by Henry James
“Feverish! how in the world comes he to be feverish?” Ambient asked. “He was perfectly right this afternoon.”
“Beatrice says you walked him about too much—you almost killed him.”
“Beatrice must be very happy—she has an opportunity to triumph!” said my friend with a bright bitterness which was all I could have wished it.
“Surely not if the child’s ill,” I ventured to remark by way of pleading for Mrs. Ambient.
“My dear fellow, you aren’t married—you don’t know the nature of wives!” my host returned with spirit.
I tried to match it. “Possibly not; but I know the nature of mothers.”
“Beatrice is perfect as a mother,” sighed Miss Ambient quite tremendously and with her fingers interlaced on her embroidered knees.
“I shall go up and see my boy,” her brother went on.” Do you suppose he’s asleep?”
“Beatrice won’t let you see him, dear”—as to which our young lady looked at me, though addressing our companion.
“Do you call that being perfect as a mother?” Ambient asked.
“Yes, from her point of view.”
“Damn her point of view!” cried the author of “Beltraffio.” And he left the room; after which we heard him ascend the stairs.
I sat there for some ten minutes with Miss Ambient, and we naturally had some exchange of remarks, which began, I think, by my asking her what the point of view of her sister-in-law could be.
“Oh it’s so very odd. But we’re so very odd altogether. Don’t you find us awfully unlike others of our class?—which indeed mostly, in England, is awful. We’ve lived so much abroad. I adore ‘abroad.’ Have you people like us in America?”
“You’re not all alike, you interesting three—or, counting Dolcino, four—surely, surely; so that I don’t think I understand your question. We’ve no one like your brother—I may go so far as that.”
“You’ve probably more persons like his wife,” Miss Ambient desolately smiled.
“I can tell you that better when you’ve told me about her point of view.”
“Oh yes—oh yes. Well,” said my entertainer, “she doesn’t like his ideas. She doesn’t like them for the child. She thinks them undesirable.”
Being quite fresh from the contemplation of some of Mark Ambient’s arcana I was particularly in a position to appreciate this announcement. But the effect of it was to make me, after staring a moment, burst into laughter which I instantly checked when I remembered the indisposed child above and the possibility of parents nervously or fussily anxious.
“What has that infant to do with ideas?” I asked. “Surely he can’t tell one from another. Has he read his father’s novels?”
“He’s very precocious and very sensitive, and his mother thinks she can’t begin to guard him too early.” Miss Ambient’s head drooped a little to one side and her eyes fixed themselves on futurity. Then of a sudden came a strange alteration; her face lighted to an effect more joyless than any gloom, to that indeed of a conscious insincere grimace, and she added “When one has children what one writes becomes a great responsibility.”
“Children are terrible critics,” I prosaically answered. “I’m really glad I haven’t any.”
“Do you also write, then? And in the same style as my brother? And do you like that style? And do people appreciate it in America? I don’t write, but I think I feel.” To these and various other inquiries and observations my young lady treated me till we heard her brother’s step in the hall again and Mark Ambient reappeared. He was so flushed and grave that I supposed he had seen something symptomatic in the condition of his child. His sister apparently had another idea; she gazed at him from afar—as if he had been a burning ship on the horizon—and simply murmured “Poor old Mark!”
“I hope you’re not anxious,” I as promptly pronounced.
“No, but I’m disappointed. She won’t let me in. She has locked the door, and I’m afraid to make a noise.” I daresay there might have been a touch of the ridiculous in such a confession, but I liked my new friend so much that it took nothing for me from his dignity. “She tells me—from behind the door—that she’ll let me know if he’s worse.”
“It’s very good of her,” said Miss Ambient with a hollow sound.
I had exchanged a glance with Mark in which it’s possible he read that my pity for him was untinged with contempt, though I scarce know why he should have cared; and as his sister soon afterward got up and took her bedroom candlestick he proposed we should go back to his study. We sat there till after midnight; he put himself into his slippers and an old velvet jacket, he lighted an ancient pipe, but he talked considerably less than before. There were longish pauses in our communion, but they only made me feel we had advanced in intimacy. They helped me further to understand my friend’s personal situation and to imagine it by no means the happiest possible. When his face was quiet it was vaguely troubled, showing, to my increase of interest—if that was all that was wanted!—that for him too life was the same struggle it had been for so many another man of genius. At last I prepared to leave him, and then, to my ineffable joy, he gave me some of the sheets of his forthcoming book—which, though unfinished, he had indulged in the luxury, so dear to writers of deliberation, of having “set up,” from chapter to chapter, as he advanced. These early pages, the premices, in the language of letters, of that new fruit of his imagination, I should take to my room and look over at my leisure. I was in the act of leaving him when the door of the study noiselessly opened and Mrs. Ambient stood before us. She observed us a moment, her candle in her hand, and then said to her husband that as she supposed he hadn’t gone to bed she had come down to let him know Dolcino was more quiet and would probably be better in the morning. Mark Ambient made no reply; he simply slipped past her in the doorway, as if for fear she might seize him in his passage, and bounded upstairs to judge for himself of his child’s condition. She looked so frankly discomfited that I for a moment believed her about to give him chase. But she resigned herself with a sigh and her eyes turned, ruefully and without a ray, to the lamplit room where various books at which I had been looking were pulled out of their places on the shelves and the fumes of tobacco hung in mid-air. I bade her good-night and then, without intention, by a kind of fatality, a perversity that had already made me address her overmuch on that question of her husband’s powers, I alluded to the precious proof-sheets with which Ambient had entrusted me and which I nursed there under my arm. “They’re the opening chapters of his new book,” I said. “Fancy my satisfaction at being allowed to carry them to my room!”
