by Henry James
“I don’t contend for anything with you, sir,” said Walter Puddick.
“Ah, but you do want to be let alone,” his friend insisted.
The young man turned graver in proportion to this urbanity. “Mrs. Traffle has closed my mouth.”
“By laying on you, you mean, the absolute obligation to report her offer—?” That lady’s representative continued to smile, but then it was that he yet began to see where fine freedom of thought—translated into act at least—would rather grotesquely lodge him. He hung fire, none the less, but for an instant; even though not quite saying what he had been on the point of. “I should like to feel at liberty to put it to you that if, in your place, I felt that a statement of Mrs. Traffle’s overture would probably, or even possibly, dish me, I’m not sure I should make a scruple of holding my tongue about it. But of course I see that I can’t very well go so far without looking to you as if my motive might be mixed. You might naturally say that I can’t want my wife’s money to go out of the house.”
Puddick had an undissimulated pause for the renewed effort to do justice to so much elegant arrangement of the stiff truth of his case; but his intelligence apparently operated, and even to the extent of showing him that his companion really meant, more and more, as well—as well, that is, to him—as it was humanly conceivable that Mrs. Traffle’s husband could mean. “Your difficulty’s different from mine, and from the appearance I incur in carrying Miss Montravers her aunt’s message as a clear necessity and at any risk.”
“You mean that your being conscientious about it may look as if the risk you care least to face is that of not with a little patience coming in yourself for the money?” After which, with a glitter fairly sublime in its profession of his detachment from any stupid course: “You can be sure, you know, that I’d be sure–-!”
“Sure I’m not a pig?” the young man asked in a manner that made Traffle feel quite possessed at last of his confidence.
“Even if you keep quiet I shall know you’re not, and shall believe also you won’t have thought me one.” To which, in the exaltation produced by this, he next added: “Isn’t she, with it all—with all she has done for you I mean—splendidly fond of you?”
The question proved, however, but one of those that seemed condemned to cast, by their action, a chill; which was expressed, on the young man’s part, with a certain respectful dryness. “How do you know, sir, what Miss Montravers has done for me?”
Sidney Traffle felt himself enjoy, on this, a choice of replies—one of which indeed would have sprung easiest from his lips. “Oh now, come!” seemed for the instant what he would have liked most to hear himself say; but he renounced the pleasure—even though making up for it a little by his actual first choice. “Don’t I know at least that she left the honourable shelter of this house for you?”
Walter Puddick had a wait “I never asked it of her.”
“You didn’t seduce her, no—and even her aunt doesn’t accuse you of it. But that she should have given up—well, what she has given up, moderately as you may estimate it,” Traffle again smiled—”surely has something to say about her case?”
“What has more to say than anything else,” Puddick promptly returned to this, “is that she’s the very cleverest and most original and most endowed, and in every way most wonderful, person I’ve known in all my life.”
His entertainer fairly glowed, for response, with the light of it. “Thank you then!” Traffle thus radiated.
“‘Thank you for nothing!’” cried the other with a short laugh and set into motion down the steps and the garden walk by this final attestation of the essential impenetrability even of an acutest young artist’s vie intime with a character sketchable in such terms.
Traffle accompanied him to the gate, but wondering, as they went, if it was quite inevitable one should come back to feeling, as the result of every sort of brush with people who were really living, like so very small a boy. No, no, one must stretch to one’s tallest again. It restored one’s stature a little then that one didn’t now mind that this demonstration would prove to Jane, should she be waiting in the drawing-room and watching for one’s return, that one had detained their guest for so much privacy in the porch. “Well, take care what you do!” Traffle bravely brought out for good-bye.
“Oh, I shall tell her,” Puddick replied under the effect of his renewed pat of the back; and even, standing there an instant, had a further indulgence. “She loathes my unfortunate name of course; but she’s such an incalculable creature that my information possibly may fetch her.”
