by Henry James
His want of means—of means sufficient for any one but himself—was really the great ugliness, and was moreover at no time more ugly for him than when it rose there, as it did seem to rise, all shameless, face to face with the elements in Kate’s life colloquially and conveniently classed by both of them as funny. He sometimes indeed, for that matter, asked himself if these elements were as funny as the innermost fact, so often vivid to him, of his own consciousness—his private inability to believe he should ever be rich. His conviction on this head was in truth quite positive and a thing by itself; he failed, after analysis, to understand it, though he had naturally more lights on it than any one else. He knew how it subsisted in spite of an equal consciousness of his being neither mentally nor physically quite helpless, neither a dunce nor a cripple; he knew it to be absolute, though secret, and also, strange to say, about common undertakings, not discouraging, not prohibitive. Only now was he having to think if it were prohibitive in respect to marriage; only now, for the first time, had he to weigh his case in scales. The scales, as he sat with Kate, often dangled in the line of his vision; he saw them, large and black, while he talked or listened, take, in the bright air, singular positions. Sometimes the right was down and sometimes the left; never a happy equipoiseone or the other always kicking the beam. Thus was kept before him the question of whether it were more ignoble to ask a woman to take her chance with you, or to accept it from your conscience that her chance could be at the best but one of the degrees of privation; whether too, otherwise, marrying for money mightn’t after all be a smaller cause of shame than the mere dread of marrying without. Through these variations of mood and view, nevertheless, the mark on his forehead stood clear; he saw himself remain without whether he married or not. It was a line on which his fancy could be admirably active; the innumerable ways of making money were beautifully present to him; he could have handled them for his newspaper as easily as he handled everything. He was quite aware how he handled everything; it was another mark on his forehead: the pair of smudges from the thumb of fortune, the brand on the passive fleece, dated from the primal hour and kept each other company. He wrote, as for print, with deplorable ease; since there had been nothing to stop him even at the age of ten, so there was as little at twenty; it was part of his fate in the first place and part of the wretched public’s in the second. The innumerable ways of making money were, no doubt, at all events, what his imagination often was busy with after he had tilted his chair and thrown back his head with his hands clasped behind it. What would most have prolonged that attitude, moreover, was the reflexion that the ways were ways only for others. Within the minute now—however this might be—he was aware of a nearer view than he had yet quite had of those circumstances on his companion’s part that made least for simplicity of relation. He saw above all how she saw them herself, for she spoke of them at present with the last frankness, telling him of her visit to her father and giving him, in an account of her subsequent scene with her sister, an instance of how she was perpetually reduced to patching-up, in one way or another, that unfortunate woman’s hopes.
“The tune,” she exclaimed, “to which we’re a failure as a family!” With which he had it all again from her—and this time, as it seemed to him, more than all: the dishonour her father had brought them, his folly and cruelty and wickedness; the wounded state of her mother, abandoned despoiled and helpless, yet, for the management of such a home as remained to them, dreadfully unreasonable too; the extinction of her two young brothers—one, at nineteen, the eldest of the house, by typhoid fever contracted at a poisonous little place, as they had afterwards found out, that they had taken for a summer; the other, the flower of the flock, a middy on the Britannia, dreadfully drowned, and not even by an accident at sea, but by cramp, unrescued, while bathing, too late in the autumn, in a wretched little river during a holiday visit to the home of a shipmate. Then Marian’s unnatural marriage, in itself a kind of spiritless turning of the other cheek to fortune: her actual wretchedness and plaintiveness, her greasy children, her impossible claims, her odious visitors—these things completed the proof of the heaviness, for them all, of the hand of fate. Kate confessedly described them with an excess of impatience; it was much of her charm for Densher that she gave in general that turn to her descriptions, partly as if to amuse him by free and humourous colour, partly—and that charm was the greatest—as if to work off, for her own relief, her constant perception of the incongruity of things. She had seen the general show too early and too sharply, and was so intelligent that she knew it and allowed for that misfortune; therefore when, in talk with him, she was violent and almost unfeminine, it was quite as if they had settled, for intercourse, on the short cut of the fantastic and the happy language of exaggeration. It had come to be definite between them at a primary stage that, if they could have no other straight way, the realm of thought at least was open to them. They could think whatever they liked about whatever they would—in other words they could say it. Saying it for each other, for each other alone, only of course added to the taste. The implication was thereby constant that what they said when not together had no taste for them at all, and nothing could have served more to launch them, at special hours, on their small floating island than such an assumption that they were only making believe everywhere else. Our young man, it must be added, was conscious enough that it was Kate who profited most by this particular play of the fact of intimacy. It always struck him she had more life than he to react from, and when she recounted the dark disasters of her house and glanced at the hard odd offset of her present exaltation—since as exaltation it was apparently to be considered—he felt his own grey domestic annals make little show. It was naturally, in all such reference, the question of her father’s character that engaged him most, but her picture of her adventure in Chirk Streeth gave him a sense of how little as yet that character was clear to him. What was it, to speak plainly, that Mr. Croy had originally done?
