The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  “You’re always thinking too much of ‘people.’”

  “They say I think too little,” Gabriel smiled.

  “Well, I’ve agreed to stand for Harsh,” said Nick with a roundabout transition.

  “It’s you then who are lucky to have money.”

  “I haven’t,” Nick explained. “My expenses are to be paid.”

  “Then you too must think of ‘people.’”

  Nick made no answer to this, but after a moment said: “I wish very much you had more to show for it.”

  “To show for what?”

  “Your little system—the æsthetic life.”

  Nash hesitated, tolerantly, gaily, as he often did, with an air of being embarrassed to choose between several answers, any one of which would be so right. “Oh having something to show’s such a poor business. It’s a kind of confession of failure.”

  “Yes, you’re more affected than anything else,” said Nick impatiently.

  “No, my dear boy, I’m more good-natured: don’t I prove it? I’m rather disappointed to find you not more accessible to esoteric doctrine. But there is, I confess, another plane of intelligence, honourable, and very honourable, in its way, from which it may legitimately appear important to have something to show. If you must confine yourself to that plane I won’t refuse you my sympathy. After all that’s what I have to show! But the degree of my sympathy must of course depend on the nature of the demonstration you wish to make.”

  “You know it very well—you’ve guessed it,” Nick returned, looking before him in a conscious, modest way which would have been called sheepish had he been a few years younger.

  “Ah you’ve broken the scent with telling me you’re going back to the House of Commons,” said Nash.

  “No wonder you don’t make it out! My situation’s certainly absurd enough. What I really hanker for is to be a painter; and of portraits, on the whole, I think. That’s the abject, crude, ridiculous fact. In this out-of-the-way corner, at the dead of night, in lowered tones, I venture to disclose it to you. Isn’t that the æsthetic life?”

  “Do you know how to paint?” asked Nash.

  “Not in the least. No element of burlesque is therefore wanting to my position.”

  “That makes no difference. I’m so glad.”

  “So glad I don’t know how?”

  “So glad of it all. Yes, that only makes it better. You’re a delightful case, and I like delightful cases. We must see it through. I rejoice I met you again.”

  “Do you think I can do anything?” Nick inquired.

  “Paint good pictures? How can I tell without seeing some of your work? Doesn’t it come back to me that at Oxford you used to sketch very prettily? But that’s the last thing that matters.”

  “What does matter then?” Nick asked with his eyes on his companion.

  “To be on the right side—on the side of the ‘fine.’”

  “There’ll be precious little of the ‘fine’ if I produce nothing but daubs.”

  “Ah you cling to the old false measure of success! I must cure you of that. There’ll be the beauty of having been disinterested and independent; of having taken the world in the free, brave, personal way.”

  “I shall nevertheless paint decently if I can,” Nick presently said.

  “I’m almost sorry! It will make your case less clear, your example less grand.”

  “My example will be grand enough, with the fight I shall have to make.”

  “The fight? With whom?”

  “With myself first of all. I’m awfully against it.”

  “Ah but you’ll have me on the other side,” Nash smiled.

  “Well, you’ll have more than a handful to meet—everything, every one that belongs to me, that touches me near or far; my family, my blood, my heredity, my traditions, my promises, my circumstances, my prejudices; my little past—such as it is; my great future—such as it has been supposed it may be.”

  “I see, I see. It’s splendid!” Nash exclaimed. “And Mrs. Dallow into the bargain,” he added.

  “Yes, Mrs. Dallow if you like.”

  “Are you in love with her?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “Well, she is with you—so I understood.”

  “Don’t say that,” said Nick Dormer with sudden sternness.

  “Ah you are, you are!” his companion pronounced, judging apparently from this accent.

  “I don’t know what I am—heaven help me!” Nick broke out, tossing his hat down on his little tin table with vehemence. “I’m a freak of nature and a sport of the mocking gods. Why should they go out of their way to worry me? Why should they do everything so inconsequent, so improbable, so preposterous? It’s the vulgarest practical joke. There has never been anything of the sort among us; we’re all Philistines to the core, with about as much esthetic sense as that hat. It’s excellent soil—I don’t complain of it—but not a soil to grow that flower. From where the devil then has the seed been dropped? I look back from generation to generation; I scour our annals without finding the least little sketching grandmother, any sign of a building or versifying or collecting or even tulip-raising ancestor. They were all as blind as bats, and none the less happy for that. I’m a wanton variation, an unaccountable monster. My dear father, rest his soul, went through life without a suspicion that there’s anything in it that can’t be boiled into blue-books, and became in that conviction a very distinguished person. He brought me up in the same simplicity and in the hope of the same eminence. It would have been better if I had remained so. I think it’s partly your fault that I haven’t,” Nick went on. “At Oxford you were very bad company for me—my evil genius: you opened my eyes, you communicated the poison. Since then, little by little, it has been working within me; vaguely, covertly, insensibly at first, but during the last year or two with violence, pertinacity, cruelty. I’ve resorted to every antidote in life; but it’s no use—I’m stricken. C’est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée—putting Venus for ‘art.’ It tears me to pieces as I may say.”

