The New York Stories of Henry James

by Henry James

  Mrs. Ingram and Elizabeth were, of course, not at the ball; but they had come back from Newport, bringing an ardent suitor in their train. The event had amply justified Mrs. Ingram’s circumspection; she had captured a young Southern planter, whose estates were fabled to cover three-eighths of the State of Alabama. Elizabeth was more beautiful than ever, and the marriage was being hurried forward. Several times, in public, to my knowledge, Elizabeth and her mother, found themselves face to face with Crawford and his wife. What Crawford must have felt when he looked from the exquisite creature he had lost to the full-blown dowdy he had gained, is a matter it is well but to glance at and pass—the more so, as my story approaches its close. One morning, in my consulting-room, I had been giving some advice to a little old gentleman who was as sound as a winter-pippin, but, who used to come and see me once a month to tell me that he felt a hair on his tongue, or, that he had dreamed of a blue-dog, and to ask to be put upon a “diet” in consequence. The basis of a diet, in his view, was a daily pint of port wine. He had retired from business, he belonged to a club, and he used to go about peddling gossip. His wares, like those of most peddlers, were cheap, and usually, for my prescription, I could purchase the whole contents of his tray. On this occasion, as he was leaving me, he remarked that he supposed I had heard the news about our friend Crawford. I said that I had heard nothing. What was the news?

  “He has lost every penny of his fortune,” said my patient. “He is completely cleaned out.” And, then, in answer to my exclamation of dismay, he proceeded to inform me that the New Amsterdam Bank had suspended payment, and would certainly never resume it. All the world knew that Crawford’s funds were at the disposal of the bank, and that two or three months before, when things were looking squally, he had come most generously to the rescue. The squall had come, it had proved a hurricane, the bank had capsized, and Crawford’s money had gone to the bottom. “It’s not a surprise to me,” said Mr. Niblett, “I suspected something a year ago. It’s true, I am very sharp.”

  “Do you think any one else suspected anything?” I asked.

  “I dare say not; people are so easily humbugged. And, then, what could have looked better, above board, than the New Amsterdam?”

  “Nevertheless, here and there,” I said, “an exceptionally sharp person may have been on the watch.”

  “Unquestionably—though I am told that they are going on to-day, down town, as if no bank had ever broken before.”

  “Do you know Mrs. Ingram?” I asked.

  “Thoroughly! She is exceptionally sharp, if that is what you mean.”

  “Do you think it is possible that she foresaw this affair six months ago?”

  “Very possible; she always has her nose in Wall street, and she knows more about stocks than the whole board of brokers.”

  “Well,” said I, after a pause, “sharp as she is, I hope she will get nipped, yet!”

  “Ah,” said my old friend, “you allude to Crawford’s affairs? But you shouldn’t be a better royalist than the king. He has forgiven her—he has consoled himself. But what will console him now? Is it true his wife was a washerwoman? Perhaps she will not be sorry to know a trade.”

  I hoped with all my heart that Mr. Niblett’s story was an exaggeration, and I repaired that evening to Crawford’s house, to learn the real extent of his misfortune. He had seen me coming in, and he met me in the hall and drew me immediately into the library. He looked like a man who had been thrown by a vicious horse, but had picked himself up and resolved to go the rest of the way on foot.

  “How bad is it?” I asked.

  “I have about a thousand a year left. I shall get some work, and with careful economy we can live.”

  At this moment I heard a loud voice screaming from the top of the stairs. “Will she help you?” I asked.

  He hesitated a moment, and then—“No!” he said simply. Immediately, as a commentary upon his answer, the door was thrown open and Mrs. Crawford swept in. I saw in an instant that her good-humor was in permanent eclipse; flushed, disheveled, inflamed, she was a perfect presentation of a vulgar fury. She advanced upon me with a truly formidable weight of wrath.

