by Henry James
“To me her things are awful. They’re the newest of the new.”
“Ah, but the old forms!”
“Those are the most blatant. I mean the swaggering reproductions.”
“Oh but,” she pleaded, “we can’t all be really old.”
“No, we can’t, Cornelia. But you can—!” said White-Mason with the frankest appreciation.
She looked up at him from where she sat as he could imagine her looking up at the curate at Bognor. “Thank you, sir! If that’s all you want–-!”
“It is” he said, “all I want—or almost.”
“Then no wonder such a creature as that,” she lightly moralised, “won’t suit you!”
He bent upon her, for all the weight of his question, his smoothest stare. “You hold she certainly won’t suit me?”
“Why, what can I tell about it? Haven’t you by this time found out?”
“No, but I think I’m finding.” With which he began again to explore.
Miss Rasch immensely wondered. “You mean you don’t expect to come to an understanding with her?” And then as even to this straight challenge he made at first no answer: “Do you mean you give it up?”
He waited some instants more, but not meeting her eyes—only looking again about the room. “What do you think of my chance?”
“Oh,” his companion cried, “what has what I think to do with it? How can I think anything but that she must like you?”
“Yes—of course. But how much?”
“Then don’t you really know?” Cornelia asked.
He kept up his walk, oddly preoccupied and still not looking at her. “Do you, my dear?”
She waited a little. “If you haven’t really put it to her I don’t suppose she knows.”
This at last arrested him again. “My dear Cornelia, she doesn’t know–-!”
He had paused as for the desperate tone, or at least the large emphasis of it, so that she took him up. “The more reason then to help her to find it out.”
“I mean,” he explained, “that she doesn’t know anything.”
“Anything?”
“Anything else, I mean—even if she does know that.”
Cornelia considered of it. “But what else need she—in particular—know? Isn’t that the principal thing?”
“Well”—and he resumed his circuit—”she doesn’t know anything that we know. But nothing,” he re-emphasised—”nothing whatever!”
“Well, can’t she do without that?”
“Evidently she can—and evidently she does, beautifully. But the question is whether I can!”
He had paused once more with his point—but she glared, poor Cornelia, with her wonder. “Surely if you know for yourself–-!”
“Ah, it doesn’t seem enough for me to know for myself! One wants a woman,” he argued—but still, in his prolonged tour, quite without his scowl—”to know for one, to know with one. That’s what you do now,” he candidly put to her.
It made her again gape. “Do you mean you want to marry me?”
He was so full of what he did mean, however, that he failed even to notice it. “She doesn’t in the least know, for instance, how old I am.”
“That’s because you’re so young!”
“Ah, there you are!”—and he turned off afresh and as if almost in disgust. It left her visibly perplexed—though even the perplexed Cornelia was still the exceedingly pointed; but he had come to her aid after another turn. “Remember, please, that I’m pretty well as old as you.”
She had all her point at least, while she bridled and blinked, for this. “You’re exactly a year and ten months older.”
It checked him there for delight. “You remember my birthday?”
She twinkled indeed like some far-off light of home. “I remember every one’s. It’s a little way I’ve always had—and that I’ve never lost.”
He looked at her accomplishment, across the room, as at some striking, some charming phenomenon. “Well, that’s the sort of thing I want!” All the ripe candour of his eyes confirmed it.
What could she do therefore, she seemed to ask him, but repeat her question of a moment before?—which indeed presently she made up her mind to. “Do you want to marry me?”
It had this time better success—if the term may be felt in any degree to apply. All his candour, or more of it at least, was in his slow, mild, kind, considering head-shake. “No, Cornelia—not to marry you.”
His discrimination was a wonder; but since she was clearly treating him now as if everything about him was, so she could as exquisitely meet it. “Not at least,” she convulsively smiled, “until you’ve honourably tried Mrs. Worthingham. Don’t you really mean to?” she gallantly insisted.
He waited again a little; then he brought out: “I’ll tell you presently.” He came back, and as by still another mere glance over the room, to what seemed to him so much nearer. “That table was old Twelfth-Street?”
“Everything here was.”
“Oh, the pure blessings! With you, ah, with you, I haven’t to wear a green shade.” And he had retained meanwhile his small photograph, which he again showed himself. “Didn’t we talk of Mary Cardew?”
“Why, do you remember it?” She marvelled to extravagance.
“You make me. You connect me with it. You connect it with we.” He liked to display to her this excellent use she thus had, the service she rendered. “There are so many connections—there will be so many. I feel how, with you, they must all come up again for me: in fact you’re bringing them out already, just while I look at you, as fast as ever you can. The fact that you knew every one—!” he went on; yet as if there were more in that too than he could quite trust himself about.
