Great Short Novels of Henry James

by Henry James

  “It’s a favour I never refused,” she replied.

  “Very true. Do you expect this evening a visit from Mr. Longmore?”

  “Mr. Longmore,” said his wife, “has left Saint-Germain.” M. de Mauves waited, but his smile expired. “Mr. Longmore,” his wife continued, “has gone to America.”

  M. de Mauves took it—a rare thing for him—with confessed, if momentary, intellectual indigence. But he raised, as it were, the wind. “Has anything happened?” he asked, “Had he a sudden call?” But his question received no answer. At the same moment the servant threw open the door and announced dinner; Madame Clairin rustled in, rubbing her white hands, Madame de Mauves passed silently into the dining-room, but he remained outside—outside of more things, clearly, than his mere salle-a-manger. Before long he went forth to the terrace and continued his uneasy walk. At the end of a quarter of an hour the servant came to let him know that his carriage was at the door. “Send it away,” he said without hesitation. “I shan’t use it.” When the ladies had half-finished dinner he returned and joined them, with a formal apology to his wife for his inconsequence.

  The dishes were brought back, but he hardly tasted them; he drank on the other hand more wine than usual. There was little talk, scarcely a convivial sound save the occasional expressive appreciative “M-m-m!” of Madame Clairin over the succulence of some dish. Twice this lady saw her brother’s eyes, fixed on her own over his wineglass, put to her a question she knew she should have to irritate him later on by not being able to answer. She replied, for the present at least, by an elevation of the eyebrows that resembled even to her own humour the vain raising of an umbrella in anticipation of a storm. M. de Mauves was left alone to finish his wine; he sat over it for more than an hour and let the darkness gather about him. At last the servant came in with a letter and lighted a candle. The letter was a telegram, which M. de Mauves, when he had read it, burnt at the candle. After five minutes’ meditation he wrote a message on the back of a visiting-card and gave it to the servant to carry to the office. The man knew quite as much as his master suspected about the lady to whom the telegram was addressed; but its contents puzzled him; they consisted of the single word “Impossible.” As the evening passed without her brother’s reappearing in the drawing-room Madame Clairin came to him where he sat by his solitary candle. He took no notice of her presence for some time, but this affected her as unexpected indulgence. At last, however, he spoke with a particular harshness. “Ce jeune mufle has gone home at an hour’s notice. What the devil does it mean?”

  Madame Clairin now felt thankful for her umbrella. “It means that I’ve a sister-in-law whom I’ve not the honour to understand.”

  He said nothing more and silently allowed her, after a little, to depart. It had been her duty to provide him with an explanation, and he was disgusted with her blankness; but she was—if there was no more to come—getting off easily. When she had gone he went into the garden and walked up and down with his cigar. He saw his wife seated alone on the terrace, but remained below, wandering, turning, pausing, lingering. He remained a long time. It grew late and Madame de Mauves disappeared. Toward midnight he dropped upon a bench, tired, with a long vague exhalation of unrest. It was sinking into his spirit that he too didn’t understand Madame Clairin’s sister-in-law.

  Longmore was obliged to wait a week in London for a ship. It was very hot, and he went out one day to Richmond. In the garden of the hotel at which he dined he met his friend Mrs. Draper, who was staying there. She made eager enquiry about Madame de Mauves; but Longmore at first, as they sat looking out at the famous view of the Thames, parried her questions and confined himself to other topics. At last she said she was afraid he had something to conceal; whereupon, after a pause, he asked her if she remembered recommending him, in the letter she had addressed him at Saint-Germain, to draw the sadness from her friend’s smile. “The last I saw of her was her smile,” he said—“when I bade her good-bye.”

  “I remember urging you to ‘console’ her,” Mrs. Draper returned, “and I wondered afterwards whether—model of discretion as you are—I hadn’t cut you out work for which you wouldn’t thank me.”