  “Was it you that put him up to it?” she cried. “Was it you that put it into his head to marry me? I’m sure I never thought of him—he isn’t the twentieth part of a man! I took him for his money—four thousand a year, clear; I never pretended it was for anything else. To-day, he comes and tells me that it was all a mistake—that we must get on as well as we can on twelve hundred. And he calls himself a gentleman—and so do you, I suppose! There are gentlemen in the State’s prison for less. I have been cheated, insulted and ruined; but I’m not a woman you can play that sort of game upon. The money’s mine, what is left of it, and he may go and get his fine friends to support him. There ain’t a thing in the world he can do—except lie and cheat!”

  Crawford, during this horrible explosion, stood with his eyes fixed upon the floor; and I felt that the peculiarly odious part of the scene was that his wife was literally in the right. She had been bitterly disappointed—she had been practically deceived. Crawford turned to me and put out his hand. “Good-bye,” he said. “I must forego the pleasure of receiving you any more in my own house.”

  “I can’t come again?” I exclaimed.

  “I will take it as a favor that you should not.”

  I withdrew with an insupportable sense of helplessness. In the house he was then occupying, he, of course, very soon ceased to live; but for some time I was in ignorance of whither he had betaken himself. He had forbidden me to come and see him, and he was too much occupied in accommodating himself to his change of fortune to find time for making visits. At last I disinterred him in one of the upper streets, near the East River, in a small house of which he occupied but a single floor. I disobeyed him and went in, and as his wife was apparently absent, he allowed me to remain. He had kept his books, or most of them, and arranged a sort of library. He looked ten years older, but he neither made nor suffered me to make, an allusion to himself. He had obtained a place as clerk at a wholesale chemist’s, and he received a salary of five hundred dollars. After this, I not infrequently saw him; we used often, on a Sunday, to take a long walk together. On our return we parted at his door; he never asked me to come in. He talked of his reading, of his scientific fancies, of public affairs, of our friends—of everything, except his own troubles. He suffered, of course, most of his purely formal social relations to die out; but if he appeared not to cling to his friends, neither did he seem to avoid them. I remember a clever old lady saying to me at this time, in allusion to her having met him somewhere—“I used always to think Mr. Crawford the most agreeable man in the world, but I think now he has even improved!” One day—we had walked out into the country, and were sitting on a felled log by the roadside, to rest (for in those days New Yorkers could walk out into the country),—I said to him that I had a piece of news to tell him. It was not pleasing, but it was interesting.

  “I told you six weeks ago,” I said, “that Elizabeth Ingram had been seized with small-pox. She has recovered, and two or three people have seen her. Every ray of her beauty is gone. They say she is hideous.”

  “I don’t believe it!” he said, simply.

  “The young man who was to marry her does,” I answered. “He has backed out—he has given her up—he has posted back to Alabama.”

  Crawford looked at me a moment, and then—“The idiot!” he exclaimed.

  For myself, I felt the full bitterness of poor Elizabeth’s lot; Mrs. Ingram had been “nipped,” as I had ventured to express it, in a grimmer fashion than I hoped. Several months afterward, I saw the young girl, shrouded in a thick veil, beneath which I could just distinguish her absolutely blasted face. On either side of her walked her father and mother, each of them showing a visage almost as blighted as her own.

  I saw Crawford for a time, as I have said, with a certain frequency; but there began to occur long intervals, during which he plunged i
nto inscrutable gloom. I supposed in a general way, that his wife’s temper gave him plenty of occupation at home; but a painful incident—which I need not repeat—at last informed me how much. Mrs. Crawford, it appeared, drank deep; she had resorted to liquor to console herself for her disappointments. During her periods of revelry, her husband was obliged to be in constant attendance upon her, to keep her from exposing herself. She had done so to me, hideously, and it was so that I learned the reason of her husband’s fitful absences. After this, I expressed to Crawford my amazement that he should continue to live with her.

  “It’s very simple,” he answered. “I have done her a great wrong, and I have forfeited the right to complain of any she may do to me.”

  “In heaven’s name,” I said, “make another fortune and pension her off.”

  He shook his head. “I shall never make a fortune. My working-power is not of a high value.”

  One day, not having seen him for several weeks, I went to his house. The door was opened by his wife, in curl-papers and a soiled dressing-gown. After what I can hardly call an exchange of greetings,—for she wasted no politeness upon me,—I asked for news of my friend.

