The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  “I don’t know what I may have said then,” replied Miriam, whose steady flight was not arrested by this ineffectual bolt; “I was no doubt already wonderful for talking of things I know nothing about. I was only on the brink of the stream and I perhaps thought the water colder than it is. One warms it a bit one’s self when once one’s in. Of course I’m a contortionist and of course there’s a hateful side, but don’t you see how that very fact puts a price on every compensation, on the help of those who are ready to insist on the other side, the grand one, and especially on the sympathy of the person who’s ready to insist most and to keep before us the great thing, the element that makes up for everything?”

  “The element—?” Peter questioned with a vagueness that was pardonably exaggerated. “Do you mean your success?”

  “I mean what you’ve so often been eloquent about,” she returned with an indulgent shrug—”the way we simply stir people’s souls. Ah there’s where life can help us,” she broke out with a change of tone, “there’s where human relations and affections can help us; love and faith and joy and suffering and experience—I don’t know what to call ‘em! They suggest things, they light them up and sanctify them, as you may say; they make them appear worth doing.” She became radiant a while, as if with a splendid vision; then melting into still another accent, which seemed all nature and harmony and charity, she proceeded: “I must tell you that in the matter of what we can do for each other I have a tremendously high ideal. I go in for closeness of union, for identity of interest. A true marriage, as they call it, must do one a lot of good!”

  He stood there looking at her for a time during which her eyes sustained his penetration without a relenting gleam, some lapse of cruelty or of paradox. But with a passionate, inarticulate sound he turned away, to remain, on the edge of the window, his hands in his pockets, gazing defeatedly, doggedly, into the featureless night, into the little black garden which had nothing to give him but a familiar smell of damp. The warm darkness had no relief for him, and Miriam’s histrionic hardness flung him back against a fifth-rate world, against a bedimmed, star-punctured nature which had no consolation—the bleared, irresponsive eyes of the London firmament. For the brief space of his glaring at these things he dumbly and helplessly raged. What he wanted was something that was not in that thick prospect. What was the meaning of this sudden, offensive importunity of “art,” this senseless, mocking catch, like some irritating chorus of conspirators in a bad opera, in which her voice was so incongruously conjoined with Nick’s and in which Biddy’s sweet little pipe had not scrupled still more bewilderingly to mingle? Art might yield to damnation: what commission after all had he ever given it to better him or bother him? If the pointless groan in which Peter exhaled a part of his humiliation had been translated into words, these words would have been as heavily charged with a genuine British mistrust of the uncanny principle as if the poor fellow speaking them had never quitted his island. Several acquired perceptions had struck a deep root in him, but an immemorial, compact formation lay deeper still. He tried at the present hour to rest on it spiritually, but found it inelastic; and at the very moment when most conscious of this absence of the rebound or of any tolerable ease he felt his vision solicited by an object which, as he immediately guessed, could only add to the complication of things.

  An undefined shape hovered before him in the garden, halfway between the gate and the house; it remained outside of the broad shaft of lamplight projected from the window. It wavered for a moment after it had become aware of his observation and then whisked round the corner of the lodge. This characteristic movement so effectually dispelled the mystery—it could only be Mrs. Rooth who resorted to such conspicuous secrecies—that, to feel the game up and his interview over, he had no need to see the figure reappear on second thoughts and dodge about in the dusk with a sportive, vexatious vagueness. Evidently Miriam’s warning of a few minutes before had been founded: a cab had deposited her anxious mother at the garden door. Mrs. Rooth had entered with precautions; she had approached the house and retreated; she had effaced herself—had peered and waited and listened. Maternal solicitude and muddled calculations had drawn her from a feast as yet too imperfectly commemorative. The heroine of the occasion of course had been intolerably missed, so that the old woman had both obliged the company and quieted her own nerves by jumping insistently into a hansom and rattling up to Saint John’s Wood to reclaim the absentee. But if she had wished to be in time she had also desired not to be impertinent, and would have been still more embarrassed to say what she aspired to promote than to phrase what she had proposed to hinder. She wanted to abstain tastefully, to interfere felicitously, and, more generally and justifiably—the small hours having come—to see what her young charges were “up to.” She would probably have gathered that they were quarrelling, and she appeared now to be motioning to Peter to know if it were over. He took no notice of her signals, if signals they were; he only felt that before he made way for the poor, odious lady there was one small spark he might strike from Miriam’s flint.

