Great Short Novels of Henry James

by Henry James

  I went to bed that night very tired, without being able to compose a letter to Miss Tita. Was this failure the reason why I became conscious the next morning as soon as I awoke of a determination to see the poor lady again the first moment she would receive me? That had something to do with it, but what had still more was the fact that during my sleep a very odd revulsion had taken place in my spirit. I found myself aware of this almost as soon as I opened my eyes; it made me jump out of my bed with the movement of a man who remembers that he has left the house door ajar or a candle burning under a shelf. Was I still in time to save my goods? That question was in my heart; for what had now come to pass was that in the unconscious cerebration of sleep I had swung back to a passionate appreciation of Miss Bordereau’s papers. They were now more precious than ever, and a kind of ferocity had come into my desire to possess them. The condition Miss Tita had attached to the possession of them no longer appeared an obstacle worth thinking of, and for an hour, that morning, my repentant imagination brushed it aside. It was absurd that I should be able to invent nothing; absurd to renounce so easily and turn away helpless from the idea that the only way to get hold of the papers was to unite myself to her for life. I would not unite myself and yet I would have them. I must add that by the time I sent down to ask if she would see me I had invented no alternative, though to do so I had had all the time that I was dressing. This failure was humiliating, yet what could the alternative be? Miss Tita sent back word that I might come; and as I descended the stairs and crossed the sala to her door—this time she received me in her aunt’s forlorn parlor—I hoped she would not think my errand was to tell her I accepted her hand. She certainly would have made the day before the reflection that I declined it.

  As soon as I came into the room I saw that she had drawn this inference, but I also saw something which had not been in my forecast. Poor Miss Tita’s sense of her failure had produced an extraordinary alteration in her, but I had been too full of my literary concupiscence to think of that. Now I perceived it; I can scarcely tell how it startled me. She stood in the middle of the room with a face of mildness bent upon me, and her look of forgiveness, of absolution, made her angelic. It beautified her; she was younger; she was not a ridiculous old woman. This optical trick gave her a sort of phantasmagoric brightness, and while I was still the victim of it I heard a whisper somewhere in the depths of my conscience: “Why not, after all—why not?” It seemed to me I was ready to pay the price. Still more distinctly however than the whisper I heard Miss Tita’s own voice. I was so struck with the different effect she made upon me that at first I was not clearly aware of what she was saying; then I perceived she had bade me goodbye—she said something about hoping I should be very happy.

  “Goodbye—goodbye?” I repeated with an inflection interrogative and probably foolish.

  I saw she did not feel the interrogation, she only heard the words; she had strung herself up to accepting our separation and they fell upon her ear as a proof. “Are you going today?” she asked. “But it doesn’t matter, for whenever you go I shall not see you again. I don’t want to.” And she smiled strangely, with an infinite gentleness. She had never doubted that I had left her the day before in horror. How could she, since I had not come back before night to contradict, even as a simple form, such an idea? And now she had the force of soul—Miss Tita with force of soul was a new conception—to smile at me in her humiliation.

  “What shall you do—where shall you go?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I have done the great thing. I have destroyed the papers.”

  “Destroyed them?” I faltered.

  “Yes; what was I to keep them for? I burned them last night, one by one, in the kitchen.”

  “One by one?” I repeated, mechanically.

  “It took a long time—there were so many.” The room seemed to go round me as she said this, and a real darkness for a moment descended upon my eyes. When it passed Miss Tita was there still, but the transfiguration was over and she had changed back to a plain, dingy, elderly person. It was in this character she spoke as she said, “I can’t stay with you longer, I can’t;” and it was in this character that she turned her back upon me, as I had turned mine upon her twenty-four hours before, and moved to the door of her room. Here she did what I had not done when I quitted her—she paused long enough to give me one look. I have never forgotten it and I sometimes still suffer from it, though it was not resentful. No, there was no resentment, nothing hard or vindictive in poor Miss Tita; for when, later, I sent her in exchange for the portrait of Jeffrey Aspern a larger sum of money than I had hoped to be able to gather for her, writing to her that I had sold the picture, she kept it with thanks; she never sent it back. I wrote to her that I had sold the picture, but I admitted to Mrs. Prest, at the time (I met her in London, in the autumn), that it hangs above my writing table. When I look at it my chagrin at the loss of the letters becomes almost intolerable.

