The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  “To sink your shaft deep and polish the plate through which people look into it—that’s what your work consists of,” I remember ingeniously observing.

  “Ah polishing one’s plate—that’s the torment of execution!” he exclaimed, jerking himself up and sitting forward. “The effort to arrive at a surface, if you think anything of that decent sort necessary—some people don’t, happily for them! My dear fellow, if you could see the surface I dream of as compared with the one with which I’ve to content myself. Life’s really too short for art—one hasn’t time to make one’s shell ideally hard. Firm and bright, firm and bright is very well to say—the devilish thing has a way sometimes of being bright, and even of being hard, as mere tough frozen pudding is hard, without being firm. When I rap it with my knuckles it doesn’t give the right sound. There are horrible sandy stretches where I’ve taken the wrong turn because I couldn’t for the life of me find the right. If you knew what a dunce I am sometimes! Such things figure to me now base pimples and ulcers on the brow of beauty!”

  “They’re very bad, very bad,” I said as gravely as I could.

  “Very bad? They’re the highest social offence I know; it ought—it absolutely ought; I’m quite serious—to be capital. If I knew I should be publicly thrashed else I’d manage to find the true word. The people who can’t—some of them don’t so much as know it when they see it—would shut their inkstands, and we shouldn’t be deluged by this flood of rubbish!”

  I shall not attempt to repeat everything that passed between us, nor to explain just how it was that, every moment I spent in his company, Mark Ambient revealed to me more and more the consistency of his creative spirit, the spirit in him that felt all life as plastic material. I could but envy him the force of that passion, and it was at any rate through the receipt of this impression that by the time we returned I had gained the sense of intimacy with him that I have noted. Before we got up for the homeward stretch he alluded to his wife’s having once—or perhaps more than once—asked him whether he should like Dolcino to read “Beltraffio.” He must have been unaware at the moment of all that this conveyed to me—as well doubtless of my extreme curiosity to hear what he had replied. He had said how much he hoped Dolcino would read ALL his works—when he was twenty; he should like him to know what his father had done. Before twenty it would be useless; he wouldn’t understand them.

  “And meanwhile do you propose to hide them—to lock them up in a drawer?” Mrs. Ambient had proceeded.

  “Oh no—we must simply tell him they’re not intended for small boys. If you bring him up properly after that he won’t touch them.”

  To this Mrs. Ambient had made answer that it might be very awkward when he was about fifteen, say; and I asked her husband if it were his opinion in general, then, that young people shouldn’t read novels.

  “Good ones—certainly not!” said my companion. I suppose I had had other views, for I remember saying that for myself I wasn’t sure it was bad for them if the novels were “good” to the right intensity of goodness. “Bad for THEM, I don’t say so much!” my companion returned. “But very bad, I’m afraid, for the poor dear old novel itself.” That oblique accidental allusion to his wife’s attitude was followed by a greater breadth of reference as we walked home. “The difference between us is simply the opposition between two distinct ways of looking at the world, which have never succeeded in getting on together, or in making any kind of common household, since the beginning of time. They’ve borne all sorts of names, and my wife would tell you it’s the difference between Christian and Pagan. I may be a pagan, but I don’t like the name; it sounds sectarian. She thinks me at any rate no better than an ancient Greek. It’s the difference between making the most of life and making the least, so that you’ll get another better one in some other time and place. Will it be a sin to make the most of that one, too, I wonder; and shall we have to be bribed off in the future state as well as in the present? Perhaps I care too much for beauty—I don’t know, I doubt if a poor devil CAN; I delight in it, I adore it, I think of it continually, I try to produce it, to reproduce it. My wife holds that we shouldn’t cultivate or enjoy it without extraordinary precautions and reserves. She’s always afraid of it, always on her guard. I don’t know what it can ever have done to her, what grudge it owes her or what resentment rides. And she’s so pretty, too, herself! Don’t you think she’s lovely? She was at any rate when we married. At that time I wasn’t aware of that difference I speak of— I thought it all came to the same thing: in the end, as they say. Well, perhaps it will in the end. I don’t know what the end will be. Moreover, I care for seeing things as they are; that’s the way I try to show them in any professed picture. But you mustn’t talk to Mrs. Ambient about things as they are. She has a mortal dread of things as they are.”

