by Henry James
“It’s a great chance my meeting you—for what you so kindly think of me.”
She brought that out as if he had been uttering mere vain sounds—to which she preferred the comparative seriousness of the human, or at least of the mature, state, and her unexpectedness it was that thus a little stiffened him up. “What I think of you? How do you know what I think?”
She dimly and charmingly smiled at him, for it wasn’t really that she was harsh. She was but infinitely remote—the syren on her headland dazzlingly in view, yet communicating, precisely, over such an abyss. “Because it’s so much more, you mean, than you know yourself? If you don’t know yourself, if you know as little as, I confess, you strike me as doing,” she, however, at once went on, “I’m more sorry for you than anything else; even though at the best, I dare say, it must seem odd to you to hear me so patronising.” It was borne in upon him thus that she would now make no difference, to his honour—to that of his so much more emancipated spirit at least—between her aunt and her uncle; so much should the poor uncle enjoy for his pains. He should stand or fall with fatal Jane—for at this point he was already sure Jane had been fatal; it was in fact with fatal Jane tied as a millstone round his neck that he at present knew himself sinking. “You try to make grabs at some idea, but the simplest never occurs to you.”
“What do you call the simplest, Mora?” he at this heard himself whine.
“Why, my being simply a good girl. You gape at it”—he was trying exactly not to—”as if it passed your belief; but it’s really all the while, to my own sense, what has been the matter with me. I mean, you see, a good creature—wanting to live at peace. Everything, however, occurs to you but that—and in spite of my trying to show you. You never understood,” she said with her sad, quiet lucidity, “what I came to see you for two months ago.” He was on the point of breaking in to declare that the reach of his intelligence at the juncture of which she spoke had been quite beyond expression; but he checked himself in time, as it would strike her but as a vague weak effort to make exactly the distinction that she held cheap. No, he wouldn’t give Jane away now—he’d suffer anything instead; the taste of what he should have to suffer was already there on his lips: it came over him, to the strangest effect of desolation, of desolation made certain, that they should have lost Mora for ever, and that this present scant passage must count for them as her form of rupture. Jane had treated her the other day—treated her, that is, through Walter Pud-dick, who would have been, when all was said, a faithful agent—to their form, their form save on the condition attached, much too stiff a one, no doubt; so that he was actually having the extraordinary girl’s answer. What they thought of her was that she was Walter Puddick’s mistress—the only difference between them being that whereas her aunt fixed the character upon her as by the act of tying a neatly inscribed luggage-tag to a bandbox, he himself flourished about with his tag in his hand and a portentous grin for what he could do with it if he would. She brushed aside alike, however, vulgar label and bewildered formula; she but took Jane’s message as involving an insult, and if she treated him, as a participant, with any shade of humanity, it was indeed that she was the good creature for whom she had a moment ago claimed credit. Even under the sense of so supreme a pang poor Traffle could value his actual, his living, his wonderful impression, rarest treasure of sense, as what the whole history would most have left with him. It was all he should have of her in the future—the mere memory of these dreadful minutes in so noble a place, minutes that were shining easy grace on her part and helpless humiliation on his; wherefore, tragically but instinctively, he gathered in, as for preservation, every grain of the experience. That was it; they had given her, without intending it, still wider wings of freedom; the clue, the excuse, the pretext, whatever she might call it, for shaking off any bond that had still incommoded her. She was spreading her wings—that was what he saw—as if she hovered, rising and rising, like an angel in a vision; it was the picture that he might, if he chose, or mightn’t, make Jane, on his return, sit up to. Truths, these, that for our interest in him, or for our grasp of them, press on us in succession, but that within his breast were quick and simultaneous; so that it was virtually without a wait he heard her go on. “Do try—that’s really all I want to say—to keep hold of my husband.”
“Your husband—?” He did gape.
She had the oddest charming surprise—her nearest approach to familiarity. “Walter Puddick. Don’t you know I’m married?” And then as for the life of him he still couldn’t but stare: “Hasn’t he told you?”
“Told us? Why, we haven’t seen him–-“
“Since the day you so put the case to him? Oh! I should have supposed—!” She would have supposed, obviously, that he might in some way have communicated the fact; but she clearly hadn’t so much as assured herself of it. “Then there exactly he is—he doesn’t seem, poor dear, to know what to do.” And she had on his behalf, apparently, a moment of beautiful anxious, yet at the same time detached and all momentary thought. “That’s just then what I mean.”
“My dear child,” Traffle gasped, “what on earth do you mean?”
“Well”—and she dropped for an instant comparatively to within his reach—”that it’s where you can come in. Where in fact, as I say, I quite wish you would!”
All his wondering attention for a moment hung upon her. “Do you ask me, Mora, to do something for you?”
“Yes”—and it was as if no “good creature” had ever been so beautiful, nor any beautiful creature ever so good—”to make him your care. To see that he does get it.”