“I don’t know—and I don’t want to. I only know that years and years ago—when I was about fifteen—something or other happened that made him impossible. I mean impossible for the world at large first, and then, little by little, for mother. We of course didn’t know it at the time,” Kate explained, “but we knew it later; and it was, oddly enough, my sister who first made out that he had done something. I can hear her now—the way, one cold black Sunday morning when, on account of an extraordinary fog, we hadn’t gone to church, she broke it to me by the school-room fire. I was reading a history-book by the lamp—when we didn’t go to church we had to read history-books-and I suddenly heard her say, out of the fog, which was in the room, and apropos of nothing: ‘Papa has done something wicked.’ And the curious thing was that I believed it on the spot and have believed it ever since, though she could tell me nothing more—neither what was the wickedness, nor how she knew, nor what would happen to him, nor anything else about it. We had our sense always that all sorts of things had happened, were all the while happening, to him; so that when Marian only said she was sure, tremendously sure, that she had made it out for herself, but that that was enough, I took her word for it—it seemed somehow so natural. We were not, however, to ask mother—which made it more natural still, and I said never a word. But mother, strangely enough, spoke of it to me, in time, of her own accord—this was very much later on. He hadn’t been with us for ever so long, but we were used to that. She must have had some fear, some conviction that I had an idea, some idea of her own that it was the best thing to do. She came out as abruptly as Marian had done: ‘If you hear anything against your father—anything I mean except that he’s odious and vile—remember it’s perfectly false.’ That was the way I knew it was true, though I recall my saying to her then that I of course knew it wasn’t. She might have told me it was true, and yet have trusted me to contradict fiercely enough any accusation of him that I should meet—to contradict it much more fiercely and effectively, I think, than she would have done herself. As it happens, however,
” the girl went on, “I’ve never had occasion, and I’ve been conscious of it with a sort of surprise. It has made the world seem at times more decent. No one has so much as breathed to me. That has been a part of the silence, the silence that surrounds him, the silence that, for the world, has washed him out. He doesn’t exist for people. And yet I’m as sure as ever. In fact, though I know no more than I did then, I’m more sure. And that,” she wound up, “is what I sit here and tell you about my own father. If you don’t call it a proof of confidence I don’t know what will satisfy you.”
“It satisfies me beautifully,” Densher returned, “but it doesn‘t, my dear child, very greatly enlighten me. You don’t, you know, really tell me anything. It’s so vague that what am I to think but that you may very well be mistaken? What has he done, if no one can name it?”
“He has done everything.”
“Oh—everything! Everything’s nothing.”
“Well then,” said Kate, “he has done some particular thing. It’s known—only, thank God, not to us. But it has been the end of him. You could doubtless find out with a little trouble. You can ask about.”
Densher for a moment said nothing; but the next moment he made it up. “I wouldn’t find out for the world, and I’d rather lose my tongue than put a question.”
“And yet it’s a part of me,” said Kate.
“A part of you?”
“My father’s dishonour.” Then she sounded for him, but more deeply than ever yet, her note of proud still pessimism. “How can such a thing as that not be the great thing in one’s life?”
She had to take from him again, on this, one of his long looks, and she took it to its deepest, its headiest dregs. “I shall ask you, for the great thing in your life,” he said, “to depend on me a little more.” After which, just debating, “Doesn’t he belong to some club?” he asked.
She had a grave headshake. “He used to—to many.”
“But he has dropped them?”
“They’ve dropped him. Of that I’m sure. It ought to do for you. I offered him,” the girl immediately continued—“and it was for that I went to him—to come and be with him, make a home for him so far as is possible. But he won’t hear of it.”
Densher took this in with marked but generous wonder. “You offered him—‘impossible’ as you describe him to me—to live with him and share his disadvantages?” The young man saw for the moment only the high beauty of it. “You are gallant!”
“Because it strikes you as being brave for him?” She wouldn’t in the least have this. “It wasn’t courage—it was the opposite. I did it to save myself—to escape.”
He had his air, so constant at this stage, as of her giving him finer things than any one to think about. “Escape from what?”
“From everything.”
“Do you by any chance mean from me?”
“No; I spoke to him of you, told him—or what amounted to it—that I would bring you, if he would allow it, with me.”
“But he won’t allow it,” said Densher.
