The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  He had never from the first, to do himself—or to do her—justice, felt he had really known her, small, cool, supposedly childish, yet not a bit confiding, verily not a bit appealing, presence as she was; but clearly he should know her now, and to do so might prove indeed a job. Not that he wanted to be too cold-blooded about her—that is in the way of enlightened appreciation, the detachment of the simply scandalised state being another matter; for this was somehow to leave poor Jane, and poor Jane’s gloom of misery, in the lurch. But once safely back from the studio, Puddick’s own—where he hadn’t been sure, upon his honour, that some coarse danger mightn’t crop up—he indulged in a surreptitious vow that if any “fun,” whether just freely or else more or less acutely speaking, was to come of the matter, he’d be blamed if he’d be wholly deprived of it. The possibility of an incalculable sort of interest—in fact, quite a refined sort, could there be refinement in such doings—had somehow come out with Puddick’s at once saying: “Certainly sir, I’ll marry her if you and Mrs. Truffle absolutely insist—and if Mora herself (the great point!) can be brought round to look at it in that way. But I warn you that if I do, and that if she makes that concession, I shall probably lose my hold of her—which won’t be best, you know, for any one concerned. You don’t suppose I don’t want to make it all right, do you?” the surprising young man had gone on. “The question’s only of what is right—or what will be if we keep our heads and take time—with such an extraordinary person as Mora, don’t you see? to deal with. You must grant me,” Mr. Puddick had wound up, “that she’s a rum case.”

  II

  What he had first felt, of course, was the rare coolness of it, the almost impudent absence of any tone of responsibility; which had begun by seeming to make the little painter-man’s own case as “rum,” surely, as one could imagine it. He had gone, poor troubled Traffle, after the talk, straight to his own studio, or to the rather chill and vague, if scrupulously neat, pavilion at the garden-end, which he had put up eight years ago in the modest hope that it would increasingly inspire him; since it wasn’t making preparations and invoking facilities that constituted swagger, but, much rather, behaving as if one’s powers could boldly dispense with them. He was certain Jane would come to him there on hearing of him from the parlour-maid, to whom he had said a word in the hall. He wasn’t afraid—no—of having to speak a little as he felt; but, though well aware of his wife’s impatience, he wasn’t keen, either, for any added intensity of effort to abound only in Mrs. Traffle’s sense. He required space and margin, he required a few minutes’ time, to say to himself frankly that this dear dismal lady had no sense—none at least of their present wretched question—that was at all worth developing: since he of course couldn’t possibly remark it to poor Jane. He had perhaps never remarked for his own private benefit so many strange things as between the moment of his letting himself again into the perpetually swept and garnished temple of his own perfunctory aesthetic rites, where everything was ready to his hand and only that weak tool hung up, and his glimpse of Jane, from the smaller window, as she came down the garden walk. Pud-dick’s studio had been distinctly dirty, and Puddick himself, from head to foot, despite his fine pale little face and bright, direct, much more searching than shifting eyes, almost as spotty as the large morsel of rag with which he had so oddly begun to rub his fingers while standing there to receive Mora’s nearest male relative; but the canvas on his easel, the thing that even in the thick of his other adventure was making so straight a push for the Academy, almost embarrassed that relative’s eyes, not to say that relative’s conscience, by the cleanness of its appeal. Traffle hadn’t come to admire his picture or to mark how he didn’t muddle where not muddling was vital; he had come to denounce his conduct, and yet now, perhaps most of all, felt the strain of having pretended so to ignore what would intensely have interested him. Thanks to this barren artifice, to the after-effect of it on his nerves, his own preposterous place, all polish and poverty, pointed such a moral as he had never before dreamed of. Spotless it might be, unlike any surface or aspect presented under the high hard Puddick north-light, since it showed no recording trace, no homely smear—since it had had no hour of history. That was the way truth showed and history came out—in spots: by them, and by nothing else, you knew the real, as you knew the leopard, so that the living creature and the living life equally had to have them. Stuffed animals and weeping women were—well, another question. He had gathered, on the scene of his late effort, that Mora didn’t weep, that she was still perfectly pleased with her shocking course; her complacency indeed remained at such a pitch as to make any question of her actual approach, on whatever basis, or any rash direct challenge of her, as yet unadvisable. He was at all events, after another moment, in presence of Jane’s damp severity; she never ceased crying, but her tears froze as they fell—though not, unfortunately, to firm ice, any surface that would bear the weight of large argument. The only thing for him, none the less, was to carry the position with a rush, and he came at once to the worst.

  “He’ll do it—he’s willing; but he makes a most striking point—I mean given the girl as we know her and as he of course by this time must. He keeps his advantage, he thinks, by not forcing the note—don’t you see?” Traffle himself—under the quick glow of his rush—actually saw more and more. “He’s feeling his way—he used that expression to me; and again I haven’t to tell you, any more than he really had to tell me, that with Mora one has to sit tight. He puts on us, in short, the responsibility.”

