The Princess Casamassima (Classics)

by Henry James

  ‘If we didn’t love you, we should say that you had betrayed us!’ cried Madame Poupin, quickly, taking her husband’s idea.

  ‘Oh, I shall never betray you,’ said Hyacinth, smiling.

  ‘You will never betray us – of course you think so. But you have no right to act for the people when you have ceased to believe in the people. Il faut être conséquent, nom de Dieu!’278 Poupin went on.

  ‘You will give up all thoughts of acting for me – je ne permets pas ça!’279 exclaimed his wife.

  ‘It is probably not of importance – only a little fraternal greeting,’ Schinkel suggested, soothingly.

  ‘We repudiate you, we deny you, we denounce you!’ shouted Poupin, more and more excited.

  ‘My poor friends, it is you who have broken down, not I,’ said Hyacinth. ‘I am much obliged to you for your solicitude, but the inconsequence is yours. At all events, good-night.’

  He turned away from them, and was leaving the room, when Madame Poupin threw herself upon him, as her husband had done a moment before, but in silence and with an extraordinary force of passion and distress. Being stout and powerful she quickly got the better of him, and pressed him to her ample bosom in a long, dumb embrace.

  ‘I don’t know what you want me to do,’ said Hyacinth, as soon as he could speak. ‘It’s for me to judge of my convictions.’

  ‘We want you to do nothing, because we know you have changed,’ Poupin replied. ‘Doesn’t it stick out of you, in every glance of your eye and every breath of your lips? It’s only for that, because that alters everything.’

  ‘Does it alter my engagement? There are some things in which one can’t change. I didn’t promise to believe; I promised to obey.’

  ‘We want you to be sincere – that is the great thing,’ said Poupin, edifyingly. ‘I will go to see them – I will make them understand.’

  ‘Ah, you should have done that before!’ Madame Poupin groaned.

  ‘I don’t know whom you are talking about, but I will allow no one to meddle in my affairs.’ Hyacinth spoke with sudden vehemence; the scene was cruel to his nerves, which were not in a condition to bear it.

  ‘When it is Hoffendahl, it is no good to meddle,’ Schinkel remarked, smiling.

  ‘And pray, who is Hoffendahl, and what authority has he got?’ demanded Madame Poupin, who had caught his meaning. ‘Who has put him over us all, and is there nothing to do but to lie down in the dust before him? Let him attend to his little affairs himself, and not put them off on innocent children, no matter whether they are with us or against us.’

  This protest went so far that, evidently, Poupin felt a little ashamed of his wife. ‘He has no authority but what we give him; but you know that we respect him, that he is one of the pure, ma bonne. Hyacinth can do exactly as he likes; he knows that as well as we do. He knows there is not a feather’s weight of compulsion; he knows that, for my part, I long since ceased to expect anything from him.’

  ‘Certainly, there is no compulsion,’ said Schinkel. ‘It’s to take or to leave. Only they keep the books.’

  Hyacinth stood there before the three, with his eyes on the floor. ‘Of course I can do as I like, and what I like is what I shall do. Besides, what are we talking about, with such sudden passion?’ he asked, looking up. ‘I have no summons, I have no sign. When the call reaches me, it will be time to discuss it. Let it come or not come: it’s not my affair.’

  ‘Certainly, it is not your affair,’ said Schinkel.

  ‘I can’t think why M. Paul has never done anything, all this time, knowing that everything is different now!’ Madame Poupin exclaimed.

  ‘Yes, my dear boy, I don’t understand our friend,’ her husband remarked, watching Hyacinth with suspicious, contentious eyes.

  ‘It’s none of his business, any more than ours; it’s none of any one’s business!’ Schinkel declared.

  ‘Muniment walks straight; the best thing you can do is to imitate him,’ said Hyacinth, trying to pass Poupin, who had placed himself before the door.

  ‘Promise me only this – not to do anything till I have seen you first,’ the Frenchman begged, almost piteously.

  ‘My poor old friend, you are very weak.’ And Hyacinth opened the door, in spite of him, and passed out.