“Yes, I knew every one,” said Cornelia Rasch; but this time with perfect simplicity. “I knew, I imagine, more than you do—or more than you did.”
It kept him there, it made him wonder with his eyes on her. “Things about them—our people?”
“Our people. Ours only now.”
Ah, such an interest as he felt in this—taking from her while, so far from scowling, he almost gaped, all it might mean! “Ours indeed—and it’s awfully good they are; or that we’re still here for them! Nobody else is—nobody but you: not a cat!”
“Well, I am a cat!” Cornelia grinned.
“Do you mean you can tell me things—?” It was too beautiful to believe.
“About what really was?” she artfully considered, holding him immensely now. “Well, unless they’ve come to you with time; unless you’ve learned—or found out.”
“Oh,” he reassuringly cried—reassuringly, it most seemed, for himself—”nothing has come to me with time, everything has gone from me. How can I find out now! What creature has an idea–-?”
She threw up her hands with the shrug of old days—the sharp little shrug his sisters used to imitate and that she hadn’t had to go to Europe for. The only thing was that he blessed her for bringing it back.
“Ah, the ideas of people now–-!”
“Yes, their ideas are certainly not about us” But he ruefully faced it. “We’ve none the less, however, to live with them.”
“With their ideas—?” Cornelia questioned.
“With them—these modern wonders; such as they are!” Then he went on: “It must have been to help me you’ve come back.”
She said nothing for an instant about that, only nodding instead at his photograph. “What has become of yours? I mean of her.”
This time it made him turn pale. “You remember I have one?”
She kept her eyes on him. “In a ‘pork-pie’ hat, with her hair in a long net. That was so ‘smart’ then; especially with one’s skirt looped up, over one’s hooped magenta petticoat, in little festoons, and a row of very big onyx beads over one’s braided velveteen sack—braided quite plain and very broad, don’t you know?”
He smiled for her extraordinary possession of these things—she was as prompt as if she had had them bef
ore her. “Oh, rather—’don’t I know?’ You wore brown velveteen, and, on those remarkably small hands, funny gauntlets—like mine.”
“Oh, do you remember? But like yours?” she wondered.
“I mean like hers in my photograph.” But he came back to the present picture. “This is better, however, for really showing her lovely head.”
“Mary’s head was a perfection!” Cornelia testified.
“Yes—it was better than her heart.”
“Ah, don’t say that!” she pleaded. “You weren’t fair.”
“Don’t you think I was fair?” It interested him immensely—and the more that he indeed mightn’t have been; which he seemed somehow almost to hope.
“She didn’t think so—to the very end.”
“She didn’t?”—ah the right things Cornelia said to him! But before she could answer he was studying again closely the small faded face. “No, she doesn’t, she doesn’t. Oh, her charming sad eyes and the way they say that, across the years, straight into mine! But I don’t know, I don’t know!” White-Mason quite comfortably sighed.
His companion appeared to appreciate this effect. “That’s just the way you used to flirt with her, poor thing. Wouldn’t you like to have it?” she asked.
“This—for my very own?” He looked up delighted. “I really may?”
“Well, if you’ll give me yours. We’ll exchange.”
“That’s a charming idea. We’ll exchange. But you must come and get it at my rooms—where you’ll see my things.”
For a little she made no answer—as if for some feeling. Then she said: “You asked me just now why I’ve come back.”
He stared as for the connection; after which with a smile: “Not to do that–-?”
She waited briefly again, but with a queer little look. “I can do those things now; and—yes!—that’s in a manner why. I came,” she then said, “because I knew of a sudden one day—knew as never before—that I was old.”
“I see. I see.” He quite understood—she had notes that so struck him. “And how did you like it?”
She hesitated—she decided. “Well, if I liked it, it was on the principle perhaps on which some people like high game!”
“High game—that’s good!” he laughed. “Ah, my dear, we’re ‘high’!”
She shook her head. “No, not you—yet. I at any rate didn’t want any more adventures,” Cornelia said.
He showed their small relic again with assurance. “You wanted us. Then here we are. Oh how we can talk!—with all those things you know! You are an invention. And you’ll see there are things J know. I shall turn up here—well, daily.”
She took it in, but only after a moment answered. “There was something you said just now you’d tell me. Don’t you mean to try–-?”
“Mrs. Worthingham?” He drew from within his coat his pocket-book and carefully found a place in it for Mary Cardew’s carte-de-visite, folding it together with deliberation over which he put it back. Finally he spoke. “No—I’ve decided. I can’t—I don’t want to.”
Cornelia marvelled—or looked as if she did. “Not for all she has?”
“Yes—I know all she has. But I also know all she hasn’t. And, as I told you, she herself doesn’t—hasn’t a glimmer of a suspicion of it; and never will have.”
