by Henry James
“Met it, dear lady, simply enough! It’s the old story, Mrs. Blessingbourne. The relation’s innocent that the heroine gets out of. The book’s innocent that’s the story of her getting out. But what the devil—in the name of innocence—was she doing IN?”
Mrs. Dyott promptly echoed the question. “You have to be in, you know, to GET out. So there you are already with your relation. It’s the end of your goodness.”
“And the beginning,” said Voyt, “of your play!”
“Aren’t they all, for that matter, even the worst,” Mrs. Dyott pursued, “supposed SOME time or other to get out? But if meanwhile they’ve been in, however briefly, long enough to adorn a tale?”
“They’ve been in long enough to point a moral. That is to point ours!” With which, and as if a sudden flush of warmer light had moved him, Colonel Voyt got up. The veil of the storm had parted over a great red sunset.
Mrs. Dyott also was on her feet, and they stood before his charming antagonist, who, with eyes lowered and a somewhat fixed smile, had not moved.
“We’ve spoiled her subject!” the elder lady sighed.
“Well,” said Voyt, “it’s better to spoil an artist’s subject than to spoil his reputation. I mean,” he explained to Maud with his indulgent manner, “his appearance of knowing what he has got hold of, for that, in the last resort, is his happiness.”
She slowly rose at this, facing him with an aspect as handsomely mild as his own. “You can’t spoil my happiness.”
He held her hand an instant as he took leave. “I wish I could add to it!”
CHAPTER III
When he had quitted them and Mrs. Dyott had candidly asked if her friend had found him rude or crude, Maud replied—though not immediately—that she had feared showing only too much how charming she found him. But if Mrs. Dyott took this it was to weigh the sense. “How could you show it too much?”
“Because I always feel that that’s my only way of showing anything. It’s absurd, if you like,” Mrs. Blessingbourne pursued, “but I never know, in such intense discussions, what strange impression I may give.”
Her companion looked amused. “Was it intense?”
“I was,” Maud frankly confessed.
“Then it’s a pity you were so wrong. Colonel Voyt, you know, is right.” Mrs. Blessingbourne at this gave one of the slow soft silent headshakes to which she often resorted and which, mostly accompanied by the light of cheer, had somehow, in spite of the small obstinacy that smiled in them, a special grace. With this grace, for a moment, her friend, looking her up and down, appeared impressed, yet not too much so to take the next minute a decision. “Oh my dear, I’m sorry to differ from any one so lovely—for you’re awfully beautiful to-night, and your frock’s the very nicest I’ve ever seen you wear. But he’s as right as he can be.”
Maud repeated her motion. “Not so right, at all events as he thinks he is. Or perhaps I can say,” she went on, after an instant, “that I’m not so wrong. I do know a little what I’m talking about.”
Mrs. Dyott continued to study her. “You ARE vexed. You naturally don’t like it—such destruction.”
“Destruction?”
“Of your illusion.”
“I HAVE no illusion. If I had moreover it wouldn’t be destroyed. I have on the whole, I think, my little decency.”
Mrs. Dyott stared. “Let us grant it for argument. What, then?”
“Well, I’ve also my little drama.”
“An attachment ?”
“An attachment.”
“That you shouldn’t have?”
“That I shouldn’t have.”
“A passion?”
“A passion.”
“Shared?”
“Ah thank goodness, no!”
Mrs. Dyott continued to gaze. “The object’s unaware—?”
“Utterly.”
Mrs. Dyott turned it over. “Are you sure?”
“Sure.”
“That’s what you call your decency? But isn’t it,” Mrs. Dyott asked, “rather his?”
“Dear no. It’s only his good fortune.”
Mrs. Dyott laughed. “But yours, darling—your good fortune: where does THAT come in?”
“Why, in my sense of the romance of it.”
“The romance of what? Of his not knowing?”
“Of my not wanting him to. If I did”—Maud had touchingly worked it out—”where would be my honesty?”
The inquiry, for an instant, held her friend, yet only, it seemed, for a stupefaction that was almost amusement. “Can you want or not want as you like? Where in the world, if you don’t want, is your romance?”
Mrs. Blessingbourne still wore her smile, and she now, with a light gesture that matched it, just touched the region of her heart. “There!”
Her companion admiringly marvelled. “A lovely place for it, no doubt!—but not quite a place, that I can see, to make the sentiment a relation.”
“Why not? What more is required for a relation for me?”
“Oh all sorts of things, I should say! And many more, added to those, to make it one for the person you mention.”
“Ah that I don’t pretend it either should be or CAN be. I only speak for myself.”
This was said in a manner that made Mrs. Dyott, with a visible mixture of impressions, suddenly turn away. She indulged in a vague movement or two, as if to look for something; then again found herself near her friend, on whom with the same abruptness, in fact with a strange sharpness, she conferred a kiss that might have represented either her tribute to exalted consistency or her idea of a graceful close of the discussion. “You deserve that one should speak FOR you!”