  ‘Ah, well, if you are with us, that’s all I want to know!’ the young man heard him say, behind him, at the top of the stairs, in a different voice, a tone of sudden, exaggerated fortitude.

  44

  Hyacinth hurried down and got out of the house, but he had not the least intention of losing sight of Schinkel. The odd behaviour of the Poupins was a surprise and annoyance, and he had wished to shake himself free from it. He was candidly astonished at the alarm they were so good as to feel for him, for he had never perceived that they had gone round to the hope that the note he had signed (as it were) to Hoffendahl would not be presented. What had he said, what had he done, after all, to give them the right to fasten on him the charge of apostasy? He had always been a free critic of everything, and it was natural that, on certain occasions, in the little parlour in Lisson Grove, he should have spoken in accordance with that freedom; but it was only with the Princess that he had permitted himself really to rail at the democracy and given the full measure of his scepticism. He would have thought it indelicate to express contempt for the opinions of his old foreign friends, to whom associations that made them venerable were attached; and, moreover, for Hyacinth, a change of heart was, in the nature of things, much more an occasion for a hush of publicity and a kind of retrospective reserve; it couldn’t prompt one to aggression or jubilation. When one had but lately discovered what could be said on the opposite side one didn’t want to boast of one’s sharpness – not even when one’s new convictions cast shadows that looked like the ghosts of the old.

  Hyacinth lingered in the street, a certain distance from the house, watching for Schinkel’s exit and prepared to remain there if necessary till the dawn of another day. He had said to his friends, just before, that the manner in which the communication they looked so askance at should reach him was none of his business – it might reach him as it could. This was true enough in theory, but in fact his desire was overwhelming to know what Madame Poupin had meant by her allusion to a letter, destined for him, in Schinkel’s possession – an allusion confirmed by Schinkel’s own virtual acknowledgment. It was indeed this eagerness that had driven him out of the house, for he had reason to believe that the German would not fail him, and it galled his suspense to see the foolish Poupins try to interpose, to divert the missive from its course. He waited and waited, in the faith that Schinkel was dealing with them in his slow, categorical Teutonic way, and only objurgated the cabinet-maker for having in the first place paltered with his sacred trust. Why hadn’t he come straight to him – whatever the mysterious document was – instead of talking it over with French featherheads? Passers were rare, at this hour, in Lisson Grove, and lights were mainly extinguished; there was nothing to look at but the vista of the low black houses, the dim, interspaced street-lamps, the prowling cats who darted occasionally across the road, and the terrible, mysterious, far-off stars, which appeared to him more than ever to see everything and tell nothing. A policeman creaked along on the opposite side of the way, looking across at him as he passed, and stood for some minutes on the corner, as if to keep an eye on him. Hyacinth had leisure to reflect that the day was perhaps not far off when a policeman might have his eye on him for a very good reason – might walk up and down, pass and repass, as he mounted guard over him.

  It seemed horribly long before Schinkel came out of the house, but it was probably only half an hour. In the stillness of the street he heard Poupin let his visitor out, and at the sound he stepped back into the recess of a doorway on the same side, so that, in looking out, the Frenchman should not see him waiting. There was another delay, for the two stood talking together interminably and in a low tone on the doorstep. At last, however, Poupin went in again, and then Schinkel c
ame down the street towards Hyacinth, who had calculated that he would proceed in that direction, it being, as Hyacinth happened to know, that of his own lodging. After he had heard Poupin go in he stopped and looked up and down; it was evidently his idea that Hyacinth would be waiting for him. Our hero stepped out of the shallow recess in which he had been flattening himself, and came straight to him, and the two men stood there face to face, in the dusky, empty, sordid street.

  ‘You didn’t let them have the letter?’

  ‘Oh no, I retained it,’ said Schinkel, with his eyes more than ever like invisible points.

  ‘Then hadn’t you better give it to me?’