  “He’s at the New York Hospital,” she said.

  “What in the world has happened to him?”

  “He has broken his leg, and he went there to be taken care of—as if he hadn’t a comfortable home of his own! But he’s a deep one; that’s a hit at me!”

  I immediately announced my intention of going to see him, but as I was turning away she stopped me, laying her hand on my arm. She looked at me hard, almost menacingly. “If he tells you,” she said, “that it was me that made him break his leg—that I came behind him, and pushed him down the steps of the back-yard, upon the flags, you needn’t believe him. I could have done it; I’m strong enough”—and with a vigorous arm she gave a thump upon the door-post. “It would have served him right, too. But it’s a lie!”

  “He will not tell me,” I said. “But you have done so!”

  Crawford was in bed, in one of the great, dreary wards of the hospital, looking as a man looks who has been laid up for three weeks with a compound fracture of the knee. I had seen no small amount of physical misery, but I had never seen anything so poignant as the sight of my once brilliant friend in such a place, from such a cause. I told him I would not ask him how his misfortune occurred: I knew! We talked awhile and at last I said, “Of course you will not go back to her!”

  He turned away his head, and at this moment, the nurse came and said that I had made the poor gentleman talk enough.

  Of course he did go back to her—at the end of a very long convalescence. His leg was permanently injured; he was obliged to move about very slowly, and what he had called the value of his working-power was not thereby increased. This meant permanent poverty, and all the rest of it. It lasted ten years longer—until 185–, when Mrs. Crawford died of delirium tremens. I cannot say that this event restored his equanimity, for the excellent reason that to the eyes of the world—and my own most searching ones—he had never lost it.

  1876

  AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE

  I

  FOUR years ago—in 1874—two young Englishmen had occasion to go to the United States. They crossed the ocean at midsummer, and, arriving in New York on the first day of August, were much struck with the fervid temperature of that city. Disembarking upon the wharf, they climbed into one of those huge high-hung coaches which convey passengers to the hotels, and with a great deal of bouncing and bumping, took their course through Broadway. The midsummer aspect of New York is not perhaps the most favourable one; still, it is not without its picturesque and even brilliant side. Nothing could well resemble less a typical English street than the interminable avenue, rich in incongruities, through which our two travellers advanced—looking out on each side of them at the comfortable animation of the sidewalks, the high-coloured, heterogeneous architecture, the huge white marble façades, glittering in the strong, crude light and bedizened with gilded lettering, the multifarious awnings, banners and streamers, the extraordinary number of omnibuses, horse-cars and other democratic vehicles, the vendors of cooling fluids, the white trousers and big straw-hats of the policemen, the tripping gait of the modish young persons on the pavement, the general brightness, newness, juvenility, both of people and things. The young men had exchanged few observations; but in crossing Union Square, in front of the monument to Washington—in the very shadow, indeed, projected by the image of the pater patriœ—one of them remarked to the other, “It seems a rum-looking place.”

  “Ah, very odd, very odd,” said the other, who was the clever man of the two.

  “Pity it’s so beastly hot,” resumed the first speaker, after a pause.

  “You know we are in a low latitude,” said his friend.

  “I daresay,” remarked the other.

  “I wonder,” said the second speaker, presently, “if they can give one a bath.”

  “I daresay not,” rejoined the other.

  “Oh, I say!” cried his comrade.

