by Henry James
“Oh!” Mamie repeated in a tone that sufficiently covered her prices. The question was in every way larger. “Do you never forgive?” she reproachfully inquired. The door opened however at the moment she spoke and Scott Homer presented himself.
CHAPTER IV
Scott Homer wore exactly, to his sister’s eyes, the aspect he had worn the day before, and it also formed to her sense the great feature of his impartial greeting.
“How d’ye do, Mamie? How d’ye do, Lady Wantridge?”
“How d’ye do again?” Lady Wantridge replied with an equanimity striking to her hostess. It was as if Scott’s own had been contagious; it was almost indeed as if she had seen him before. Had she ever so seen him—before the previous day? While Miss Cutter put to herself this question her visitor at all events met the one she had previously uttered. “Ever ‘forgive’?” this personage echoed in a tone that made as little account as possible of the interruption. “Dear yes! The people I HAVE forgiven!” She laughed—perhaps a little nervously; and she was now looking at Scott. The way she looked at him was precisely what had already had its effect for his sister. “The people I can!”
“Can you forgive me?” asked Scott Homer.
She took it so easily. “But—what?”
Mamie interposed; she turned directly to her brother. “Don’t try her. Leave it so.” She had had an inspiration, it was the most extraordinary thing in the world. “Don’t try HIM”—she had turned to their companion. She looked grave, sad, strange. “Leave it so.” Yes, it was a distinct inspiration, which she couldn’t have explained, but which had come, prompted by something she had caught—the extent of the recognition expressed—in Lady Wantridge’s face. It had come absolutely of a sudden, straight out of the opposition of the two figures before her—quite as if a concussion had struck a light. The light was helped by her quickened sense that her friend’s silence on the incident of the day before showed some sort of consciousness. She looked surprised. “Do you know my brother?”
“DO I know you?” Lady Wantridge asked of him.
“No, Lady Wantridge,” Scott pleasantly confessed, “not one little mite!”
“Well then if you MUST go—” and Mamie offered her a hand. “But I’ll go down with you. NOT YOU!” she launched at her brother, who immediately effaced himself. His way of doing so—and he had already done so, as for Lady Wantridge, in respect to their previous encounter—struck her even at the moment as an instinctive if slightly blind tribute to her possession of an idea; and as such, in its celerity, made her so admire him, and their common wit, that she on the spot more than forgave him his queerness. He was right. He could be as queer as he liked! The queerer the better! It was at the foot of the stairs, when she had got her guest down, that what she had assured Mrs. Medwin would come did indeed come. “DID you meet him here yesterday?”
“Dear yes. Isn’t he too funny?”
“Yes,” said Mamie gloomily. “He IS funny. But had you ever met him before?”
“Dear no!”
“Oh!”—and Mamie’s tone might have meant many things.
Lady Wantridge however, after all, easily overlooked it. “I only knew he was one of your odd Americans. That’s why, when I heard yesterday here that he was up there awaiting your return, I didn’t let that prevent me. I thought he might be. He certainly,” her ladyship laughed, “IS.”
“Yes, he’s very American,” Mamie went on in the same way.
“As you say, we ARE fond of you! Good-bye,” said Lady Wantridge.
But Mamie had not half done with her. She felt more and more—or she hoped at least—that she looked strange. She WAS, no doubt, if it came to that, strange. “Lady Wantridge,” she almost convulsively broke out, “I don’t know whether you’ll understand me, but I seem to feel that I must act with you—I don’t know what to call it!—responsibly. He IS my brother.”
“Surely—and why not?” Lady Wantridge stared. “He’s the image of you!”
“Thank you!”—and Mamie was stranger than ever.
“Oh he’s good-looking. He’s handsome, my dear. Oddly—but distinctly!” Her ladyship was for treating it much as a joke.
But Mamie, all sombre, would have none of this. She boldly gave him up. “I think he’s awful.”