  The Pupil

  The Pupil

  THE PUPIL (1891) is characteristically a nouvelle both in theme and construction. It is not so well known as it deserves to be, probably because its plot is not quite so exciting or original as the plots of The Aspern Papers and The Beast in the Jungle. Yet it is one of James’s best narratives, of which it can be said that it is converted by its rare measure of objectivity and insight into a piece of modern poetry pure and simple—a poetry not of the lyrical impulse but of the psychological faculty.

  The objectivity is of a quality peculiar to James, which is quite unlike the objectivity of the naturalist school of fiction. It depends neither on exhaustive documentation nor on the author’s assumption of an attitude of seemingly scientific detachment toward his material. For the Jamesian objectivity is not a calculated method but the result, rather, of an unusually concrete and close understanding of the characters and situation. So close and concrete is this understanding that it is transformed into a kind of self-contained irony which leaves us with no “problem” on our hands, no general issue or topic which we can extract from the work for purposes of discussion. Save for the work itself, there is nothing to discuss. As James tells it, the story of the worldly Moreen family and of their precocious son is an impression of life assimilated and criticized with such quiet intensity that it asks nothing of us except to experience it. And the experience and illumination are one.

  Essentially this is what makes for the chief difference between James and novelists of like caliber whose writing is in the European tradition of deriving value directly from ideas, from ideological ferment and provocation. And for this reason, too, readers who are accustomed to judge literature by the ideological stimulus it provides, by the range and profundity of the questions raised, may be unable to appreciate the qualities of a nouvelle like The Pupil. T. S. Eliot once said that James’s genius comes out “most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. . . .” This is a very shrewd observation, and, while it helps us to understand some Jamesian effects better than others, there can be no doubt of its relevance in the case of The Pupil.

  As for the origin of this work, in the preface to the collected edition James recalled that the idea of it came to him all at once during a session with a friend in an Italian railway-carriage. The friend happened to speak of a migratory American family, with pretensions to worldliness, the most interesting member of which was a small boy of extraordinary intelligence who saw their life exactly for what it was. Then and there James grasped all the elements of the story—“to the last delicacy.” It was a moment of absolute perception.

  In The Pupil James again turns to account his method of presenting characters indirectly, through a perspective of the most careful design. His effort is to make us see the characters “through” those among them who possess the gift of consciousness, or, as the Jamesian phrase has it, “who are capable of a certa
in high lucidity.” He believed that the human predicament dealt with in a work of fiction needs to be organized around a nucleus of “irrepressible appreciation,” that is to say, that it needs a central intelligence to bring out its finer possibilities. Hence his emphasis on what seems like a purely technical issue—the issue of the “point of view” from which the action of a story is seen by the reader. For the choice of the “point of view” and its structural placing in the story are not only its available means of unity and coherence but also the means of securing for it the maximum amount of consciousness. Given this approach, it is obvious that a good deal of the drama of those who are conscious and who do “appreciate” what happens to them must consist of their relation to those who don’t—the fools, as James calls them. In The Pupil it is little Morgan Moreen and his tutor who stand at the post of observation and awareness, while the other figures are “the fools who minister to the free spirits engaged with them.”

  I

  THE POOR young man hesitated and procrastinated: it cost him such an effort to broach the subject of terms, to speak of money to a person who spoke only of feelings and, as it were, of the aristocracy. Yet he was unwilling to take leave, treating his engagement as settled, without some more conventional glance in that direction than he could find an opening for in the manner of the large affable lady who sat there drawing a pair of soiled gants de Suède through a fat jewelled hand and, at once pressing and gliding, repeated over and over everything but the thing he would have liked to hear. He would have liked to hear the figure of his salary; but just as he was nervously about to sound that note the little boy came back—the little boy Mrs. Moreen had sent out of the room to fetch her fan. He came back without the fan, only with the casual observation that he couldn’t find it. As he dropped this cynical confession he looked straight and hard at the candidate for the honour of taking his education in hand. This personage reflected somewhat grimly that the thing he should have to teach his little charge would be to appear to address himself to his mother when he spoke to her—especially not to make her such an improper answer as that.

