by Henry James
“I would like you to do me a favor,” he said at last. “Lend me some money.”
“How much do you wish?” Rowland asked.
“Say a thousand francs.”
Rowland hesitated a moment. “I don’t wish to be indiscreet, but may I ask what you propose to do with a thousand francs?”
“To go to Interlaken.”
“And why are you going to Interlaken?”
Roderick replied without a shadow of wavering, “Because that woman is to be there.”
Rowland burst out laughing, but Roderick remained serenely grave. “You have forgiven her, then?” said Rowland.
“Not a bit of it!”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I. I only know that she is incomparably beautiful, and that she has waked me up amazingly. Besides, she asked me to come.”
“She asked you?”
“Yesterday, in so many words.”
“Ah, the jade!”
“Exactly. I am willing to take her for that.”
“Why in the name of common sense did you go back to her?”
“Why did I find her standing there like a goddess who had just stepped out of her cloud? Why did I look at her? Before I knew where I was, the harm was done.”
Rowland, who had been sitting erect, threw himself back on the grass and lay for some time staring up at the sky. At last, raising himself, “Are you perfectly serious?” he asked.
“Deadly serious.”
“Your idea is to remain at Interlaken some time?”
“Indefinitely!” said Roderick; and it seemed to his companion that the tone in which he said this made it immensely well worth hearing.
“And your mother and cousin, meanwhile, are to remain here? It will soon be getting very cold, you know.”
“It does n’t seem much like it to-day.”
“Very true; but to-day is a day by itself.”
“There is nothing to prevent their going back to Lucerne. I depend upon your taking charge of them.”
At this Rowland reclined upon the grass again; and again, after reflection, he faced his friend. “How would you express,” he asked, “the character of the profit that you expect to derive from your excursion?”
“I see no need of expressing it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating! The case is simply this. I desire immensely to be near Christina Light, and it is such a huge refreshment to find myself again desiring something, that I propose to drift with the current. As I say, she has waked me up, and it is possible something may come of it. She makes me feel as if I were alive again. This,” and he glanced down at the inn, “I call death!”
“That I am very grateful to hear. You really feel as if you might do something?”
“Don’t ask too much. I only know that she makes my heart beat, makes me see visions.”
“You feel encouraged?”
“I feel excited.”
“You are really looking better.”
“I am glad to hear it. Now that I have answered your questions, please to give me the money.”
Rowland shook his head. “For that purpose, I can’t!”
“You can’t?”
“It ‘s impossible. Your plan is rank folly. I can’t help you in it.”
Roderick flushed a little, and his eye expanded. “I will borrow what money I can, then, from Mary!” This was not viciously said; it had simply the ring of passionate resolution.
Instantly it brought Rowland to terms. He took a bunch of keys from his pocket and tossed it upon the grass. “The little brass one opens my dressing-case,” he said. “You will find money in it.”
Roderick let the keys lie; something seemed to have struck him; he looked askance at his friend. “You are awfully gallant!”
“You certainly are not. Your proposal is an outrage.”
“Very likely. It ‘s a proof the more of my desire.”
“If you have so much steam on, then, use it for something else. You say you are awake again. I am delighted; only be so in the best sense. Is n’t it very plain? If you have the energy to desire, you have also the energy to reason and to judge. If you can care to go, you can also care to stay, and staying being the more profitable course, the inspiration, on that side, for a man who has his self-confidence to win back again, should be greater.”
Roderick, plainly, did not relish this simple logic, and his eye grew angry as he listened to its echo. “Oh, the devil!” he cried.
Rowland went on. “Do you believe that hanging about Christina Light will do you any good? Do you believe it won’t? In either case you should keep away from her. If it won’t, it ‘s your duty; and if it will, you can get on without it.”
“Do me good?” cried Roderick. “What do I want of ‘good’—what should I do with ‘good’? I want what she gives me, call it by what name you will. I want to ask no questions, but to take what comes and let it fill the impossible hours! But I did n’t come to discuss the matter.”