She turned away, leaving me to take my candlestick from the table in the hall; but before we separated, thinking it apparently a good occasion to let me know once for all since I was beginning, it would seem, to be quite “thick” with my host—that there was no fitness in my appealing to her for sympathy in such a case; before we separated, I say, she remarked to me with her quick fine well-bred inveterate curtness: “I daresay you attribute to me ideas I haven’t got. I don’t take that sort of interest in my husband’s proof-sheets. I consider his writings most objectionable!”
CHAPTER III
I had an odd colloquy the next morning with Miss Ambient, whom I found strolling in the garden before breakfast. The whole place looked as fresh and trim, amid the twitter of the birds, as if, an hour before, the housemaids had been turned into it with their dust- pans and feather-brushes. I almost hesitated to light a cigarette and was doubly startled when, in the act of doing so, I suddenly saw the sister of my host, who had, at the best, something of the weirdness of an apparition, stand before me. She might have been posing for her photograph. Her sad-coloured robe arranged itself in serpentine folds at her feet; her hands locked themselves listlessly together in front; her chin rested on a cinque-cento ruff. The first thing I did after bidding her good-morning was to ask her for news of her little nephew—to express the hope she had heard he was better. She was able to grati
fy this trust—she spoke as if we might expect to see him during the day. We walked through the shrubberies together and she gave me further light on her brother’s household, which offered me an opportunity to repeat to her what his wife had so startled and distressed me with the night before. WAS it the sorry truth that she thought his productions objectionable?
“She doesn’t usually come out with that so soon!” Miss Ambient returned in answer to my breathlessness.
“Poor lady,” I pleaded, “she saw I’m a fanatic.”
“Yes, she won’t like you for that. But you mustn’t mind, if the rest of us like you! Beatrice thinks a work of art ought to have a ‘purpose.’ But she’s a charming woman—don’t you think her charming? I find in her quite the grand air.”
“She’s very beautiful,” I produced with an effort; while I reflected that though it was apparently true that Mark Ambient was mismated it was also perceptible that his sister was perfidious. She assured me her brother and his wife had no other difference but this—one that she thought his writings immoral and his influence pernicious. It was a fixed idea; she was afraid of these things for the child. I answered that it was in all conscience enough, the trifle of a woman’s regarding her husband’s mind as a well of corruption, and she seemed much struck with the novelty of my remark. “But there hasn’t been any of the sort of trouble that there so often is among married people,” she said. “I suppose you can judge for yourself that Beatrice isn’t at all—well, whatever they call it when a woman kicks over! And poor Mark doesn’t make love to other people either. You might think he would, but I assure you he doesn’t. All the same of course, from her point of view, you know, she has a dread of my brother’s influence on the child on the formation of his character, his ‘ideals,’ poor little brat, his principles. It’s as if it were a subtle poison or a contagion—something that would rub off on his tender sensibility when his father kisses him or holds him on his knee. If she could she’d prevent Mark from even so much as touching him. Every one knows it—visitors see it for themselves; so there’s no harm in my telling you. Isn’t it excessively odd? It comes from Beatrice’s being so religious and so tremendously moral—so a cheval on fifty thousand riguardi. And then of course we mustn’t forget,” my companion added, a little unexpectedly, to this polyglot proposition, “that some of Mark’s ideas are—well, really—rather impossible, don’t you know?”
