The Princess Casamassima

by Henry James

  On the terrace Hyacinth paced to and fro with the Princess until she suddenly remembered that he had not had his luncheon. He protested that this was the last thing he wished to think of, but she declared that she had not asked him down to Medley to starve him and that he must go back and be fed. They went back, but by a very roundabout way, through the park, so that they really had half an hour’s more talk. She explained to him that she herself breakfasted at twelve o’clock, in the foreign fashion, and had tea in the afternoon; as he too was so foreign he might like that better, and in this case, on the morrow, they would breakfast together. He could have coffee, and anything else he wanted, brought to his room when he woke up. When Hyacinth had sufficiently composed himself, in the presence of this latter image – he thought he saw a footman arranging a silver service at his bedside – he mentioned that really, as regarded the morrow, he should have to be back in London. There was a train at nine o’clock; he hoped she didn’t mind his taking it. She looked at him a moment, gravely and kindly, as if she were considering an abstract idea, and then she said, ‘Oh yes, I mind it very much. Not to-morrow – some other day.’ He made no rejoinder, and the Princess spoke of something else; that is, his rejoinder was private, and consisted of the reflection that he would leave Medley in the morning, whatever she might say. He simply couldn’t afford to stay; he couldn’t be out of work. And then Madame Grandoni thought it so important; for though the old lady was obscure she was decidedly impressive. The Princess’s protest, however, was to be reckoned with; he felt that it might take a form less cursory than the words she had just uttered, which would make it embarrassing. She was less solemn, less explicit, than Madame Grandoni had been, but there was something in her slight seriousness and the delicate way in which she signified a sort of command that seemed to tell him his liberty was going – the liberty he had managed to keep (till the other day, when he gave Hoffendahl a mortgage on it), and the possession of which had in some degree consoled him for other forms of penury. This made him uneasy; what would become of him if he should add another servitude to the one he had undertaken, at the end of that long, anxious cab-drive in the rain, in that dim back-bedroom of a house as to whose whereabouts he was even now not clear, while Muniment and Poupin and Schinkel, all visibly pale, listened and accepted the vow? Muniment and Poupin and Schinkel – how disconnected, all the same, he felt from them at the present hour; how little he was the young man who had made the pilgrimage in the cab; and how the two latter, at least, if they could have a glimpse of him now, would wonder what he was up to!

  As to this, Hyacinth wondered sufficiently himself, while the Princess touched upon the people and places she had seen, the impressions and conclusions she had gathered, since their former meeting. It was to such matters as these that she directed the conversation; she appeared to wish to keep it off his own concerns, and he was surprised at her continued avoidance of the slums and the question of her intended sacrifices. She mentioned none of her friends by name, but she talked of their character, their houses, their manners, taking for granted, as before, that Hyacinth would always follow. So far as he followed he was edified, but he had to admit to himself that half the time he didn’t know what she was talking about. At all events, if he had been with the dukes (she didn’t call her associates dukes, but Hyacinth was sure they were of that order), he would have got more satisfaction from them. She appeared, on the whole, to judge the English world severely; to think poorly of its wit, and even worse of its morals. ‘You know people oughtn’t to be both corrupt and dull,’ she said; and Hyacinth turned this over, feeling that he certainly had not yet caught the point of view of a person for whom the aristocracy was a collection of bores. He had sometimes taken great pleasure in hearing that it was fabulously profligate, but he was rather disappointed in the bad account the Princess gave of it. She remarked that she herself was very corrupt – she ought to have mentioned that before – but she had never been accused of being stupid. Perhaps he would discover it, but most of the people she had had to do with thought her only too lively. The second allusion that she made to their ulterior designs (Hyacinth’s and hers) was when she said, ‘I determined to see it’ – she was speaking still of English society – ‘to learn for myself what it really is, before we blow it up. I have been here now a year and a half, and, as I tell you, I feel that I have seen. It is the old régime again, the rottenness and extravagance, bristling with every iniquity and every abuse, over which the French Revolution passed like a whirlwind; or perhaps even more a reproduction of Roman society in its decadence, gouty, apoplectic, depraved, gorged and clogged with wealth and spoils, selfishness and scepticism, and waiting for the onset of the barbarians. You and I are the barbarians, you know.’ The Princess was pretty general, after all, in her animadversions, and regaled him with no anecdotes (he rather missed them) that would have betrayed the hospitality she had enjoyed. She couldn’t treat him absolutely as if he had been an ambassador. By way of defending the aristocracy he said to her that it couldn’t be true they were all a bad lot (he used that expression because she had let him know that she liked him to speak in the manner of the people), inasmuch as he had an acquaintance among them – a noble lady – who was one of the purest, kindest, most conscientious human beings it was possible to imagine. At this she stopped short and looked at him; then she asked, ‘Whom do you mean – a noble lady?’

