The Princess Casamassima (Classics)

by Henry James

  Mr Vetch was habited in a tattered dressing-gown; his apartment smelt strongly of the liquor he was consuming. Divested of his evening-gear he looked to our hero so plucked and blighted that on the spot Hyacinth ceased to hesitate as to his claims in the event of a social liquidation; he, too, was unmistakably a creditor. ‘I’m afraid you find your young lady rather expensive.’

  ‘I find everything expensive,’ said Hyacinth, as if to finish that subject.

  ‘Especially, I suppose, your secret societies.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ the young man asked, staring.

  ‘Why, you told me, in the autumn, that you were just about to join a few.’

  ‘A few? How many do you suppose?’ And Hyacinth checked himself. ‘Do you suppose if I had been serious I would tell?’

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ Mr Vetch murmured, with a sigh. Then he went on: ‘You want to take her to my shop, eh?’

  ‘I’m sorry to say she won’t go there. She wants something in the Strand: that’s a great point. She wants very much to see the Pearl of Paraguay. I don’t wish to pay anything, if possible; I am sorry to say I haven’t a penny. But as you know people at the other theatres, and I have heard you say that you do each other little favours, from place to place –a charge de revanche,107 as the French say – it occurred to me that you might be able to get me an order. The piece has been running a long time, and most people (except poor devils like me) must have seen it: therefore there probably isn’t a rush.’

  Mr Vetch listened in silence, and presently he said, ‘Do you want a box?’

  ‘Oh no; something more modest.’

  ‘Why not a box?’ asked the fiddler, in a tone which Hyacinth knew.

  ‘Because I haven’t got the clothes that people wear in that sort of place, if you must have such a definite reason.’

  ‘And your young lady – has she got the clothes?’

  ‘Oh, I daresay; she seems to have everything.’

  ‘Where does she get them?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. She belongs to a big shop; she has to be fine.’

  ‘Won’t you have a pipe?’ Mr Vetch asked, pushing an old tobacco-pouch across the table to his visitor; and while the young man helped himself he puffed a while in silence. ‘What will she do with you?’ he inquired at last.

  ‘What will who do with me?’

  ‘Your big beauty – Miss Henning. I know all about her from Pinnie.’

  ‘Then you know what she’ll do with me!’ Hyacinth returned, with rather a scornful laugh.

  ‘Yes, but, after all, it doesn’t very much matter.’

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ said Hyacinth.

  ‘Well, now the other matter – the International108 – are you very deep in that?’ the fiddler went on, as if he had not heard him.

  ‘Did Pinnie tell you also about that?’ his visitor asked.

  ‘No, our friend Eustace has told me a good deal. He knows you have put your head into something. Besides, I see it,’ said Mr Vetch.

  ‘How do you see it, pray?’

  ‘You have got such a speaking eye. Any one can tell, to look at you, that you have become a nihilist,109 that you’re a member of a secret society. You seem to say to every one, “Slow torture won’t induce me to tell where it meets!” ’

  ‘You won’t get me an order, then?’ Hyacinth said, in a moment.

  ‘My dear boy, I offer you a box. I take the greatest interest in you.’

  They smoked together a while, and at last Hyacinth remarked, ‘It has nothing to do with the International.’

  ‘Is it more terrible – more deadly secret?’ his companion inquired, looking at him with extreme seriousness.

  ‘I thought you pretended to be a radical,’ answered Hyacinth.

  ‘Well, so I am – of the old-fashioned, constitutional, milk-and-water, jog-trot sort. I’m not an exterminator.’

  ‘We don’t know what we may be when the time comes,’ Hyacinth rejoined, more sententiously than he intended.

  ‘Is the time coming, then, my dear boy?’

  ‘I don’t think I have a right to give you any more of a warning than that,’ said our hero, smiling.

  ‘It’s very kind of you to do so much, I’m sure, and to rush in here at the small hours for the purpose. Meanwhile, in the few weeks, or months, or years, or whatever they are, that are left, you wish to put in as much enjoyment as you can squeeze, with the young ladies: that’s a very natural inclination.’ Then, irrelevantly, Mr Vetch inquired, ‘Do you see many foreigners?’

  ‘Yes, I see a good many.’

  ‘And what do you think of them?’

  ‘Oh, all sorts of things. I rather like Englishmen better.’

  ‘Mr Muniment, for example?’

  ‘I say, what do you know about him?’ Hyacinth asked.

  ‘I’ve seen him at Eustace’s. I know that you and he are as thick as thieves.’

