Great Short Novels of Henry James

by Henry James

  We passed through the house, and into the grounds, as I should have called them, which extended into the rear. They covered but three or four acres, but, like the house, they were very old and crooked, and full of traces of long habitation, with inequalities of level and little steps—mossy and cracked were these—which connected the different parts with each other. The limits of the place, cleverly dissimulated, were muffled in the deepest verdure. They made, as I remember, a kind of curtain at the further end, in one of the folds of which, as it were, we presently perceived, from afar, a little group. “Ah, there she is!” said Mark Ambient; “and she has got the boy.” He made this last remark in a slightly different tone from any in which he yet had spoken. I was not fully aware of it at the time, but it lingered in my ear and I afterwards understood it.

  “Is it your son?” I inquired, feeling the question not to be brilliant.

  “Yes, my only child. He’s always in his mother’s pocket. She coddles him too much.” It came back to me afterwards, too—the manner in which he spoke these words. They were not petulant; they expressed rather a sudden coldness, a kind of mechanical submission. We went a few steps further, and then he stopped short and called the boy, beckoning to him repeatedly.

  “Dolcino, come and see your daddy!” There was something in the way he stood still and waited that made me think he did it for a purpose. Mrs. Ambient had her arm round the child’s waist, and he was leaning against her knee; but though he looked up at the sound of his father’s voice, she gave no sign of releasing him. A lady, apparently a neighbor, was seated near her, and before them was a garden-table, on which a tea-service had been placed.

  Mark Ambient called again, and Dolcino struggled in the maternal embrace, but he was too tightly held, and after two or three fruitless efforts he suddenly turned round and buried his head deep in his mother’s lap. There was a certain awkwardness in the scene; I thought it rather odd that Mrs. Ambient should pay so little attention to her husband. But I would not for the world have betrayed my thought, and, to conceal it, I observed that it must be such a pleasant thing to have tea in the garden. “Ah, she won’t let him come!” said Mark Ambient, with a sigh; and we went our way ‘till we reached the two ladies. He mentioned my name to his wife, and I noticed that he addressed her as “My dear,” very genially, without any trace of resentment at her detention of the child. The quickness of the transition made me vaguely ask myself whether he were henpecked,—a shocking conjecture, which I instantly dismissed. Mrs. Ambient was quite such a wife as I should have expected him to have; slim and fair, with a long neck and pretty eyes and an air of great refinement. She was a little cold, and a little shy; but she was very sweet, and she had a certain look of race, justified by my afterwards learning that she was “connected” with two or three great families. I have seen poets married to women of whom it was difficult to conceive that they should gratify the poetic fancy,—women with dull faces and glutinous minds, who were none the less, however, excellent wives. But there was no obvious incongruity in Mark Ambient’s union. Mrs. Ambient, delicate and quiet, in a white dress, with her beautiful child at her side, was worthy of the author of a work so distinguished as Beltraffio. Bound her neck she wore a black velvet ribbon, of which the long ends, tied behind, hung down her back, and to which, in front, was attached a miniature portrait of her little boy. Her smooth, shining hair was confined in a net. She gave me a very pleasant greeting, and Dolcino—I thought this little name of endearment delightful—took advantage of her getting up to slip away from her and go to his father, who said nothing to him, but simply seized him and held him high in his arms for a moment, kissing him several times.

  I had lost no time in observing that the child, who was not more than seven years old, was extraordinarily beautiful. He had the face of an angel,—the eyes, the hair, the more than mortal bloom, the smile of innocence. There was something touching, almost alarming, in his beauty, which seemed to be composed of elements too fine and pure for the breath of this world. When I spoke to him, and he came and held out his hand and smiled at me, I felt a sudden pity for him, as if he had been an orphan, or a changeling, or stamped with some social stigma. It was impossible to be, in fact, more exempt from these misfortunes, and yet, as one kissed him, it was hard to keep from murmuring “Poor little devil!” though why one should have applied this epithet to a living cherub is more than I can say. Afterwards, indeed, I knew a little better; I simply discovered that he was too charming to live, wondering at the same time that his parents should not have perceived it, and should not be in proportionate grief and despair. For myself, I had no doubt of his evanescence, having already noticed that there is a kind of charm which is like a death-warrant.

  The lady who had been sitting with Mrs. Ambient was a jolly, ruddy personage, dressed in velveteen and rather limp feathers, whom I guessed to be the vicar’s wife,—our hostess did not introduce me,—and who immediately began to talk to Ambient about chrysanthemums. This was a safe subject, and yet there was a certain surprise for me in seeing the author of Beltraffio even in such superficial communion with the Church of England. His writings implied so much detachment from that institution, expressed a view of life so profane, as it were, so independent, and so little likely, in general, to be thought edifying, that I should have expected to find him an object of horror to vicars and their ladies—of horror repaid on his own part by good-natured but brilliant mockery. This proves how little I knew as yet of the English people and their extraordinary talent for keeping up their forms, as well as of some of the mysteries of Mark Ambient’s hearth and home. I found afterwards that he had, in his study, between smiles and cigar-smoke, some wonderful comparisons for his clerical neighbors; but meanwhile the chrysanthemums were a source of harmony, for he and the vicaress were equally fond of them, and I was surprised at the knowledge they exhibited of this interesting plant. The lady’s visit, however, had presumably already been long, and she presently got up, saying she must go, and kissed Mrs. Ambient. Mark started to walk with her to the gate of the grounds, holding Dolcino by the hand.