  “She’s afraid of them for Dolcino,” I said: surprised a moment afterwards at being in a position—thanks to Miss Ambient—to be so explanatory; and surprised even now that Mark shouldn’t have shown visibly that he wondered what the deuce I knew about it. But he didn’t; he simply declared with a tenderness that touched me: “Ah nothing shall ever hurt HIM!”

  He told me more about his wife before we arrived at the gate of home, and if he be judged to have aired overmuch his grievance I’m afraid I must admit that he had some of the foibles as well as the gifts of the artistic temperament; adding, however, instantly that hitherto, to the best of my belief, he had rarely let this particular cat out of the bag. “She thinks me immoral—that’s the long and short of it,” he said as we paused outside a moment and his hand rested on one of the bars of his gate; while his conscious expressive perceptive eyes—the eyes of a foreigner, I had begun to account them, much more than of the usual Englishman—viewing me now evidently as quite a familiar friend, took part in the declaration. “It’s very strange when one thinks it all over, and there’s a grand comicality in it that I should like to bring out. She’s a very nice woman, extraordinarily well-behaved, upright and clever and with a tremendous lot of good sense about a good many matters. Yet her conception of a novel—she has explained it to me once or twice, and she doesn’t do it badly as exposition—is a thing so false that it makes me blush. It’s a thing so hollow, so dishonest, so lying, in which life is so blinked and blinded, so dodged and disfigured, that it makes my ears burn. It’s two different ways of looking at the whole affair,” he repeated, pushing open the gate. “And they’re irreconcilable!” he added with a sigh. We went forward to the house, but on the walk, half-way to the door, he stopped and said to me: “If you’re going into this kind of thing there’s a fact you should know beforehand; it may save you some disappointment. There’s a hatred of art, there’s a hatred of literature—I mean of the genuine kinds. Oh the shams—those they’ll swallow by the bucket!” I looked up at the charming house, with its genial colour and crookedness, and I answered with a smile that those evil passions might exist, but that I should never have expected to find them there. “Ah it doesn’t matter after all,” he a bit nervously laughed; which I was glad to hear, for I was reproaching myself with having worked him up.

  If I had it soon passed off, for at luncheon he was delightful; strangely delightful considering that the difference between himself and his wife was, as he had said, irreconcilable. He had the art, by his manner, by his smile, by his natural amenity, of reducing the importance of it in the common concerns of life; and Mrs. Ambient, I must add, lent herself to this transaction with a very good grace. I watched her at table for further illustrations of that fixed idea of which Miss Ambient had spoken to me; for in the light of the united revelations of her sister-in-law and her husband she had come to seem to me almost a sinister personage. Yet the signs of a sombre fanaticism were not more immediately striking in her than before; it was only after a while that her air of incorruptible conformity, her tapering monosyllabic correctness, began to affect me as in themselves a cold thin flame. Certainly, at first, she resembled a woman with as few passions as
possible; but if she had a passion at all it would indeed be that of Philistinism. She might have been (for there are guardian-spirits, I suppose, of all great principles) the very angel of the pink of propriety—putting the pink for a principle, though I’d rather put some dismal cold blue. Mark Ambient, apparently, ten years before, had simply and quite inevitably taken her for an angel, without asking himself of what. He had been right in calling my attention to her beauty. In looking for some explanation of his original surrender to her I saw more than before that she was, physically speaking, a wonderfully cultivated human plant—that he might well have owed her a brief poetic inspiration. It was impossible to be more propped and pencilled, more delicately tinted and petalled.