Her companion looked cheerful and secure. “How CAN you without knowing—?”
“Oh by guessing! It’s not—?”
But that was as far as Mrs. Dyott could get. “It’s not,” said Maud, “any one you’ve ever seen.”
“Ah then I give you up!”
And Mrs. Dyott conformed for the rest of Maud’s stay to the spirit of this speech. It was made on a Saturday night, and Mrs. Blessingbourne remained till the Wednesday following, an interval during which, as the return of fine weather was confirmed by the Sunday, the two ladies found a wider range of action. There were drives to be taken, calls made, objects of interest seen at a distance; with the effect of much easy talk and still more easy silence. There had been a question of Colonel Voyt’s probable return on the Sunday, but the whole time passed without a sign from him, and it was merely mentioned by Mrs. Dyott, in explanation, that he must have been suddenly called, as he was so liable to be, to town. That this in fact was what had happened he made clear to her on Thursday afternoon, when, walking over again late, he found her alone. The consequence of his Sunday letters had been his taking, that day, the 4.15. Mrs. Voyt had gone back on Thursday, and he now, to settle on the spot the question of a piece of work begun at his place, had rushed down for a few hours in anticipation of the usual collective move for the week’s end. He was to go up again by the late train, and had to count a little—a fact accepted by his hostess with the hard pliancy of practice—his present happy moments. Too few as these were, however, he found time to make of her an inquiry or two not directly bearing on their situation. The first was a recall of the question for which Mrs. Blessingbourne’s entrance on the previous Saturday had arrested her answer. Had that lady the idea of anything between them?
“No. I’m sure. There’s one idea she has got,” Mrs. Dyott went on; “but it’s quite different and not so very wonderful.”
“What then is it?”
“Well, that she’s herself in love.”
Voyt showed his interest. “You mean she told you?”
“I got it out of her.”
He showed his amusement. “Poor thing! And with whom?”
“With you.”
His surprise, if the distinction might be made, was less than his wonder. “You got that out of her too?”
“No—it rema
ins in. Which is much the best way for it. For you to know it would be to end it.”
He looked rather cheerfully at sea. “Is that then why you tell me?”
“I mean for her to know you know it. Therefore it’s in your interest not to let her.”
“I see,” Voyt after a moment returned. “Your real calculation is that my interest will be sacrificed to my vanity—so that, if your other idea is just, the flame will in fact, and thanks to her morbid conscience, expire by her taking fright at seeing me so pleased. But I promise you,” he declared, “that she shan’t see it. So there you are!” She kept her eyes on him and had evidently to admit after a little that there she was. Distinct as he had made the case, however, he wasn’t yet quite satisfied. “Why are you so sure I’m the man?”
“From the way she denies you.”
“You put it to her?”
“Straight. If you hadn’t been she’d of course have confessed to you—to keep me in the dark about the real one.”
Poor Voyt laughed out again. “Oh you dear souls!”
“Besides,” his companion pursued, “I wasn’t in want of that evidence.”
“Then what other had you?”
“Her state before you came—which was what made me ask you how much you had seen her. And her state after it,” Mrs. Dyott added. “And her state,” she wound up, “while you were here.”
“But her state while I was here was charming.”
“Charming. That’s just what I say.”
She said it in a tone that placed the matter in its right light—a light in which they appeared kindly, quite tenderly, to watch Maud wander away into space with her lovely head bent under a theory rather too big for it. Voyt’s last word, however, was that there was just enough in it—in the theory—for them to allow that she had not shown herself, on the occasion of their talk, wholly bereft of sense. Her consciousness, if they let it alone—as they of course after this mercifully must—WAS, in the last analysis, a kind of shy romance. Not a romance like their own, a thing to make the fortune of any author up to the mark—one who should have the invention or who COULD have the courage; but a small scared starved subjective satisfaction that would do her no harm and nobody else any good. Who but a duffer—he stuck to his contention—would see the shadow of a “story” in it?
FLICKERBRIDGE
CHAPTER I
Frank Granger had arrived from Paris to paint a portrait—an order given him, as a young compatriot with a future, whose early work would some day have a price, by a lady from New York, a friend of his own people and also, as it happened, of Addie’s, the young woman to whom it was publicly both affirmed and denied that he was engaged. Other young women in Paris—fellow-members there of the little tight transpontine world of art-study—professed to know that the pair had “several times” over renewed their fond understanding. This, however, was their own affair; the last phase of the relation, the last time of the times, had passed into vagueness; there was perhaps even an impression that if they were inscrutable to their friends they were not wholly crystalline to each other and themselves. What had occurred for Granger at all events in connexion with the portrait was that Mrs. Bracken, his intending model, whose return to America was at hand, had suddenly been called to London by her husband, occupied there with pressing business, but had yet desired that her displacement should not interrupt her sittings. The young man, at her request, had followed her to England and profited by all she could give him, making shift with a small studio lent him by a London painter whom he had known and liked a few years before in the French atelier that then cradled, and that continued to cradle, so many of their kind.