  Without letting her guess that her mother was on the premises he turned again to his companion, half-expecting she would have taken her chance to regard their discussion as more than terminated and by the other egress flit away from him in silence. But she was still there; she was in the act of approaching him with a manifest intention of kindness, and she looked indeed, to his surprise, like an angel of mercy.

  “Don’t let us part so harshly,” she said—”with your trying to make me feel as if I were merely disobliging. It’s no use talking—we only hurt each other. Let us hold our tongues like decent people and go about our business. It isn’t as if you hadn’t any cure—when you’ve such a capital one. Try it, try it, my dear friend—you’ll see! I wish you the highest promotion and the quickest—every success and every reward. When you’ve got them all, some day, and I’ve become a great swell too, we’ll meet on that solid basis and you’ll be glad I’ve been dreadful now.”

  “Surely before I leave you I’ve a right to ask you this,” he answered, holding fast in both his own the cool hand of farewell she had chosen finally to torment him with. “Are you ready to follow up by a definite promise your implied assurance that I’ve a remedy?”

  “A definite promise?” Miriam benignly gazed—it was the perfection of indirectness. “I don’t ‘imply’ that you’ve a remedy. I declare it on the house-tops. That delightful girl—”

  “I’m not talking of any delightful girl but you!” he broke in with a voice that, as he afterwards learned, struck Mrs. Rooth’s ears in the garden with affright. “I simply hold you, under pain of being convicted of the grossest prevarication, to the strict sense of what you said ten minutes ago.”

  “Ah I’ve said so many things! One has to do that to get rid of you. You rather hurt my hand,” she added—and jerked it away in a manner showing that if she was an angel of mercy her mercy was partly for herself.

  “As I understand you, then, I may have some hope if I do renounce my profession?” Peter pursued. “If I break with everything, my prospects, my studies, my training, my emoluments, my past and my future, the service of my country and the ambition of my life, and engage to take up instead the business of watching your interests so far as I may learn how and ministering to your triumphs so far as may in me lie—if after further reflexion I decide to go through these preliminaries, have I your word that I may definitely look to you to reward me with your precious hand?”

  “I don’t think you’ve any right to put the question to me now,” she returned with a promptitude partly produced perhaps by the clear-cut form his solemn speech had given—there was a charm in the sound of it—to each item of his enumeration. “The case is so very contingent, so dependent on what you ingeniously call your further reflexion. While you really reserve everything you ask me to commit myself. If it’s a question of further reflexion why did you drag me up here? And then,” she added, “I’m so far from wishing you to take an
y such monstrous step.”

  “Monstrous you call it? Just now you said it would be sublime.”

  “Sublime if it’s done with spontaneity, with passion; ridiculous if it’s done ‘after further reflexion.’ As you said, perfectly, a while ago, it isn’t a thing to reason about.”

  “Ah what a help you’d be to me in diplomacy!” Peter yearningly cried. “Will you give me a year to consider?”

  “Would you trust me for a year?”

  “Why not, if I’m ready to trust you for life?”

  “Oh I shouldn’t be free then, worse luck. And how much you seem to take for granted one must like you!”

  “Remember,” he could immediately say, “that you’ve made a great point of your liking me. Wouldn’t you do so still more if I were heroic?”

  She showed him, for all her high impatience now, the interest of a long look. “I think I should pity you in such a cause. Give it all to her; don’t throw away a real happiness!”

  “Ah you can’t back out of your position with a few vague and even rather impertinent words!” Peter protested. “You accuse me of swallowing my opinions, but you swallow your pledges. You’ve painted in heavenly colours the sacrifice I’m talking of, and now you must take the consequences.”

  “The consequences?”

  “Why my coming back in a year to square you.”

  “Ah you’re a bore!”—she let him have it at last. “Come back when you like. I don’t wonder you’ve grown desperate, but fancy me then!” she added as she looked past him at a new interlocutor.

  “Yes, but if he’ll square you!” Peter heard Mrs. Rooth’s voice respond all persuasively behind him. She had stolen up to the window now, had passed the threshold, was in the room, but her daughter had not been startled. “What is it he wants to do, dear?” she continued to Miriam.

