by Henry James
“Yes, it’s a cruel honour to pay them.”
“Cruel—that’s too much,” he objected.
“I mean it’s one you shouldn’t confer on those you like, for when it’s over it’s over: it kills your interest in them. After you’ve finished them you don’t like them any more at all.”
“Surely I like you,” Nick returned, sitting tilted back before his picture with his hands in his pockets.
“We’ve done very well: it’s something not to have quarrelled”—and she smiled at him now, seeming more “in” it. “I wouldn’t have had you slight your work—I wouldn’t have had you do it badly. But there’s no fear of that for you,” she went on. “You’re the real thing and the rare bird. I haven’t lived with you this way without seeing that: you’re the sincere artist so much more than I. No, no, don’t protest,” she added with one of her sudden, fine transitions to a deeper tone. “You’ll do things that will hand on your name when my screeching is happily over. Only you do seem to me, I confess, rather high and dry here—I speak from the point of view of your comfort and of my personal interest in you. You strike me as kind of lonely, as the Americans say—rather cut off and isolated in your grandeur. Haven’t you any confrères—fellow-artists and people of that sort? Don’t they come near you?”
“I don’t know them much,” Nick humbly confessed. “I’ve always been afraid of them, and how can they take me seriously?”
“Well, I‘ve got confrères, and sometimes I wish I hadn’t! But does your sister never come near you any more,” she asked, “or is it only the fear of meeting me?”
He was aware of his mother’s theory that Biddy was constantly bundled home from Rosedale Road at the approach of improper persons: she was as angry at this as if she wouldn’t have been more so had her child suffered exposure; but the explanation he gave his present visitor was nearer the truth. He reminded her that he had already told her—he had been careful to do this, so as not to let it appear she was avoided—that his sister was now most of the time in the country, staying with an hospitable relation.
“Oh yes,” the girl rejoined to this, “with Mr. Sherringham’s sister, Mrs.—what’s her name? I always forget.” And when he had pronounced the word with a reluctance he doubtless failed sufficiently to conceal—he hated to talk of Julia by any name and didn’t know what business Miriam had with her—she went on: “That’s the one—the beauty, the wonderful beauty. I shall never forget how handsome she looked the day she found me here. I don’t in the least resemble her, but I should like to have a try at that type some day in a comedy of manners. But who the devil will write me a comedy of manners? There it is! The danger would be, no doubt, that I should push her à la charge.”
Nick listened to these remarks in silence, saying to himself that if she should have the bad taste—which she seemed trembling on the brink of—to make an allusion to what had passed between the lady in question and himself he should dislike her beyond remedy. It would show him she was a coarse creature after all. Her good genius interposed, however, as against this hard penalty, and she quickly, for the moment at least, whisked away from the topic, demanding, since they spoke of comrades and visitors, what had become of Gabriel Nash, whom she hadn’t heard of for so many days.
“I think he’s tired of me,” said Nick; “he hasn’t been near me either. But after all it’s natural—he has seen me through.”
“Seen you through? Do you mean,” she laughed, “seen through you? Why you’ve only just begun.”
“Precisely, and at bottom he doesn’t like to see me begin. He’s afraid I shall do something.”
She wondered—as with the interest of that. “Do you mean he’s jealous?”
“Not in the least, for from the moment one does anything one ceases to compete with him. It leaves him the field more clear. But that’s just the discomfort for him—he feels, as you said just now, kind of lonely: he feels rather abandoned and even, I think, a little betrayed. So far from being jealous he yearns for me and regrets me. The only thing he really takes seriously is to speculate and understand, to talk about the reasons and the essence of things: the people who do that are the highest. The applications, the consequences, the vulgar little effects, belong to a lower plane, for which one must doubtless be tolerant and indulgent, but which is after all an affair of comparative accidents and trifles. Indeed he’ll probably tell me frankly the next time I see him that he can’t but feel that to come down to small questions of action—to the small prudences and compromises and simplifications of practice—is for the superior person really a fatal descent. One may be inoffensive and even commendable after it, but one can scarcely pretend to be interesting. ‘Il en faut comme ça,’ but one doesn’t haunt them. He’ll do his best for me; he’ll come back again, but he’ll come back sad, and finally he’ll fade away altogether. Hell go off to Granada or somewhere.”
“The simplifications of practice?” cried Miriam. “Why they’re just precisely the most blessed things on earth. What should we do without them?”
“What indeed?” Nick echoed. “But if we need them it’s because we’re not superior persons. We’re awful Philistines.”
“I’ll be one with you,” the girl smiled. “Poor Nash isn’t worth talking about. What was it but a small question of action when he preached to you, as I know he did, to give up your seat?”
“Yes, he has a weakness for giving up—he’ll go with you as far as that. But I’m not giving up any more, you see. I’m pegging away, and that’s gross.”
“He’s an idiot—n’en parlons plus!” she dropped, gathering up her parasol but lingering.
“Ah I stick to him,” Nick said. “He helped me at a difficult time.”
