by Henry James
She was at home when Littlemore went to see her and surrounded by several visitors to whom she was giving a late cup of tea and to whom she introduced her tall compatriot. He stayed till they dispersed, in spite of the maneuvers of a gentleman who evidently desired to outlinger him, but who, whatever might have been his happy fortune on former visits, received on this occasion no encouragement from their hostess. He looked at Littlemore slowly, beginning with his boots and travelling up as if to discover the reason of so unexpected a preference, and then, with no salutation to him, left the pair face to face.
“I’m curious to see what you’ll do for me now you’ve got your sister with you,” Mrs. Headway presently remarked, having heard of this circumstance from Rupert Waterville. “I realise you’ll have to do something, you know. I’m sorry for you, but I don’t see how you can get off. You might ask me to dine some day when she’s dining out. I’d come even then, I think, because I want to keep on the right side of you.”
“I call that the wrong side,” said Littlemore.
“Yes, I see. It’s your sister that’s on the right side. You’re in rather a bad fix, ain’t you? You’ve got to be ‘good’ and mean, or you’ve got to be kind with a little courage. However, you take those things very quietly. There’s something in you that exasperates me. What does your sister think of me? Does she hate me?” Nancy persisted.
“She knows nothing about you.”
“Have you told her nothing?”
“Never a word.”
“Hasn’t she asked you? That shows how she hates me. She thinks I ain’t creditable to America. I know that way of doing it. She wants to show people over here that, however they may be taken in by me, she knows much better. But she’ll have to ask you about me; she can’t go on for ever. Then what’ll you say?”
“That you’re the biggest ‘draw’ in Europe.”
“Oh shucks!” she cried, out of her repertory.
“Haven’t you got into European society?”
“Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t. It’s too soon to see. I can’t tell this season. Every one says I’ve got to wait till next, to see if it’s the same. Sometimes they take you right up for a few weeks and then just drop you anywhere. You’ve got to make it a square thing somehow—to drive in a nail.”
“You speak as if it were your coffin,” said Littlemore.
“Well, it is a kind of coffin. I’m burying my past!”
He winced at this—he was tired to death of her past. He changed the subject and turned her on to London, a topic as to which her freshness of view and now unpremeditated art of notation were really interesting, displayed as they were at the expense of most of her new acquaintances and of some of the most venerable features of the great city. He himself looked at England from the outside as much as it was possible to do; but in the midst of her familiar allusions to people and things known to her only since yesterday he was struck with the truth that she would never really be initiated. She buzzed over the surface of things like a fly on a window-pane. This surface immensely pleased her; she was flattered, encouraged, excited; she dropped her confident judgment as if she were scattering flowers, talked about her intentions, her prospects, her discoveries, her designs. But she had really learnt no more about English life than about the molecular theory. The words in which he had described her of old to Waterville came back to him: “Elle ne doute de rien!” Suddenly she jumped up; she was going out to dine and it was time to dress. “Before you leave I want you to promise me something,” she said off-hand, but with a look he had seen before and that pressed on the point—oh so intensely! “You’ll be sure to be questioned about me.” And then she paused.
“How do people know I know you?”
“You haven’t ‘blown’ about it? Is that what you mean? You can be a brute when you try. They do know it at any rate. Possibly I may have told them. They’ll come to you to ask about me. I mean from Lady Demesne. She’s in an awful state. She’s so afraid of it—of the way he wants me.”
In himself too, after all, she could still press the spring of careless mirth. “I’m not afraid, if you haven’t yet brought it off.”
“Well, he can’t make up his mind. I appeal to him so, yet he can’t quite place me where he’d have to have me.” Her lucidity and her detachment were both grotesque and touching.
“He must be a poor creature if he won’t take you as you are. I mean for the sweet sake of what you are,” Littlemore added.
This wasn’t a very gallant form, but she made the best of it. “Well—he wants to be very careful, and so he ought!”
“If he asks too many questions he’s not worth marrying,” Littlemore rather cheaply opined.
“I beg your pardon—he’s worth marrying whatever he does; he’s worth marrying for me. And I want to marry him—that’s what I want to do.”
Her old friend had a pause of some blankness. “Is he waiting for me to settle it?”
