The Princess Casamassima

by Henry James

  ‘It’s not the ground, my dear; it’s you that are turning somersaults,’ Madame Grandoni interposed.

  ‘Ah, you, my friend, you have the happy faculty of believing what you like to believe. I have to believe what I see.’

  ‘She wishes to throw herself into the revolution, to guide it, to enlighten it,’ Madame Grandoni said to Hyacinth, speaking now with imperturbable gravity.

  ‘I am sure she could direct it in any sense she would wish!’ the young man responded, in a glow. The pure, high dignity with which the Princess had just spoken, and which appeared to cover a suppressed tremor of passion, set Hyacinth’s pulses throbbing, and though he scarcely saw what she meant – her aspirations seeming so vague – her tone, her voice, her wonderful face, showed that she had a generous soul.

  She answered his eager declaration with a serious smile and a melancholy head-shake. ‘I have no such pretensions, and my good old friend is laughing at me. Of course that is very easy; for what, in fact, can be more absurd, on the face of it, than for a woman with a title, with diamonds, with a carriage, with servants, with a position, as they call it, to sympathise with the upward struggles of those who are below? “Give all that up, and we’ll believe you,” you have a right to say. I am ready to give them up the moment it will help the cause; I assure you that’s the least difficulty. I don’t want to teach, I want to learn; and, above all, I want to know à quoi m’en tenir.116 Are we on the eve of great changes, or are we not? Is everything that is gathering force, underground, in the dark, in the night, in little hidden rooms, out of sight of governments and policemen and idiotic “statesmen” – heaven save them! – is all this going to burst forth some fine morning and set the world on fire? Or is it to sputter out and spend itself in vain conspiracies, be dissipated in sterile heroisms and abortive isolated movements? I want to know a quoi m’en tenir,’ she repeated, fixing her visitor with more brilliant eyes, as if he could tell her on the spot. Then, suddenly, she added in a totally different tone, ‘Excuse me, I have an idea you speak French. Didn’t Captain Sholto tell me so?’

  ‘I have some little acquaintance with it,’ Hyacinth murmured. ‘I have French blood in my veins.’

  She considered him as if he had proposed to her some kind of problem. ‘Yes, I can see that you are not le premier venu.117 Now, your friend, of whom you were speaking, is a chemist; and you, yourself – what is your occupation?’

  ‘I’m just a bookbinder.’

  ‘That must be delightful. I wonder if you would bind some books for me.’

  ‘You would have to bring them to our shop, and I can do there only the work that’s given out to me. I might manage it by myself, at home,’ Hyacinth added, smiling.

  ‘I should like that better. And what do you call home?’

  ‘The place I live in, in the north of London: a little street you certainly never heard of.’

  ‘What is it called?’

  ‘Lomax Place, at your service,’ said Hyacinth, laughing.

  She laughed back at him, and he didn’t know whether her brightness or her gravity were the more charming. ‘No, I don’t think I have heard of it. I don’t know London very well; I haven’t lived here long. I have spent most of my life abroad. My husband is a foreigner, an Italian. We don’t live together much. I haven’t the manners of this country – not of any class; have I, eh? Oh, this country – there is a great deal to be said about it; and a great deal to be done, as you, of course, understand better than any one. But I want to know London; it interests me more than I can say – the huge, swarming, smoky, human city. I mean real London, the people and all their sufferings and passions; not Park Lane and Bond Street. Perhaps you can help me – it would be a great kindness: that’s what I want to know men like you for. You see it isn’t idle, my having given you so much trouble to-night.’

  ‘I shall be very glad to show you all I know. But it isn’t much, and above all it isn’t pretty,’ said Hyacinth.

  ‘Whom do you live with, in Lomax Place?’ the Princess asked, by way of rejoinder to this.

  ‘Captain Sholto is leaving the young lady – he is coming back here,’ Madame Grandoni announced, inspecting the balcony with her instrument. The orchestra had been for some time playing the overture to the following act.

  Hyacinth hesitated a moment. ‘I live with a dressmaker.’

  ‘With a dressmaker? Do you mean – do you mean –?’ And the Princess paused.

  ‘Do you mean she’s your wife?’ asked Madame Grandoni, humorously.

  ‘Perhaps she gives you rooms,’ remarked the Princess.

  ‘How many do you think I have? She gives me everything, or she has done so in the past. She brought me up; she is the best little woman in the world.’