  If I had had it in my heart to think my host a little of a hypocrite for appearing to forget at table everything he had said to me in our walk, I should instantly have cancelled such a judgement on reflecting that the good news his wife was able to give him about their little boy was ground enough for any optimistic reaction. It may have come partly, too, from a certain compunction at having breathed to me at all harshly on the cool fair lady who sat there—a desire to prove himself not after all so mismated. Dolcino continued to be much better, and it had been promised him he should come downstairs after his dinner. As soon as we had risen from our own meal Mark slipped away, evidently for the purpose of going to his child; and no sooner had I observed this than I became aware his wife had simultaneously vanished. It happened that Miss Ambient and I, both at the same moment, saw the tail of her dress whisk out of a doorway; an incident that led the young lady to smile at me as if I now knew all the secrets of the Ambients. I passed with her into the garden and we sat down on a dear old bench that rested against the west wall of the house. It was a perfect spot for the middle period of a Sunday in June, and its felicity seemed to come partly from an antique sun-dial which, rising in front of us and forming the centre of a small intricate parterre, measured the moments ever so slowly and made them safe for leisure and talk. The garden bloomed in the suffused afternoon, the tall beeches stood still for an example, and, behind and above us, a rose tree of many seasons, clinging to the faded grain of the brick, expressed the whole character of the scene in a familiar exquisite smell. It struck me as a place to offer genius every favour and sanction—not to bristle with challenges and checks. Miss Ambient asked me if I had enjoyed my walk with her brother and whether we had talked of many things.

  “Well, of most things,” I freely allowed, though I remembered we hadn’t talked of Miss Ambient.

  “And don’t you think some of his theories are very peculiar?”

  “Oh I guess I agree with them all.” I was very particular, for Miss Ambient’s entertainment, to guess.

  “Do you think art’s everything?” she put to me in a moment.

  “In art, of course I do!”

  “And do you think beauty’s everything?”

  “Everything’s a big word, which I think we should use as little as possible. But how can we not want beauty?”

  “Ah there you are!” she sighed, though I didn’t quite know what she meant by it. “Of course it’s difficult for a woman to judge how far to go,” she went on. “I adore everything that gives a charm to life. I’m intensely sensitive to form. But sometimes I draw back—don’t you see what I mean?—I don’t quite see where I shall be landed. I only want to be quiet, after all,” Miss Ambient continued as if she had long been baffled of this modest desire. “And one must be good, at any rate, must not one?” she pursued with a dubious quaver—an intimation apparently that what I might say one way or the other would settle it for her. It was difficult for me to be very original in reply, and I’m afraid I repaid her confidence with an unblushing platitude. I remember, moreover, attaching to it an inquiry, equally destitute of freshness and still more wanting perhaps in tact, as to whether she didn’t mean to go to church, since that was an obvious way of being good. She made answer that she had performed this duty in the morning, and that for her, of Sunday afternoons, supreme virtue consisted in answering the week’s letters. Then suddenly and without transition she brought out: “It’s quite a mistake about Dolcino’s being better. I’ve seen him and he’s not at all right.”

  I wondered, and somehow I think I scarcely believed. “Surely his mother would know, wouldn’t she?”

  She appeared for a moment to be counting the leaves on one of the great beeches. “As regards most matters one can easily say what, in a given situation, my sister-in-law will, or would, do. But in the present case there are strange elements at work.”

  “Strange elements? Do you mean in the constitution of the child?”

  “No, I mean in my sister-in-law’s feelings.”

  “Elements of affection of course; elements of anxiety,” I concurred. “But why do you call them strange?”

  She repeated my words. “Elements of affection, elements of anxiety. She’s very anxious.”

  Miss Ambient put me indescribably ill at ease; she almost scared me, and I wished she would go and write her letters. “His father will have seen him now,” I said, “and if he’s not satisfied he will send for the doctor.”

  “The doctor ought to have been here this morning,” she promptly returned. “He lives only two miles away.”

