The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  The place struck him with a kind of Roman vastness; the doors which opened out of the upper balconies, high aloft, and which were constantly swinging to and fro with the passage of spectators and ushers, reminded him of the vomitoria that he had read about in descriptions of the Colosseum. The huge organ, the background of the stage—a stage occupied with tiers of seats for choruses and civic worthies—lifted to the dome its shining pipes and sculptured pinnacles, and some genius of music or oratory erected himself in monumental bronze at the base. The hall was so capacious and serious, and the audience increased so rapidly without filling it, giving Ransom a sense of the numbers it would contain when it was packed, that the courage of the two young women, face to face with so tremendous an ordeal, hovered before him as really sublime, especially the conscious tension of poor Olive, who would have been spared none of the anxieties and tremors, none of the previsions of accident or calculations of failure. In the front of the stage was a slim, high desk, like a music-stand, with a cover of red velvet, and near it was a light ornamental chair, on which he was sure Verena would not seat herself, though he could fancy her leaning at moments on the back. Behind this was a kind of semicircle of a dozen arm-chairs, which had evidently been arranged for the friends of the speaker, her sponsors and patrons. The hall was more and more full of premonitory sounds; people making a noise as they unfolded, on hinges, their seats, and itinerant boys, whose voices as they cried out “Photographs of Miss Tarrant—sketch of her life!” or “Portraits of the Speaker—story of her career!” sounded small and piping in the general immensity. Before Ransom was aware of it several of the arm-chairs, in the row behind the lecturer’s desk, were occupied, with gaps, and in a moment he recognised, even across the interval, three of the persons who had appeared. The straight-featured woman with bands of glossy hair and eyebrows that told at a distance, could only be Mrs. Farrinder, just as the gentleman beside her, in a white overcoat, with an umbrella and a vague face, was probably her husband Amariah. At the opposite end of the row were another pair, whom Ransom, unacquainted with certain chapters of Verena’s history, perceived without surprise to be Mrs. Burrage and her insinuating son. Apparently their interest in Miss Tarrant was more than a momentary fad, since—like himself—they had made the journey from New York to hear her. There were other figures, unknown to our young man, here and there, in the semicircle; but several places were still empty (one of which was of course reserved for Olive), and it occurred to Ransom, even in his preoccupation, that one of them ought to remain so—ought to be left to symbolise the presence, in the spirit, of Miss Birdseye.

  He bought one of the photographs of Verena, and thought it shockingly bad, and bought also the sketch of her life, which many people seemed to be reading, but crumpled it up in his pocket for future consideration. Verena was not in the least present to him in connexion with this exhibition of enterprise and puffery; what he saw was Olive, struggling and yielding, making every sacrifice of taste for the sake of the largest hearing, and conforming herself to a great popular system. Whether she had struggled or not, there was a catch-penny effect about the whole thing which added to the fever in his cheek and made him wish he had money to buy up the stock of the vociferous little boys. Suddenly the notes of the organ rolled out into the hall, and he became aware that the overture or prelude had begun. This, too, seemed to him a piece of claptrap, but he didn’t wait to think of it; he instantly edged out of his place, which he had chosen near the end of a row, and reached one of the numerous doors. If he had had no definite plan he now had at least an irresistible impulse, and he felt the prick of shame at having faltered for a moment. It had been his tacit calculation that Verena, still enshrined in mystery by her companion, would not have reached the scene of her performance till within a few minutes of the time at which she was to come forth; so that he had lost nothing by waiting, up to this moment, before the platform. But now he must overtake his opportunity. Before passing out of the hall into the lobby he paused, and with his back to the stage, gave a look at the gathered auditory. It had become densely numerous, and, suffused with the evenly distributed gaslight, which fell from a great elevation, and the thick atmosphere that hangs for ever in such places, it appeared to pile itself high and to look dimly expectant and formidable. He had a throb of uneasiness at his private purpose of balking it of its entertainment, its victim—a glimpse of the ferocity that lurks in a disappointed mob. But the thought of that danger only made him pass more quickly through the ugly corridors; he felt that his plan was definite enough now, and he found that he had no need even of asking the way to a certain small door (one or more of them), which he meant to push open. In taking his place in the morning he had assured himself as to the side of the house on which (with its approach to the platform) the withdrawing room of singers and speakers was situated; he had chosen his seat in that quarter, and he now had not far to go before he reached it. No one heeded or challenged him; Miss Tarrant’s auditors were still pouring in (the occasion was evidently to have been an unprecedented success of curiosity), and had all the attention of the ushers. Ransom opened a door at the end of the passage, and it admitted him into a sort of vestibule, quite bare save that at a second door, opposite to him, stood a figure at the sight of which he paused for a moment in his advance.

