The Wings of the Dove

by Henry James

  “Haven’t you thought then,” his daughter asked, “of what I speak of? I mean of my being ready.”

  Standing before her with his hands behind him and his legs a little apart, he swayed slightly to and fro, inclined toward her as if rising on his toes. It had an effect of conscientious deliberation. “No—I haven’t. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.” It was so respectable a show that she felt afresh, and with the memory of their old despair, the despair at home, how little, his appearance ever by any chance told about him. His plausibility had been the heaviest of her mother’s crosses; inevitably so much more present to the world than whatever it was that was horrid—thank God they didn’t really know!—that he had done. He had positively been, in his way, by the force of his particular type, a terrible husband not to live with; this type reflecting so invidiously on the woman who had found him distasteful. Had this thereby not kept directly present to Kate herself that it might, on some sides, prove no light thing for her to leave uncompanion’d a parent with such a face and such a manner? Yet if there was much she neither knew nor dreamed of it passed between them at this very moment that he was quite familiar with himself as the subject of such quandaries. If he recognised his younger daughter’s happy aspect as a tangible value, he had from the first still more exactly appraised every point of his own. The great wonder was not that in spite of everything these points had helped him; the great wonder was that they hadn’t helped him more. However, it was, to its eternal recurrent tune, helping him all the while; her drop into patience with him showed how it was helping him at this moment. She saw the next instant precisely the line he would take. “Do you really ask me to believe you’ve been making up your mind to that?”

  She had to consider her own line. “I don’t think I care, papa, what you believe. I never, for that matter, think of you as believing anything; hardly more,” she permitted herself to add, “than I ever think of you as yourself believed. I don’t know you, father, you see.”

  “And it’s your idea that you may make that up?”

  “Oh dear, no; not at all. That’s no part of the question. If I haven’t understood you by this time I never shall, and it doesn’t matter. It has seemed to me you may be lived with, but not that you may be understood. Of course I’ve not the least idea how you get on.”

  “I don’t get on,” Mr. Croy almost gaily replied.

  His daughter took the place in again, and it might well have seemed odd that with so little to meet the eye there should be so much to show. What showed was the ugliness—so positive and palpable that it was somehow sustaining. It was a medium, a setting, and to that extent, after all, a dreadful sign of life; so that it fairly gave point to her answer. “Oh I beg your pardon. You flourish.”

  “Do you throw it up at me again,” he pleasantly put to her, “that I’ve not made away with myself?”

  She treated the question as needing no reply; she sat there for real things. “You know how all our anxieties, under mamma’s will, have Come out. She had still less to leave than she feared. We don’t know how we lived. It all makes up about two hundred a year for Marian, and two for me, but I give up a hundred to Marian.”

  “Oh you weak thing!” her father sighed as from depths of enlightened experience.

  “For you and me together,” she went on, “the other hundred would do something.”

  “And what would do the rest?”

  “Can you yourself do nothing?”

  He gave her a look; then, slipping his hands into his pockets and turning away, stood for a little at the window she had left open. She said nothing more—she had placed him there with that question, and the silence lasted a minute, broken by the call of an appealing costermonger, which came in with the mild March air, with the shabby sunshine, fearfully unbecoming to the room, and with the small homely hum of Chirk Street. Presently he moved nearer, but as if her question had quite dropped. “I don’t see what has so suddenly wound you up.”

  “I should have thought you might perhaps guess. Let me at any rate tell you. Aunt Maud has made me a proposal. But she has also made me a condition. She wants to keep me.”

  “And what in the world else could she possibly want?”

  “Oh I don’t know—many things. I’m not so precious a capture,” the girl a little dryly explained. “No one has ever wanted to keep me before.”

  Looking always what was proper, her father looked now still more surprised than interested. “You’ve not had proposals?” He spoke as if that were incredible of Lionel Croy’s daughter; as if indeed such an admission scarce consorted, even in filial intimacy, with her high spirit and general form.

