by Henry James
“Those are the most blatant. I mean the swaggering reproductions.”
“Oh but,” she pleaded, “we can’t all be really old.”
“No, we can’t, Cornelia. But you can—!” said White-Mason with the frankest appreciation.
She looked up at him from where she sat as he could imagine her looking up at the curate at Bognor.
“Thank you, sir! If that’s all you want——!”
“It is,” he said, “all I want—or almost.”
“Then no wonder such a creature as that,” she lightly moralised, “won’t suit you!”
He bent upon her, for all the weight of his question, his smoothest stare. “You hold she certainly won’t suit me?”
“Why, what can I tell about it? Haven’t you by this time found out?”
“No, but I think I’m finding.” With which he began again to explore.
Miss Rasch immensely wondered. “You mean you don’t expect to come to an understanding with her?” And then as even to this straight challenge he made at first no answer: “Do you mean you give it up?”
He waited some instants more, but not meeting her eyes—only looking again about the room. “What do you think of my chance?”
“Oh,” his companion cried, “what has what I think to do with it? How can I think anything but that she must like you?”
“Yes—of course. But how much?”
“Then don’t you really know?” Cornelia asked.
He kept up his walk, oddly preoccupied and still not looking at her. “Do you, my dear?”
She waited a little. “If you haven’t really put it to her I don’t suppose she knows.”
This at last arrested him again. “My dear Cornelia, she doesn’t know——!”
He had paused as for the desperate tone, or at least the large emphasis of it, so that she took him up. “The more reason then to help her to find it out.”
“I mean,” he explained, “that she doesn’t know anything.”
“Anything?”
“Anything else, I mean—even if she does know that.”
Cornelia considered of it. “But what else need she—in particular—know? Isn’t that the principal thing?”
“Well”—and he resumed his circuit—“she doesn’t know anything that we know. But nothing,” he re-emphasised—“nothing whatever!”
“Well, can’t she do without that?”
“Evidently she can—and evidently she does, beautifully. But the question is whether I can!”
He had paused once more with his point—but she glared, poor Cornelia, with her wonder. “Surely if you know for yourself——!”
“Ah, it doesn’t seem enough for me to know for myself! One wants a woman,” he argued—but still, in his prolonged tour, quite without his scowl—“to know for one, to know with one. That’s what you do now,” he candidly put to her.
It made her again gape. “Do you mean you want to marry me?”
He was so full of what he did mean, however, that he failed even to notice it. “She doesn’t in the least know, for instance, how old I am.”
“That’s because you’re so young!”
“Ah, there you are!”—and he turned off afresh and as if almost in disgust. It left her visibly perplexed—though even the perplexed Cornelia was still the exceedingly pointed; but he had come to her aid after another turn. “Remember, please, that I’m pretty well as old as you.”
She had all her point at least, while she bridled and blinked, for this. “You’re exactly a year and ten months older.”
It checked him there for delight. “You remember my birthday?”
She twinkled indeed like some far-off light of home. “I remember every one’s. It’s a little way I’ve always had—and that I’ve never lost.”
He looked at her accomplishment, across the room, as at some striking, some charming phenomenon. “Well, that’s the sort of thing I want!” All the ripe candour of his eyes confirmed it.
What could she do therefore, she seemed to ask him, but repeat her question of a moment before?—which indeed, presently she made up her mind to. “Do you want to marry me?”
It had this time better success—if the term may be felt in any degree to apply. All his candour, or more of it at least, was in his slow, mild, kind, considering head-shake. “No, Cornelia —not to marry you.”
His discrimination was a wonder; but since she was clearly treating him now as if everything about him was, so she could as exquisitely meet it. “Not at least,” she convulsively smiled, “until you’ve honourably tried Mrs. Worthingham. Don’t you really mean to?” she gallantly insisted.
He waited again a little; then he brought out: “I’ll tell you presently.” He came back, and as by still another mere glance over the room, to what seemed to him so much nearer. “That table was old Twelfth-Street?”
“Everything here was.”
“Oh, the pure blessings! With you, ah, with you, I haven’t to wear a green shade.” And he had retained meanwhile his small photograph, which he again showed himself. “Didn’t we talk of Mary Cardew?”