  “I see, I follow you,” said Nash, who had listened to this recital with radiant interest and curiosity. “And that’s why you are going to stand.”

  “Precisely—it’s an antidote. And at present you’re another.”

  “Another?”

  “That’s why I jumped at you. A bigger dose of you may disagree with me to that extent that I shall either die or get better.”

  “I shall control the dilution,” said Nash. “Poor fellow—if you’re elected!” he added.

  “Poor fellow either way. You don’t know the atmosphere in which I live, the horror, the scandal my apostasy would provoke, the injury and suffering it would inflict. I believe it would really kill my mother. She thinks my father’s watching me from the skies.”

  “Jolly to make him jump!” Nash suggested.

  “He’d jump indeed—come straight down on top of me. And then the grotesqueness of it—to begin all of a sudden at my age.”

  “It’s perfect indeed, it’s too lovely a case,” Nash raved.

  “Think how it sounds—a paragraph in the London papers: ‘Mr. Nicholas Dormer, M. P. for Harsh and son of the late Right Honourable and so forth and so forth, is about to give up his seat and withdraw from public life in order to devote himself to the practice of portrait-painting—and with the more commendable perseverance by reason of all the dreadful time he has lost. Orders, in view of this, respectfully solicited.’”

  “The nineteenth century’s a sweeter time than I thought,” said Nash. “It’s the portrait then that haunts your dreams?”

  “I wish you could see. You must of course come immediately to my place in London.”

  “Perfidious wretch, you’re capable of having talent—which of course will spoil everything!” Gabriel wailed.

  “No, I’m too old and was too early perverted. It’s too late to go through the mill.”

  “You make me young! Don’t miss your election at your peril.
Think of the edification.”

  “The edification—?”

  “Of your throwing it all up the next moment.”

  “That would be pleasant for Mr. Carteret,” Nick brooded.

  “Mr. Carteret—?”

  “A dear old family friend who’ll wish to pay my agent’s bill.”

  “Serve him right for such depraved tastes.”

  “You do me good,” said Nick as he rose and turned away.

  “Don’t call me useless then.”

  “Ah but not in the way you mean. It’s only if I don’t get in that I shall perhaps console myself with the brush,” Nick returned with humorous, edifying elegance while they retraced their steps.

  “For the sake of all the muses then don’t stand. For you will get in.”

  “Very likely. At any rate I’ve promised.”

  “You’ve promised Mrs. Dallow?”

  “It’s her place—she’ll put me in,” Nick said.

  “Baleful woman! But I’ll pull you out!” cried Gabriel Nash.

  X

  For several days Peter Sherringham had business in hand which left him neither time nor freedom of mind to occupy himself actively with the ladies of the Hôtel de la Garonne. There were moments when they brushed across his memory, but their passage was rapid and not lighted with complacent attention; for he shrank from bringing to the proof the question of whether Miriam would be an interest or only a bore. She had left him after their second meeting with a quickened sympathy, but in the course of a few hours that flame had burned dim. Like most other men he was a mixture of impulse and reflexion, but was peculiar in this, that thinking things over almost always made him think less conveniently. He found illusions necessary, so that in order to keep an adequate number going he often forbade himself any excess of that exercise. Mrs. Rooth and her daughter were there and could certainly be trusted to make themselves felt. He was conscious of their anxiety and their calculations as of a frequent oppression, and knew that whatever results might ensue he should have to do the costly thing for them. An idea of tenacity, of worrying feminine duration, associated itself with their presence; he would have assented with a silent nod to the proposition—enunciated by Gabriel Nash—that he was saddled with them. Remedies hovered before him, but these figured also at the same time as complications; ranging vaguely from the expenditure of money to the discovery that he was in love. This latter accident would be particularly tedious; he had a full perception of the arts by which the girl’s mother might succeed in making it so. It wouldn’t be a compensation for trouble, but a trouble which in itself would require compensations. Would that balm spring from the spectacle of the young lady’s genius? The genius would have to be very great to justify a rising young diplomatist in making a fool of himself.

  With the excuse of pressing work he put off Miss Rooth from day to day, and from day to day he expected to hear her knock at his door. It would be time enough when they ran him to earth again; and he was unable to see how after all he could serve them even then. He had proposed impetuously a course of the theatres; but that would be a considerable personal effort now that the summer was about to begin—a free bid for bad air, stale pieces, and tired actors. When, however, more than a week had elapsed without a reminder of his neglected promise it came over him that he must himself in honour give a sign. There was a delicacy in such unexpected and such difficult discretion—he was touched by being let alone. The flurry of work at the embassy was over and he had time to ask himself what in especial he should do. He wanted something definite to suggest before communicating with the Hôtel de la Garonne.