  “Not from rich relations. She’s extremely kind to me, but it’s time, she says, that we should understand each other.”

  Mr. Croy fully assented. “Of course it is—high time; and I can quite imagine what she means by it.”

  “Are you very sure?”

  “Oh perfectly. She means that she’ll ‘do’ for you handsomely if you’ll break off all relations with me. You speak of her condition. Her condition’s of course that.”

  “Well then,” said Kate, “it’s what has wound me up. Here I am.”

  He showed with a gesture how thoroughly he had taken it in; after which, within a few seconds, he had quite congruously turned the situation about. “Do you really suppose me in a position to justify your throwing yourself upon me?”

  She waited a little, but when she spoke it was clear. “Yes.”

  “Well then, you’re of feebler intelligence than I should have ventured to suppose you.”

  “Why so? You live. You flourish. You bloom.”

  “Ah how you’ve all always hated me!” he murmured with a pensive gaze again at the window.

  “No one could be less of a mere cherished memory,” she declared as if she had not heard him. “You’re an actual person, if there ever was one. We agreed just now that you’re beautiful. You strike me, you know, as—in your own way—much more firm on your feet than I. Don’t put it to me therefore as monstrous that the fact that we’re after all parent and child should at present in some manner count for us. My idea has been that it should have some effect for each of us. I don’t at all, as I told you just now,” she pursued, “make out your life; but whatever it is I hereby offer to accept it. And, on my side, I’ll do everything I can for you.”

  “I see,” said Lionel Croy. Then with the sound of extreme relevance: “And what can you?” She only, at this, hesitated, and he took up her silence. “You can describe yourself—to yourself—as, in a fine flight, giving up your aunt for me; but what good, I should like to know, would your fine flight do me?” As she still said nothing he developed a little. “We’re not possessed of so much, at this charming pass, please to remember, as that we can afford not to take hold of any perch held out to us. I like the way you talk, my dear, about ”giving up“! One doesn’t give up the use of a spoon because one’s reduced to living on broth. And your spoon, that is your aunt, please consider, is partly mine as well.” She rose now, as if in sight of the term of her effort, in sight of the futility and the weariness of many things, and moved back to the poor little glass with which she had communed before. She retouched here again the poise of her hat, and this brought to her father’s lips another remark—in which impatience, however, had already been replaced by a free flare of appreciation. “Oh you’re all right! Don’t muddle yourself up with me!”

  His daughter turned round to him. “The condition Aunt Maud makes is that I shall have absolutely nothing to do with you; never see you, nor speak nor write to you, never go near you nor make you a sign, nor hold any sort of communication with you. What she requires is that you shall simply cease to exist for me.”

  He had always seemed—it was one of the marks of what they called the “unspeakable” in him—to walk a little more on his toes, as if for jauntiness, under the touch of offence. Nothing, however, was more wonderful than what he sometimes would take for offence, unless it might be wha
t he sometimes wouldn’t. He walked at any rate on his toes now. “A very proper requirement of your Aunt Maud, my dear—I don’t hesitate to say it!” Yet as this, much as she had seen, left her silent at first from what might have been a sense of sickness, he had time to go on: “That’s her condition then. But what are her promises? Just what does she engage to do? You must work it, you know.”

  “You mean make her feel,” Kate asked after a moment, “how much I’m attached to you?”

  “Well, what a cruel invidious treaty it is for you to sign. I’m a poor ruin of an old dad to make a stand about giving up—I quite agree. But I’m not, after all, quite the old ruin not to get something for giving up.”

  “Oh I think her idea,” said Kate almost gaily now, “is that I shall get a great deal.”

  He met her with his inimitable amenity. “But does she give you the items?”

  The girl went through the show. “More or less, I think. But many of them are things I dare say I may take for granted—things women can do for each other and that you wouldn’t understand.”

