The Princess Casamassima (Classics)

by Henry James

  That evening, about nine o’clock, the Princess Casamassima drove in a hansom to Hyacinth’s lodgings in Westminster. The door of the house was a little open, and a man stood on the step, smoking his big pipe and looking up and down. The Princess, seeing him while she was still at some distance, had hoped he was Hyacinth, but he proved to be a very different figure indeed from her devoted young friend. He had not a forbidding countenance, but he looked very hard at her as she descended from her hansom and approached the door. She was used to being looked at hard, and she didn’t mind this; she supposed he was one of the lodgers in the house. He edged away to let her pass, and watched her while she endeavoured to impart an elasticity of movement to the limp bell-pull beside the door. It gave no audible response, so that she said to him, ‘I wish to ask for Mr Hyacinth Robinson. Perhaps you can tell me –’

  ‘Yes, I too,’ the man replied, smiling. ‘I have come also for that.’

  The Princess hesitated a moment. ‘I think you must be Mr Schinkel. I have heard of you.’

  ‘You know me by my bad English,’ her interlocutor remarked, with a sort of benevolent coquetry.

  ‘Your English is remarkably good – I wish I spoke German as well. Only just a hint of an accent, and evidently an excellent vocabulary.’

  ‘I think I have heard, also, of you,’ said Schinkel, appreciatively.

  ‘Yes, we know each other, in our circle, don’t we? We are all brothers and sisters.’ The Princess was anxious, she was in a fever; but she could still relish the romance of standing in a species of back-slum and fraternising with a personage looking like a very tame horse whose collar galled him. ‘Then he’s at home, I hope; he is coming down to you?’ she went on.

  ‘That’s what I don’t know. I am waiting.’

  ‘Have they gone to call him?’

  Schinkel looked at her, while he puffed his pipe. ‘I have called him myself, but he will not say.’

  ‘How do you mean – he will not say?’

  ‘His door is locked. I have knocked many times.’

  ‘I suppose he is out,’ said the Princess.

  ‘Yes, he may be out,’ Schinkel remarked, judicially.

  He and the Princess stood a moment looking at each other, and then she asked, ‘Have you any doubt of it?’

  ‘Oh, es kann sein.290 Only the woman of the house told me five minutes ago that he came in.’

  ‘Well, then, he probably went out again,’ the Princess remarked.

  ‘Yes, but she didn’t hear him.’

  The Princess reflected, and was conscious that she was flushing. She knew what Schinkel knew about their young friend’s actual situation, and she wished to be very clear with him and to induce him to be the same with her. She was rather baffled, however, by the sense that he was cautious, and justly cautious. He was polite and inscrutable, quite like some of the high personages – ambassadors and cabinet-ministers – whom she used to meet in the great world. ‘Has the woman been here, in the house, ever since?’ she asked in a moment.

  ‘No, she went out for ten minutes, half an hour ago.’

  ‘Surely, then, he may have gone out again in that time!’ the Princess exclaimed.

  ‘That is what I have thought. It is also why I have waited here,’ said Schinkel. ‘I have nothing to do,’ he added, serenely.

  ‘Neither have I,’ the Princess rejoined. ‘We can wait together.’

  ‘It’s a pity you haven’t got some room,’ the German suggested.

  ‘No, indeed; this will do very well. We shall see him the sooner when he comes back.’

  ‘Yes, but perhaps it won’t be for long.’

  ‘I don’t care for that; I will wait. I hope you don’t object to my company,’ she went on, smiling.

  ‘It is good, it is good,’ Schinkel responded, through his smoke.

  ‘Then I will send away my cab.’ She returned to the vehicle and paid the driver, who said, ‘Thank you, my lady,’ with expression, and drove off.

  ‘You gave him too much,’ observed Schinkel, when she came back.

  ‘Oh, he looked like a nice man. I am sure he deserved it.’

  ‘It is very expensive,’ Schinkel went on, sociably.

  ‘Yes, and I have no money, but it’s done. Was there no one else in the house while the woman was away?’ the Princess asked.

  ‘No, the people are out; she only has single men. I asked her that. She has a daughter, but the daughter has gone to see her cousin. The mother went only a hundred yards, round the corner there, to buy a pennyworth of milk. She locked this door, and put the key in her pocket; she stayed at the grocer’s, where she got the milk, to have a little conversation with a friend she met there. You know ladies always stop like that – nicht wahr?291 It was half an hour later that I came. She told me that he was at home, and I went up to his room. I got no sound, as I have told you. I came down and spoke to her again, and she told me what I say.’

