by Henry James
“Exactly”—she was full of the saving vision; “but as the conditions are directly embodied in persons–-“
“Oh, of course it here and there bells the cat; which means that it bells three or four.”
“Yes,” she richly brooded—”Lady Lappington is a cat!”
“She will have been ‘belled,’ at any rate, with your father,” Hugh amusedly went on, “to the certainty of a row; and a row can only be good for us—I mean for us in particular.” Yet he had to bethink himself. “The case depends a good deal of course on how your father takes such a resounding rap.”
“Oh, I know how he’ll take it!”—her perception went all the way.
“In the very highest and properest spirit?”
“Well, you’ll see.” She was as brave as she was clear. “Or at least I shall!”
Struck with all this in her he renewed his homage. “You are, yes, splendid!”
“I even,” she laughed, “surprise myself.”
But he was already back at his calculations. “How early do the papers get to you?”
“At Dedborough? Oh, quite for breakfast—which isn’t, however, very early.”
“Then that’s what has caused his wire to Bender.”
“But how will such talk strike him?” the girl asked.
Hugh meanwhile, visibly, had not only followed his train of thought, he had let it lead him to certainty. “It will have moved Mr. Bender to absolute rapture.”
“Rather,” Lady Grace wondered, “than have put him off?”
“It will have put him prodigiously on! Mr. Bender—as he said to me at Dedborough of his noble host there,” Hugh pursued—”is ‘a very nice man’; but he’s a product of the world of advertisment, and advertisement is all he sees and aims at. He lives in it as a saint in glory or a fish in water.”
She took it from him as half doubting. “But mayn’t advertisement, in so special a case, turn, on the whole, against him?”
Hugh shook a negative forefinger with an expression he might have caught from foreign comrades. “He rides the biggest whirlwind—he has got it saddled and bitted.”
She faced the image, but cast about “Then where does our success come in?”
“In our making the beast, all the same, bolt with him and throw him.” And Hugh further pointed the moral. “If in such proceedings all he knows is publicity the thing is to give him publicity, and it’s only a question of giving him enough. By the time he has enough for himself, you see, he’ll have too much for every one else—so that we shall ‘up’ in a body and slay him.”
The girl’s eyebrows, in her wondering face, rose to a question. “But if he has meanwhile got the picture?”
“We’ll slay him before he gets it!” He revelled in the breadth of his view. “Our own policy must be to organise to that end the inevitable outcry. Organise Bender himself—organise him to scandal.” Hugh had already even pity to spare for their victim. “He won’t know it from a boom.”
Though carried along, however, Lady Grace could still measure. “But that will be only if he wants and decides for the picture.”
“We must make him then want and decide for it—decide, that is, for ‘ours.’ To save it we must work him up—he’ll in that case want it so indecently much. Then we shall have to want it more!”
“Well,” she anxiously felt it her duty to remind him, “you can take a horse to water–-!”
“Oh, trust me to make him drink!”
There appeared a note in this that convinced her. “It’s you, Mr. Crimble, who are ‘splendid’!”
“Well, I shall be—with my jolly wire!” And all on that scent again, “May I come back to you from the club with Pappendick’s news?” he asked.
“Why, rather, of course, come back!”
“Only not,” he debated, “till your father has left.”
Lady Grace considered too, but sharply decided. “Come when you have it. But tell me first,” she added, “one thing.” She hung fire a little while he waited, but she brought it out. “Was it you who got the ‘Journal’ to speak?”
“Ah, one scarcely ‘gets’ the ‘Journal’!”
“Who then gave them their ‘tip’?”
“About the Mantovano and its peril?” Well, he took a moment—but only not to say; in addition to which the butler had reappeared, entering from the lobby. “I’ll tell you,” he laughed, “when I come back!”
Gotch had his manner of announcement while the visitor was mounting the stairs. “Mr. Breckenridge Bender!”
“Ah then I go,” said Lady Grace at once.
“I’ll stay three minutes.” Hugh turned with her, alertly, to the easier issue, signalling hope and cheer from that threshold as he watched her disappear; after which he faced about with as brave a smile and as ready for immediate action as if she had there within kissed her hand to him. Mr. Bender emerged at the same instant, Gotch withdrawing and closing the door behind him; and the former personage, recognising his young friend, threw up his hands for friendly pleasure.
III
“Ah, Mr. Crimble,” he cordially inquired, “you’ve come with your great news?”
Hugh caught the allusion, it would have seemed, but after a moment. “News of the Moretto? No, Mr. Bender, I haven’t news yet.” But he added as with high candour for the visitor’s motion of disappointment: “I think I warned you, you know, that it would take three or four weeks.”
“Well, in my country,” Mr. Bender returned with disgust, “it would take three or four minutes! Can’t you make ‘em step more lively?”
“I’m expecting, sir,” said Hugh good-humouredly, “a report from hour to hour.”