There was a final suddenness of candour in it that made Traffle gape. “Oh, our names, and hers—! But is her loathing of yours then all that’s the matter?”
Walter Puddick stood some seconds; he might, in pursuance of what had just passed, have been going to say things. But he had decided again the next moment for the fewest possible. “No!” he tossed back as he walked off.
V
“We seem to have got so beautifully used to it,” Traflle remarked more than a month later to Jane—”we seem to have lived into it and through it so, and to have suffered and surmounted the worst, that, upon my word, I scarce see what’s the matter now, or what, that’s so very dreadful, it’s doing or has done for us. We haven’t the interest of her, no,” he had gone on, slowly pacing and revolving things according to his wont, while the sharer of his life, tea being over and the service removed, reclined on a sofa, perfectly still and with her eyes rigidly closed; “we’ve lost that, and I agree that it was great—I mean the interest of the number of ideas the situation presented us with. That has dropped—by our own act, evidently; we must have simply settled the case, a month ago, in such a way as that we shall have no more acquaintance with it; by which I mean no more of the fun of it. I, for one, confess I miss the fun—put it only at the fun of our having had to wriggle so with shame, or, call it if you like, to live so under arms, against prying questions and the too easy exposure of our false explanations; which only proves, however, that, as I say, the worst that has happened to us appears to be that we’re going to find life tame again—as tame as it was before ever Mora came into it so immensely to enrich and agitate it. She has gone out of it, obviously, to leave it flat and forlorn—tasteless after having had for so many months the highest flavour. If, by her not thanking you even though she declines, by her not acknowledging in any way your—as I admit—altogether munificent offer, it seems indicated that we shall hold her to have definitely enrolled herself in the deplorable ‘flaunting’ class, we must at least recognise that she doesn’t flaunt at us, at whomever else she may; and that she has in short cut us as neatly and effectively as, in the event of her conclusive, her supreme contumacy, we could have aspired to cut her. Never was a scandal, therefore, less scandalous—more naturally a disappointment, that is, to our good friends, whose resentment of this holy calm, this absence of any echo of any convulsion, of any sensation of any kind to be picked up, strikes me as ushering in the only form of ostracism our dissimulated taint, our connection with lurid facts that might have gone on making us rather eminently worth while, will have earned for us. But aren’t custom and use breaking us in to the sense even of that anticlimax, and preparing for us future years of wistful, rueful, regretful thought of the time when everything was nice and dreadful?”
Mrs. Traffle’s posture was now, more and more, certainly, this recumbent sightless stillness; which she appeared to have resorted to at first—after the launching, that is, of her ultimatum to Mr. Puddick—as a sign of the intensity with which she awaited results. There had been no results, alas, there were none from week to week; never was the strain of suspense less gratefully crowned; with the drawback, moreover, that they could settle to nothing—not even to the alternative, that of the cold consciousness of slighted magnanimity, in which Jane had assumed beforehand that she should find her last support. Her husband circled about her couch, with his eternal dim whistle, at a discreet distance—as certain as i
f he turned to catch her in the act that when his back was presented in thoughtful retreat her tightened eyes opened to rest on it with peculiar sharpness. She waited for the proof that she had intervened to advantage—the advantage of Mora’s social future—and she had to put up with Sidney’s watching her wait. So he, on his side, lived under her tacit criticism of that attention; and had they asked themselves, the comfortless pair—as it’s in fact scarce conceivable that they didn’t—what it would practically have cost them to receive their niece without questions, they might well have judged their present ordeal much the dearer. When Sidney had felt his wife glare at him undetectedly for a fortnight he knew at least what it meant, and if she had signified how much he might have to pay for it should he presume again to see Mora alone, she was now, in their community of a quietude that had fairly soured on their hands, getting ready to quarrel with him for his poverty of imagination about that menace. Absolutely, the conviction grew for him, she would have liked him better to do something, even something inconsiderate of her to the point of rudeness, than simply parade there in the deference that left her to languish. The fault of this conspicuous propriety, which gave on her nerves, was that it did nothing to refresh their decidedly rather starved sense of their case; so that Traffle was frankly merciless—frankly, that is, for himself—in his application of her warning. There was nothing he would indeed have liked better than to call on Mora—quite, as who should say, in the friendly way to which her own last visit at Wimbledon had set so bright an example. At the same time, though he revelled in his acute reflection as to the partner of his home—”I’ve only to go, and then come back with some ‘new fact,’ à la Dreyfus, in order to make her sit up in a false flare that will break our insufferable spell”—he was yet determined that the flare, certain to take place sooner or later, should precede his act; so large a licence might he then obviously build upon it. His excursions to town were on occasion, even, in truth, not other than perverse—determined, that is, he was well aware, by their calculated effect on Jane, who could imagine in his absence, each time, that he might be “following something up” (an expression that had in fact once slipped from her), might be having the gumption, in other words, to glean a few straws for their nakeder nest; imagine it, yes, only to feel herself fall back again on the mere thorns of consistency.