“He is indeed—delightfully. And where DO you get your ways of saying things? It isn’t anything—and the things aren’t anything. But it’s so droll.”
“Don’t let yourself, all the same,” Mamie consistently pursued, “be carried away by it. The thing can’t be done—simply.”
Lady Wantridge wondered. “‘Done simply’?”
“Done at all.”
“But what can’t be?”
“Why, what you might think—from his pleasantness. What he spoke of your doing for him.”
Lady Wantridge recalled. “Forgiving him?”
“He asked you if you couldn’t. But you can’t. It’s too dreadful for me, as so near a relation, to have, loyally—loyally to YOU—to say it. But he’s impossible.”
It was so portentously produced that her ladyship had somehow to meet it. “What’s the matter with him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then what’s the matter with YOU?” Lady Wantridge inquired.
“It’s because I WON’T know,” Mamie—not without dignity—explained.
“Then I won’t either.”
“Precisely. Don’t. It’s something,” Mamie pursued, with some inconsequence, “that—somewhere or other, at some time or other—he appears to have done. Something that has made a difference in his life.”
“‘Something’?” Lady Wantridge echoed again. “What kind of thing?”
Mamie looked up at the light above the door, through which the London sky was doubly dim. “I haven’t the least idea.”
“Then what kind of difference?”
Mamie’s gaze was still at the light. “The difference you see.”
Lady Wantridge, rather obligingly, seemed to ask herself what she saw. “But I don’t see any! It seems, at least,” she added, “such an amusing one! And he has such nice eyes.”
“Oh DEAR eyes!” Mamie conceded; but with too much sadness, for the moment, about the connexions of the subject, to say more.
It almost forced her companion after an instant to proceed. “Do you mean he can’t go home?”
She weighed her responsibility. “I only make out—more’s the pity!—that he doesn’t.”
“Is it then something too terrible—?”
She thought again. “I don’t know what—for men—IS too terrible.”
“Well then as you don’t know what ‘is’ for women either—good-bye!” her visitor laughed.
It practically wound up the interview; which, however, terminating thus on a considerable stir of the air, was to give Miss Cutter for several days the sense of being much blown about. The degree to which, to begin with, she had been drawn—or perhaps rather pushed- -closer to Scott was marked in the brief colloquy that she on her friend’s departure had with him. He had immediately said it. “You’ll see if she doesn’t ask me down!”
“So soon?”
“Oh I’ve known them at places—at Cannes, at Pau, at Shanghai—do it sooner still. I always know when they will. You CAN’T make out they don’t love me!” He spoke almost plaintively, as if he wished she could.
“Then I don’t see why it hasn’t done you more good.”
“Why Mamie,” he patiently reasoned, “what more good COULD it? As I tell you,” he explained, “it has just been my life.”
“Then why do you come to me for money?”
“Oh they don’t give me THAT!” Scott returned.
“So that it only means then, after all, that I, at the best, must keep you up?”
He fixed on her the nice eyes Lady Wantridge admired. “Do you mean to tell me that already—at this very moment—I’m not distinctly keeping you?”
She gave him back his look. “Wait till she HAS asked you,
and then,” Mamie added, “decline.”
Scott, not too grossly, wondered. “As acting for YOU?”
Mamie’s next injunction was answer enough. “But BEFORE—yes— call.”
He took it in. “Call—but decline. Good!”
“The rest,” she said, “I leave to you.” And she left it in fact with such confidence that for a couple of days she was not only conscious of no need to give Mrs. Medwin another turn of the screw, but positively evaded, in her fortitude, the reappearance of that lady. It was not till the fourth day that she waited upon her, finding her, as she had expected, tense.
“Lady Wantridge WILL—?”
“Yes, though she says she won’t.”
“She says she won’t? O-oh!” Mrs. Medwin moaned.
“Sit tight all the same. I HAVE her!”
“But how?”
“Through Scott—whom she wants.”