“He’s waiting for I don’t know what—for some one to come and tell him that I’m the sweetest of the sweet. Then he’ll believe it. Some one who has been out there and knows all about me. Of course you’re the man, you’re created on purpose. Don’t you remember how I told you in Paris he wanted to ask you? He was ashamed and gave it up; he tried to forget me. But now it’s all on again—only meanwhile his mother has been at him. She works night and day, like a weasel in a hole, to persuade him that I’m too much beneath him. He’s very fond of her and very open to influence; I mean from her—not from any one else. Except me of course. Oh I’ve influenced him, I’ve explained everything fifty times over. But some memories, you know, are like those lumpish or pointed things you can’t get into your trunk—they won’t pack anyway; and he keeps coming back to them. He wants every little speck explained. He won’t come to you himself, but his mother will, or she’ll send some of her people. I guess she’ll send the lawyer—the family solicitor they call him. She wanted to send him out to America to make inquiries, only she didn’t know where to send. Of course I couldn’t be expected to give the places—they’ve got to find them out the best way they can. She knows all about you and has made up to your sister; a big proof, as she never makes up to any one. So you see how much I know. She’s waiting for you; she means to hold you with her glittering eye. She has an idea she can—can make you say what’ll meet her views. Then she’ll lay it before Sir Arthur. So you’ll be so good as to have none—not a view.”
Littlemore had, however disguisedly, given her every attention; but the conclusion left him all too consciously staring. “You don’t mean that anything I can say will make a difference?”
“Don’t be affected! You know it will as well as I.”
“You make him out not only a laggard in love but almost a dastard in war.”
“Never mind what I make him out. I guess if I can understand him you can accept him. And I appeal to you solemnly. You can save me or you can lose me. If you lose me you’ll be a coward. And if you say a word against me I’ll be lost.”
“Go and dress for dinner—that’s your salvation,” Littlemore returned as he quitted her at the head of the stairs.
IX
IT WAS very well for him to take that tone; but he felt as he walked home that he should scarcely know what to say to people who were determined, as she put it, to hold him with glittering eyes. She had worked a certain spell; she had succeeded in making him feel responsible. The sight of her success, however, rather hardened his heart; he might have pitied her if she had “muffed” it, as they said, but he just sensibly resented her heavy scoring. He dined alone that evening while his sister and her husband, who had engagements every day for a month, partook of their repast at the expense of friends. Mrs. Dolphin, however, came home rather early and immediately sought admittance to the small apartment at the foot of the staircase which was already spoken of as her brother’s den. Reggie had gone on to a “squash” somewhere, and she had returned in her eagerness to the third member of their party. She was too
impatient even to wait for morning. She looked impatient; she was very unlike George Littlemore. “I want you to tell me about Mrs. Headway,” she at once began, while he started slightly at the coincidence of this remark with his own thoughts. He was just making up his mind at last to speak to her. She unfastened her cloak and tossed it over a chair, then pulled off her long tight black gloves, which were not so fine as those Mrs. Headway wore; all this as if she were preparing herself for an important interview. She was a fair neat woman, who had once been pretty, with a small thin voice, a finished manner and a perfect knowledge of what it was proper to do on every occasion in life. She always did it, and her conception of it was so definite that failure would have left her without excuse. She was usually not taken for an American, but she made a point of being one, because she flattered herself that she was of a type which under that banner borrowed distinction from rarity. She was by nature a great conservative and had ended by figuring as a better Tory than her husband; to the effect of being thought by some of her old friends to have changed immensely since her marriage. She knew English society as if she had compiled a red-covered handbook of the subject; had a way of looking prepared for far-reaching social action; had also thin lips and pretty teeth; and was as positive as she was amiable. She told her brother that Mrs. Headway had given out that he was her most intimate friend; whereby she thought it rather odd he had never spoken of her “at home.” Littlemore admitted, on this, that he had known her a long time, referred to the conditions in which the acquaintance had sprung up, and added that he had seen her that afternoon. He sat there smoking his cigar and looking up at the cornice while Mrs. Dolphin delivered herself of a series of questions. Was it true that he liked her so much, was it true he thought her a possible woman to marry, was it true that her antecedents had not been most peculiar?
“I may as well tell you I’ve a letter from Lady Demesne,” his visitor went on. “It came to me just before I went out, and I have it in my pocket.”