  When Mrs. Moreen bethought herself of this pretext for getting rid of their companion Pemberton supposed it was precisely to approach the delicate subject of his remuneration. But it had been only to say some things about her son that it was better a boy of eleven shouldn’t catch. They were extravagantly to his advantage save when she lowered her voice to sigh, tapping her left side familiarly, “And all overclouded by this, you know; all at the mercy of a weakness—!” Pemberton gathered that the weakness was in the region of the heart. He had known the poor child was not robust: this was the basis on which he had been invited to treat, through an English lady, an Oxford acquaintance, then at Nice, who happened to know both his needs and those of the amiable American family looking out for something really superior in the way of a resident tutor.

  The young man’s impression of his prospective pupil, who had come into the room as if to see for himself the moment Pemberton was admitted, was not quite the soft solicitation the visitor had taken for granted. Morgan Moreen was somehow sickly without being “delicate,” and that he looked intelligent—it is true Pemberton wouldn’t have enjoyed his being stupid—only added to the suggestion that, as with his big mouth and big ears he really couldn’t be called pretty, he might too utterly fail to please. Pemberton was modest, was even timid; and the chance that his small scholar might prove cleverer than himself had quite figured, to his anxiety, among the dangers of an untried experiment. He reflected, however, that these were risks one had to run when one accepted a position, as it was called, in a private family; when as yet one’s university honours had, pecuniarily speaking, remained barren. At any rate when Mrs. Moreen got up as to intimate that, since it was understood he would enter upon his duties within the week she would let him off now, he succeeded, in spite of the presence of the child, in squeezing out a phrase about the rate of payment. It was not the fault of the conscious smile which seemed a reference to the lady’s expensive identity, it was not the fault of this demonstration, which had, in a sort, both vagueness and point, if the allusion didn’t sound rather vulgar. This was exactly because she became still more gracious to reply: “Oh I can assure you that all that will be quite regular.”

  Pemberton only wondered, while he took up his hat, what “all that” was to amount to—people had such different ideas. Mrs. Moreen’s words, however, seemed to commit the family to a pledge definite enough to elicit from the child a strange little comment in the shape of the mocking foreign ejaculation “Oh la-la!”

  Pemberton, in some confusion, glanced at him as he walked slowly to the window with his back turned, his hands in his pockets and the air in his elderly shoulders of a boy who didn’t play. The young man wondered if he should be able to teach him to play, though his mother had said it would never do and that this was why school was impossible. Mrs. Moreen exhibited no discomfiture; she only continued blandly: “Mr. Moreen will be delighted to meet your wishes. As I told you, he has been called to London for a week. As soon as he comes back you shall have it out with him.”

  This was so frank and friendly that the young man could only reply, laughing as his hostess laughed: “Oh I don’t imagine we shall have much of a battle.”

  “They’ll give you anything you like,” the boy remarked unexpectedly, returning from the window. “We don’t mind what anything costs—we live awfully well.”

  “My darling, you’re too quaint!” his mother exclaimed, putting out to caress him a practised but ineffectual hand. He slipped out of it, but looked with intelligent innocent eyes at Pemberton, who had already had time to notice that from one moment to the other his small satiric face seemed to change its time of life. At this moment it was infantine, yet it appeared also to be under the influence of curious intuitions and knowledges. Pemberton rather disliked precocity and was disappointed to find gleams of it in a disciple not yet in his teens. Nevertheless he divined on the spot that Morgan wouldn’t prove a bore. He would prove on the contrary a source of agitation. This idea held the young man, in spite of a certain repulsion.

  “You pompous little person! We’re not extravagant!” Mrs. Moreen gaily protested, making another unsuccessful attempt to draw the boy to her side. “You must know what to expect,” she went on to Pemberton.

  “The less you expect the better!” her companion interposed. “But we are people of fashion.”