“Your bad brother!” Mrs. Medwin stared. “What does she want of him?”
“To amuse them at Catchmore. Anything for that. And he WOULD. But he shan’t!” Mamie declared. “He shan’t go unless she comes. She must meet you first—you’re my condition.”
“O-o-oh!” Mrs. Medwin’s tone was a wonder of hope and fear. “But doesn’t he want to go?”
“He wants what I want. She draws the line at YOU. I draw the line at HIM.”
“But SHE—doesn’t she mind that he’s bad?”
It was so artless that Mamie laughed. “No—it doesn’t touch her. Besides, perhaps he isn’t. It isn’t as for you—people seem not to know. He has settled everything, at all events, by going to see her. It’s before her that he’s the thing she’ll have to have.”
“Have to?”
“For Sundays in the country. A feature—THE feature.”
“So she has asked him?”
“Yes—and he has declined.”
“For ME?” Mrs. Medwin panted.
“For me,” said Mamie on the door-step. “But I don’t leave him for long.” Her hansom had waited. “She’ll come.”
Lady Wantridge did come. She met in South Audley Street, on the fourteenth, at tea, the ladies whom Mamie had named to her, together with three or four others, and it was rather a master- stroke for Miss Cutter that if Mrs. Medwin was modestly present Scott Homer was as markedly not. This occasion, however, is a medal that would take rare casting, as would also, for that matter, even the minor light and shade, the lower relief, of the pecuniary transaction that Mrs. Medwin’s flushed gratitude scarce awaited the dispersal of the company munificently to complete. A new understanding indeed on the spot rebounded from it, the conception of which, in Mamie’s mind, had promptly bloomed. “He shan’t go now unless he takes you.” Then, as her fancy always moved quicker for her client than her client’s own—”Down with him to Catchmore! When he goes to amuse them YOU,” she serenely developed, “shall amuse them too.” Mrs. Medwin’s response was again rather oddly divided, but she was sufficiently intelligible when it came to meeting the hint that this latter provision would represent success to the tune of a separate fee. “Say,” Mamie had suggested, “the same.”
“Very well; the same.”
The knowledge that it was to be the same had perhaps something to do also with the obliging spirit in which Scott eventually went. It was all at the last rather hurried—a party rapidly got together for the Grand Duke, who was in England but for the hour, who had good-naturedly proposed himself, and who liked his parties small, intimate and funny. This one was of the smallest and was finally judged to conform neither too little nor too much to the other conditions—after a brief whirlwind of wires and counterwires, and an iterated waiting of hansoms at various doors—to include Mrs. Medwin. It was from Catchmore itself that, snatching, a moment—on the wondrous Sunday afternoon, this lady had the harmonious thought of sending the new cheque. She was in bliss enough, but her scribble none the less intimated that it was Scott who amused them most. He WAS the feature.
The Tragic Muse
PREFACE
I profess a certain vagueness of remembrance in respect to the origin and growth of The Tragic Muse, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly again, beginning January 1889 and running on, inordinately, several months beyond its proper twelve. If it be ever of interest and profit to put one’s finger on the productive germ of a work of art, and if in fact a lucid account of any such work involves that prime identification, I can but look on the present fiction as a poor fatherless and motherless, a sort of unregistered and unacknowledged birth. I fail to recover my precious first moment of consciousness of the idea to which it was to give form; to recognise in it—as I like to do in general—the effect of some particular sharp impression or concussion. I call such remembered glimmers always precious, because without them comes no clear vision of what one may have intended, and without that vision no straight measure of what one may have succeeded in doing. What I make out from furthest back is that I must have had from still further back, must in fact practically have always had, the happy thought of some dramatic picture of the “artist-life” and of the difficult terms on which it is at the best secured and enjoyed, the general question of its having to be not altogether easily paid for. To “do something about art”—art, that is, as a human complication and a social stumbling-block—must have been for me early a good deal of a nursed intention, the conflict between art and “the world” striking me thus betimes as one of the half-dozen great primary motives. I remember even having taken for granted with this fond inveteracy that no one of these pregnant themes was likely to prove under the test more full of matter. This being the case, meanwhile, what would all experience have done but enrich one’s conviction?—since if, on the one hand, I had gained a more and more intimate view of the nature of art and the conditions therewith imposed, so the world was a conception that clearly required, and that would for ever continue to take, any amount of filling-in. The happy and fruitful truth, at all events, was that there was opposition—why there should be was another matter—and that the opposition would beget an infinity of situations. What had doubtless occurred in fact, moreover, was that just this question of the essence and the reasons of the opposition had shown itself to demand the light of experience; so that to the growth of experience, truly, the treatment of the subject had yielded. It had waited for that advantage.