Cornelia magnanimously thought “No—but she knows other things.”
He shook his head as at the portentous heap of them. “Too many—too many. And other indeed—so other! Do you know,” he went on, “that it’s as if you—by turning up for me—had brought that home to me?”
“‘For you,’” she candidly considered. “But what—since you can’t marry me!—can you do with me?”
Well, he seemed to have it all. “Everything. I can live with you—just this way.” To illustrate which he dropped into the other chair by her fire; where, leaning back, he gazed at the flame. “I can’t give you up. It’s very curious. It has come over me as it did over you when you renounced Bognor. That’s it—I know it at last, and I see one can like it. I’m ‘high.’ You needn’t deny it. That’s my taste. I’m old.” And in spite of the considerable glow there of her little household altar he said it without the scowl.
THE BENCH OF DESOLATION
I
SHE had practically, he believed, conveyed the intimation, the horrid, brutal, vulgar menace, in the course of their last dreadful conversation, when, for whatever was left him of pluck or confidence—confidence in what he would fain have called a little more aggressively the strength of his position—he had judged best not to take it up. But this time there was no question of not understanding, or of pretending he didn’t; the ugly, the awful words, ruthlessly formed by her lips, were like the fingers of a hand that she might have thrust into her pocket for extraction of the monstrous object that would serve best for—what should he call it?—a gage of battle.
“If I haven’t a very different answer from you within the next three days I shall put the matter into the hands of my solicitor, whom it may interest you to know I’ve already seen. I shall bring an action for ‘breach’ against you, Herbert Dodd, as sure as my name’s Kate Cookham.”
There it was, straight and strong—yet he felt he could say for himself, when once it had come, or even, already, just as it was coming, that it turned on, as if she had moved an electric switch, the very brightest light of his own very reasons. There she was, in all the grossness of her native indelicacy, in all her essential excess of will and destitution of scruple; and it was the woman capable of that ignoble threat who, his sharper sense of her quality having become so quite deterrent, was now making for him a crime of it that he shouldn’t wish to tie himself to her for life. The vivid, lurid thing was the reality, all unmistakable, of her purpose; she had thought her case well out; had measured its odious, specious presentability; had taken, he might be sure, the very best advice obtainable at Properley, where there was always a first-rate promptitude of everything fourth-rate; it was disgustingly certain, in short, that she’d proceed. She was sharp and adroit, moreover—distinctly in certain ways a master-hand; how otherwise, with her so limited mere attractiveness, should she have entangled him? He couldn’t shut his eyes to the very probable truth that if she should try it she’d pull it off. She knew she would—precisely; and her assurance was thus the very proof of her cruelty. That she had pretended she loved him was comparatively nothing; other women had pretended it, and other women too had really done it; but that she had pretended he could possibly have been right and safe and blest in loving her, a creature of the kind who could sniff that squalor of the law-court, of claimed damages and brazen lies and published kisses, of love-letters read amid obscene guffaws, as a positive tonic to resentment, as a high incentive to her course—this was what put him so beautifully in the right It was what might signify in a woman all through, he said to himself, the mere imagination of such machinery. Truly what a devilish conception and what an appalling nature!
But there was no doubt, luckily, either, that he could plant his feet the firmer for his now intensified sense of these things. He was to live, it appeared, abominably worried, he was to live consciously rueful, he was to live perhaps even what a scoffing world would call abjectly exposed; but at least he was to live saved. In spite of his clutch of which steadying truth, however, and in spite of his declaring to her, with many other angry protests and pleas, that the line of conduct she announced was worthy of a vindictive barmaid, a lurking fear in him, too deep to counsel mere defiance, made him appear to keep open a little, till he could somehow turn round again, the door of possible composition. He had scoffed at her claim, at her threat, at her thinking she could hustle and bully him—”Such a way, my eye, to call back to life a dead love!”—yet his instinct was ever, prudentially but helplessly, for gaining time, even if time only more wofully to quake, and he gained it now by not absolutely giving for his ultimatum that he wouldn’t think of coming round. He didn’t in the smallest degree mean to come round, b
ut it was characteristic of him that he could for three or four days breathe a little easier by having left her under the impression that he perhaps might. At the same time he couldn’t not have said—what had conduced to bring out, in retort, her own last word, the word on which they had parted—”Do you mean to say you yourself would now be willing to marry and live with a man of whom you could feel, the thing done, that he’d be all the while thinking of you in the light of a hideous coercion?” “Never you mind about my willingness,” Kate had answered; “you’ve known what that has been for the last six months. Leave that to me, my willingness—I’ll take care of it all right; and just see what conclusion you can come to about your own.”