  ‘You had better command a dress!’ exclaimed Madame Grandoni.

  ‘And your family, where are they?’ the Princess continued.

  ‘I have no family.’

  ‘None at all?’

  ‘None at all. I never had.’

  ‘But the French blood that you speak of, and which I see perfectly in your face – you haven’t the English expression, or want of expression – that must have come to you through some one.’

  ‘Yes, through my mother.’

  ‘And she is dead?’

  ‘Long ago.’

  ‘That’s a great loss, because French mothers are usually so much to their sons.’ The Princess looked at her painted fan a moment, as she opened and closed it; after which she said, ‘Well, then, you’ll come some day. We’ll arrange it.’

  Hyacinth felt that the answer to this could be only a silent inclination of his little person; and to make it he rose from his chair. As he stood there, conscious that he had stayed long enough and yet not knowing exactly how to withdraw, the Princess, with her fan closed, resting upright on her knee, and her hands clasped on the end of it, turned up her strange, lovely eyes at him, and said –

  ‘Do you think anything will occur soon?’

  ‘Will occur?’

  ‘That there will be a crisis – that you’ll make yourselves felt?’

  In this beautiful woman’s face there was to Hyacinth’s bewildered perception something at once inspiring, tempting and mocking; and the effect of her expression was to make him say, rather clumsily, ‘I’ll try and ascertain’; as if she had asked him whether her carriage were at the door.

  ‘I don’t quite know what you are talking about; but please don’t have it for another hour or two. I want to see what becomes of the Pearl!’ Madame Grandoni interposed.

  ‘Remember what I told you: I would give up everything – everything!’ the Princess went on, looking up at the young man in the same way. Then she held out her hand, and this time he knew sufficiently what he was about to take it.

  When he bade good-night to Madame Grandoni the old lady exclaimed to him, with a comical sigh, ‘Well, she is respectable!’ and out in the lobby, when he had closed the door of the box behind him, he found himself echoing these words and repeating mechanically, ‘She is respectable!’ They were on his lips as he stood, suddenly, face to face with Captain Sholto, who laid his hand on his shoulder once more and shook him a little, in that free yet insinuating manner for which this officer appeared to be remarkable.

  ‘My dear fellow, you were born under a lucky star.’

  ‘I never supposed it,’ said Hyacinth, changing colour.

  ‘Why, what in the world would you have? You have the faculty, the precious faculty, of inspiring women with an interest – but an interest!’

  ‘Yes, ask them in the box there! I behaved like a cretin,’ Hyacinth declared, overwhelmed now with a sense of opportunities missed.

  ‘They won’t tell me that. And the lady upstairs?’

  ‘Well,’ said Hyacinth gravely, ‘what about her?’

  The Captain considered him a moment. ‘She wouldn’t talk to me of anything but you. You may imagine how I liked it!’

  ‘I don’t like it, either. But I must go up.’r />
  ‘Oh yes, she counts the minutes. Such a charming person!’ Captain Sholto added, with more propriety of tone. As Hyacinth left him he called after him, ‘Don’t be afraid – you’ll go far.’

  When the young man took his place in the balcony beside Millicent this damsel gave him no greeting, nor asked any question about his adventures in the more aristocratic part of the house. She only turned her fine complexion upon him for some minutes, and as he himself was not in the mood to begin to chatter, the silence continued – continued till after the curtain had risen on the last act of the play. Millicent’s attention was now, evidently, not at her disposal for the stage, and in the midst of a violent scene, which included pistol-shots and shrieks, she said at last to her companion, ‘She’s a tidy lot, your Princess, by what I learn.’

  ‘Pray, what do you know about her?’

  ‘I know what that fellow told me.’

  ‘And pray, what was that?’

  ‘Well, she’s a bad ’un, as ever was. Her own husband has had to turn her out of the house.’

  Hyacinth remembered the allusion the lady herself had made to her matrimonial situation; nevertheless, what he would have liked to reply to Miss Henning was that he didn’t believe a word of it. He withheld the doubt, and after a moment remarked quietly, ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘You don’t care? Well, I do, then!’ Millicent cried. And as it was impossible, in view of the performance and the jealous attention of their neighbours, to continue the conversation in this pitch, she contented herself with ejaculating, in a somewhat lower key, at the end of five minutes, during which she had been watching the stage, ‘Gracious, what dreadful common stuff!’

