The Princess Casamassima (Classics)

by Henry James

  ‘What are you prowling about here for? You’re after no good, I’ll be bound!’

  ‘Good evening Miss Henning; what a jolly meeting!’ said the Captain, removing his hat with a humorous flourish.

  ‘Oh, how d’ye do?’ Millicent returned, as if she did not immediately place him.

  ‘Where were you going so fast? What are you doing?’ asked Hyacinth, who had looked from one to the other.

  ‘Well, I never did see such a manner – from one that knocks about like you!’ cried Miss Henning. ‘I’m going to see a friend of mine – a lady’s-maid in Curzon Street. Have you anything to say to that?’

  ‘Don’t tell us – don’t tell us!’ Sholto interposed, after she had spoken (she had not hesitated an instant). ‘I, at least, disavow the indiscretion. Where may not a charming woman be going when she trips with a light foot through the gathering dusk?’

  ‘I say, what are you talking about?’ the girl inquired, with dignity, of Hyacinth’s companion. She spoke as if with a resentful suspicion that her foot had not really been perceived to be light.

  ‘On what errand of mercy, of secret tenderness?’ the Captain went on, laughing.

  ‘Secret yourself!’ cried Millicent. ‘Do you two always hunt in couples?’

  ‘All right, we’ll turn round and go with you as far as your friend’s,’ Hyacinth said.

  ‘All right,’ Millicent replied.

  ‘All right,’ the Captain added; and the three took their way together in the direction of Curzon Street. They walked for a few moments in silence, though the Captain whistled, and then Millicent suddenly turned to Hyacinth.

  ‘You haven’t told me where you were going, yet.’

  ‘We met in that public-house,’ the Captain said, ‘and we were each so ashamed of being found in such a place by the other that we tumbled out together, without much thinking what we should do with ourselves.’

  ‘When he’s out with me he pretends he can’t abide them houses,’ Miss Henning declared. ‘I wish I had looked in that one, to see who was there.’

  ‘Well, she’s rather nice,’ the Captain went on. ‘She told me her name was Georgiana.’

  ‘I went to get a piece of money changed,’ Hyacinth said, with a sense that there was a certain dishonesty in the air; glad that he, at least, could afford to speak the truth.

  ‘To get your grandmother’s nightcap changed! I recommend you to keep your money together – you’ve none too much of it!’ Millicent exclaimed.

  ‘Is that the reason you are playing me false?’ Hyacinth flashed out. He had been thinking, with still intentness, as they walked; at once nursing and wrestling with a kindled suspicion. He was pale with the idea that he was being bamboozled; yet he was able to say to himself that one must allow, in life, for the element of coincidence, and that he might easily put himself immensely in the wrong by making a groundless charge. It was only later that he pieced his impressions together and saw them – as it appeared – justify each other; at present, as soon as he had uttered it, he was almost ashamed of his quick retort to Millicent’s taunt. He ought at least to have waited to see what Curzon Street would bring forth.

  The girl broke out upon him immediately, repeating ‘False, false?’ with high derision, and wanting to know whether that was the way to knock a lady about in public. She had stopped short on the edge of a crossing, and she went on, with a voice so uplifted that he was glad they were in a street that was rather empty at such an hour: ‘You’re a pretty one to talk about falsity, when a woman has only to leer at you out of an opera-box!’

  ‘Don’t say anything about her,’ the young man interposed, trembling.

  ‘And pray why not about “her”, I should like to know? You don’t pretend she’s a decent woman, I suppose?’ Millicent’s laughter rang through the quiet neighbourhood.

  ‘My dear fellow, you know you have been to her,’ Captain Sholto remarked, smiling.

  Hyacinth turned upon him, staring, at once challenged and baffled by his ambiguous part in an incident it was doubtless possible to magnify but it was not possible to treat as perfectly simple. ‘Certainly, I have been to the Princess Casamassima, thanks to you. When you came and begged me, when you dragged me, do you make it a reproach? Who the devil are you, any way, and what do you want of me?’ our hero cried – his mind flooded in a moment with everything in the Captain that had puzzled and eluded him. This swelling tide obliterated on the spot everything that had entertained and gratified him.