“Why, do you remember it?”—she marvelled to extravagance.
“You make me. You connect me with it. You connect it with me.” He liked to display to her this excellent use she thus had, the service she rendered. “There are so many connections—there will be so many. I feel how, with you, they must all come up again for me: in fact you’re bringing them out already, just while I look at you, as fast as ever you can. The fact that you knew every one—!” he went on; yet as if there were more in that too than he could quite trust himself about.
“Yes, I knew every one,” said Cornelia Rasch; but this time with perfect simplicity. “I knew, I imagine, more than you do —or more than you did.”
It kept him there, it made him wonder with his eyes on her. “Things about them—our people?”
“Our people. Ours only now.”
Ah, such an interest as he felt in this—taking from her while, so far from scowling, he almost gaped, all it might mean! “Ours indeed—and it’s awfully good they are; or that we’re still here for them! Nobody else is—nobody but you: not a cat!”
“Well, I am a cat!” Cornelia grinned.
“Do you mean you can tell me things—?” It was too beautiful to believe.
“About what really was?” She artfully considered, holding him immensely now. “Well, unless they’ve come to you with time; unless you’ve learned—or found out.”
“Oh,” he reassuringly cried—reassuringly, it most seemed, for himself—“nothing has come to me with time, everything has gone from me. How can I find out now! What creature has an idea——?”
She threw up her hands with the shrug of old days—the sharp little shrug his sisters used to imitate and that she hadn’t had to go to Europe for. The only thing was that he blessed her for bringing it back. “Ah, the ideas of people now——!”
“Yes, their ideas are certainly not about us.” But he ruefully faced it. “We’ve none the less, however, to live with them.”
“With their ideas—?” Cornelia questioned.
“With them—these modern wonders; such as they are!” Then he went on: “It must have been to help me you’ve come back.”
She said nothing for an instant about that, only nodding instead at his photograph. “What has become of yours? I mean of her.”
This time it made him turn pale. “You remember I have one?”
She kept her eyes on him. “In a ‘pork-pie’ hat, with her hair in a long net. That was so ‘smart’ then; especially with one’s skirt looped up, over one’s hooped magenta petticoat, in little festoons, and a row of very big onyx beads over one’s braided velveteen sack—braided quite plain and very broad, don’t you know?”
He smiled for her extraordinary possession of these things—she was as prompt as if she had had them before her. ‘Oh, rather—‘don’t I know?’ You wore brown velveteen, and, on those remarkably small hands, funny
gauntlets—like mine.”
“Oh, do you remember? But like yours?” she wondered.
“I mean like hers in my photograph.” But he came back to the present picture. “This is better, however, for really showing her lovely head.”
“Mary’s head was a perfection!” Cornelia testified.
“Yes—it was better than her heart.”
“Ah, don’t say that!” she pleaded. “You weren’t fair.”
“Don’t you think I was fair?” It interested him immensely—and the more that he indeed mightn’t have been; which he seemed somehow almost to hope.
“She didn’t think so—to the very end.”
“She didn’t?”—ah the right things Cornelia said to him! But before she could answer he was studying again closely the small faded face. “No, she doesn’t, she doesn’t. Oh, her charming sad eyes and the way they say that, across the years, straight into mine! But I don’t know, I don’t know!” White-Mason quite comfortably sighed.
His companion appeared to appreciate this effect. “That’s just the way you used to flirt with her, poor thing. Wouldn’t you like to have it?” she asked.
“This—for my very own?” He looked up delighted. “I really may?”
“Well, if you’ll give me yours. We’ll exchange.”
“That’s a charming idea. We’ll exchange. But you must come and get it at my rooms—where you’ll see my things.”
For a little she made no answer—as if for some feeling. Then she said: “You asked me just now why I’ve come back.”
He stared as for the connection; after which with a smile: “Not to do that——?”
She waited briefly again, but with a queer little look. “I can do those things now; and—yes!—that’s in a manner why. I came,” she then said, “because I knew of a sudden one day—knew as never before—that I was old.”