  ‘Then you determined to wait, as I have done,’ said the Princess.

  ‘Oh, yes, I want to see him.’

  ‘So do I, very much.’ The Princess said nothing more, for a minute; then she added, ‘I think we want to see him for the same reason.’

  ‘Das kann sein – das kann sein.’

  The two continued to stand there in the brown evening, and they had some further conversation, of a desultory and irrelevant kind. At the end of ten minutes the Princess broke out, in a low tone, laying her hand on her companion’s arm, ‘Mr Schinkel, this won’t do. I’m intolerably nervous.’

  ‘Yes, that is the nature of ladies,’ the German replied, imperturbably.

  ‘I wish to go up to his room,’ the Princess pursued. ‘You will be so good as to show me where it is.’

  ‘It will do you no good, if he is not there.’

  The Princess hesitated. ‘I am not sure he is not there.’

  ‘Well, if he won’t speak, it shows he likes better not to have visitors.’

  ‘Oh, he may like to have me better than he does you!’ the Princess exclaimed.

  ‘Das kann sein – das kann sein.’ But Schinkel made no movement to introduce her into the house.

  ‘There is nothing to-night – you know what I mean,’ the Princess remarked, after looking at him for a moment.

  ‘Nothing to-night?’

  ‘At the Duke’s. The first party is on Thursday, the other is next Tuesday.’

  ‘Schön.292 I never go to parties,’ said Schinkel.

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘Except that this is a kind of party – you and me,’ suggested Schinkel.

  ‘Yes, and the woman of the house doesn’t approve of it.’ The footstep of the personage in question had been audible in the passage, through the open door, which was presently closed, from within, with a little reprehensive bang. Something in this incident appeared to quicken exceedingly the Princess’s impatience and emotion; the menace of exclusion from the house made her wish more even than before to enter it. ‘For God’s sake, Mr Schinkel, take me up there. If you won’t, I will go alone,’ she pleaded.

  Her face was white now, and it need hardly be added that it was beautiful. The German considered it a moment in silence; then turned and reopened the door and went in, followed closely by his companion.

  There was a light in the lower region, which tempered the gloom of the staircase – as high, that is, as the first floor; the ascent the rest of the way was so dusky that the pair went slowly and Schinkel led the Princess by the hand. She gave a suppressed exclamation as she rounded a sharp turn in the second flight. ‘Good God, is that his door, with the light?’

  ‘Yes, you can see under it. There was a light before,’ said Schinkel, without confusion.

  ‘And why, in heaven’s name, didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because I thought it would worry you.’

  ‘And doesn’t it worry you?’

  ‘A little, but I don’t mind,’ said Schinkel. ‘Very likely he may have left it.’

  ‘He doesn�
�t leave candles!’ the Princess returned, with vehemence. She hurried up the few remaining steps to the door, and paused there with her ear against it. Her hand grasped the handle, and she turned it, but the door resisted. Then she murmured, pantingly, to her companion, ‘We must go in – we must go in!’

  ‘What will you do, when it’s locked?’ he inquired.

  ‘You must break it down.’

  ‘It is very expensive,’ said Schinkel.

  ‘Don’t be abject!’ cried the Princess. ‘In a house like this the fastenings are certainly flimsy; they will easily yield.’

  ‘And if he is not there – if he comes back and finds what we have done?’

  She looked at him a moment through the darkness, which was mitigated only by the small glow proceeding from the chink. ‘He is there! Before God, he is there!’