  As a consequence of this speculation he went back to Madame Carré to ask her to reconsider her stern judgement and give the young English lady—to oblige him—a dozen lessons of the sort she knew so well how to give. He was aware that this request scarcely stood on its feet; for in the first place Madame Carré never reconsidered when once she had got her impression, and in the second never wasted herself on subjects whom nature had not formed to do her honour. He knew his asking her to strain a point to please him would give her a false idea—save that for that matter she had it already—of his relations, actual or prospective, with the girl; but he decided he needn’t care for this, since Miriam herself probably wouldn’t care. What he had mainly in mind was to say to the old actress that she had been mistaken—the jeune Anglaise wasn’t such a grue. This would take some courage, but it would also add to the amusement of his visit.

  He found her at home, but as soon as he had expressed his conviction she began: “Oh, your jeune Anglaise, I know a great deal more about her than you! She has been back to see me twice; she doesn’t go the longest way round. She charges me like a grenadier and asks me to give her—guess a little what!—private recitations all to herself. If she doesn’t succeed it won’t be for want of knowing how to thump at doors. The other day when I came in she was waiting for me; she had been there two hours. My private recitations—have you an idea what people pay for them?”

  “Between artists, you know, there are easier conditions,” Sherringham laughed.

  “How do I know if she’s an artist? She won’t open her mouth to me; what she wants is to make me say things to her. She does make me—I don’t know how—and she sits there gaping at me with her big eyes. They look like open pockets!”

  “I daresay she’ll profit by it,” said Sherringham.

  “I daresay you will! Her face is stupid while she watches me, and when she has tired me out she simply walks away. However, as she comes back—!”

  Madame Carré paused a moment, listened and then cried: “Didn’t I tell you?”

  Sherringham heard a parley of voices in the little antechamber, and the next moment the door was pushed open and Miriam Rooth bounded into the room. She was flushed and breathless, without a smile, very direct.

  “Will you hear me to-day? I know four things,” she immediately broke out. Then seeing Sherringham she added in the same brisk, earnest tone, as if the matter were of the highest importance: “Oh how d’ye do? I’m very glad you’re here.” She said nothing else to him than this, appealed to him in no way, made no allusion to his having neglected her, but addressed herself to Madame Carré as if he had not been there; making no excuses and using no flattery; taking rather a tone of equal authority—all as if the famous artist had an obvious duty toward her. This was another variation Peter thought; it differed from each of the attitudes in which he had previously seen her. It came over him suddenly that so far from there being any question of her having the histrionic nature she simply had it in such perfection that she was always acting; that her existence was a series of parts assumed for the moment, each changed for the next, before the perpetual mirror of some curiosity or admiration or wonder—some spectatorship that she perceived or imagined in the people about her. Interested as he had ever been in the profession of which she was potentially an ornament, this idea startled him by its novelty and even lent, on the spot, a formidable, a really appalling character to Miriam Rooth. It struck him abruptly that a woman whose only being was to “make believe,” to make believe she had any and every being you might like and that would serve a purpose and produce a certain effect, and whose identity resided in the continuity of her personations, so that she had no moral privacy, as he phrased it to himself, but lived in a high wind of exhibition, of figuration—such a woman was a kind of monster in whom of necessity there would be nothing to “be fond” of, because there would be nothing to take hold of. He felt for a moment how simple he had been not to have achieved before this analysis of the actress. The girl’s very face made it vivid to him now—the discovery that she positively had no countenance of her own, but only the countenance of the occasion, a sequence, a variety—capable possibly of becoming immense—of representative movements. She was always trying them, practising them, for her amusement or profit, jumping from one to the other and extending her range; and this would doubtless be her occupation more and more as she acquired e
ase and confidence. The expression that came nearest belonging to her, as it were, was the one that came nearest being a blank—an air of inanity when she forgot herself in some act of sincere attention. Then her eye was heavy and her mouth betrayed a commonness; though it was perhaps just at such a moment that the fine line of her head told most. She had looked slightly bête even when Sherringham, on their first meeting at Madame Carré’s, said to Nick Dormer that she was the image of the Tragic Muse.

  Now, at any rate, he seemed to see that she might do what she liked with her face. It was an elastic substance, an element of gutta-percha, like the flexibility of the gymnast, the lady at the music-hall who is shot from the mouth of a cannon. He winced a little at this coarser view of the actress; he had somehow always looked more poetically at that priestess of art. Yet what was she, the priestess, when one came to think of it, but a female gymnast, a mountebank at higher wages? She didn’t literally hang by her heels from a trapeze and hold a fat man in her teeth, but she made the same use of her tongue, of her eyes, of the imitative trick, that her muscular sister made of leg and jaw. It was an odd circumstance that Miss Rooth’s face seemed to him to-day a finer instrument than old Madame Carré’s. It was doubtless that the girl’s was fresh and strong and had a future in it, while poor Madame Carré’s was worn and weary and had only a past.