  The figure was simply that of a robust policeman, in his helmet and brass buttons—a policeman who was expecting him—Ransom could see that in a twinkling. He judged in the same space of time that Olive Chancellor had heard of his having arrived and had applied for the protection of this functionary, who was now simply guarding the ingress and was prepared to defend it against all comers. There was a slight element of surprise in this, as he had reasoned that his nervous kinswoman was absent from her house for the day—had been spending it all in Verena’s retreat, wherever that was. The surprise was not great enough, however, to interrupt his course for more than an instant, and he crossed the room and stood before the belted sentinel. For a moment neither spoke; they looked at each other very hard in the eyes, and Ransom heard the organ, beyond partitions, launching its waves of sound through the hall. They seemed to be very near it, and the whole place vibrated. The policeman was a tall, lean-faced, sallow man, with a stoop of the shoulders, a small, steady eye, and something in his mouth which made a protuberance in his cheek. Ransom could see that he was very strong, but he believed that he himself was not materially less so. However, he had not come there to show physical fight—a public tussle about Verena was not an attractive idea, except perhaps, after all, if he should get the worst of it, from the point of view of Olive’s new system of advertising; and, moreover, it would not be in the least necessary. Still he said nothing, and still the policeman remained dumb, and there was something in the way the moments elapsed and in our young man’s consciousness that Verena was separated from him only by a couple of thin planks, which made him feel that she too expected him, but in another sense; that she had nothing to do with this parade of resistance, that she would know in a moment, by quick intuition, that he was there, and that she was only praying to be rescued, to be saved. Face to face with Olive she hadn’t the courage, but she would have it with her hand in his. It came to him that there was no one in the world less sure of her business just at that moment than Olive Chancellor; it was as if he could see, through the door, the terrible way her eyes were fixed on Verena while she held her watch in her hand and Verena looked away from her. Olive would have been so thankful that she should begin before the hour, but of course that was impossible. Ransom asked no questions—that seemed a waste of time; he only said, after a minute, to the policeman:

  “I should like very much to see Miss Tarrant, if you will be so good as to take in my card.”

  The guardian of order, well planted just between him and the handle of the door, took from Ransom the morsel of pasteboard which he held out to him, read slowly the name inscribed on it, turned it over and looked at the back, then returned it to his interlocutor. “Well,
I guess it ain’t much use,” he remarked.

  “How can you know that? You have no business to decline my request.”

  “Well, I guess I have about as much business as you have to make it.” Then he added, “You are just the very man she wants to keep out.”

  “I don’t think Miss Tarrant wants to keep me out,” Ransom returned.

  “I don’t know much about her, she hasn’t hired the hall. It’s the other one—Miss Chancellor; it’s her that runs this lecture.”

  “And she has asked you to keep me out? How absurd!” exclaimed Ransom ingeniously.

  “She tells me you’re none too fit to be round alone; you have got this thing on the brain. I guess you’d better be quiet,” said the policeman.

  “Quiet? Is it possible to be more quiet than I am?”

  “Well, I’ve seen crazy folks that were a good deal like you. If you want to see the speaker why don’t you go and set round in the hall, with the rest of the public?” And the policeman waited, in an immovable, ruminating, reasonable manner, for an answer to this inquiry.

  Ransom had one, on the instant, at his service. “Because I don’t want simply to see her; I want also to speak to her—in private.”

  “Yes—it’s always intensely private,” said the policeman. “Now I wouldn’t lose the lecture if I was you. I guess it will do you good.”

  “The lecture?” Ransom repeated, laughing. “It won’t take place.”

  “Yes it will—as quick as the organ stops.” Then the policeman added, as to himself, “Why the devil don’t it?”

  “Because Miss Tarrant has sent up to the organist to tell him to keep on.”

  “Who has she sent, do you s’pose?” And Ransom’s new acquaintance entered into his humour. “I guess Miss Chancellor isn’t her nigger.”

  “She has sent her father, or perhaps even her mother. They are in there too.”

  “How do you know that?” asked the policeman consideringly.

  “Oh, I know everything,” Ransom answered, smiling.

  “Well, I guess they didn’t come here to listen to that organ. We’ll hear something else before long, if he doesn’t stop.”

  “You will hear a good deal, very soon,” Ransom remarked.