  He had felt how more than ever her “done” yellow hair—done only in the sense of an elaborately unbecoming conformity to the spasmodic prescriptions, undulations and inflations of the day, not in that of any departure from its pale straw-coloured truth—was helped by her white invalidical shawl to intensify those reminders of their thin ideals, their bloodless immunity, their generally compromised and missed and forfeited frankness, that every other feature of their domestic scene had just been projecting for him. “Responsibility—we responsible?” She gaped with the wonder of it.

  “I mean that we should be if anything were to happen by our trying to impose on her our view of her one redemption. I give it you for his own suggestion—and thereby worth thinking of.”

  But Jane could take nothing in. “He suggests that he needn’t marry her, and you agree with him? Pray what is there left to ‘happen,’” she went on before he could answer, “after her having happened so completely to disgrace herself?”

  He turned his back a moment—he had shortly before noticed a framed decoration, a “refined” Japanese thing that gave accent, as he would have said, to the neatness of his mouse-grey wall, and that needed straightening. Those spare apprehensions had somehow, it was true, suddenly been elbowed out of his path by richer ones; but he obeyed his old habit. “She can leave him, my dear; that’s what she can do—and not, you may well believe, to come back to us.”

  “If she will come I’ll take her—even now,” said Jane Traffle; “and who can ask of me more than that?”

  He slid about a little, sportively, on his polished floor, as if he would have liked to skate, while he vaguely, inaudibly hummed. “Our difficulty is that she doesn’t ask the first blessed thing of us. We’ve been, you see, too stupid about her. Puddick doesn’t say it, but he knows it—that I felt She feels what she is—and so does he.”

  “What she is? She’s an awful little person”—and Mrs. Traffle stated it with a cold finality she had never yet used.

  “Well then, that’s what she feels!—even though it’s probably not the name she employs in connection with it. She has tremendously the sense of life.”

  “That’s bad,” cried Jane, “when you haven’t—not even feebly!—the sense of decency.”

  “How do you know, my dear,” he returned, “when you’ve never had it?” And then as she but stared, since he couldn’t mean she hadn’t the sense of decency, he went on, really quite amazed at himself: “People must have both if possible, b
ut if they can only have one I’m not sure that that one, as we’ve had it—not at all ‘feebly,’ as you say!—is the better of the two. What do we know about the sense of life—when it breaks out with real freedom? It has never broken out here, my dear, for long enough to leave its breath on the window-pane. But they’ve got it strong down there in Puddick’s studio.”

  She looked at him as if she didn’t even understand his language, and she flopped thereby into the trap set for her by a single word. “Is she living in the studio?”

  He didn’t avoid her eyes. “I don’t know where she’s living.”

  “And do I understand that you didn’t ask him?”

  “It was none of my business—I felt that there in an unexpected way; I couldn’t somehow not feel it—and I suggest, my dear, accordingly, that it’s also none of yours. I wouldn’t answer, if you really want to know,” he wound up, hanging fire an instant, but candidly bringing it out—”I wouldn’t answer, if you really want to know, for their relations.”

  Jane’s eyebrows mounted and mounted. “Whoever in the world would?”

  He waited a minute, looking off at his balanced picture—though not as if now really seeing it. “I’m not talking of what the vulgar would say—or are saying, of course, to their fill. I’m not talking of what those relations may be. I’m talking—well,” he said, “of what they mayn’t.”

  “You mean they may be innocent?”

  “I think it possible. They’re, as he calls it, a ‘rum’ pair. They’re not like us.”

  “If we’re not like them,” she broke in, “I grant you I hope not”

  “We’ve no imagination, you see,” he quietly explained—”whereas they have it on tap, for the sort of life they lead down there, all the while.” He seemed wistfully to figure it out. “For us only one kind of irregularity is possible—for them, no doubt, twenty kinds.”

  Poor Jane listened this time—and so intently that after he had spoken she still rendered his obscure sense the tribute of a wait. “You think it’s possible she’s not living with him?”

  “I think anything possible.”

  “Then what in the world did she want?”

  “She wanted in the first place to get away from us. We didn’t like her–-“

  “Ah, we never let her see it!”—Jane could triumphantly make that point.

  It but had for him, however, an effect of unconscious comedy. “No, that was it—and she wanted to get away from everything we did to prevent her; from our solemn precautions against her seeing it We didn’t understand her, or we should have understood how much she must have wanted to. We were afraid of her in short, and she wanted not to see our contortions over it. Puddick isn’t beautiful—though he has a fine little head and a face with some awfully good marks; but he’s a Greek god, for statuesque calm, compared with us. He isn’t afraid of her.”

  Jane drew herself elegantly up. “I understood you just now that it’s exactly what he is!”

  Traffie reflected. “That’s only for his having to deal with her in our way. Not if he handles her in his own.”

  “And what, pray, is his own?”

