by Henry James
He didn’t take up her charge, as his so compromised “pride” yet in a manner prompted him, that he had enjoyed all the week all those elements of ease about her; the most he achieved for that was to declare, with an ingenuity contributing to float him no small distance further, that of course he had turned up at their old place of tryst, which had been, through the years, the haunt of his solitude and the goal of his walk any Sunday morning that seemed too beautiful for church; but that he hadn’t in the least built on her presence there—since that supposition gave him, she would understand, wouldn’t she? the air, disagreeable to him, of having come in search of her. Her quest of himself, once he had been seated there, would have been another matter—but in short “Of course after all you did come to me, just now, didn’t you?” He felt himself, too, lamely and gracelessly grin, as for the final kick of his honour, in confirmation of the record that he had then yielded but to her humility. Her humility became for him at this hour and to this tune, on the bench of desolation, a quantity more prodigious and even more mysterious than that other guaranteed quantity the finger-tips of his left hand could feel the tap by the action of his right; though what was in especial extraordinary was the manner in which she could keep making him such allowances and yet meet him again, at some turn, as with her residuum for her clever self so great.
“Come to you, Herbert Dodd?” she imperturbably echoed. “I’ve been coming to you for the last ten years!”
There had been for him just before this sixty supreme seconds of intensest aspiration—a minute of his keeping his certificate poised for a sharp thrust back at her, the thrust of the wild freedom of his saying: “No, no, I can’t give them up; I can’t simply sink them deep down in my soul forever, with no cross in all my future to mark that burial; so that if this is what our arrangement means I must decline to have anything to do with it.” The words none the less hadn’t come, and when she had herself, a couple of minutes later, spoken those others, the blood rose to his face as if, given his stiffness and her extravagance, he had just indeed saved himself.
Everything in fact stopped, even his fidget with his paper; she imposed a hush, she imposed at any rate the conscious decent form of one, and he couldn’t afterward have told how long, at this juncture, he must have sat simply gazing before him. It was so long, at any rate, that Kate herself got up—and quite indeed, presently, as if her own forms were now at an end. He had returned her nothing—so what was she waiting for? She had been on the two other occasions momentarily at a loss, but never so much so, no doubt, as was thus testified to by her leaving the bench and moving over once more to the rail of the terrace. She could carry it off, in a manner, with her resources, that she was waiting with so little to wait for; she could face him again, after looking off at the sea, as if this slightly stiff delay, not wholly exempt from awkwardness, had been but a fine scruple of her courtesy. She had gathered herself in; after giving him time to appeal she could take it that he had decided and that nothing was left for her to do. “Well then,” she clearly launched at him across the broad walk—”well then, good-bye.”
She had come nearer with it, as if he might rise for some show of express separation; but he only leaned back motionless, his eyes on her now—he kept her a moment before him. “Do you mean that we don’t—that we don’t—?” But he broke down.
“Do I ‘mean’—?” She remained as for questions he might ask, but it was wellnigh as if there played through her dotty veil an irrepressible irony for that particular one. “I’ve meant, for long years, I think, all I’m capable of meaning. I’ve meant so much that I can’t mean more. So there it is.”
“But if you go,” he appealed—and with a sense as of final flatness, however he arranged it, for his own attitude—”but if you go sha’n’t I see you again?”
She waited a little, and it was strangely for him now as if—though at last so much more gorged with her tribute than she had ever been with his—something still depended on her. “Do you like to see me?” she very simply asked.
At this he did get up; that was easier than to say—at least with responsive simplicity; and again for a little he looked hard and in silence at his letter; which at last, however, raising his eyes to her own for the act, while he masked their conscious ruefulness, to his utmost, in some air of assurance, he slipped into the inner pocket of his coat, letting it settle there securely. “You’re too wonderful.” But he frowned at her with it as never in his life. “Where does it all come from?”
“The wonder of poor me?” Kate Cookham said. “It comes from you.”
He shook his head slowly—feeling, with his letter there against his heart, such a new agility, almost such a new range of interest. “I mean so much money—so extraordinarily much.”
Well, she held him a while blank. “Does it seem to you extraordinarily much—twelve-hundred-and-sixty? Because, you know,” she added, “it’s all.”
“It’s enough!” he returned with a slight thoughtful droop of his head to the right and his eyes attached to the far horizon as through a shade of shyness for what he was saying. He felt all her own lingering nearness somehow on his cheek.
“It’s enough? Thank you then!” she rather oddly went on.
He shifted a little his posture. “It was more than a hundred a year—for you to get together.”
“Yes,” she assented, “that was what year by year I tried for.”