  ‘I suppose there is no harm saying. Lady Aurora Langrish.’

  ‘I don’t know her. Is she nice?’

  ‘I like her ever so much.’

  ‘Is she pretty, clever?’

  ‘She isn’t pretty, but she is very uncommon,’ said Hyacinth.

  ‘How did you make her acquaintance?’ As he hesitated, she went on, ‘Did you bind some books for her?’

  ‘No. I met her in a place called Audley Court.’

  ‘Where is that?’

  ‘In Camberwell.’

  ‘And who lives there?’

  ‘A young woman I was calling on, who is bedridden.’

  ‘And the lady you speak of – what do you call her, Lydia Languish?178 – goes to see her?’

  ‘Yes, very often.’

  The Princess was silent a moment, looking at him. ‘Will you take me there?’

  ‘With great pleasure. The young woman I speak of is the sister of the chemist’s assistant you will perhaps remember that I mentioned to you.’

  ‘Yes, I remember. It must be one of the first places we go to. I am sorry,’ the Princess added, walking on. Hyacinth inquired what she might be sorry for, but she took no notice of his question, and presently remarked, ‘Perhaps she goes to see him.’

  ‘Goes to see whom?’

  ‘The chemist’s assistant – the brother.’ She said this very seriously.

  ‘Perhaps she does,’ Hyacinth rejoined, laughing. ‘But she is a fine sort of woman.’

  The Princess repeated that she was sorry, and he again asked her for what – for Lady Aurora’s being of that sort? To which she replied, ‘No; I mean for my not being the first – what is it you call them? – noble lady that you have encountered.’

  ‘I don’t see what difference that makes. You needn’t be afraid you don’t make an impression on me.’

  ‘I was not thinking of that. I was thinking that you might be less fresh than I thought.’

  ‘Of course I don’t know what you thought,’ said Hyacinth, smiling.

  ‘No; how should you?’

  23

  He was in the library, after luncheon, when word was brought to him that the carriage was at the door, for their drive; and when he went into the hall he found Madame Grandoni, bonneted and cloaked, awaiting the descent of the Princess. ‘You see I go with you. I am always there,’ she remarked, jovially. ‘The Princess has me with her to take care of her, and this is how I do it. Besides, I never miss my drive.’

  ‘You are different from me; this will be the first I have ever had in my life.’ He could establish that distinction witho
ut bitterness, because he was too pleased with his prospect to believe the old lady’s presence could spoil it. He had nothing to say to the Princess that she might not hear. He didn’t dislike her for coming, even after she had said to him, in answer to his own announcement, speaking rather more sententiously than was her wont, ‘It doesn’t surprise me that you have not spent your life in carriages. They have nothing to do with your trade.’

  ‘Fortunately not,’ he answered. ‘I should have made a ridiculous coachman.’