  The serenity of his self-confidence appeared at last to make an impression on his antagonist, who lowered his head a little, like some butting animal, and looked at the young man from beneath bushy eyebrows. “Well, I have heard a good deal, since I’ve been in Boston.”

  “Oh, Boston’s a great place,” Ransom rejoined inattentively. He was not listening to the policeman or to the organ now, for the sound of voices had reached him from the other side of the door. The policeman took no further notice of it than to lean back against the panels, with folded arms; and there was another pause, between them, during which the playing of the organ ceased.

  “I will just wait here, with your permission,” said Ransom, “and presently I shall be called.”

  “Who do you s’pose will call you?”

  “Well, Miss Tarrant, I hope.”

  “She’ll have to square the other one first.”

  Ransom took out his watch, which he had adapted, on purpose, several hours before, to Boston time, and saw that the minutes had sped with increasing velocity during this interview, and that it now marked five minutes past eight. “Miss Chancellor will have to square the public,” he said in a moment; and the words were far from being an empty profession of security, for the conviction already in possession of him, that a drama in which he, though cut off, was an actor, had been going on for some time in the apartment he was prevented from entering, that the situation was extraordinarily strained there, and that it could not come to an end without an appeal to him—this transcendental assumption acquired an infinitely greater force the instant he perceived that Verena was even now keeping her audience waiting. Why didn’t she go on? Why, except that she knew he was there, and was gaining time?

  “Well, I guess she has shown herself,” said the door-keeper, whose discussion with Ransom now appeared to have passed, on his own part, and without the slightest prejudice to his firmness, into a sociable, gossiping phase.

  “If she had shown herself, we should hear the reception, the applause.”

  “Well, there they air; they are going to give it to her,” the policeman announced.

  He had an odious appearance of being in the right, for there indeed they seemed to be—they were giving it to her. A general hubbub rose from the floor and the galleries of the hall—the sound of several thousand people stamping with their feet and rapping with their umbrellas and sticks. Ransom felt faint, and for a little while he stood with his gaze interlocked with that of the policeman. Then suddenly a wave of coolness seemed to break over him, and he exclaimed: “My dear fellow, that isn’t applause—it’s impatience. It isn’t a reception, it’s a call!”

  The policeman neither assented to this proposition nor denied it; he only transferred the protuberance in his cheek to the other side, and observed:

  “I guess she’s sick.”

  “Oh, I hope not!” said Ransom, very gently. The stamping and rapping swelled and swelled for a minute, and then it subsided; but before it had done so Ransom’s definition of it had plainly become the true one. The tone of the manifestation was good-humoured, but it was not gratulatory. He looked at his watch again, and saw that five minutes more had elapsed, and he remembered what the newspaperman in Charles Street had said about Olive’s guaranteeing Verena’s punctuality. Oddly enough, at the moment the image of this gentleman recurred to him, the gentleman himself burst through the other door, in a state of the liveliest agitation.

  “Why in the name of goodness don’t she go on? If she wants to make them call her, they’ve done it about enough!” Mr. Pardon turned, pressingly, from Ransom to the policeman and back again, and in his preoccupation gave no sign of having met the Mississippian before.

  “I guess she’s sick,” said the policeman.

  “The public’ll be sick!” cried the distressed reporter. “If she’s sick, why doesn’t she send for a doctor? All Boston is packed into this house, and she has got to talk to it. I want to go in and see.”

  “You can’t go in,” said the policeman drily.

  “Why can’t I go in, I should like to know? I want to go in for the Vesper“!

  “You can’t go in for anything. I’m keeping this man out, too,” the policeman added genially, as if to make Mr. Pardon’s exclusion appear less invidious.

  “Why, they’d ought to let you in,” said Matthias, staring a moment at Ransom.

  “May be they’d ought, but they won’t,” the policeman remarked.

  “Gracious me!” panted Mr. Pardon; “I knew from the first Miss Chancellor would make a mess of it! Where’s Mr. Filer?” he went on eagerly, addressing himself apparently to either of the others, or to both.

  “I guess he’s at the door, counting the money,” said the policeman.

  “Well, he’ll have to give it back if he don’t look out!”

  “Maybe he will. I’ll let him in if he comes, but he’s the only one. She is on now,” the policeman added, without emotion.

  His ear had caught the first faint murmur of another explosion of sound. This time, unmistakably, it was applause—the clapping of multitudinous hands, mingled with the noise of many throats. The demonstration, however, though considerable, was not what might have been expected, and it died away quickly. Mr. Pardon stood listening, with an expression of some alarm. “Merciful fathers! can’t they give her more than that?” he cried. “I’ll just fly round and see!”