by Henry James
They quivered, clearly, they hummed and drummed, they leaped and bounded in Mrs. Stringham’s typical organism—this lady striking him as before all things excited, as, in the native phrase, keyed-up, to a perception of more elements in the occasion than he was himself able to count. She was accessible to sides of it, he imagined, that were as yet obscure to him; for, though she unmistakeably rejoiced and soared, he none the less saw her at moments as even more agitated than pleasure required. It was a state of emotion in her that could scarce represent simply an impatience to report at home. Her little dry New England brightness—he had “sampled” all the shades of the American complexity, if complexity it were—had its actual reasons for finding relief most in silence; so that before the subject was changed he perceived (with surprise at the others) that they had given her enough of it. He had quite had enough of it himself by the time he was asked if it were true that their friend had really not made in her own country the mark she had chalked so large in London. It was Mrs. Lowder herself who addressed him that enquiry; while he scarce knew if he were the more impressed with her launching it under Mrs. Stringham’s nose or with her hope that he would allow to London the honour of discovery. The less expansive of the white waistcoats propounded the theory that they saw in London—for all that was said—much further than in the States: it wouldn’t be the first time, he urged, that they had taught the Americans to appreciate (especially when it was funny) some native product. He didn’t mean that Miss Theale was funny—though she was weird, and this was precisely her magic; but it might very well be that New York, in having her to show, hadn’t been aware of its luck. There WERE plenty of people who were nothing over there and yet were awfully taken up in England; just as—to make the balance right, thank goodness—they sometimes sent out beauties and celebrities who left the Briton cold. The Briton’s temperature in truth wasn’t to be calculated—a formulation of the matter that was not reached, however, without producing in Mrs. Stringham a final feverish sally. She announced that if the point of view for a proper admiration of her young friend HAD seemed to fail a little in New York, there was no manner of doubt of her having carried Boston by storm. It pointed the moral that Boston, for the finer taste, left New York nowhere; and the good lady, as the exponent of this doctrine—which she set forth at a certain length— made, obviously, to Densher’s mind, her nearest approach to supplying the weirdness in which Milly’s absence had left them deficient. She made it indeed effective for him by suddenly addressing him. “You know nothing, sir—but not the least little bit—about my friend.”
He hadn’t pretended he did, but there was a purity of reproach in Mrs. Stringham’s face and tone, a purity charged apparently with solemn meanings; so that for a little, small as had been his claim, he couldn’t but feel that she exaggerated. He wondered what she did mean, but while doing so he defended himself. “I certainly don’t know enormously much—beyond her having been most kind to me, in New York, as a poor bewildered and newly landed alien, and my having tremendously appreciated it.” To which he added, he scarce knew why, what had an immediate success. “Remember, Mrs. Stringham, that you weren’t then present.”
“Ah there you are!” said Kate with much gay expression, though what it expressed he failed at the time to make out.
“You weren’t present THEN, dearest,” Mrs. Lowder richly concurred. “You don’t know,” she continued with mellow gaiety, “how far things may have gone.”
It made the little woman, he could see, really lose her head. She had more things in that head than any of them in any other; unless perhaps it were Kate, whom he felt as indirectly watching him during this foolish passage, though it pleased him—and because of the foolishness—not to meet her eyes. He met Mrs. Stringham’s, which affected him: with her he could on occasion clear it up—a sense produced by the mute communion between them and really the beginning, as the event was to show, of something extraordinary. It was even already a little the effect of this communion that Mrs. Stringham perceptibly faltered in her retort to Mrs. Lowder’s joke. “Oh it’s precisely my point that Mr. Densher CAN’T have had vast opportunities.” And then she smiled at him. “I wasn’t away, you know, long.”
It made everything, in the oddest way in the world, immediately right for him. “And I wasn’t THERE long, either.” He positively saw with it that nothing for him, so far as she was concerned, would again be wrong. “She’s beautiful, but I don’t say she’s easy to know.”
“Ah she’s a thousand and one things!” replied the good lady, as if now to keep well with him.
He asked nothing better. “She was off with you to these parts before I knew it. I myself was off too—away off to wonderful parts, where I had endlessly more to see.”
“But you didn’t forget her!” Aunt Maud interposed with almost menacing archness.
“No, of course I didn’t forget her. One doesn’t forget such charming impressions. But I never,” he lucidly maintained, “chattered to others about her.”
“She’ll thank you for that, sir,” said Mrs. Stringham with a flushed firmness.
“Yet doesn’t silence in such a case,” Aunt Maud blandly enquired, “very often quite prove the depth of the impression?”
He would have been amused, hadn’t he been slightly displeased, at all they seemed desirous to fasten on him. “Well, the impression was as deep as you like. But I really want Miss Theale to know,” he pursued for Mrs. Stringham, “that I don’t figure by any consent of my own as an authority about her.”