  ‘He will distinguish himself some day, very much,’ said Hyacinth, who was perfectly willing, and indeed very proud, to be thought a close ally of the chemist’s assistant.

  ‘Very likely – very likely. And what will he do with you?’ the fiddler inquired.

  Hyacinth got up; the two men looked at each other for an instant. ‘Do get me two good places in the second balcony,’ said Hyacinth.

  Mr Vetch replied that he would do what he could, and three days afterwards he gave the coveted order to his young friend. As he placed it in his hands he exclaimed, ‘You had better put in all the fun you can, you know!’

  BOOK SECOND

  12

  Hyacinth and his companion took their seats with extreme promptitude before the curtain rose upon the Pearl of Paraguay. Thanks to Millicent’s eagerness not to be late they encountered the discomfort which had constituted her main objection to going into the pit: they waited for twenty minutes at the door of the theatre, in a tight, stolid crowd, before the official hour of opening. Millicent, bareheaded and very tightly laced, presented a most splendid appearance and, on Hyacinth’s part, gratified a certain youthful, ingenuous pride of possession in every respect save a tendency, while ingress was denied them, to make her neighbours feel her elbows and to comment, loudly and sarcastically, on the situation. It was more clear to him even than it had been before that she was a young lady who in public places might easily need a champion or an apologist. Hyacinth knew there was only one way to apologise for a ‘female’, when the female was attached very closely and heavily to one’s arm, and was reminded afresh how little constitutional aversion Miss Henning had to a row. He had an idea she might think his own taste ran even too little in that direction, and had visions of violent, confused scenes, in which he should in some way distinguish himself: he scarcely knew in what way, and imagined himself more easily routing some hulking adversary by an exquisite application of the retort courteous than by flying at him with a pair of very small fists.

  By the time they had reached their places in the balcony Millicent was rather flushed and a good deal ruffled; but she had composed herself in season for the rising of the curtain upon the farce which preceded the melodrama110 and which the pair had had no intention of losing. At this stage a more genial agitation took possession of her, and she surrendered her sympathies to the horse-play of the traditional prelude. Hyacinth found it less amusing, but the theatre, in any conditions, was full of sweet deception for him. His imagination projected itself lovingly across the footlights, gilded and coloured the shabby canvas and battered accessories, and lost itself so effectually in the fictive world that the end of the piece, however long, or however short, brought with it a kind of alarm, like a stoppage of his personal life. It was impossible to be more friendly to the dramatic illusion. Millicent, as the audience thickened, rejoiced more largely and loudly, held herself as a lady, surveyed the place as if she knew all about it, leaned back and leaned forward, fanned herself with majesty, gave her opinion upon the appearance and coiffure of every woman within sight,
abounded in question and conjecture, and produced, from her pocket, a little paper of peppermint-drops, of which, under cruel threats, she compelled Hyacinth to partake. She followed with attention, though not always with success, the complicated adventures of the Pearl of Paraguay, through scenes luxuriantly tropical, in which the male characters wore sombreros and stilettos,111 and the ladies either danced the cachucha112 or fled from licentious pursuit; but her eyes wandered, during considerable periods, to the occupants of the boxes and stalls, concerning several of whom she had theories which she imparted to Hyacinth while the play went on, greatly to his discomfiture, he being unable to conceive of such levity. She had the pretension of knowing who every one was; not individually and by name, but as regards their exact social station, the quarter of London in which they lived, and the amount of money they were prepared to spend in the neighbourhood of Buckingham Palace. She had seen the whole town pass through her establishment there, and though Hyacinth, from his infancy, had been watching it from his own point of view, his companion made him feel that he had missed a thousand characteristic points, so different were most of her interpretations from his, and so very bold and irreverent. Miss Henning’s observation of human society had not been of a nature to impress her with its high moral tone, and she had a free off-hand cynicism which imposed itself. She thought most ladies were hypocrites, and had, in all ways, a low opinion of her own sex, which, more than once, before this, she had justified to Hyacinth by narrating observations of the most surprising kind, gathered during her career as a shop-girl. There was a pleasing inconsequence, therefore, in her being moved to tears in the third act of the play, when the Pearl of Paraguay, dishevelled and distracted, dragging herself on her knees, implored the stern hidalgo her father, to believe in her innocence in spite of the circumstances which seemed to condemn her – a midnight meeting with the wicked hero in the grove of cocoanuts. It was at this crisis, none the less, that she asked Hyacinth who his friends were in the principal box on the left of the stage, and let him know that a gentleman seated there had been watching him, at intervals, for the past half hour.

  ‘Watching me! I like that!’ said the young man. ‘When I want to be watched I take you with me.’

