, for +him, with a still sharper eventual ache, of whether he positively _had_, +as an effect of the miracle, been petrified, before fifty pair of eyes, +to the posture of a prepossessing shepherd--and would perhaps have left +him under the shadow of some such imputable fatuity if his consciousness +hadn't, at a given moment, cleared up to still stranger things. + +The agent of the change was, as quite congruously happened, none other +than the shining youth whom he now seemed to himself to have been +thinking of for ever so long, for a much longer time than he had ever in +his life spent at an evening party, as the young Lord: which personage +suddenly stood before him again, holding him up an odd object and +smiling, as if in reference to it, with a gladness that at once struck +our friend as almost too absurd for belief. The object was incongruous +by reason of its being, to a second and less preoccupied glance, a book; +and what had befallen Berridge within twenty minutes was that they--the +Princess and he, that is--had got such millions of miles, or at least +such thousands of years, away from _those_ platitudes. The book, he +found himself assuming, could only be _his_ book (it seemed also to have +a tawdry red cover); and there came to him memories, dreadfully false +notes sounded so straight again by his new acquaintance, of certain +altogether different persons who at certain altogether different parties +had flourished volumes before him very much with that insinuating +gesture, that arch expression, and that fell intention. The meaning of +these things--of all possible breaks of the charm at such an hour!--was +that he should "signature" the ugly thing, and with a characteristic +quotation or sentiment: that was the way people simpered and squirmed, +the way they mouthed and beckoned, when animated by such purposes; and +it already, on the spot, almost broke his heart to see such a type as +that of the young Lord brought, by the vulgarest of fashions, so low. +This state of quick displeasure in Berridge, however, was founded on a +deeper question--the question of how in the world he was to remain for +himself a prepossessing shepherd if he should consent to come back to +these base actualities. It was true that even while this wonderment held +him, his aggressor's perfect good conscience had placed the matter in a +slightly different light. + +"By an extraordinary chance I've found a copy of my friend's novel on +one of the tables here--I see by the inscription that she has presented +it to Gloriani. So if you'd like to glance at it--!" And the young Lord, +in the pride of his association with the eminent thing, held it out to +Berridge as artlessly as if it had been a striking natural specimen +of some sort, a rosy round apple grown in his own orchard, or an +exceptional precious stone, to be admired for its weight and lustre. +Berridge accepted the offer mechanically--relieved at the prompt fading +of his worst fear, yet feeling in himself a tell-tale facial blankness +for the still absolutely anomalous character of his friend's appeal. He +was even tempted for a moment to lay the volume down without looking at +it--only with some extemporised promise to borrow it of their host and +take it home, to give himself to it at an easier moment. Then the very +expression of his fellow-guests own countenance determined in him a +different and a still more dreadful view; in fact an immediate collapse +of the dream in which he had for the splendid previous space of time +been living. The young Lord himself, in his radiant costly barbarism, +figured far better than John Berridge could do the prepossessing +shepherd, the beautiful mythological mortal "distinguished" by a +goddess; for our hero now saw that his whole manner of dealing with +his ridiculous tribute was marked exactly by the grand simplicity, the +prehistoric good faith, as one might call it, of far-off romantic and +"plastic" creatures, figures of exquisite Arcadian stamp, glorified +rustics like those of the train of peasants in "A Winter's Tale," who +thought nothing of such treasure-trove, on a Claude Lorrain sea-strand, +as a royal infant wrapped in purple: something in that fabulous style of +exhibition appearing exactly what his present demonstration might have +been prompted by. "The Top of the Tree, by Amy Evans"--scarce credible +words floating before Berridge after he had with an anguish of effort +dropped his eyes on the importunate title-page--represented an object +as alien to the careless grace of goddess-haunted Arcady as a washed-up +"kodak" from a wrecked ship might have been to the appreciation of some +islander of wholly unvisited seas. Nothing could have been more in the +tone of an islander deplorably diverted from his native interests and +dignities than the glibness with which John's own child of nature went +on. "It's her pen-name, Amy Evans"--he couldn't have said it otherwise +had he been a blue-chinned penny-a-liner; yet marking it with a +disconnectedness of intelligence that kept up all the poetry of his own +situation and only crashed into that of other persons. The reference put +the author of "The Heart of Gold" quite into _his_ place, but left the +speaker absolutely free of Arcady. "Thanks awfully"--Berridge somehow +clutched at that, to keep everything from swimming. "Yes, I should like +to look at it," he managed, horribly grimacing now, he believed, to say; +and there was in fact a strange short interlude after this in which he +scarce knew what had become of any one or of anything; in which he only +seemed to himself to stand alone in a desolate place where even its +desolation didn't save him from having to stare at the greyest of +printed pages. Nothing here helped anything else, since the stamped +greyness didn't even in itself make it impossible his eyes should follow +such sentences as: "The loveliness of the face, which was that of the +glorious period in which Pheidias reigned supreme, and which owed its +most exquisite note to that shell-like curl of the upper lip which +always somehow recalls for us the smile with which windblown Astarte +must have risen from the salt sea to which she owed her birth and her +terrible moods; or it was too much for all the passionate woman in her, +and she let herself go, over the flowering land that had been, but was +no longer their love, with an effect of blighting desolation that might +have proceeded from one of the more physical, though not more awful, +convulsions of nature." + +He seemed to know later on that other and much more natural things +had occurred; as that, for instance, with now at last a definite +intermission of the rare music that for a long time past, save at the +briefest intervals, had kept all participants ostensibly attentive +and motionless, and that in spite of its high quality and the supposed +privilege of listening to it he had allowed himself not to catch a note +of, there was a great rustling and shifting and vociferous drop to a +lower plane, more marked still with the quick clearance of a way to +supper and a lively dispersal of most of the guests. Hadn't he made out, +through the queer glare of appearances, though they yet somehow all came +to him as confused and unreal, that the Princess was no longer +there, wasn't even only crowded out of his range by the immediate +multiplication of her court, the obsequious court that the change +of pitch had at once permitted to close round her; that Gloriani had +offered her his arm, in a gallant official way, as to the greatest lady +present, and that he was left with half a dozen persons more knowing +than the others, who had promptly taken, singly or in couples, to a +closer inspection of the fine small scattered treasures of the studio? + +He himself stood there, rueful and stricken, nursing a silly red-bound +book under his arm very much as if he might have been holding on tight +to an upright stake, or to the nearest piece of furniture, during some +impression of a sharp earthquake-shock or of an attack of dyspeptic +dizziness; albeit indeed that he wasn't conscious of this absurd, this +instinctive nervous clutch till the thing that was to be more wonderful +than any yet suddenly flared up for him--the sight of the Princess again +on the threshold of the room, poised there an instant, in her +exquisite grace, for recovery of some one or of something, and then, at +recognition of him, coming straight to him across the empty place as if +he alone, and nobody and nothing else, were what she incredibly wanted. +She was there, she was radiantly _at_ him, as if she had known and loved +him for ten years--ten years during which, however, she had never quite +been able, in spite of undiscouraged attempts, to cure him, as goddesses +_had_ to cure shepherds, of his mere mortal shyness. + +"Ah no, not _that_ one!" she said at once, with her divine familiarity; +for she had in the flash of an eye "spotted" the particular literary +production he seemed so very fondly to have possessed himself of and +against which all the Amy Evans in her, as she would doubtless have put +it, clearly wished on the spot to discriminate. She pulled it away from +him; he let it go; he scarce knew what was happening--only made out that +she distinguished the right one, the one that should have been shown +him, as blue or green or purple, and intimated that her other friend, +her fellow-Olympian, as Berridge had thought of him from the +first, really did too clumsily bungle matters, poor dear, with his +officiousness over the red one! She went on really as if she had come +for that, some such rectification, some such eagerness of reunion with +dear Mr. Berridge, some talk, after all the tiresome music, of questions +really urgent; while, thanks to the supreme strangeness of it, the high +tide of golden fable floated him afresh, and her pretext and her plea, +the queerness of her offered motive, melted away after the fashion of +the enveloping clouds that do their office in epics and idylls. "You +didn't perhaps know I'm Amy Evans," she smiled, "or even perhaps that +I write in English--which I love, I assure you, as much as you can +yourself do, and which gives one (doesn't it? for who should know if +not you?) the biggest of publics. I 'just love'--don't they say?--your +American millions; and all the more that they really _take_ me for Amy +Evans, as I've just wanted to be taken, to be loved too for myself, +don't you know?--that they haven't seemed to try at all to 'go behind' +(don't you say?) my poor dear little _nom de guerre_. But it's the new +one, my last, 'The Velvet Glove,' that I should like you to judge me +by--if such a _corvee_ isn't too horrible for you to think of; though +I admit it's a move straight in the romantic direction--since after +all (for I might as well make a clean breast of it) it's dear old +discredited romance that I'm most in sympathy with. I'll send you 'The +Velvet Glove' to-morrow, if you _can_ find half an hour for it; and +then--and _then_--!" She paused as for the positive bright glory of her +meaning. + +It could only be so extraordinary, her meaning, whatever it was, +that the need in him that would--whatever it was again!--meet it most +absolutely formed the syllables on his lips as: "Will you be very, +_very_ kind to me?" + +"Ah 'kind,' dear Mr. Berridge? 'Kind,'" she splendidly laughed, "is +nothing to what--!" But she pulled herself up again an instant. "Well, +to what I want to be! Just _see_," she said, "how I want to be!" It +was exactly, he felt, what he couldn't _but_ see--in spite of books and +publics and pen-names, in spite of the really "decadent" perversity, +recalling that of the most irresponsibly insolent of the old Romans +and Byzantines, that could lead a creature so formed for living and +breathing her Romance, and so committed, up to the eyes, to the constant +fact of her personal immersion in it and genius for it, the dreadful +amateurish dance of ungrammatically scribbling it, with editions and +advertisements and reviews and royalties and every other futile item: +since what was more of the deep essence of throbbing intercourse itself +than this very act of her having broken away from people, in the other +room, to whom he was as nought, of her having, with her _cranerie_ of +audacity and indifference, just turned her back on them all as soon as +she had begun to miss him? What was more of it than her having forbidden +them, by a sufficient curt ring of her own supremely silver tone, to +attempt to check or criticise her freedom, than her having looked him +up, at his distance, under all the noses he had put out of joint, so as +to let them think whatever they might--not of herself (much she troubled +to care!) but of the new champion to be reckoned with, the invincible +young lion of the day? What was more of it in short than her having +perhaps even positively snubbed for him the great mystified Sculptor and +the great bewildered Dramatist, treated to this queer experience for the +first time of their lives? + +It all came back again to the really great ease of really great ladies, +and to the perfect facility of everything when once they were great +enough. _That_ might become the delicious thing to him, he more and more +felt, as soon as it should be supremely attested; it was ground he had +ventured on, scenically, representation-ally, in the artistic sphere, +but without ever dreaming he should "realise" it thus in the social. +Handsomely, gallantly just now, moreover, he didn't so much as let it +occur to him that the social experience would perhaps on some future +occasion richly profit further scenic efforts; he only lost himself in +the consciousness of all she invited him to believe. It took licence, +this consciousness, the next moment, for a tremendous further throb, +from what she had gone on to say to him in so many words--though indeed +the words were nothing and it was all a matter but of the implication +that glimmered through them: "Do you _want_ very much your supper here?" +And then while he felt himself glare, for charmed response, almost to +the point of his tears rising with it: "Because if you don't----!" + +"Because if I don't--?" She had paused, not from the faintest shade of +timidity, but clearly for the pleasure of making him press. + +"Why shouldn't we go together, letting me drive you home?" + +"You'll come home with me?" gasped John Berridge while the perspiration +on his brow might have been the morning dew on a high lawn of Mount Ida. + +"No--you had better come with _me_. That's what I mean; but I certainly +will come to you with pleasure some time if you'll let me." + +She made no more than that of the most fatuous of freedoms, as he felt +directly he had spoken that it might have seemed to her; and before +he had even time to welcome the relief of not having then himself, for +beastly contrition, to make more of it, she had simply mentioned, with +her affectionate ease, that she wanted to get away, that of the bores +there she might easily, after a little, have too much, and that if he'd +but say the word they'd nip straight out together by an independent door +and be sure to find her motor in the court. What word he had found to +say, he was afterward to reflect, must have little enough mattered; +for he was to have kept, of what then occurred, but a single other +impression, that of her great fragrant rustle beside him over the rest +of the ample room and toward their nearest and friendliest resource, the +door by which he had come in and which gave directly upon a staircase. +This independent image was just that of the only other of his +fellow-guests with whom he had been closely concerned; he had thought +of him rather indeed, up to that moment, as the Princess's +fellow-Olympian--but a new momentary vision of him seemed now to qualify +it. + +The young Lord had reappeared within a minute on the threshold, that +of the passage from the supper-room, lately crossed by the Princess +herself, and Berridge felt him there, saw him there, wondered about him +there, all, for the first minute, without so much as a straight look +at him. He would have come to learn the reason of his friend's +extraordinary public demonstration--having more right to his curiosity, +or his anxiety or whatever, than any one else; he would be taking in +the remarkable appearances that thus completed it, and would perhaps be +showing quite a different face for them, at the point they had reached, +than any that would have hitherto consorted with the beautiful security +of his own position. So much, on our own young man's part, for this +first flush of a presumption that he might have stirred the germs of ire +in a celestial breast; so much for the moment during which nothing +would have induced him to betray, to a possibly rueful member of an +old aristocracy, a vulgar elation or a tickled, unaccustomed glee. His +inevitable second thought was, however, it has to be confessed, another +matter, which took a different turn--for, frankly, all the conscious +conqueror in him, as Amy Evans would again have said, couldn't forego a +probably supreme consecration. He treated himself to no prolonged reach +of vision, but there was something he nevertheless fully measured for +five seconds--the sharp truth of the fact, namely, of how the interested +observer in the doorway must really have felt about him. Rather +disconcertingly, hereupon, the sharp truth proved to be that the most +amused, quite the most encouraging and the least invidious of smiles +graced the young Lord's handsome countenance--forming, in short, his +final contribution to a display of high social candour unprecedented in +our hero's experience. No, he wasn't jealous, didn't do John Berridge +the honour to be, to the extent of the least glimmer of a spark of it, +but was so happy to see his immortal mistress do what she liked that he +could positively beam at the odd circumstance of her almost lavishing +public caresses on a gentleman not, after all, of negligible importance. + + + + +III + +Well, it was all confounding enough, but this indication in particular +would have jostled our friend's grasp of the presented cup had he +had, during the next ten minutes, more independence of thought. That, +however, was out of the question when one positively felt, as with a +pang somewhere deep within, or even with a smothered cry for alarm, +one's whole sense of proportion shattered at a blow and ceasing to +serve. "Not _straight_, and not too fast, shall we?" was the ineffable +young woman's appeal to him, a few minutes later, beneath the wide glass +porch-cover that sheltered their brief wait for their chariot of fire. +It was there even as she spoke; the capped charioteer, with a great +clean curve, drew up at the steps of the porch, and the Princess's +footman, before rejoining him in front, held open the door of the car. +She got in, and Berridge was the next instant beside her; he could only +say: "As you like, Princess--where you will; certainly let us prolong +it; let us prolong everything; don't let us have it over--strange and +beautiful as it can only be!--a moment sooner than we must." So +he spoke, in the security of their intimate English, while the +perpendicular imperturbable _valet-de-pied_, white-faced in the electric +light, closed them in and then took his place on the box where the rigid +liveried backs of the two men, presented through the glass, were like a +protecting wall; such a guarantee of privacy as might come--it occurred +to Berridge's inexpugnable fancy--from a vision of tall guards erect +round Eastern seraglios. + +His companion had said something, by the time they started, about their +taking a turn, their looking out for a few of the night-views of Paris +that were so wonderful; and after that, in spite of his constantly +prized sense of knowing his enchanted city and his way about, he ceased +to follow or measure their course, content as he was with the particular +exquisite assurance it gave him. _That_ was knowing Paris, of a wondrous +bland April night; that was hanging over it from vague consecrated +lamp-studded heights and taking in, spread below and afar, the great +scroll of all its irresistible story, pricked out, across river and +bridge and radiant _place_, and along quays and boulevards and avenues, +and around monumental circles and squares, in syllables of fire, and +sketched and summarised, further and further, in the dim fire-dust of +endless avenues; that was all of the essence of fond and thrilled and +throbbing recognition, with a thousand things understood and a flood of +response conveyed, a whole familiar possessive feeling appealed to and +attested. + +"From you, you know, it _would_ be such a pleasure, and I think--in fact +I'm sure--it would do so much for the thing in America." Had she gone +on as they went, or had there been pauses of easy and of charmed and +of natural silence, breaks and drops from talk, but only into greater +confidence and sweetness?--such as her very gesture now seemed a part +of; her laying her gloved hand, for emphasis, on the back of his own, +which rested on his knee and which took in from the act he scarce knew +what melting assurance. The emphasis, it was true--this came to him even +while for a minute he held his breath--seemed rather that of Amy Evans; +and if her talk, while they rolled, had been in the sense of these words +(he had really but felt that they were shut intimately in together, all +his consciousness, all his discrimination of meanings and indications +being so deeply and so exquisitely merged in that) the case wasn't as +surely and sublimely, as extravagantly, as fabulously romantic for him +as his excited pulses had been seeming to certify. Her hand was there on +his own, in precious living proof, and splendid Paris hung over them, +as a consecrating canopy, her purple night embroidered with gold; yet he +waited, something stranger still having glimmered for him, waited though +she left her hand, which expressed emphasis and homage and tenderness, +and anything else she liked indeed--since it was all then a matter of +what he next heard and what he slowly grew cold as he took from her. + +"You know they do it here so charmingly--it's a compliment a clever man +is always so glad to pay a literary friend, and sometimes, in the case +of a great name like yours, it renders such a service to a poor little +book like mine!" She spoke ever so humbly and yet ever so gaily--and +still more than before with this confidence of the sincere admirer and +the comrade. That, yes, through his sudden sharpening chill, was +what first became distinct for him; she was mentioning somehow her +explanation and her conditions--her motive, in fine, disconcerting, +deplorable, dreadful, in respect to the experience, otherwise so +boundless, that he had taken her as having opened to him; and she +was doing it, above all, with the clearest coolness of her general +privilege. What in particular she was talking about he as yet, still +holding his breath, wondered; it was something she wanted him to do for +her--which was exactly what he had hoped, but something of what trivial +and, heaven forgive them both, of what dismal order? Most of all, +meanwhile, he felt the dire penetration of two or three of the words +she had used; so that after a painful minute the quaver with which he +repeated them resembled his-drawing, slowly, carefully, timidly, some +barbed dart out of his flesh. + +"A 'literary friend'?" he echoed as he turned his face more to her; so +that, as they sat, the whites of her eyes, near to his own, gleamed in +the dusk like some silver setting of deep sapphires. + +It made her smile--which in their relation now was like the breaking +of a cool air-wave over the conscious sore flush that maintained itself +through his general chill. "Ah, of course you don't allow that I +_am_ literary--and of course if you're awfully cruel and critical and +incorruptible you won't let it say for me what I so want it should!" + +"Where are we, where, in the name of all that's damnably, of all that's +grotesquely delusive, are we?" he said, without a sign, to himself; +which was the form of his really being quite at sea as to what she was +talking about. That uncertainty indeed he could but frankly betray by +taking her up, as he cast about him, on the particular ambiguity that +his voice perhaps already showed him to find most irritating. "Let it +show? 'It,' dear Princess----?" + +"Why, my dear man, let your Preface show, the lovely, friendly, +irresistible log-rolling Preface that I've been asking you if you +wouldn't be an angel and write for me." + +He took it in with a deep long gulp--he had never, it seemed to him, +had to swallow anything so bitter. "You've been asking me if I wouldn't +write you a Preface?" + +"To 'The Velvet Glove'--after I've sent it to you and you've judged +if you really can. Of course I don't want you to perjure yourself; +but"--and she fairly brushed him again, at their close quarters, with +her fresh fragrant smile--"I do want you so to like me, and to say it +all out beautifully and publicly." "You want me to like you, Princess?" +"But, heaven help us, haven't you understood?" Nothing stranger could +conceivably have been, it struck him--if he was right now--than this +exquisite intimacy of her manner of setting him down on the other side +of an abyss. It was as if she had lifted him first in her beautiful +arms, had raised him up high, high, high, to do it, pressing him to +her immortal young breast while he let himself go, and then, by some +extraordinary effect of her native force and her alien quality, setting +him down exactly where she wanted him to be--which was a thousand miles +away from her. Once more, so preposterously face to face with her for +these base issues, he took it all in; after which he felt his eyes +close, for amazement, despair and shame, and his head, which he had some +time before, baring his brow to the mild night, eased of its crush-hat, +sink to confounded rest on the upholstered back of the seat. The act, +the ceasing to see, and if possible to hear, was for the moment a +retreat, an escape from a state that he felt himself fairly flatter +by thinking of it as "awkward"; the state of really wishing that his +humiliation might end, and of wondering in fact if the most decent +course open to him mightn't be to ask her to stop the motor and let him +down. + +He spoke no word for a long minute, or for considerably more than that; +during which time the motor went and went, now even somewhat faster, +and he knew, through his closed eyes, that the outer lights had begun to +multiply and that they were getting back somewhere into the spacious and +decorative quarters. He knew this, and also that his retreat, for all +his attitude as of accommodating thought, his air--_that_ presently +and quickly came to him--of having perhaps gathered himself in, for +an instant, at her behest, to turn over, in his high ingenuity, some +humbugging "rotten" phrase or formula that he might place at her service +and make the note of such an effort; he became aware, I say, that +his lapse was but a half-retreat, with her strenuous presence and +her earnest pressure and the close cool respiration of her good faith +absolutely timing the moments of his stillness and the progress of the +car. Yes, it was wondrous well, he had all but made the biggest of +all fools of himself, almost as big a one as _she_ was still, to every +appearance, in her perfect serenity, trying to make of him; and the one +straight answer to it _would_ be that he should reach forward and touch +the footman's shoulder and demand that the vehicle itself should make an +end. + +That would be an answer, however, he continued intensely to see, only to +inanely importunate, to utterly superfluous Amy Evans--not a bit to his +at last exquisitely patient companion, who was clearly now quite taking +it from him that what kept him in his attitude was the spring of the +quick desire to oblige her, the charming loyal impulse to consider a +little what he could do for her, say "handsomely yet conscientiously" +(oh the loveliness!) before he should commit himself. She was +enchanted--_that_ seemed to breathe upon him; she waited, she hung +there, she quite bent over him, as Diana over the sleeping Endymion, +while all the conscientious man of letters in him, as she might so +supremely have phrased it, struggled with the more peccable, the more +muddled and "squared," though, for her own ideal, the so much more +_banal_ comrade. Yes, he could keep it up now--that is he could hold out +for his real reply, could meet the rather marked tension of the rest of +their passage as well as she; he should be able somehow or other to +make his wordless detachment, the tribute of his ostensibly deep +consideration of her request, a retreat in good order. She _was_, for +herself, to the last point of her guileless fatuity, Amy Evans and an +asker for "lifts," a conceiver of twaddle both in herself and in him; +or at least, so far as she fell short of all this platitude, it was +no fault of the really affecting folly of her attempt to become a +mere magazine mortal after the only fashion she had made out, to the +intensification of her self-complacency, that she might. + +Nothing might thus have touched him more--if to be touched, beyond a +certain point, hadn't been to be squared--than the way she failed to +divine the bearing of his thoughts; so that she had probably at no one +small crisis of her life felt so much a promise in the flutter of her +own as on the occasion of the beautiful act she indulged in at the very +moment, he was afterward to recognise, of their sweeping into her +great smooth, empty, costly street--a desert, at that hour, of lavish +lamplight and sculptured stone. She raised to her lips the hand she +had never yet released and kept it there a moment pressed close against +them; he himself closing his eyes to the deepest detachment he was +capable of while he took in with a smothered sound of pain that this +was the conferred bounty by which Amy Evans sought most expressively to +encourage, to sustain and to reward. The motor had slackened and in a +moment would stop; and meanwhile even after lowering his hand again +she hadn't let it go. This enabled it, while he after a further moment +roused himself to a more confessed consciousness, to form with his +friend's a more active relation, to possess him of hers, in turn, and +with an intention the straighter that her glove had by this time somehow +come off. Bending over it without hinderance, he returned as firmly +and fully as the application of all his recovered wholeness of feeling, +under his moustache, might express, the consecration the bareness of +his own knuckles had received; only after which it was that, still thus +drawing out his grasp of her, and having let down their front glass by +his free hand, he signified to the footman his view of their stopping +short. + +They had arrived; the high, closed _porte-cochere_, in its crested +stretch of wall, awaited their approach; but his gesture took effect, +the car pulled up at the edge of the pavement, the man, in an instant, +was at the door and had opened it; quickly moving across the walk, the +next moment, to press the bell at the gate. Berridge, as his hand now +broke away, felt he had cut his cable; with which, after he had stepped +out, he raised again the glass he had lowered and closed, its own being +already down, the door that had released him. During these motions he +had the sense of his companion, still radiant and splendid, but somehow +momentarily suppressed, suspended, silvered over and celestially +blurred, even as a summer moon by the loose veil of a cloud. So it was +he saw her while he leaned for farewell on the open window-ledge; he +took her in as her visible intensity of bright vagueness filled the +circle that the interior of the car made for her. It was such a state as +she would have been reduced to--he felt this, was certain of it--for the +first time in her life; and it was he, poor John Berridge, after all, +who would have created the condition. + +"Good-night, Princess. I sha'n't see you again." + +Vague was indeed no word for it--shine though she might, in her screened +narrow niche, as with the liquefaction of her pearls, the glimmer of her +tears, the freshness of her surprise. "You won't come in--when you've +had no supper?" + +He smiled at her with a purpose of kindness that could never in his life +have been greater; and at first but smiled without a word. He presently +shook his head, however--doubtless also with as great a sadness. "I seem +to have supped to my fill, Princess. Thank you, I won't come in." + +It drew from her, while she looked at him, a long low anxious wail. "And +you won't do my Preface?" + +"No, Princess, I won't do your Preface. Nothing would induce me to say +a word in print about you. I'm in fact not sure I shall ever mention you +in any manner at all as long as ever I live." + +He had felt for an instant as if he were speaking to some miraculously +humanised idol, all sacred, all jewelled, all votively hung about, but +made mysterious, in the recess of its shrine, by the very thickness +of the accumulated lustre. And "Then you don't like me--?" was the +marvellous sound from the image. + +"Princess," was in response the sound of the worshipper, "Princess, I +adore you. But I'm ashamed for you." + +"Ashamed----?" + +"You _are_ Romance--as everything, and by what I make out every one, +about you is; so what more do you want? Your Preface--the only one worth +speaking of--was written long ages ago by the most beautiful imagination +of man." + +Humanised at least for these moments, she could understand enough to +declare that she didn't. "I don't, I don't!" + +"You don't need to understand. Don't attempt such base things. Leave +those to us. Only live. Only be. _We'll_ do the rest." + +She moved over--she had come close to the window. "Ah, but Mr. +Berridge----!" + +He raised both hands; he shook them at her gently, in deep and soft +deprecation. "Don't sound my dreadful name. Fortunately, however, you +can't help yourself." + +"Ah, _voyons!