“I see. I see.” He quite understood—she had notes that so struck him. “And how did you like it?”
She hesitated—she decided. “Well, if I liked it, it was on the principle perhaps on which some people like high game!”
“High game—that’s good!” he laughed. “Ah, my dear, we’re ‘high’!”
She shook her head. “No, not you—yet. I at any rate didn’t want any more adventures,” Cornelia said.
He showed their small relic again with assurance. “You wanted us. Then here we are. Oh, how we can talk!—with all those things you know! You are an invention. And you’ll see there are things I know. I shall turn up here—well, daily.”
She took it in, but only after a moment answered. “There was something you said just now you’d tell me. Don’t you mean to try——?”
“Mrs. Worthingham?” He drew from within his coat his pocket-book and carefully found a place in it for Mary Cardew’s carte-de-visite, folding it together with deliberation over which he put it back. Finally he spoke. “No—I’ve decided. I can’t—I don’t want to.”
Cornelia marvelled—or looked as if she did. “Not for all she has?”
“Yes—I know all she has. But I also know all she hasn’t. And, as I told you, she herself doesn’t—hasn’t a glimmer of a suspicion of it; and never will have.”
Cornelia magnanimously thought. “No—but she knows other things.”
He shook his head as at the portentous heap of them. “Too many—too many. And other indeed—so other. Do you know,” he went on, “that it’s as if you—by turning up for me—had brought that home to me?”
“‘For you,’” she candidly considered. “But what—since you can’t marry me!—can you do with me?”
Well, he seemed to have it all. “Everything. I can live with you—just this way.” To illustrate which he dropped into the other chair by her fire; where, leaning back, he gazed at the flame. “I can’t give you up. It’s very curious. It has come over me as it did over you when you renounced Bognor. That’s it—I know it at last, and I see one can like it. I’m ‘high.’ You needn’t deny it. That’s my taste. I’m old.” And in spite of the considerable glow there of her little household altar he said it without the scowl.
1909
A ROUND OF VISITS
I
HE HAD been out but once since his arrival, Mark Monteith; that was the next day after—he had disembarked by night on the previous; then everything had come at once, as he would have said, everything had changed. He had got in on Tuesday; he had spent Wednesday for the most part down town, looking into the dismal subject of his anxiety—the anxiety that, under a sudden decision, had brought him across the unfriendly sea at mid-winter, and it was through information reaching him on Wednesday evening that he had measured his loss, measured above all his pain. These were two distinct things, he felt, and, though both bad, one much worse than the other. It wasn’t till the next three days had pretty well ebbed, in fact, that he knew himself for so badly wounded. He had waked up on Thursday morning, so far as he had slept at all, with the sense, together, of a blinding New York blizzard and of a deep sore inward ache. The great white savage storm would have kept him at the best within doors, but his stricken state was by itself quite reason enough.
He so felt the blow indeed, so gasped, before what had happened to him, at the ugliness, the bitterness, and, beyond these things, the sinister strangeness, that, the matter of his dismay little by little detaching and projecting itself, settling there face to face with him as something he must now live with always, he might have been in charge of some horrid alien thing, some violent, scared, unhappy creature whom there was small joy, of a truth, in remaining with, but whose behaviour wouldn’t perhaps bring him under notice, nor otherwise compromise him, so long as he should stay to watch it. A young jibbering ape of one of the more formidable sorts, or an ominous infant panther smuggled into the great gaudy hotel and whom it might yet be important he shouldn’t advertise, couldn’t have affected him as needing more domestic attention. The great gaudy hotel—The Pocahontas, but carried out largely on “Du Barry” lines—made all about him, beside, behind, below, above, in blocks and tiers and superpositions, a sufficient defensive hugeness; so that, between the massive labyrinth and the New York weather, life in a lighthouse during a gale would scarce have kept him more apart. Even when in the course of that worse Thursday it had occurred to him for vague relief that the odious certified facts couldn’t be all his misery, and that, with his throat and a probable temperature, a brush of the epidemic, which was for ever brushing him, accounted for something, even then he couldn’t resign himself to bed and broth and dimness, but only circled and prowled the more within his high cage, only watched the more from his tenth story the rage of the elements.