I reflected as we went into the house, where we found Ambient unfolding The Observer at the breakfast-table, that none of them were probably quite so “impossible, don’t you know?” as his sister. Mrs. Ambient, a little “the worse,” as was mentioned, for her ministrations, during the night, to Dolcino, didn’t appear at breakfast. Her husband described her, however, as hoping to go to church. I afterwards learnt that she did go, but nothing naturally was less on the cards than that we should accompany her. It was while the church-bell droned near at hand that the author of “Beltraffio” led me forth for the ramble he had spoken of in his note. I shall attempt here no record of where we went or of what we saw. We kept to the fields and copses and commons, and breathed the same sweet air as the nibbling donkeys and the browsing sheep, whose woolliness seemed to me, in those early days of acquaintance with English objects, but part of the general texture of the small dense landscape, which looked as if the harvest were gathered by the shears and with all nature bleating and braying for the violence. Everything was full of expression for Mark Ambient’s visitor—from the big bandy-legged geese whose whiteness was a “note” amid all the tones of green as they wandered beside a neat little oval pool, the foreground of a thatched and whitewashed inn, with a grassy approach and a pictorial sign—from these humble wayside animals to the crests of high woods which let a gable or a pinnacle peep here and there and looked even at a distance like trees of good company, conscious of an individual profile. I admired the hedge-rows, I plucked the faint- hued heather, and I was for ever stopping to say how charming I thought the thread-like footpaths across the fields, which wandered in a diagonal of finer grain from one smooth stile to another. Mark Ambient was abundantly good-natured and was as much struck, dear man, with some of my observations as I was with the literary allusions of the landscape. We sat and smoked on stiles, broaching paradoxes in the decent English air; we took short cuts across a park or two where the bracken was deep and my companion nodded to the old woman at the gate; we skirted rank coverts which rustled here and there as we passed, and we stretched ourselves at last on a heathery hillside where if the sun wasn’t too hot neither was the earth too cold, and where the country lay beneath us in a rich blue mist. Of course I had already told him what I thought of his new novel, having the previous night read every word of the opening chapters before I went to bed.
“I’m not without hope of being able to make it decent enough,” he said as I went back to the subject while we turned up our heels to the sky. “At least the people who dislike my stuff—and there are plenty of them, I believe—will dislike this thing (if it does turn out well) most.” This was the first time I had heard him allude to the people who couldn’t read him—a class so generally conceived to sit heavy on the consciousness of the man of letters. A being organised for literature as Mark Ambient was must certainly have had the normal proportion of sensitiveness, of irritability; the artistic ego, capable in some cases of such monstrous development, must have been in his composition sufficiently erect and active. I won’t therefore go so far as to say that he never thought of his detractors or that he had any illusions with regard to the number of his admirers—he could never so far have deceived himself as to believe he was popular, but I at least then judged (and had occasion to be sure later on) that stupidity ruffled him visibly but little, that he had an air of thinking it quite natural he should leave many simple folk, tasting of him, as simple as ever he found them, and that he very seldom talked about the newspapers, which, by the way, were always even abnormally vulgar about him. Of course he may have thought them over—the newspapers—night and day; the only point I make is that he didn’t show it while at the same time he didn’t strike one as a man actively on his guard. I may add that, touching his hope of making the work on which he was then engaged the best of his books, it was only partly carried out. That place belongs incontestably to “Beltraffio,” in spite of the beauty of certain parts of its successor. I quite believe, however, that he had at the moment of which I speak no sense of having declined; he was in love with his idea, which was indeed magnificent, and though for him, as I suppose for every sane artist, the act of execution had in it as much torment as joy, he saw his result grow like the crescent of the young moon and promise to fill the disk. “I want to be truer than I’ve ever been,” he said, settling himself on his back with his hands clasped behind his head; “I want to give the impression of life itself. No, you may say what you will, I’ve always arranged things too much, always smoothed them down and rounded them off and tucked them in—done everything to them that life doesn’t do. I’ve been a slave to the old superstitions.”
“You a slave, my dear Mark Ambient? You’ve the freest imagination of our day!”
“All the more shame to me to have done some of the things I have! The reconciliation of the two women in ‘Natalina,’ for instance, which could never really have taken place. That sort of thing’s ignoble—I blush when I think of it! This new affair must be a golden vessel, filled with the purest distillation of the actual; and oh how it worries me, the shaping of the vase, the hammering of the metal! I have to hammer it so fine, so smooth; I don’t do more than an inch or two a day. And all the while I have to be so careful not to let a drop of the liquor escape! When I see the kind of things Life herself, the brazen hussy, does, I despair of ever catching her peculiar trick. She has an impudence, Life! If one risked a fiftieth part of the effects she risks! It takes ever so long to believe it. You don’t know yet, my dear youth. It isn’t till one has been watching her some forty years that one finds out half of what she’s up to!
Therefore one’s earlier things must inevitably contain a mass of rot. And with what one sees, on one side, with its tongue in its cheek, defying one to be real enough, and on the other the bonnes gens rolling up their eyes at one’s cynicism, the situation has elements of the ludicrous which the poor reproducer himself is doubtless in a position to appreciate better than any one else. Of course one mustn’t worry about the bonnes gens,” Mark Ambient went on while my thoughts reverted to his ladylike wife as interpreted by his remarkable sister.