“Get it?” Traffle blankly echoed.
“Why, what you promised him. My aunt’s money.”
He felt his countenance an exhibition. “She promised it, Mora, to you.”
“If I married him, yes—because I wasn’t fit for her to speak to till I should. But if I’m now proudly Mrs. Puddick–-!”
He had already, however, as with an immense revulsion, a long jump, taken her up: “You are, you are—?” He gaped at the difference it made and in which then, immensely, they seemed to recover her.
“Before all men—and the Registrar.”
“The Registrar?” he again echoed; so that, with another turn of her humour, it made her lift her eyebrows at him.
“You mean it doesn’t hold if that’s the way–-?”
“It holds, Mora, I suppose, any way—that makes a real marriage. It is,” he hopefully smiled, “real?”
“Could anything be more real,” she asked, “than to have become such a thing?”
“Walter Puddick’s wife?” He kept his eyes on her pleadingly. “Surely, Mora, it’s a good thing—clever and charming as he is.” Now that Jane had succeeded his instinct, of a sudden, was to back her up.
Mrs. Puddick’s face—and the fact was it was strange, in the light of her actual aspect, to think of her and name her so—showed, however, as ready a disposition. “If he’s as much as that then why were you so shocked by my relations with him?”
He panted—he cast about. “Why, we didn’t doubt of his distinction—of what it was at any rate likely to become.”
“You only doubted of mine?” she asked with her harder look.
He threw up helpless arms, he dropped them while he gazed at her. “It doesn’t seem to me possible any one can ever have questioned your gift for doing things in your own way. And if you’re now married,” he added with his return of tentative presumption and his strained smile, “your own way opens out for you, doesn’t it? as never yet.”
Her eyes, on this, held him a moment, and he couldn’t have said now what was in them. “I think it does. I’m seeing,” she said—”I shall see. Only”—she hesitated but for an instant—”for that it’s necessary you shall look after him.”
They stood there face to face on it—during a pause that, lighted by her radiance, gave him time to take from her, somehow, larger and stranger things than either might at all intelligibly or happi
ly have named. “Do you ask it of me?”
“I ask it of you,” said Mrs. Puddick after a wait that affected him as giving his contribution to her enjoyment of that title as part of her reason.
He held out, however—contribution or no contribution—another moment. “Do you beg me very hard?”
Once more she hung fire—but she let him have it. “I beg you very hard.”
It made him turn pale. “Thank you,” he said; and it was as if now he didn’t care what monstrous bargain he passed with her—which was fortunate, for that matter, since, when she next spoke, the quantity struck him as looming large.
“I want to be free.”
“How can you not?” said Sidney Traffle, feeling, to the most extraordinary tune, at one and the same time both sublime and base; and quite vague, as well as indifferent, as to which character prevailed.
“But I don’t want him, you see, to suffer.”
Besides the opportunity that this spread before him, he could have blessed her, could have embraced her, for “you see.” “Well, I promise you he sha’n’t suffer if I can help it.”
“Thank you,” she said in a manner that gave him, if possible, even greater pleasure yet, showing him as it did, after all, what an honest man she thought him. He even at that point had his apprehension of the queer-ness of the engagement that, as an honest man, he was taking—the engagement, since she so “wanted to be free,” to relieve her, so far as he devotedly might, of any care hampering this ideal; but his perception took a tremendous bound as he noticed that their interview had within a moment become exposed to observation. A reflected light in Mora’s face, caught from the quarter behind him, suddenly so advised him and caused him to turn, with the consequence of his seeing a gentleman in the doorway by which he had entered—a gentleman in the act of replacing the hat raised to salute Mrs. Puddick and with an accompanying smile still vivid in a clear, fresh, well-featured face. Everything took for Sidney Traffle a sharper sense from this apparition, and he had, even while the fact of the nature of his young friend’s business there, the keeping of an agreeable appointment in discreet conditions, stood out for him again as in its odd insolence of serenity and success, the consciousness that whatever his young friend was doing, whatever she was “up to,” he was now quite as much in the act of backing her as the gentlemen in the doorway, a slightly mature, but strikingly well-dressed, a pleasantly masterful-looking gentleman, a haunter of the best society, one could be sure, was waiting for him to go. Mora herself, promptly, had that apprehension, and conveyed it to him, the next thing, in words that amounted, with their sweet conclusive look, to a decent dismissal. “Here’s what’s of real importance to me,” she seemed to say; “so, though I count on you, I needn’t keep you longer.” But she took time in fact just to revert. “I’ve asked him to go to you; and he will, I’m sure, he will: by which you’ll have your chance, don’t fear! Good-bye.” She spoke as if this “chance” were what he would now at once be most yearning for; and thus it was that, while he stayed but long enough to let his eyes move again to the new, the impatient and distinctly “smart,” yes, unmistakably, this time, not a bit Bohemian candidate for her attention, and then let them come back to herself as for some grasp of the question of a relation already so developed, there might have hung itself up there the prospect of an infinite future of responsibility about Walter Puddick—if only as a make-weight perhaps to the extinction of everything else. When he had turned his back and begun humbly to shuffle, as it seemed to him, through a succession of shining rooms where the walls bristled with eyes that watched him for mockery, his sense was of having seen the last of Mora as completely as if she had just seated herself in the car of a rising balloon that would never descend again to earth.