  I reflected that all this was very possibly but a part of the general tragedy of Miss Ambient’s view of things; yet I asked her why she hadn’t urged that view on her sister-in-law. She answered me with a smile of extraordinary significance and observed that I must have very little idea of her “peculiar” relations with Beatrice; but I must do her the justice that she re-enforced this a little by the plea that any distinguishable alarm of Mark’s was ground enough for a difference of his wife’s. He was always nervous about the child, and as they were predestined by nature to take opposite views, the only thing for the mother was to cultivate a false optimism. In Mark’s absence and that of his betrayed fear she would have been less easy. I remembered what he had said to me about their dealings with their son—that between them they’d probably put an end to him; but I didn’t repeat this to Miss Ambient: the less so that just then her brother emerged from the house, carrying the boy in his arms. Close behind him moved his wife, grave and pale; the little sick face was turned over Ambient’s shoulder and toward the mother. We rose to receive the group, and as they came near us Dolcino twisted himself about. His enchanting eyes showed me a smile of recognition, in which, for the moment, I should have taken a due degree of comfort. Miss Ambient, however, received another impression, and I make haste to say that her quick sensibility, which visibly went out to the child, argues that in spite of her affectations she might have been of some human use. “It won’t do at all—it won’t do at all,” she said to me under her breath. “I shall speak to Mark about the Doctor.”

  Her small nephew was rather white, but the main difference I saw in him was that he was even more beautiful than the day before. He had been dressed in his festal garments—a velvet suit and a crimson sash—and he looked like a little invalid prince too young to know condescension and smiling familiarly on his subjects.

  “Put him down, Mark, he’s not a bit at his ease,” Mrs. Ambient said.

  “Should you like to stand on your feet, my boy?” his father asked.

  He made a motion that quickly responded. “Oh yes; I’m remarkably well.”

  Mark placed him on the ground; he had shining pointed shoes with enormous bows. “Are you happy now, Mr. Ambient?”

  “Oh yes, I’m particularly happy,” Dolcino replied. But the words were scarce out of his mouth when his mother caught him up and, in a moment, holding him on her knees, took her place on the bench where Miss Ambient and I had been sitting. This young lady said something to her brother, in consequence of which the two wandered away into the garden together.

  CHAPTER IV

  I remained with Mrs. Ambient, but as a servant had brought out a couple of chairs I wasn’t obliged to seat myself beside her. Our
conversation failed of ease, and I, for my part, felt there would be a shade of hypocrisy in my now trying to make myself agreeable to the partner of my friend’s existence. I didn’t dislike her—I rather admired her; but I was aware that I differed from her inexpressibly. Then I suspected, what I afterwards definitely knew and have already intimated, that the poor lady felt small taste for her husband’s so undisguised disciple; and this of course was not encouraging. She thought me an obtrusive and designing, even perhaps a depraved, young man whom a perverse Providence had dropped upon their quiet lawn to flatter his worst tendencies. She did me the honour to say to Miss Ambient, who repeated the speech, that she didn’t know when she had seen their companion take such a fancy to a visitor; and she measured apparently my evil influence by Mark’s appreciation of my society. I had a consciousness, not oppressive but quite sufficient, of all this; though I must say that if it chilled my flow of small-talk it yet didn’t prevent my thinking the beautiful mother and beautiful child, interlaced there against their background of roses, a picture such as I doubtless shouldn’t soon see again. I was free, I supposed, to go into the house and write letters, to sit in the drawing-room, to repair to my own apartment and take a nap; but the only use I made of my freedom was to linger still in my chair and say to myself that the light hand of Sir Joshua might have painted Mark Ambient’s wife and son. I found myself looking perpetually at the latter small mortal, who looked constantly back at me, and that was enough to detain me. With these vaguely-amused eyes he smiled, and I felt it an absolute impossibility to abandon a child with such an expression. His attention never strayed; it attached itself to my face as if among all the small incipient things of his nature throbbed a desire to say something to me. If I could have taken him on my own knee he perhaps would have managed to say it; but it would have been a critical matter to ask his mother to give him up, and it has remained a constant regret for me that on that strange Sunday afternoon I didn’t even for a moment hold Dolcino in my arms. He had said he felt remarkably well and was especially happy; but though peace may have been with him as he pillowed his charming head on his mother’s breast, dropping his little crimson silk legs from her lap, I somehow didn’t think security was. He made no attempt to walk about; he was content to swing his legs softly and strike one as languid and angelic.