“But that you could live all the while and save that—!” Yes, he was at liberty, as he hadn’t been, quite pleasantly to marvel. All his wonderments in life had been hitherto unanswered—and didn’t the change mean that here again was the social relation?
“Ah, I didn’t live as you saw me the other day.”
“Yes,” he answered—and didn’t he the next instant feel he must fairly have smiled with it?—”the other day you were going it!”
“For once in my life,” said Kate Cookham. “I’ve left the hotel,” she after a moment added.
“Ah, you’re in—a—lodgings?” he found himself inquiring as for positive sociability.
She had apparently a slight shade of hesitation, but in an instant it was all right; as what he showed he wanted to know she seemed mostly to give him. “Yes—but far of course from here. Up on the hill.” To which, after another instant, “At The Mount, Castle Terrace,” she subjoined.
“Oh, I know The Mount. And Castle Terrace is awfully sunny and nice.”
“Awfully sunny and nice,” Kate Cookham took from him.
“So that if it isn’t,” he pursued, “like the Royal, why you’re at least comfortable.”
“I shall be comfortable anywhere now,” she replied with a certain dryness.
It was astonishing, however, what had become of his own. “Because I’ve accepted–-?”
“Call it that!” she dimly smiled.
“I hope then at any rate,” he returned, “you can now thoroughly rest” He spoke as for a cheerful conclusion and moved again also to smile, though as with a poor grimace, no doubt; since what he seemed most clearly to feel was that since he “accepted” he mustn’t, for his last note, have accepted in sulkiness or gloom. With that, at the same time, he couldn’t but know, in all his fibres, that with such a still-watching face as the dotty veil didn’t disguise for him there was no possible concluding, at least on his part On hers, on hers it was—as he had so often for a week had reflectively to pronounce things—another affair. Ah, somehow, both formidably and helpfully, her face concluded—yet in a sense so strangely enshrouded in things she didn’t tell him. What must she, what mustn’t she, have done? What she had said—and she had really told him nothing—was no account of her life; in the midst of which conflict of opposed recognitions, at any rate, it was as if, for all he could do, he himself now considerably floundered. “But I can’t think—I can’t think–-!”
“You can’t think I can have made so much money in the time and been honest?”
“Oh, you’ve been honest!” Herbert Dodd dis
tinctly allowed.
It moved her stillness to a gesture—which, however, she had as promptly checked; and she went on the next instant as for further generosity to his failure of thought. “Everything was possible, under my stress, with my hatred.”
“Your hatred—?” For she had paused as if it were after all too difficult.
“Of what I should for so long have been doing to you.”
With this, for all his failures, a greater light than any yet shone upon him. “It made you think of ways–-?”
“It made me think of everything. It made me work,” said Kate Cookham. She added, however, the next moment: “But that’s my story.”
“And I mayn’t hear it?”
“No—because I mayn’t hear yours.”
“Oh, mine—!” he said with the strangest, saddest, yet after all most resigned sense of surrender of it; which he tried to make sound as if he couldn’t have told it, for its splendor of sacrifice and of misery, even if he would.
It seemed to move in her a little, exactly, that sense of the invidious. “Ah, mine too, I assure you–-!”
He rallied at once to the interest. “Oh, we can talk then?”
“Never,” she all oddly replied. “Never,” said Kate Cookham.
They remained so, face to face; the effect of which for him was that he had after a little understood why. That was fundamental. “Well, I see.”
Thus confronted they stayed; and then, as he saw with a contentment that came up from deeper still, it was indeed she who, with her worn fine face, would conclude. “But I can take care of you.”
“You have!” he said as with nothing left of him but a beautiful appreciative candour.
“Oh, but you’ll want it now in a way—!” she responsibly answered.
He waited a moment, dropping again on the seat. So, while she still stood, he looked up at her; with the sense somehow that there were too many things and that they were all together, terribly, irresistibly, doubtless blessedly, in her eyes and her whole person; which thus affected him for the moment as more than he could bear. He leaned forward, dropping his elbows to his knees and pressing his head on his hands. So he stayed, saying nothing; only, with the sense of her own sustained, renewed and wonderful action, knowing that an arm had passed round him and that he was held. She was beside him on the bench of desolation.
Four Meetings
I saw her only four times, but I remember them vividly; she made an impression upon me. I thought her very pretty and very interesting,—a charming specimen of a type. I am very sorry to hear of her death; and yet, when I think of it, why should I be sorry? The last time I saw her she was certainly not—But I will describe all our meetings in order.
I.