  “There’s nothing I understand so well, always, as the things I needn’t! But what I want to do, you see,” he went on, “is to put it to your conscience that you’ve an admirable opportunity; and that it’s moreover one for which, after all, damn you, you’ve really to thank me.”

  “I confess I don’t see,” Kate observed, “what my ‘conscience’ has to do with it.”

  “Then, my dear girl, you ought simply to be ashamed of yourself. Do you know what you’re a proof of, all you hard hollow people together?” He put the question with a charming air of sudden spiritual heat. “Of the deplorably superficial morality of the age. The family sentiment, in our vulgarised brutalised life, has gone utterly to pot. There was a day when a man like me—by which I mean a parent like me—would have been for a daughter like you quite a distinct value; what’s called in the business world, I believe, an ‘asset.’ ”4 He continued sociably to make it out. “I’m not talking only of what you might, with the right feeling, do for me, but of what you might—it’s what I call your opportunity—do with me. Unless indeed,” he the next moment imperturbably threw off, “they come a good deal to the same thing. Your duty as well as your chance, if you’re capable of seeing it, is to use me. Show family feeling by seeing what I’m good for. If you had it as I have it you’d see I’m still good—well, for a lot of things. There’s in fact, my dear,” Mr. Croy wound up, “a coach-and-foure to be got out of me.” His lapse, or rather his climax, failed a little of effect indeed through an undue precipitation of memory. Something his daughter had said came back to him. “You’ve settled to give away half your little inheritance?”

  Her hesitation broke into laughter. “No—I haven’t ‘settled’ anything.”

  “But you mean practically to let Marian collar it?” They stood there face to face, but she so denied herself to his challenge that he could only go on. “You’ve a view of three hundred a year for her in addition to what her husband left her with? Is that,” the remote progenitor of such wantonness audibly wondered, “your morality?”

  Kate found her answer without trouble. “Is it your idea that I should give you everything?”

  The “everything” clearly struck him—to the point even of determining the tone of his reply. “Far from it. How can you ask that when I refuse what you tell me you came to offer? Make of my idea what you can; I think I’ve sufficiently expressed it, and it’s at any rate to take or to leave. It’s the only one, I may nevertheless add; it’s the basket with all my eggs. It’s my conception, in short, of your duty.”

  The girl’s tired smile watched the word as if it had taken on a small grotesque visibility. “You’re wonderful on such subjects! I think I should leave you in no doubt,” she pursued, “that if I were to sign my aunt’s agreement I should carry it out, in honour, to the letter.”

  “Rather, my own love! It’s just your honour that I appeal to. The only way to play the game is to play it. There’s no limit to what your aunt can do for you.”

  “Do you mean in the way of marrying me?”

  “What else should I mean? Marry properly—”

  “And then?” Kate asked as he hung fire.

  “And then—well, I will talk with you. I’ll resume relations.”

  She looked about her and picked up her parasol. “Because you’re not so afraid of any one else in the world as you are of her? My husband, if I should marry, would be at the worst less of a terror? If that’s what you mean there may be something in it. But doesn’t it depend a little also on what you mean by my getting a proper one? However,” Kate added as she picked out the frill of her little umbrella, “I don’t suppose your idea of him is quite that he should persuade you to live with us.”

  “Dear no—not a bit.” He spoke as not resenting either the fear or the hope she imputed; met both imputations in fact with a sort of intellectual relief. “I place the case for you wholly in your aunt’s hands. I take her view with my eyes shut; I accept in all confidence any man she selects. If he’s good enough for her-elephantine snob as she is—he’s good enough for me; and quite in spite of the fact that she’ll be sure to select one who can be trusted to be nasty to me. My only interest is in your doing what she wants. You shan’t be so beastly poor, my darling,” Mr. Croy declared, “if I can help it.”

  “Well then good-bye, papa,” the girl said after a reflexion on this that had perceptibly ended for her in a renunciation of further debate. “Of course you understand that it may be for long.”