“You ought to be ashamed to confess it.”
“Oh you are a Philistine!” Nick returned.
“Certainly I am,” she declared, going toward the door—”if it makes me one to be sorry, awfully sorry and even rather angry, that I haven’t before me a period of the same sort of unsociable pegging away that you have. For want of it I shall never really be good. However, if you don’t tell people I’ve said so they’ll never know. Your conditions are far better than mine and far more respectable: you can do as many things as you like in patient obscurity while I’m pitchforked into the mêlée and into the most improbable fame—all on the back of a solitary cheval de bataille, a poor broken-winded screw. I read it clear that I shall be condemned for the greater part of the rest of my days—do you see that?—to play the stuff I’m acting now. I’m studying Juliet and I want awfully to do her, but really I’m mortally afraid lest, making a success of her, I should find myself in such a box. Perhaps the brutes would want Juliet for ever instead of my present part. You see amid what delightful alternatives one moves. What I long for most I never shall have had—five quiet years of hard all-round work in a perfect company, with a manager more perfect still, playing five hundred things and never being heard of at all. I may be too particular, but that’s what I should have liked. I think I’m disgusting with my successful crudities. It’s discouraging; it makes one not care much what happens. What’s the use, in such an age, of being good?”
“Good? Your haughty claim,” Nick laughed, “is that you’re bad.”
“I mean good, you know—there are other ways. Don’t be stupid.” And Miriam tapped him—he was near her at the door—with her parasol.
“I scarcely know what to say to you,” he logically pleaded, “for certainly it’s your fault if you get on so fast.”
“I’m too clever—I’m a humbug.”
“That’s the way I used to be,” said Nick.
She rested her brave eyes on him, then turned them over the room slowly; after which she attached them again, kindly, musingly—rather as if he had been a fine view or an interesting object—to his face. “Ah, the pride of that—the sense of purification! He ‘used’ to be forsooth! Poor me! Of course you’ll say, ‘Look at the sort of thing I’ve undertaken to produce compared with the rot you have.’ S
o it’s all right. Become great in the proper way and don’t expose me.” She glanced back once more at the studio as if to leave it for ever, and gave another last look at the unfinished canvas on the easel. She shook her head sadly, “Poor Mr. Sherringham—with that!” she wailed.
“Oh I’ll finish it—it will be very decent,” Nick said.
“Finish it by yourself?”
“Not necessarily. You’ll come back and sit when you return to London.”
“Never, never, never again.”
He wondered. “Why you’ve made me the most profuse offers and promises.”
“Yes, but they were made in ignorance and I’ve backed out of them. I’m capricious too—faites la part de ça. I see it wouldn’t do—I didn’t know it then. We’re too far apart—I am, as you say, a Philistine.” And as he protested with vehemence against this unscrupulous bad faith she added: “You’ll find other models. Paint Gabriel Nash.”
“Gabriel Nash—as a substitute for you?”
“It will be a good way to get rid of him. Paint Mrs. Dallow too,” Miriam went on as she passed out of the door he had opened for her—”paint Mrs. Dallow if you wish to eradicate the last possibility of a throb.”
It was strange that, since only a moment before he had been in a state of mind to which the superfluity of this reference would have been the clearest thing about it, he should now have been moved to receive it quickly, naturally, irreflectively, receive it with the question: “The last possibility? Do you mean in her or in me?”
“Oh in you. I don’t know anything about ‘her.’”
“But that wouldn’t be the effect,” he argued with the same supervening candour. “I believe that if she were to sit to me the usual law would be reversed.”
“The usual law?”
“Which you cited a while since and of which I recognised the general truth. In the case you speak of,” he said, “I should probably make a shocking picture.”
“And fall in love with her again? Then for God’s sake risk the daub!” Miriam laughed out as she floated away to her victoria.
XLIX
She had guessed happily in saying to him that to offer to paint Gabriel Nash would be the way to get rid of that visitant. It was with no such invidious purpose indeed that our young man proposed to his intermittent friend to sit; rather, as August was dusty in the London streets, he had too little hope that Nash would remain in town at such a time to oblige him. Nick had no wish to get rid of his private philosopher; he liked his philosophy, and though of course premeditated paradox was the light to read him by he yet had frequently and incidentally an inspired unexpectedness. He remained in Rosedale Road the man who most produced by his presence the effect of company. All the other men of Nick’s acquaintance, all his political friends, represented, often very communicatively, their own affairs, their own affairs alone; which when they did it well was the most their host could ask of them. But Nash had the rare distinction that he seemed somehow to figure his affairs, the said host’s, and to show an interest in them unaffected by the ordinary social limitations of capacity. This relegated him to the class of high luxuries, and Nick was well aware that we hold our luxuries by a fitful and precarious tenure. If a friend without personal eagerness was one of the greatest of these it would be evident to the simplest mind that by the law of distribution of earthly boons such a convenience should be expected to forfeit in duration what it displayed in intensity. He had never been without a suspicion that Nash was too good to last, though for that matter nothing had yet confirmed a vague apprehension that his particular manner of breaking up or breaking down would be by his wishing to put so fresh a recruit in relation with other disciples.