  ‘We will talk of that – we will talk.’ Schinkel made no motion to satisfy his friend; he had his hands in the pockets of his trousers, and his appearance was characterised by an exasperating assumption that they had the whole night before them. He was intolerably methodical.

  ‘Why should we talk? Haven’t you talked enough with those people, all the evening? What have they to say about it? What right have you to detain a letter that belongs to me?’

  ‘Erlauben Sie:280 I will light my pipe,’ the German remarked. And he proceeded to this business, methodically, while Hyacinth’s pale, excited face showed in the glow of the match that he ignited on the rusty railing beside them. ‘It is not yours unless I have given it to you,’ Schinkel went on, as they walked along. ‘Be patient, and I will tell you,’ he added, passing his hand into his companion’s arm. ‘Your way, not so? We will go down toward the Park.’ Hyacinth tried to be patient, and he listened with interest when Schinkel said, ‘She tried to take it; she attacked me with her hands. But that was not what I went for, to give it up.’

  ‘Is she mad? I don’t recognise them,’ Hyacinth murmured.

  ‘No, but they lofe you.’

  ‘Why, then, do they try to disgrace me?’

  ‘They think it is no disgrace, if you have changed.’

  ‘That’s very well for her; but it’s pitiful for him, and I declare it surprises me.’

  ‘Oh, he came round, and he helped me to resist. He pulled his wife off. It was the first shock,’ said Schinkel.

  ‘You oughtn’t to have shocked them, my dear fellow,’ Hyacinth replied.

  ‘I was shocked myself – I couldn’t help it.’

  ‘Lord, how shaky you all are!’

  ‘You take it well. I am very sorry. But it is a fine chance,’ Schinkel went on, smoking away. His pipe, for the moment, seemed to absorb him, so that after a silence Hyacinth resumed –

  ‘Be so good as to reflect that all this while I don’t in the least understand what you are talking about.’

  ‘Well, it was this morning, early,’ said the German. ‘You know in my country we don’t lie in bed late, and what they do in my country I try to do everywhere. I think it is good enough. In winter I get up, of course, long before the sun, and in summer I get up almost at the same time. I should see the fine spectacle of the sunrise, if in London you could see. The first thing I do of a Sunday is to smoke a pipe at my window, which is at the front, you remember, and looks into a little dirty street. At that hour there is nothing to see there – you English are so slow to leave the bed. Not much, however, at any time; it is not important, my little street. But my first pipe is the one I enjoy most. I want nothing else when I have that pleasure. I look out at the new, fresh light – though in London it is not very fresh – and I think it is the beginning of another day. I wonder what such a day will bring; whether it will bring anything good to us poor devils. But I have seen a great many pass, and nothing has come. This morning, however, brought something – something, at least, to you. On the other side of the way I saw a young man, who stood just opposite to my house, looking up at my window. He looked at me straight, without any ceremony, and I smoked my pipe and looked at him. I wondered what he wanted, but he made no sign and spoke no word. He was a very nice young man; he had an umbrella, and he wore spectacles. We remained that way, face to face, perhaps for a quarter of an hour, and at last he took out his watch – he had a watch, too – and held it in his hand, just glancing at it every few minutes, as if to let me know that he would rather not give me the whole day. Then it came over me that he wanted to speak to me! You would have guessed that before, but we good Germans are slow. When we understand, however, we act; so I nodded to him, to let him know I would come down. I put on my coat and my shoes, for I was only in my shirt and stockings (though of course I had on my trousers), and I went down into the street. When he saw me come he walked slowly away, but at the end of a little distance he waited for me. When I came near him I saw that he was a very nice young man indeed – very young, with a very pleasant, friendly face. He was also very neat, and he had gloves, and his umbrella was of silk. I liked him very much. He said I should come round the corner, so we went round the corner together. I thought there would be some one there waiting for us; but there was nothing – only the closed shops and the early light and a little spring mist which told that the day would be fine. I didn’t know what he wanted; perhaps it was some of our business – that’s what I first thought – and perhaps it was only a little game. So I was very careful; I didn’t ask him to come into the house. Yet I told him that he must excuse me for not understanding more quickly that he wished to speak with me; and when I said this he said it was not of consequence – he would have waited there, for the chance to see me all day. I told him I was glad I had spared him that, at least, and we had some very polite conversation. He was a very nice young man. But what he wanted was simply to put a letter in my hand; as he said himself, he was only a kind of private postman. He gave me the letter – it was not addressed; and when I had taken it I asked him how he knew, and it he wouldn’t be sorry if it should turn out that I was not the man for whom the letter was meant. But I didn’t give him a start; he told me he knew all it was necessary for him to know – he knew exactly what to do and how to do it. I think he is a valuable member. I asked him if the letter required an answer, and he told me he had nothing to do with that; he was only to put it in my hand. He recommended me to wait till I had gone into the house again to read it. We had a little more talk – always very polite; and he mentioned that he had come so early because he thought I might go out, if he delayed, and because, also, he had a great deal to do and had to take his time when he could. It is true that he looked as if he had plenty to do – as if he was in some very good occupation. I should tell you that he spoke to me always in English, but he is not English; he sounded his words like some kind of foreigner. I suppose he is not German, or he would have spoken to me in German. But there are so many, of all countries! I said if he had so much to do I wouldn’t keep him; I would go to my room and open my letter. He said it wasn’t important; and then I asked him if he wouldn’t come into my room, also, and rest. I told him it wasn’t very handsome, my room – because he looked like a young man who would have, for himself, a very neat lodging. Then I found he meant it wasn’t important that we should talk any more, and he went away without even offering to shake hands. I don’t know if he had other letters to give, but he went away, as I have said, like a postman on his rounds, without giving me any more information.’