  14

  Hyacinth did not mention to Pinnie or Mr Vetch that he had been taken up by a great lady; but he mentioned it to Paul Muniment, to whom he now confided a great many things. He had, at first, been in considerable fear of his straight, loud, north-country friend, who showed signs of cultivating logic and criticism to a degree that was hostile to free conversation; but he discovered later that he was a man to whom one could say anything in the world, if one didn’t think it of more importance to be sympathised with than to be understood. For a revolutionist, he was strangely good-natured. The sight of all the things he wanted to change had seemingly no power to irritate him, and if he joked about questions that lay very near his heart his pleasantry was not bitter nor invidious; the fault that Hyacinth sometimes found with it, rather, was that it was innocent to puerility. Our hero envied his power of combining a care for the wide misery of mankind with the apparent state of mind of the cheerful and virtuous young workman who, on Sunday morning, has put on a clean shirt, and, not having taken the gilt off his wages the night before, weighs against each other, for a happy day, the respective attractions of Epping Forest118 and Gravesend. He was never sarcastic about his personal lot and his daily life; it had not seemed to occur to him, for instance, that ‘society’ was really responsible for the condition of his sister’s spinal column, though Eustache Poupin and his wife (who practically, however, were as patient as he), did everything they could to make him say so, believing, evidently, that it would relieve him. Apparently he cared nothing for women, talked of them rarely, and always decently, and had never a sign of a sweetheart, unless Lady Aurora Langrish might pass for one. He never drank a drop of beer nor touched a pipe; he always had a clear tone, a fresh cheek and a smiling eye, and once excited on Hyacinth’s part a kind of elder-brotherly indulgence by the open-mouthed glee and credulity with which, when the pair were present, in the sixpenny gallery, at Astley’s,119 at an equestrian pantomime, he followed the tawdry spectacle. He once told the young bookbinder that he was a suggestive little beggar, and Hyacinth’s opinion of him, by this time, was so exalted that the remark had almost the value of a patent of nobility. Our hero treated himself to an unlimited belief in him; he had always dreamed of having some grand friendship, and this was the best opening he had ever encountered. No one could entertain a sentiment of that sort better than Hyacinth, or cultivate a greater luxury of confidence. It disappointed him, sometimes, that it was not more richly repaid; that on certain important points of the socialistic programme Muniment would never commit himself; and that he had not yet shown the fond du sac,120 as Eustache Poupin called it, to so ardent an admirer. He answered particular questions freely enough, and answered them occasionally in a manner that made Hyacinth jump, as when, in reply to an inquiry in regard to his view of capital punishment, he said that, so far from wishing it abolished, he should go in for extending it much further – he should impose it on those who habitually lied or got drunk; but his friend had always a feeling that he kept back his best card and that even in the listening circle in Bloomsbury, when only the right men were present, there were unspoken conclusions in his mind which he didn’t as yet think any one good enough to be favoured with. So far, therefore, from suspecting him of half-heartedness, Hyacinth was sure that he had extraordinary things in his head; that he was thinking them out to the logical end, wherever it might land him; and that the night he should produce them, with the door of the club-room guarded and the company bound by a tremendous oath, the others would look at each other and turn pale.

  ‘She wants to see you; she asked me to bring you; she was very serious,’ Hyacinth said, relating his interview with the ladies in the box at the play; which, however, now that he looked back upon it, seemed as queer as a dream, and not much more likely than that sort of experience to have a continuation in one’s waking hours.

  ‘To bring me – to bring me where?’ asked Muniment. ‘You talk as if I were a sample out of your shop, or a little dog you had for sale. Has she ever seen me? Does she think I’m smaller than you? What does she know about me?’

  ‘Well, principally, that you’re a friend of mine – that’s enough for her.’

  ‘Do you mean that it ought to be enough for me that she’s a friend of yours? I have a notion you’ll have some queer ones before you’re done; a good many more than I have time to talk to. And how can I go to see a delicate female, with those paws?’ Muniment inquired, exhibiting ten work-stained fingers.

  ‘Buy a pair of gloves,’ said Hyacinth, who recognised the serious character of this obstacle. But after a moment he added, ‘No, you oughtn’t to do that; she wants to see dirty hands.’

  ‘That’s easy enough; she needn’t send for me for the purpose. But isn’t she making game of you?’

  ‘It’s very possible, but I don’t see what good it can do her.’

  ‘You are not obliged to find excuses for the pampered classes. Their bloated luxury begets evil, impudent desires; they are capable of doing harm for the sake of harm. Besides, is she genuine?’