  ‘Of course he has looked at me,’ Millicent answered, as if she had no interest in denying that. ‘But you’re the one he wants to get hold of.’

  ‘To get hold of!’

  ‘Yes, you ninny: don’t hang back. He may make your fortune.’

  ‘Well, if you would like him to come and sit by you I’ll go and take a walk in the Strand,’ said Hyacinth, entering into the humour of the occasion but not seeing, from where he was placed, any gentleman in the box. Millicent explained that the mysterious observer had just altered his position; he had gone into the back of the box, which had considerable depth. There were other persons in it, out of sight; she and Hyacinth were too much on the same side. One of them was a lady, concealed by the curtain; her arm, bare save for its bracelets, was visible at moments on the cushioned ledge. Hyacinth saw it, in effect, reappear there, and even while the play went on contemplated it with a certain interest; but until the curtain fell at the end of the act there was no further symptom that a gentleman wished to get hold of him.

  ‘Now do you say it’s me he’s after?’ Millicent asked abruptly, giving him a sidelong dig, as the fiddlers in the orchestra began to scrape their instruments for the interlude.

  ‘Of course; I am only the pretext,’ Hyacinth replied, after he had looked a moment, in a manner which he flattered himself was a proof of quick self-possession. The gentleman designated by his companion was once more at the front, leaning forward, with his arms on the edge. Hyacinth saw that he was looking straight at him, and our young man returned his gaze – an effort not rendered the more easy by the fact that, after an instant, he recognised him.

  ‘Well, if he knows us he might give some sign, and if he doesn’t he might leave us alone,’ Millicent declared, abandoning the distinction she had made between herself and her companion. She had no sooner spoken than the gentleman complied with the first mentioned of these conditions; he smiled at Hyacinth across the house – he nodded to him with unmistakable friendliness. Millicent, perceiving this, glanced at the young man from Lomax Place and saw that the demonstration had brought a deep colour to his cheek. He was blushing, flushing; whether with pleasure or embarrassment was not immediately apparent to her. ‘I say, I say – is it one of your grand relations?’ she promptly exclaimed. ‘Well, I can stare as well as him’, and she told Hyacinth it was a ‘shime’ to bring a young lady to the play when you hadn’t so much as an opera-glass for her to look at the company. ‘Is he one of those lords your aunt was always talking about in the Plice? Is he your uncle, or your grandfather, or your first or second cousin? No, he’s too young for your grandfather. What a pity I can’t see if he looks like you!’

  At any other time Hyacinth would have thought these inquiries in the worst possible taste, but now he was too much given up to other reflections. It pleased him that the gentleman in the box should recognise and notice him, because even so small a fact as this was an extension of his social existence; but it also surprised and puzzled him, and it produced, generally, in his easily-excited organism, an agitation of which, in spite of his attempted self-control, the appearance he presented to Millicent was the sign. They had met three times, he and his fellow-spectator; but they had met under circumstances which, to Hyacinth’s mind, would have made a furtive wink, a mere tremor of the eyelid, a more judicious reference to the fact than so public a salutation. Hyacinth would never have permitted himself to greet him first; and this was not because the gentleman in the box belonged – conspicuously as he did so – to a different walk of society. He was apparently a man of forty, tall and lean and loose-jointed; he fell into lounging, dawdling attitudes, and even at a distance he looked lazy. He had a long, smooth, amused, contented face, unadorned with moustache or whisker, and his brown hair parted itself evenly over his forehead, and came forward on either temple in a rich, well-brushed lock which gave his countenance a certain analogy to portraits of English gentlemen about the year 1820. Millicent Henning had a glance of such range and keenness that she was able to make out the details of his evening-dress, of which she appreciated the ‘form’; to observe the character of his large hands; and to note that he appeared to be perpetually smiling, that his eyes were extraordinarily light in colour, and that in spite of the dark, well-marked brows arching over them, his fine skin never had produced, and never would produce, a beard. Our young lady pronounced him mentally a ‘swell’ of the first magnitude, and wondered more than ever where he had picked up Hyacinth. Her companion seemed to echo her thought when he exclaimed, with a little surprised sigh, almost an exhalation of awe, ‘Well, I had no idea he was one of that lot!’

  ‘You might at least tell me his name, so that I shall know what to call him when he comes round to speak to us,’ the girl said, provoked at her companion’s incommunicativeness.

  ‘Comes round to speak to us – a chap like that!’ Hyacinth exclaimed.

  ‘Well, I’m sure if he had been your own brother he couldn’t have grinned at you more! He may want to make my acquaintance after all; he won’t be the first.’