  “To induce me to marry him if he’ll go upon the stage. He’ll practise over there—where he’s going—and then come back and appear. Isn’t it too dreadful? Talk him out of it, stay with him, soothe him!” the girl hurried on. “You’ll find some drinks and some biscuits in the cupboard—keep him with you, pacify him, give him his little supper. Meanwhile I’ll go to mine; I’ll take the brougham; don’t follow!”

  With which words Miriam bounded into the garden, her white drapery shining for an instant in the darkness before she disappeared. Peter looked about him to pick up his hat, but while he did so heard the bang of the gate and the quick carriage get into motion. Mrs. Rooth appeared to sway violently and in opposed directions: that of the impulse to rush after Miriam and that of the extraordinary possibility to which the young lady had alluded. She was in doubt, yet at a venture, detaining him with a maternal touch, she twinkled up at their visitor like an insinuating glow-worm. “I’m so glad you came.”

  “I’m not. I’ve got nothing by it,” Peter said as he found his hat.

  “Oh it was so beautiful!” she declared.

  “The play—yes, wonderful. I’m afraid it’s too late for me to avail myself of the privilege your daughter offers me. Good-night.”

  “Ah it’s a pity; won’t you take anything?” asked Mrs. Rooth. “When I heard your voice so high I was scared and hung back.” But before he could reply she added: “Are you really thinking of the stage?”

  “It comes to the same thing.”

  “Do you mean you’ve proposed?”

  “Oh unmistakably.”

  “And what does she say?”

  “Why you heard: she says I’m an ass.”

  “Ah the little wretch!” laughed Mrs. Rooth. “Leave her to me. I’ll help you. But you are mad. Give up nothing—least of all your advantages.”

  “I won’t give up your daughter,” said Peter, reflecting that if this was cheap it was at any rate good enough for Mrs. Rooth. He mended it a little indeed by adding darkly: “But you can’t make her take me.”

  “I can prevent her taking any one else.”

  “Oh can you?” Peter cried with more scepticism than ceremony.

  “You’ll see—you’ll see.” He passed into the garden, but, after she had blown out the candles and drawn the window to, Mrs. Rooth went with him. “All you’ve got to do is to be yourself—to be true to your fine position,” she explained as they proceeded. “Trust me with the rest—trust me and be quiet.”

  “How can one be quiet after this magnificent evening?”

  “Yes, but it’s just that!” panted the eager old woman. “It has launched her so on this sea of dangers that to make up for the loss of the old security (don’t you know?) we must take a still firmer hold.”

  “Aye, of what?” Peter asked as Mrs. Rooth’s comfort became vague while she stopped with him at the garden door.

  “Ah you know: of the real life, of the true anchor!” Her hansom was waiting for her and she added: “I kept it, you see; but a little extravagance on the night one’s fortune has come!—”

  Peter stared. Yes, there were people whose fortune had come; but he managed to stammer: “Are you following her again?”

  “For you—for you!” And she clambered into the vehicle. From the seat, enticingly, she offered him the place beside her. “Won’t you come too? I know he invited you.” Peter declined with a quick gesture and as he turned away he heard her call after him, to cheer him on his lonely walk: “I shall keep this up; I shall never lose sight of her!”

  BOOK EIGHTH

  XLVII

  When Mrs. Dallow returned to London just before London broke up the fact was immediately known in Calcutta Gardens and was promptly communicated to Nick Dormer by his sister Bridget. He had learnt it in no other way—he had had no correspondence with Julia during her absence. He gathered that his mother and sisters were not ignorant of her whereabouts—he never mentioned her name to them—but as to this he was not sure if the source of their information had been the Morning Post or a casual letter received by the inscrutable Biddy. He knew Biddy had some epistolary commerce with Julia; he had an impression Grace occasionally exchanged letters with Mrs. Gresham. Biddy, however, who, as he was also well aware, was always studying what he would like, forbore to talk to him about the absent mistress of Harsh beyond once dropping the remark that she had gone from Florence to Venice and was enjoying gondolas and sunsets too much to leave them. Nick’s comment on this was that she was a happy woman to have such a go at Titian and Tintoret: as he spoke, and for some time afterwards, the sense of how he himself should enjoy a like “go” made him ache with ineffectual longing.