The first one took place in the country, at a little tea-party, one snowy night. It must have been some seventeen years ago. My friend Latouche, going to spend Christmas with his mother, had persuaded me to go with him, and the good lady had given in our honor the entertainment of which I speak. To me it was really entertaining; I had never been in the depths of New England at that season. It had been snowing all day, and the drifts were knee-high. I wondered how the ladies had made their way to the house; but I perceived that at Grimwinter a conversazione offering the attraction of two gentlemen from New York was felt to be worth an effort.
Mrs. Latouche, in the course of the evening, asked me if I “did n’t want to” show the photographs to some of the young ladies. The photographs were in a couple of great portfolios, and had been brought home by her son, who, like myself, was lately returned from Europe. I looked round and was struck with the fact that most of the young ladies were provided with an object of interest more absorbing than the most vivid sun-picture. But there was a person standing alone near the mantelshelf, and looking round the room with a small gentle smile which seemed at odds, somehow, with her isolation. I looked at her a moment, and then said, “I should like to show them to that young lady.”
“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Latouche, “she is just the person. She doesn’t care for flirting; I will speak to her.”
I rejoined that if she did not care for flirting, she was, perhaps, not just the person; but Mrs. Latouche had already gone to propose the photographs to her.
“She’s delighted,” she said, coming back. “She is just the person, so quiet and so bright.” And then she told me the young lady was, by name, Miss Caroline Spencer, and with this she introduced me.
Miss Caroline Spencer was not exactly a beauty, but she was a charming little figure. She must have been close upon thirty, but she was made almost like a little girl, and she had the complexion of a child. She had a very pretty head, and her hair was arranged as nearly as possible like the hair of a Greek bust, though indeed it was to be doubted if she had ever seen a Greek bust. She was “artistic,” I suspected, so far as Grimwinter allowed such tendencies. She had a soft, surprised eye, and thin lips, with very pretty teeth. Round her neck she wore what ladies call, I believe, a “ruche,” fastened with a very small pin in pink coral, and in her hand she carried a fan made of plaited straw and adorned with pink ribbon. She wore a scanty black silk dress. She spoke with a kind of soft precision, showing her white teeth between her narrow but tender-looking lips, and she seemed extremely pleased, even a little fluttered, at the prospect of my demonstrations. These went forward very smoothly, after I had moved the portfolios out of their corner and placed a couple of chairs near a lamp. The photographs were usually things I knew,—large views of Switzerland, Italy, and Spain, landscapes, copies of famous buildings, pictures, and statues. I said what I could about them, and my companion, looking at them as I held them up, sat perfectly still, with her straw fan raised to her underlip. Occasionally, as I laid one of the pictures down, she said very softly, “Have you seen that place?” I usually answered that I had seen it several times (I had been a great traveller), and then I felt that she looked at me askance for a moment with her pretty eyes. I had asked her at the outset whether she had been to Europe; to this she answered, “No, no, no,” in a little quick, confidential whisper. But after that, though she never took her eyes off the pictures, she said so little that I was afraid she was bored. Accordingly, after we had finished one portfolio, I offered, if she desired it, to desist. I felt that she was not bored, but her reticence puzzled me, and I wished to make her speak. I turned round to look at her, and saw that there was a faint flush in each of her cheeks. She was waving her little fan to and fro. Instead of looking at me she fixed her eyes upon the other portfolio, which was leaning against the table.
“Won’t you show me that?” she asked, with a little tremor in her voice. I could almost have believed she was agitated.
“With pleasure,” I answered, “if you are not tired.”
“No, I am not tired,” she affirmed. “I like it—I love it.”
And as I took up the other portfolio she laid her hand upon it, rubbing it softly.
“And have you been here too?” she asked.
On my opening the portfolio it appeared that I had been there. One of the first photographs was a large view of the Castle of Chillon, on the Lake of Geneva.
“Here,” I said, “I have been many a time. Is it not beautiful?” And I pointed to the perfect reflection of the rugged rocks and pointed towers in the clear still water. She did not say, “Oh, enchanting!” and push it away to see the next picture. She looked awhile, and then she asked if it was not where Bonnivard, about whom Byron wrote, was confined. I assented, and tried to quote some of Byron’s verses, but in this attempt I succeeded imperfectly.
She fanned herself a moment, and then repeated the lines correctly, in a soft, flat, and yet agreeable voice. By the time she had finished she was blushing. I complimented her and told her she was perfectly equipped for visiting Switzerland and Italy. She looked at me askance again, to see whether I was serious, and I added, that if she wished to recognize Byron’s descriptions she must go abroad speedily; Europe was getting sadly dis-Byronized.