The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  By the fifth of August the weather was very warm, and on that day, while the Colonel sat straight and gossiped, Lyon opened for the sake of ventilation a little subsidiary door which led directly from his studio into the garden and sometimes served as an entrance and an exit for models and for visitors of the humbler sort, and as a passage for canvases, frames, packing-boxes and other professional gear. The main entrance was through the house and his own apartments, and this approach had the charming effect of admitting you first to a high gallery, from which a crooked picturesque staircase enabled you to descend to the wide, decorated, encumbered room. The view of this room, beneath them, with all its artistic ingenuities and the objects of value that Lyon had collected, never failed to elicit exclamations of delight from persons stepping into the gallery. The way from the garden was plainer and at once more practicable and more private. Lyon’s domain, in St. John’s Wood, was not vast, but when the door stood open of a summer’s day it offered a glimpse of flowers and trees, you smelt something sweet and you heard the birds. On this particular morning the side-door had been found convenient by an unannounced visitor, a youngish woman who stood in the room before the Colonel perceived her and whom he perceived before she was noticed by his friend. She was very quiet, and she looked from one of the men to the other. ‘Oh, dear, here’s another!’ Lyon exclaimed, as soon as his eyes rested on her. She belonged, in fact, to a somewhat importunate class—the model in search of employment, and she explained that she had ventured to come straight in, that way, because very often when she went to call upon gentlemen the servants played her tricks, turned her off and wouldn’t take in her name.

  ‘But how did you get into the garden?’ Lyon asked.

  ‘The gate was open, sir—the servants’ gate. The butcher’s cart was there.’

  ‘The butcher ought to have closed it,’ said Lyon.

  ‘Then you don’t require me, sir?’ the lady continued.

  Lyon went on with his painting; he had given her a sharp look at first, but now his eyes lighted on her no more. The Colonel, however, examined her with interest. She was a person of whom you could scarcely say whether being young she looked old or old she looked young; she had at any rate evidently rounded several of the corners of life and had a face that was rosy but that somehow failed to suggest freshness. Nevertheless she was pretty and even looked as if at one time she might have sat for the complexion. She wore a hat with many feathers, a dress with many bugles, long black gloves, encircled with silver bracelets, and very bad shoes. There was something about her that was not exactly of the governess out of place nor completely of the actress seeking an engagement, but that savoured of an interrupted profession or even of a blighted career. She was rather soiled and tarnished, and after she had been in the room a few moments the air, or at any rate the nostril, became acquainted with a certain alcoholic waft. She was unpractised in the h, and when Lyon at last thanked her and said he didn’t want her—he was doing nothing for which she could be useful—she replied with rather a wounded manner, ‘Well, you know you ‘ave ‘ad me!’

  ‘I don’t remember you,’ Lyon answered.

  ‘Well, I daresay the people that saw your pictures do! I haven’t much time, but I thought I would look in.’

  ‘I am much obliged to you.’

  ‘If ever you should require me, if you just send me a postcard–-‘

  ‘I never send postcards,’ said Lyon.

  ‘Oh well, I should value a private letter! Anything to Miss Geraldine, Mortimer Terrace Mews, Notting ‘ill–-‘

  ‘Very good; I’ll remember,’ said Lyon.

  Miss Geraldine lingered. ‘I thought I’d just stop, on the chance.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t hold out hopes, I’m so busy with portraits,’ Lyon continued.

  ‘Yes; I see you are. I wish I was in the gentleman’s place.’

  ‘I’m afraid in that case it wouldn’t look like me,’ said the Colonel, laughing.

  ‘Oh, of course it couldn’t compare—it wouldn’t be so ‘andsome! But I do hate them portraits!’ Miss Geraldine declared. ‘It’s so much bread out of our mouths.’

  ‘Well, there are many who can’t paint them,’ Lyon suggested, comfortingly.

  ‘Oh, I’ve sat to the very first—and only to the first! There’s many that couldn’t do anything without me.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re in such demand.’ Lyon was beginning to be bored and he added that he wouldn’t detain her—he would send for her in case of need.

  ‘Very well; remember it’s the Mews—more’s the pity! You don’t sit so well as us!’ Miss Geraldine pursued, looking at the Colonel. ‘If you should require me, sir–-‘

  ‘You put him out; you embarrass him,’ said Lyon.