_ I so want-----!" + +He repeated his gesture, and when he brought down his hands they closed +together on both of hers, which now quite convulsively grasped the +window-ledge. "Don't speak, because when you speak you really say +things--!" "You _are_ Romance," he pronounced afresh and with the last +intensity of conviction and persuasion. "That's all you have to do with +it," he continued while his hands, for emphasis, pressed hard on her +own. + +Their faces, in this way, were nearer together than ever, but with the +effect of only adding to the vividness of that dire non-intelligence +from which, all perversely and incalculably, her very beauty now +appeared to gain relief. This made for him a pang and almost an anguish; +the fear of her saying something yet again that would wretchedly prove +how little he moved her perception. So his eyes, of remonstrant, of +suppliant intention, met hers close, at the same time that these, so far +from shrinking, but with their quite other swimming plea all bedimmed +now, seemed almost to wash him with the tears of her failure. He +soothed, he stroked, he reassured her hands, for tender conveyance of +his meaning, quite as she had just before dealt with his own for brave +demonstration of hers. It was during these instants as if the question +had been which of them _could_ most candidly and fraternally plead. +Full but of that she kept it up. "Ah, if you'd only think, if you'd only +try----!" + +He couldn't stand it--she was capable of believing he had edged away, +excusing himself and trumping up a factitious theory, because he hadn't +the wit, hadn't the hand, to knock off the few pleasant pages she asked +him for and that any proper Frenchman, master of the _metier_, would +so easily and gallantly have promised. Should she so begin to commit +herself he'd, by the immortal gods, anticipate it in the manner most +admirably effective--in fact he'd even thus make her further derogation +impossible. Their faces were so close that he could practise any rich +freedom--even though for an instant, while the back of the chauffeur +guarded them on that side and his own presented breadth, amplified +by his loose mantle, filled the whole window-space, leaving him no +observation from any quarter to heed, he uttered, in a deep-drawn final +groan, an irrepressible echo of his pang for what might have been, +the muffled cry of his insistence. "You _are_ Romance!"--he drove it +intimately, inordinately home, his lips, for a long moment, sealing +it, with the fullest force of authority, on her own; after which, as +he broke away and the car, starting again, turned powerfully across +the pavement, he had no further sound from her than if, all divinely +indulgent but all humanly defeated, she had given the question up, +falling back to infinite wonder. He too fell back, but could still wave +his hat for her as she passed to disappearance in the great floridly +framed aperture whose wings at once came together behind her. + + + + + +A ROUND OF VISITS + + + + +I + +HE had been out but once since his arrival, Mark Monteith; that was +the next day after--he had disembarked by night on the previous; then +everything had come at once, as he would have said, everything had +changed. He had got in on Tuesday; he had spent Wednesday for the most +part down town, looking into the dismal subject of his anxiety--the +anxiety that, under a sudden decision, had brought him across the +unfriendly sea at mid-winter, and it was through information reaching +him on Wednesday evening that he had measured his loss, measured above +all his pain. These were two distinct things, he felt, and, though both +bad, one much worse than the other. It wasn't till the next three +days had pretty well ebbed, in fact, that he knew himself for so badly +wounded. He had waked up on Thursday morning, so far as he had slept at +all, with the sense, together, of a blinding New York blizzard and of a +deep sore inward ache. The great white savage storm would have kept him +at the best within doors, but his stricken state was by itself quite +reason enough. + +He so felt the blow indeed, so gasped, before what had happened to him, +at the ugliness, the bitterness, and, beyond these things, the sinister +strangeness, that, the matter of his dismay little by little detaching +and projecting itself, settling there face to face with him as something +he must now live with always, he might have been in charge of some +horrid alien thing, some violent, scared, unhappy creature whom there +was small joy, of a truth, in remaining with, but whose behaviour +wouldn't perhaps bring him under notice, nor otherwise compromise him, +so long as he should stay to watch it. A young jibbering ape of one of +the more formidable sorts, or an ominous infant panther, smuggled into +the great gaudy hotel and whom it might yet be important he shouldn't +advertise, couldn't have affected him as needing more domestic +attention. The great gaudy hotel--The Pocahontas, but carried out +largely on "Du Barry" lines--made all about him, beside, behind, below, +above, in blocks and tiers and superpositions, a sufficient defensive +hugeness; so that, between the massive labyrinth and the New York +weather, life in a lighthouse during a gale would scarce have kept +him more apart. Even when in the course of that worse Thursday it +had occurred to him for vague relief that the odious certified facts +couldn't be all his misery, and that, with his throat and a probable +temperature, a brush of the epidemic, which was for ever brushing him, +accounted for something, even then he couldn't resign himself to bed and +broth and dimness, but only circled and prowled the more within his +high cage, only watched the more from his tenth story the rage of the +elements. + +In the afternoon he had a doctor--the caravanserai, which supplied +everything in quantities, had one for each group of so many rooms--just +in order to be assured that he was _grippe_ enough for anything. What +his visitor, making light of his attack, perversely told him was that +he was, much rather, "blue" enough, and from causes doubtless known +to himself--which didn't come to the same thing; but he "gave him +something," prescribed him warmth and quiet and broth and courage, +and came back the next day as to readminister this last dose. He then +pronounced him better, and on Saturday pronounced him well--all the more +that the storm had abated and the snow had been dealt with as New York, +at a push, knew how to deal with things. Oh, how New York knew how to +deal--to deal, that is, with other accumulations lying passive to its +hand--was exactly what Mark now ached with his impression of; so that, +still threshing about in this consciousness, he had on the Saturday +come near to breaking out as to what was the matter with him. The +Doctor brought in somehow the air of the hotel--which, cheerfully +and conscientiously, by his simple philosophy, the good man wished to +diffuse; breathing forth all the echoes of other woes and worries and +pointing the honest moral that, especially with such a thermometer, +there were enough of these to go round. + +Our sufferer, by that time, would have liked to tell some one; +extracting, to the last acid strain of it, the full strength of his +sorrow, taking it all in as he could only do by himself and with the +conditions favourable at least to this, had been his natural first need. +But now, he supposed, he _must_ be better; there was something of his +heart's heaviness he wanted so to give out. He had rummaged forth on the +Thursday night half a dozen old photographs stuck into a leather frame, +a small show-case that formed part of his usual equipage of travel--he +mostly set it up on a table when he stayed anywhere long enough; and in +one of the neat gilt-edged squares of this convenient portable array, +as familiar as his shaving-glass or the hair-brushes, of backs and +monograms now so beautifully toned and wasted, long ago given him by his +mother, Phil Blood-good handsomely faced him. Not contemporaneous, and +a little faded, but so saying what it said only the more dreadfully, +the image seemed to sit there, at an immemorial window, like some long +effective and only at last exposed "decoy" of fate. It was _because_ he +was so beautifully good-looking, because he was so charming and clever +and frank--besides being one's third cousin, or whatever it was, one's +early schoolfellow and one's later college classmate--that one had +abjectly trusted him. To live thus with his unremoved, undestroyed, +engaging, treacherous face, had been, as our traveller desired, to live +with all of the felt pang; had been to consume it in such a single hot, +sore mouthful as would so far as possible dispose of it and leave but +cold dregs. Thus, if the Doctor, casting about for pleasantness, had +happened to notice him there, salient since he was, and possibly by the +same stroke even to know him, as New York--and more or less to its cost +now, mightn't one say?--so abundantly and agreeable had, the cup would +have overflowed and Monteith, for all he could be sure of the contrary, +would have relieved himself positively in tears. + +"Oh _he's_ what's the matter with me--that, looking after some of my +poor dividends, as he for the ten years of my absence had served me by +doing, he has simply jockeyed me out of the whole little collection, +such as it was, and taken the opportunity of my return, inevitably at +last bewildered and uneasy, to 'sail,' ten days ago, for parts unknown +and as yet unguessable. It isn't the beastly values themselves, however; +that's only awkward and I can still live, though I don't quite know how +I shall turn round; it's the horror of _his_ having done it, and done it +to _me_--without a mitigation or, so to speak, a warning or an excuse." +That, at a hint or a jog, is what he would have brought out--only to +feel afterward, no doubt, that he had wasted his impulse and profaned +even a little his sincerity. The Doctor didn't in the event so much +as glance at his cluster of portraits--which fact quite put before our +friend the essentially more vivid range of imagery that a pair of eyes +transferred from room to room and from one queer case to another, in +such a place as that, would mainly be adjusted to. It wasn't for _him_ +to relieve himself touchingly, strikingly or whatever, to such a +man: such a man might much more pertinently--save for professional +discretion--have emptied out there his own bag of wonders; prodigies +of observation, flowers of oddity, flowers of misery, flowers of the +monstrous, gathered in current hotel practice. Countless possibilities, +making doctors perfunctory, Mark felt, swarmed and seethed at their +doors; it showed for an incalculable world, and at last, on Sunday, he +decided to leave his room. + + + + +II + +Everything, as he passed through the place, went on--all the offices of +life, the whole bustle of the market, and withal, surprisingly, scarce +less that of the nursery and the playground; the whole sprawl in +especial of the great gregarious fireside: it was a complete social +scene in itself, on which types might figure and passions rage and plots +thicken and dramas develop, without reference to any other sphere, or +perhaps even to anything at all outside. The signs of this met him at +every turn as he threaded the labyrinth, passing from one extraordinary +masquerade of expensive objects, one portentous "period" of decoration, +one violent phase of publicity, to another: the heavy heat, the +luxuriance, the extravagance, the quantity, the colour, gave the +impression of some wondrous tropical forest, where vociferous, +bright-eyed, and feathered creatures, of every variety of size and hue, +were half smothered between undergrowths of velvet and tapestry and +ramifications of marble and bronze. The fauna and the flora startled him +alike, and among them his bruised spirit drew in and folded its wings. +But he roamed and rested, exploring and in a manner enjoying the vast +rankness--in the depth of which he suddenly encountered Mrs. Folliott, +whom he had last seen, six months before, in London, and who had spoken +to him then, precisely, of Phil Bloodgood, for several years previous +her confidential American agent and factotum too, as she might say, but +at that time so little in her good books, for the extraordinary things +he seemed to be doing, that she was just hurrying home, she had made no +scruple of mentioning, to take everything out of his hands. + +Mark remembered how uneasy she had made him--how that very talk with +her had wound him up to fear, as so acute and intent a little person she +affected him; though he had affirmed with all emphasis and flourish his +own confidence and defended, to iteration, his old friend. This passage +had remained with him for a certain pleasant heat of intimacy, his +partner, of the charming appearance, being what she was; he liked to +think how they had fraternised over their difference and called each +other idiots, or almost, without offence. It was always a link to have +scuffled, failing a real scratch, with such a character; and he had at +present the flutter of feeling that something of this would abide. _He_ +hadn't been hurrying home, at the London time, in any case; he was doing +nothing then, and had continued to do it; he would want, before showing +suspicion--that had been his attitude--to have more, after all, to go +upon. Mrs. Folliott also, and with a great actual profession of it, +remembered and rejoiced; and, also staying in the house as she was, sat +with him, under a spreading palm, in a wondrous rococo salon, surrounded +by the pinkest, that is the fleshiest, imitation Boucher panels, and +wanted to know if he _now_ stood up for his swindler. She would herself +have tumbled on a cloud, very passably, in a fleshy Boucher manner, +hadn't she been over-dressed for such an exercise; but she was quite +realistically aware of what had so naturally happened--she was prompt +about Bloodgood's "flight." + +She had acted with energy, on getting back--she had saved what she +could; which hadn't, however, prevented her losing all disgustedly some +ten thousand dollars. She was lovely, lively, friendly, interested, she +connected Monteith perfectly with their discussion that day during the +water-party on the Thames; but, sitting here with him half an hour, she +talked only of her peculiar, her cruel sacrifice--since she should +never get a penny back. He had felt himself, on their meeting, quite +yearningly reach out to her--so decidedly, by the morning's end, +and that of his scattered sombre stations, had he been sated with +meaningless contacts, with the sense of people all about him intensely, +though harmlessly, animated, yet at the same time raspingly indifferent. +_They_ would have, he and she at least, their common pang--through which +fact, somehow, he should feel less stranded. It wasn't that he wanted to +be pitied--he fairly didn't pity himself; he winced, rather, and even +to vicarious anguish, as it rose again, for poor shamed Bloodgood's +doom-ridden figure. But he wanted, as with a desperate charity, to give +some easier turn to the mere ugliness of the main facts; to work off his +obsession from them by mixing with it some other blame, some other pity, +it scarce mattered what--if it might be some other experience; as an +effect of which larger ventilation it would have, after a fashion and +for a man of free sensibility, a diluted and less poisonous taste. + +By the end of five minutes of Mrs. Folliott, however, he felt his dry +lips seal themselves to a makeshift simper. She could _take_ nothing--no +better, no broader perception of anything than fitted her own small +faculty; so that though she must have recalled or imagined that he had +still, up to lately, had interests at stake, the rapid result of her +egotistical little chatter was to make him wish he might rather have +conversed with the French waiter dangling in the long vista that showed +the oriental cafe as a climax, or with the policeman, outside, the top +of whose helmet peeped above the ledge of a window. She bewailed her +wretched money to excess--she who, he was sure, had quantities more; she +pawed and tossed her bare bone, with her little extraordinarily gemmed +and manicured hands, till it acted on his nerves; she rang all the +changes on the story, the dire fatality, of her having wavered and +muddled, thought of this and but done that, of her stupid failure to +have pounced, when she had first meant to, in season. She abused the +author of their wrongs--recognising thus too Monteith's right to loathe +him--for the desperado he assuredly had proved, but with a vulgarity +of analysis and an incapacity for the higher criticism, as her listener +felt it to be, which made him determine resentfully, almost grimly, +that she shouldn't have the benefit of a grain of _his_ vision or _his_ +version of what had befallen them, and of how, in particular, it had +come; and should never dream thereby (though much would she suffer from +that!) of how interesting he might have been. She had, in a finer sense, +no manners, and to be concerned with her in any retrospect was--since +their discourse was of losses--to feel the dignity of history incur +the very gravest. It was true that such fantasies, or that any shade +of inward irony, would be Greek to Mrs. Folliott. It was also true, +however, and not much more strange, when she had presently the +comparatively happy thought of "Lunch with _us_, you poor dear!" and +mentioned three or four of her "crowd"--a new crowd, rather, for her, +all great Sunday lunchers there and immense fun, who would in a moment +be turning up--that this seemed to him as easy as anything else; so that +after a little, deeper in the jungle and while, under the temperature +as of high noon, with the crowd complete and "ordering," he wiped the +perspiration from his brow, he felt he was letting himself go. He did +that certainly to the extent of leaving far behind any question of Mrs. +Folliott's manners. They didn't matter there--nobody's did; and if she +ceased to lament her ten thousand it was only because, among higher +voices, she couldn't make herself heard. Poor Blood-good didn't have +a show, as they might have said, didn't get through at any point; the +crowd was so new that--there either having been no hue and cry for +him, or having been too many others, for other absconders, in the +intervals--they had never so much as heard of him and would have no more +of Mrs. Folliott's true inwardness, on that subject at least, than she +had lately cared to have of Monteith's. + +There was nothing like a crowd, this unfortunate knew, for making one +feel lonely, and he felt so increasingly during the meal; but he got +thus at least in a measure away from the terrible little lady; after +which, and before the end of the hour, he wanted still more to get away +from every one else. He was in fact about to perform this manoeuvre when +he was checked by the jolly young woman he had been having on his left +and who had more to say about the Hotels, up and down the town, than he +had ever known a young woman to have to say on any subject at all; +she expressed herself in hotel terms exclusively, the names of those +establishments playing through her speech as the _leit-motif_ might have +recurrently flashed and romped through a piece of profane modern music. +She wanted to present him to the pretty girl she had brought with her, +and who had apparently signified to her that she must do so. + +"I think you know my brother-in-law, Mr. Newton Winch," the pretty girl +had immediately said; she moved her head and shoulders together, as by +a common spring, the effect of a stiff neck or of something loosened in +her back hair; but becoming, queerly enough, all the prettier for +doing so. He had seen in the papers, her brother-in-law, Mr. Monteith's +arrival--Mr. Mark P. Monteith, wasn't it?--and where he was, and she +had been with him, three days before, at the time; whereupon he had +said "Hullo, what can have brought old Mark back?" He seemed to have +believed--Newton had seemed--that that shirker, as he called him, never +_would_ come; and she guessed that if she had known she was going to +meet such a former friend ("Which he claims you are, sir," said the +pretty girl) he would have asked her to find out what the trouble could +be. But the real satisfaction would just be, she went on, if his former +friend would himself go and see him and tell him; he had appeared of +late so down. + +"Oh, I remember him"--Mark didn't repudiate the friendship, placing him +easily; only then he wasn't married and the pretty girl's sister must +have come in later: which showed, his not knowing such things, how they +had lost touch. The pretty girl was sorry to have to say in return to +this that her sister wasn't living--had died two years after marrying; +so that Newton was up there in Fiftieth Street alone; where (in +explanation of his being "down") he had been shut up for days with bad +_grippe_; though now on the mend, or she wouldn't have gone to him, not +she, who had had it nineteen times and didn't want to have it again. But +the horrid poison just seemed to have entered into poor Newton's soul. + +"That's the way it _can_ take you, don't you know?" And then as, with +her single twist, she just charmingly hunched her eyes at our friend, +"Don't you want to go to see him?" + +Mark bethought himself: "Well, I'm going to see a lady-----" + +She took the words from his mouth. "Of course you're going to see a +lady--every man in New York is. But Newton isn't a lady, unfortunately +for him, to-day; and Sunday afternoon in this place, in this weather, +alone-----!" + +"Yes, isn't it awful?"--he was quite drawn to her. + +"Oh, _you've_ got your lady!" + +"Yes, I've got my lady, thank goodness!" The fervour of which was his +sincere tribute to the note he had had on Friday morning from Mrs. Ash, +the only thing that had a little tempered his gloom. + +"Well then, feel for others. Fit him in. Tell him why!" + +"Why I've come back? I'm glad I _have_--since it was to see _you_!" +Monteith made brave enough answer, promising to do what he could. +He liked the pretty girl, with her straight attack and her free +awkwardness--also with her difference from the others through something +of a sense and a distinction given her by so clearly having Newton on +her mind. Yet it was odd to him, and it showed the lapse of the years, +that Winch--as he had known him of old--could _be_ to that degree on any +one's mind. + + + + +III + +Outside in the intensity of the cold--it was a jump from the Tropics to +the Pole--he felt afresh the force of what he had just been saying; +that if it weren't for the fact of Mrs. Ash's good letter of welcome, +despatched, characteristically, as soon as she had, like the faithful +sufferer in Fiftieth Street, observed his name, in a newspaper, on one +of the hotel-lists, he should verily, for want of a connection and an +abutment, have scarce dared to face the void and the chill together, but +have sneaked back into the jungle and there tried to lose himself. He +made, as it was, the opposite effort, resolute to walk, though hovering +now and then at vague crossways, radiations of roads to nothing, or +taking cold counsel of the long but still sketchy vista, as it struck +him, of the northward Avenue, bright and bleak, fresh and harsh, +rich and evident somehow, a perspective like a page of florid +modern platitudes. He didn't quite know what he had expected for his +return--not certainly serenades and deputations; but without Mrs. +Ash his mail would have quite lacked geniality, and it was as if Phil +Blood-good had gone off not only with so large a slice of his small +_peculium_, but with all the broken bits of the past, the loose ends of +old relationships, that he had supposed he might pick up again. Well, +perhaps he should still pick up a few--by the sweat of his brow; no +motion of their own at least, he by this time judged, would send them +fluttering into his hand. + +Which reflections but quickened his forecast of this charm of the old +Paris inveteracy renewed--the so-prized custom of nine years before, +when he still believed in results from his fond frequentation of the +Beaux Arts; that of walking over the river to the Rue de Marignan, +precisely, every Sunday without exception, and sitting at her fireside, +and often all offensively, no doubt, outstaying every one. How he +had used to want those hours then, and how again, after a little, at +present, the Rue de Marignan might have been before him! He had gone to +her there at that time with his troubles, such as they were, and they +had always worked for her amusement--which had been her happy, her +clever way of taking them: she couldn't have done anything better for +them in that phase, poor innocent things compared with what they might +have been, than be amused by them. Perhaps that was what she would still +be--with those of his present hour; now too they might inspire her with +the touch she best applied and was most instinctive mistress of: this +didn't at all events strike him as what he should most resent. It wasn't +as if Mrs. Folliott, to make up for boring him with her own plaint, for +example, had had so much as a gleam of conscious diversion over his. + +"I'm _so_ delighted to see you, I've such immensities to tell you!"--it +began with the highest animation twenty minutes later, the very moment +he stood there, the sense of the Rue de Marignan in the charming room +and in the things about all reconstituted, regrouped, wonderfully +preserved, down to the very sitting-places in the same relations, and +down to the faint sweet mustiness of generations of cigarettes; but +everything else different, and even vaguely alien, and by a measure +still other than that of their own stretched interval and of the dear +delightful woman's just a little pathetic alteration of face. He had +allowed for the nine years, and so, it was to be hoped, had she; but +the last thing, otherwise, that would have been touched, he immediately +felt, was the quality, the intensity, of her care to see him. She cared, +oh so visibly and touchingly and almost radiantly--save for her being, +yes, distinctly, a little _more_ battered than from even a good nine +years' worth; nothing could in fact have perched with so crowning an +impatience on the heap of what she had to "tell" as that special shade +of revived consciousness of having him in particular to tell it to. It +wasn't perhaps much to matter how soon she brought out and caused to +ring, as it were, on the little recognised marqueterie table between +them (such an anciently envied treasure), the heaviest gold-piece of +current history she was to pay him with for having just so felicitously +come back: he knew already, without the telling, that intimate domestic +tension must lately, within those walls, have reached a climax and that +he could serve supremely--oh how he was going to serve!--as the most +sympathetic of all pairs of ears. + +The whole thing was upon him, in any case, with the minimum of delay: +Bob had had it from her, definitely, the first of the week, and it +was absolutely final now, that they must set up avowedly separate +lives--without horrible "proceedings" of any sort, but with her own +situation, her independence, secured to her once for all. She had been +coming to it, taking her time, and she had gone through--well, so old a +friend would guess enough what; but she was at the point, oh blessedly +now, where she meant to stay, he'd see if she didn't; with which, in +this wonderful way, he himself had arrived for the cream of it and +she was just selfishly glad. Bob had gone to Washington--ostensibly +on business, but really to recover breath; she had, speaking vulgarly, +knocked the wind out of him and was allowing him time to turn round. +Mrs. Folliott moreover, she was sure, would have gone--was certainly +believed to have been seen there five days ago; and of course his first +necessity, for public use, would be to patch up something with Mrs. +Folliott. Mark knew about Mrs. Folliott?--who was only, for that matter, +one of a regular "bevy." Not that it signified, however, if he didn't: +she would tell him about _her_ later. + +He took occasion from the first fraction of a break not quite to know +what he knew about Mrs. Folliott--though perhaps he could imagine a +little; and it was probably at this minute that, having definitely +settled to a position, and precisely in his very own tapestry _bergere_, +the one with the delicious little spectral "subjects" on the back and +seat, he partly exhaled, and yet managed partly to keep to himself, the +deep resigned sigh of a general comprehension. He knew what he was "in" +for, he heard her go on--she said it again and again, seemed constantly +to be saying it while she smiled at him with her peculiar fine charm, +her positive gaiety of sensibility, scarce dimmed: "I'm just selfishly +glad, just selfishly glad!" Well, she was going to have reason to be; +she was going to put the whole case to him, all her troubles and plans, +and each act of the tragi-comedy of her recent existence, as to the +dearest and safest sympathiser in all the world. There would be no +chance for _his_ case, though it was so much for his case he had +come; yet there took place within him but a mild, dumb convulsion, +the momentary strain of his substituting, by the turn of a hand, one +prospect of interest for another. + +Squaring himself in his old _bergere_, and with his lips, during the +effort, compressed to the same passive grimace that had an hour or two +before operated for the encouragement of Mrs. Folliott--just as it +was to clear the stage completely for the present more prolonged +performance--he shut straight down, as he even in the act called it to +himself, on any personal claim for social consideration and rendered +a perfect little agony of justice to the grounds of his friend's +vividness. For it was all the justice that could be expected of him +that, though, secretly, he wasn't going to be interested in her being +interesting, she was yet going to be so, all the same, by the very force +of her lovely material (Bob Ash _was_ such a pure pearl of a donkey!) +and he was going to keep on knowing she was--yes, to the very end. When +after the lapse of an hour he rose to go, the rich fact that she +_had_ been was there between them, and with an effect of the frankly, +fearlessly, harmlessly intimate fireside passage for it that went beyond +even the best memories of the pleasant past. He hadn't "amused" her, no, +in quite the same way as in the Rue de Marignan time--it had then been +he who for the most part took frequent turns, emphatic, explosive, +elocutionary, over that wonderful waxed parquet while she laughed as for +the young perversity of him from the depths of the second, the matching +_bergere_. To-day she herself held and swept the floor, putting him +merely to the trouble of his perpetual "Brava!" But that was all through +the change of basis--the amusement, another name only for the thrilled +absorption, having been inevitably for _him_; as how could it have +failed to be with such a regular "treat" to his curiosity? With the +tea-hour now other callers were turning up, and he got away on the plea +of his wanting so to think it all over. He hoped again he hadn't too +queer a grin with his assurance to her, as if she would quite know what +he meant, that he had been thrilled to the core. But she returned, quite +radiantly, that he had carried _her_ completely away; and her sincerity +was proved by the final frankness of their temporary parting. "My +pleasure of you is selfish, horribly, I admit; so that if _that_ doesn't +suit you--!" Her faded beauty flushed again as she said it. + + + + +IV + +In the street again, as he resumed his walk, he saw how perfectly it +would _have_ to suit him and how he probably for a long time wouldn't +be suited otherwise. Between them and that time, however, what mightn't, +for him, poor devil, on his new basis, have happened? She wasn't at any +rate within any calculable period going to care so much for anything +as for the so quaintly droll terms in which her rearrangement with her +husband--thanks to that gentleman's inimitable fatuity--would have to +be made. This was what it was to own, exactly, her special grace--the +brightest gaiety in the finest sensibility; _such_ a display of which +combination, Mark felt as he went (if he could but have done it still +more justice) she must have regaled him with! That exquisite last flush +of her fadedness could only remain with him; yet while he presently +stopped at a street-corner in a district redeemed from desolation but by +the passage just then of a choked trolley-car that howled, as he paused +for it, beneath the weight of its human accretions, he seemed to know +the inward "sinking" that had been determined in a hungry man by some +extravagant sight of the preparation of somebody else's dinner. Florence +Ash was dining, so to speak, off the feast of appreciation, appreciation +of what she had to "tell" him, that he had left her seated at; and +she was welcome, assuredly--welcome, welcome, welcome, he musingly, he +wistfully, and yet at the same time a trifle mechanically, repeated, +stayed as he was a moment longer by the suffering shriek of another +public vehicle and a sudden odd automatic return of his mind to the +pretty girl, the flower of Mrs. Folliott's crowd, who had spoken to +him of Newton Winch. It was extraordinarily as if, on the instant, she +reminded him, from across the town, that she had offered him dinner: it +was really quite strangely, while he stood there, as if she had told +him where he could go and get it. With which, none the less, it was +apparently where he wouldn't find her--and what was there, after all, of +nutritive in the image of Newton Winch? He made up his mind in a moment +that it owed that property, which the pretty girl had somehow made +imputable, to the fact of its simply being just then the one image of +anything known to him that the terrible place had to offer. Nothing, +he a minute later reflected, could have been so "rum" as that, sick and +sore, of a bleak New York eventide, he should have had nowhere to turn +if not to the said Fiftieth Street. + +That was the direction he accordingly took, for when he found the number +given him by the same remarkable agent of fate also present to his +memory he recognised the direct intervention of Providence and how it +absolutely required a miracle to explain his so precipitately embracing +this loosest of connections. The miracle indeed soon grew clearer: +Providence had, on some obscure system, chosen this very ridiculous hour +to save him from cultivation of the sin of selfishness, the obsession +of egotism, and was breaking him to its will by constantly directing his +attention to the claims of others. Who could say what at that critical +moment mightn't have become of Mrs. Folliott (otherwise too then so +sadly embroiled!) if she hadn't been enabled to air to him her grievance +and her rage?