“I have not the least desire to discuss it,” said Rowland. “I simply protest.”
Roderick meditated a moment. “I have never yet thought twice of accepting a favor of you,” he said at last; “but this one sticks in my throat.”
“It is not a favor; I lend you the money only under compulsion.”
“Well, then, I will take it only under compulsion!” Roderick exclaimed. And he sprang up abruptly and marched away.
His words were ambiguous; Rowland lay on the grass, wondering what they meant. Half an hour had not elapsed before Roderick reappeared, heated with rapid walking, and wiping his forehead. He flung himself down and looked at his friend with an eye which expressed something purer than bravado and yet baser than conviction.
“I have done my best!” he said. “My mother is out of money; she is expecting next week some circular notes from London. She had only ten francs in her pocket. Mary Garland gave me every sou she possessed in the world. It makes exactly thirty-four francs. That ‘s not enough.”
“You asked Miss Garland?” cried Rowland.
“I asked her.”
“And told her your purpose?”
“I named no names. But she knew!”
“What did she say?”
“Not a syllable. She simply emptied her purse.”
Rowland turned over and buried his face in his arms. He felt a movement of irrepressible elation, and he barely stifled a cry of joy. Now, surely, Roderick had shattered the last link in the chain that bound Mary to him, and after this she would be free!… When he turned about again, Roderick was still sitting there, and he had not touched the keys which lay on the grass.
“I don’t know what is the matter with me,” said Roderick, “but I have an insurmountable aversion to taking your money.”
“The matter, I suppose, is that you have a grain of wisdom left.”
“No, it ‘s not that. It ‘s a kind of brute instinct. I find it extremely provoking!” He sat there for some time with his head in his hands and his eyes on the ground. His lips were compressed, and he was evidently, in fact, in a state of profound irritation. “You have succeeded in making this thing excessively unpleasant!” he exclaimed.
“I am sorry,” said Rowland, “but I can’t see it in any other way.”
“That I believe, and I resent the range of your vision pretending to be the limit of my action. You can’t feel for me nor judge for me, and there are certain things you know nothing about. I have suffered, sir!” Roderick went on with increasing emphasis. “I have suffered damnable torments. Have I been such a placid, contented, comfortable man this last six months, that when I find a chance to forget my misery, I should take such pains not to profit by it? You ask too much, for a man who himself has no occasion to play the hero. I don’t say that invidiously; it ‘s your disposition, and you can’t help it. But decidedly, there are certain things you know nothing about.”
Rowland listened to this outbreak with open eyes, and Roderick, if he had been less intent upon
his own eloquence, would probably have perceived that he turned pale. “These things—what are they?” Rowland asked.
“They are women, principally, and what relates to women. Women for you, by what I can make out, mean nothing. You have no imagination—no sensibility!”
“That ‘s a serious charge,” said Rowland, gravely.
“I don’t make it without proof!”
“And what is your proof?”
Roderick hesitated a moment. “The way you treated Christina Light. I call that grossly obtuse.”
“Obtuse?” Rowland repeated, frowning.
“Thick-skinned, beneath your good fortune.”
“My good fortune?”
“There it is—it ‘s all news to you! You had pleased her. I don’t say she was dying of love for you, but she took a fancy to you.”
“We will let this pass!” said Rowland, after a silence.
“Oh, I don’t insist. I have only her own word for it.”
“She told you this?”
“You noticed, at least, I suppose, that she was not afraid to speak. I never repeated it, not because I was jealous, but because I was curious to see how long your ignorance would last if left to itself.”
“I frankly confess it would have lasted forever. And yet I don’t consider that my insensibility is proved.”