  The gentleman had once more retreated from sight, and there was as much evidence as that of the intention Millicent attributed to him. ‘I don’t think I’m at all clear that I have a right to tell his name,’ he remarked, with sincerity, but with a considerable disposition at the same time to magnify an incident which deepened the brilliancy of the entertainment he had been able to offer Miss Henning. ‘I met him in a place where he may not like to have it known that he goes.’

  ‘Do you go to places that people are ashamed of? Is it one of your political clubs, as you call them, where that dirty young man from Camberwell, Mr Monument (what do you call him?) fills your head with ideas that’ll bring you to no good? I’m sure your friend over there doesn’t look as if he�
�d be on your side.’

  Hyacinth had indulged in this reflection himself; but the only answer he made to Millicent was, ‘Well, then, perhaps he’ll be on yours!’

  ‘Laws, I hope she ain’t one of the aristocracy!’ Millicent exclaimed, with apparent irrelevance; and following the direction of her eyes Hyacinth saw that the chair his mysterious acquaintance had quitted in the stage-box was now occupied by a lady hitherto invisible – not the one who had given them a glimpse of her shoulder and bare arm. This was an ancient personage, muffled in a voluminous, crumpled white shawl – a stout, odd, foreign-looking woman, whose head apparently was surmounted with a light-coloured wig. She had a placid, patient air and a round, wrinkled face, in which, however, a small, bright eye moved quickly enough. Her rather soiled white gloves were too large for her, and round her head, horizontally arranged, as if to keep her wig in its place, she wore a narrow band of tinsel, decorated, in the middle of the forehead, by a jewel which the rest of her appearance would lead the spectator to suppose false. ‘Is the old woman his mother? Where did she dig up her clothes? They look as if she had hired them for the evening. Does she come to your wonderful club, too? I daresay she cuts it fine, don’t she?’ Millicent went on; and when Hyacinth suggested, sportively, that the old lady might be, not the gentleman’s mother, but his wife or his ‘fancy’, she declared that in that case, if he should come to see them, she wasn’t afraid. No wonder he wanted to get out of that box! The woman in the wig was sitting there on purpose to look at them, but she couldn’t say she was particularly honoured by the notice of such an old guy. Hyacinth pretended that he liked her appearance and thought her very handsome; he offered to bet another paper of peppermints that if they could find out she would be some tremendous old dowager, some one with a handle to her name. To this Millicent replied, with an air of experience, that she had never thought the greatest beauty was in the upper class; and her companion could see that she was covertly looking over her shoulder to watch for his political friend and that she would be disappointed if he did not come. This idea did not make Hyacinth jealous, for his mind was occupied with another side of the business; and if he offered sportive suggestions it was because he was really excited, dazzled, by an incident of which the reader will have failed as yet to perceive the larger relations. What moved him was not the pleasure of being patronised by a rich man; it was simply the prospect of new experience – a sensation for which he was always ready to exchange any present boon; and he was convinced that if the gentleman with whom he had conversed in a small occult back-room in Bloomsbury as Captain Godfrey Sholto – the Captain had given him his card – had more positively than in Millicent’s imagination come out of the stage-box to see him, he would bring with him rare influences. This nervous presentiment, lighting on our young man, was so keen that it constituted almost a preparation; therefore, when at the end of a few minutes he became aware that Millicent, with her head turned (her face was in his direction), was taking the measure of some one who had come in behind them, he felt that fate was doing for him, by way of a change, as much as could be expected. He got up in his place, but not too soon to see that Captain Sholto had been standing there a moment in contemplation of Millicent, and that this young lady had performed with deliberation the ceremony of taking his measure. The Captain had his hands in his pockets, and wore a crush-hat, pushed a good deal backward. He laughed at the young couple in the balcony in the friendliest way, as if he had known them both for years, and Millicent could see, on a nearer view, that he was a fine distinguished, easy, genial gentleman, at least six feet high, in spite of a habit, or an affectation, of carrying himself in a casual, relaxed, familiar manner. Hyacinth felt a little, after the first moment, as if he were treating them rather too much as a pair of children whom he had stolen upon, to startle; but this impression was speedily removed by the air with which he said, laying his hand on our hero’s shoulder as he stood in the little passage at the end of the bench where the holders of Mr Vetch’s order occupied the first seats, ‘My dear fellow, I really thought I must come round and speak to you. My spirits are all gone with this brute of a play. And those boxes are fearfully stuffy, you know,’ he added, as if Hyacinth had had at least an equal experience of that part of the theatre.