  ‘Embarrass him, oh gracious!’ the visitor cried, with a laugh which diffused a fragrance. ‘Perhaps you send postcards, eh?’ she went on to the Colonel; and then she retreated with a wavering step. She passed out into the garden as she had come.

  ‘How very dreadful—she’s drunk!’ said Lyon. He was painting hard, but he looked up, checking himself: Miss Geraldine, in the open doorway, had thrust back her head.

  ‘Yes, I do hate it—that sort of thing!’ she cried with an explosion of mirth which confirmed Lyon’s declaration. And then she disappeared.

  ‘What sort of thing—what does she mean?’ the Colonel asked.

  ‘Oh, my painting you, when I might be painting her.’

  ‘And have you ever painted her?’

  ‘Never in the world; I have never seen her. She is quite mistaken.’

  The Colonel was silent a moment; then he remarked, ‘She was very pretty—ten years ago.’

  ‘I daresay, but she’s quite ruined. For me the least drop too much spoils them; I shouldn’t care for her at all.’

  ‘My dear fellow, she’s not a model,’ said the Colonel, laughing.

  ‘To-day, no doubt, she’s not worthy of the name; but she has been one.’

  ‘Jamais de la vie! That’s all a pretext.’

  ‘A pretext?’ Lyon pricked up his ears—he began to wonder what was coming now.

  ‘She didn’t want you—she wanted me.’

  ‘I noticed she paid you some attention. What does she want of you?’

  ‘Oh, to do me an ill turn. She hates me—lots of women do. She’s watching me—she follows me.’

  Lyon leaned back in his chair—he didn’t believe a word of this. He was all the more delighted with it and with the Colonel’s bright, candid manner. The story had bloomed, fragrant, on the spot. ‘My dear Colonel!’ he murmured, with friendly interest and commiseration.

  ‘I was annoyed when she came in—but I wasn’t startled,’ his sitter continued.

  ‘You concealed it very well, if you were.’

  ‘Ah, when one has been through what I have! To-day however I confess I was half prepared. I have seen her hanging about—she knows my movements. She was near my house this morning—she must have followed me.’

  ‘But who is she then—with such a toupet?’

  ‘Yes, she has that,’ said the Colonel; ‘but as you observe she was primed. Still, there was a cheek, as they say, in her coming in. Oh, she’s a bad one! She isn’t a model and she never was; no doubt she has known some of those women and picked up their form. She had hold of a friend of mine ten years ago—a stupid young gander who might have been left to be plucked but whom I was obliged to take an interest in for family reasons. It’s a long story—I had really forgotten all about it. She’s thirty-seven if she’s a day. I cut in and made him get rid of her—I sent her about her business. She knew it was me she had to thank. She has never forgiven me—I think she’s off her head. Her name isn’t Geraldine at all and I doubt very much if that’s her address.’

  ‘Ah, what is her name?’ Lyon asked, most attentive. The details always began to multiply, to abound, when once his companion was well launched—they flowed forth in battalions.

  ‘It’s Pearson—Harriet Pearso
n; but she used to call herself Grenadine—wasn’t that a rum appellation? Grenadine—Geraldine—the jump was easy.’ Lyon was charmed with the promptitude of this response, and his interlocutor went on: ‘I hadn’t thought of her for years—I had quite lost sight of her. I don’t know what her idea is, but practically she’s harmless. As I came in I thought I saw her a little way up the road. She must have found out I come here and have arrived before me. I daresay—or rather I’m sure—she is waiting for me there now.’

  ‘Hadn’t you better have protection?’ Lyon asked, laughing.

  ‘The best protection is five shillings—I’m willing to go that length. Unless indeed she has a bottle of vitriol. But they only throw vitriol on the men who have deceived them, and I never deceived her—I told her the first time I saw her that it wouldn’t do. Oh, if she’s there we’ll walk a little way together and talk it over and, as I say, I’ll go as far as five shillings.’

  ‘Well,’ said Lyon, ‘I’ll contribute another five.’ He felt that this was little to pay for his entertainment.