In the afternoon he had a doctor—the caravanserai, which supplied everything in quantities, had one for each group of so many rooms—just in order to be assured that he was grippé enough for anything. What his visitor, making light of his attack, perversely told him was that he was, much rather, “blue” enough, and from causes doubtless known to himself—which didn’t come to the same thing; but he “gave him something,” prescribed him warmth and quiet and broth and courage, and came back the next day to readminister this last dose. He then pronounced him better, and on Saturday pronounced him well —all the more that the storm had abated and the snow had been dealt with as New York, at a push, knew how to deal with things. Oh, how New York knew how to deal—to deal, that is, with other accumulations lying passive to its hand—was exactly what Mark now ached with his impression of; so that, still threshing about in this consciousness, he had on the Saturday come near to breaking out as to what was the matter with him. The Doctor brought in somehow the air of the hotel—which, cheerfully and conscientiously, by his simple philosophy, the good man wished to diffuse; breathing forth all the echoes of other woes and worries and pointing the honest moral that, especially with such a thermometer, there were enough of these to go round. Our sufferer, by that time, would have liked to tell some one; extracting, to the last acid strain of it, the full
strength of his sorrow, taking it all in as he could only do by himself and with the conditions favourable at least to this, had been his natural first need. But now, he supposed, he must be better; there was something of his heart’s heaviness he wanted so to give out.
He had rummaged forth on the Thursday night half a dozen old photographs stuck into a leather frame, a small show-case that formed part of his usual equipage of travel—he mostly set it up on a table when he stayed anywhere long enough; and in one of the neat gilt-edged squares of this convenient portable array, as familiar as his shaving-glass or the hair-brushes, of backs and monograms now so beautifully toned and wasted, long ago given him by his mother, Phil Bloodgood handsomely faced him. Not contemporaneous, and a little faded, but so saying what it said only the more dreadfully, the image seemed to sit there, at an immemorial window, like some long effective and only at last exposed “decoy” of fate. It was because he was so beautifully good-looking, because he was so charming and clever and frank—besides being one’s third cousin, or whatever it was, one’s early school-fellow and one’s later college classmate —that one had abjectly trusted him. To live thus with his unremoved, undestroyed, engaging, treacherous face, had been, as our traveller desired, to live with all of the felt pang; had been to consume it in such a single hot, sore mouthful as would so far as possible dispose of it and leave but cold dregs. Thus, if the Doctor, casting about for pleasantness, had happened to notice him there, salient since he was, and possibly by the same stroke even to know him, as New York—and more or less to its cost now, mightn’t one say?—so abundantly and agreeably had, the cup would have overflowed and Monteith, for all he could be sure of the contrary, would have relieved himself positively in tears.
“Oh, he’s what’s the matter with me—that, looking after some of my poor dividends, as he for the ten years of my absence had served me by doing, he has simply jockeyed me out of the whole little collection, such as it was, and taken the opportunity of my return, inevitably at last bewildered and uneasy, to ‘sail,’ ten days ago, for parts unknown and as yet unguessable. It isn’t the beastly values themselves, however; that’s only awkward and I can still live, though I don’t quite know how I shall turn round; it’s the horror of his having done it, and done it to me—without a mitigation or, so to speak, a warning or an excuse.” That, at a hint or a jog, is what he would have brought out—only to feel afterward, no doubt, that he had wasted his impulse and profaned even a little his sincerity. The Doctor didn’t in the event so much as glance at his cluster of portraits—which fact quite put before our friend the essentially more vivid range of imagery that a pair of eyes transferred from room to room and from one queer case to another, in such a place as that, would mainly be adjusted to. It wasn’t for him to relieve himself touchingly, strikingly or whatever, to such a man: such a man might much more pertinently—save for professional discretion—have emptied out there his own bag of wonders; prodigies of observation, flowers of oddity, flowers of misery, flowers of the monstrous, gathered in current hotel practice. Countless possibilities, making doctors perfunctory, Mark felt, swarmed and seethed at their doors; it showed for an incalculable world, and at last, on Sunday, he decided to leave his room.