  “Only so far as you make us so!” Mrs. Moreen tenderly mocked. “Well then, on Friday—don’t tell me you’re superstitious—and mind you don’t fail us. Then you’ll see us all. I’m so sorry the girls are out. I guess you’ll like the girls. And, you know, I’ve another son, quite different from this one.”

  “He tries to imitate me,” Morgan said to their friend.

  “He tries? Why he’s twenty years old!” cried Mrs. Moreen.

  “You’re very witty,” Pemberton remarked to the child—a proposition his mother echoed with enthusiasm, declaring Morgan’s sallies to be the delight of the house.

  The boy paid no heed to this; he only enquired abruptly of the visitor, who was surprised afterwards that he hadn’t struck him as offensively forward: “Do you want very much to come?”

  “Can you doubt it after such a description of what I shall hear?” Pemberton replied. Yet he didn’t want to come at all; he was coming because he had to go somewhere, thanks to the collapse of his fortune at the end of a year abroad spent on the system of putting his scant patrimony into a single full wave of experience. He had had his full wave but couldn’t pay the score at his inn. Moreover he had caught in the boy’s eyes the glimpse of a far-off appeal.

  “Well, I’ll do the best I can for you,” said Morgan; with which he turned away again. He passed out of one of the long windows; Pemberton saw him go and lean on the parapet of the terrace. He remained there while the young man took leave of his mother, who, on Pemberton’s looking as if he expected a farewell from him, interposed with
: “Leave him, leave him; he’s so strange!” Pemberton supposed her to fear something he might say. “He’s a genius—you’ll love him,” she added. “He’s much the most interesting person in the family.” And before he could invent some civility to oppose to this she wound up with: “But we’re all good, you know!”

  “He’s a genius—you’ll love him!” were words that recurred to our aspirant before the Friday, suggesting among many things that geniuses were not invariably loveable. However, it was all the better if there was an element that would make tutorship absorbing: he had perhaps taken too much for granted it would only disgust him. As he left the villa after his interview he looked up at the balcony and saw the child leaning over it. “We shall have great larks!” he called up.

  Morgan hung fire a moment and then gaily returned: “By the time you come back I shall have thought of something witty!”

  This made Pemberton say to himself “After all he’s rather nice.”

  II

  ON THE Friday he saw them all, as Mrs. Moreen had promised, for her husband had come back and the girls and the other son were at home. Mr. Moreen had a white moustache, a confiding manner and, in his buttonhole, the ribbon of a foreign order—bestowed, as Pemberton eventually learned, for services. For what services he never clearly ascertained: this was a point—one of a large number—that Mr. Moreen’s manner never confided. What it emphatically did confide was that he was even more a man of the world than you might first make out. Ulick, the firstborn, was in visible training for the same profession—under the disadvantage as yet, however, of a buttonhole but feebly floral and a moustache with no pretensions to type. The girls had hair and figures and manners and small fat feet, but had never been out alone. As for Mrs. Moreen Pemberton saw on a nearer view that her elegance was intermittent and her parts didn’t always match. Her husband, as she had promised, met with enthusiasm Pemberton’s ideas in regard to a salary. The young man had endeavoured to keep these stammerings modest, and Mr. Moreen made it no secret that he found them wanting in “style.” He further mentioned that he aspired to be intimate with his children, to be their best friend, and that he was always looking out for them. That was what he went off for, to London and other places—to look out; and this vigilance was the theory of life, as well as the real occupation, of the whole family. They all looked out, for they were very frank on the subject of its being necessary. They desired it to be understood that they were earnest people, and also that their fortune, though quite adequate for earnest people, required the most careful administration. Mr. Moreen, as the parent bird, sought sustenance for the nest. Ulick invoked support mainly at the club, where Pemberton guessed that it was usually served on green cloth. The girls used to do up their hair and their frocks themselves, and our young man felt appealed to be glad, in regard to Morgan’s education, that, though it must naturally be of the best, it didn’t cost too much. After a little he was glad, forgetting at times his own needs in the interest inspired by the child’s character and culture and the pleasure of making easy terms for him.