by Henry James
I surveyed him, askance, as we walked together; I had already, I had indeed instantly, seen him as all delightful. His face is so well known that I needn’t describe it; he looked to me at once an English gentleman and a man of genius, and I thought that a happy combination. There was a brush of the Bohemian in his fineness; you would easily have guessed his belonging to the artist guild. He was addicted to velvet jackets, to cigarettes, to loose shirt-collars, to looking a little dishevelled. His features, which were firm but not perfectly regular, are fairly enough represented in his portraits; but no portrait I have seen gives any idea of his expression. There were innumerable things in it, and they chased each other in and out of his face. I have seen people who were grave and gay in quick alternation; but Mark Ambient was grave and gay at one and the same moment. There were other strange oppositions and contradictions in his slightly faded and fatigued countenance. He affected me somehow as at once fresh and stale, at once anxious and indifferent. He had evidently had an active past, which inspired one with curiosity; yet what was that compared to his obvious future? He was just enough above middle height to be spoken of as tall, and rather lean and long in the flank. He had the friendliest frankest manner possible, and yet I could see it cost him something. It cost him small spasms of the self-consciousness that is an Englishman’s last and dearest treasure—the thing he pays his way through life by sacrificing small pieces of even as the gallant but moneyless adventurer in “Quentin Durward” broke off links of his brave gold chain. He had been thirty-eight years old at the time “Beltraffio” was published. He asked me about his friend in America, about the length of my stay in England, about the last news in London and the people I had seen there; and I remember looking for the signs of genius in the very form of his questions and thinking I found it. I liked his voice as if I were somehow myself having the use of it.
There was genius in his house too I thought when we got there; there was imagination in the carpets and curtains, in the pictures and books, in the garden behind it, where certain old brown walls were muffled in creepers that appeared to me to have been copied from a masterpiece of one of the pre-Raphaelites. That was the way many things struck me at that time, in England—as reproductions of something that existed primarily in art or literature. It was not the picture, the poem, the fictive page, that seemed to me a copy; these things were the originals, and the life of happy and distinguished people was fashioned in their image. Mark Ambient called his house a cottage, and I saw afterwards he was right for if it hadn’t been a cottage it must have been a villa, and a villa, in England at least, was not a place in which one could fancy him at home. But it was, to my vision, a cottage glorified and translated; it was a palace of art, on a slightly reduced scale—and might besides have been the dearest haunt of the old English genius loci. It nestled under a cluster of magnificent beeches, it had little creaking lattices that opened out of, or into, pendent mats of ivy, and gables, and old red tiles, as well as a general aspect of being painted in water-colours and inhabited by people whose lives would go on in chapters and volumes. The lawn seemed to me of extraordinary extent, the garden-walls of incalculable height, the whole air of the place delightfully still, private, proper to itself. “My wife must be somewhere about,” Mark Ambient said as we went in. “We shall find her perhaps—we’ve about an hour before dinner. She may be in the garden. I’ll show you my little place.”
We passed through the house and into the grounds, as I should have called them, which extended into the rear. They covered scarce three or four acres, but, like the house, were very old and crooked and full of traces of long habitation, with inequalities of level and little flights of 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 great verdurous screens. They formed, as I remember, a thick loose curtain at the further end, in one of the folds of which, as it were, we presently made out from afar a little group. “Ah there she is!” said Mark Ambient; “and she has got the boy.” He noted that last fact in a slightly different tone from any in which he yet had spoken. I wasn’t fully aware of this 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 sound of these critical words. They weren’t petulant; they expressed rather a sudden coldness, a 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 moved at his father’s call she gave no sign of releasing him. A lady, apparently a neighbour, 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, too tightly held, he after two or three fruitless efforts jerked about and buried his head deep in his mother’s lap. There was a certain awkwardness in the scene; I thought it odd Mrs. Ambient should pay so little attention to her husband. But I wouldn’t for the world have betrayed my thought, and, to conceal it, I began loudly to rejoice in the prospect of our having tea in the garden. “Ah she won’t let him come!” said my host 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 a trace of resentment at her detention of the child. The quickness of the transition made me vaguely ask myself if he were perchance henpecked—a shocking surmise 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 good breeding. She shone with a certain coldness and practised in intercourse a certain bland detachment, but she was clothed in gentleness as in one of those vaporous redundant scarves that muffle the heroines of Gainsborough and Romney. She had also a vague air of race, justified by my afterwards learning that she was “connected with the aristocracy.” 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 disparity in Mark Ambient’s union. My hostess—so far as she could be called so—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.” Round 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 an adequate greeting, and Dolcino—I thought this small name of endearment delightful—took advantage of her getting up to slip away from her and go to his father, who seized him in silence and held him high for a long moment, kissing him several times.