  It took Schinkel a long time to tell this story – his calm and conscientious thoroughness made no allowance for any painful acuteness of curiosity that Hyacinth might feel. He went from step to step, and treated his different points with friendly explicitness, as if each would have exactly the same interest for his companion. The latter made no attempt to hurry him, and indeed he listened, now, with a kind of intense patience; for he was interested, and, moreover, it was clear to him that he was safe with Schinkel; the German would satisfy him in time – wouldn’t worry him with attaching conditions to their transaction, in spite of the mistake he had made in going for guidance to Lisson Grove. Hyacinth learned in due course that on returning to his apartment and opening the little packet of which he had been put into possession, Mr Schinkel had found hims
elf confronted with two separate articles: one a sealed letter superscribed with our young man’s name, the other a sheet of paper containing in three lines a request that within two days of receiving it he would hand the letter to the ‘young Robinson’. The three lines in question were signed D.H., and the letter was addressed in the same hand. Schinkel professed that he already knew the writing; it was that of Diedrich Hoffendahl. ‘Good, good,’ he said, exerting a soothing pressure upon Hyacinth’s arm. ‘I will walk with you to your door, and I will give it to you there; unless you like better that I should keep it till to-morrow morning, so that you may have a quiet sleep – I mean in case it might contain anything that will be disagreeable to you. But it is probably nothing; it is probably only a word to say that you need think no more about your engagement.’

  ‘Why should it be that?’ Hyacinth asked.

  ‘Probably he has heard that you repent.’

  ‘That I repent?’ Hyacinth stopped him short; they had just reached the top of Park Lane. ‘To whom have I given a right to say that?’

  ‘Ah well, if you haven’t, so much the better. It may be, then, for some other reason.’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, Schinkel,’ Hyacinth returned, as they walked along. And in a moment he went on, ‘What the devil did you go and tattle to the Poupins for?’

  ‘Because I thought they would like to know. Besides, I felt my responsibility; I thought I should carry it better if they knew it. And then, I’m like them – I lofe you.’

  Hyacinth made no answer to this profession; he asked the next instant, ‘Why didn’t your young man bring the letter directly to me?’

  ‘Ah, I didn’t ask him that! The reason was probably not complicated, but simple – that those who wrote it knew my address and didn’t know yours. And wasn’t I one of your guarantors?’