The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  “Well, she will be sure to know you have been round here, at any rate,” Verena rejoined.

  “How will she know, unless you tell her?”

  “I tell her everything,” said the girl; and now as soon as she had spoken, she blushed. He stood before her, tracing a figure on the mosaic pavement with his cane, conscious that in a moment they had become more intimate. They were discussing their affairs, which had nothing to do with the heroic symbols that surrounded them; but their affairs had suddenly grown so serious that there was no want of decency in their lingering there for the purpose. The implication that his visit might remain as a secret between them made them both feel it differently. To ask her to keep it so would have been, as it seemed to Ransom, a liberty, and, moreover, he didn’t care so much as that; but if she were to prefer to do so such a preference would only make him consider the more that his expedition had been a success.

  “Oh, then, you can tell her this!” he said in a moment.

  “If I shouldn’t, it would be the first–-” And Verena checked herself.

  “You must arrange that with your conscience,” Ransom went on, laughing.

  They came out of the hall, passed down the steps, and emerged from the Delta, as that portion of the college precinct is called. The afternoon had begun to wane, but the air was filled with a pink brightness, and there was a cool, pure smell, a vague breath of spring.

  “Well, if I don’t tell Olive, then you must leave me here,” said Verena, stopping in the path and putting out a hand of farewell.

  “I don’t understand. What has that to do with it? Besides I thought you said you must tell,” Ransom added. In playing with the subject this way, in enjoying her visible hesitation, he was slightly conscious of a man’s brutality—of being pushed by an impulse to test her good-nature, which seemed to have no limit. It showed no sign of perturbation as she answered:

  “Well, I want to be free—to do as I think best. And, if there is a chance of my keeping it back, there mustn’t be anything more—there must not, Mr. Ransom, really.”

  “Anything more? Why, what are you afraid there will be—if I should simply walk home with you?”

  “I must go alone, I must hurry back to mother,” she said, for all reply. And she again put out her hand, which he had not taken before.

  Of course he took it now, and even held it a moment; he didn’t like being dismissed, and was thinking of pretexts to linger. “Miss Birdseye said you would convert me, but you haven’t yet,” it came into his head to say.

  “You can’t tell yet; wait a little. My influence is peculiar; it sometimes comes out a long time afterwards!” This speech, on Verena’s part, was evidently perfunctory, and the grandeur of her self-reference jocular; she was much more serious when she went on quickly, “Do you mean to say Miss Birdseye promised you that?”

  “Oh yes. Talk about influence! you should have seen the influence I obtained over her.”

  “Well, what good will it do, if I’m going to tell Olive about your visit?”

  “Well, you see, I think she hopes you won’t. She believes you are going to convert me privately—so that I shall blaze forth, suddenly, out of the darkness of Mississippi, as a first-class proselyte: very effective and dramatic.”

  Verena struck Basil Ransom as constantly simple, but there were moments when her candour seemed to him preternatural. “If I thought that would be the effect, I might make an exception,” she remarked, speaking as if such a result were, after all, possible.

  “Oh, Miss Tarrant, you will convert me enough, any way,” said the young man.

  “Enough? What do you mean by enough?”

  “Enough to make me terribly unhappy.”

  She looked at him a moment, evidently not understanding; but she tossed him a retort at a venture, turned away, and took her course homeward. The retort was that if he should be unhappy it would serve him right—a form of words that committed her to nothing. As he returned to Boston he saw how curious he should be to learn whether she had betrayed him, as it were, to Miss Chancellor. He might learn through Mrs. Luna; that would almost reconcile him to going to see her again. Olive would mention it in writing to her sister, and Adeline would repeat the complaint. Perhaps she herself would even make him a scene about it; that would be, for him, part of the unhappiness he had foretold to Verena Tarrant.