--just as who could deny that it must have done Florence +Ash a world of good to have put her thoughts about Bob in order by the +aid of a person to whom the vision of Bob in the light of those thoughts +(or in other words to whom _her_ vision of Bob and nothing else) would +mean so delightfully much? It was on the same general lines that poor +Newton Winch, bereft, alone, ill, perhaps dying, and with the drawback +of a not very sympathetic personality--as Mark remembered it at +least--to contend against in almost any conceivable appeal to human +furtherance, it was on these lines, very much, that the luckless case in +Fiftieth Street was offered him as a source of salutary discipline. The +moment for such a lesson might strike him as strange, in view of the +quite special and independent opportunity for exercise that his spirit +had during the last three days enjoyed there in his hotel bedroom; but +evidently his languor of charity needed some admonition finer than +any it might trust to chance for, and by the time he at last, Winch's +residence recognised, was duly elevated to his level and had pressed +the electric button at his door, he felt himself acting indeed as under +stimulus of a sharp poke in the side. + + + + +V + +Within the apartment to which he had been admitted, moreover, the fine +intelligence we have imputed to him was in the course of three minutes +confirmed; since it took him no longer than that to say to himself, +facing his old acquaintance, that he had never seen any one so improved. +The place, which had the semblance of a high studio light as well as a +general air of other profusions and amplitudes, might have put him off +a little by its several rather glaringly false accents, those of +contemporary domestic "art" striking a little wild. The scene was +smaller, but the rich confused complexion of the Pocahontas, showing +through Du Barry paint and patches, might have set the example--which +had been followed with the costliest candour--so that, clearly, Winch +was in these days rich, as most people in New York seemed rich; as, in +spite of Bob's depredations, Florence Ash was, as even Mrs. Folliott was +in spite of Phil Bloodgood's, as even Phil Bloodgood himself must have +been for reasons too obvious; as in fine every one had a secret for +being, or for feeling, or for looking, every one at least but Mark +Monteith. + +These facts were as nothing, however, in presence of his quick and +strong impression that his pale, nervous, smiling, clean-shaven host +had undergone since their last meeting some extraordinary process of +refinement. He had been ill, unmistakably, and the effects of a plunge +into plain clean living, where any fineness had remained, were often +startling, sometimes almost charming. But independently of this, and for +a much longer time, some principle of intelligence, some art of life, +would discernibly have worked in him. Remembered from college years and +from those two or three luckless and faithless ones of the Law School +as constitutionally common, as consistently and thereby doubtless even +rather powerfully coarse, clever only for uncouth and questionable +things, he yet presented himself now as if he had suddenly and +mysteriously been educated. There was a charm in his wide, "drawn," +convalescent smile, in the way his fine fingers--had he anything like +fine fingers of old?--played, and just fidgeted, over the prompt and +perhaps a trifle incoherent offer of cigars, cordials, ashtrays, +over the question of his visitor's hat, stick, fur coat, general best +accommodation and ease; and how the deuce, accordingly, had charm, for +coming out so on top, Mark wondered, "squared" the other old elements? +For the short interval so to have dealt with him what force had it +turned on, what patented process, of the portentous New York order +in which there were so many, had it skilfully applied? Were these the +things New York did when you just gave her all her head, and that he +himself then had perhaps too complacently missed? Strange almost to the +point of putting him positively off at first--quite as an exhibition of +the uncanny--this sense of Newton's having all the while neither missed +nor muffed anything, and having, as with an eye to the _coup de theatre_ +to come, lowered one's expectations, at the start, to that abject pitch. +It might have been taken verily for an act of bad faith--really for +such a rare stroke of subtlety as could scarce have been achieved by a +straight or natural aim. + +So much as this at least came and went in Monteith's agitated mind; the +oddest intensity of apprehension, admiration, mystification, which the +high north-light of the March afternoon and the quite splendidly +vulgar appeal of fifty overdone decorative effects somehow fostered and +sharpened. Everything had already gone, however, the next moment, +for wasn't the man he had come so much too intelligently himself to +patronise absolutely bowling him over with the extraordinary speech: +"See here, you know--you must be ill, or have had a bad shock, or some +beastly upset: are you very sure you ought to have come out?" Yes, he +after an instant believed his ears; coarse common Newton Winch, whom +he had called on because he could, as a gentleman, after all afford to, +coarse common Newton Winch, who had had troubles and been epidemically +poisoned, lamentably sick, who bore in his face and in the very tension, +quite exactly the "charm," of his manner, the traces of his late ordeal, +and, for that matter, of scarce completed gallant emergence--this +astonishing ex-comrade was simply writing himself at a stroke (into our +friend's excited imagination at all events) the most distinguished of +men. Oh, _he_ was going to be interesting, if Florence Ash had been +going to be; but Mark felt how, under the law of a lively present +difference, that would be as an effect of one's having one's self +thoroughly rallied. He knew within the minute that the tears stood in +his eyes; he stared through them at his friend with a sharp "Why, how do +you know? How _can_ you?" To which he added before Winch could speak: "I +met your charming sister-in-law a couple of hours since--at luncheon, at +the Pocahontas; and heard from her that you were badly laid up and had +spoken of me. So I came to minister to you." + +The object of this design hovered there again, considerably restless, +shifting from foot to foot, changing his place, beginning and giving up +motions, striking matches for a fresh cigarette, offering them again, +redundantly, to his guest and then not lighting himself--but all the +while with the smile of another creature than the creature known to +Mark; all the while with the history of something that had happened to +him ever so handsomely shining out. Mark was conscious within himself +from this time on of two quite distinct processes of notation--that +of his practically instant surrender to the consequences of the act of +perception in his host of which the two women trained suppos-ably in the +art of pleasing had been altogether incapable; and that of some other +condition on Newton's part that left his own poor power of divination +nothing less than shamed. This last was signally the case on the +former's saying, ever so responsively, almost radiantly, in answer to +his account of how he happened to come: "Oh then it's very interesting!" +_That_ was the astonishing note, after what he had been through: neither +Mrs. Folliott nor Florence Ash had so much as hinted or breathed to him +that _he_ might have incurred that praise. No wonder therefore he was +now taken--with this fresh party's instant suspicion and imputation of +it; though it was indeed for some minutes next as if each tried to see +which could accuse the other of the greater miracle of penetration. Mark +was so struck, in a word, with the extraordinarily straight guess Winch +had had there in reserve for him that, other quick impressions helping, +there was nothing for him but to bring out, himself: "There must be, +my dear man, something rather wonderful the matter with you!" The quite +more intensely and more irresistibly drawn grin, the quite unmistakably +deeper consciousness in the dark, wide eye, that accompanied the not +quite immediate answer to which remark he was afterward to remember. +"How do you know that--or why do you think it?" "Because there _must_ +be--for you to see! I shouldn't have expected it." + +"Then you take me for a damned fool?" laughed wonderful Newton Winch. + + + + +VI + +He could say nothing that, whether as to the sense of it or as to the +way of it, didn't so enrich Mark's vision of him that our friend, after +a little, as this effect proceeded, caught himself in the act of +almost too curiously gaping. Everything, from moment to moment, fed his +curiosity; such a question, for instance, as whether the quite ordinary +peepers of the Newton Winch of their earlier youth could have looked, +under any provocation, either dark or wide; such a question, above all, +as how _this_ incalculable apparition came by the whole startling power +of play of its extravagantly sensitive labial connections--exposed, so +to its advantage (he now jumped at one explanation) by the removal of +what had probably been one of the vulgar-est of moustaches. With this, +at the same time, the oddity of that particular consequence was vivid to +him; the glare of his curiosity fairly lasting while he remembered how +he had once noted the very opposite turn of the experiment for Phil +Bloodgood. He would have said in advance that poor Winch couldn't have +afforded to risk showing his "real" mouth; just as he would have said +that in spite of the fine ornament that so considerably muffled it Phil +could only have gained by showing his. But to have seen Phil shorn--as +he once had done--was earnestly to pray that he might promptly again +bristle; beneath Phil's moustache lurked nothing to "make up" for it in +case of removal. While he thought of which things the line of grimace, +as he could only have called it, the mobile, interesting, ironic line +the great double curve of which connected, in the face before him, the +strong nostril with the lower cheek, became the very key to his first +idea of Newton's capture of refinement. He had shaved and was happily +transfigured. Phil Bloodgood had shaved and been wellnigh lost; though +why should he just now too precipitately drag the reminiscence in? + +That question too, at the queer touch of association, played up for Mark +even under so much proof that the state of his own soul was being with +the lapse of every instant registered. Phil Bloodgood had brought about +the state of his soul--there was accordingly that amount of connection; +only it became further remarkable that from the moment his companion had +sounded him, and sounded him, he knew, down to the last truth of things, +his disposition, his necessity to talk, the desire that had in the +morning broken the spell of his confinement, the impulse that had thrown +him so defeatedly into Mrs. Folliott's arms and into Florence Ash's, +these forces seemed to feel their impatience ebb and their discretion +suddenly grow. His companion was talking again, but just then, +incongruously, made his need to communicate lose itself. It was as if +his personal case had already been touched by some tender hand--and +that, after all, was the modest limit of its greed. "I know now why +you came back--did Lottie mention how I had wondered? But sit down, sit +down--only let me, nervous beast as I am, take it standing!--and believe +me when I tell you that I've now ceased to wonder. My dear chap, I +_have_ it! It can't but have been for poor Phil Blood-good. He sticks +out of you, the brute--as how, with what he has done to you, shouldn't +he? There was a man to see me yesterday--Tim Slater, whom I don't think +you know, but who's 'on' everything within about two minutes of its +happening (I never saw such a fellow!) and who confirmed my supposition, +all my own, however, mind you, at first, that you're one of the +sufferers. So how the devil can you _not_ feel knocked? Why _should_ +you look as if you were having the time of your life? What a hog to +have played it on _you_, on _you_, of all his friends!" So Newton Winch +continued, and so the air between the two men might have been, for a +momentary watcher--which is indeed what I can but invite the reader to +become--that of a nervously displayed, but all considerate, as well as +most acute, curiosity on the one side, and that on the other, after a +little, of an eventually fascinated acceptance of so much free and +in especial of so much right attention. "Do you _mind_ my asking +you? Because if you do I won't press; but as a man whose own +responsibilities, some of 'em at least, don't differ much, I gather, +from some of his, one would like to know how he was ever allowed to get +to the point--! But I _do_ plough you up?" + +Mark sat back in his chair, moved but holding himself, his elbows +squared on each arm, his hands a bit convulsively interlocked across +him--very much in fact as he had appeared an hour ago in the old +tapestry _bergere_; but as his rigour was all then that of the grinding +effort to profess and to give, so it was considerably now for the fear +of too hysterically gushing. Somehow too--since his wound was to that +extent open--he winced at hearing the author of it branded. He hadn't so +much minded the epithets Mrs. Folliott had applied, for they were to +the appropriator of _her_ securities. As the appropriator of his own he +didn't so much want to brand him as--just more "amusingly" even, if one +would.--to make out, perhaps, with intelligent help, how such a man, in +such a relation, _could_ come to tread such a path: which was exactly +the interesting light that Winch's curiosity and sympathy were there +to assist him to. He pleaded at any rate immediately his advertising +no grievance. "I feel sore, I admit, and it's a horrid sort of thing +to have had happen; but when you call him a brute and a hog I rather +squirm, for brutes and hogs never live, I guess, in the sort of hell in +which he now must be." + +Newton Winch, before the fireplace, his hands deep in his pockets, where +his guest could see his long fingers beat a tattoo on his thighs, Newton +Winch dangled and swung himself, and threw back his head and laughed. +"Well, I must say you take it amazingly!--all the more that to see you +again this way is to feel that if, all along, there was a man whose +delicacy and confidence and general attitude might have marked him for +a particular consideration, you'd have been the man." And they were +more directly face to face again; with Newton smiling and smiling _so_ +appreciatively; making our friend in fact almost ask himself when before +a man had ever grinned from ear to ear to the effect of its so becoming +him. What he replied, however, was that Newton described in those +flattering terms a client temptingly fatuous; after which, and the +exchange of another protest or two in the interest of justice and +decency, and another plea or two in that of the still finer contention +that even the basest misdeeds had always somewhere or other, could one +get at it, their propitiatory side, our hero found himself on his +feet again, under the influence of a sudden failure of everything but +horror--a horror determined by some turn of their talk and indeed by the +very fact of the freedom of it. It was as if a far-borne sound of the +hue and cry, a vision of his old friend hunted and at bay, had suddenly +broken in--this other friend's, this irresistibly intelligent other +companion's, practically vivid projection of that making the worst +ugliness real. "Oh, it's just making my wry face to somebody, and your +letting me and caring and wanting to know: that," Mark said, "is what +does me good; not any other hideous question. I mean I don't take any +interest in _my_ case--what one wonders about, you see, is what can be +done for him. I mean, that is"--for he floundered a little, not knowing +at last quite what he did mean, a great rush of mere memories, a great +humming sound as of thick, thick echoes, rising now to an assault that +he met with his face indeed contorted. If he didn't take care he should +howl; so he more or less successfully took care--yet with his host +vividly watching him while he shook the danger temporarily off. "I don't +mind--though it's rather _that_; my having felt this morning, after +three dismal dumb bad days, that one's friends perhaps would be thinking +of one. All I'm conscious of now--I give you my word--is that I'd like +to see him." + +"You'd like to see him?" + +"Oh, I don't say," Mark ruefully smiled, "that I should like him to see +_me_--!" + +Newton Winch, from where he stood--and they were together now, on the +great hearth-rug that was a triumph of modern orientalism--put out one +of the noted fine hands and, with an expressive headshake, laid it on +his shoulder. "Don't wish him that, Monteith--don't wish him that!" + +"Well, but,"--and Mark raised his eyebrows still higher--"he'd see I +bear up; pretty well!" + +"God forbid he should see, my dear fellow!" Newton cried as for the pang +of it. + +Mark had for his idea, at any rate, the oddest sense of an exaltation +that grew by this use of frankness. "I'd go to him. Hanged if I +wouldn't--anywhere!" + +His companion's hand still rested on him. "You'd go to him?" + +Mark stood up to it--though trying to sink solemnity as pretentious. +"I'd go like a shot." And then he added: "And it's probably what--when +we've turned round--I _shall_ do." + +"When 'we' have turned round?" + +"Well"--he was a trifle disconcerted at the tone--"I say that because +you'll have helped me." + +"Oh, I do nothing but want to help you!" Winch replied--which made it +right again; especially as our friend still felt himself reassuringly +and sustainingly grasped. But Winch went on: "You _would_ go to him--in +kindness?" + +"Well--to understand." + +"To understand how he could swindle you?" + +"Well," Mark kept on, "to try and make out with him how, after such +things--!" But he stopped; he couldn't name them. + +It was as if his companion knew. "Such things as you've done for him of +course--such services as you've rendered him." + +"Ah, from far back. If I could tell you," our friend vainly wailed--"if +I could tell you!" + +Newton Winch patted his shoulder. "Tell me--tell me!" + +"The sort of relation, I mean; ever so many things of a kind--!" Again, +however, he pulled up; he felt the tremor of his voice. + +"Tell me, tell me," Winch repeated with the same movement. + +The tone in it now made their eyes meet again, and with this +presentation of the altered face Mark measured as not before, for +some reason, the extent of the recent ravage. "You must have been ill +indeed." + +"Pretty bad. But I'm better. And you do me good"--with which the light +of convalescence came back. + +"I don't awfully bore you?" + +Winch shook his head. "You keep me up--and you see how no one else comes +near me." + +Mark's eyes made out that he was better--though it wasn't yet that +nothing was the matter with him. If there was ever a man with whom there +was still something the matter--! Yet one couldn't insist on that, and +meanwhile he clearly did want company. "Then there we are. I myself had +no one to go to." + +"You save my life," Newton renewedly grinned. + + + + +VII + +"Well, it's your own fault," Mark replied to that, "if you make me +take advantage of you." Winch had withdrawn his hand, which was back, +violently shaking keys or money, in his trousers pocket; and in this +position he had abruptly a pause, a sensible, absence, that might have +represented either some odd drop of attention, some turn-off to another +thought, or just simply the sudden act of listening. His guest had +indeed himself--under suggestion--the impression of a sound. "Mayn't you +perhaps--if you hear something--have a call?" + +Mark had said it so lightly, however, that he was the more struck with +his host's appearing to turn just paler; and, with it, the latter now +_was_ listening. "You hear something?" + +"I thought _you_ did." Winch himself, on Mark's own pressure of the +outside bell, had opened the door of the apartment--an indication then, +it sufficiently appeared, that Sunday afternoons were servants', or +attendants', or even trained nurses' holidays. It had also marked the +stage of his convalescence, and to that extent--after his first flush +of surprise--had but smoothed Monteith's way. At present he barely gave +further attention; detaching himself as under some odd cross-impulse, +he had quitted the spot and then taken, in the wide room, a restless +turn--only, however, to revert in a moment to his friend's just-uttered +deprecation of the danger of boring him. "If I make you take advantage +of me--that is blessedly talk to me--it's exactly what I want to do. +Talk to me--talk to me!" He positively waved it on; pulling up again, +however, in his own talk, to say with a certain urgency: "Hadn't you +better sit down?" + +Mark, who stayed before the fire, couldn't but excuse himself. +"Thanks--I'm very well so. I think of things and I fidget." + +Winch stood a moment with his eyes on the ground. "Are you very sure?" + +"Quite--I'm all right if you don't mind." + +"Then as you like!" With which, shaking to extravagance again his long +legs, Newton had swung off--only with a movement that, now his back was +turned, affected his visitor as the most whimsical of all the forms of +his rather unnatural manner. He was curiously different with his back +turned, as Mark now for the first time saw it--dangling and somewhat +wavering, as from an excess of uncertainty of gait; and this impression +was so strange, it created in our friend, uneasily and on the spot, such +a need of explanation, that his speech was stayed long enough to give +Winch time to turn round again. The latter had indeed by this moment +reached one of the limits of the place, the wide studio bay, where he +paused, his back to the light and his face afresh presented, to let his +just passingly depressed and quickened eyes take in as much as possible +of the large floor, range over it with such brief freedom of search +as the disposition of the furniture permitted. He was looking for +something, though the betrayed reach of vision was but of an instant. +Mark caught it, however, and with his own sensibility all in vibration, +found himself feeling at once that it meant something and that what it +meant was connected with his entertainer's slightly marked appeal to +him, the appeal of a moment before, not to remain standing. Winch knew +by this time quite easily enough that he was hanging fire; which meant +that they were suddenly facing each other across the wide space with a +new consciousness. + +Everything had changed--changed extraordinarily with the mere turning +of that gentleman's back, the treacherous aspect of which its owner +couldn't surely have suspected. If the question was of the pitch of +their sensibility, at all events, it wouldn't be Mark's that should +vibrate to least purpose. Visibly it had come to his host that something +had within the few instants remarkably happened, but there glimmered on +him an induction that still made him keep his own manner. Newton himself +might now resort to any manner he liked. His eyes had raked the floor to +recover the position of something dropped or misplaced, and something, +above all, awkward or compromising; and he had wanted his companion not +to command this scene from the hearth-rug, the hearthrug where he had +been just before holding him, hypnotising him to blindness, _because_ +the object in question would there be most exposed to sight Mark +embraced this with a further drop--while the apprehension penetrated--of +his power to go on, and with an immense desire at the same time that his +eyes should seem only to look at his friend; who broke out now, for that +matter, with a fresh appeal. "Aren't you going to take advantage of me, +man--aren't you going to _take_ it?" + +Everything had changed, we have noted, and nothing could more have +proved it than the fact that, by the same turn, sincerity of desire +had dropped out of Winch's chords, while irritation, sharp and almost +imperious, had come in. "That's because he sees I see something!" Mark +said to himself; but he had no need to add that it shouldn't prevent his +seeing more--for the simple reason that, in a miraculous fashion, this +was exactly what he did do in glaring out the harder. It was beyond +explanation, but the very act of blinking thus in an attempt at showy +steadiness became one and the same thing with an optical excursion +lasting the millionth of a minute and making him aware that the edge of +a rug, at the point where an arm-chair, pushed a little out of position, +over-straddled it, happened just not wholly to have covered in something +small and queer, neat and bright, crooked and compact, in spite of the +strong toe-tip surreptitiously applied to giving it the right lift Our +gentleman, from where he hovered, and while looking straight at the +master of the scene, yet saw, as by the tiny flash of a reflection from +fine metal, _under_ the chair. What he recognised, or at least guessed +at, as sinister, made him for a moment turn cold, and that chill was on +him while Winch again addressed him--as differently as possible from any +manner yet used. "I beg of you in God's name to talk to me--to _talk_ to +me!" + +It had the ring of pure alarm and anguish, but was by this turn at least +more human than the dazzling glitter of intelligence to which the poor +man had up to now been treating him. "It's you, my good friend, who are +in deep trouble," Mark was accordingly quick to reply, "and I ask your +pardon for being so taken up with my own sorry business." + +"Of course I'm in deep trouble"--with which Winch came nearer again; +"but turning you on was exactly what I wanted." + +Mark Monteith, at this, couldn't, for all his rising dismay, but +laugh out; his sense of the ridiculous so swallowed up, for that brief +convulsion, his sense of the sinister. Of such conivence in pain, +it seemed, was the fact of another's pain, and of so much worth again +disinterested sympathy! "Your interest was then----?" + +"My interest was in your being interesting. For you _are!_ And my +nerves--!" said Newton Winch with a face from which the mystifying +smile had vanished, yet in which distinction, as Mark so persistently +appreciated it, still sat in the midst of ravage. + +Mark wondered and wondered--he made strange things out. "Your nerves +have needed company." He could lay his hand on him now, even as shortly +before he had felt Winch's own pressure of possession and detention. "As +good for you yourself, that--or still better," he went on--"than I and +my grievance were to have found you. Talk to we, talk to we, Newton +Winch!" he added with an immense inspiration of charity. + +"That's a different matter--that others but too much can do! But I'll +say this. If you want to go to Phil Bloodgood----!" + +"Well?" said Mark as he stopped. He stopped, and Mark had now a hand on +each of his shoulders and held him at arm's-length, held him with a fine +idea that was not disconnected from the sight of the small neat weapon +he had been fingering in the low luxurious morocco chair--it was of the +finest orange colour--and then had laid beside him on the carpet; where, +after he had admitted his visitor, his presence of mind coming back to +it and suggesting that he couldn't pick it up without making it more +conspicuous, he had thought, by some swing of the foot or other casual +manoeuvre, to dissimulate its visibility. + +They were at close quarters now as not before and Winch perfectly +passive, with eyes that somehow had no shadow of a secret left and with +the betrayal to the sentient hands that grasped him of an intense, an +extraordinary general tremor. To Mark's challenge he opposed afresh a +brief silence, but the very quality of it, with his face speaking, was +that of a gaping wound. "Well, you needn't take _that_ trouble. You see +I'm such another." + +"Such another as Phil-----?" + +He didn't blink. "I don't know for sure, but I guess I'm worse." + +"Do you mean you're guilty-----?" + +"I mean I shall be wanted. Only I've stayed to take it." + +Mark threw back his head, but only tightened his hands. He inexpressibly +understood, and nothing in life had ever been so strange and dreadful to +him as his thus helping himself by a longer and straighter stretch, +as it were, to the monstrous sense of his friend's "education." It had +been, in its immeasurable action, the education of business, of which +the fruits were all around them. Yet prodigious was the interest, for +prodigious truly--it seemed to loom before Mark--must have been the +system. "To 'take' it?" he echoed; and then, though faltering a little, +"To take what?" + +He had scarce spoken when a long sharp sound shrilled in from the outer +door, seeming of so high and peremptory a pitch that with the start it +gave him his grasp of his host's shoulders relaxed an instant, though to +the effect of no movement in _them_ but what came from just a sensibly +intenser vibration of the whole man. "For _that_!" said Newton Winch. + +"Then you've known-----?" + +"I've expected. You've helped me to wait." And then as Mark gave an +ironic wail: "You've tided me over. My condition has _wanted_ somebody +or something. Therefore, to complete this service, will you be so good +as to open the door?" + +Deep in the eyes Mark looked him, and still to the detection of no +glimmer of the earlier man in the depths. The earlier man had been what +he invidiously remembered--yet would _he_ had been the whole simpler +story! Then he moved his own eyes straight to the chair under which +the revolver lay and which was but a couple of yards away. He felt his +companion take this consciousness in, and it determined in them another +long, mute exchange. "What do you mean to do?" + +"Nothing." + +"On your honour?" + +"_My_ 'honour'?" his host returned with an accent that he felt even as +it sounded he should never forget. + +It brought to his own face a crimson flush--he dropped his guarding +hands. Then as for a last look at him: "You're wonderful!" + +"We _are_ wonderful," said Newton Winch, while, simultaneously with the +words, the pressed electric bell again and for a longer time pierced the +warm cigaretted air. + +Mark turned, threw up his arms, and it was only when he had passed +through the vestibule and laid his hand on the door-knob that the +horrible noise dropped. The next moment he was face to face with two +visitors, a nondescript personage in a high hat and an astrakhan collar +and cuffs, and a great belted constable, a splendid massive New York +"officer" of the type he had had occasion to wonder at much again in the +course of his walk, the type so by itself--his wide observation quite +suggested--among those of the peacemakers of the earth. The pair stepped +straight in--no word was said; but as he closed the door behind them +Mark heard the infallible crack of a discharged pistol and, so nearly +with it as to make all one violence, the sound of a great fall; things +the effect of which was to lift him, as it were, with his company, +across the threshold of the room in a shorter time than that taken +by this record of the fact. But their rush availed little; Newton was +stretched on his back before the fire; he had held the weapon horribly +to his temple, and his upturned face was disfigured. The emissaries +of the law, looking down at him, exhaled simultaneously a gruff +imprecation, and then while the worthy in the high hat bent over the +subject of their visit the one in the helmet raised a severe pair of +eyes to Mark. "Don't you think, sir, you might have prevented it?" + +Mark took a hundred things in, it seemed to him--things of the scene, +of the moment, and of all the strange moments before; but one appearance +more vividly even than the others stared out at him. "I really think I +must practically have caused it." + + + + + +CRAPY CORNELIA + + + + +I + +THREE times within a quarter of an hour--shifting the while his posture +on his chair of contemplation--had he looked at his watch as for its +final sharp hint that he should decide, that he should get up. His +seat was one of a group fairly sequestered, unoccupied save for his own +presence, and from where he lingered he looked off at a stretch of lawn +freshened by recent April showers and on which sundry small children +were at play. The trees, the shrubs, the plants, every stem and twig +just ruffled as by the first touch of the light finger of the relenting +year, struck him as standing still in the blest hope of more of the same +caress; the quarter about him held its breath after the fashion of the +child who waits with the rigour of an open mouth and shut eyes for the +promised sensible effect of his having been good. So, in the windless, +sun-warmed air of the beautiful afternoon, the Park of the winter's +end had struck White-Mason as waiting; even New York, under such an +impression, was "good," good enough--for _him_; its very sounds were +faint, were almost sweet, as they reached him from so seemingly far +beyond the wooded horizon that formed the remoter limit of his large +shallow glade. The tones of the frolic infants ceased to be nondescript +and harsh--were in fact almost as fresh and decent as the frilled and +puckered and ribboned garb of the little girls, which had always a +way, in those parts, of so portentously flaunting the daughters of the +strange native--that is of the overwhelmingly alien--populace at him. + +Not that these things in particular were his matter of meditation +now; he had wanted, at the end of his walk, to sit apart a little and +think--and had been doing that for twenty minutes, even though as yet +to no break in the charm of procrastination. But he had looked without +seeing and listened without hearing: all that had been positive for +him was that he hadn't failed vaguely to feel. He had felt in the first +place, and he continued to feel--yes, at forty-eight quite as much as at +any point of the supposed reign of younger intensities--the great spirit +of the air, the fine sense of the season, the supreme appeal of +Nature, he might have said, to his time of life; quite as if she, easy, +indulgent, indifferent, cynical Power, were offering him the last chance +it would rest with his wit or his blood to embrace. Then with that he +had been entertaining, to the point and with the prolonged consequence +of accepted immobilization, the certitude that if he did call on Mrs. +Worthingham and find her at home he couldn't in justice to himself not +put to her the question that had lapsed the other time, the last time, +through the irritating and persistent, even if accidental, presence of +others. What friends she had--the people who so stupidly, so wantonly +stuck! If they _should_, he and she, come to an understanding, that +would presumably have to include certain members of her singularly +ill-composed circle, in whom it was incredible to him that he