  The Princess appeared, and they mounted into a great square barouche, an old-fashioned, high-hung vehicle, with a green body, a faded hammer-cloth179 and a rumble where the footman sat (the Princess mentioned that it had been let with the house), which rolled ponderously and smoothly along the winding avenue and through the gilded gates (they were surmounted with an immense escutcheon) of the park. The progress of this oddly composed trio had a high respectability, and that is one of the reasons why Hyacinth felt the occasion to be tremendously memorable. There might still be greater joys in store for him – he was by this time quite at sea, and could recognise no shores – but he would never again in his life be so respectable. The drive was long and comprehensive, but very little was said while it lasted. ‘I shall show you the whole country: it is exquisitely beautiful; it speaks to the heart.’ Of so much as this his hostess had informed him at the start; and she added, in French, with a light, allusive nod at the rich, humanised landscape, ‘Voilà ce que j’aime en Angleterre.’180 For the rest, she sat there opposite to him, in quiet fairness, under her softly-swaying, lace-fringed parasol: moving her eyes to where she noticed that his eyes rested; allowing them, when the carriage passed anything particularly charming, to meet his own; smiling as if she enjoyed the whole affair very nearly as much as he; and now and then calling his attention to some prospect, some picturesque detail, by three words of which the cadence was sociable. Madame Grandoni dozed most of the time, with her chin resting on rather a mangy ermine tippet, in which she had enveloped herself; expanding into consciousness at moments, however, to greet the scenery with comfortable polyglot ejaculations. If Hyacinth was exalted, during these delightful hours, he at least measured his exaltation, and it kept him almost solemnly still, as if with the fear that a wrong movement of any sort would break the charm, cause the curtain to fall upon the play. This was especially the case when his senses oscillated back from the objects that sprang up by the way, every one of which was a rich image of something he had longed for, to the most beautiful woman in England, who sat there, close to him, as completely for his benefit as if he had been a painter engaged to make her portrait. More than once he saw everything through a mist; his eyes were full of tears.

  That evening they sat in the drawing-room after dinner, as the Princess had promised, or, as he was inclined to consider it, threatened him. The force of the threat was in his prevision that the ladies would make themselves fine, and that in contrast with the setting and company he should feel dingier than ever; having already on his back the only tolerably decent coat he possessed, and being unable to exchange it for a garment of the pattern that civilised people (so much he knew, if he couldn’t emulate them), put on about eight o’clock. The ladies, when they came to dinner, looked festal indeed; but Hyacinth was able to make the reflection that he was more pleased to be dressed as he was dressed, meanly and unsuitably as it was, than he should have been to present such a figure as Madame Grandoni, in whose toggery there was something comical. He was coming more and more round to the sense that if the Princess didn’t mind his poorness, in every way, he had no call to mind it himself. His present circumstances were not of his seeking – they had been forced upon him; they were not the fruit of a disposition to push. How little the Princess minded – how much, indeed, she enjoyed the consciousness that in having him about her in that manner she was playing a trick upon society, the false and conventional society she had measured and despised – was manifest from the way she had introduced him to the people they found awaiting them in the hall on the return from their drive: four ladies, a mother and three daughters, who had come over to call, from Broome, a place some five miles off. Broome was also a great house, as he gathered, and Lady Marchant, the mother, was the wife of a county magnate. She explained that they had come in on the persuasion of the butler, who had represented the return of the Princess as imminent, and who then had administered tea without waiting for this event. The evening had drawn in chill; there was a fire in the hall, and they all sat near it, round the tea-table, under the great roof which rose to the top of the house. Hyacinth conversed mainly with one of the daughters, a very fine girl with a straight back and long arms, whose neck was encircled so tightly with a fur boa that, to look a little to one side, she was obliged to move her whole body. She had a handsome, inanimate face, over which the firelight played without making it more lively, a beautiful voice, and the occasional command of a few short words. She asked Hyacinth with what pack he hunted, and whether he went in much for tennis, and she ate three muffins.