  XXVI

  “Mrs. Henry Burrage, at home Wednesday evening, March 26th, at half-past nine o’clock.” It was in consequence of having received a card with these words inscribed upon it that Basil Ransom presented himself, on the evening she had designated, at the house of a lady he had never heard of before. The account of the relation of effect to cause is not complete, however, unless I mention that the card bore, furthermore, in the left-hand lower corner, the words: “An Address from Miss Verena Tarrant.” He had an idea (it came mainly from the look and even the odour of the engraved pasteboard) that Mrs. Burrage was a member of the fashionable world, and it was with considerable surprise that he found himself in such an element. He wondered what had induced a denizen of that fine air to send him an invitation; then he said to himself that, obviously, Verena Tarrant had simply requested that this should be done. Mrs. Henry Burrage, whoever she might be, had asked her if she shouldn’t like some of her own friends to be present, and she had said, Oh yes, and mentioned him in the happy group. She had been able to give Mrs. Burrage his address, for had it not been contained in the short letter he despatched to Monadnoc Place soon after his return from Boston, in which he thanked Miss Tarrant afresh for the charming hour she had enabled him to spend at Cambridge? She had not answered his letter at the time, but Mrs. Burrage’s card was a very good answer. Such a missive deserved a rejoinder, and it was by way of rejoinder that he entered the street car which, on the evening of March 26th, was to deposit him at a corner adjacent to Mrs. Burrage’s dwelling. He almost never went to evening parties (he knew scarcely any one who gave them, though Mrs. Luna had broken him in a little), and he was sure this occasion was of festive intention, would have nothing in common with the nocturnal “exercises” at Miss Birdseye’s; but he would have exposed himself to almost any social discomfort in order to see Verena Tarrant on the platform. The platform it evidently was to be—private if not public—since one was admitted by a ticket given away if not sold. He took his in his pocket, quite ready to present it at the door. It would take some time for me to explain the contradiction to the reader; but Basil Ransom’s desire to be present at one of Verena’s regular performances was not diminished by the fact that he detested her views and thought the whole business a poor perversity. He understood her now very well (since his visit to Cambridge); he saw she was honest and natural; she had queer, bad lecture-blood in her veins, and a comically false idea of the aptitude of little girls for conducting movements; but her enthusiasm was of the purest, her illusions had a fragrance, and so far as the mania for producing herself personally was concerned, it had been distilled into her by people who worked her for ends which to Basil Ransom could only appear insane. She was a touching, ingenuous victim, unconscious of the pernicious forces which were hurrying her to her ruin. With this idea of ruin there had already associated itself in the young man’s mind, the idea—a good deal more dim and incomplete—of rescue; and it was the disposition to confirm himself in the view that her charm was her own, and her fallacies, her absurdity, a mere reflexion of unlucky circumstance, that led him to make an effort to behold her in the position in which he could least bear to think of her. Such a glimpse was all that was wanted to prove to him that she was a person for whom he might open an unlimited credit of tender compassion. He expected to suffer—to suffer deliciously.

  By the time he had crossed Mrs. Burrage’s threshold there was no doubt whatever in his mind that he was in the fashionable world. It was embodied strikingly in the stout, elderly, ugly lady, dressed in a brilliant colour, with a twinkle of jewels and a bosom much uncovered, who stood near the door of the first room, and
with whom the people passing in before him were shaking hands. Ransom made her a Mississipian bow, and she said she was delighted to see him, while people behind him pressed him forward. He yielded to the impulsion, and found himself in a great saloon, amid lights and flowers, where the company was dense, and there were more twinkling, smiling ladies, with uncovered bosoms. It was certainly the fashionable world, for there was no one there whom he had ever seen before. The walls of the room were covered with pictures—the very ceiling was painted and framed. The people pushed each other a little, edged about, advanced and retreated, looking at each other with differing faces—sometimes blandly, unperceivingly, sometimes with a harshness of contemplation, a kind of cruelty, Ransom thought; sometimes with sudden nods and grimaces, inarticulate murmurs, followed by a quick reaction, a sort of gloom. He was now absolutely certain that he was in the best society. He was carried further and further forward, and saw that another room stretched beyond the one he had entered, in which there was a sort of little stage, covered with a red cloth, and an immense collection of chairs, arranged in rows. He became aware that people looked at him, as well as at each other, rather more, indeed, than at each other, and he wondered whether it were very visible in his appearance that his being there was a kind of exception. He didn’t know how much his head looked over the heads of others, or that his brown complexion, fuliginous eye, and straight black hair, the leonine fall of which I mentioned in the first pages of this narrative, gave him that relief which, in the best society, has the great advantage of suggesting a topic. But there were other topics besides, as was proved by a fragment of conversation, between two ladies, which reached his ear while he stood rather wistfully wondering where Verena Tarrant might be.

  “Are you a member?” one of the ladies said to the other. “I didn’t know you had joined.”

  “Oh, I haven’t; nothing would induce me.”

  “That’s not fair; you have all the fun and none of the responsibility.”

  “Oh, the—the fun!” exclaimed the second lady.

  “You needn’t abuse us, or I will never invite you,” said the first.

  “Well, I thought it was meant to be improving; that’s all I mean; very good for the mind. Now, this woman to-night; isn’t she from Boston?”

  “Yes, I believe they have brought her on, just for this.”

  “Well, you must be pretty desperate when you have got to go to Boston for your entertainment.”

  “Well, there’s a similar society there, and I never heard of their sending to New York.”

  “Of course not, they think they have got everything. But doesn’t it make your life a burden thinking what you can possibly have?”

  “Oh dear, no. I am going to have Professor Gougenheim—all about the Talmud. You must come.”

  “Well, I’ll come,” said the second lady; “but nothing would induce me to be a regular member.”