should +ever take an interest. This defeat, to do himself justice--he had bent +rather predominantly on _that_, you see; ideal justice to _her_, with +her possible conception of what it should consist of, being another and +quite a different matter--he had had the fact of the Sunday afternoon to +thank for; she didn't "keep" that day for him, since they hadn't, up to +now, quite begun to cultivate the appointment or assignation founded +on explicit sacrifices. He might at any rate look to find this pleasant +practical Wednesday--should he indeed, at his actual rate, stay it +before it ebbed--more liberally and intendingly given him. + +The sound he at last most wittingly distinguished in his nook was the +single deep note of half-past five borne to him from some high-perched +public clock. He finally got up with the sense that the time from then +on _ought_ at least to be felt as sacred to him. At this juncture it +was--while he stood there shaking his garments, settling his hat, his +necktie, his shirt-cuffs, fixing the high polish of his fine shoes as +if for some reflection in it of his straight and spare and grizzled, his +refined and trimmed and dressed, his altogether distinguished person, +that of a gentleman abundantly settled, but of a bachelor markedly +nervous--at this crisis it was, doubtless, that he at once most measured +and least resented his predicament. If he should go he would almost to +a certainty find her, and if he should find her he would almost to a +certainty come to the point. He wouldn't put it off again--there was +that high consideration for him of justice at least to himself. He +had never yet denied himself anything so apparently fraught with +possibilities as the idea of proposing to Mrs. Worthingham--never yet, +in other words, denied himself anything he had so distinctly wanted to +do; and the results of that wisdom had remained for him precisely the +precious parts of experience. Counting only the offers of his honourable +hand, these had been on three remembered occasions at least the +consequence of an impulse as sharp and a self-respect as reasoned; +a self-respect that hadn't in the least suffered, moreover, from the +failure of each appeal. He had been met in the three cases--the only +ones he at all compared with his present case--by the frank confession +that he didn't somehow, charming as he was, cause himself to be +superstitiously believed in; and the lapse of life, afterward, had +cleared up many doubts. + +It _wouldn't_ have done, he eventually, he lucidly saw, each time he had +been refused; and the candour of his nature was such that he could +live to think of these very passages as a proof of how right he had +been--right, that is, to have put himself forward always, by the +happiest instinct, only in impossible conditions. He had the happy +consciousness of having exposed the important question to the crucial +test, and of having escaped, by that persistent logic, a grave mistake. +What better proof of his escape than the fact that he was now free to +renew the all-interesting inquiry, and should be exactly, about to do +so in different and better conditions? The conditions were better by as +much more--as much more of his career and character, of his situation, +his reputation he could even have called it, of his knowledge of life, +of his somewhat extended means, of his possibly augmented charm, of +his certainly improved mind and temper--as was involved in the actual +impending settlement. Once he had got into motion, once he had crossed +the Park and passed out of it, entering, with very little space to +traverse, one of the short new streets that abutted on its east side, +his step became that of a man young enough to find confidence, quite to +find felicity, in the sense, in almost any sense, of action. He could +still enjoy almost anything, absolutely an unpleasant thing, in default +of a better, that might still remind him he wasn't so old. The standing +newness of everything about him would, it was true, have weakened this +cheer by too much presuming on it; Mrs. Worthingham's house, before +which he stopped, had that gloss of new money, that glare of a piece +fresh from the mint and ringing for the first time on any counter, +which seems to claim for it, in any transaction, something more than the +"face" value. + +This could but be yet more the case for the impression of the observer +introduced and committed. On our friend's part I mean, after his +admission and while still in the hall, the sense of the general shining +immediacy, of the still unhushed clamour of the shock, was perhaps +stronger than he had ever known it. That broke out from every corner as +the high pitch of interest, and with a candour that--no, certainly--he +had never seen equalled; every particular expensive object shrieking at +him in its artless pride that it had just "come home." He met the whole +vision with something of the grimace produced on persons without goggles +by the passage from a shelter to a blinding light; and if he had--by a +perfectly possible chance--been "snap-shotted" on the spot, would +have struck you as showing for his first tribute to the temple of Mrs. +Worthingham's charming presence a scowl almost of anguish. He wasn't +constitutionally, it may at once be explained for him, a goggled +person; and he was condemned, in New York, to this frequent violence of +transition--having to reckon with it whenever he went out, as who should +say, from himself. The high pitch of interest, to his taste, was the +pitch of history, the pitch of acquired and earned suggestion, the +pitch of association, in a word; so that he lived by preference, +incontestably, if not in a rich gloom, which would have been beyond his +means and spirits, at least amid objects and images that confessed to +the tone of time. + +He had ever felt that an indispensable presence--with a need of it +moreover that interfered at no point with his gentle habit, not to say +his subtle art, of drawing out what was left him of his youth, of +thinly and thriftily spreading the rest of that choicest jam-pot of the +cupboard of consciousness over the remainder of a slice of life still +possibly thick enough to bear it; or in other words of moving the +melancholy limits, the significant signs, constantly a little further +on, very much as property-marks or staked boundaries are sometimes +stealthily shifted at night. He positively cherished in fact, as against +the too inveterate gesture of distressfully guarding his eyeballs--so +many New York aspects seemed to keep him at it--an ideal of adjusted +appreciation, of courageous curiosity, of fairly letting the world +about him, a world of constant breathless renewals and merciless +substitutions, make its flaring assault on its own inordinate terms. +Newness was value in the piece--for the acquisitor, or at least +sometimes might be, even though the act of "blowing" hard, the act +marking a heated freshness of arrival, or other form of irruption, could +never minister to the peace of those already and long on the field; and +this if only because maturer tone was after all most appreciable +and most consoling when one staggered back to it, wounded, bleeding, +blinded, from the riot of the raw--or, to put the whole experience more +prettily, no doubt, from excesses of light. + + + + +II + +If he went in, however, with something of his more or less inevitable +scowl, there were really, at the moment, two rather valid reasons for +screened observation; the first of these being that the whole place +seemed to reflect as never before the lustre of Mrs. Worthingham's own +polished and prosperous little person--to smile, it struck him, with her +smile, to twinkle not only with the gleam of her lovely teeth, but with +that of all her rings and brooches and bangles and other gewgaws, +to curl and spasmodically cluster as in emulation of her charming +complicated yellow tresses, to surround the most animated of +pink-and-white, of ruffled and ribboned, of frilled and festooned +Dresden china shepherdesses with exactly the right system of rococo +curves and convolutions and other flourishes, a perfect bower of painted +and gilded and moulded conceits. The second ground of this immediate +impression of scenic extravagance, almost as if the curtain rose for him +to the first act of some small and expensively mounted comic opera, +was that she hadn't, after all, awaited him in fond singleness, but +had again just a trifle inconsiderately exposed him to the drawback of +having to reckon, for whatever design he might amiably entertain, with +the presence of a third and quite superfluous person, a small black +insignificant but none the less oppressive stranger. It was odd how, +on the instant, the little lady engaged with her did affect him as +comparatively black--very much as if that had absolutely, in such a +medium, to be the graceless appearance of any item not positively of +some fresh shade of a light colour or of some pretty pretension to a +charming twist. Any witness of their meeting, his hostess should surely +have felt, would have been a false note in the whole rosy glow; but +what note so false as that of the dingy little presence that she might +actually, by a refinement of her perhaps always too visible study of +effect, have provided as a positive contrast or foil? whose name and +intervention, moreover, she appeared to be no more moved to mention and +account for than she might have been to "present"--whether as stretched +at her feet or erect upon disciplined haunches--some shaggy old +domesticated terrier or poodle. + +Extraordinarily, after he had been in the room five minutes--a space of +time during which his fellow-visitor had neither budged nor uttered a +sound--he had made Mrs. Worthingham out as all at once perfectly pleased +to see him, completely aware of what he had most in mind, and singularly +serene in face of his sense of their impediment. It was as if for all +the world she didn't take it for one, the immobility, to say nothing of +the seeming equanimity, of their tactless companion; at whom meanwhile +indeed our friend himself, after his first ruffled perception, no more +adventured a look than if advised by his constitutional kindness that +to notice her in any degree would perforce be ungraciously to glower. +He talked after a fashion with the woman as to whose power to please and +amuse and serve him, as to whose really quite organised and indicated +fitness for lighting up his autumn afternoon of life his conviction had +lately strained itself so clear; but he was all the while carrying on +an intenser exchange with his own spirit and trying to read into +the charming creature's behaviour, as he could only call it, some +confirmation of his theory that she also had her inward flutter and +anxiously counted on him. He found support, happily for the conviction +just named, in the idea, at no moment as yet really repugnant to him, +the idea bound up in fact with the finer essence of her appeal, that she +had her own vision too of her quality and her price, and that the +last appearance she would have liked to bristle with was that of being +forewarned and eager. + +He had, if he came to think of it, scarce definitely warned her, and he +probably wouldn't have taken to her so consciously in the first instance +without an appreciative sense that, as she was a little person of twenty +superficial graces, so she was also a little person with her secret +pride. She might just have planted her mangy lion--not to say her +muzzled house-dog--there in his path as a symbol that she wasn't cheap +and easy; which would be a thing he couldn't possibly wish his future +wife to have shown herself in advance, even if to him alone. That she +could make him put himself such questions was precisely part of the +attaching play of her iridescent surface, the shimmering interfusion +of her various aspects; that of her youth with her independence--her +pecuniary perhaps in particular, that of her vivacity with her beauty, +that of her facility above all with her odd novelty; the high modernity, +as people appeared to have come to call it, that made her so much +more "knowing" in some directions than even he, man of the world as he +certainly was, could pretend to be, though all on a basis of the most +unconscious and instinctive and luxurious assumption. She was "up" to +everything, aware of everything--if one counted from a short enough time +back (from week before last, say, and as if quantities of history had +burst upon the world within the fortnight); she was likewise surprised +at nothing, and in that direction one might reckon as far ahead as the +rest of her lifetime, or at any rate as the rest of his, which was all +that would concern him: it was as if the suitability of the future +to her personal and rather pampered tastes was what she most took for +granted, so that he could see her, for all her Dresden-china shoes and +her flutter of wondrous befrilled contemporary skirts, skip by the side +of the coming age as over the floor of a ball-room, keeping step with +its monstrous stride and prepared for every figure of the dance. Her +outlook took form to him suddenly as a great square sunny window that +hung in assured fashion over the immensity of life. There rose toward it +as from a vast swarming _plaza_ a high tide of emotion and sound; yet it +was at the same time as if even while he looked her light gemmed hand, +flashing on him in addition to those other things the perfect polish of +the prettiest pink finger-nails in the world, had touched a spring, the +most ingenious of ecent devices for instant ease, which dropped half +across the scene a soft-coloured mechanical blind, a fluttered, fringed +awning of charmingly toned silk, such as would make a bath of cool shade +for the favoured friend leaning with her there--that is for the happy +couple itself--on the balcony. The great view would be the prospect and +privilege of the very state he coveted--since didn't he covet it?--the +state of being so securely at her side; while the wash of privacy, as +one might count it, the broad fine brush dipped into clear umber and +passed, full and wet, straight across the strong scheme of colour, would +represent the security itself, all the uplifted inner elegance, the +condition, so ideal, of being shut out from nothing and yet of having, +so gaily and breezily aloft, none of the burden or worry of anything. +Thus, as I say, for our friend, the place itself, while his vivid +impression lasted, portentously opened and spread, and what was before +him took, to his vision, though indeed at so other a crisis, the form +of the "glimmering square" of the poet; yet, for a still more remarkable +fact, with an incongruous object usurping at a given instant the +privilege of the frame and seeming, even as he looked, to block the +view. + +The incongruous object was a woman's head, crowned with a little +sparsely feathered black hat, an ornament quite unlike those the women +mostly noticed by White-Mason were now "wearing," and that grew and +grew, that came nearer and nearer, while it met his eyes, after the +manner of images in the kinematograph. It had presently loomed so large +that he saw nothing else--not only among the things at a considerable +distance, the things Mrs. Worthingham would eventually, yet +unmistakably, introduce him to, but among those of this lady's various +attributes and appurtenances as to which he had been in the very act of +cultivating his consciousness. It was in the course of another minute +the most extraordinary thing in the world: everything had altered, +dropped, darkened, disappeared; his imagination had spread its wings +only to feel them flop all grotesquely at its sides as he recognised in +his hostess's quiet companion, the oppressive alien who hadn't indeed +interfered with his fanciful flight, though she had prevented his +immediate declaration and brought about the thud, not to say the felt +violent shock, of his fall to earth, the perfectly plain identity of +Cornelia Rasch. It was she who had remained there at attention; it was +she their companion hadn't introduced; it was she he had forborne to +face with his fear of incivility. He stared at her--everything else +went. + +"Why it has been _you_ all this time?" + +Miss Rasch fairly turned pale. "I was waiting to see if you'd know me." + +"Ah, my dear Cornelia"--he came straight out with it--"rather!" + +"Well, it isn't," she returned with a quick change to red now, "from +having taken much time to look at me!" + +She smiled, she even laughed, but he could see how she had felt his +unconsciousness, poor thing; the acquaintance, quite the friend of his +youth, as she had been, the associate of his childhood, of his early +manhood, of his middle age in fact, up to a few years back, not more +than ten at the most; the associate too of so many of his associates and +of almost all of his relations, those of the other time, those who had +mainly gone for ever; the person in short whose noted disappearance, +though it might have seemed final, had been only of recent seasons. She +was present again now, all unexpectedly--he had heard of her having +at last, left alone after successive deaths and with scant resources, +sought economic salvation in Europe, the promised land of American +thrift--she was present as this almost ancient and this oddly +unassertive little rotund figure whom one seemed no more obliged to +address than if she had been a black satin ottoman "treated" with +buttons and gimp; a class of object as to which the policy of blindness +was imperative. He felt the need of some explanatory plea, and before he +could think had uttered one at Mrs. Worthingham's expense. "Why, you see +we weren't introduced----!" + +"No--but I didn't suppose I should have to be named to you." + +"Well, my dear woman, you haven't--do me that justice!" He could at +least make this point. "I felt all the while--!" However, it would have +taken him long to say what he had been feeling; and he was aware now of +the pretty projected light of Mrs. Worthingham's wonder. She looked as +if, out for a walk with her, he had put her to the inconvenience of his +stopping to speak to a strange woman in the street. + +"I never supposed you knew her!"--it was to him his hostess excused +herself. + +This made Miss Rasch spring up, distinctly flushed, distinctly strange +to behold, but not vulgarly nettled--Cornelia was incapable of that; +only rather funnily bridling and laughing, only showing that this was +all she had waited for, only saying just the right thing, the thing +she could make so clearly a jest. "Of course if you _had_ you'd have +presented him." + +Mrs. Worthingham looked while answering at White-Mason. "I didn't want +you to go--which you see you do as soon as he speaks to you. But I never +dreamed----!" + +"That there was anything between us? Ah, there are no end of things!" +He, on his side, though addressing the younger and prettier woman, +looked at his fellow-guest; to whom he even continued: "When did you get +back? May I come and see you the very first thing?" + +Cornelia gasped and wriggled--she practically giggled; she had +lost every atom of her little old, her little young, though always +unaccountable prettiness, which used to peep so, on the bare chance of +a shot, from behind indefensible features, that it almost made watching +her a form of sport. He had heard vaguely of her, it came back to +him (for there had been no letters; their later acquaintance, thank +goodness, hadn't involved that) as experimenting, for economy, and then +as settling, to the same rather dismal end, somewhere in England, "at +one of those intensely English places, St. Leonards, Cheltenham, Bognor, +Dawlish--which, awfully, _was_ it?"--and she now affected him for all +the world as some small squirming, exclaiming, genteelly conversing old +maid of a type vaguely associated with the three-volume novels he used +to feed on (besides his so often encountering it in "real life,") during +a far-away stay of his own at Brighton. Odder than any element of his +ex-gossip's identity itself, however, was the fact that she somehow, +with it all, rejoiced his sight. Indeed the supreme oddity was that +the manner of her reply to his request for leave to call should have +absolutely charmed his attention. She didn't look at him; she only, from +under her frumpy, crapy, curiously exotic hat, and with her good little +near-sighted insinuating glare, expressed to Mrs. Worthingham, while she +answered him, wonderful arch things, the overdone things of a shy woman. +"Yes, you may call--but only when this dear lovely lady has done with +you!" The moment after which she had gone. + + + + +III + +Forty minutes later he was taking his way back from the queer +miscarriage of his adventure; taking it, with no conscious positive +felicity, through the very spaces that had witnessed shortly before the +considerable serenity of his assurance. He had said to himself then, or +had as good as said it, that, since he might do perfectly as he liked, +it couldn't fail for him that he must soon retrace those steps, humming, +to all intents, the first bars of a wedding-march; so beautifully had it +cleared up that he was "going to like" letting Mrs. Worthingham accept +him. He was to have hummed no wedding-march, as it seemed to be turning +out--he had none, up to now, to hum; and yet, extraordinarily, it wasn't +in the least because she had refused him. Why then hadn't he liked as +much as he had intended to like it putting the pleasant act, the act of +not refusing him, in her power? Could it all have come from the awkward +minute of his failure to decide sharply, on Cornelia's departure, +whether or no he would attend her to the door? He hadn't decided at +all--what the deuce had been in him?--but had danced to and fro in the +room, thinking better of each impulse and then thinking worse. He had +hesitated like an ass erect on absurd hind legs between two bundles +of hay; the upshot of which must have been his giving the falsest +impression. In what way that was to be for an instant considered had +their common past committed him to crapy Cornelia? He repudiated with a +whack on the gravel any ghost of an obligation. + +What he could get rid of with scanter success, unfortunately, was the +peculiar sharpness of his sense that, though mystified by his visible +flurry--and yet not mystified enough for a sympathetic question +either--his hostess had been, on the whole, even more frankly diverted: +which was precisely an example of that newest, freshest, finest freedom +in her, the air and the candour of assuming, not "heartlessly," not +viciously, not even very consciously, but with a bright pampered +confidence which would probably end by affecting one's nerves as the +most impertinent stroke in the world, that every blest thing coming up +for her in any connection was somehow matter for her general recreation. +There she was again with the innocent egotism, the gilded and +overflowing anarchism, really, of her doubtless quite unwitting but none +the less rabid modern note. Her grace of ease was perfect, but it was +all grace of ease, not a single shred of it grace of uncertainty or +of difficulty--which meant, when you came to see, that, for its happy +working, not a grain of provision was left by it to mere manners. This +was clearly going to be the music of the future--that if people were but +rich enough and furnished enough and fed enough, exercised and sanitated +and manicured and generally advised and advertised and made "knowing" +enough, _avertis_ enough, as the term appeared to be nowadays in Paris, +all they had to do for civility was to take the amused ironic view of +those who might be less initiated. In _his_ time, when he was young or +even when he was only but a little less middle-aged, the best manners +had been the best kindness, and the best kindness had mostly been some +art of not insisting on one's luxurious differences, of concealing +rather, for common humanity, if not for common decency, a part at least +of the intensity or the ferocity with which one might be "in the know." + +Oh, the "know"--Mrs. Worthingham was in it, all instinctively, +inevitably, and as a matter of course, up to her eyes; which didn't, +however, the least little bit prevent her being as ignorant as a fish of +everything that really and intimately and fundamentally concerned _him_, +poor dear old White-Mason. She didn't, in the first place, so much as +know who he was--by which he meant know who and what it was to _be_ +a White-Mason, even a poor and a dear and old one, "anyway." That +indeed--he did her perfect justice--was of the very essence of the +newness and freshness and beautiful, brave, social irresponsibility by +which she had originally dazzled him: just exactly that circumstance of +her having no instinct for any old quality or quantity or identity, a +single historic or social value, as he might say, of the New York of his +already almost legendary past; and that additional one of his, on his +side, having, so far as this went, cultivated blankness, cultivated +positive prudence, as to her own personal background--the vagueness, +at the best, with which all honest gentlefolk, the New Yorkers of his +approved stock and conservative generation, were content, as for the +most part they were indubitably wise, to surround the origins and +antecedents and queer unimaginable early influences of persons swimming +into their ken from those parts of the country that quite necessarily +and naturally figured to their view as "Godforsaken" and generally +impossible. + +The few scattered surviving representatives of a society once +"good"--_rari nantes in gurgite vasto_--were liable, at the pass things +had come to, to meet, and even amid old shades once sacred, or what was +left of such, every form of social impossibility, and, more irresistibly +still, to find these apparitions often carry themselves (often at +least in the case of the women) with a wondrous wild gallantry, equally +imperturbable and inimitable, the sort of thing that reached its maximum +in Mrs. Worthingham. Beyond that who ever wanted to look up their +annals, to reconstruct their steps and stages, to dot their i's in fine, +or to "go behind" anything that was theirs? One wouldn't do that for +the world--a rudimentary discretion forbade it; and yet this check from +elementary undiscussable taste quite consorted with a due respect for +them, or at any rate with a due respect for oneself in connection with +them; as was just exemplified in what would be his own, what would be +poor dear old White-Mason's, insurmountable aversion to having, on any +pretext, the doubtless very queer spectre of the late Mr. Worthingham +presented to him. No question had he asked, or would he ever ask, should +his life--that is should the success of his courtship--even intimately +depend on it, either about that obscure agent of his mistress's actual +affluence or about the happy head-spring itself, and the apparently +copious tributaries, of the golden stream. + +From all which marked anomalies, at any rate, what was the moral to +draw? He dropped into a Park chair again with that question, he lost +himself in the wonder of why he had come away with his homage so very +much unpaid. Yet it didn't seem at all, actually, as if he could say +or conclude, as if he could do anything but keep on worrying--just in +conformity with his being a person who, whether or no familiar with the +need to make his conduct square with his conscience and his taste, was +never wholly exempt from that of making his taste and his conscience +square with his conduct. To this latter occupation he further abandoned +himself, and it didn't release him from his second brooding session +till the sweet spring sunset had begun to gather and he had more or less +cleared up, in the deepening dusk, the effective relation between the +various parts of his ridiculously agitating experience. There were vital +facts he seemed thus to catch, to seize, with a nervous hand, and the +twilight helping, by their vaguely whisked tails; unquiet truths that +swarmed out after the fashion of creatures bold only at eventide, +creatures that hovered and circled, that verily brushed his nose, in +spite of their shyness. Yes, he had practically just sat on with his +"mistress"--heaven save the mark!--as if not to come to the point; as +if it had absolutely come up that there would be something rather vulgar +and awful in doing so. The whole stretch of his stay after Cornelia's +withdrawal had been consumed by his almost ostentatiously treating +himself to the opportunity of which he was to make nothing. It was as +if he had sat and watched himself--that came back to him: Shall I now or +sha'n't I? Will I now or won't I? "Say within the next three minutes, +say by a quarter past six, or by twenty minutes past, at the +furthest--always if nothing more comes up to prevent." + +What had already come up to prevent was, in the strangest and drollest, +or at least in the most preposterous, way in the world, that not +Cornelia's presence, but her very absence, with its distraction of his +thoughts, the thoughts that lumbered after her, had made the difference; +and without his being the least able to tell why and how. He put it +to himself after a fashion by the image that, this distraction once +created, his working round to his hostess again, his reverting to the +matter of his errand, began suddenly to represent a return from so far. +That was simply all--or rather a little less than all; for something +else had contributed. "I never dreamed you knew her," and "I never +dreamed _you_ did," were inevitably what had been exchanged between +them--supplemented by Mrs. Worthingham's mere scrap of an explanation: +"Oh yes--to the small extent you see. Two years ago in Switzerland +when I was at a high place for an 'aftercure,' during twenty days of +incessant rain, she was the only person in an hotel full of roaring, +gorging, smoking Germans with whom I could have a word of talk. She +and I were the only speakers of English, and were thrown together like +castaways on a desert island and in a raging storm. She was ill besides, +and she had no maid, and mine looked after her, and she was very +grateful--writing to me later on and saying she should certainly come to +see me if she ever returned to New York. She has returned, you see--and +there she was, poor little creature!" Such was Mrs. Worthingham's +tribute--to which even his asking her if Miss Rasch had ever happened +to speak of him caused her practically to add nothing. Visibly she had +never thought again of any one Miss Rasch had spoken of or anything Miss +Rasch had said; right as she was, naturally, about her being a +little clever queer creature. This was perfectly true, and yet it +was probably--by being _all_ she could dream of about her--what had +paralysed his proper gallantry. Its effect had been not in what it +simply stated, but in what, under his secretly disintegrating criticism, +it almost luridly symbolised. + +He had quitted his seat in the Louis Quinze drawing-room without having, +as he would have described it, done anything but give the lady of the +scene a superior chance not to betray a defeated hope--not, that is, +to fail of the famous "pride" mostly supposed to prop even the most +infatuated women at such junctures; by which chance, to do her justice, +she had thoroughly seemed to profit. But he finally rose from his later +station with a feeling of better success. He had by a happy turn of his +hand got hold of the most precious, the least obscure of the flitting, +circling things that brushed his ears. What he wanted--as justifying for +him a little further consideration--was there before him from the moment +he could put it that Mrs. Worthingham had no data. He almost hugged that +word,--it suddenly came to mean so much to him. No data, he felt, for a +conception of the sort of thing the New York of "his time" had been in +his personal life--the New York so unexpectedly, so vividly and, as he +might say, so perversely called back to all his senses by its identity +with that of poor Cornelia's time: since even she had had a time, small +show as it was likely to make now, and his time and hers had been the +same. Cornelia figured to him while he walked away as, by contrast and +opposition, a massive little bundle of data; his impatience to go to see +her sharpened as he thought of this: so certainly should he find out +that wherever he might touch her, with a gentle though firm pressure, he +would, as the fond visitor of old houses taps and fingers a disfeatured, +overpapered wall with the conviction of a wainscot-edge beneath, +recognise some small extrusion of history. + + + + +IV + +There would have been a wonder for us meanwhile in his continued use, as +it were, of his happy formula--brought out to Cornelia Rasch within ten +minutes, or perhaps only within twenty, of his having settled into the +quite comfortable chair that, two days later, she indicated to him by +her fireside. He had arrived at her address through the fortunate chance +of his having noticed her card, as he went out, deposited, in the good +old New York fashion, on one of the rococo tables of Mrs. Worthingham's +hall. His eye had been caught by the pencilled indication that was to +affect him, the next instant, as fairly placed there for his sake. This +had really been his luck, for he shouldn't have liked to write to Mrs. +Worthingham for guidance--_that_ he felt, though too impatient just +now to analyze the reluctance. There was nobody else he could have +approached for a clue, and with this reflection he was already aware +of how it testified to their rare little position, his and +Cornelia's--position as conscious, ironic, pathetic survivors together +of a dead and buried society--that there would have been, in all the +town, under such stress, not a member of their old circle left to turn +to. Mrs. Worthingham had practically, even if accidentally, helped him +to knowledge; the last nail in the coffin of the poor dear extinct +past had been planted for him by his having thus to reach his antique +contemporary through perforation of the newest newness. The note of this +particular recognition was in fact the more prescribed to him that +the ground of Cornelia's return to a scene swept so bare of the +associational charm was certainly inconspicuous. What had she then come +back for?