  Our young man perceived that Lady Marchant and her daughters had already been at Medley, and even guessed that their reception by the Princess, who probably thought them of a tiresome type, had not been enthusiastic; and his imagination projected itself, further still, into the motives which, in spite of this tepidity, must have led them, in consideration of the rarity of princesses in that country, to come a second time. The talk, in the firelight, while Hyacinth laboured, rather recklessly (for the spirit of the occasion, on his hostess’s part, was passing into his own blood), with his muffin-eating beauty – the conversation, accompanied with the light click of delicate tea-cups, was as well-bred as could be consistent with an odd, evident parti pris181 of the Princess’s to make poor Lady Marchant explain everything. With great urbanity of manner, she professed complete inability to understand the sense in which her visitor meant her thin remarks; and Hyacinth was scarcely able to follow her here, he wondered so what interest she could have in trying to appear dense. It was only afterwards he learned that the Marchant family produced a very peculiar, and at moments almost maddening, effect upon her nerves. He asked himself what would happen to that member of it with whom he was engaged if it should be revealed to her that she was conversing (how little soever) with a beggarly London artisan; and though he was rather pleased at her not having discovered his station (for he didn’t attribute her brevity to this idea), he entertained a little the question of its being perhaps his duty not to keep it hidden from her, not to flourish in a cowardly disguise. What did she take him for – or, rather, what didn’t she take him for – when she asked him if he hunted? Perhaps that was because it was rather dark; if there had been more light in the great vague hall she would have seen he was not one of themselves. Hyacinth felt that by this time he had associated a good deal with swells, but they had always known what he was and had been able to elect how to treat him. This was the first occasion on which a young gentlewoman had not been warned, and, as a consequence, he appeared to pass muster. He determined not to unmask himself, on the simple ground that he should by the same stroke betray the Princess. It was quite open to her to lean over and say to Miss Marchant, ‘You know he’s a wretched little bookbinder, earning a few shillings a week in a horrid street in Soho. There are all kinds of low things – and I suspect even something very horrible – connected with his birth. It seems to me I ought to mention it.’ He almost wished she would mention it, for the sake of the strange, violent sensation of the thing, a curiosity quivering within him to know what Miss Marchant would do at such a pinch, and what chorus of ejaculations – or, what appalled, irremediable silence – would rise to the painted roof. The responsibility, however, was not his; he had entered a phase of his destiny where responsibilities were suspended. Madame Grandoni’s tea had waked her up; she came, at every crisis, to the rescue of the conversation, and talked to the visitors about Rome, where they had once spent a winter, describing with much drollery the manner
in which the English families she had seen there for nearly half a century (and had met, of an evening, in the Roman world) inspected the ruins and monuments and squeezed into the great ceremonies of the church. Clearly, the four ladies didn’t know what to make of the Princess; but, though they perhaps wondered if she were a paid companion, they were on firm ground in the fact that the queer, familiar, fat person had been acquainted with the Millingtons, the Bunburys and the Tripps.

  After dinner (during which the Princess allowed herself a considerable license of pleasantry on the subject of her recent visitors, declaring that Hyacinth must positively go with her to return their call, and must see their interior, their manner at home), Madame Grandoni sat down to the piano, at Christina’s request, and played to her companions for an hour. The spaces were large in the big drawing-room, and our friends had placed themselves at a distance from each other. The old lady’s music trickled forth discreetly into the pleasant dimness of the candlelight; she knew dozens of Italian local airs, which sounded like the forgotten tunes of a people, and she followed them by a series of tender, plaintive German Lieder, awaking, without violence, the echoes of the high, pompous apartment. It was the music of an old woman, and seemed to quaver a little, as her singing might have done. The Princess, buried in a deep chair, listened, behind her fan. Hyacinth at least supposed she listened; at any rate, she never moved. At last Madame Grandoni left the piano and came toward the young man. She had taken up, on the way, a French book, in a pink cover, which she nursed in the hollow of her arm, and she stood looking at Hyacinth.

  ‘My poor little friend, I must bid you good-night. I shall not see you again for the present, as, to take your early train, you will have left the house before I put on my wig – and I never show myself to gentlemen without it. I have looked after the Princess pretty well, all day, to keep her from harm, and now I give her up to you, for a little. Take the same care, I beg you. I must put myself into my dressing-gown; at my age, at this hour, it is the only thing. What will you have? I hate to be tight,’ pursued Madame Grandoni, who appeared even in her ceremonial garment to have evaded this discomfort successfully enough. ‘Do not sit up late,’ she added; ‘and do not keep him, Christina. Remember that for an active young man like Mr Robinson, going every day to his work, there is nothing more exhausting than such an unoccupied life as ours. For what do we do, after all? His eyes are very heavy. Basta!’182