It wasn’t, nevertheless, that he took all his exercise to this supersubtle tune; the state of his own nerves treated him at moments to larger and looser exactions; which is why, though poor Jane’s sofa still remained his centre of radiation, the span of his unrest sometimes embraced half London. He had never been on such fidgety terms with his club, which he could neither not resort to, from his suburb, with an unnatural frequency, nor make, in the event, any coherent use of; so that his suspicion of his not remarkably carrying it off there was confirmed to him, disconcertingly, one morning when his dash townward had been particularly wild, by the free address of a fellow-member prone always to overdoing fellowship and who had doubtless for some time amusedly watched his vague gyrations—”I say, Traff, old man, what in the world, this time, have you got ‘on’?” It had never been anything but easy to answer the ass, and was easier than ever now—“‘On’? You don’t suppose I dress, do you, to come to meet you?“—yet the effect of the nasty little mirror of his unsatisfied state so flashed before him was to make him afresh wander wide, if wide half the stretch of Trafalgar Square could be called. He turned into the National Gallery, where the great masters were tantalising more by their indifference than by any offer of company, and where he could take up again his personal tradition of a lawless range. One couldn’t be a raffiné at Wimbledon—no, not with any comfort; but he quite liked to think how he had never been anything less in the great museum, distinguished as he thus was from those who gaped impartially and did the place by schools. His sympathies were special and far-scattered, just as the places of pilgrimage he most fondly reverted to were corners unnoted and cold, where the idol in the numbered shrine sat apart to await him.
So he found himself at the end of five minutes in one of the smaller, one of the Dutch rooms—in a temple bare in very fact at that moment save for just one other of the faithful. This was a young person—visibly young, from the threshold of the place, in spite of the back presented for an instant while a small picture before which she had stopped continued to hold her; but who turned at sound of his entering footfall, and who then again, as by an alertness in this movement, engaged his eyes. With which it was remarkably given to Traffle to feel himself recognise even almost to immediate, to artless extravagance of display, two things; the first that his fellow-votary in the unprofaned place and at the odd morning hour was none other than their invincible Mora, surprised, by this extraordinary fluke, in her invincibility, and the second (oh his certainty of that!) that she was expecting to be joined there by no such pale fellow-adventurer as her whilom uncle. It amazed him, as it also annoyed him, on the spot, that his heart, for thirty seconds, should be standing almost still; but he wasn’t to be able afterward to blink it that he had at once quite gone to pieces, any slight subsequent success in recovering himself to the contrary notwithstanding. Their happening thus to meet was obviously a wonder—it made him feel unprepared; but what especially did the business for him, he subsequently reflected, was again the renewed degree, and for that matter the developed kind, of importance that the girl’s beauty gave her. Dear Jane, at home, as he knew—and as Mora herself probably, for that matter, did—was sunk in the conviction that she was leading a life; but whatever she was doing it was clearly the particular thing she might best be occupied with. How could anything be better for a lovely creature than thus to grow from month to month in loveliness?—so that she was able to stand there before him with no more felt inconvenience than the sense of the mere tribute of his eyes could promptly rectify.