--he had asked himself that; with the effect of deciding that +it probably would have been, a little, to "look after" her remnant of +property. Perhaps she had come to save what little might still remain of +that shrivelled interest; perhaps she had been, by those who took care +of it for her, further swindled and despoiled, so that she wished to +get at the facts. Perhaps on the other hand--it was a more cheerful +chance--her investments, decently administered, were making larger +returns, so that the rigorous thrift of Bognor could be finally relaxed. + +He had little to learn about the attraction of Europe, and rather +expected that in the event of his union with Mrs Worthingham he should +find himself pleading for it with the competence of one more in the +"know" about Paris and Rome, about Venice and Florence, than even she +could be. He could have lived on in _his_ New York, that is in the +sentimental, the spiritual, the more or less romantic visitation of it; +but had it been positive for him that he could live on in hers?--unless +indeed the possibility of this had been just (like the famous _vertige +de l'abime_, like the solicitation of danger, or otherwise of the +dreadful) the very hinge of his whole dream. However that might be, +his curiosity was occupied rather with the conceivable hinge of poor +Cornelia's: it was perhaps thinkable that even Mrs. Worthingham's New +York, once it should have become possible again at all, might have +put forth to this lone exile a plea that wouldn't be in the chords of +Bognor. For himself, after all, too, the attraction had been much +more of the Europe over which one might move at one's ease, and which +therefore could but cost, and cost much, right and left, than of the +Europe adapted to scrimping. He saw himself on the whole scrimping with +more zest even in Mrs. Worthingham's New York than under the inspiration +of Bognor. Apart from which it was yet again odd, not to say perceptibly +pleasing to him, to note where the emphasis of his interest fell in this +fumble of fancy over such felt oppositions as the new, the latest, the +luridest power of money and the ancient reserves and moderations and +mediocrities. These last struck him as showing by contrast the old brown +surface and tone as of velvet rubbed and worn, shabby, and even a bit +dingy, but all soft and subtle and still velvety--which meant still +dignified; whereas the angular facts of current finance were as harsh +and metallic and bewildering as some stacked "exhibit" of ugly patented +inventions, things his mediaeval mind forbade his taking in. He had +for instance the sense of knowing the pleasant little old Rasch +fortune--pleasant as far as it went; blurred memories and impressions +of what it had been and what it hadn't, of how it had grown and how +languished and how melted; they came back to him and put on such +vividness that he could almost have figured himself testify for them +before a bland and encouraging Board. The idea of taking the field in +any manner on the subject of Mrs. Worthingham's resources would have +affected him on the other hand as an odious ordeal, some glare of +embarrassment and exposure in a circle of hard unhelpful attention, of +converging, derisive, unsuggestive eyes. + +In Cornelia's small and quite cynically modern flat--the house had +a grotesque name, "The Gainsborough," but at least wasn't an awful +boarding-house, as he had feared, and she could receive him quite +honourably, which was so much to the good--he would have been ready to +use at once to her the greatest freedom of friendly allusion: "Have +you still your old 'family interest' in those two houses in Seventh +Avenue?--one of which was next to a corner grocery, don't you know? and +was occupied as to its lower part by a candy-shop where the proportion +of the stock of suspectedly stale popcorn to that of rarer and stickier +joys betrayed perhaps a modest capital on the part of your father's, +your grandfather's, or whoever's tenant, but out of which I nevertheless +remember once to have come as out of a bath of sweets, with my very +garments, and even the separate hairs of my head, glued together. +The other of the pair, a tobacconist's, further down, had before it a +wonderful huge Indian who thrust out wooden cigars at an indifferent +world--you could buy candy cigars too, at the pop-corn shop, and I +greatly preferred them to the wooden; I remember well how I used to gape +in fascination at the Indian and wonder if the last of the Mohicans was +like him; besides admiring so the resources of a family whose 'property' +was in such forms. I haven't been round there lately--we must go round +together; but don't tell me the forms have utterly perished!" It was +after _that_ fashion he might easily have been moved, and with almost +no transition, to break out to Cornelia--quite as if taking up some old +talk, some old community of gossip, just where they had left it; even +with the consciousness perhaps of overdoing a little, of putting at its +maximum, for the present harmony, recovery, recapture (what should he +call it?) the pitch and quantity of what the past had held for them. + +He didn't in fact, no doubt, dart straight off to Seventh Avenue, there +being too many other old things and much nearer and long subsequent; +the point was only that for everything they spoke of after he had fairly +begun to lean back and stretch his legs, and after she had let him, +above all, light the first of a succession of cigarettes--for everything +they spoke of he positively cultivated extravagance and excess, piling +up the crackling twigs as on the very altar of memory; and that by the +end of half an hour she had lent herself, all gallantly, to their game. +It was the game of feeding the beautiful iridescent flame, ruddy and +green and gold, blue and pink and amber and silver, with anything they +could pick up, anything that would burn and flicker. Thick-strown with +such gleanings the occasion seemed indeed, in spite of the truth that +they perhaps wouldn't have proved, under cross-examination, to have +rubbed shoulders in the other life so very hard. Casual contacts, +qualified communities enough, there had doubtless been, but not +particular "passages," nothing that counted, as he might think of it, +for their "very own" together, for nobody's else at all. These shades of +historic exactitude didn't signify; the more and the less that there +had been made perfect terms--and just by his being there and by her +rejoicing in it--with their present need to have _had_ all their past +could be made to appear to have given them. It was to this tune they +proceeded, the least little bit as if they knowingly pretended--he +giving her the example and setting her the pace of it, and she, poor +dear, after a first inevitable shyness, an uncertainty of wonder, a +breathlessness of courage, falling into step and going whatever length +he would. + +She showed herself ready for it, grasping gladly at the perception of +what he must mean; and if she didn't immediately and completely fall +in--not in the first half-hour, not even in the three or four others +that his visit, even whenever he consulted his watch, still made nothing +of--she yet understood enough as soon as she understood that, if their +finer economy hadn't so beautifully served, he might have been conveying +this, that, and the other incoherent and easy thing by the comparatively +clumsy method of sound and statement. "No, I never made love to you; it +would in fact have been absurd, and I don't care--though I almost know, +in the sense of almost remembering!--who did and who didn't; but you +were always about, and so was I, and, little as you may yourself care +who I did it to, I dare say you remember (in the sense of having known +of it!) any old appearances that told. But we can't afford at this time +of day not to help each other to have had--well, everything there was, +since there's no more of it now, nor any way of coming by it except so; +and therefore let us make together, let us make over and recreate, our +lost world; for which we have after all and at the worst such a lot +of material. You were in particular my poor dear sisters' friend--they +thought you the funniest little brown thing possible; so isn't that +again to the good? You were mine only to the extent that you were so +much in and out of the house--as how much, if we come to that, wasn't +one in and out, south of Thirtieth Street and north of Washington +Square, in those days, those spacious, sociable, Arcadian days, that we +flattered ourselves we filled with the modern fever, but that were so +different from any of these arrangements of pretended hourly Time +that dash themselves forever to pieces as from the fiftieth floors of +sky-scrapers." + +This was the kind of thing that was in the air, whether he said it or +not, and that could hang there even with such quite other things as +more crudely came out; came in spite of its being perhaps calculated to +strike us that these last would have been rather and most the unspoken +and the indirect. They were Cornelia's contribution, and as soon as she +had begun to talk of Mrs. Worthingham--_he_ didn't begin it!--they had +taken their place bravely in the centre of the circle. There they made, +the while, their considerable little figure, but all within the ring +formed by fifty other allusions, fitful but really intenser irruptions +that hovered and wavered and came and went, joining hands at moments +and whirling round as in chorus, only then again to dash at the slightly +huddled centre with a free twitch or peck or push or other taken +liberty, after the fashion of irregular frolic motions in a country +dance or a Christmas game. + +"You're so in love with her and want to marry her!"--she said it all +sympathetically and yearningly, poor crapy Cornelia; as if it were to be +quite taken for granted that she knew all about it. And then when he had +asked how she knew--why she took so informed a tone about it; all on +the wonder of her seeming so much more "in" it just at that hour than +he himself quite felt he could figure for: "Ah, how but from the dear +lovely thing herself? Don't you suppose _she_ knows it?" + +"Oh, she absolutely 'knows' it, does she?"--he fairly heard himself ask +that; and with the oddest sense at once of sharply wanting the certitude +and yet of seeing the question, of hearing himself say the words, +through several thicknesses of some wrong medium. He came back to it +from a distance; as he would have had to come back (this was again vivid +to him) should he have got round again to his ripe intention three days +before--after his now present but then absent friend, that is, had left +him planted before his now absent but then present one for the purpose. +"Do you mean she--at all confidently!--expects?" he went on, not much +minding if it couldn't but sound foolish; the time being given it for +him meanwhile by the sigh, the wondering gasp, all charged with the +unutterable, that the tone of his appeal set in motion. He saw his +companion look at him, but it might have been with the eyes of thirty +years ago; when--very likely.--he had put her some such question about +some girl long since dead. Dimly at first, then more distinctly, didn't +it surge back on him for the very strangeness that there had been some +such passage as this between them--yes, about Mary Cardew!--in the +autumn of '68? + +"Why, don't you realise your situation?" Miss Rasch struck him as quite +beautifully wailing--above all to such an effect of deep interest, that +is, on her own part and in him. + +"My situation?"--he echoed, he considered; but reminded afresh, by +the note of the detached, the far-projected in it, of what he had +last remembered of his sentient state on his once taking ether at the +dentist's. + +"Yours and hers--the situation of her adoring you. I suppose you at +least know it," Cornelia smiled. + +Yes, it was like the other time and yet it wasn't. She was like--poor +Cornelia was--everything that used to be; that somehow was most definite +to him. Still he could quite reply "Do you call it--her adoring me--_my_ +situation?" + +"Well, it's a part of yours, surely--if you're in love with her." + +"Am I, ridiculous old person! in love with her?" White-Mason asked. + +"I may be a ridiculous old person," Cornelia returned--"and, for that +matter, of course I am! But she's young and lovely and rich and clever: +so what could be more natural?" + +"Oh, I was applying that opprobrious epithet--!" He didn't finish, +though he meant he had applied it to himself. He had got up from his +seat; he turned about and, taking in, as his eyes also roamed, several +objects in the room, serene and sturdy, not a bit cheap-looking, little +old New York objects of '68, he made, with an inner art, as if to +recognise them--made so, that is, for himself; had quite the sense for +the moment of asking them, of imploring them, to recognise _him_, to be +for him things of his own past. Which they truly were, he could have +the next instant cried out; for it meant that if three or four of +them, small sallow carte-de-visite photographs, faithfully framed but +spectrally faded, hadn't in every particular, frames and balloon skirts +and false "property" balustrades of unimaginable terraces and all, +the tone of time, the secret for warding and easing off the perpetual +imminent ache of one's protective scowl, one would verily but have to +let the scowl stiffen, or to take up seriously the question of blue +goggles, during what might remain of life. + + + + +V + +What he actually took up from a little old Twelfth-Street table that +piously preserved the plain mahogany circle, with never a curl nor a +crook nor a hint of a brazen flourish, what he paused there a moment for +commerce with, his back presented to crapy Cornelia, who sat taking that +view of him, during this opportunity, very protrusively and frankly and +fondly, was one of the wasted mementos just mentioned, over which he +both uttered and suppressed a small comprehensive cry. He stood there +another minute to look at it, and when he turned about still kept it in +his hand, only holding it now a litde behind him. "You _must_ have come +back to stay--with all your beautiful things. What else does it mean?" + +"'Beautiful'?" his old friend commented with her brow all wrinkled and +her lips thrust out in expressive dispraise. They might at that rate +have been scarce more beautiful than she herself. "Oh, don't talk +so--after Mrs. Worthingham's! _They're_ wonderful, if you will: such +things, such things! But one's own poor relics and odds and ends are +one's own at least; and one _has_--yes--come back to them. They're all +I have in the world to come back to. They were stored, and what I was +paying--!" Miss Rasch wofully added. + +He had possession of the small old picture; he hovered there; he put his +eyes again to it intently; then again held it a little behind him as if +it might have been snatched away or the very feel of it, pressed against +him, was good to his palm. "Mrs. Worthingham's things? You think them +beautiful?" + +Cornelia did now, if ever, show an odd face. "Why certainly prodigious, +or whatever. Isn't that conceded?" + +"No doubt every horror, at the pass we've come to, is conceded. That's +just what I complain of." + +"Do you _complain?_"--she drew it out as for surprise: she couldn't have +imagined such a thing. + +"To me her things are awful. They're the newest of the new." + +"Ah, but the old forms!" + +"Those are the most blatant. I mean the swaggering reproductions." + +"Oh but," she pleaded, "we can't all be _really_ old." + +"No, we can't, Cornelia. But _you_ can--!" said White-Mason with the +frankest appreciation. + +She looked up at him from where she sat as he could imagine her +looking up at the curate at Bognor. "Thank you, sir! If that's all you +want----!" + +"It _is_" he said, "all I want--or almost." + +"Then no wonder such a creature as that," she lightly moralised, "won't +suit you!" + +He bent upon her, for all the weight of his question, his smoothest +stare. "You hold she certainly won't suit me?" + +"Why, what can I tell about it? Haven't you by this time found out?" + +"No, but I think I'm finding." With which he began again to explore. + +Miss Rasch immensely wondered. "You mean you don't expect to come to an +understanding with her?" And then as even to this straight challenge he +made at first no answer: "Do you mean you give it up?" + +He waited some instants more, but not meeting her eyes--only looking +again about the room. "What do you think of my chance?" + +"Oh," his companion cried, "what has what I think to do with it? How can +I think anything but that she must like you?" + +"Yes--of course. But how much?" + +"Then don't you really know?" Cornelia asked. + +He kept up his walk, oddly preoccupied and still not looking at her. "Do +you, my dear?" + +She waited a little. "If you haven't really put it to her I don't +suppose she knows." + +This at last arrested him again. "My dear Cornelia, she doesn't +know----!" + +He had paused as for the desperate tone, or at least the large emphasis +of it, so that she took him up. "The more reason then to help her to +find it out." + +"I mean," he explained, "that she doesn't know anything." + +"Anything?" + +"Anything else, I mean--even if she does know _that_." + +Cornelia considered of it. "But what else need she--in particular--know? +Isn't that the principal thing?" + +"Well"--and he resumed his circuit--"she doesn't know anything that we +know. But nothing," he re-emphasised--"nothing whatever!" + +"Well, can't she do without that?" + +"Evidently she can--and evidently she does, beautifully. But the +question is whether _I_ can!" + +He had paused once more with his point--but she glared, poor Cornelia, +with her wonder. "Surely if you know for yourself----!" + +"Ah, it doesn't seem enough for me to know for myself! One wants a +woman," he argued--but still, in his prolonged tour, quite without his +scowl--"to know _for_ one, to know _with_ one. That's what you do now," +he candidly put to her. + +It made her again gape. "Do you mean you want to marry _me?_" + +He was so full of what he did mean, however, that he failed even to +notice it. "She doesn't in the least know, for instance, how old I am." + +"That's because you're so young!" + +"Ah, there you are!"--and he turned off afresh and as if almost in +disgust. It left her visibly perplexed--though even the perplexed +Cornelia was still the exceedingly pointed; but he had come to her aid +after another turn. "Remember, please, that I'm pretty well as old as +you." + +She had all her point at least, while she bridled and blinked, for this. +"You're exactly a year and ten months older." + +It checked him there for delight. "You remember my birthday?" + +She twinkled indeed like some far-off light of home. "I remember every +one's. It's a little way I've always had--and that I've never lost." + +He looked at her accomplishment, across the room, as at some striking, +some charming phenomenon. "Well, _that's_ the sort of thing I want!" All +the ripe candour of his eyes confirmed it. + +What could she do therefore, she seemed to ask him, but repeat her +question of a moment before?--which indeed presently she made up her +mind to. "Do you want to marry _me?_" + +It had this time better success--if the term may be felt in any degree +to apply. All his candour, or more of it at least, was in his slow, +mild, kind, considering head-shake. "No, Cornelia--not to _marry_ you." + +His discrimination was a wonder; but since she was clearly treating him +now as if everything about him was, so she could as exquisitely meet it. +"Not at least," she convulsively smiled, "until you've honourably tried +Mrs. Worthingham. Don't you really _mean_ to?" she gallantly insisted. + +He waited again a little; then he brought out: "I'll tell you +presently." He came back, and as by still another mere glance over +the room, to what seemed to him so much nearer. "That table was old +Twelfth-Street?" + +"Everything here was." + +"Oh, the pure blessings! With you, ah, with you, I haven't to wear a +green shade." And he had retained meanwhile his small photograph, which +he again showed himself. "Didn't we talk of Mary Cardew?" + +"Why, do you remember it?" She marvelled to extravagance. + +"You make me. You connect me with it. You connect it with we." He liked +to display to her this excellent use she thus had, the service she +rendered. "There are so many connections--there will be so many. I +feel how, with you, they must all come up again for me: in fact you're +bringing them out already, just while I look at you, as fast as ever you +can. The fact that you knew every one--!" he went on; yet as if there +were more in that too than he could quite trust himself about. + +"Yes, I knew every one," said Cornelia Rasch; but this time with perfect +simplicity. "I knew, I imagine, more than you do--or more than you did." + +It kept him there, it made him wonder with his eyes on her. "Things +about _them_--our people?" + +"Our people. Ours only now." + +Ah, such an interest as he felt in this--taking from her while, so far +from scowling, he almost gaped, all it might mean! "Ours indeed--and it's +awfully good they are; or that we're still here for them! Nobody else +is--nobody but you: not a cat!" + +"Well, I _am_ a cat!" Cornelia grinned. + +"Do you mean you can tell me things--?" It was too beautiful to believe. + +"About what really _was?_" she artfully considered, holding him +immensely now. "Well, unless they've come to you with time; unless +you've learned--or found out." + +"Oh," he reassuringly cried--reassuringly, it most seemed, for +himself--"nothing has come to me with time, everything has gone from me. +How can I find out now! What creature has an idea----?" + +She threw up her hands with the shrug of old days--the sharp little +shrug his sisters used to imitate and that she hadn't had to go to +Europe for. The only thing was that he blessed her for bringing it back. + +"Ah, the ideas of people now----!" + +"Yes, their ideas are certainly not about us" But he ruefully faced it. +"We've none the less, however, to live with them." + +"With their ideas--?" Cornelia questioned. + +"With _them_--these modern wonders; such as they are!" Then he went on: +"It must have been to help me you've come back." + +She said nothing for an instant about that, only nodding instead at his +photograph. "What has become of yours? I mean of _her_." + +This time it made him turn pale. "You remember I _have_ one?" + +She kept her eyes on him. "In a 'pork-pie' hat, with her hair in a long +net. That was so 'smart' then; especially with one's skirt looped up, +over one's hooped magenta petticoat, in little festoons, and a row of +very big onyx beads over one's braided velveteen sack--braided quite +plain and very broad, don't you know?" + +He smiled for her extraordinary possession of these things--she was as +prompt as if she had had them before her. "Oh, rather--'don't I know?' +You wore brown velveteen, and, on those remarkably small hands, funny +gauntlets--like mine." + +"Oh, do _you_ remember? But like yours?" she wondered. + +"I mean like hers in my photograph." But he came back to the present +picture. "This is better, however, for really showing her lovely head." + +"Mary's head was a perfection!" Cornelia testified. + +"Yes--it was better than her heart." + +"Ah, don't say that!" she pleaded. "You weren't fair." + +"Don't you think I was fair?" It interested him immensely--and the more +that he indeed mightn't have been; which he seemed somehow almost to +hope. + +"She didn't think so--to the very end." + +"She didn't?"--ah the right things Cornelia said to him! But before she +could answer he was studying again closely the small faded face. "No, +she doesn't, she doesn't. Oh, her charming sad eyes and the way they say +that, across the years, straight into mine! But I don't know, I don't +know!" White-Mason quite comfortably sighed. + +His companion appeared to appreciate this effect. "That's just the way +you used to flirt with her, poor thing. Wouldn't you like to have it?" +she asked. + +"This--for my very own?" He looked up delighted. "I really may?" + +"Well, if you'll give me yours. We'll exchange." + +"That's a charming idea. We'll exchange. But you must come and get it at +my rooms--where you'll see my things." + +For a little she made no answer--as if for some feeling. Then she said: +"You asked me just now why I've come back." + +He stared as for the connection; after which with a smile: "Not to do +_that_----?" + +She waited briefly again, but with a queer little look. "I can do those +things now; and--yes!--that's in a manner why. I came," she then said, +"because I knew of a sudden one day--knew as never before--that I was +old." + +"I see. I see." He quite understood--she had notes that so struck him. +"And how did you like it?" + +She hesitated--she decided. "Well, if I liked it, it was on the +principle perhaps on which some people like high game!" + +"High game--that's good!" he laughed. "Ah, my dear, we're 'high'!" + +She shook her head. "No, not you--yet. I at any rate didn't want any +more adventures," Cornelia said. + +He showed their small relic again with assurance. "You wanted _us_. Then +here we are. Oh how we can talk!--with all those things you know! You +are an invention. And you'll see there are things J know. I shall turn +up here--well, daily." + +She took it in, but only after a moment answered. "There was something +you said just now you'd tell me. Don't you mean to try----?" + +"Mrs. Worthingham?" He drew from within his coat his pocket-book and +carefully found a place in it for Mary Cardew's carte-de-visite, folding +it together with deliberation over which he put it back. Finally he +spoke. "No--I've decided. I can't--I don't want to." + +Cornelia marvelled--or looked as if she did. "Not for all she has?" + +"Yes--I know all she has. But I also know all she hasn't. And, as I told +you, she herself doesn't--hasn't a glimmer of a suspicion of it; and +never will have." + +Cornelia magnanimously thought "No--but she knows other things." + +He shook his head as at the portentous heap of them. "Too many--too +many. And other indeed--_so_ other! Do you know," he went on, "that it's +as if _you_--by turning up for me--had brought that home to me?" + +"'For you,'" she candidly considered. "But what--since you can't marry +me!--can you do with me?" + +Well, he seemed to have it all. "Everything. I can live with you--just +this way." To illustrate which he dropped into the other chair by her +fire; where, leaning back, he gazed at the flame. "I can't give you +up. It's very curious. It has come over me as it did over you when you +renounced Bognor. That's it--I know it at last, and I see one can like +it. I'm 'high.' You needn't deny it. That's my taste. I'm old." And in +spite of the considerable glow there of her little household altar he +said it without the scowl. + + + + +THE BENCH OF DESOLATION + + + + +I + +SHE had practically, he believed, conveyed the intimation, the +horrid, brutal, vulgar menace, in the course of their last +dreadful conversation, when, for whatever was left him of pluck or +confidence--confidence in what he would fain have called a little more +aggressively the strength of his position--he had judged best not to +take it up. But this time there was no question of not understanding, or +of pretending he didn't; the ugly, the awful words, ruthlessly formed +by her lips, were like the fingers of a hand that she might have thrust +into her pocket for extraction of the monstrous object that would serve +best for--what should he call it?--a gage of battle. + +"If I haven't a very different answer from you within the next three +days I shall put the matter into the hands of my solicitor, whom it +may interest you to know I've already seen. I shall bring an action for +'breach' against you, Herbert Dodd, as sure as my name's Kate Cookham." + +There it was, straight and strong--yet he felt he could say for himself, +when once it had come, or even, already, just as it was coming, that it +turned on, as if she had moved an electric switch, the very brightest +light of his own very reasons. There _she_ was, in all the grossness +of her native indelicacy, in all her essential excess of will and +destitution of scruple; and it was the woman capable of that ignoble +threat who, his sharper sense of her quality having become so quite +deterrent, was now making for him a crime of it that he shouldn't wish +to tie himself to her for life. The vivid, lurid thing was the reality, +all unmistakable, of her purpose; she had thought her case well out; +had measured its odious, specious presentability; had taken, he might +be sure, the very best advice obtainable at Properley, where there +was always a first-rate promptitude of everything fourth-rate; it was +disgustingly certain, in short, that she'd proceed. She was sharp +and adroit, moreover--distinctly in certain ways a master-hand; how +otherwise, with her so limited mere attractiveness, should she have +entangled him? He couldn't shut his eyes to the very probable truth that +if she should try it she'd pull it off. She _knew_ she would--precisely; +and her assurance was thus the very proof of her cruelty. That she +had pretended she loved him was comparatively nothing; other women had +pretended it, and other women too had really done it; but that she had +pretended he could possibly have been right and safe and blest in +loving _her_, a creature of the kind who could sniff that squalor of the +law-court, of claimed damages and brazen lies and published kisses, +of love-letters read amid obscene guffaws, as a positive tonic to +resentment, as a high incentive to her course--this was what put him +so beautifully in the right It was what might signify in a woman all +through, he said to himself, the mere imagination of such machinery. +Truly what a devilish conception and what an appalling nature! + +But there was no doubt, luckily, either, that he _could_ plant his feet +the firmer for his now intensified sense of these things. He was to +live, it appeared, abominably worried, he was to live consciously +rueful, he was to live perhaps even what a scoffing world would call +abjectly exposed; but at least he was to live saved. In spite of his +clutch of which steadying truth, however, and in spite of his declaring +to her, with many other angry protests and pleas, that the line of +conduct she announced was worthy of a vindictive barmaid, a lurking fear +in him, too deep to counsel mere defiance, made him appear to keep open +a little, till he could somehow turn round again, the door of possible +composition. He had scoffed at her claim, at her threat, at her thinking +she could hustle and bully him--"Such a way, my eye, to call back +to life a dead love!"--yet his instinct was ever, prudentially but +helplessly, for gaining time, even if time only more wofully to quake, +and he gained it now by not absolutely giving for his ultimatum that he +wouldn't think of coming round. He didn't in the smallest degree mean to +come round, but it was characteristic of him that he could for three +or four days breathe a little easier by having left her under the +impression that he perhaps might. At the same time he couldn't not have +said--what had conduced to bring out, in retort, her own last word, the +word on which they had parted--"Do you mean to say you yourself would +now be _willing_ to marry and live with a man of whom you could feel, +the thing done, that he'd be all the while thinking of you in the light +of a hideous coercion?" "Never you mind about _my_ willingness," Kate +had answered; "you've known what that has been for the last six months. +Leave that to me, my willingness--I'll take care of it all right; and +just see what conclusion you can come to about your own." + +He was to remember afterward how he had wondered whether, turned upon +her in silence while her odious lucidity reigned unchecked, his face had +shown her anything like the quantity of hate he felt. Probably not at +all; no man's face _could_ express that immense amount; especially the +fair, refined, intellectual, gentlemanlike face which had had--and by +her own more than once repeated avowal--so much to do with the enormous +fancy she had originally taken to him. "Which--frankly now--would you +personally _rather_ I should do," he had at any rate asked her with an +intention of supreme irony: "just sordidly marry you on top of this, or +leave you the pleasure of your lovely appearance in court and of your so +assured (since that's how you feel it) big haul of damages? Sha'n't +you be awfully disappointed, in fact, if I don't let you get something +better out of me than a poor plain ten-shilling gold ring and the rest +of the blasphemous rubbish, as we should make it between us, pronounced +at the altar? I take it of course," he had swaggered on, "that your +pretension wouldn't be for a moment that I should--after the act of +profanity--take up my life with you." + +"It's just as much my dream as it ever was, Herbert Dodd, to take up +mine with _you!