“Then will you let me have it right off?”
Hugh indulged in a pause; after which very frankly: “Ah, it’s scarcely for you, Mr. Bender, that I’m acting!”
The great collector was but briefly checked. “Well, can’t you just act for Art?”
“Oh, you’re doing that yourself so powerfully,” Hugh laughed, “that I think I had best leave it to you!”
His friend looked at him as some inspector on circuit might look at a new improvement. “Don’t you want to go round acting with me?”
“Go ‘on tour,’ as it were? Oh, frankly, Mr. Bender,” Hugh said, “if I had any weight–-!”
“You’d add it to your end of the beam? Why, what have I done that you should go back on me—after working me up so down there? The worst I’ve done,” Mr. Bender continued, “is to refuse that Moretto.”
“Has it deplorably been offered you?” our young man cried, unmistakably and sincerely affected. After which he went on, as his fellow-visitor only eyed him hard, not, on second thoughts, giving the owner of the great work away: “Then why are you—as if you were a banished Romeo—so keen for news from Verona?” To this odd mixture of business and literature Mr. Bender made no reply, contenting himself with but a large vague blandness that wore in him somehow the mark of tested utility; so that Hugh put him another question: “Aren’t you here, sir, on the chance of the Mantovano?”
“I’m here,” he then imperturbably said, “because Lord Theign has wired me to meet him. Ain’t you here for that yourself?”
Hugh betrayed for a moment his enjoyment of a “big” choice of answers. “Dear, no! I’ve but been in, by Lady Sandgate’s leave, to see that grand Lawrence.”
“Ah yes, she’s very kind about it—one does go ‘in.’” After which Mr. Bender had, even in the atmosphere of his danger, a throb of curiosity. “Is any one after that grand Lawrence?”
“Oh, I hope not,” Hugh laughed, “unless you again dreadfully are: wonderful thing as it is and so just in its right place there.”
“You call it,” Mr. Bender impartially inquired, “a very wonderful thing?”
“Well, as a Lawrence, it has quite bowled me over”—Hugh spoke as for the strictly aesthetic awkwardness of that. “But you know I take my pictures hard.” He gave a punch to his hat, pressed for time in this conne
ction as he was glad truly to appear to his friend. “I must make my little rapport.” Yet before it he did seek briefly to explain. “We’re a band of young men who care—and we watch the great things. Also—for I must give you the real truth about myself—we watch the great people.”
“Well, I guess I’m used to being watched—if that’s the worst you can do.” To which Mr. Bender added in his homely way: “But you know, Mr. Crimble, what I’m really after.”
Hugh’s strategy on this would again have peeped out for us. “The man in this morning’s ‘Journal’ appears at least to have discovered.”
“Yes, the man in this morning’s ‘Journal’ has discovered three or four weeks—as it appears to take you here for everything—after my beginning to talk. Why, they knew I was talking that time ago on the other side.”
“Oh, they know things in the States,” Hugh cheerfully agreed, “so independently of their happening! But you must have talked loud.”
“Well, I haven’t so much talked as raved,” Mr. Bender conceded—”for I’m afraid that when I do want a thing I rave till I get it. You heard me at Ded-borough, and your enterprising daily press has at last caught the echo.”
“Then they’ll make up for lost time! But have you done it,” Hugh asked, “to prepare an alibi?”
“An alibi?”
“By ‘raving,’ as you say, the saddle on the wrong horse. I don’t think you at all believe you’ll get the Sir Joshua—but meanwhile we shall have cleared up the question of the Moretto.”
Mr. Bender, imperturbable, didn’t speak till he had done justice to this picture of his subtlety. “Then, why on earth do you want to boom the Moretto?”
“You ask that,” said Hugh, “because it’s the boomed thing that’s most in peril.”
“Well, it’s the big, the bigger, the biggest things, and if you drag their value to the light why shouldn’t we want to grab them and carry them off—the same as all of you originally did?”
“Ah, not quite the same,” Hugh smiled—”that I will say for you!”
“Yes, you stick it on now—you have got an eye for the rise in values. But I grant you your unearned increment, and you ought to be mighty glad that, to such a time, I’ll pay it you.”
Our young man kept, during a moment’s thought, his eyes on his companion, and then resumed with all intensity and candour: “You may easily, Mr. Bender, be too much for me—as you appear too much for far greater people. But may I ask you, very earnestly, for your word on this, as to any case in which that happens—that when precious things, things we are to lose here, are knocked down to you, you’ll let us at least take leave of them, let us have a sight of them in London, before they’re borne off?”
Mr. Bender’s big face fell almost with a crash. “Hand them over, you mean, to the sandwich men on Bond Street?”
“To one or other of the placard and poster men—I don’t insist on the inserted human slice! Let the great values, as a compensation to us, be on view for three or four weeks.”
“You ask me,” Mr. Bender returned, “for a general assurance to that effect?”