“Oh, don’t say that,” cried Roderick, “or I shall begin to suspect—what I must do you the justice to say that I never have suspected—that you are a trifle conceited. Upon my word, when I think of all this, your protest, as you call it, against my following Christina Light seems to me thoroughly offensive. There is something monstrous in a man’s pretending to lay down the law to a sort of emotion with which he is quite unacquainted—in his asking a fellow to give up a lovely woman for conscience’ sake, when he has never had the impulse to strike a blow for one for passion’s!”
“Oh, oh!” cried Rowland.
“All that ‘s very easy to say,” Roderick went on; “but you must remember that there are such things as nerves, and senses, and imagination, and a restless demon within that may sleep sometimes for a day, or for six months, but that sooner or later wakes up and thumps at your ribs till you listen to him! If you can’t understand it, take it on trust, and let a poor imaginative devil live his life as he can!”
Roderick’s words seemed at first to Rowland like something heard in a dream; it was impossible they had been actually spoken—so supreme an expression were they of the insolence of egotism. Reality was never so consistent as that! But Roderick sat there balancing his beautiful head, and the echoes of his strident accent still lingered along the half-muffled mountain-side. Rowland suddenly felt that the cup of his chagrin was full to overflowing, and his long-gathered bitterness surged into the simple, wholesome passion of anger for wasted kindness. But he spoke without violence, and Roderick was probably at first far from measuring the force that lay beneath his words.
“You are incredibly ungrateful,” he said. “You are talking arrogant nonsense. What do you know about my sensibilities and my imagination? How do you know whether I have loved or suffered? If I have held my tongue and not troubled you with my complaints, you find it the most natural thing in the world to put an ignoble construction on my silence. I loved quite as well as you; indeed, I think I may say rather better. I have been constant. I have been willing to give more than I received. I have not forsaken one mistress because I thought another more beautiful, nor given up the other and believed all manner of evil about her because I had not my way with her. I have been a good friend to Christina Light, and it seems to me my friendship does her quite as much honor as your love!”
“Your love—your suffering—your silence—your friendship!” cried Roderick. “I declare I don’t understand!”
“I dare say not. You are not used to understanding such things—you are not used to hearing me talk of my feelings. You are altogether too much taken up with your own. Be as much so as you please; I have always respected your right. Only when I have kept myself in durance on purpose to leave you an open field, don’t, by way of thanking me, come and call me an idiot.”
“Oh, you claim then that you have made sacrifices?”
“Several! You have never suspected it?”
“If I had, do you suppose I would have allowed it?” cried Roderick.
“They were the sacrifices of friendship and they were easily made; only I don’t enjoy having them thrown back in my teeth.”
This was, under the circumstances, a sufficiently generous speech; but Roderick was not in the humor to take it generously. “Come, be more definite,” he said. “Let me know where it is the shoe has pinched.”
Rowland frowned; if Roderick would not take generosity, he should have full justice. “It ‘s a perpetual sacrifice,” he said, “to live with a perfect egotist.”
“I am an egotist?” cried Roderick.
“Did it never occur to you?”
“An egotist to whom you have made perpetual sacrifices?” He repeated the words in a singular tone; a tone that denoted neither exactly indignation nor incredulity, but (strange as it may seem) a sudden violent curiosity for news about himself.
“You are selfish,” said Rowland; “you think only of yourself and believe only in yourself. You regard other people only as they play into your own hands. You have always been very frank about it, and the thing seemed so mixed up with the temper of your genius and the very structure of your mind, that often one was willing to take the evil with the good and to be thankful that, considering your great talent, you were no worse. But if one believed in you, as I have done, one paid a tax upon it.”
Roderick leaned his elbows on his knees, clasped his hands together, and crossed them, shadewise, over his eyes. In this attitude, for a moment, he sat looking coldly at his friend. “So I have made you very uncomfortable?” he went on.
“Extremely so.”
“I have been eager, grasping, obstinate, vain, ungrateful, indifferent, cruel?”
“I have accused you, mentally, of all these things, with the exception of vanity.”