  This animated discussion was checked by their arrival at the hotel, which had been recommended to them by an American gentleman whose acquaintance they made—with whom, indeed, they became very intimate—on the steamer, and who had proposed to accompany them to the inn and introduce them, in a friendly way, to the proprietor. This plan, however, had been defeated by their friend’s finding that his “partner” was awaiting him on the wharf, and that his commercial associate desired him instantly to come and give his attention to certain telegrams received from St. Louis. But the two Englishmen, with nothing but their national prestige and personal graces to recommend them, were very well received at the hotel, which had an air of capacious hospitality. They found that a bath was not unattainable, and were indeed struck with the facilities for prolonged and reiterated immersion with which their apartment was supplied. After bathing a good deal—more indeed than they had ever done before on a single occasion—they made their way into the dining-room of the hotel, which was a spacious restaurant, with a fountain in the middle, a great many tall plants in ornamental tubs, and an array of French waiters. The first dinner on land, after a sea-voyage, is under any circumstances a delightful occasion, and there was something particularly agreeable in the circumstances in which our young Englishmen found themselves. They were extremely good-natured young men; they were more observant than they appeared; in a sort of inarticulate, accidentally dissimulative fashion, they were highly appreciative. This was perhaps especially the case with the elder, who was also, as I have said, the man of talent. They sat down at a little table which was a very different affair from the great clattering see-saw in the saloon of the steamer. The wide doors and windows of the restaurant stood open, beneath large awnings, to a wide pavement, where there were other plants in tubs, and rows of spreading trees, and beyond which there was a large shady square, without any palings and with marble-paved walks. And above the vivid verdure rose other façades of white marble and of pale chocolate-coloured stone, squaring themselves against the deep blue sky. Here, outside, in the light and the shade and the heat, there was a great tinkling of the bells of innumerable street-cars, and a constant strolling and shuffling and rustling of many pedestrians, a large proportion of whom were young women in Pompadour-looking dresses. Within, the place was cool and vaguely-lighted; with the plash of water, the odour of flowers and the flitting of French waiters, as I have said, upon soundless carpets.

  “It’s rather like Paris, you know,” said the younger of our two travellers.

  “It’s like Paris—only more so,” his companion rejoined.

  “I suppose it’s the French waiters,” said the first speaker. “Why don’t they have French waiters in London?”

  “Fancy a French waiter at a club,” said his friend.

  The young Englishman stared a little, as if he could not fancy it. “In Paris I’m very apt to dine at a place where there’s an English waiter. Don’
t you know, what’s-his-name’s, close to the thingumbob? They always set an English waiter at me. I suppose they think I can’t speak French.”

  “No more you can.” And the elder of the young Englishmen unfolded his napkin.

  His companion took no notice whatever of this declaration. “I say,” he resumed, in a moment, “I suppose we must learn to speak American. I suppose we must take lessons.”

  “I can’t understand them,” said the clever man.

  “What the deuce is he saying?” asked his comrade, appealing from the French waiter.

  “He is recommending some soft-shell crabs,” said the clever man.

  And so, in desultory observation of the idiosyncrasies of the new society in which they found themselves, the young Englishmen proceeded to dine—going in largely, as the phrase is, for cooling draughts and dishes, of which their attendant offered them a very long list. After dinner they went out and slowly walked about the neighbouring streets. The early dusk of waning summer was coming on, but the heat was still very great. The pavements were hot even to the stout boot-soles of the British travellers, and the trees along the kerb-stone emitted strange exotic odours. The young men wandered through the adjoining square—that queer place without palings, and with marble walks arranged in black and white lozenges. There were a great many benches, crowded with shabby-looking people, and the travellers remarked, very justly, that it was not much like Belgrave Square. On one side was an enormous hotel, lifting up into the hot darkness an immense array of open, brightly-lighted windows. At the base of this populous structure was an eternal jangle of horse-cars, and all round it, in the upper dusk, was a sinister hum of mosquitoes. The ground-floor of the hotel seemed to be a huge transparent cage, flinging a wide glare of gaslight into the street, of which it formed a sort of public adjunct, absorbing and emitting the passers-by promiscuously. The young Englishmen went in with every one else, from curiosity, and saw a couple of hundred men sitting on divans along a great marble-paved corridor, with their legs stretched out, together with several dozen more standing in a queue, as at the ticket-office of a railway station, before a brilliantly-illuminated counter, of vast extent. These latter persons, who carried portmanteaux in their hands, had a dejected, exhausted look; their garments were not very fresh, and they seemed to be rendering some mysterious tribute to a magnificent young man with a waxed moustache and a shirt front adorned with diamond buttons, who every now and then dropped an absent glance over their multitudinous patience. They were American citizens doing homage to an hotel-clerk.