She drew forth the missive, which she evidently wished to read him; but he gave her no invitation to proceed. He knew she had come to him to extract a declaration adverse to Mrs. Headway’s projects, and however little edification he might find in this lady’s character he hated to be arraigned or prodded. He had a great esteem for Mrs. Dolphin, who, among other Hampshire notions, had picked up that of the major weight of the male members of any family, so that she treated him with a consideration which made his having an English sister rather a luxury. Nevertheless he was not, on the subject of his old Texan friend, very accommodating. He admitted once for all that she hadn’t behaved properly—it wasn’t worth while to split hairs about that; but he couldn’t see that she was much worse than lots of other women about the place—women at once less amusing and less impugned; and he couldn’t get up much feeling about her marrying or not marrying. Moreover, it was none of his business, and he intimated that it was none of Mrs. Dolphin’s.
“One surely can’t resist the claims of common humanity!” his sister replied; and she added that he was very inconsistent. He didn’t respect Mrs. Headway, he knew the most dreadful things about her, he didn’t think her fit company for his own flesh and blood. And yet he was willing not to save poor Arthur Demesne.
“Perfectly willing!” Littlemore returned. “I’ve nothing to do with saving others. All I’ve got to do is not to marry her myself.”
“Don’t you think then we’ve any responsibilities, any duties to society?”
“I don’t know what you mean. Society can look after itself. If she can bring it off she’s welcome. It’s a splendid sight in its way.”
“How do you mean splendid?”
“Why she has run up the tree as if she were a squirrel!”
“It’s very true she has an assurance à toute épreuve. But English society has become scandalously easy. I never saw anything like the people who are taken up. Mrs. Headway has had only to appear to succeed. If they can only make out big enough spots in you they’ll find you attractive. It’s like the decadence of the Roman Empire. You can see to look at this person that she’s not a lady. She’s pretty, very pretty, but she might be a dissipated dressmaker. She wouldn’t go down for a minute in New York. I’ve seen her three times—she apparently goes everywhere. I didn’t speak of her—I was wanting to see what you’d do. I judged you meant to do nothing, then this letter decided me. It’s written on purpose to be shown you; it’s what the poor lady—such a nice woman herself—wants you to do. She wrote to me before I came to town, and I went to see her as soon as I arrived. I think it very important. I told her that if she’d draw up a little statement I’d put it before you as soon as we should get settled. She’s in real distress. I think you ought to feel for her. You ought to communicate the facts exactly as they stand. A woman has no right to do such things as Mrs. Headway and come and ask to be accepted. She may make it up with her conscience, but she can’t make it up with society. Last night at Lady Dovedale’s I was afraid she’d know who I was and get somehow at me. I believe she’d really have been capable of it, and I got so frightened I went away. If Sir Arthur wishes to marry her for what she is, of course he’s welcome. But at least he ought to know.”
Mrs. Dolphin was neither agitated nor voluble; she moved from point to point with the temper and method of a person accustomed to preside at committees and to direct them. She deeply desired, however, that Mrs. Headway’s triumphant career should be checked; such a person had sufficiently abused a tolerance already so overstrained. Herself a party to an international marriage, Mrs. Dolphin naturally desired the class to which she belonged to close its ranks and carry its standard high.
“It seems to me she’s quite as good as the poor young man himself,” said Littlemore, lighting another cigar.
“As good? What do you mean by ‘good?’ No one has ever breathed a word against him.”
“Very likely. But he’s a nonentity of the first water, and she at least a positive quantity, not to say a positive force. She’s a person, and a very clever one. Besides, she’s quite as good as the women lots of them have married. It’s new to me that your alliances have been always so august.”
“I know nothing about other cases,” Mrs. Dolphin said, “I only know about this one. It so happens that I’ve been brought near it, and that an appeal has been made to me. The English are very romantic—the most romantic people in the world, if that’s what you mean. They do the strangest things from the force of passion—even those of whom you would least expect it. They marry their cooks, they marry their coachmen, and their romances always have the most miserable end. I’m sure this one would be wretched. How can you pretend that such a flaming barbarian can be worked into any civilisation? What I see is a fine old race—one of the oldest and most honourable in England, people with every tradition of good conduct and high principle—and a dreadful disreputable vulgar little woman, who hasn’t an idea of what such things are, trying to force her way into it. I hate to see such things—I want to go to the rescue!”
“Well, I don’t,” Littlemore returned at his leisure. “I don’t care a pin for the fine old race.”
“Not from interested motives, of course, any more than I. But surely on artistic grounds, on grounds of decency?”
“Mrs. Headway isn’t indecent—you go too far. You must remember that she’s an old friend of mine.” He had become rather stern; Mrs. Dolphin was forgetting the consideration due, from an English point of view, to brothers.
She forgot it even a little more. “Oh if you’re in love with her too!” she quite wailed, turning away.