  Whatever the mystic circle might be, Ransom agreed with the second lady that regular membership must have terrors, and he admired her independence in such an artificial world. A considerable part of the company had now directed itself to the further apartment—people had begun to occupy the chairs, to confront the empty platform. He reached the wide doors, and saw that the place was a spacious music-room, decorated in white and gold, with a polished floor and marble busts of composers, on brackets attached to the delicate panels. He forbore to enter, however, being shy about taking a seat, and seeing that the ladies were arranging themselves first. He turned back into the first room, to wait till the audience had massed itself, conscious that even if he were behind every one he should be able to make a long neck; and here, suddenly, in a corner, his eyes rested upon Olive Chancellor. She was seated a little apart, in an angle of the room, and she was looking straight at him; but as soon as she perceived that he saw her she dropped her eyes, giving no sign of recognition. Ransom hesitated a moment, but the next he went straight over to her. It had been in his mind that if Verena Tarrant was there, she would be there; an instinct told him that Miss Chancellor would not allow her dear friend to come to New York without her. It was very possible she meant to “cut” him—especially if she knew of his having cut her, the other week, in Boston; but it was his duty to take for granted she would speak to him, until the contrary should be definitely proved. Though he had seen her only twice he remembered well how acutely shy she was capable of being, and he thought it possible one of these spasms had seized her at the present time.

  When he stood before her he found his conjecture perfectly just; she was white with the intensity of her self-consciousness; she was altogether in a very uncomfortable state. She made no response to his offer to shake hands with her, and he saw that she would never go through that ceremony again. She looked up at him when he spoke to her, and her lips moved; but her face was intensely grave and her eye had almost a feverish light. She had evidently got into her corner to be out of the way; he recognised in her the air of an interloper, as he had felt it in himself. The small sofa on which she had placed herself had the form to which the French give the name of causeuse; there was room on it for just another person, and Ransom asked her, with a cheerful accent, if he might sit down beside her. She turned towards him when he had done so, turned everything but her eyes, and opened and shut her fan while she waited for her fit of diffidence to pass away. Ransom himself did not wait; he took a jocular tone about their encounter, asking her if she had come to New York to rouse the people. She glanced round the room; the backs of Mrs. Burrage’s guests, mainly, were presented to them, and their position was partly masked by a pyramid of flowers which rose from a pedestal close to Olive’s end of the sofa and diffused a fragrance in the air.

  “Do you call these ‘the people’?” she asked.

  “I haven’t the least idea. I don’t know who any of them are, not even who Mrs. Henry Burrage is, I simply received an invitation.”

  Miss Chancellor gave him no information on the point he had mentioned; she only said, in a moment: “Do you go wherever you are invited?”

  “Why, I go if I think I may find you there,” the young man replied gallantly. “My card mentioned that Miss Tarrant would give an address, and I knew that wherever she is you are not far off. I have heard you are inseparable, from Mrs. Luna.”

  “Yes, we are inseparable. That is exactly why I am here.”

  “It’s the fashionable world, then, you are going to stir up.”

  Olive remained for some time with her eyes fastened to the floor; then she flashed them up at her interlocutor. “It’s a part of our life to go anywhere—to carry our work where it seems most needed. We have taught ourselves to stifle repulsion, distaste.”

  “Oh, I think this is very amusing,” said Ransom. “It’s a beautiful house, and there are some very pretty faces. We haven’t anything so brilliant in Mississippi.”

  To everything he said Olive offered at first a momentary silence, but the worst of her shyness was apparently leaving her.

  “Are you successful in New York? do you like it?” she presently asked, uttering the inquiry in a tone of infinite melancholy, as if the eternal sense of duty forced it from her lips.

  “Oh, successful! I am not successful as you and Miss Tarrant are; for (to my barbaric eyes) it is a great sign of prosperity to be the heroines of an occasion like this.”

  “Do I look like the heroine of an occasion?” asked Olive Chancellor, without an intention of humour, but with an effect that was almost comical.

  “You would if you didn’t hide yourself away. Are you not going into the other room to hear the speech? Everything is prepared.”

  “I am going when I am notified—when I am invited.”

  There was considerable majesty in her tone, and Ransom saw that something was wrong, that she felt neglected. To see that she was as ticklish with others as she had been with him made him feel forgiving, and there was in his manner a perfect disposition to forget their differences as he said, “Oh, there is plenty of time; th
e place isn’t half full yet.”

  She made no direct rejoinder to this, but she asked him about his mother and sisters, what news he received from the South. “Have they any happiness?” she inquired, rather as if she warned him to take care not to pretend they had. He neglected her warning to the point of saying that there was one happiness they always had—that of having learned not to think about it too much, and to make the best of their circumstances. She listened to this with an air of great reserve, and apparently thought he had wished to give her a lesson; for she suddenly broke out, “You mean that you have traced a certain line for them, and that that’s all you know about it!”

  Ransom stared at her, surprised; he felt, now, that she would always surprise him. “Ah, don’t be rough with me,” he said, in his soft Southern voice; “don’t you remember how you knocked me about when I called on you in Boston?”

  “You hold us in chains, and then, when we writhe in our agony, you say we don’t behave prettily!” These words, which did not lessen Ransom’s wonderment, were the young lady’s answer to his deprecatory speech. She saw that he was honestly bewildered and that in a moment more he would laugh at her, as he had done a year and a half before (she remembered it as if it had been yesterday); and to stop that off, at any cost, she went on hurriedly—”If you listen to Miss Tarrant, you will know what I mean.”