_ Remember for me that I can do with it, my dear, that my +idea is for even as much as that of you!" she had cried; "remember that +for me, Herbert Dodd; remember, remember!" + +It was on this she had left him--left him frankly under a mortal chill. +There might have been the last ring of an appeal or a show of persistent +and perverse tenderness in it, however preposterous any such matter; but +in point of fact her large, clean, plain, brown face--so much too big +for her head, he now more than ever felt it to be, just as her head was +so much too big for her body, and just as her hats had an irritating way +of appearing to decline choice and conformity in respect to _any_ of her +dimensions--presented itself with about as much expression as his own +shop-window when the broad, blank, sallow blind was down. He was fond of +his shop-window with some good show on; he had a fancy for a good show +and was master of twenty different schemes of taking arrangement for the +old books and prints, "high-class rarities" his modest catalogue called +them, in which he dealt and which his maternal uncle, David Geddes, had, +as he liked to say, "handed down" to him. His widowed mother had screwed +the whole thing, the stock and the connection and the rather bad little +house in the rather bad little street, out of the ancient worthy, +shortly before his death, in the name of the youngest and most +interesting, the "delicate" one and the literary, of her five scattered +and struggling children. He could enjoy his happiest collocations and +contrasts and effects, his harmonies and varieties of toned and faded +leather and cloth, his sought color-notes and the high clearnesses, +here and there, of his white and beautifully figured price-labels, which +pleased him enough in themselves almost to console him for not +oftener having to break, on a customer's insistence, into the balanced +composition. But the dropped expanse of time-soiled canvas, the thing +of Sundays and holidays, with just his name, "Herbert Dodd, Successor," +painted on below his uncle's antique style, the feeble penlike +flourishes already quite archaic--this ugly vacant mask, which might +so easily be taken for the mask of failure, somehow always gave him a +chill. + +That had been just the sort of chill--the analogy was complete--of Kate +Cookham's last look. He supposed people doing an awfully good and sure +and steady business, in whatever line, could see a whole front turned +to vacancy that way and merely think of the hours off represented by it. +Only for this--nervously to bear it, in other words, and Herbert Dodd, +quite with the literary temperament himself, was capable of that amount +of play of fancy, or even of morbid analysis--you had to be on some +footing, you had to feel some confidence, pretty different from his own +up to now. He had never _not_ enjoyed passing his show on the other side +of the street and taking it in thence with a casual obliquity; but he +had never held optical commerce with the drawn blind for a moment longer +than he could help. It _always_ looked horribly final and as if it never +would come up again. Big and bare, with his name staring at him from the +middle, it thus offered in its grimness a turn of comparison for Miss +Cookham's ominous visage. She never wore pretty, dotty, transparent +veils, as Nan Drury did, and the words "Herbert Dodd"--save that she had +sounded them at him there two or three times more like a Meg Merrilies +or the bold bad woman in one of the melodramas of high life given during +the fine season in the pavilion at the end of Properley Pier--were +dreadfully, were permanently, seated on her lips. _She_ was grim, no +mistake. + +That evening, alone in the back room above the shop, he saw so little +what he could do that, consciously demoralised for the hour, he gave way +to tears about it. Her taking a stand so incredibly "low," that was +what he couldn't get over. The particular bitterness of his cup was +his having let himself in for a struggle on such terms--the use, on +her side, of the vulgarest process known to the law: the vulgarest, the +vulgarest, he kept repeating that, clinging to the help rendered him by +this imputation to his terrorist of the vice he sincerely believed he +had ever, among difficulties (for oh he recognised the difficulties!) +sought to keep most alien to him. He knew what he was, in a dismal, +down-trodden sphere enough--the lean young proprietor of an old business +that had itself rather shrivelled with age than ever grown fat, the +purchase and sale of second-hand books and prints, with the back street +of a long-fronted south-coast watering-place (Old Town by good luck) for +the dusky field of his life. But he had gone in for all the education he +could get--his educated customers would often hang about for more talk +by the half-hour at a time, he actually feeling himself, and almost with +a scruple, hold them there; which meant that he had had (he couldn't be +blind to that) natural taste and had lovingly cultivated and formed it. +Thus, from as far back as he could remember, there had been things all +round him that he suffered from when other people didn't; and he had +kept most of his suffering to himself--which had taught him, in a +manner, _how_ to suffer, and how almost to like to. + +So, at any rate, he had never let go his sense of certain differences, +he had done everything he could to keep it up--whereby everything that +was vulgar was on the wrong side of his line. He had believed, for a +series of strange, oppressed months, that Kate Cookham's manners +and tone were on the right side; she had been governess--for young +children--in two very good private families, and now had classes in +literature and history for bigger girls who were sometimes brought by +their mammas; in fact, coming in one day to look over his collection of +students' manuals, and drawing it out, as so many did, for the evident +sake of his conversation, she had appealed to him that very first time +by her apparently pronounced intellectual side--goodness knew she didn't +even then by the physical!--which she had artfully kept in view till she +had entangled him past undoing. And it had all been but the cheapest of +traps--when he came to take the pieces apart a bit--laid over a brazen +avidity. What he now collapsed for, none the less--what he sank down on +a chair at a table and nursed his weak, scared sobs in his resting arms +for--was the fact that, whatever the trap, it held him as with the grip +of sharp murderous steel. There he was, there he was; alone in the brown +summer dusk--brown through _his_ windows--he cried and he cried. He +shouldn't get out without losing a limb. The only question was which of +his limbs it should be. + +Before he went out, later on--for he at last felt the need to--he could, +however, but seek to remove from his face and his betraying eyes, over +his washing-stand, the traces of his want of fortitude. He brushed +himself up; with which, catching his stricken image a bit spectrally +in an old dim toilet-glass, he knew again, in a flash, the glow of +righteous resentment. Who should be assured against coarse usage if +a man of his really elegant, perhaps in fact a trifle over-refined or +"effete" appearance, his absolutely gentlemanlike type, couldn't be? +He never went so far as to rate himself, with exaggeration, a gentleman; +but he would have maintained against all comers, with perfect candour +and as claiming a high advantage, that he was, in spite of that +liability to blubber, "like" one; which he _was_ no doubt, for that +matter, at several points. Like what lady then, who could ever possibly +have been taken for one, was Kate Cookham, and therefore how could one +have anything--anything of the intimate and private order--out with her +fairly and on the plane, the only possible one, of common equality? He +might find himself crippled for life; he believed verily, the more he +thought, that that was what was before him. But be ended by seeing this +doom in the almost redeeming light of the fact that it would all have +been because he was, comparatively, too aristocratic. Yes, a man in his +station couldn't afford to carry that so far--it must sooner or later, +in one way or another, spell ruin. Never mind--it was the only thing +he could be. Of course he should exquisitely suffer--but when hadn't +he exquisitely suffered? How was he going to get through life by _any_ +arrangement without that? No wonder such a woman as Kate Cookham had +been keen to annex so rare a value. The right thing would have been that +the highest price should be paid for it--by such a different sort of +logic from this nightmare of _his_ having to pay. + + + + +II + +Which was the way, of course, he talked to Nan Drury--as he had felt the +immediate wild need to do; for he should perhaps be able to bear it +all somehow or other with _her_--while they sat together, when time and +freedom served, on one of the very last, the far westward, benches +of the interminable sea-front. It wasn't every one who walked so far, +especially at that flat season--the only ghost of a bustle now, save for +the gregarious, the obstreperous haunters of the fluttering, far-shining +Pier, being reserved for the sunny Parade of midwinter. It wasn't every +one who cared for the sunsets (which you got awfully well from there +and which were a particular strong point of the lower, the more +"sympathetic," as Herbert Dodd liked to call it, Properley horizon) as +he had always intensely cared, and as he had found Nan Drury care; to +say nothing of his having also observed how little they directly spoke +to Miss Cookham. He had taught this oppressive companion to notice +them a bit, as he had taught her plenty of other things, but that was +a different matter; for the reason that the "land's end" (stretching a +point it carried off that name) had been, and had had to be, by their +lack of more sequestered resorts and conveniences, the scene of so much +of what she styled their wooing-time--or, to put it more properly, of +the time during which she had made the straightest and most unabashed +love to _him_: just as it could henceforth but render possible, under +an equal rigour, that he should enjoy there periods of consolation from +beautiful, gentle, tender-souled Nan, to whom he was now at last, after +the wonderful way they had helped each other to behave, going to make +love, absolutely unreserved and abandoned, absolutely reckless and +romantic love, a refuge from poisonous reality, as hard as ever he +might. + +The league-long, paved, lighted, garden-plotted, seated and refuged +Marina renounced its more or less celebrated attractions to break off +short here; and an inward curve of the kindly westward shore almost made +a wide-armed bay, with all the ugliness between town and country, and +the further casual fringe of the coast, turning, as the day waned, to +rich afternoon blooms of grey and brown and distant--it might fairly +have been beautiful Hampshire--blue. Here it was that, all that blighted +summer, with Nan--from the dreadful May-day on--he gave himself up to +the reaction of intimacy with the _kind_ of woman, at least, that he +liked; even if of everything else that might make life possible he was +to be, by what he could make out, forever starved. Here it was that--as +well as on whatever other scraps of occasions they could manage--Nan +began to take off and fold up and put away in her pocket her pretty, +dotty, becoming veil; as under the logic of his having so tremendously +ceased, in the shake of his dark storm-gust, to be engaged to another +woman. Her removal of that obstacle to a trusted friend's assuring +himself whether the peachlike bloom' of her finer facial curves bore +the test of such further inquiry into their cool sweetness as might +reinforce a mere baffled gaze--her momentous, complete surrender of so +much of her charm, let us say, both marked the change in the situation +of the pair and established the record of their perfect observance of +every propriety for so long before. They afterward in fact could have +dated it, their full clutch of their freedom and the bliss of their +having so little henceforth to consider save their impotence, their +poverty, their ruin; dated it from the hour of his recital to her +of the--at the first blush--quite appalling upshot of his second and +conclusive "scene of violence" with the mistress of his fortune, +when the dire terms of his release had had to be formally, and oh! +so abjectly, acceded to. She "compromised," the cruel brute, for Four +Hundred Pounds down--for not a farthing less would she stay her strength +from "proceedings." No jury in the land but would give her six, on the +nail ("Oh she knew quite where she was, thank you!") and he might feel +lucky to get off with so whole a skin. This was the sum, then, for which +he had grovellingly compounded--under an agreement sealed by a supreme +exchange of remarks. + +"'Where in the name of lifelong ruin are you to _find_ Four Hundred?'" +Miss Cookham had mockingly repeated after him while he gasped as from +the twist of her grip on his collar. "That's _your_ look-out, and I +should have thought you'd have made sure you knew before you decided on +your base perfidy." And then she had mouthed and minced, with ever +so false a gentility, her consistent, her sickening conclusion. "Of +course--I may mention again--if you too distinctly object to the trouble +of looking, you know where to find _me_." + +"I had rather starve to death than ever go within a mile of you!" +Herbert described himself as having sweetly answered; and that was +accordingly where _they_ devotedly but desperately were--he and she, +penniless Nan Drury. Her father, of Drury & Dean, was, like so far +too many other of the anxious characters who peered through the dull +window-glass of dusty offices at Properley, an Estate and House Agent, +Surveyor, Valuer and Auctioneer; she was the prettiest of six, with two +brothers, neither of the least use, but, thanks to the manner in which +their main natural protector appeared to languish under the accumulation +of his attributes, they couldn't be said very particularly or positively +to live. Their continued collective existence was a good deal of a +miracle even to themselves, though they had fallen into the way of not +unnecessarily, or too nervously, exchanging remarks upon it, and had +even in a sort, from year to year, got used to it. Nan's brooding +pinkness when he talked to her, her so very parted lips, considering her +pretty teeth, her so very parted eyelids, considering her pretty eyes, +all of which might have been those of some waxen image of uncritical +faith, cooled the heat of his helplessness very much as if he were +laying his head on a tense silk pillow. She had, it was true, forms +of speech, familiar watchwords, that affected him as small scratchy +perforations of the smooth surface from within; but his pleasure in +her and need of her were independent of such things and really almost +altogether determined by the fact of the happy, even if all so lonely, +forms and instincts in her which claimed kinship with his own. With +her natural elegance stamped on her as by a die, with her dim and +disinherited individual refinement of grace, which would have made any +one wonder who she was anywhere--hat and veil and feather-boa and smart +umbrella-knob and all--with her regular God-given distinction of type, +in fine, she couldn't abide vulgarity much more than he could. + +Therefore it didn't seem to him, under his stress, to matter +particularly, for instance, if she _would_ keep on referring so many +things to the time, as she called it, when she came into his life--his +own great insistence and contention being that she hadn't in the least +entered there till his mind was wholly made up to eliminate his other +friend. What that methodical fury was so fierce to bring home to him was +the falsity to herself involved in the later acquaintance; whereas just +his precious right to hold up his head to everything--before himself at +least--sprang from the fact that she couldn't make dates fit anyhow. +He hadn't so much as heard of his true beauty's existence (she had come +back but a few weeks before from her two years with her terribly trying +deceased aunt at Swindon, previous to which absence she had been an +unnoticeable chit) till days and days, ever so many, upon his honour, +after he had struck for freedom by his great first backing-out +letter--the precious document, the treat for a British jury, in which, +by itself, Miss Cookham's firm instructed her to recognise the prospect +of a fortune. The way the ruffians had been "her" ruffians--it appeared +as if she had posted them behind her from the first of her beginning +her game!--and the way "instructions" bounced out, with it, at a touch, +larger than life, as if she had arrived with her pocket full of them! +The date of the letter, taken with its other connections, and the date +of _her_ first give-away for himself, his seeing her get out of the +Brighton train with Bill Frankle that day he had gone to make the row +at the Station parcels' office about the miscarriage of the box from +Wales--those were the facts it sufficed him to point to, as he had +pointed to them for Nan Drury's benefit, goodness knew, often and often +enough. If he didn't seek occasion to do so for any one else's--in open +court as they said--that was his own affair, or at least his and Nan's. + +It little mattered, meanwhile, if on their bench of desolation, all that +summer--and it may be added for summers and summers, to say nothing of +winters, there and elsewhere, to come--she did give way to her artless +habit of not contradicting him enough, which led to her often trailing +up and down before him, too complacently, the untimely shreds and +patches of his own glooms and desperations. "Well, I'm glad I _am_ in +your life, terrible as it is, however or whenever I did come in!" and +"_Of course_ you'd rather have starved--and it seems pretty well as if +we shall, doesn't it?--than have bought her off by a false, abhorrent +love, wouldn't you?" and "It isn't as if she hadn't made up to you the +way she did before you had so much as looked at her, is it? or as if you +hadn't shown her what you felt her really to be before you had so much +as looked at _me_, is it either?" and "Yes, how on earth, pawning the +shoes on your feet, you're going to raise another shilling--_that's_ +what you want to know, poor darling, don't you?" + + + + +III + +His creditor, at the hour it suited her, transferred her base of +operations to town, to which impenetrable scene she had also herself +retired; and his raising of the first Two Hundred, during five +exasperated and miserable months, and then of another Seventy piecemeal, +bleedingly, after long delays and under the epistolary whiplash cracked +by the London solicitor in his wretched ear even to an effect of the +very report of Miss Cookham's tongue--these melancholy efforts formed +a scramble up an arduous steep where steps were planted and missed, and +bared knees were excoriated, and clutches at wayside tufts succeeded and +failed, on a system to which poor Nan could have intelligently entered +only if she had been somehow less ladylike. She kept putting into his +mouth the sick quaver of where he should find the rest, the always +inextinguishable rest, long after he had in silent rage fallen away from +any further payment at all--at first, he had but too blackly felt, for +himself, to the still quite possible non-exclusion of some penetrating +ray of "exposure." He didn't care a tuppenny damn now, and in point +of fact, after he had by hook and by crook succeeded in being able to +unload to the tune of Two-Hundred-and-Seventy, and then simply returned +the newest reminder of his outstanding obligation unopened, this latter +belated but real sign of fight, the first he had risked, remarkably +caused nothing at all to happen; nothing at least but his being moved +to quite tragically rueful wonder as to whether exactly some such +demonstration mightn't have served his turn at an earlier stage. + +He could by this time at any rate measure his ruin--with three fantastic +mortgages on his house, his shop, his stock, and a burden of interest +to carry under which his business simply stretched itself inanimate, +without strength for a protesting kick, without breath for an appealing +groan. Customers lingering for further enjoyment of the tasteful remarks +he had cultivated the unobstrusive art of throwing in, would at this +crisis have found plenty to repay them, might his wit have strayed a +little more widely still, toward a circuitous egotistical outbreak, from +the immediate question of the merits of this and that author or of the +condition of this and that volume. He had come to be conscious through +it all of strangely glaring at people when they tried to haggle--and +not, as formerly, with the glare of derisive comment on their overdone +humour, but with that of fairly idiotised surrender--as if they were +much mistaken in supposing, for the sake of conversation, that he might +take himself for saveable by the difference between sevenpence and +ninepence. He watched everything impossible and deplorable happen as in +an endless prolongation of his nightmare; watched himself proceed, that +is, with the finest, richest incoherence, to the due preparation of his +catastrophe. Everything came to seem _equally_ part of this--in complete +defiance of proportion; even his final command of detachment, on +the bench of desolation (where each successive fact of his dire case +regularly cut itself out black, yet of senseless silhouette, against the +red west) in respect to poor Nan's flat infelicities, which for the most +part kept no pace with the years or with change, but only shook like +hard peas in a child's rattle, the same peas a ways, of course, so long +as the rattle didn't split open with usage or from somebody's act of +irritation. They represented, or they had long done so, her contribution +to the more superficial of the two branches of intimacy--the +intellectual alternative, the one that didn't merely consist of her +preparing herself for his putting his arm round her waist. + +There were to have been moments, nevertheless, all the first couple of +years, when she did touch in him, though to his actively dissimulating +it, a more or less sensitive nerve--moments as they were too, to do +her justice, when she treated him not to his own wisdom, or even folly, +served up cold, but to a certain small bitter fruit of her personal, +her unnatural, plucking. "I wonder that since _she_ took legal advice +so freely, to come down on you, you didn't take it yourself, a little, +before being so sure you stood no chance. Perhaps _your_ people would +have been sure of something quite different--_perhaps_, I only say, you +know." She "only" said it, but she said it, none the less, in the early +time, about once a fortnight. In the later, and especially after their +marriage, it had a way of coming up again to the exclusion, as it seemed +to him, of almost everything else; in fact during the most dismal years, +the three of the loss of their two children, the long stretch of sordid +embarrassment ending in her death, he was afterward to think of her +as having generally said it several times a day. He was then also to +remember that his answer, before she had learnt to discount it, had been +inveterately at hand: "What would any solicitor have done or wanted to +do but drag me just into the hideous public arena"--he had always so put +it--"that it has been at any rate my pride and my honour, the one rag +of self-respect covering my nakedness, to have loathed and avoided from +every point of view?" + +That had disposed of it so long as he cared, and by the time he had +ceased to care for anything it had also lost itself in the rest of the +vain babble of home. After his wife's death, during his year of mortal +solitude, it awoke again as an echo of far-off things--far-off, very +far-off, because he felt then not ten but twenty years older. That was +by reason simply of the dead weight with which his load of debt had +settled--the persistence of his misery dragging itself out. With all +that had come and gone the bench of desolation was still there, just as +the immortal flush of the westward sky kept hanging its indestructible +curtain. He had never got away--everything had left him, but he himself +had been able to turn his back on nothing--and now, his day's labour +before a dirty desk at the Gas Works ended, he more often than not, +almost any season at temperate Properley serving his turn, took his slow +straight way to the Land's End and, collapsing there to rest, sat often +for an hour at a time staring before him. He might in these sessions, +with his eyes on the grey-green sea, have been counting again and +still recounting the beads, almost all worn smooth, of his rosary of +pain--which had for the fingers of memory and the recurrences of wonder +the same felt break of the smaller ones by the larger that would have +aided a pious mumble in some dusky altar-chapel. + +If it has been said of him that when once full submersion, as from far +back, had visibly begun to await him, he watched himself, in a cold +lucidity, _do_ punctually and necessarily each of the deplorable things +that were inconsistent with his keeping afloat, so at present again he +might have been held agaze just by the presented grotesqueness of that +vigil. Such ghosts of dead seasons were all he _had_ now to watch--such +a recaptured sense for instance as that of the dismal unavailing +awareness that had attended his act of marriage. He had let submersion +final and absolute become the signal for it--a mere minor determinant +having been the more or less contemporaneously unfavourable effect on +the business of Drury & Dean of the sudden disappearance of Mr. Dean +with the single small tin box into which the certificates of the +firm's credit had been found to be compressible. That had been his +only form--or had at any rate seemed his only one. He couldn't not have +married, no doubt, just as he couldn't not have suffered the last degree +of humiliation and almost of want, or just as his wife and children +couldn't not have died of the little he was able, under dire reiterated +pinches, to do for them; but it was "rum," for final solitary brooding, +that he hadn't appeared to see his way definitely to undertake the +support of a family till the last scrap of his little low-browed, +high-toned business, and the last figment of "property" in the old tiled +and timbered shell that housed it, had been sacrificed to creditors +mustering six rows deep. + +Of course what had counted too in the odd order was that even at the +end of the two or three years he had "allowed" her, Kate Cookham, gorged +with his unholy tribute, had become the subject of no successful siege +on the part either of Bill Frankle or, by what he could make out, of any +one else. She had judged decent--he could do her that justice--to take +herself personally out of his world, as he called it, for good and all, +as soon as he had begun regularly to bleed; and, to whatever lucrative +practice she might be devoting her great talents in London or elsewhere, +he felt his conscious curiosity about her as cold, with time, as the +passion of vain protest that she had originally left him to. He could +recall but two direct echoes of her in all the bitter years--both +communicated by Bill Frankle, disappointed and exposed and at last +quite remarkably ingenuous sneak, who had also, from far back, taken to +roaming the world, but who, during a period, used fitfully and +ruefully to reappear. Herbert Dodd had quickly seen, at their first +meeting--every one met every one sooner or later at Properley, if +meeting it could always be called, either in the glare or the gloom of +the explodedly attractive Embankment--that no silver stream of which he +himself had been the remoter source could have played over the career of +this all but repudiated acquaintance. That hadn't fitted with his first, +his quite primitive raw vision of the probabilities, and he had further +been puzzled when, much later on, it had come to him in a roundabout way +that Miss Cookham was supposed to be, or to have been, among them for +a few days "on the quiet," and that Frankle, who had seen her and who +claimed to know more about it than he said, was cited as authority for +the fact. But he hadn't himself at this juncture seen Frankle; he had +only wondered, and a degree of mystification had even remained. + +That memory referred itself to the dark days of old Drury's smash, +the few weeks between his partner's dastardly flight and Herbert's own +comment on it in the form of his standing up with Nan for the nuptial +benediction of the Vicar of St. Bernard's on a very cold, bleak December +morning and amid a circle of seven or eight long-faced, red-nosed and +altogether dowdy persons. Poor Nan herself had come to affect him as +scarce other than red-nosed and dowdy by that time, but this only added, +in his then, and indeed in his lasting view, to his general and his +particular morbid bravery. He had cultivated ignorance, there were small +inward immaterial luxuries he could scrap-pily cherish even among other, +and the harshest, destitutions; and one of them was represented by +this easy refusal of his mind to render to certain passages of his +experience, to various ugly images, names, associations, the homage of +continued attention. That served him, that helped him; but what happened +when, a dozen dismal years having worn themselves away, he sat single +and scraped bare again, as if his long wave of misfortune had washed him +far beyond everything and then conspicuously retreated, was that, thus +stranded by tidal action, deposited in the lonely hollow of his fate, he +felt even sustaining pride turn to nought and heard no challenge from +it when old mystifications, stealing forth in the dusk of the day's work +done, scratched at the door of speculation and hung about, through the +idle hours, for irritated notice. + +The evenings of his squalid clerkship were all leisure now, but there +was nothing at all near home on the other hand, for his imagination, +numb and stiff from its long chill, to begin to play with. Voices from +far off would quaver to him therefore in the stillness; where he knew +for the most recurrent, little by little, the faint wail of his wife. +He had become deaf to it in life, but at present, after so great an +interval, he listened again, listened and listened, and seemed to hear +it sound as by the pressure of some weak broken spring. It phrased for +his ear her perpetual question, the one she had come to at the last as +under the obsession of a discovered and resented wrong, a wrong withal +that had its source much more in his own action than anywhere else. +"That you didn't make _sure_ she could have done anything, that you +didn't make sure and that you were too afraid!"--this commemoration +had ended by playing such a part of Nan's finally quite contracted +consciousness as to exclude everything else. + +At the time, somehow, he had made his terms with it; he had then more +urgent questions to meet than that of the poor creature's taste in +worrying pain; but actually it struck him--not the question, but the +fact itself of the taste--as the one thing left over from all that had +come and gone. So it was; nothing remained to him in the world, on the +bench of desolation, but the option of taking up that echo--together +with an abundance of free time for doing so. That he hadn't made sure of +what might and what mightn't have been done to him, that he had been +too afraid--had the proposition a possible bearing on his present +apprehension of things? To reply indeed he would have had to be able to +say what his present apprehension of things, left to itself, amounted +to; an uninspiring effort indeed he judged it, sunk to so poor a pitch +was his material of thought--though it might at last have been the feat +he sought to perform as he stared at the grey-green sea. + + + + +IV + +It was seldom he was disturbed in any form of sequestered speculation, +or that at his times of predilection, especially that of the long autumn +blankness between the season of trippers and the season of Bath-chairs, +there were westward stragglers enough to jar upon his settled sense of +priority. For himself his seat, the term of his walk, was consecrated; +it had figured to him for years as the last (though there were others, +not immediately near it, and differently disposed, that might have +aspired to the title); so that he could invidiously distinguish as he +approached, make out from a distance any accident of occupation, and +never draw nearer while that unpleasantness lasted. What he disliked +was to compromise on his tradition, whether for a man, a woman or a +connoodling couple; it was to idiots of this last composition he most +objected, he having sat there, in the past, alone, having sat there +interminably with Nan, having sat there with--well, with other women +when women, at hours of ease, could still care or count for him, but +having never shared the place with any shuffling or snuffling stranger. +It was a world of fidgets and starts, however, the world of his present +dreariness--he alone possessed in it, he seemed to make out, of the +secret, of the dignity of sitting still with one's fate; so that if +he took a turn about or rested briefly elsewhere even foolish +philanderers--though this would never have been his and Nan's way--ended +soon by some adjournment as visibly pointless as their sprawl. +Then, their backs turned, he would drop down on it, the bench of +desolation--which was what he, and he only, made it by sad adoption; +where, for that matter, moreover, once he had settled at his end, it +was marked that nobody else ever came to sit. He saw people, along the +Marina, take this liberty with other resting presences; but his own +struck them perhaps in general as either of too grim or just of too +dingy a vicinage. He might have affected the fellow-lounger as a man +evil, unsociable, possibly engaged in working out the idea of a +crime; or otherwise, more probably--for on the whole he surely looked +harmless--devoted to the worship of some absolutely unpractical remorse. + +On a certain October Saturday he had got off, as usual, early; but the +afternoon light, his pilgrimage drawing to its aim, could still show +him, at long range, the rare case of an established usurper. His impulse +was then, as by custom, to deviate a little and wait, all the more +that the occupant of the bench was a lady, and that ladies, when alone, +were--at that austere end of the varied frontal stretch--markedly +discontinuous; but he kept on at sight of this person's rising, while he +was still fifty yards off, and proceeding, her back turned, to the edge +of the broad terrace, the outer line of which followed the interspaced +succession of seats and was guarded by an iron rail from the abruptly +lower level of the beach. Here she stood before the sea, while our +friend on his side, recognising no reason to the contrary, sank into the +place she had quitted. There were other benches, eastward and off by the +course of the drive, for vague ladies. The lady indeed thus thrust upon +Herbert's vision might have struck an observer either as not quite vague +or as vague with a perverse intensity suggesting design. + +Not that our own observer at once thought of these things; he only took +in, and with no great interest, that the obtruded presence was a "real" +lady; that she was dressed--he noticed such matters--with a certain +elegance of propriety or intention of harmony; and that she remained +perfectly still for a good many minutes; so many in fact that he +presently ceased to heed her, and that as she wasn't straight before +him, but as far to the left as was consistent with his missing her +profile, he had turned himself to one of his sunsets again (though +it wasn't quite one of his best) and let it hold him for a time that +enabled her to alter her attitude and present a fuller view. Without +other movement, but her back now to the sea and her face to the odd +person who had appropriated her corner, she had taken a sustained +look at him before he was aware she had stirred. On that apprehension, +however, he became also promptly aware of her direct, her applied +observation. As his sense of this quickly increased he wondered who she +was and what she wanted--what, as it were, was the matter with her; it +suggested to him, the next thing, that she had, under some strange idea, +actually been waiting for him. Any idea about him to-day on the part of +any one could only be strange. + +Yes, she stood there with the ample width of the Marina between them, +but turned to him, for all the world, as to show frankly that she was +concerned with him. And she _was_--oh yes--a real lady: a middle-aged +person, of good appearance and of the best condition, in quiet but +"handsome" black, save for very fresh white kid gloves, and with a +pretty, dotty, becoming veil, predominantly white, adjusted to her +countenance; which through it somehow, even to his imperfect sight, +showed strong fine black brows and what he would have called on the spot +character. But she was pale; her black brows were the blacker behind +the flattering tissue; she still kept a hand, for support, on the +terrace-rail, while the other, at the end of an extended arm that had +an effect of rigidity, clearly pressed hard on the knob of a small and +shining umbrella, the lower extremity of whose stick was equally, was +sustainingly, firm on the walk. So this mature, qualified, important +person stood and looked at the limp, undistinguished--oh his values of +aspect now!