  Traffle, his hands in his pockets, resumed his walk, touching with the points of his shoes certain separations between the highly-polished planks of his floor. “Well, why should we have to know?”

  “Do you mean we’re to wash our hands of her?”

  He only circulated at first—but quite sounding a low whistle of exhilaration. He felt happier than for a long time; broken as at a blow was the formation of ice that had somehow covered, all his days, the whole ground of life, what he would have called the things under. There they were, the things under. He could see them now; which was practically what he after a little replied. “It will be so interesting.” He pulled up, none the less, as he turned, before her poor scared and mottled face, her still suffused eyes, her “dressed” head parading above these miseries.

  She vaguely panted, as from a dance through bush and briar. “But what, Sidney, will be?”

  “To see what becomes of her. Without our muddling.” Which was a term, however, that she so protested against his use of that he had on the spot, with more kindness than logic, to attenuate, admitting her right to ask him who could do less—less than take the stand she proposed; though indeed coming back to the matter that evening after dinner (they never really got away from it; but they had the consciousness now of false starts in other directions, followed by the captive returns that were almost as ominous of what might still be before them as the famous tragic rentrée of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette from Varennes); when he brought up, for their common relief, the essential fact of the young woman’s history as they had suffered it to shape itself: her coming to them bereft and homeless, addressed, packed and registered after the fashion of a postal packet; their natural flutter of dismay and apprehension, but their patient acceptance of the charge; the five flurried governesses she had had in three years, who had so bored her and whom she had so deeply disconcerted; the remarkable disposition for drawing and daubing that she had shown from the first and that had led them to consent to her haunting of a class in town, that had made her acquainted with the as yet wholly undistinguished young artist, Walter Puddick, who, with a couple of other keen and juvenile adventurers of the brush, “criticised,” all at their ease, according to the queer new licence of the day, and with nobody to criticise them, eighty supposed daughters of gentlemen; the uncontrolled spread of her social connection in London, on the oddest lines, as a proof of this prosecution of her studies; her consequent prolonged absences, her strange explanations and deeper duplicities, and presently her bolder defiances; with her staying altogether, at last, one fine day, under pretext of a visit at Highgate, and writing them at the end of a week, during which they had been without news of her, that her visit was to Mr. Puddick and his “set,” and was likely to be of long duration, as he was “looking after her,” and there were plenty of people in the set to help, and as she, above all, wanted nothing more: nothing more, of course, than her two hundred and seventy a year, the scant remainder of her mother’s fortune that she had come into the use of, under that battered lady’s will, on her eighteenth birthday, and through which her admirers, every member of the set, no doubt, wouldn’t have found her least admirable. Puddick wouldn’t be paying for her, by the blessing of heaven—that, Traffle recognised, would have been ground for anything; the case rather must be the other way round. She was “treating” the set, probably, root and branch—magnificently; so no wonder she was having success and liking it. Didn’t Jane recognise, therefore, how in the light of this fact almost any droll different situation—different from the common and less edifying turn of such affairs—might here prevail? He could imagine even a fantastic delicacy; not on the part of the set at large perhaps, but on that of a member or two.

  What Jane most promptly recognised, she showed him in answer to this, was that, with the tone he had so extraordinarily begun to take on the subject, his choice of terms left her staring. Their ordeal would have to be different indeed from anything she had yet felt it for it to affect her as droll, and Mora’s behaviour to repudiate at every point and in some scarce conceivable way its present appearance for it to strike her either as delicate or as a possible cause of delicacy. In fact she could have but her own way—Mora was a monster.

  “Well,” he laughed—quite brazen about it now—”if she is it’s because she has paid for it! Why the deuce did her stars, unless to make her worship gods entirely other than Jane Traffle’s, rig her out with a name that puts such a premium on adventures? ‘Mora Montravers’—it paints the whole career for you. She is, one does feel, her name; but how couldn’t she be? She’d dishonour it and its grand air if she weren’t.”

  “Then by that reasoning you admit,” Mrs. Traffle returned with more of an argumentative pounce than she had perhaps ever achieved in her life, “that she is misconducting herself.”

  It pulled him up but ten seconds. “It isn
’t, love, that she’s misconducting herself—it’s that she’s conducting, positively, and by her own lights doubtless quite responsibly, Miss Montravers through the preappointed circle of that young lady’s experience.” Jane turned on this a desolate back; but he only went on. “It would have been better for us perhaps if she could have been a Traffle—but, failing that, I think I should, on the ground that sinning at all one should sin boldly, have elected for Montravers outright. That does the thing—it gives the unmistakable note. And if ‘Montravers’ made it probable ‘Mora’—don’t you see, dearest?—made it sure. Would you wish her to change to Puddick?” This brought her round again, but as the affirmative hadn’t quite leaped to her lips he found time to continue. “Unless indeed they can make some arrangement by which he takes her name. Perhaps we can work it that way!”