  ‘My dear fellow, whatever I am, I am not an ass,’ this gentleman replied, with imperturbable good-humour. ‘I don’t reproach you with anything. I only wanted to put in a word as a peacemaker. My good friends – my good friends,’ and he laid a hand, in his practised way, on Hyacinth’s shoulder, while, with the other pressed to his heart, he bent on the girl a face of gallantry which had something paternal in it, ‘I am determined this absurd misunderstanding shall end as lovers’ quarrels ought always to end.’

  Hyacinth withdrew himself from the Captain’s touch and said to Millicent, ‘You are not really jealous of – of any one. You pretend that, only to throw dust in my eyes.’

  To this sally Miss Henning returned him an answer which promised to be lively, but the Captain swept it away in the profusion of his protests. He pronounced them a dear delightful, abominable young couple; he declared it was most interesting to see how, in people of their sort, the passions lay near the surface; he almost pushed them into each other’s arms; and he wound up by proposing that they should all terminate their little differences by proceeding together to the Pavilion music-hall,153 the nearest place of entertainment in that neighbourhood, leaving the lady’s-maid in Curzon Street to dress her mistress’s wig in peace. He has been presented to the reader as an accomplished man, and it will doubtless be felt that the picture is justified when I relate that he placed this idea in so attractive a light that his companions finally entered a hansom with him and rattled toward the haunt of pleasure, Hyacinth sandwiched, on the edge of the seat, between the others. Two or three times his ears burned; he felt that if there was an understanding between them they had now, behind him, a rare opportunity for carrying it out. If it was at his expense, the whole evening constituted for them, indeed, an opportunity, and this thought rendered his diversion but scantily absorbing, though at the Pavilion the Captain engaged a private box and ordered ices to be brought in. Hyacinth cared so little for his little pink pyramid that he suffered Millicent to consume it after she had disposed of her own. It was present to him, however, that if he should make a fool of himself the folly would be of a very gross kind, and this is why he withheld a question which rose to his lips repeatedly – a disposition to inquire of his entertainer why the mischief he had hurried him so out of the public-house, if he had not been waiting there, preconcertedly, for Millicent. We know that in Hyacinth’s eyes one of this young lady’s compensatory merits had been that she was not deceitful, and he asked himself if a girl could change, that way, from one month to the other. This was optimistic, but, all the same, he reflected, before leaving the Pavilion, that he could see quite well what Lady Aurora meant by thinking Captain Sholto vulgar.

  21

  Paul Muniment had fits of silence, while the others were talking; but on this occasion he had not opened his lips for half an hour. When he talked Hyacinth listened, almost holding his breath; and when he said nothing Hyacinth watched him fixedly, listening to the others only through the medium of his candid countenance. At the ‘Sun and Moon’ Muniment paid very little attention to his young friend, doing nothing that should cause it to be perceived they were particular pals; and Hyacinth even thought, at moments, that he was bored or irritated by the serious manner in which the bookbinder could not conceal from the world that he regarded him. He wondered whether this were a system, a calculated prudence, on Muniment’s part, or only a manifestation of that superior brutality, latent in his composition, which never had an intention of unkindness but was naturally intolerant o
f palaver. There was plenty of palaver at the ‘Sun and Moon’; there were nights when a blast of imbecility seemed to blow over the place, and one felt ashamed to be associated with so much insistent ignorance and flat-faced vanity. Then every one, with two or three exceptions, made an ass of himself, thumping the table and repeating over some inane phrase which appeared for the hour to constitute the whole furniture of his mind. There were men who kept saying, ‘Them was my words in the month of February last, and what I say I stick to – what I say I stick to’; and others who perpetually inquired of the company, ‘And what the plague am I to do with seventeen shillings – with seventeen shillings? What am I to do with them – will ye tell me that?’ an interrogation which, in truth, usually ended by eliciting a ribald reply. There were still others who remarked, to satiety, that if it was not done to-day it would have to be done to-morrow, and several who constantly proclaimed their opinion that the only way was to pull up the Park rails again154 – just to pluck them straight up. A little shoemaker, with red eyes and a grayish face, whose appearance Hyacinth deplored, scarcely ever expressed himself but in the same form of words: ‘Well, are we in earnest, or ain’t we in earnest? – that’s the thing I want to know.’ He was terribly in earnest himself, but this was almost the only way he had of showing it; and he had much in common (though they were always squabbling) with a large red-faced man, of uncertain attributes and stertorous breathing, who was understood to know a good deal about dogs, had fat hands, and wore on his forefinger a big silver ring, containing some one’s hair – Hyacinth believed it to be that of a terrier, snappish in life. He had always the same refrain: ‘Well, now, are we just starving, or ain’t we just starving? I should like the ’vice of the company on that question.’