  “Stay with me, my darling,” Mrs. Ambient said to the boy, who was wandering away with his father.

  Mark Ambient paid no attention to the summons, but Dolcino turned round and looked with eyes of shy entreaty at his mother. “Can’t I go with papa?”

  “Not when I ask you to stay with me.”

  “But please don’t ask me, mamma,” said the child, in his little clear, new voice.

  “I must ask you when I want you. Come to me, my darling.” And Mrs. Ambient, who had seated herself again, held out her long, slender hands.

  Her husband stopped, with his back turned to her, but without releasing the child. He was still talking to the vicaress, but this good lady, I think, had lost the thread of her attention. She looked at Mrs. Ambient and at Dolcino, and then she looked at me, smiling very hard, in an extremely fixed, cheerful manner.

  “Papa,” said the child, “mamma wants me not to go with you.”

  “He’s very tired—he has run about all day. He ought to be quiet till he goes to bed. Otherwise he won’t sleep.” These declarations fell successively and gravely from Mrs. Ambient’s lips.

  Her husband, still without turning round, bent over the boy and looked at him in silence. The vicaress gave a genial, irrelevant laugh, and observed that he was a precious little pet. “Let him choose,” said Mark Ambient. “My dear little boy, will you go with me or will you stay with your mother?”

  “Oh, it’s a shame!” cried the vicar’s lady, with increased hilarity.

  “Papa, I don’t think I can choose,” the child answered, making his voice very low and confidential. “But I have been a great deal with mamma to-day,” he added in a moment.

  “And very little with papa! My dear fellow, I think you have chosen!” And Mark Ambient walked off with his son, accompanied by re-echoing but inarticulate comments from my fellow-visitor.

  His wife had seated herself again, an
d her fixed eyes, bent upon the ground, expressed for a few moments so much mute agitation that I felt as if almost any remark from my own lips would be a false note. But Mrs. Ambient quickly recovered herself, and said to me civilly enough that she hoped I didn’t mind having had to walk from the station. I reassured her on this point, and she went on, “We have got a thing that might have gone for you, but my husband wouldn’t order it.”

  “That gave me the pleasure of a walk with him,” I rejoined.

  She was silent a minute, and then she said, “I believe the Americans walk very little.”

  “Yes, we always run,” I answered laughingly.

  She looked at me seriously, and I began to perceive a certain coldness in her pretty eyes. “I suppose your distances are so great?”

  “Yes; but we break our marches! I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is for me to find myself here,” I added. “I have the greatest admiration for Mr. Ambient.”

  “He will like that. He likes being admired.”

  “He must have a very happy life, then. He has many worshippers.”

  “Oh, yes, I have seen some of them,” said Mrs. Ambient, looking away, very far from me, rather as if such a vision were before her at the moment. Something in her tone seemed to indicate that the vision was scarcely edifying, and I guessed very quickly that she was not in sympathy with the author of Beltraffio. I thought the fact strange, but, somehow, in the glow of my own enthusiasm, I didn’t think it important; it only made me wish to be rather explicit about that enthusiasm.

  “For me, you know,” I remarked, “he is quite the greatest of living writers.”

  “Of course I can’t judge. Of course he’s very clever,” said Mrs. Ambient, smiling a little.

  “He’s magnificent, Mrs. Ambient! There are pages in each of his books that have a perfection that classes them with the greatest things. Therefore, for me to see him in this familiar way,—in his habit as he lives,—and to find, apparently, the man as delightful as the artist, I can’t tell you how much too good to be true it seems, and how great a privilege I think it.” I knew that I was gushing, but I couldn’t help it, and what I said was a good deal less than what I felt. I was by no means sure that I should dare to say even so much as this to Ambient himself, and there was a kind of rapture in speaking it out to his wife which was not affected by the fact that, as a wife, she appeared peculiar. She listened to me with her face grave again, and with her lips a little compressed, as if there were no doubt, of course, that her husband was remarkable, but at the same time she had heard all this before and couldn’t be expected to be particularly interested in it. There was even in her manner an intimation that I was rather young, and that people usually got over that sort of thing. “I assure you that for me this is a red-letter day,” I added.

  She made no response, until after a pause, looking round her, she said abruptly, though gently, “We are very much afraid about the fruit this year.”