  He had forbidden himself at the present to think of absence, not only because it would be inconvenient and expensive, but because it would be a kind of retreat from the enemy, a concession to difficulty. The enemy was no particular person and no particular body of persons: not his mother; not Mr. Carteret, who, as he heard from the doctor at Beauclere, lingered on, sinking and sinking till his vitality appeared to have the vertical depth of a gold-mine; not his pacified constituents, who had found a healthy diversion in returning another Liberal wholly without Mrs. Dallow’s aid (she had not participated even to the extent of a responsive telegram in the election); not his late colleagues in the House, nor the biting satirists of the newspapers, nor the brilliant women he took down at dinner-parties—there was only one sense in which he ever took them down; not in short his friends, his foes, his private thoughts, the periodical phantom of his shocked father: the enemy was simply the general awkwardness of his situation. This awkwardness was connected with the sense of responsibility so greatly deprecated by Gabriel Nash, Gabriel who had ceased to roam of late on purpose to miss as few scenes as possible of the drama, rapidly growing dull alas, of his friend’s destiny; but that compromising relation scarcely drew the soreness from it. The public flurry produced by his collapse had only been large enough to mark the flatness of our young man’s position when it was over. To have had a few jokes cracked audibly at your expense wasn’t an ordeal worth talking of; the hardest thing about it was merely that there had not been enough of them
to yield a proportion of good ones. Nick had felt in fine the benefit of living in an age and in a society where number and pressure have, for the individual figure, especially when it’s a zero, compensations almost equal to their cruelties.

  No, the pinch for his conscience after a few weeks had passed was simply an acute mistrust of the superficiality of performance into which the desire to justify himself might hurry him. That desire was passionate as regards Julia Dallow; it was ardent also as regards his mother; and, to make it absolutely uncomfortable, it was complicated with the conviction that neither of them would know his justification even when she should see it. They probably couldn’t know it if they would, and very certainly wouldn’t if they could. He assured himself, however, that this limitation wouldn’t matter; it was their affair—his own was simply to have the right sort of thing to show. The work he was now attempting wasn’t the right sort of thing, though doubtless Julia, for instance, would dislike it almost as much as if it were. The two portraits of Miriam, after the first exhilaration of his finding himself at large, filled him with no private glee; they were not in the direction in which he wished for the present really to move. There were moments when he felt almost angry, though of course he held his tongue, when by the few persons who saw them they were pronounced wonderfully clever. That they were wonderfully clever was just the detestable thing in them, so active had that cleverness been in making them seem better than they were. There were people to whom he would have been ashamed to show them, and these were the people whom it would give him most pleasure some day to please. Not only had he many an hour of disgust at his actual work, but he thought he saw as in an ugly revelation that nature had cursed him with an odious facility and that the lesson of his life, the sternest and wholesomest, would be to keep out of the trap it had laid for him. He had fallen into this trap on the threshold and had only scrambled out with his honour. He had a talent for appearance, and that was the fatal thing; he had a damnable suppleness and a gift of immediate response, a readiness to oblige, that made him seem to take up causes which he really left lying, enabled him to learn enough about them in an hour to have all the air of having converted them to his use. Many people used them—that was the only thing to be said—who had taken them in much less. He was at all events too clever by half, since this pernicious overflow had wrecked most of his attempts. He had assumed a virtue and enjoyed assuming it, and the assumption had cheated his father and his mother and his affianced wife and his rich benefactor and the candid burgesses of Harsh and the cynical reporters of the newspapers. His enthusiasms had been but young curiosity, his speeches had been young agility, his professions and adhesions had been like postage-stamps without glue: the head was all right, but they wouldn’t stick. He stood ready now to wring the neck of the irrepressible vice that certainly would tend to nothing so much as to get him into further trouble. His only real justification would be to turn patience—his own of course—inside out; yet if there should be a way to misread that recipe his humbugging genius could be trusted infallibly to discover it. Cheap and easy results would dangle before him, little amateurish conspicuities at exhibitions helped by his history; putting it in his power to triumph with a quick “What do you say to that?” over those he had wounded. The fear of this danger was corrosive; it poisoned even lawful joys. If he should have a striking picture at the Academy next year it wouldn’t be a crime; yet he couldn’t help suspecting any conditions that would enable him to be striking so soon. In this way he felt quite enough how Gabriel Nash had “had” him whenever railing at his fever for proof, and how inferior as a productive force the desire to win over the ill-disposed might be to the principle of quiet growth. Nash had a foreign manner of lifting up his finger and waving it before him, as if to put an end to everything, whenever it became, in conversation or discussion, to any extent a question whether any one would “like” anything.