  When the tone fell as low as this Paul Muniment held his peace, except that he whistled a little, leaning back, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the table. Hyacinth often supposed him to be on the point of breaking out and letting the company know what he thought of them – he had a perfectly clear vision of what he must think: but Muniment never compromised his popularity to that degree; he judged it – this he once told Hyacinth – too valuable an instrument, and cultivated the faculty of patience, which had the advantage of showing one more and more that one must do one’s thinking for one’s self. His popularity, indeed, struck Hyacinth as rather an uncertain quantity, and the only mistake he had seen a symptom of on his friend’s part was a tendency to over-estimate it. Muniment thought many of their colleagues asinine, but it was Hyacinth’s belief that he himself knew still better how asinine they were; and this inadequate conception supported, in some degree, on Paul’s part, his theory of his influence – an influence that would be stronger than any other on the day he should choose to exert it. Hyacinth only wished that day would come; it would not be till then, he was sure, that they would all know where they were, and that the good they were striving for, blindly, obstructedly, in a kind of eternal dirty intellectual fog, would pass from the stage of crude discussion and mere sharp, tantalising desirableness into that of irresistible reality. Muniment was listened to unanimously, when he spoke, and was much talked about, usually with a knowing, implicit allusiveness, when he was absent; it was generally admitted that he could see further than most. But it was suspected that he wanted to see further than was necessary; as one of the most inveterate frequenters of the club remarked one evening, if a man could see as far as he could chuck a brick, that was far enough. There was an idea that he had nothing particular to complain of, personally, or that if he had he didn’t complain of it – an attitude which perhaps contained the germs of a latent disaffection. Hyacinth could easily see that he himself was exposed to the same imputation, but he couldn’t help it; it would have been impossible to him to keep up his character for sincerity by revealing, at the ‘Sun and Moon’, the condition of his wardrobe, or announcing that he had not had a pennyworth of bacon for six months. There were members of the club who were apparently always in the enjoyment of involuntary leisure – narrating the vainest peregrinations in search of a job, the cruellest rebuffs, the most vivid anecdotes of the insolence of office.155 They made Hyacinth uncomfortably conscious, at times, that if he should be out of work it would be wholly by his own fault; that he had in his hand a bread-winning tool on which he might absolutely count. He was also aware, however, that his position in this little band of malcontents (it was little only if measured by the numbers that were gathered together on any one occasion; he liked to think it was large in its latent possibilities, its mysterious ramifications and affiliations), was peculiar and distinguished; it would be favourable if he had the kind of energy and assurance that would help him to make use of it. He had an intimate conviction – the proof of it was in the air, in the sensible facility of his footing at the ‘Sun and Moon’ – that Eustache Poupin had taken upon himself to disseminate the anecdote of his origin, of his mother’s disaster; in consequence of which, as the victim of social infamy, of heinous laws, it was conceded to him that he had a larger account to settle even than most. He was ab ovo156 a revolutionist, and that balanced against his smart neckties, a certain suspicious security that was perceived in him as to the h157 (he had had from his earliest years a natural command of it), and the fact that he possessed the sort of hand on which there is always a premium – an accident somehow to be guarded against in a thorough-going system of equality. He never challenged Poupin on the subject, for he owed the Frenchman too much to reproach him with any officious step that was meant in kindness; and moreover his fellow-labourer at old Crookenden’s had said to him, as if to anticipate such an impugnment of his discretion, ‘Remember, my child, that I am incapable of drawing aside any veil that you may have preferred to drop over your lacerated personality. Your moral dignity will always be safe with me. But remember at the same time that among the disinherited there is a mystic language which dispenses with proofs – a freemasonry, a reciprocal divination; they understand each other with half a word.’ It was with half a word, then, in Bloomsbury, that Hyacinth had been understood; but there was a certain delicacy within him that forbade him to push his advantage, to treat implications of sympathy, none the less definite for being roundabout, as steps in the ladder of success. He had no wish to be a leader because his mother had murdered her lover and died in penal servitude: these circumstances recommended intentness but they also suggested modesty. When the gathering at the ‘Sun and Moon’ was at its best, and its temper seemed really an earnest of what was the basis of all its calculations – that the people was only a sleeping lion, already breathing shorter and beginning to stretch its limbs – at these hours, some of them thrilling enough, Hyacinth waited for the voice that should allot to him the particular part he was to play. His ambition was to play it with brilliancy, to offer an example – an example, even, that might survive him – of pure youthful, almost juvenile, consecration. He was conscious of no commission to give the promises, to assume the responsibilities, of a redeemer, and he had no envy of the man on whom this burden should rest. Muniment, indeed, might carry it, and it was the first article of his faith that to help him to carry it the better he himself was ready for any sacrifice. Then it was – on these nights of intenser vibration – that Hyacinth waited for a sign.