--shabby man on the bench. + +It was extraordinary, but the fact of her interest, by immensely +surprising, by immediately agitating him, blinded him at first to her +identity and, for the space of his long stare, diverted him from it; +with which even then, when recognition did break, the sense of the +shock, striking inward, simply consumed itself in gaping stillness. He +sat there motionless and weak, fairly faint with surprise, and there +was no instant, in all the succession of so many, at which Kate Cookham +could have caught the special sign of his intelligence. Yet that she +did catch something he saw--for he saw her steady herself, by her +two supported hands, to meet it; while, after she had done so, a very +wonderful thing happened, of which he could scarce, later on, have made +a clear statement, though he was to think it over again and again. She +moved toward him, she reached him, she stood there, she sat down near +him, he merely passive and wonderstruck, unresentfully "impressed," +gaping and taking it in--and all as with an open allowance on the part +of each, so that they positively and quite intimately met in it, o the +impertinence for their case, this case that brought them again, +after horrible years, face to face, of the vanity, the profanity, the +impossibility, of anything between them but silence. + +Nearer to him, beside him at a considerable interval (oh she was +immensely considerate!) she presented him, in the sharp terms of +her transformed state--but thus the more amply, formally, +ceremoniously--with the reasons that would serve him best for not having +precipitately known her. She was simply another and a totally different +person, and the exhibition of it to which she had proceeded with this +solemn anxiety was all, obviously, for his benefit--once he had, as +he appeared to be doing, provisionally accepted her approach. He had +remembered her as inclined to the massive and disowned by the graceful; +but this was a spare, fine, worn, almost wasted lady--who had repaired +waste, it was true, however, with something he could only appreciate as +a rich accumulation of manner. She was strangely older, so far as that +went--marked by experience and as if many things had happened to +her; her face had suffered, to its improvement, contraction and +concentration; and if he had granted, of old and from the first, that +her eyes were remarkable, had they yet ever had for him this sombre +glow? Withal, something said, she had flourished--he felt it, wincing at +it, as that; she had had a life, a career, a history--something that +her present waiting air and nervous consciousness couldn't prevent his +noting there as a deeply latent assurance. She had flourished, she had +flourished--though to learn it after this fashion was somehow at the +same time not to feel she flaunted it. It wasn't thus execration that +she revived in him; she made in fact, exhibitively, as he could only +have put it, the matter of long ago irrelevant, and these extraordinary +minutes of their reconstituted relation--how many? how few?--addressed +themselves altogether to new possibilities. + +Still it after a little awoke in him as with the throb of a touched +nerve that his own very attitude was supplying a connection; he knew +presently that he wouldn't have had her go, _couldn't_ have made a +sign to her for it--which was what she had been uncertain of--without +speaking to him; and that therefore he was, as at the other, the hideous +time, passive to whatever she might do. She was even yet, she was +always, in possession of him; she had known how and where to find him +and had appointed that he should see her, and, though he had never +dreamed it was again to happen to him, he was meeting it already as if +it might have been the only thing that the least humanly _could_. +Yes, he had come back there to flop, by long custom, upon the bench of +desolation _as_ the man in the whole place, precisely, to whom nothing +worth more than tuppence could happen; whereupon, in the grey desert of +his consciousness, the very earth had suddenly opened and flamed. With +this, further, it came over him that he hadn't been prepared and +that his wretched appearance must show it. He wasn't fit to receive +a visit--any visit; a flush for his felt misery, in the light of her +opulence, broke out in his lean cheeks. But if he coloured he sat as he +was--she should at least, as a visitor, be satisfied. His eyes only, at +last, turned from her and resumed a little their gaze at the sea. That, +however, didn't relieve him, and he perpetrated in the course of another +moment the odd desperate gesture of raising both his hands to his face +and letting them, while he pressed it to them, cover and guard it. It +was as he held them there that she at last spoke. + +"I'll go away if you wish me to." And then she waited a moment. "I +mean now--now that you've seen I'm here. I wanted you to know it, and I +thought of writing--I was afraid of our meeting accidentally. Then I was +afraid that if I wrote you might refuse. So I thought of this way--as +I knew you must come out here." She went on with pauses, giving him a +chance to make a sign. "I've waited several days. But I'll do what you +wish. Only I should like in that case to come back." Again she stopped; +but strange was it to him that he wouldn't have made her break off. She +held him in boundless wonder. "I came down--I mean I came from town--on +purpose. I'm staying on still, and I've a great patience and will give +you time. Only may I say it's important? Now that I do see you," she +brought out in the same way, "I see how inevitable it was--I mean that I +should have wanted to come. But you must feel about it as you can," she +wound up--"till you get used to the idea." + +She spoke so for accommodation, for discretion, for some ulterior view +already expressed in her manner, that, after taking well in, from behind +his hands, that this was her very voice--oh ladylike!--heard, and heard +in deprecation of displeasure, after long years again, he uncovered his +face and freshly met her eyes. More than ever he couldn't have known +her. Less and less remained of the figure all the facts of which had +long ago so hardened for him. She was a handsome, grave, authoritative, +but refined and, as it were, physically rearranged person--she, the +outrageous vulgarity of whose prime assault had kept him shuddering so +long as a shudder was in him. That atrocity in her was what everything +had been built on, but somehow, all strangely, it was slipping from him; +so that, after the oddest fashion conceivable, when he felt he mustn't +let her go, it was as if he were putting out his hand to save the past, +the hideous real unalterable past, exactly as she had been the cause of +its being and the cause of his undergoing it. He should have been too +awfully "sold" if he wasn't going to have been right about her. + +"I don't mind," he heard himself at last say. Not to mind had seemed for +the instant the length he was prepared to go; but he was afterward aware +of how soon he must have added: "You've come on purpose to see me?" He +was on the point of putting to her further: "What then do you want of +me?" But he would keep--yes, in time--from appearing to show he cared. +If he showed he cared, where then would be his revenge? So he was +already, within five minutes, thinking his revenge uncomfortably over +instead of just comfortably knowing it. What came to him, at any +rate, as they actually fell to talk, was that, with such precautions, +considerations, reduplications of consciousness, almost avowed feelings +of her way on her own part, and light fingerings of his chords of +sensibility, she was understanding, she _had_ understood, more things +than all the years, up to this strange eventide, had given him an +inkling of. They talked, they went on--he hadn't let her retreat, to +whatever it committed him and however abjectly it did so; yet keeping +off and off, dealing with such surface facts as involved ancient +acquaintance but held abominations at bay. The recognition, the +attestation that she _had_ come down for him, that there would be +reasons, that she had even hovered and watched, assured herself a little +of his habits (which she managed to speak of as if, on their present +ampler development, they were much to be deferred to), detained them +enough to make vivid how, listen as stiffly or as serenely as he might, +she sat there in fear, just as she had so stood there at first, and that +her fear had really to do with her calculation of some sort of chance +with him. What chance could it possibly be? Whatever it might have +done, on this prodigious showing, with Kate Cookham, it made the present +witness to the state of his fortunes simply exquisite: he ground his +teeth secretly together as he saw he should have to take _that_. For +what did it mean but that she would have liked to pity him if she could +have done it with safety? Ah, however, he must give her no measure of +safety! + +By the time he had remarked, with that idea, that she probably saw few +changes about them there that weren't for the worse--the place was going +down, down and down, so fast that goodness knew where it would stop--and +had also mentioned that in spite of this he himself remained faithful, +with all its faults loving it still; by the time he had, after that +fashion, superficially indulged her, adding a few further light and +just sufficiently dry reflections on local matters, the disappearance of +landmarks and important persons, the frequency of gales, the low policy +of the town-council in playing down to cheap excursionists: by the time +he had so acquitted himself, and she had observed, of her own motion, +that she was staying at the Royal, which he knew for the time-honoured, +the conservative and exclusive hotel, he had made out for himself +one thing at least, the amazing fact that he had been landed by his +troubles, at the end of time, in a "social relation," of all things +in the world, and how of that luxury he was now having unprecedented +experience. He had but once in his life had his nose in the Royal, on +the occasion of his himself delivering a parcel during some hiatus in +his succession of impossible small boys and meeting in the hall the +lady who had bought of him, in the morning, a set of Crabbe, largely, he +flattered himself, under the artful persuasion of his acute remarks +on that author, gracefully associated by him, in this colloquy, he +remembered, with a glance at Charles Lamb as well, and who went off in +a day or two without settling, though he received her cheque from London +three or four months later. + +_That_ hadn't been a social relation; and truly, deep within his appeal +to himself to be remarkable, to be imperturbable and impenetrable, to +be in fact quite incomparable now, throbbed the intense vision of his +drawing out and draining dry the sensation he had begun to taste. He +would do it, moreover--that would be the refinement of his art--not only +without the betraying anxiety of a single question, but just even by +seeing her flounder (since she must, in a vagueness deeply disconcerting +to her) as to her real effect on him. She was distinctly floundering +by the time he had brought her--it had taken ten minutes--down to a +consciousness of absurd and twaddling topics, to the reported precarious +state, for instance, of the syndicate running the Bijou Theatre at the +Pierhead--all as an admonition that she might want him to want to know +why she was thus waiting on him, might want it for all she was +worth, before he had ceased to be so remarkable as not to ask her. He +didn't--and this assuredly was wondrous enough--want to do anything +worse to her than let her flounder; but he was willing to do that so +long as it mightn't prevent his seeing at least where _he_ was. He +seemed still to see where he was even at the minute that followed her +final break-off, clearly intended to be resolute, from make-believe +talk. + +"I wonder if I might prevail on you to come to tea with me to-morrow at +five." + +He didn't so much as answer it--though he could scarcely believe his +ears. To-morrow was Sunday, and the proposal referred, clearly, to the +custom of "five-o'clock" tea, known to him only by the contemporary +novel of manners and the catchy advertisement of table-linen. He had +never in his life been present at any such luxurious rite, but he was +offering practical indifference to it as a false mark of his sense that +his social relation had already risen to his chin. "I gave up my very +modest, but rather interesting little old book business, perhaps you +know, ever so long ago." + +She floundered so that she could say nothing--meet _that_ with no +possible word; all the less too that his tone, casual and colourless, +wholly defied any apprehension of it as a reverse. Silence only came; +but after a moment she returned to her effort. "If you _can_ come I +shall be at home. To see you otherwise than thus was in fact what, as +I tell you, I came down for. But I leave it," she returned, "to your +feeling." + +He had at this, it struck him, an inspiration; which he required however +a minute or two to decide to carry out; a minute or two during which +the shake of his foot over his knee became an intensity of fidget. "Of +course I know I still owe you a large sum of money. If it's about _that_ +you wish to see me," he went on, "I may as well tell you just here that +I shall be able to meet my full obligation in the future as little as +I've met it in the past. I can never," said Herbert Dodd, "pay up that +balance." + +He had looked at her while he spoke, but on finishing looked off at the +sea again and continued to agitate his foot. He knew now what he had +done and why; and the sense of her fixed dark eyes on him during his +speech and after didn't alter his small contentment. Yet even when she +still said nothing he didn't turn round; he simply kept his corner as +if _that_ were his point made, should it even be the last word between +them. It might have been, for that matter, from the way in which she +presently rose, gathering herself, her fine umbrella and her very small +smart reticule, in the construction of which shining gilt much figured, +well together, and, after standing another instant, moved across to the +rail of the terrace as she had done before and remained, as before, with +her back to him, though this time, it well might be, under a different +fear. A quarter of an hour ago she hadn't tried him, and had had that +anxiety; now that she had tried him it wasn't easier--but she was +thinking what she still could do. He left her to think--nothing in fact +more interesting than the way she might decide had ever happened to him; +but it was a part of this also that as she turned round and came nearer +again he didn't rise, he gave her no help. If she got any, at least, +from his looking up at her only, meeting her fixed eyes once more in +silence, that was her own affair. "You must think," she said--"you +must take all your time, but I shall be at home." She left it to him +thus--she insisted, with her idea, on leaving him something too. And +on her side as well she showed an art--which resulted, after another +instant, in his having to rise to his feet. He flushed afresh as he did +it--it exposed him so shabbily the more; and now if she took him in, +with each of his seedy items, from head to foot, he didn't and couldn't +and wouldn't know it, attaching his eyes hard and straight to something +quite away from them. + +It stuck in his throat to say he'd come, but she had so curious a way +with her that he still less could say he wouldn't, and in a moment had +taken refuge in something that was neither. "Are you married?"--he put +it to her with that plainness, though it had seemed before he said it to +do more for him than while she waited before replying. + +"No, I'm not married," she said; and then had another wait that might +have amounted to a question of what this had to do with it. + +He surely couldn't have told her; so that he had recourse, a little +poorly as he felt, but to an "Oh!" that still left them opposed. He +turned away for it--that is for the poorness, which, lingering in the +air, had almost a vulgar platitude; and when he presently again wheeled +about she had fallen off as for quitting him, only with a pause, once +more, for a last look. It was all a bit awkward, but he had another +happy thought, which consisted in his silently raising his hat as for a +sign of dignified dismissal. He had cultivated of old, for the occasions +of life, the right, the discriminated bow, and now, out of the grey +limbo of the time when he could care for such things, this flicker of +propriety leaped and worked She might, for that matter, herself have +liked it; since, receding further, only with her white face toward him, +she paid it the homage of submission. He remained dignified, and she +almost humbly went. + + + + +V + +Nothing in the world, on the Sunday afternoon, could have prevented +him from going; he was not after all destitute of three or four such +articles of clothing as, if they wouldn't particularly grace the +occasion, wouldn't positively dishonour it. That deficiency might have +kept him away, but no voice of the spirit, no consideration of pride. It +sweetened his impatience in fact--for he fairly felt it a long time +to wait--that his pride would really most find its account in his +acceptance of these conciliatory steps. From the moment he could put +it in that way--that he couldn't refuse to hear what she might have, so +very elaborately, to say for herself--he ought certainly to be at his +ease; in illustration of which he whistled odd snatches to himself as +he hung about on that cloud-dappled autumn Sunday, a mild private +minstrelsy that his lips hadn't known since when? The interval of the +twenty-four hours, made longer by a night of many more revivals than +oblivions, had in fact dragged not a little; in spite of which, however, +our extremely brushed-up and trimmed and polished friend knew an +unprecedented flutter as he was ushered, at the Royal Hotel, into Miss +Cookham's sitting-room. Yes, it was an adventure, and he had never had +an adventure in his life; the term, for him, was essentially a term +of high appreciation--such as disqualified for that figure, under due +criticism, every single passage of his past career. + +What struck him at the moment as qualifying in the highest degree this +actual passage was the fact that at no great distance from his hostess +in the luxurious room, as he apprehended it, in which the close of day +had begun to hang a few shadows, sat a gentleman who rose as she rose, +and whose name she at once mentioned to him. He had for Herbert Dodd all +the air of a swell, the gentleman--rather red-faced and bald-headed, but +moustachioed, waistcoated, necktied to the highest pitch, with an effect +of chains and rings, of shining teeth in a glassily monocular smile; a +wondrous apparition to have been asked to "meet" him, as in contemporary +fiction, or for him to have been asked to meet. "Captain Roper, Mr. +Herbert Dodd"--their entertainer introduced them, yes; but with a sequel +immediately afterward more disconcerting apparently to Captain Roper +himself even than to her second and more breathless visitor; a "Well +then, good-bye till the next time," with a hand thrust straight out, +which allowed the personage so addressed no alternative but to lay aside +his teacup, even though Herbert saw there was a good deal left in it, +and glare about him for his hat. Miss Cookham had had her tea-tray on a +small table before her, she had served Captain Roper while waiting +for Mr. Dodd; but she simply dismissed him now, with a high sweet +unmistakable decision, a knowledge of what she was about, as our hero +would have called it, which enlarged at a stroke the latter's view of +the number of different things and sorts of things, in the sphere of the +manners and ways of those living at their ease, that a social relation +would put before one. Captain Roper would have liked to remain, would +have liked more tea, but Kate signified in this direct fashion that +she had had enough of him. Herbert had seen things, in his walk of +life--rough things, plenty; but never things smoothed with that especial +smoothness, carried out as it were by the fine form of Captain Roper's +own retreat, which included even a bright convulsed leave-taking +cognisance of the plain, vague individual, of no lustre at all and with +the very low-class guard of an old silver watch buttoned away under an +ill-made coat, to whom he was sacrificed. + +It came to Herbert as he left the place a shade less remarkable--though +there was still wonder enough and to spare--that he had been even +publicly and designedly sacrificed; exactly so that, as the door closed +behind him, Kate Cookham, standing there to wait for it, could seem to +say, across the room, to the friend of her youth, only by the expression +of her fine eyes: "There--see what I do for you!" "For" him--that was +the extraordinary thing, and not less so that he was already, within +three minutes, after this fashion, taking it in as by the intensity of a +new light; a light that was one somehow with this rich inner air of +the plush-draped and much-mirrored hotel, where the fire-glow and +the approach of evening confirmed together the privacy, and the loose +curtains at the wide window were parted for a command of his old +lifelong Parade--the field of life so familiar to him from below and in +the wind and the wet, but which he had never in all the long years hung +over at this vantage. + +"He's an acquaintance, but a bore," his hostess explained in respect to +Captain Roper. "He turned up yesterday, but I didn't invite him, and I +had said to him before you came in that I was expecting a gentleman with +whom I should wish to be alone. I go quite straight at my idea that way, +as a rule; but you know," she now strikingly went on, "how straight I +go. And he had had," she added, "his tea." + +Dodd had been looking all round--had taken in, with the rest, the +brightness, the distinguished elegance, as he supposed it, of the +tea-service with which she was dealing and the variously tinted appeal +of certain savoury edibles on plates. "Oh but he _hadn't_ had his tea!" +he heard himself the next moment earnestly reply; which speech had at +once betrayed, he was then quickly aware, the candour of his interest, +the unsophisticated state that had survived so many troubles. If he was +so interested how could he be proud, and if he was proud how could he be +so interested? + +He had made her at any rate laugh outright, and was further conscious, +for this, both that it was the first time of that since their new +meeting, and that it didn't affect him as harsh. It affected him, +however, as free, for she replied at once, still smiling and as a part +of it: "Oh, I think we shall get on!" + +This told him he had made some difference for her, shown her the way, +or something like it, that she hadn't been sure of yesterday; which +moreover wasn't what he had intended--he had come armed for showing her +nothing; so that after she had gone on with the same gain of gaiety, +"You must at any rate comfortably have yours," there was but one answer +for him to make. + +His eyes played again over the tea-things--they seemed strangely to help +him; but he didn't sit down. + +"I've come, as you see--but I've come, please, to understand; and if you +require to be alone with me, and if I break bread with you, it seems to +me I should first know exactly where I am and to what you suppose I so +commit myself." He had thought it out and over and over, particularly +the turn about breaking bread; though perhaps he didn't give it, in +her presence--this was impossible, her presence altered so many +things--quite the full sound or the weight he had planned. + +But it had none the less come to his aid--it had made her perfectly +grave. "You commit yourself to nothing. You're perfectly free. It's only +I who commit myself." + +On which, while she stood there as if all handsomely and deferentially +waiting for him to consider and decide, he would have been naturally +moved to ask her what she committed herself then _to_--so moved, that +is, if he hadn't, before saying it, thought more sharply still of +something better. "Oh, that's another thing." + +"Yes, that's another thing," Kate Cookham returned. To which she added, +"So _now_ won't you sit down?" He sank with deliberation into the seat +from which Captain Roper had risen; she went back to her own and while +she did so spoke again. "I'm _not_ free. At least," she said over her +tea-tray, "I'm free only for this." + +Everything was there before them and around them, everything massive and +shining, so that he had instinctively fallen back in his chair as for +the wondering, the resigned acceptance of it; where her last words +stirred in him a sense of odd deprecation. Only for "that"? "That" was +everything, at this moment, to his long inanition, and the effect, as if +she had suddenly and perversely mocked him, was to press the spring of a +protest. "Isn't 'this' then riches?" + +"Riches?" she smiled over, handing him his cup--for she had triumphed in +having struck from him a question. + +"I mean haven't you a lot of money?" He didn't care now that it was out; +his cup was in his hand, and what was that but proved interest? He had +succumbed to the social relation. + +"Yes, I've money. Of course you wonder--but I've wanted you to wonder. +It was to make you take that in that I came. So now you know," she said, +leaning back where she faced him, but in a straighter chair and with her +arms closely folded, after a fashion characteristic of her, as for some +control of her nerves. + +"You came to show you've money?" + +"That's one of the things. Not a lot--not even very much. But enough," +said Kate Cookham. + +"Enough? I should think so!" he again couldn't help a bit crudely +exhaling. + +"Enough for what I wanted. I don't always live like this--not at all. +But I came to the best hotel on purpose. I wanted to show you I could. +Now," she asked, "do you understand?" + +"Understand?" He only gaped. + +She threw up her loosed arms, which dropped again beside her. "I did it +_for_ you--I did it _for_ you!" + +"'For' me----?" + +"What I did--what I did here of old." + +He stared, trying to see it. "When you made me pay you?" + +"The Two Hundred and Seventy--all I could get from you, as you reminded +me yesterday, so that I had to give up the rest It was my idea," she +went on--"it was my idea." + +"To bleed me quite to death?" Oh, his ice was broken now! + +"To make you raise money--since you could, you _could_. You did, you +did--so what better proof?" + +His hands fell from what he had touched; he could only stare--her own +manner for it was different now too. "I did. I did indeed--!" And the +woful weak simplicity of it, which seemed somehow all that was left him, +fell even on his own ear. + +"Well then, here it is--it isn't lost!" she returned with a graver face. + +"'Here' it is," he gasped, "my poor agonised old money--my blood?" + +"Oh, it's _my_ blood too, you must know now!" She held up her head as +not before--as for her right to speak of the thing to-day most precious +to her. "I took it, but this--my being here this way--is what I've made +of it! That was the idea I had!" + +Her "ideas," as things to boast of, staggered him. "To have everything +in the world, like this, at my wretched expense?" + +She had folded her arms back again--grasping each elbow she sat firm; +she knew he could see, and had known well from the first, what she had +wanted to say, difficult, monstrous though it might be. "No more than +at my own--but to do something with your money that you'd never do +yourself." + +"Myself, myself?" he wonderingly wailed. "Do you know--or don't +you?--what my life has been?" + +She waited, and for an instant, though the light in the room had failed +a little more and would soon be mainly that of the flaring lamps on the +windy Parade, he caught from her dark eye a silver gleam of impatience. +"You've suffered and you've worked--which, God knows, is what I've done! +_Of course_ you've suffered," she said--"you inevitably had to! We have +to," she went on, "to do or to be or to get anything." + +"And pray what have I done or been or got?" Herbert Dodd found it almost +desolately natural to demand. + +It made her cover him again as with all she was thinking of. "Can you +imagine nothing, or can't you conceive--?" And then as her challenge +struck deeper in, deeper down than it had yet reached, and with the +effect of a rush of the blood to his face, "It was _for_ you, it was +_for_ you!" she again broke out--"and for what or whom else could it +have been?" + +He saw things to a tune now that made him answer straight: "I thought at +one time it might be for Bill Frankle." + +"Yes--that was the way you treated me," Miss Cookham as plainly replied. + +But he let this pass; his thought had already got away from it. "What +good then--its having been for me--has that ever done me?" + +"Doesn't it do you any good _now?_" his friend returned. To which she +added, with another dim play of her tormented brightness, before he +could speak: "But if you won't even have your tea----!" + +He had in fact touched nothing and, if he could have explained, would +have pleaded very veraciously that his appetite, keen when he came in, +had somehow suddenly failed. It was beyond eating or drinking, what she +seemed to want him to take from her. So if he looked, before him, over +the array, it was to say, very grave and graceless: "Am I to understand +that you offer to repay me?" + +"I offer to repay you with interest, Herbert Dodd"--and her emphasis of +the great word was wonderful. + +It held him in his place a minute, and held his eyes upon her; after +which, agitated too sharply to sit still, he pushed back his chair and +stood up. It was as if mere distress or dismay at first worked in him, +and was in fact a wave of deep and irresistible emotion which made him, +on his feet, sway as in a great trouble and then, to correct it, +throw himself stiffly toward the window, where he stood and looked out +unseeing. The road, the wide terrace beyond, the seats, the eternal sea +beyond that, the lighted lamps now flaring in the October night-wind, +with the few dispersed people abroad at the tea-hour; these things, +meeting and melting into the firelit hospitality at his elbow--or was it +that portentous amenity that melted into _them?_--seemed to form round +him and to put before him, all together, the strangest of circles +and the newest of experiences, in which the unforgettable and the +unimaginable were confoundingly mixed. "Oh, oh, oh!"--he could only +almost howl for it. + +And then, while a thick blur for some moments mantled everything, +he knew she had got up, that she stood watching him, allowing for +everything, again all "cleverly" patient with him, and he heard her +speak again as with studied quietness and clearness. "I wanted to take +care of you--it was what I first wanted--and what you first consented +to. I'd have done it, oh I'd have done it, I'd have loved you and helped +you and guarded you, and you'd have had no trouble, no bad blighting +ruin, in all your easy, yes, just your quite jolly and comfortable life. +I showed you and proved to you this--I brought it home to you, as I +fondly fancied, and it made me briefly happy. You swore you cared for +me, you wrote it and made me believe it--you pledged me your honour +and your faith. Then you turned and changed suddenly from one day to +another; everything altered, you broke your vows, you as good as told me +you only wanted it off. You faced me with dislike, and in fact tried not +to face me at all; you behaved as if you hated me--you had seen a girl, +of great beauty, I admit, who made me a fright and a bore." + +This brought him straight round. "No, Kate Cookham." + +"Yes, Herbert Dodd." She but shook her head, calmly and nobly, in the +now gathered dusk, and her memories and her cause and her character--or +was it only her arch-subtlety, her line and her "idea"?--gave her an +extraordinary large assurance. + +She had touched, however, the treasure of his own case--his terrible +own case that began to live again at once by the force of her talking of +hers, and which could always all cluster about his great asseveration. +"No, no, never, never; I had never seen her then and didn't dream of +her; so that when you yourself began to be harsh and sharp with me, +and to seem to want to quarrel, I could have but one idea--which was +an appearance you didn't in the least, as I saw it then, account for or +disprove." + +"An appearance--?" Kate desired, as with high astonishment, to know +which one. + +"How _shouldn't_ I have supposed you really to care for Bill +Frankle?--as thoroughly believing the motive of your claim for my money +to be its help to your marrying him, since you couldn't marry me. I was +only surprised when, time passing, I made out that that hadn't happened; +and perhaps," he added the next instant with something of a conscious +lapse from the finer style, "hadn't been in question." + +She had listened to this only staring, and she was silent after he +had said it, so silent for some instants that while he considered her +something seemed to fail him, much as if he had thrown out his foot for +a step and not found the place to rest it. He jerked round to the window +again, and then she answered, but without passion unless it was that of +her weariness for something stupid and forgiven in him, "Oh, the blind, +the pitiful folly!"