“Well, a particular one—so it be particular enough,” Hugh said—”will do just for now. Let me put in my plea for the issue—well, of the value that’s actually in the scales.”
“The Mantovano-Moretto?”
“The Moretto-Mantovano!”
Mr. Bender carnivorously smiled. “Hadn’t we better know which it is first?”
Hugh had a motion of practical indifference for this. “The public interest—playing so straight on the question—may help to settle it. By which I mean that it will profit enormously—the question of probability, of identity itself will—by the discussion it will create. The discussion will promote certainty–-“
“And certainty,” Mr. Bender massively mused, “will kick up a row.”
“Of course it will kick up a row!”—Hugh thoroughly guaranteed that. “You’ll be, for the month, the best-abused man in England—if you venture to remain here at all; except, naturally, poor Lord Theign.”
“Whom it won’t be my interest, at the same time, to worry into backing down.”
“But whom it will be exceedingly mine to practise on”—and Hugh laughed as at the fun before them—”if I may entertain the sweet hope of success. The only thing is—from my point of view,” he went on—”that backing down before what he will call vulgar clamour isn’t in the least in his traditions, nothing less so; and that if there should be really too much of it for his taste or his nerves he’ll set his handsome face as a stone and never budge an inch. But at least again what I appeal to you for will have taken place—the picture will have been seen by a lot of people who’ll care.”
“It will have been seen,” Mr. Bender amended—”on the mere contingency of my acquisition of it—only if its present owner consents.”
“‘Consents’?” Hugh almost derisively echoed; “why, he’ll propose it himself, he’ll insist on it, he’ll put it through, once he’s angry enough—as angry, I mean, as almost any public criticism of a personal act of his will be sure to make him; and I’m afraid the striking criticism, or at least animadversion, of this morning, will have blown on his flame of bravado.”
Inevitably a student of character, Mr. Bender rose to the occasion. “Yes, I guess he’s pretty mad.”
“They’ve imputed to him”—Hugh but wanted to abound in that sense—”an intention of which after all he isn’t guilty.”
“So that”—his listener glowed with interested optimism—”if they don’t look out, if they impute it to him again, I guess he’ll just go and be guilty!”
Hugh might at this moment have shown to an initiated eye as fairly elated by the sense of producing something of the effect he had hoped. “You entertain the fond vision of lashing them up to that mistake, oh fisher in troubled waters?” And then with a finer art, as his companion, expansively bright but crudely acute, eyed him in turn as if to sound him: “The strongest thing in such a type—one does make out—is his resentment of a liberty taken; and the most natural furthermore is quite that he should feel almost anything you do take uninvited from the groaning board of his banquet of life to be such a liberty.”
Mr. Bender participated thus at his perceptive ease in the exposed aristocratic illusion. “Yes, I guess he has always lived as he likes, the way those of you who have got things fixed for them do, over here; and to have to quit it on account of unpleasant remark—”
But he gave up thoughtfully trying to express what this must be; reduced to the mere synthetic interjection “My!”
“That’s it, Mr. Bender,” Hugh said for the consecration of such a moral; “he won’t quit it without a hard struggle.”
Mr. Bender hereupon at last gave himself quite gaily away as to his high calculation of impunity. “Well, I guess he won’t struggle too hard for me to hold on to him if I want to!”
“In the thick of the conflict then, however that may be,” Hugh returned, “don’t forget what I’ve urged on you—the claim of our desolate country.”
But his friend had an answer to this. “My natural interest, Mr. Crimble—considering what I do for it—is in the claim of ours. But I wish you were on my side!”
“Not so much,” Hugh hungrily and truthfully laughed, “as I wish you were on mine!” Decidedly, none the less, he had to go. “Good-bye—for another look here!”
He reached the doorway of the second room, where, however, his companion, freshly alert at this, stayed him by a gesture. “How much is she really worth?”
“‘She’?” Hugh, staring a moment, was miles at sea. “Lady Sandgate?”
“Her great-grandmother.”
A responsible answer was prevented—the butler was again with them; he had opened wide the other door and he named to Mr. Bender the personage under his convoy. “Lord John!”
Hugh caught this from the inner threshold, and it gave him his escape. “Oh, ask that friend!” With which he sought the further passage
to the staircase and street, while Lord John arrived in charge of Mr. Gotch, who, having remarked to the two occupants of the front drawing-room that her ladyship would come, left them together.
IV
“Then Theign’s not yet here!” Lord John had to resign himself as he greeted his American ally. “But he told me I should find you.”
“He has kept me waiting,” that gentleman returned—”but what’s the matter with him anyway?”
“The matter with him”—Lord John treated such ignorance as irritating—”must of course be this beastly thing in the ‘Journal.’”
Mr. Bender proclaimed, on the other hand, his incapacity to seize such connections. “What’s the matter with the beastly thing?”