“Won’t hear of it on any terms. He won’t help me, won’t save me, won’t hold out a finger to me,” Kate went on. “He simply wriggles away, in his inimitable manner, and throws me back.”
“Back then, after all, thank goodness,” Densher concurred, “on me”.
But she spoke again as with the sole vision of the whole scene she had evoked. “It’s a pity, because you’d like him. He’s wonderful—he’s charming.” Her companion gave one of the laughs that showed again how inveterately he felt in her tone something that banished the talk of other women, so far as he knew other women, to the dull desert of the conventional, and she had already continued. “He would make himself delightful to you.”
“Even while objecting to me?”
“Well, he likes to please,” the girl explained—“personally. I’ve seen it make him wonderful. He would appreciate you and be clever with you. It’s to me he objects—that is as to my liking you.”
“Heaven be praised then,” cried Densher, “that you like me enough for the objection!”
But she met it after an instant with some inconsequence. “I don’t. I offered to give you up, if necessary, to go to him. But it made no difference, and that’s what I mean,” she pursued, “by his declining me on any terms. The point is, you see, that I don’t escape.”
Densher wondered. “But if you didn’t wish to escape me?”
“I wished to escape Aunt Maud. But he insists that it’s through her and through her only that I may help him; just as Marian insists that it’s through her, and through her only, that I can help her. That’s what I mean,” she again explained, “by their turning me back.”
The young man thought. “Your sister turns you back too?”
“Oh with a push!”
“But have you offered to live with your sister?”
“I would in a moment if she’d have me. That’s all my virtue—a narrow little family feeling. I’ve a small stupid piety—I don’t know what to call it.” Kate bravely stuck to that; she made it out. “Sometimes, alone, I’ve to smother my shrieks when I think of my poor mother. She went through things—they pulled her down; I know what they were now—I didn’t then, for I was a pig; and my position, compared with hers, is an insolence of success. That’s what Marian keeps before me; that’s what papa himself, as I say, so inimitably does. My position’s a value, a great value, for them both”—she followed and followed. Lucid and ironic, she knew no merciful muddle. “It’s the value—the only one they have.”
Everything between our young couple moved today, in spite of their pauses, their margin, to a quicker measure—the quickness of anxiety playing lightning-like in the sultriness. Densher watched, decidedly, as he had never done before. “And the fact you speak of holds you!”
“Of course it holds me. It’s a perpetual sound in my ears. It makes me ask myself if I’ve any right to personal happiness, any right to anything but to be as rich and overflowing, as smart and shining, as I can be made.”
Densher had a pause. “Oh you might by good luck have the personal happiness too.”
Her immediate answer to this was a silence like his own; after which she gave him straight in the face, but quite simply and quietly: “Darling!”
It took him another moment; then he was also quiet and simple. “Will you settle it by our being married tomorrow—as we can, with perfect ease, civilly?”
“Let us wait to arrange it,” Kate presently replied, “till after you’ve seen her.”
“Do you call that adoring me?” Densher demanded.
They were talking, for the time, with the strangest mixture of deliberation and directness, and nothing could have been more in the tone of it than the way she at last said: “You’re afraid of her yourself.”
He gave rather a glazed smile. “For young persons of a great distinction and a very high spirit we’re a caution!”
“Yes,” she took it straight up; “we’re hideously intelligent. But there’s fun in it too. We must get our fun where we can. I think,” she added, and for that matter not without courage, “our relation’s quite beautiful. It’s not a bit vulgar. I cling to some saving romance in things.”
It made him break into a laugh that had more freedom than his smile. “How you must be afraid you’ll chuck me!”
“No, no, that would be vulgar. But of course,” she admitted, “I do see my danger of doing something base.”
“Then what can be so base as sacrificing me?”
“I shan’t sacrifice you. Don’t cry out till you’re hurt. I shall sacrifice nobody and nothing, and that’s just my situation, that I want and that I shall try for everything. That,” she wound up “is how I see myself (and how I see you quite as much) acting for them.”
“For ‘them’?”—and the young man extravagantly marked his coldness. “Thank you!”
“Don’t you care for them?”
“Why should I? What are they to me but a serious nuisance?
” As soon as he had permitted himself this qualification of the unfortunate persons she so perversely cherished he repented of his roughness—and partly because he expected a flash from her. But it was one of her finest sides that she sometimes flashed with a mere mild glow. “I don’t see why you don’t make out a little more that if we avoid stupidity we may do all. We may keep her.”
He stared. “Make her pension us?”
“Well, wait at least till we’ve seen.”
He thought. “Seen what can be got out of her?”
Kate for a moment said nothing. “After all I never asked her; never, when our troubles were at the worst, appealed to her nor went near her. She fixed upon me herself, settled on me with her wonderful gilded claws.”