  They came oftener, this second winter, for the season was terribly hard; and as in that lower world one walked with one’s ear nearer the ground, the deep perpetual groan of London misery seemed to swell and swell and form the whole undertone of life. The filthy air came into the place in the damp coats of silent men, and hung there till it was brewed to a nauseous warmth, and ugly, serious faces squared themselves through it, and strong-smelling pipes contributed their element in a fierce, dogged manner which appeared to say that it now had to stand for everything– for bread and meat and beer, for shoes and blankets and the poor things at the pawnbroker’s and the smokeless chimney at home. Hyacinth’s colleagues seemed to him wiser then, and more permeated with intentions boding il
l to the satisfied classes; and though the note of popularity was still most effectively struck by the man who could demand oftenest, unpractically, ‘What the plague am I to do with seventeen shillings?’ it was brought home to our hero on more than one occasion that revolution was ripe at last. This was especially the case on the evening I began by referring to, when Eustache Poupin squeezed in and announced, as if it were a great piece of news, that in the east of London, that night, there were forty thousand men out of work. He looked round the circle with his dilated foreign eye, as he took his place; he seemed to address the company individually as well as collectively, and to make each man responsible for hearing him. He owed his position at the ‘Sun and Moon’ to the brilliancy with which he represented the political exile, the magnanimous immaculate citizen wrenched out of bed at dead of night, torn from his hearthstone, his loved ones and his profession, and hurried across the frontier with only the coat on his back. Poupin had performed in this character now for many years, but he had never lost the bloom of the outraged proscript, and the passionate pictures he had often drawn of the bitterness of exile were moving even to those who knew with what success he had set up his household gods in Lisson Grove. He was recognised as suffering everything for his opinions; and his hearers in Bloomsbury – who, after all, even in their most concentrated hours, were very good-natured – appeared never to have made the subtle reflection, though they made many others, that there was a want of tact in his calling upon them to sympathise with him for being one of themselves. He imposed himself by the eloquence of his assumption that if one were not in the beautiful France one was nowhere worth speaking of, and ended by producing an impression that that country had an almost supernatural charm. Muniment had once said to Hyacinth that he was sure Poupin would be very sorry if he should be enabled to go home again (as he might, from one week to the other, the Republic158 being so indulgent and the amnesty to the Communards constantly extended), for over there he couldn’t be a refugee; and however this might be he certainly flourished a good deal in London on the basis of this very fact that he was miserable there.