--to which, as it might perfectly have applied to her +own behaviour, he returned nothing. She had moreover at once gone on. +"Have it then that there wasn't much to do--between your finding that +you loathed me for another woman or discovering only, when it came to +the point, that you loathed me quite enough for myself." + +Which, as she put it in that immensely effective fashion, he recognised +that he must just unprotestingly and not so very awkwardly--not so +_very!_--take from her; since, whatever he had thus come to her for, it +wasn't to perjure himself with any pretence that, "another woman" or no +other woman, he hadn't, for years and years, abhorred her. Now he was +taking tea with her--or rather, literally, seemed not to be; but this +made no difference, and he let her express it as she would while he +distinguished a man he knew, Charley Coote, outside on the Parade, under +favour of the empty hour and one of the flaring lamps, making up to a +young woman with whom (it stuck out grotesquely in his manner) he had +never before conversed. Dodd's own position was that of acquiescing in +this recall of what had so bitterly been--but he hadn't come back to +her, of himself, to stir up, to recall or to recriminate, and for _her_ +it could but be the very lesson of her whole present act that if she +touched anything she touched everything. Soon enough she _was_ indeed, +and all overwhelmingly, touching everything--with a hand of which the +boldness grew. + +"But I didn't let _that_, even, make a difference in what I +wanted--which was all," she said, "and had only and passionately been, +to take care of you. I had _no_ money whatever--nothing then of my own, +not a penny to come by anyhow; so it wasn't with mine I could do it. But +I could do it with yours," she amazingly wound up--"if I could once get +yours out of you." + +He faced straight about again--his eyebrows higher than they had ever +been in his life. "Mine? What penny of it was mine? What scrap beyond a +bare, mean little living had I ever pretended to have?" + +She held herself still a minute, visibly with force; only her eyes +consciously attached to the seat of a chair the back of which her +hands, making it tilt toward her a little, grasped as for support. +"You pretended to have enough to marry me--and that was all I afterward +claimed of you when you wouldn't." + +He was on the point of retorting that he had absolutely pretended to +nothing--least of all to the primary desire that such a way of stating +it fastened on him; he was on the point for ten seconds of giving +her full in the face: "I never _had_ any such dream till you +yourself--infatuated with me as, frankly, you on the whole appeared to +be--got round me and muddled me up and made me behave as if in a way +that went against the evidence of my senses." But he was to feel as +quickly that, whatever the ugly, the spent, the irrecoverable truth, he +might better have bitten his tongue off: there beat on him there this +strange and other, this so prodigiously different beautiful and dreadful +truth that no far remembrance and no abiding ache of his own could +wholly falsify, and that was indeed all out with her next words. +"That--_using_ it for you and using you yourself for your own +future--was my motive. I've led my life, which has been an affair, +I assure you; and, as I've told you without your quite seeming to +understand, I've brought everything fivefold back to you." + +The perspiration broke out on his forehead. "Everything's mine?" he +quavered as for the deep piercing pain of it. + +"Everything!" said Kate Cookham. + +So it told him how she had loved him--but with the tremendous effect +at once of its only glaring out at him from the whole thing that it was +verily she, a thousand times over, who, in the exposure of his youth and +his vanity, had, on the bench of desolation, the scene of yesterday's +own renewal, left for him no forward steps to take. It hung there for +him tragically vivid again, the hour she had first found him sequestered +and accessible after making his acquaintance at his shop. And from this, +by a succession of links that fairly clicked to his ear as with their +perfect fitting, the fate and the pain and the payment of others stood +together in a great grim order. Everything there then was _his_--to +make him ask what had been Nan's, poor Nan's of the constant question +of whether he need have collapsed. She was before him, she was between +them, his little dead dissatisfied wife; across all whose final woe and +whose lowly grave he was to reach out, it appeared, to take gifts. He +saw them too, the gifts; saw them--she bristled with them--in his actual +companion's brave and sincere and authoritative figure, her strangest of +demonstrations. But the other appearance was intenser, as if their ghost +had waved wild arms; so that half a minute hadn't passed before the one +poor thing that remained of Nan, and that yet thus became a quite +mighty and momentous poor thing, was sitting on his lips as for its sole +opportunity. + +"Can you give me your word of honour that I mightn't, under decent +advice, have defied you?" + +It made her turn very white; but now that she had said what she _had_ +said she could still hold up her head. "Certainly you might have defied +me, Herbert Dodd." + +"They would have told me you had no legal case?" + +Well, if she was pale she was bold. "You talk of decent advice--!" She +broke off, there was too much to say, and all needless. What she said +instead was: "They would have told you I had nothing." + +"I didn't so much as ask," her sad visitor remarked. + +"Of course you didn't so much as ask." + +"I couldn't be so outrageously vulgar," he went on. + +"_I_ could, by God's help!" said Kate Cookham. + +"Thank you." He had found at his command a tone that made him feel more +gentlemanlike than he had ever felt in his life or should doubtless ever +feel again. It might have been enough--but somehow as they stood there +with this immense clearance between them it wasn't. The clearance was +like a sudden gap or great bleak opening through which there blew upon +them a deadly chill. Too many things had fallen away, too many new +rolled up and over him, and they made something within shake him to his +base. It upset the full vessel, and though she kept her eyes on him +he let that consequence come, bursting into tears, weakly crying there +before her even as he had cried to himself in the hour of his youth when +she had made him groundlessly fear. She turned away then--_that_ she +couldn't watch, and had presently flung herself on the sofa and, all +responsively wailing, buried her own face on the cushioned arm. So for +a minute their smothered sobs only filled the room. But he made out, +through this disorder, where he had put down his hat; his stick and his +new tan-coloured gloves--they had cost two-and-thruppence and would +have represented sacrifices--were on the chair beside it He picked these +articles up and all silently and softly--gasping, that is, but quite on +tiptoe--reached the door and let himself out. + + + + +VI + +Off there on the bench of desolation a week later she made him a more +particular statement, which it had taken the remarkably tense interval +to render possible. After leaving her at the hotel that last Sunday he +had gone forth in his reaggravated trouble and walked straight before +him, in the teeth of the west wind, close to the iron rails of the +stretched Marina and with his telltale face turned from persons +occasionally met, and toward the surging sea. At the Land's End, even in +the confirmed darkness and the perhaps imminent big blow, his immemorial +nook, small shelter as it yielded, had again received him; and it was +in the course of this heedless session, no doubt, where the agitated air +had nothing to add to the commotion within him, that he began to look +his extraordinary fortune a bit straighter in the face and see it +confess itself at once a fairy-tale and a nightmare That, visibly, +confoundingly, she was still attached to him (attached in fact was a +mild word!) and that the unquestionable proof of it was in this offered +pecuniary salve, of the thickest composition, for his wounds and sores +and shames--these things were the fantastic fable, the tale of money +in handfuls, that he seemed to have only to stand there and swallow +and digest and feel himself full-fed by; but the whole of the rest +was nightmare, and most of all nightmare his having thus to thank one +through whom Nan and his little girls had known torture. + +He didn't care for himself now, and this unextinguished and apparently +inextinguishable charm by which he had held her was a fact incredibly +romantic; but he gazed with a longer face than he had ever had for +anything in the world at his potential acceptance of a great bouncing +benefit from the person he intimately, if even in a manner indirectly, +associated with the conditions to which his lovely wife and his children +(who would have been so lovely too) had pitifully succumbed. He had +accepted the social relation--which meant he had taken even that on +trial--without knowing what it so dazzlingly masked; for a social +relation it had become with a vengeance when it drove him about the +place as now at his hours of freedom (and he actually and recklessly +took, all demoralised and unstrung and unfit either for work or for +anything else, other liberties that would get him into trouble) under +this queer torment of irreconcilable things, a bewildered consciousness +of tenderness and patience and cruelty, of great evident mystifying +facts that were as little to be questioned as to be conceived or +explained, and that were yet least, withal, to be lost sight of. + +On that Sunday night he had wandered wild, incoherently ranging and +throbbing, but this became the law of his next days as well, since he +lacked more than ever all other resort or refuge and had nowhere to +carry, to deposit, or contractedly let loose and lock up, as it were, +his swollen consciousness, which fairly split in twain the raw shell of +his sordid little boarding-place. The arch of the sky and the spread of +sea and shore alone gave him space; he could roam with himself anywhere, +in short, far or near--he could only never take himself back. That +certitude--that this was impossible to him even should she wait there +among her plushes and bronzes ten years--was the thing he kept +closest clutch of; it did wonders for what he would have called his +self-respect. Exactly as he had left her so he would stand off--even +though at moments when he pulled up sharp somewhere to put himself an +intensest question his heart almost stood still. The days of the week +went by, and as he had left her she stayed; to the extent, that is, of +his having neither sight nor sound of her, and of the failure of +every sign. It took nerve, he said, not to return to her, even for +curiosity--since how, after all, in the name of wonder, had she invested +the fruits of her extortion to such advantage, there being no chapter +of all the obscurity of the years to beat that for queer-ness? But +he dropped, tired to death, on benches, half a dozen times an +evening--exactly on purpose to recognise that the nerve required was +just the nerve he had. + +As the days without a token from her multiplied he came in as well for +hours--and these indeed mainly on the bench of desolation--of sitting +stiff and stark in presence of the probability that he had lost +everything for ever. When he passed the Royal he never turned an +eyelash, and when he met Captain Roper on the Front, three days after +having been introduced to him, he "cut him dead"--another privileged +consequence of a social relation--rather than seem to himself to make +the remotest approach to the question of whether Miss Cookham had left +Properley. He had cut people in the days of his life before, just as +he had come to being himself cut--since there had been no time for +him wholly without one or other face of that necessity--but had never +effected such a severance as of this rare connection, which helped to +give him thus the measure of his really precious sincerity. If he had +lost what had hovered before him he had lost it, his only tribute to +which proposition was to grind his teeth with one of those "scrunches," +as he would have said, of which the violence fairly reached his ear. It +wouldn't make him lift a finger, and in fact if Kate had simply +taken herself off on the Tuesday or the Wednesday she would have been +reabsorbed again into the darkness from which she had emerged--and +no lifting of fingers, the unspeakable chapter closed, would evermore +avail. That at any rate was the kind of man he still was--even after all +that had come and gone, and even if for a few dazed hours certain things +had seemed pleasant. The dazed hours had passed, the surge of the old +bitterness had dished him (shouldn't he have been shamed if it hadn't?), +and he might sit there as before, as always, with nothing at all on +earth to look to. He had therefore wrongfully believed himself to be +degraded; and the last word about him would be that he _couldn't_ then, +it appeared, sink to vulgarity as he had tried to let his miseries make +him. + +And yet on the next Sunday morning, face to face with him again at the +Land's End, what she very soon came to was: "As if I believed you didn't +_know_ by what cord you hold me!" Absolutely too, and just that morning +in fact, above all, he wouldn't, he quite couldn't have taken his solemn +oath that he hadn't a sneaking remnant, as he might have put it to +himself--a remnant of faith in tremendous things still to come of their +interview. The day was sunny and breezy, the sea of a cold purple; he +wouldn't go to church as he mostly went of Sunday mornings, that being +in its way too a social relation--and not least when two-and-thruppenny +tan-coloured gloves were new; which indeed he had the art of keeping +them for ages. Yet he would dress himself as he scarce mustered +resources for even to figure on the fringe of Society, local and +transient, at St. Bernard's, and in this trim he took his way westward; +occupied largely, as he went, it might have seemed to any person +pursuing the same course and happening to observe him, in a fascinated +study of the motions of his shadow, the more or less grotesque shape +projected, in front of him and mostly a bit to the right, over the +blanched asphalt of the Parade and dandling and dancing at such a rate, +shooting out and then contracting, that, viewed in themselves, its +eccentricities might have formed the basis of an interesting challenge: +"Find the state of mind, guess the nature of the agitation, possessing +the person so remarkably represented!" Herbert Dodd, for that matter, +might have been himself attempting to make by the sun's sharp aid some +approach to his immediate horoscope. + +It had at any rate been thus put before him that the dandling and +dancing of his image occasionally gave way to perfect immobility, when +he stopped and kept his eyes on it. "Suppose she should come, suppose +she _should!_" it is revealed at least to ourselves that he had at +these moments audibly breathed--breathed with the intensity of an arrest +between hope and fear. It had glimmered upon him from early, with the +look of the day, that, given all else that could happen, this would be +rather, as he put it, in her line; and the possibility lived for him, as +he proceeded, to the tune of a suspense almost sickening. It was, from +one small stage of his pilgrimage to another, the "For ever, never!" +of the sentimental case the playmates of his youth used to pretend +to settle by plucking the petals of a daisy. But it came to his truly +turning faint--so "queer" he felt--when, at the gained point of the +long stretch from which he could always tell, he arrived within positive +sight of his immemorial goal. His seat was taken and she was keeping it +for him--it could only be _she_ there in possession; whereby it shone +out for Herbert Dodd that if he hadn't been quite sure of her recurrence +she had at least been quite sure of his. _That_ pulled him up to some +purpose, where recognition began for them--or to the effect, in other +words, of his pausing to judge if he could bear, for the sharpest note +of their intercourse, this inveterate demonstration of her making him do +what she liked. What settled the question for him then--and just +while they avowedly watched each other, over the long interval, before +closing, as if, on either side, for the major advantage--what settled it +was this very fact that what she liked she liked so terribly. If it were +simply to "use" him, as she had said the last time, and no matter to +the profit of which of them she called it, one might let it go for that; +since it could make her wait over, day after day, in that fashion, and +with such a spending of money, on the hazard of their meeting again. How +could she be the least sure he would ever again consent to it after the +proved action on him, a week ago, of her last monstrous honesty? It was +indeed positively as if he were now himself putting this influence--and +for their common edification--to the supreme, to the finest test. He had +a sublime, an ideal flight, which lasted about a minute. "Suppose, now +that I see her there and what she has taken so characteristically for +granted, suppose I just show her that she _hasn't_ only confidently to +wait or whistle for me, and that the length of my leash is greater +than she measures, and that everything's impossible always?--show it by +turning my back on her now and walking straight away. She won't be able +not to understand _that!_" + +Nothing had passed, across their distance, but the mute apprehension +of each on the part of each; the whole expanse, at the church hour, was +void of other life (he had scarce met a creature on his way from end +to end), and the sun-seasoned gusts kept brushing the air and all the +larger prospect clean. It was through this beautiful lucidity that +he watched her watch him, as it were--watch him for what he would do. +Neither moved at this high tension; Kate Cookham, her face fixed on +him, only waited with a stiff appearance of leaving him, not for dignity +but--to an effect of even deeper perversity--for kindness, free to +choose. It yet somehow affected him at present, this attitude, as a gage +of her _knowing too_--knowing, that is, that he wasn't really free, that +this was the thinnest of vain parades, the poorest of hollow heroics, +that his need, his solitude, his suffered wrong, his exhausted rancour, +his foredoomed submission to any shown interest, all hung together too +heavy on him to let the weak wings of his pride do more than vaguely +tremble. They couldn't, they didn't carry him a single beat further +away; according to which he stood rooted, neither retreating nor +advancing, but presently correcting his own share of the bleak exchange +by looking off at the sea. Deeply conscious of the awkwardness this +posture gave him, he yet clung to it as the last shred of his honour, +to the clear argument that it was one thing for him to have felt beneath +all others, the previous days, that she was to be counted on, but quite +a different for her to have felt that _he_ was. His checked approach, +arriving thus at no term, could in these odd conditions have established +that he wasn't only if Kate Cookham had, as either of them might have +said, taken it so--if she had given up the game at last by rising, by +walking away and adding to the distance between them, and he had then +definitely let her vanish into space. It became a fact that when she did +finally rise--though after how long our record scarce takes on itself to +say--it was not to confirm their separation but to put an end to it; and +this by slowly approaching him till she had come within earshot He had +wondered, once aware of it in spite of his averted face, what she would +say and on what note, as it were, she would break their week's +silence; so that he had to recognise anew, her voice reaching him, that +remarkable quality in her which again and again came up for him as her +art. + +"There are twelve hundred and sixty pounds, to be definite, but I have +it all down for you--and you've only to draw." + +They lost themselves, these words, rare and exquisite, in the wide +bright genial medium and the Sunday stillness, but even while that +occurred and he was gaping for it she was herself there, in her battered +ladylike truth, to answer for them, to represent them, and, if a further +grace than their simple syllabled beauty were conceivable, almost +embarrassingly to cause them to materialise. Yes, she let her smart and +tight little reticule hang as if it bulged, beneath its clasp, with the +whole portentous sum, and he felt himself glare again at this vividest +of her attested claims. She might have been ready, on the spot, to open +the store to the plunge of his hand, or, with the situation otherwise +conceived, to impose on his pauperised state an acceptance of alms on +a scale unprecedented in the annals of street charity. Nothing so much +counted for him, however, neither grave numeral nor elegant fraction, +as the short, rich, rounded word that the breeze had picked up as it +dropped and seemed now to blow about between them. "To draw--to draw?" +Yes, he gaped it as if it had no sense; the fact being that even while +he did so he was reading into her use of the term more romance than any +word in the language had ever had for him. He, Herbert Dodd, was to live +to "draw," like people, scarce hampered by the conditions of earth, +whom he had remotely and circuitously heard about, and in fact when he +walked back with her to where she had been sitting it was very much, for +his strained nerves, as if the very bench of desolation itself were to +be the scene of that exploit and he mightn't really live till he reached +it. + +When they had sat down together she did press the spring of her +reticule, from which she took, not a handful of gold nor a packet of +crisp notes, but an oblong sealed letter, which she had thus waited on +him, she remarked, on purpose to deliver, and which would certify, with +sundry particulars, to the credit she had opened for him at a London +bank. He received it without looking at it--he held it, in the same +manner, conspicuous and unassimilated, for most of the rest of the +immediate time, appearing embarrassed with it, nervously twisting and +flapping it, yet thus publicly retaining it even while aware, beneath +everything, of the strange, the quite dreadful, wouldn't it be? +engagement that such inaction practically stood for. He could accept +money to that amount, yes--but not for nothing in return. For what then +in return? He kept asking himself for what, while she said other things +and made above all, in her high, shrewd, successful way the point that, +no, he needn't pretend that his conviction of her continued personal +interest in him wouldn't have tided him oyer any question besetting +him since their separation. She put it to him that the deep instinct of +where he should at last find her must confidently have worked for him, +since she confessed to her instinct of where she should find _him_; +which meant--oh it came home to him as he fingered his sealed +treasure!--neither more nor less than that she had now created +between them an equality of experience. He wasn't to have done all the +suffering, _she_ was to have "been through" things he couldn't even +guess at; and, since he was bargaining away his right ever again to +allude to the unforgettable, so much there was of it, what her tacit +proposition came to was that they were "square" and might start afresh. + +He didn't take up her charge, as his so compromised "pride" yet in a +manner prompted him, that he had enjoyed all the week all those elements +of ease about her; the most he achieved for that was to declare, with an +ingenuity contributing to float him no small distance further, that of +course he had turned up at their old place of tryst, which had been, +through the years, the haunt of his solitude and the goal of his walk +any Sunday morning that seemed too beautiful for church; but that he +hadn't in the least built on her presence there--since that supposition +gave him, she would understand, wouldn't she? the air, disagreeable to +him, of having come in search of her. Her quest of himself, once he +had been seated there, would have been another matter--but in short +"Of course after all you did come to me, just now, didn't you?" He felt +himself, too, lamely and gracelessly grin, as for the final kick of his +honour, in confirmation of the record that he had then yielded but to +her humility. Her humility became for him at this hour and to this tune, +on the bench of desolation, a quantity more prodigious and even more +mysterious than that other guaranteed quantity the finger-tips of his +left hand could feel the tap by the action of his right; though what was +in especial extraordinary was the manner in which she could keep making +him such allowances and yet meet him again, at some turn, as with her +residuum for her clever self so great. + +"Come to you, Herbert Dodd?" she imperturbably echoed. "I've been coming +to you for the last ten years!" + +There had been for him just before this sixty supreme seconds of +intensest aspiration--a minute of his keeping his certificate poised +for a sharp thrust back at her, the thrust of the wild freedom of his +saying: "No, no, I _can't_ give them up; I can't simply sink them deep +down in my soul forever, with no cross in all my future to mark _that_ +burial; so that if this is what our arrangement means I must decline to +have anything to do with it." The words none the less hadn't come, and +when she had herself, a couple of minutes later, spoken those +others, the blood rose to his face as if, given his stiffness and her +extravagance, he had just indeed saved himself. + +Everything in fact stopped, even his fidget with his paper; she imposed +a hush, she imposed at any rate the conscious decent form of one, and +he couldn't afterward have told how long, at this juncture, he must have +sat simply gazing before him. It was so long, at any rate, that Kate +herself got up--and quite indeed, presently, as if her own forms were +now at an end. He had returned her nothing--so what was she waiting for? +She had been on the two other occasions momentarily at a loss, but never +so much so, no doubt, as was thus testified to by her leaving the bench +and moving over once more to the rail of the terrace. She could carry +it off, in a manner, with her resources, that she was waiting with so +little to wait for; she could face him again, after looking off at +the sea, as if this slightly stiff delay, not wholly exempt from +awkwardness, had been but a fine scruple of her courtesy. She had +gathered herself in; after giving him time to appeal she could take +it that he had decided and that nothing was left for her to do. "Well +then," she clearly launched at him across the broad walk--"well then, +good-bye." + +She had come nearer with it, as if he might rise for some show of +express separation; but he only leaned back motionless, his eyes on her +now--he kept her a moment before him. "Do you mean that we don't--that +we don't--?" But he broke down. + +"Do I 'mean'--?" She remained as for questions he might ask, but it +was wellnigh as if there played through her dotty veil an irrepressible +irony for that particular one. "I've meant, for long years, I think, all +I'm capable of meaning. I've meant so much that I can't mean more. So +there it is." + +"But if you go," he appealed--and with a sense as of final flatness, +however he arranged it, for his own attitude--"but if you go sha'n't I +see you again?" + +She waited a little, and it was strangely for him now as if--though at +last so much more gorged with her tribute than she had ever been with +his--something still depended on her. "Do you _like_ to see me?" she +very simply asked. + +At this he did get up; that was easier than to say--at least with +responsive simplicity; and again for a little he looked hard and in +silence at his letter; which at last, however, raising his eyes to her +own for the act, while he masked their conscious ruefulness, to his +utmost, in some air of assurance, he slipped into the inner pocket of +his coat, letting it settle there securely. "You're too wonderful." But +he frowned at her with it as never in his life. "Where does it all come +from?" + +"The wonder of poor me?" Kate Cookham said. "It comes from _you_." + +He shook his head slowly--feeling, with his letter there against his +heart, such a new agility, almost such a new range of interest. "I mean +so _much_ money--so extraordinarily much." + +Well, she held him a while blank. "Does it seem to you extraordinarily +much--twelve-hundred-and-sixty? Because, you know," she added, "it's +all." + +"It's enough!" he returned with a slight thoughtful droop of his head to +the right and his eyes attached to the far horizon as through a shade of +shyness for what he was saying. He felt all her own lingering nearness +somehow on his cheek. + +"It's enough? Thank you then!" she rather oddly went on. + +He shifted a little his posture. "It was more than a hundred a year--for +you to get together." + +"Yes," she assented, "that was what year by year I tried for." + +"But that you could live all the while and save that--!" Yes, he was +at liberty, as he hadn't been, quite pleasantly to marvel. All his +wonderments in life had been hitherto unanswered--and didn't the change +mean that here again was the social relation? + +"Ah, I didn't live as you saw me the other day." + +"Yes," he answered--and didn't he the next instant feel he must fairly +have smiled with it?--"the other day you _were_ going it!" + +"For once in my life," said Kate Cookham. "I've left the hotel," she +after a moment added. + +"Ah, you're in--a--lodgings?" he found himself inquiring as for positive +sociability. + +She had apparently a slight shade of hesitation, but in an instant it +was all right; as what he showed he wanted to know she seemed mostly to +give him. "Yes--but far of course from here. Up on the hill." To which, +after another instant, "At The Mount, Castle Terrace," she subjoined. + +"Oh, I _know_ The Mount. And Castle Terrace is awfully sunny and nice." + +"Awfully sunny and nice," Kate Cookham took from him. + +"So that if it isn't," he pursued, "like the Royal, why you're at least +comfortable." + +"I shall be comfortable anywhere now," she replied with a certain +dryness. + +It was astonishing, however, what had become of his own. "Because I've +accepted----?" + +"Call it that!" she dimly smiled. + +"I hope then at any rate," he returned, "you can now thoroughly rest" He +spoke as for a cheerful conclusion and moved again also to smile, though +as with a poor grimace, no doubt; since what he seemed most clearly to +feel was that since he "accepted" he mustn't, for his last note, have +accepted in sulkiness or gloom. With that, at the same time, he couldn't +but know, in all his fibres, that with such a still-watching face as the +dotty veil didn't disguise for him there was no possible concluding, at +least on his part On hers, on hers it was--as he had so often for a week +had reflectively to pronounce things--another affair. Ah, somehow, +both formidably and helpfully, her face concluded--yet in a sense so +strangely enshrouded in things she didn't tell him. What _must_ she, +what mustn't she, have done? What she had said--and she had really told +him nothing--was no account of her life; in the midst of which conflict +of opposed recognitions, at any rate, it was as if, for all he could +do, he himself now considerably floundered. "But I can't think--I can't +think----!" + +"You can't think I can have made so much money in the time and been +honest?" + +"Oh, you've been _honest!_" Herbert Dodd distinctly allowed. + +It moved her stillness to a gesture--which, however, she had as promptly +checked; and she went on the next instant as for further generosity to +his failure of thought. "Everything was possible, under my stress, with +my hatred." + +"Your hatred--?" For she had paused as if it were after all too +difficult. + +"Of what I should for so long have been doing to you." + +With this, for all his failures, a greater light than any yet shone upon +him. "It made you think of ways----?" + +"It made me think of everything. It made me work," said Kate Cookham. +She added, however, the next moment: "But that's my story." + +"And I mayn't hear it?" + +"No--because I mayn't hear yours." + +"Oh, mine--!" he said with the strangest, saddest, yet after all most +resigned sense of surrender of it; which he tried to make sound as if he +couldn't have told it, for its splendor of sacrifice and of misery, even +if he would. + +It seemed to move in her a little, exactly, that sense of the invidious. +"Ah, mine too, I assure you----!" + +He rallied at once to the interest. "Oh, we _can_ talk then?" + +"Never," she all oddly replied. "Never," said Kate Cookham. + +They remained so, face to face; the effect of which for him was that he +had after a little understood why. That was fundamental. "Well, I see." + +Thus confronted they stayed; and then, as he saw with a contentment that +came up from deeper still, it was indeed she who, with her worn fine +face, would conclude. "But I can take care of you." + +"You _have!_" he said as with nothing left of him but a beautiful +appreciative candour. + +"Oh, but you'll want it now in a way--!" she responsibly answered. + +He waited a moment, dropping again on the seat. So, while she still +stood, he looked up at her; with the sense somehow that there were too +many things and that they were all together, terribly, irresistibly, +doubtless blessedly, in her eyes and her whole person; which thus +affected him for the moment as more than he could bear. He leaned +forward, dropping his elbows to his knees and pressing his head on his +hands. So he stayed, saying nothing; only, with the sense of her own +sustained, renewed and wonderful action, knowing that an arm had passed +round him and that he was held. She was beside him on the bench of +desolation. + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Finer Grain, by Henry James + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FINER GRAIN *** + +***** This file should be named 21968.txt or 21968.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/2/1/9/6/21968/ + +Produced by David Widger + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, +set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to +copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to +protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. 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