  “She has her consolation in herself,” the young man said; “she needs none that any one else can offer her. That’s for troubles for which—be it more, be it less—our own folly has to answer. Madame de Mauves hasn’t a grain of folly left.”

  “Ah don’t say that!”—Mrs. Draper knowingly protested. “Just a little folly’s often very graceful.”

  Longmore rose to go—she somehow annoyed him. “Don’t talk of grace,” he said, “till you’ve measured her reason!”

  For two years after his return to America he heard nothing of Madame de Mauves. That he thought of her intently, constantly, I need hardly say; most people wondered why such a clever young man shouldn’t “devote” himself to something; but to himself he seemed absorbingly occupied. He never wrote to her; he believed she wouldn’t have “liked” it. At last he heard that Mrs. Draper had come home and he immediately called on her. “Of course,” she said after the first greetings, “you’re dying for news of Madame de Mauves. Prepare yourself for something strange. I heard from her two or three times during the year after your seeing her. She left Saint-Germain and went to live in the country on some old property of her husband’s. She wrote me very kind little notes, but I felt somehow that—in spite of what you said about ‘consolation’—they were the notes of a wretched woman. The only advice I could have given her was to leave her scamp of a husband and come back to her own land and her own people. But this I didn’t feel free to do, and yet it made me so miserable not to be able to help her that I preferred to let our correspondence die a natural death. I had no news of her for a year. Last summer, however, I met at Vichy a clever young Frenchman whom I accidentally learned to be a friend of that charming sister of the Count’s, Madame Clairin. I lost no time in asking him what he knew about Madame de Mauves—a countrywoman of mine and an old friend. ‘I congratulate you on the friendship of such a person,’ he answered. ‘That’s the terrible little woman who killed her husband.’ You may imagine I promptly asked for an explanation, and he told me—from his point of view—what he called the whole story. M. de Mauves had fait quelques folies which his wife had taken absurdly to heart. He had repented and asked her forgiveness, which she had inexorably refused. She was very pretty, and severity must have suited her style; for, whether or no her husband had been in love with her before, he fell madly in love with her now. He was the proudest man in France, but he had begged her on his knees to be re-admitted to favour. All in vain! She was stone, she was ice, she was outraged virtue. People noticed a great change in him; he gave up society, ceased to care for anything, looked shockingly. One fine day they discovered he had blown out his brains. My friend had the story of course from Madame Clairin.”

  Longmore was strongly moved, and his first impulse after he had recovered his composure was to return immediately to Europe. But several years have passed, and he still lingers at home. The truth is that, in the midst of all the ardent tenderness of his memory of Madame de Mauves, he has become conscious of a singular feeling—a feeling of wonder, of uncertainty, of awe.

  Daisy Miller

  Daisy Miller

  DAISY MILLER, the pretty girl from Schenectady who defies European conventions and dies of the Roman fever and a broken heart, is the only one of Henry James’s characters to have achieved national renown. For that there is reason enough. Daisy embodies the spirit of her country in a more direct and simple manner than any of her sisters in the Jamesian gallery of native types. And no one has ever offered a better explanation of her great popularity than Edmund Wilson when he said that it is due to the impression somehow conveyed by her creator that “her spirit went marching on.”

  It should be recalled that originally the story of Daisy Miller was considered by a good many patriots to be a disloyal criticism of American manners and an outrage on American g
irlhood. Rejected on some such grounds by an editor in Philadelphia, it was first published in England, in The Cornhill Magazine (1878). But before long America reclaimed its own, for Daisy was destined to be enshrined in the national pantheon. Not long after her author’s death, William Dean Howells wrote in a preface to a new edition of the story that “never was any civilization offered a more precious tribute than that which a great artist paid ours in the character of Daisy Miller.” Thus through her phenomenal rise in public favor she finally received what amounted to almost official recognition.