Kate came to his assistance—if assistance it was—before their friend had had time to meet this charge. “You’re right about her not being easy to know. One SEES her with intensity—sees her more than one sees almost any one; but then one discovers that that isn’t knowing her and that one may know better a person whom one doesn’t ‘see,’ as I say, half so much.”
The discrimination was interesting, but it brought them back to the fact of her success; and it was at that comparatively gross circumstance, now so fully placed before them, that Milly’s anxious companion sat and looked—looked very much as some spectator in an old-time circus might have watched the oddity of a Christian maiden, in the arena, mildly, caressingly, martyred. It was the nosing and fumbling not of lions and tigers but of domestic animals let loose as for the joke. Even the joke made Mrs. Stringham uneasy, and her mute communion with Densher, to which we have alluded, was more and more determined by it. He wondered afterwards if Kate had made this out; though it was not indeed till much later on that he found himself, in thought, dividing the things she might have been conscious of from the things she must have missed. If she actually missed, at any rate, Mrs. Stringham’s discomfort, that but showed how her own idea held her. Her own idea was, by insisting on the fact of the girl’s prominence as a feature of the season’s end, to keep Densher in relation, for the rest of them, both to present and to past. “It’s everything that has happened SINCE that makes you naturally a little shy about her. You don’t know what has happened since, but we do; we’ve seen it and followed it; we’ve a little been OF it.” The great thing for him, at this, as Kate gave it, WAS in fact quite irresistibly that the case was a real one—the kind of thing that, when one’s patience was shorter than one’s curiosity, one had vaguely taken for possible in London, but in which one had never been even to this small extent concerned. The little American’s sudden social adventure, her happy and, no doubt, harmless flourish, had probably been favoured by several accidents, but it had been favoured above all by the simple spring-board of the scene, by one of those common caprices of the numberless foolish flock, gregarious movements as inscrutable as ocean-currents. The huddled herd had drifted to her blindly—it might as blindly have drifted away. There had been of course a signal, but the great reason was probably the absence at the moment of a larger lion. The bigger beast would come and the smaller would then incontinently vanish. It was at all events characteristic, and what was of the essence of it was grist to his scribb
ling mill, matter for his journalising hand. That hand already, in intention, played over it, the “motive,” as a sign of the season, a feature of the time, of the purely expeditious and rough-and-tumble nature of the social boom. The boom as in ITSELF required—that would be the note; the subject of the process a comparatively minor question. Anything was boomable enough when nothing else was more so: the author of the “rotten” book, the beauty who was no beauty, the heiress who was only that, the stranger who was for the most part saved from being inconveniently strange but by being inconveniently familiar, the American whose Americanism had been long desperately discounted, the creature in fine as to whom spangles or spots of any sufficiently marked and exhibited sort could be loudly enough predicated.
So he judged at least, within his limits, and the idea that what he had thus caught in the fact was the trick of fashion and the tone of society went so far as to make him take up again his sense of independence. He had supposed himself civilised; but if this was civilisation—! One could smoke one’s pipe outside when twaddle was within. He had rather avoided, as we have remarked, Kate’s eyes, but there came a moment when he would fairly have liked to put it across the table, to her: “I say, light of my life, is THIS the great world?” There came another, it must be added—and doubtless as a result of something that, over the cloth, did hang between them—when she struck him as having quite answered: “Dear no—for what do you take me? Not the least little bit: only a poor silly, though quite harmless, imitation.” What she might have passed for saying, however, was practically merged in what she did say, for she came overtly to his aid, very much as if guessing some of his thoughts. She enunciated, to relieve his bewilderment, the obvious truth that you couldn’t leave London for three months at that time of the year and come back to find your friends just where they were. As they had OF COURSE been jigging away they might well be so red in the face that you wouldn’t know them. She reconciled in fine his disclaimer about Milly with that honour of having discovered her which it was vain for him modestly to shirk. He HAD unearthed her, but it was they, all of them together, who had developed her. She was always a charmer, one of the greatest ever seen, but she wasn’t the person he had “backed.”