That ministered positively to his weakness—the justice he did on the spot to the rare shade of human felicity, human impunity, human sublimity, call it what one would, surely dwelling in such a consciousness. How could a girl have to think long; have to think more than three-quarters of a second, under any stress whatever, of anything in the world but that her presence was an absolute incomparable value? The prodigious thing, too, was that it had had in the past, and the comparatively recent past that one easily recalled, to content itself with counting twenty times less: a proof precisely that any conditions so determined could only as a matter of course have been odious and, at the last, outrageous to her. Goodness knew with what glare of graceless inaction this rush of recognitions was accompanied in poor Traffle; who was later on to ask himself whether he had showed to less advantage in the freshness of his commotion or in the promptly enough subsequent rage of his coolness. The commotion, in any case, had doubtless appeared more to paralyse than to agitate him, since Mora had had time to come nearer while he showed for helplessly planted. He hadn’t even at the moment been proud of his presence of mind, but it was as they afterward haunted his ear that the echoes of what he at first found to say were most odious to him. “I’m glad to take your being here for a sign you’ve not lost your interest in Art”—that might have passed if he hadn’t so almost feverishly floundered on. “I hope you keep up your painting—with such a position as you must be in for serious work; I always thought, you know, that you’d do something if you’d stick to it. In fact we quite miss your not bringing us something to admire as you sometimes did; we haven’t, you see, much of an art-atmosphere now. I’m glad you’re fond of the Dutch—that little Metsu over there that I think you were looking at is a pet thing of my own; and, if my living to do something myself hadn’t been the most idiotic of dreams, something in his line—though of course a thousand miles behind him—was what I should have tried to go in for. You see at any rate where—missing as I say our art-atmosphere—I have to come to find one. Not such a bad place certainly”—so he had hysterically gabbled; “especially at this quiet hour—as I see you yourself quite feel. I just tur
ned in—though it does discourage! I hope, however, it hasn’t that effect on you,” he knew himself to grin with the last awkwardness; making it worse the next instant by the gay insinuation: “I’m bound to say it isn’t how you look—discouraged!”
It reeked for him with reference even while he said it—for the truth was but too intensely, too insidiously, somehow, that her confidence implied, that it in fact bravely betrayed, grounds. He was to appreciate this wild waver, in retrospect, as positive dizziness in a narrow pass—the abyss being naturally on either side; that abyss of the facts of the girl’s existence which he must thus have seemed to rush into, a smirking, a disgusting tribute to them through his excessive wish to show how clear he kept of them. The terrible, the fatal truth was that she made everything too difficult—or that this, at any rate, was how she enjoyed the exquisite privilege of affecting him. She watched him, she saw him splash to keep from sinking, with a pitiless cold sweet irony; she gave him rope as a syren on a headland might have been amused at some bather beyond his depth and unable to swim. It was all the fault—his want of ease was—of the real extravagance of his idea of not letting her spy even the tip of the tail of any “freedom” with her; thanks to which fatality she had indeed the game in her own hands. She exhaled a distinction—it glanced out of every shade of selection, every turn of expression, in her dress, though she had always, for that matter, had the genius of felicity there—which was practically the “new fact” all Wimbledon had been awaiting; and yet so perverse was their relation that to mark at all any special consideration for it was to appear just to make the allusion he was most forbidding himself. It was hard, his troubled consciousness told him, to be able neither to overlook her new facts without brutality nor to recognise them without impertinence; and he was frankly at the end of his resources by the time he ceased beating the air. Then it was, yes, then it was perfectly, as if she had patiently let him show her each of his ways of making a fool of himself; when she still said nothing a moment—and yet still managed to keep him ridiculous—as if for certainty on that head. It was true that when she at last spoke she swept everything away.