  Her companion had hereupon one of his finest inspirations. “Why not frankly for ever? You must do me the justice to see that I don’t do things, that I’ve never done them, by halves—that if I offer you to efface myself it’s for the final fatal sponge I ask, well saturated and well applied.”

  She turned her handsome quiet face upon him at such length that it might indeed have been for the last time. “I don’t know what you’re like.”

  “No more do I, my dear. I’ve spent my life in trying in vain to discover. Like nothing—mere’s the pity. If there had been many of us and we could have found each other out there’s no knowing what we mightn’t have done. But it doesn’t matter now. Good-bye, love.” He looked even not sure of what she would wish him to suppose on the subject of a kiss, yet also not embarrassed by his uncertainty.

  She forbore in fact for a moment longer to clear it up. “I wish there were some one here who might serve—for any contingency—as a witness that I have put it to you that I’m ready to come.”

  “Would you like me,” her father asked, “to call the landlady?”

  “You may not believe me,” she pursued, “but I came really hoping you might have found some way. I’m very sorry at all events to leave you unwell.” He turned away from her on this and, as he had done before, took refuge, by the window, in a stare at the street. “Let me put it—unfortunately without a witness,” she added after a moment, “that there’s only one word you really need speak.”

  When he took these words up it was still with his back to her. “If I don’t strike you as having already spoken it our time has been singularly wasted.”

  “I’ll engage with you in respect to my aunt exactly to what she wants of me in respect to you. She wants me to choose. Very well, I will choose. I’ll wash my hands of her for you to just that tune.”

  He at last brought himself round. “Do you know, dear, you make me sick? I’ve tried to be clear, and it isn’t fair.”

  But she passed this over; she was too visibly sincere. “Father!”

  “I don’t quite see what’s the matter with you,” he said, “and if you can’t pull yourself together I’ll—upon my honour—take you in hand. Put you into a cab and deliver you again safe at Lancaster Gale”f

  She was really absent, distant. “Father.”

  It was too much, and he met it sharply. “Well?”

  “Strange as it may be to you to hear me say it, there’s a good yo
u can do me and a help you can render.”

  “Isn’t it then exactly what I’ve been trying to make yon feel?”

  “Yes,” she answered patiently, “but so in the wrong way. I’m perfectly honest in what I say, and I know what I’m talking about, It isn’t that I’ll pretend I could have believed a month ago in anything to call aid or support from you. The case is changed—that’s what has happened; my difficulty is a new one. But even now it’s not a question of anything I should ask you in a way to ‘do.’ It’s simply a question of your not turning me away—taking yourself out of my life. II’s simply a question of your saying: ‘Yes then, since you will, we’ll stand together. We won’t worry in advance about how or where; we’ll have a faith and find a way.’ That’s all- that would be the good you’d do me. I should have you, and it would be for my benefit. Do you see?”

  If he didn’t it wasn’t for want of looking at her hard. “The matter with you is that you’re in love, and that your aunt knows and—for reasons, I’m sure, perfect—hates and opposes it. Well she may! It’s a matter in which I trust her with my eyes shut. Go, please.” Though he spoke not in anger—rather in infinite sadness—he fairly turned her out. Before she took it up he had, as the fullest expression of what he felt, opened the door of the room. He had fairly, in his deep disapproval, a generous compassion to spare. “I’m sorry for her; deluded woman, if she builds on you.”

  Kate stood a moment in the draught. “She’s not the person I pity most, for, deluded in many ways though she may be, she’s not the person who’s most so. I mean,” she explained, “if it’s a question of what you call building on me.”

  He took it as if what she meant might be other than her description c)f it. “You’re deceiving two persons then, Mrs. Lowder and somebody else?”

  She shook her head with detachment. “I’ve no intention of that sort with respect to any one now—to Mrs. Lowder least of all. If you fail me”—she seemed to make it out for herself—“that has the merit at least that it simplifies. I shall go my way—as I see my way.”