I had lost no time in observing that the child, not more than seven years old, was extraordinarily beautiful. He had the face of an angel—the eyes, the hair, the smile of innocence, the more than mortal bloom. There was something that deeply touched, that almost alarmed, in his beauty, composed, one would have said, 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 strange pity for him—quite 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 all tenderly “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 trifle better; I grasped the truth of his being too fair to live, wondering
at the same time that his parents shouldn’t have guessed it and have been in proportionate grief and despair. For myself I had no doubt of his evanescence, having already more than once caught in the fact the particular infant charm that’s as good as a death-warrant.
The lady who had been sitting with Mrs. Ambient was a jolly ruddy personage in velveteen and limp feathers, whom I guessed to be the vicar’s wife—our hostess didn’t 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 any amount of effortless derision. This proved 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 nervous laughs and free cigar-puffs, some wonderful comparisons for his clerical neighbours; but meanwhile the chrysanthemums were a source of harmony, he and the vicaress were equally attached to them, and I was surprised at the knowledge they exhibited of this interesting plant. The lady’s visit, however, had presumably been long, and she presently rose for departure and kissed Mrs. Ambient. Mark started to walk with her to the gate of the grounds, holding Dolcino by the hand.
“Stay with me, darling,” Mrs. Ambient said to the boy, who had surrendered himself to his father.
Mark paid no attention to the summons but Dolcino turned and looked at her in shy appeal, “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 small clear new voice.
“I must ask you when I want you. Come to me, dearest.” And Mrs. Ambient, who had seated herself again, held out her long slender slightly too osseous hands.
Her husband stopped, 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 looked at me, smiling in a highly amused cheerful manner and almost to a grimace.
“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 very distinctly 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’ve been a great deal with mamma to-day,” he then added.
“And very little with papa! My dear fellow, I think you HAVE chosen!” On which Mark Ambient walked off with his son, accompanied by re-echoing but inarticulate comments from my fellow-visitor.
His wife had seated herself again, and her fixed eyes, bent on the ground, expressed for a few moments so much mute agitation that anything I could think of to say would be but a false note. Yet she none the less quickly recovered herself, to express the sufficiently civil hope that I didn’t mind having had to walk from the station. I reassured her on this point, and she went on: “We’ve got a thing that might have gone for you, but my husband wouldn’t order it.” After which and another longish pause, broken only by my plea that the pleasure of a walk with our friend would have been quite what I would have chosen, she found for reply: “I believe the Americans walk very little.”
“Yes, we always run,” I laughingly allowed.
She looked at me seriously, yet with an absence in her pretty eyes. “I suppose your distances are so great.”
“Yes, but we break our marches! I can’t tell you the pleasure to me of finding myself here,” I added. “I’ve the greatest admiration for Mr. Ambient.”
“He’ll like that. He likes being admired.”
“He must have a very happy life, then. He has many worshippers.”
“Oh yes, I’ve seen some of them,” she dropped, looking away, very far from me, rather as if such a vision were before her at the moment. It seemed to indicate, her tone, that the sight was scarcely edifying, and I guessed her quickly enough to be in no great intellectual sympathy with the author of “Beltraffio.” I thought the fact strange, but somehow, in the glow of my own enthusiasm, didn’t think it important it only made me wish rather to emphasise that homage.
“For me, you know,” I returned—doubtless with a due suffisance— “he’s quite the greatest of living writers.”
“Of course I can’t judge. Of course he’s very clever,” she said with a patient cheer.
“He’s nothing less than supreme, Mrs. Ambient! There are pages in each of his books of a perfection classing them with the greatest things. Accordingly for me to see him in this familiar way, in his habit as he lives, and apparently to find the man as delightful as the artist—well, I can’t tell you how much too good to be true it seems and how great a privilege I think it.” I knew 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 I should dare to say even so much as this to the master 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 her lips a little compressed, listened as if in no doubt, of course, that her husband was remarkable, but as if at the same time she had heard it frequently enough and couldn’t treat it as stirring news. There was even in her manner a suggestion that I was so young as to expose myself to being called forward—an imputation and a word I had always loathed; as well as a hinted reminder that people usually got over their early extravagance. “I assure you that for me this is a red-letter day,” I added.
She didn’t take this up, but after a pause, looking round her, said abruptly and a trifle dryly: “We’re very much afraid about the fruit this year.”
My eyes wandered to the mossy mottled garden-walls, where plum-trees and pears, flattened and fastened upon the rusty bricks, looked like crucified figures with many arms. “Doesn’t it promise well?”
“No, the trees look very dull. We had such late frosts.”
Then there was another pause. She addressed her attention to the opposite end of the grounds, kept it for her husband’s return with the child. “Is Mr. Ambient fond of gardening?” it occurred to me to ask, 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 impression’s that of certain places he has described. Your house is like one of his pictures.”
She seemed a bit frigidly amused at my glow. “It’s a pleasant little place. There are hundreds like it.”
“Oh it has his TONE,” I laughed, but sounding my epithet and insisting on my point the more sharply that my companion appeared to see in my appreciation of her simple establishment a mark of mean experience.