  That entertainment was interrupted however for the time by the Colonel’s departure. Lyon hoped for a letter recounting the fictive sequel; but apparently his brilliant sitter did not operate with the pen. At any rate he left town without writing; they had taken a rendezvous for three months later. Oliver Lyon always passed the holidays in the same way; during the first weeks he paid a visit to his elder brother, the happy possessor, in the south of England, of a rambling old house with formal gardens, in which he delighted, and then he went abroad—usually to Italy or Spain. This year he carried out his custom after taking a last look at his all but finished work and feeling as nearly pleased with it as he ever felt with the translation of the idea by the hand—always, as it seemed to him, a pitiful compromise. One yellow afternoon, in the country, as he was smoking his pipe on one of the old terraces he was seized with the desire to see it again and do two or three things more to it: he had thought of it so often while he lounged there. The impulse was too strong to be dismissed, and though he expected to return to town in the course of another week he was unable to face the delay. To look at the picture for five minutes would be enough—it would clear up certain questions which hummed in his brain; so that the next morning, to give himself this luxury, he took the train for London. He sent no word in advance; he would lunch at his club and probably return into Sussex by the 5.45.

  In St. John’s Wood the tide of human life flows at no time very fast, and in the first days of September Lyon found unmitigated emptiness in the straight sunny roads where the little plastered garden-walls, with their incommunicative doors, looked slightly Oriental. There was definite stillness in his own house, to which he admitted himself by his pass-key, having a theory that it was well sometimes to take servants unprepared. The good woman who was mainly in charge and who cumulated the functions of cook and housekeeper was, however, quickly summoned by his step, and (he cultivated frankness of intercourse with his domestics) received him without the confusion of surprise. He told her that she needn’t mind the place being not quite straight, he had only come up for a few hours—he should be busy in the studio. To this she replied that he was just in time to see a lady and a gentleman who were there at the moment—they had arrived five minutes before. She had told them he was away from home but they said it was all right; they only wanted to look at a picture and would be very careful of everything. ‘I hope it is all right, sir,’ the housekeeper concluded. ‘The gentleman says he’s a sitter and he gave me his name—rather an odd name; I think it’s military. The lady’s a very fine lady, sir; at any rate there they are.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all right,’ Lyon said, the identity of his visitors being clear. The good woman couldn’t know, for she usually had little to do with the comings and goings; his man, who showed people in and out, had accompanied him to the country. He was a good deal surprised at Mrs. Capadose’s having come to see her husband’s portrait when she knew that the artist himself wished her to forbear; but it was a familiar truth to him that she was a woman of a high spirit. Besides, perhaps the lady was not Mrs. Capadose; the Colonel might have brought some inquisitive friend, a person who wanted a portrait of her husband. What were they doing in town, at any rate, at that moment? Lyon made his way to the studio with a certain curiosity; he wondered vaguely what his friends were ‘up to.’ He pushed aside the curtain that hung in the door of communication—the door opening upon the gallery which it had been found convenient to construct at the time the studio was added to the house. When I say he pushed it aside I should amend my phrase; he laid his hand upon it, but at that moment he was arrested by a very singular sound. It came from the floor of the room beneath him and it startled him extremely, consisting apparently as it did of a passionate wail—a sort of smothered shriek—accompanied by a violent burst of tears. Oliver Lyon listened intently a moment, and then he passed out upon the balcony, which was covered with an old thick Moorish rug. His step was noiseless, though he had not endeavoured to make it so, and after that first instant he found himself profiting irresistibly by the accident of his not having attracted the attention of the two persons in the studio, who were some twenty feet below him. In truth they were so deeply and so strangely engaged that their unconsciousness of observation was explained. The scene that took place before Lyon’s eyes was one of the most extraordinary they had ever rested upon. Delicacy and the failure to comprehend kept him at first from interrupting it—for what he saw was a woman who had thrown herself in a flood of tears on her companion’s bosom—and these influences were succeeded after a minute (the minutes were very few and very short) by a definite motive which presently had the force to make him step back behind the curtain. I may add that it also had the force to make him avail himself for further contemplation of a crevice formed by his gathering together the two halves of the portière. He was perfectly aware of what he was about—he was for the moment an eavesdropper, a spy; but he was also aware that a very odd business, in which his confidence had been trifled with, was going forward, and that if in a measure it didn’t concern him, in a measure it very definitely did. His observation, his reflections, accomplished themselves in a flash.