  ‘Schön, schön,’ said her companion, as if he felt the contagion of her own dread but was deliberating and meant to remain calm. The Princess assured him that one or two vigorous thrusts with his shoulder would burst the bolt – it was sure to be some wretched morsel of tin – and she made way for him to come close. He did so, he even leaned against the door, but he gave no violent push, and the Princess waited, with her hand against her heart. Schinkel apparently was still deliberating. At last he gave a low sigh. ‘I know they found him the pistol; it is only for that,’ he murmured; and the next moment Christina saw him sway sharply to and fro in the gloom. She heard a crack and saw that the lock had yielded. The door collapsed: they were in the light; they were in a small room, which looked full of things. The light was that of a single candle on the mantel; it was so poor that for a moment she made out nothing definite. Before that moment was over, however, her eyes had attached themselves to the small bed. There was something on it – something black, something ambiguous, something outstretched. Schinkel held her back, but only for an instant; she sáw everything, and with the very act she flung herself beside the bed, upon her knees. Hyacinth lay there as if he were asleep, but there was a horrible thing, a mess of blood, on the bed, in his side, in his heart. His arm hung limp beside him, downwards, off the narrow couch; his face was white and his eyes were closed. So much Schinkel saw, but only for an instant; a convulsive movement of the Princess, bending over the body while a strange low cry came from her lips, covered it up. He looked about him for the weapon, for the pistol, but the Princess, in her rush at the bed, had pushed it out of sight with her knees. ‘It’s a pity they found it – if he hadn’t had it here!’ he exclaimed to her. He had determined to remain calm, so that, on turning round at the quick advent of the little woman of the house, who had hurried up, white, scared, staring, at the sound of the crashing door, he was able to say, very quietly and gravely, ‘Mr Robinson has shot himself through the heart. He must have done it while you were fetching the milk.’ The Princess got up, hearing another person in the room, and then Schinkel perceived the small revolver lying just under the bed. He picked it up and carefully placed it on the mantel-shelf, keeping, equally carefully, to himself the reflection that it would certainly have served much better for the Duke.

  NOTES

  ‘I am quite the Naturalist,’ wrote Henry James to a friend while he was working on The Princess Casamassima : meaning that he was going to a great deal of trouble to get authentic detail. He made a special visit to Millbank prison; he eavesdropped on working-men’s conversations and jotted their phrases down in his notebook; and, of course, he already had an extensive knowledge of London which he had picked up during his long walks through its streets. In these notes, therefore, I have tended to concentrate on details such as these, and also on the literary allusions, which are seldom idle, but usually have some relevance to the situation in which James’s characters find themselves.

  Good linguists need not look up all the foreign words and phrases since, for the most part, I have merely translated them.

  PATRICIA CRICK

  Pre-decimal currency. There were twelve pennies to a shilling, and twenty shillings to a pound. Coins mentioned in The Princess Casamassima include the sovereign (one pound), the half-crown (two shillings and sixpence) and the ‘bob’ (slang for a shilling).

  1. (p. 33) the first year of a long residence in London. James moved into lodgings at 3 Bolton Street, off Piccadilly, towards the end of 1876.

  2. (p. 34) there had been doors that opened. At first James had been rather lonely in London, but he was soon taken up by society. It has been calculated that during the winter of 1878/9 he dined out 140 times.

  3. (p. 37) Olympians. In Greek mythology, the gods (who inhabited Mount Olympus).

  4. (p. 41) bonhomme. Character.

  5. (p. 44) disponible. Available.

  6. (p. 53) Pynsent. James probably had in mind the French pinson (chaffinch). Miss Pynsent is here described as ‘fluttering’, and is later compared by Mr Vetch to ‘an insect or a bird’.

  7. (p. 54) the Family Herald and the London Journal. Two popular magazines in tabloid newspaper format. The Family Herald described itself as a ‘Domestic Magazine of Useful Information and Amusement’; its tone was highly moral, and the ‘amusement’ seems mostly to have consisted of rather unwitty riddles. The London Journal was much livelier, and had some fascinating illustrations.

  8. (p. 58) Lomax Place. This street name appears to have been invented. Later we learn that it is in Pentonville, a district described by a contemporary writer as one of shabby streets inhabited by the genteel poor. All the London districts and most of the streets (Lisson Grove, South Street, etc.) mentioned by James are genuine (for exceptions, see the notes to pp. 131, 415 and 509). The interested reader can find them in the current London A–Z Street Atlas, and appreciate the long distances the hero travels on foot.

  9. (p. 58) ‘by the left hand’. In a morganatic marriage (one between a person of low and one of high rank, in which the former has only limited rights) the parties take each other by the left rather than the usual right hand. The expression also seems to have been used, as here, as a euphemism for an unmarried liaison.

  10. (p. 58) a fat red book. Burke’s Peerage.

  11. (p. 62) race. Used in the French sense of ‘breeding’.

  12. (p. 65) Newgate. At this period Newgate prison, which was sited conveniently near the criminal courts at the Old Bailey, was used only for prisoners awaiting trial. An interesting contemporary account of conditions in mid-Victorian prisons is to be found in Mayhew and Binney’s Criminal Prisons of London (1862).

  13. (p. 66) Bloomsbury Theatre. This seems to be another invented name, though there were theatres in and around the Bloomsbury area, any one of which James may have had in mind.