That would practically amount to a catastrophe, Nick felt; for it was odd that one could both have a great kindness for him and not in the least, when it came to the point, yearn for a view of his personal extensions. His originality had always been that he appeared to have none; and if in the first instance he had introduced his bright, young, political prodigy to Miriam and her mother, that was an exception for which Peter Sherringham’s interference had been mainly responsible. All the same, however, it was some time before Nick ceased to view it as perhaps on the awkward books that, to complete his education as it were, Gabriel would wish him to converse a little with spirits formed by a like tonic discipline. Nick had an instinct, in which there was no consciousness of detriment to Nash, that the pupils, possibly even the imitators, of such a genius would be, as he mentally phrased it, something awful. He could be sure, even Gabriel himself could be sure, of his own reservations, but how could either of them be sure of those of others? Imitation is a fortunate homage only in proportion as it rests on measurements, and there was an indefinable something in Nash’s doctrine that would have been discredited by exaggeration or by zeal. Providence happily appeared to have spared it this ordeal; so that Nick had after months still to remind himself how his friend had never pressed on his attention the least little group of fellow-mystics, never offered to produce them for his edification. It scarcely mattered now that he was just the man to whom the superficial would attribute that sort of tail: it would probably have been hard, for example, to persuade Lady Agnes or Julia Dallow or Peter Sherringham that he was not most at home in some dusky, untidy, dimly-imagined suburb of “culture,” a region peopled by unpleasant phrasemongers who thought him a gentleman and who had no human use but to be held up in the comic press—which was, moreover, probably restrained by decorum from touching upon the worst of their aberrations.
Nick at any rate never ran his academy to earth nor so much as skirted the suburb in question; never caught from the impenetrable background of his life the least reverberation of flitting or of flirting, the fainting esthetic ululation. There had been moments when he was even moved to anxiety by the silence that poor Gabriel’s own faculty of sound made all about him—when at least it reduced to plainer elements (the mere bald terms of lonely singleness and thrift, of the lean philosophic life) the mystery he could never wholly dissociate from him, the air as of the transient and occasional, the likeness to curling vapour or murmuring wind or shifting light. It was, for instance, a symbol of this unclassified state, the lack of all position as a name in cited lists, that Nick in point of fact had no idea where he lived, would not have known how to go and see him or send him a doctor if he had heard he was ill. He had never walked with him to any door of Gabriel’s own, even to pause at the threshold, though indeed Nash had a club, the Anonymous, in some improbable square, of which he might be suspected of being the only member—one had never heard of another—where it was vaguely understood letters would some day or other find him. Fortunately he pressed with no sharpness the spring of pity—his whole “form” was so easy a grasp of the helm of consciousness, which he would never let go. He would never consent to any deformity, but would steer his course straight through the eventual narrow pass and simply go down over the horizon.
He in any case turned up Rosedale Road one day after Miriam had left London; he had just come back from a fortnight in Brittany, where he had drawn refreshment from the tragic sweetness of—well, of everything. He was on his way somewhere else—was going abroad for the autumn but was not particular what he did, professing that he had come back just to get Nick utterly off his mind. “It’s very nice, it’s very nice; yes, yes, I see,” he remarked, giving a little, general, assenting sigh as his eyes wandered over the simple scene—a sigh which for a suspicious ear would have testified to an insidious reaction.
Nick’s ear, as we know, was already suspicious; a fact accounting for the expectant smile—it indicated the pleasant apprehension of a theory confirmed—with which he returned: “Do you mean my pictures are nice?”
“Yes, yes, your pictures and the whole thing.”
“The whole thing?”
“Your existence in this little, remote, independent corner of the great city. The disinterestedness of your attitude, the persistence of your effort, the piety, t
he beauty, in short the edification, of the whole spectacle.”
Nick laughed a little ruefully. “How near to having had enough of me you must be when you speak of me as edifying!” Nash changed colour slightly at this; it was the first time in his friend’s remembrance that he had given a sign of embarrassment. “Vous allez me lâcher, I see it coming; and who can blame you?—for I’ve ceased to be in the least spectacular. I had my little hour; it was a great deal, for some people don’t even have that. I’ve given you your curious case and I’ve been generous; I made the drama last for you as long as I could. You’ll ‘slope,’ my dear fellow—you’ll quietly slope; and it will be all right and inevitable, though I shall miss you greatly at first. Who knows whether without you I shouldn’t still have been ‘representing’ Harsh, heaven help me? You rescued me; you converted me from a representative into an example—that’s a shade better. But don’t I know where you must be when you’re reduced to praising my piety?”
“Don’t turn me away,” said Nash plaintively; “give me a cigarette.”
“I shall never dream of turning you away; I shall cherish you till the latest possible hour. I’m only trying to keep myself in tune with the logic of things. The proof of how I cling is that precisely I want you to sit to me.”