  The principal quality of this famous heroine is her spontaneity—a quality retained by her successors in James’s novels and stories and invariably rendered as beautifully illustrative of the vigor and innocence of life in the western world. In picturing Daisy, James was mostly concerned with exhibiting her “inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence,” for that was the essential characteristic making possible her entry into literature as an altogether new type. Before James no such light had ever been thrown on the character of the American young lady; in Hawthorne, for instance, boldness in the feminine nature is simply the equivalent of badness, and his “good” young ladies (e.g. Priscilla in The Blithedale Romance and Hilda in The Marble Faun) have literally nothing but their innocence to recommend them. In the observation of his compatriots at home and abroad, James, however, was able to bring to bear the new method of realism absorbed in his study of writers like Balzac, Thackeray, Turgenev and Flaubert. As character creation Daisy is a triumph of the novelist’s faculty at work on materials drawn directly from experience. It is interesting, too, to trace the lines of force that radiate from this early Jamesian heroine to later heroines of American fiction. One example that may be cited is Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy in The Great Gatsby, who has quite a few features in common with her namesake. And the continuity is primarily of the national experience rather than of literary influence.

  One cannot say, however, that in the main it is the quantity of “real life” in Daisy Miller which accounts for her vitality. The mere imitation of life has seldom produced great results in a work of art. The truth is that Daisy—as her author once observed—is at one and the same time a typical little figure and a piece of pure poetry. That is the real secret of her lasting charm—the charm of “a child of nature and freedom.”

  PART I

  AT THE little town of Vevey, in Switzerland, there is a particularly comfortable hotel. There are, indeed, many hotels, for the entertainment of tourists is the business of the place, which, as many travelers will remember, is seated upon the edge of a remarkably blue lake—a lake that it behooves every tourist to visit. The shore of the lake presents an unbroken array of establishments of this order, of every category, from the “grand hotel” of the newest fashion, with a chalk-white front, a hundred balconies, and a dozen flags flying from its roof, to the little Swiss pension of an elder day, with its name inscribed in German-looking lettering upon a pink or yellow wall and an awkward summerhouse in the angle of the garden. One of the hotels at Vevey, however, is famous, even classical, being distinguished from many of its upstart neighbors by an air both of luxury and of maturity. In this region, in the month of June, American travelers are extremely numerous; it may be said, indeed, that Vevey assumes at this period some of the characteristics of an American watering place. There are sights and sounds which evoke a vision, an echo, of Newport and Saratoga. There is a flitting hither and thither of “stylish” young girls, a rustling of muslin flounces, a rattle of dance music in the morning hours, a sound of high-pitched voices at all times. You receive an impression of these things at the excellent inn of the Trois Couronnes and are transported in fancy to the Ocean House or to Congress Hall. But at the Trois Couronnes, it must be added, there are other features that are much at variance with these suggestions: neat German waiters, who look like secretaries of legation; Russian princesses sitting in the garden; little Polish boys walking about held by the hand, with their governors; a view of the sunny crest of the Dent du Midi and the picturesque towers of the Castle of Chillon.

  I hardly know whether it was the analogies or the differences that were uppermost in the mind of a young American, who, two or three years ago, sat in the garden of the Trois Couronnes, looking about him, rather idly, at some of the graceful objects I have mentioned. It was a beautiful summer morning, and in whatever fashion the young American looked at things, they must have seemed to him charming. He had come from Geneva the day before by the little steamer, to see his aunt, who was staying at the hotel—Geneva having been for a long time his place of residence. But his aunt had a headache—his aunt had almost always a headache—and now she was shut up in her room, smelling camphor, so that he was at liberty to wander about. He was some seven-and-twenty years of age; when his friends spoke of him, they usually said that he was at Geneva “studying.” When his enemies spoke of him, they said—but, after all, he had no enemies; he was an extremely amiable fellow, and universally liked. What I should say is, simply, that when certain persons spoke of him they affirmed that the reason of his spending so much time at Geneva was that he was extremely devoted to a lady who lived there—a foreign lady—a person older than himself. Very few Americans—indeed, I think none—had ever seen this lady, about whom there were some singular stories. But Winterbourne had an old attachment for the little metropolis of Calvinism; he had been put to school there as a boy, and he had afterward gone to college there—circumstances which had led to his forming a great many youthful friendships. Many of these he had kept, and they were a source of great satisfaction to him.