  My eyes wandered to the mossy, mottled, garden walls, where plum-trees and pear-trees, flattened and fastened upon the rusty bricks, looked like crucified figures with many arms. “Doesn’t it promise well?” I inquired.

  “No, the trees look very dull. We had such late frosts.”

  Then there was another pause. Mrs. Ambient kept her eyes fixed on the opposite end of the grounds, as if she were watching for her husband’s return with the child. “Is Mr. Ambient fond of gardening?” it occurred to me to inquire, irresistibly impelled as I felt myself, moreover, to bring the conversation constantly back to him.

  “He’s very fond of plums,” said his wife.

  “Ah, well then, I hope your crop will be better than you fear. It’s a lovely old place,” I continued. “The whole character of it is that of certain places that he describes. Your house is like one of his pictures.”

  “It’s a pleasant little place. There are hundreds like it”

  “Oh, it has got his tone,” I said, laughing, and insisting on my point the more that Mrs. Ambient appeared to see in my appreciation of her simple establishment a sign of limited experience.

  It was evident that I insisted too much. “His tone?” she repeated, with a quick look at me, and a slightly heightened color.

  “Surely he has a tone, Mrs. Ambient.”

  “Oh, yes, he has indeed! But I don’t in the least consider that I am living in one of his books; I shouldn’t care for that, at all,” she went on, with a smile which had in some degree the effect of converting her slightly sharp protest into a joke deficient in point “I am afraid I am not very literary,” said Mrs. Ambient. “And I am not artistic.”

  “I am very sure you are not ignorant, not stupid,” I ventured to reply, with the accompaniment of feeling immediately afterwards that I had been both familiar and patronizing. My only consolation was in the reflection that it was she, and not I, who had begun it. She had brought her idiosyncrasies into the discussion.

  “Well, whatever I am, I am very different from my husband. If you like him, you won’t like me. You needn’t say anything. Your liking me isn’t in the least necessary!”

  “Don’t defy me!” I exclaimed.

  She looked as if she had not heard me, which was the best thing she could do; and we sat some time without further speech. Mrs. Ambient had evidently the enviable English quality of being able to be silent without being restless. But at last she spoke; she asked me if there seemed to be many people in town. I gave her what satisfaction I could on this point, and we talked a little about London and of some pictures it presented at that time of the year. At the end of this I came back, irrepressibly, to Mark Ambient.

  “Doesn’t he like to be there now? I suppose he doesn’t find the proper quiet for his work. I should think his things had been written, for the most part, in a very still place. They suggest a great stillness, following on a kind of tumult. Don’t you think so? I suppose London is a tremendous place to collect impressions, but a refuge like this, in the country, must be much better for working them up. Does he get many of his impressions in London, do you think?” I proceeded from point to point in this malign inquiry, simply because my hostess, who probably thought me a very pushing and talkative young man, gave me time; for when I paused—I have not represented my pauses—she simply continued to let her eyes wander, and, with her long fair fingers, played with the medallion on her neck. When I stopped altogether, however, she was obliged to say something, and what she said was that she had not the least idea where her husband got his impressions. This made me think her, for a moment, positively disagreeable; delicate and proper and rather aristocratically dry as she sat there. But I must either have lost the impression a moment later, or been goaded by it to further aggression, for I remember asking her whether Mr. Ambient were in a good vein of work, and when we might look for the appearance of the book on which he was engaged. I have every reason now to know that she thought me an odious person.

  She gave a strange, small laugh as she said, “I am afraid you think I know a great deal more about my husband’s work than I do. I haven’t the least idea what he is doing,” she added presently, in a slightly different, that is a more explanatory, tone, as if she recognized in some degree the enormity of her confession. “I don’t read what he writes!”

  She did not succeed (and would not, even had she tried much harder) in making it seem to me anything less than monstrous. I stared at her, and I think I blushed. “Don’t you admire his genius? Don’t you admire Beltraffio?”

  She hesitated a moment, and I wondered what she could possibly say. She did not speak—I could see—the first words that rose to her lips; she repeated what she had said a few minutes before. “Oh, of course he’s very clever!” And with this she got up; her husband and little boy had reappeared. Mrs. Ambient left me and went to meet them; she stopped and had a few words with her husband, which I did not hear, and which ended in her taking the child by the hand and returning to the house with him. Her husband joined me in a moment, looking, I thought, the least
bit conscious and constrained, and said that if I would come in with him he would show me my room. In looking back upon these first moments of my visit to him, I find it important to avoid the error of appearing to have understood his situation from the first, and to have seen in him the signs of things which I learnt only afterwards. This later knowledge throws a backward light, and makes me forget that at least on the occasion of which I am speaking now (I mean that first afternoon), Mark Ambient struck me as a fortunate man. Allowing for this, I think he was rather silent and irresponsive as we walked back to the house, though I remember well the answer he made to a remark of mine in relation to his child.