Yet I continue to see experience giving me its jog mainly in the form of an invitation from the gentle editor of the Atlantic, the late Thomas Bailey Aldrich, to contribute to his pages a serial that should run through the year. That friendly appeal becomes thus the most definite statement I can make of the “genesis” of the book; though from the moment of its reaching me everything else in the matter seems to live again. What lives not least, to be quite candid, is the fact that I was to see this production make a virtual end, for the time, as by its sinister effect—though for reasons still obscure to me—of the pleasant old custom of the “running” of the novel. Not for many years was I to feel the practice, for my benefit, confidingly revive. The influence of The Tragic Muse was thus exactly other than what I had all earnestly (if of course privately enough) invoked for it, and I remember well the particular chill, at last, of the sense of my having launched it in a great grey void from which no echo or message whatever would come back. None, in the event, ever came, and as I now read the book over I find the circumstance make, in its name, for a special tenderness of charity; even for that finer consideration hanging in the parental breast about the maimed or slighted, the disfigured or defeated, the unlucky or unlikely child—with this hapless small mortal thought of further as somehow “compromising.” I am thus able to take the thing as having quite wittingly and undisturbedly existed for itself alone, and to liken it to some aromatic bag of gathered herbs of which the string has never been loosed; or, better still, to some jar of potpourri, shaped and overfigured and polished, but of which the lid, never lifted, has provided for the intense accumulation of the fragrance within. The consistent, t
he sustained, preserved tone of The Tragic Muse, its constant and doubtless rather fine-drawn truth to its particular sought pitch and accent, are, critically speaking, its principal merit—the inner harmony that I perhaps presumptuously permit myself to compare to an unevaporated scent.
After which indeed I may well be summoned to say what I mean, in such a business, by an appreciable “tone” and how I can justify my claim to it—a demonstration that will await us later. Suffice it just here that I find the latent historic clue in my hand again with the easy recall of my prompt grasp of such a chance to make a story about art. There was my subject this time—all mature with having long waited, and with the blest dignity that my original perception of its value was quite lost in the mists of youth. I must long have carried in my head the notion of a young man who should amid difficulty—the difficulties being the story—have abandoned “public life” for the zealous pursuit of some supposedly minor craft; just as, evidently, there had hovered before me some possible picture (but all comic and ironic) of one of the most salient London “social” passions, the unappeasable curiosity for the things of the theatre; for every one of them, that is, except the drama itself, and for the “personality” of the performer (almost any performer quite sufficiently serving) in particular. This latter, verily, had struck me as an aspect appealing mainly to satiric treatment; the only adequate or effective treatment, I had again and again felt, for most of the distinctively social aspects of London: the general artlessly histrionised air of things caused so many examples to spring from behind any hedge. What came up, however, at once, for my own stretched canvas, was that it would have to be ample, give me really space to turn round, and that a single illustrative case might easily be meagre fare. The young man who should “chuck” admired politics, and of course some other admired object with them, would be all very well; but he wouldn’t be enough—therefore what should one say to some other young man who would chuck something and somebody else, admired in their way too?