  After knocking at his aunt’s door and learning that she was indisposed, he had taken a walk about the town, and then he had come in to his breakfast. He had now finished his breakfast; but he was drinking a small cup of coffee, which had been served to him on a little table in the garden by one of the waiters who looked like an attaché. At last he finished his coffee and lit a cigarette. Presently a small boy came walking along the path—an urchin of nine or ten. The child, who was diminutive for his years, had an aged expression of countenance, a pale complexion, and sharp little features. He was dressed in knickerbockers, with red stockings, which displayed his poor little spindle-shanks; he also wore a brilliant red cravat. He carried in his hand a long alpenstock, the sharp point of which he thrust into everything that he approached—the flowerbeds, the garden benches, the trains of the ladies’ dresses. In front of Winterbourne he paused, looking at him with a pair of bright, penetrating little eyes.

  “Will you give me a lump of sugar?” he asked in a sharp, hard little voice—a voice immature and yet, somehow, not young.

  Winterbourne glanced at the small table near him, on which his coffee service rested, and saw that several morsels of sugar remained. “Yes, you may take one,” he answered; “but I don’t think sugar is good for little boys.”

  This little boy stepped forward and carefully selected three of the coveted fragments, two of which he buried in the pocket of his knickerbockers, depositing the other as promptly in another place. He poked his alpenstock, lance-fashion, into Winterbourne’s bench and tried to crack the lump of sugar with his teeth.

  “Oh, blazes; it’s har-r-d!” he exclaimed, pronouncing the adjective in a peculiar manner.

  Winterbourne had immediately perceived that he might have the honor of claiming him as a fellow countryman. “Take care you don’t hurt your teeth,” he said, paternally.

  “I haven’t got any teeth to hurt. They have all come out. I have only got seven teeth. My mother counted them last night, and one came out right afterward. She said she’d slap me if any more came out. I can’t help it. It’s this old Europe. It’s the climate that makes them come out. In America they didn’t come out. It’s these hotels.”

  Winterbourne was much amused. “If you eat three lumps of sugar, your mother will certainly slap you,” he said.

  “She’s got to give me some candy, then,” rejoined his young interlocutor.
“I can’t get any candy here—any American candy. American candy’s the best candy.”

  “And are American little boys the best little boys?” asked Winterbourne.

  “I don’t know. I’m an American boy,” said the child.

  “I see you are one of the best!” laughed Winterbourne.

  “Are you an American man?” pursued this vivacious infant. And then, on Winterbourne’s affirmative reply—“American men are the best,” he declared.

  His companion thanked him for the compliment, and the child, who had now got astride of his alpenstock, stood looking about him, while he attacked a second lump of sugar. Winterbourne wondered if he himself had been like this in his infancy, for he had been brought to Europe at about this age.

  “Here comes my sister!” cried the child in a moment. “She’s an American girl.”

  Winterbourne looked along the path and saw a beautiful young lady advancing. “American girls are the best girls,” he said cheerfully to his young companion.

  “My sister ain’t the best!” the child declared. “She’s always blowing at me.”

  “I imagine that is your fault, not hers,” said Winterbourne. The young lady meanwhile had drawn near. She was dressed in white muslin, with a hundred frills and flounces, and knots of pale-colored ribbon. She was bareheaded, but she balanced in her hand a large parasol, with a deep border of embroidery; and she was strikingly, admirably pretty. “How pretty they are!” thought Winterbourne, straightening himself in his seat, as if he were prepared to rise.

  The young lady paused in front of his bench, near the parapet of the garden, which overlooked the lake. The little boy had now converted his alpenstock into a vaulting pole, by the aid of which he was springing about in the gravel and kicking it up not a little.