VI
It was before that aspect of the matter, at any rate, that Sidney Traffle made a retreat which he would have had to regard as the most abject act of his life hadn’t he just savingly been able to regard it as the most lucid. The aftertaste of that quality of an intelligence in it sharp even to soreness was to remain with him, intensely, for hours—to the point in fact (which says all) of rendering necessary a thoughtful return to his club rather than a direct invocation of the society of his wife. He ceased, for the rest of the day there, to thresh about; that phase, sensibly, was over for him; he dropped into a deep chair, really exhausted, quite spent, and in this posture yielded to reflections too grave for accessory fidgets. They were so grave, or were at least so interesting, that it was long since he had been for so many hours without thinking of Jane—of whom he didn’t even dream after he had at last inevitably, reacting from weeks of tension that were somehow ended for ever, welcomed a deep foodless doze which held him till it was time to order tea. He woke to partake, still meditatively, of that repast—yet, though late the hour and quite exceptional the length of his absence, with his domestic wantonness now all gone and no charm in the thought of how Jane would be worried. He probably shouldn’t be wanton, it struck him, ever again in his life; that tap had run dry—had suffered an immense, a conclusive diversion from the particular application of its flow to Jane.
This truth indeed, I must add, proved of minor relevance on his standing before that lady, in the Wimbledon drawing-room, considerably after six o’clock had struck, and feeling himself in presence of revelations prepared not only to match, but absolutely to ignore and override, his own. He hadn’t put it to himself that if the pleasure of stretching her on the rack appeared suddenly to have dropped for him this was because “it”—by which he would have meant everything else—was too serious; but had he done so he would at once have indulged in the amendment that he himself certainly was. His wife had in any case risen from the rack, the “bed of steel” that, in the form of her habitual, her eternal, her plaintive, aggressive sofa, had positively a pushed-back and relegated air—an air to the meaning of which a tea-service that fairly seemed to sprawl and that even at such an hour still almost unprecedentedly lingered, added the very accent of recent agitations. He hadn’t been able not to consult himself a little as to the strength of the dose, or as to the protraction of the series of doses, in which he should administer the squeezed fruit, the expressed and tonic liquor, of his own adventure; but the atmosphere surrounding Jane herself was one in which he felt questions of that order immediately drop. The atmosphere surrounding Jane had been, in fine, on no occasion that he could recall, so perceptibly thick, so abruptly rich, so charged with strange aromas; he could really almost have fancied himself snuff up from it a certain strength of transient tobacco, the trace of a lately permitted cigarette or two at the best—rarest of accidents and strangest of discords in that harmonious whole. Had she, gracious goodness, been smoking with somebody?—a possibility not much less lurid than this conceived extravagance of the tolerated, the independent pipe.
Yes, absolutely, she eyed him through a ranker medium than had ever prevailed between them by any perversity of his; eyed him quite as if prepared, in regular tit-for-tat fashion, to stretch him, for a change, on his back, to let him cool his heels in that posture while she sauntered in view pointedly enough for him to tell her how he liked it. Something had happened to her in his absence that made her quite indifferent, in other words, to what might have happened to any one ‘else at all; and so little had he to fear asperity on the score of his selfish day off that she didn’t even see the advantage to her, for exasperation of his curiosity, of holding him at such preliminary arm’s-length as would be represented by a specious “scene.” She would have liked him, he easily recognized, to burst with curiosity, or, better still, to grovel with it, before she should so much as throw him a sop; but just this artless pride in her it was that, by the very candour of its extravagance, presently helped him to a keen induction. He had only to ask himself what could have occurred that would most of all things conduce to puffing her up with triumph, and then to reflect that, thoroughly to fill that bill, as who should say, she must have had a contrite call from Mora. He knew in
deed, consummately, how superior a resource to morbid contrition that young woman was actually cultivating; in accordance with which the next broadest base for her exclusive command of the situation—and she clearly claimed nothing less—would be the fact that Walter Puddick had been with her and that she had had him (and to the tune of odd revelry withal to which their disordered and unremoved cups glaringly testified) all to herself. Such an interview with him as had so uplifted her that she distractedly had failed to ring for the parlour-maid, with six o’clock ebbing in strides—this did tell a story, Traffle ruefully recognised, with which it might well verily yet be given her to work on him. He was promptly to feel, none the less, how he carried the war across her border, poor superficial thing, when he decided on the direct dash that showed her she had still to count with him.