Densher was to feel sure afterwards that Kate had had in these pleasantries no conscious, above all no insolent purpose of making light of poor Susan Shepherd’s property in their young friend—which property, by such remarks, was very much pushed to the wall; but he was also to know that Mrs. Stringham had secretly resented them, Mrs. Stringham holding the opinion, of which he was ultimately to have a glimpse, that all the Kate Croys in Christendom were but dust for the feet of her Milly. That, it was true, would be what she must reveal only when driven to her last entrenchments and well cornered in her passion—the rare passion of friendship, the sole passion of her little life save the one other, more imperturbably cerebral, that she entertained for the art of Guy de Maupassant. She slipped in the observation that her Milly was incapable of change, was just exactly, on the contrary, the same Milly; but this made little difference in the drift of Kate’s contention. She was perfectly kind to Susie: it was as if she positively knew her as handicapped for any disagreement by feeling that she, Kate, had “type,” and by being committed to admiration of type. Kate had occasion subsequently—she found it somehow—to mention to our young man Milly’s having spoken to her of this view on the good lady’s part. She would like—Milly had had it from her—to put Kate Croy in a book and see what she could so do with her. “Chop me up fine or serve me whole”—it was a way of being got at that Kate professed she dreaded. It would be Mrs. Stringham’s, however, she understood, because Mrs. Stringham, oddly, felt that with such stuff as the strange English girl was made of, stuff that (in spite of Maud Manningham, who was full of sentiment) she had never known, there was none other to be employed. These things were of later evidence, yet Densher might even then have felt them in the air. They were practically in it already when Kate, waiving the question of her friend’s chemical change, wound up with the comparatively unobjectionable proposition that he must now, having missed so much, take them all up, on trust, further on. He met it peacefully, a little perhaps as an example to Mrs. Stringham—”Oh as far on as you like!” This even had its effect: Mrs. Stringham appropriated as much of it as might be meant for herself. The nice thing about her was that she could measure how much; so that by the time dinner was over they had really covered ground.
Book Sixth, Chapter 4
The younger of the other men, it afterwards appeared, was most in his element at the piano; so that they had coffee and comic songs upstairs—the gentlemen, temporarily relinquished, submitting easily in this interest to Mrs. Lowder’s parting injunction not to sit too tight. Our especial young man sat tighter when restored to the drawing-room; he made it out perfectly with Kate that they might, off and on, foregather without offence. He had perhaps stronger needs in this general respect than she; but she had better names for the scant risks to which she consented. It was the blessing of a big house that intervals were large and, of an August night, that windows were open; whereby, at a given moment, on the wide balcony, with the songs sufficiently sung, Aunt Maud could hold her little court more freshly. Densher and Kate, during these moments, occupied side by side a small sofa—a luxury formulated by the latter as the proof, under criticism, of their remarkably good conscience. “To seem not to know each other—once you’re here—would be,” the girl said, “to overdo it”; and she arranged it charmingly that they MUST have some passage to put Aunt Maud off the scent. She would be wondering otherwise what in the world they found their account in. For Densher, none the less, the profit of snatched moments, snatched contacts, was partial and poor; there were in particular at present more things in his mind than he could bring out while watching the windows. It was true, on the other hand, that she suddenly met most of them—and more than he could see on the spot—by coming out for him with a reference to Milly that was not in the key of those made at dinner. “She’s not a bit right, you know. I mean in health. Just see her to-night. I mean it looks grave. For you she would have come, you know, if it had been at all possible.”
He took this in such patience as he could muster. “What in the world’s the matter with her?”
But Kate continued without saying. “Unless indeed your being here has been just a reason for her funking it.”
“What in the world’s the matter with her?” Densher asked again.
“Why just what I’ve told you—that she likes you so much.”
“Then why should she deny herself the joy of meeting me?”
Kate cast about—it would take so long to explain. “And perhaps it’s true that she IS bad. She easily may be.”
“Quite easily, I should say, judging by Mrs. Stringham, who’s visibly preoccupied and worried.”
“Visibly enough. Yet it mayn’t,” said Kate, “be only for that.”
“For what then?”
But this question too, on thinking, she neglected. “Why, if it’s anything real, doesn’t that poor lady go home? She’d be anxious, and she has done all she need to be civil.”
“I think,” Densher remarked, “she has been quite beautifully civil.”
It made Kate, he fancied, look at him the least bit harder; but she was already, in a manner, explaining. “Her preoccupation is probably on two different heads. One of them would make her hurry back, but the other makes her stay. She’s commissioned to tell Milly all about you.”
“Well then,” said the young man between a laugh and a sigh, “I’m glad I felt, downstairs, a kind of ‘drawing’ to her. Wasn’t I rather decent to her?”
“Awfully nice. You’ve instincts, you fiend. It’s all,” Kate declared, “as it should be.”
“Except perhaps,” he after a moment cynically suggested, “that she isn’t getting much good of me now. Will she report to Milly on THIS?” And then as Kate seemed to wonder what “this” might be: “On our present disrega
rd for appearances.”
“Ah leave appearances to me!” She spoke in her high way. “I’ll make them all right. Aunt Maud, moreover,” she added, “has her so engaged that she won’t notice.” Densher felt, with this, that his companion had indeed perceptive flights he couldn’t hope to match—had for instance another when she still subjoined: “And Mrs. Stringham’s appearing to respond just in order to make that impression.”