The British capital was a strange grey world to him, where people walked, in more ways than one, by a dim light; but he was happily of such a turn that the impression, just as it came, could nowhere ever fail him, and even the worst of these things was almost as much an occupation—putting it only at that—as the best. Mrs. Bracken moreover passed him on, and while the darkness ebbed a little in the April days he found himself consolingly committed to a couple of fresh subjects. This cut him out work for more than another month, but meanwhile, as he said, he saw a lot—a lot that, with frequency and with much expression, he wrote about to Addie. She also wrote to her absent friend, but in briefer snatches, a meagreness to her reasons for which he had long since assented. She had other play for her pen as well as, fortunately, other remuneration; a regular correspondence for a “prominent Boston paper,” fitful connexions with public sheets perhaps also in cases fitful, and a mind above all engrossed at times, to the exclusion of everything else, with the study of the short story. This last was what she had mainly come out to go into, two or three years after he had found himself engulfed in the mystery of Carolus. She was indeed, on her own deep sea, more engulfed than he had ever been, and he had grown to accept the sense that, for progress too, she sailed under more canvas. It hadn’t been particularly present to him till now that he had in the least got on, but the way in which Addie had—and evidently still more would—was the theme, as it were, of every tongue. She had thirty short stories out and nine descriptive articles. His three or four portraits of fat American ladies—they were all fat, all ladies and all American— were a poor show compared with these triumphs; especially as Addie had begun to throw out that it was about time they should go home. It kept perpetually coming up in Paris, in the transpontine world, that, as the phrase was, America had grown more interesting since they left. Addie was attentive to the rumour, and, as full of conscience as she was of taste, of patriotism as of curiosity, had often put it to him frankly, with what he, who was of New York, recognised as her New England emphasis: “I’m not sure, you know, that we do REAL justice to our country.” Granger felt he would do it on the day—if the day ever came—he should irrevocably marry her. No other country could possibly have produced her.
CHAPTER II
But meanwhile it befell that, in London, he was stricken with influenza and with subsequent sorrow. The attack was short but sharp—had it lasted Addie would certainly have come to his aid; most of a blight really in its secondary stage. The good ladies his sitters—the ladies with the frizzled hair, with the diamond earrings, with the chins tending to the massive—left for him, at the door of his lodgings, flowers, soup and love, so that with their assistance he pulled through; but his convalescence was slow and his weakness out of proportion to the muffled shock. He came out, but he went about lame; it tired him to paint—he felt as if he had been ill three months. He strolled in Kensington Gardens when he should have been at work; he sat long on penny chairs and helplessly mused and mooned. Addie desired him to return to Paris, but there were chances under his hand that he felt he had just wit enough left not to relinquish. He would have gone for a week to the sea—he would have gone to Brighton; but Mrs. Bracken had to be finished—Mrs. Bracken was so soon to sail. He just managed to finish her in time—the day before the date fixed for his breaking ground on a greater business still, the circumvallation of Mrs. Dunn. Mrs. Dunn duly waited on him, and he sat down before her, feeling, however, ere he rose, that he must take a long breath before the attack. While asking himself that night, therefore, where he should best replenish his lungs he received from Addie, who had had from Mrs. Bracken a poor report of him, a communication which, besides being of sudden and startling interest, applied directly to his case.
His friend wrote to him under the lively emotion of having from one day to another become aware of a new relative, an ancient cousin, a sequestered gentlewoman, the sole survival of “the English branch of the family,” still resident, at Flickerbridge, in the “old family home,” and with whom, that he might immediately betake himself to so auspicious a quarter for change of air, she had already done what was proper to place him, as she said, in touch. What came of it all, to be brief, was that Granger found himself so placed almost as he read: he was in touch with Miss Wenham of Flickerbridge, to the extent of being in correspondence with her, befor
e twenty-four hours had sped. And on the second day he was in the train, settled for a five-hours’ run to the door of this amiable woman who had so abruptly and kindly taken him on trust and of whom but yesterday he had never so much as heard. This was an oddity—the whole incident was—of which, in the corner of his compartment, as he proceeded, he had time to take the size. But the surprise, the incongruity, as he felt, could but deepen as he went. It was a sufficiently queer note, in the light, or the absence of it, of his late experience, that so complex a product as Addie should have ANY simple insular tie; but it was a queerer note still that she should have had one so long only to remain unprofitably unconscious of it. Not to have done something with it, used it, worked it, talked about it at least, and perhaps even written—these things, at the rate she moved, represented a loss of opportunity under which as he saw her, she was peculiarly formed to wince. She was at any rate, it was clear, doing something with it now; using it, working it, certainly, already talking—and, yes, quite possibly writing—about it. She was in short smartly making up what she had missed, and he could take such comfort from his own action as he had been helped to by the rest of the facts, succinctly reported from Paris on the very morning of his start.