  ‘If she isn’t, what becomes of your explanation?’ asked Hyacinth.

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter; at night all cats are gray. What ever she is, she’s an idle, bedizened jade.’

  ‘If you had seen her, you wouldn’t talk of her that way.’

  ‘God forbid I should see her, then, if she’s going to corrupt me!’

  ‘Do you suppose she’ll corrupt me?’ Hyacinth demanded, with an expression of face and a tone of voice which produced, on his friend’s part, an explosion of mirth.

  ‘How can she, after all, when you are already such a little mass of corruption?’

  ‘You don’t think that,’ said Hyacinth, looking very grave.

  ‘Do you mean that if I did I wouldn’t say it? Haven’t you noticed that I say what I think?’

  ‘No, you don’t, not half of it: you’re as close as a fish.’

  Paul Muniment looked at his companion a moment, as if he were rather struck with the penetration of that remark; then he said, ‘Well, then, if I should give you the other half of my opinion of you, do you think you’d fancy it?’

  ‘I’ll save you the trouble. I’m a very clever, conscientious, promising young chap, and any one would be proud to claim me as a friend.’

  ‘Is that what your Prince
ss told you? She must be a precious piece of goods!’ Paul Muniment exclaimed. ‘Did she pick your pocket meanwhile?’

  ‘Oh yes; a few minutes later I missed a silver cigar-case, engraved with the arms of the Robinsons. Seriously,’ Hyacinth continued, ‘don’t you consider it possible that a woman of that class should want to know what is going on among the like of us?’

  ‘It depends upon what class you mean.’

  ‘Well, a woman with a lot of jewels and the manners of an angel. It’s queer of course, but it’s conceivable; why not? There may be unselfish natures; there may be disinterested feelings.’

  ‘And there may be fine ladies in an awful funk about their jewels, and even about their manners. Seriously, as you say, it’s perfectly conceivable. I am not in the least surprised at the aristocracy being curious to know what we are up to, and wanting very much to look into it; in their place I should be very uneasy, and if I were a woman with angelic manners very likely I too should be glad to get hold of a soft, susceptible little bookbinder, and pump him dry, bless his heart!’

  ‘Are you afraid I’ll tell her secrets?’ cried Hyacinth, flushing with virtuous indignation.

  ‘Secrets? What secrets could you tell her, my pretty lad?’

  Hyacinth stared a moment. ‘You don’t trust me – you never have.’

  ‘We will, some day – don’t be afraid,’ said Muniment, who, evidently, had no intention of unkindness, a thing that appeared to be impossible to him. ‘And when we do, you’ll cry with disappointment.’

  ‘Well, you won’t,’ Hyacinth declared. And then he asked whether his friend thought the Princess Casamassima a spy; and why, if she were in that line, Mr Sholto was not – inasmuch as it must be supposed he was not, since they had seen fit to let him walk in and out, at that rate, in the place in Bloomsbury. Muniment did not even know whom he meant, not having had any relations with the gentleman; but he summoned a sufficient image when his companion had described the Captain’s appearance. He then remarked, with his usual geniality, that he didn’t take him for a spy – he took him for an ass; but even if he had edged himself into the place with every intention to betray them, what handle could he possibly get – what use, against them, could he make of anything he had seen or heard? If he had a fancy to dip into working-men’s clubs (Muniment remembered, now, the first night he came; he had been brought by that German cabinetmaker, who had a stiff neck and smoked a pipe with a bowl as big as a stove); if it amused him to put on a bad hat, and inhale foul tobacco, and call his ‘inferiors’ ‘my dear fellow’; if he thought that in doing so he was getting an insight into the people and going half-way to meet them and preparing for what was coming – all this was his own affair, and he was very welcome, though a man must be a flat who would spend his evening in a hole like that when he might enjoy his comfort in one of those flaming big shops,121 full of armchairs and flunkies, in Pall Mall. And what did he see, after all, in Bloomsbury? Nothing but a ‘social gathering’, where there were clay pipes, and a sanded floor, and not half enough gas, and the principal newspapers; and where the men, as any one would know, were advanced radicals, and mostly advanced idiots. He could pat as many of them on the back as he liked, and say the House of Lords wouldn’t last till midsummer; but what discoveries would he make? He was simply on the same lay as Hyacinth’s Princess; he was nervous and scared, and he thought he would see for himself.