The Wings of the Dove

by Henry James

  “You speak,” Densher observed, “as if she were a vulture.”

  “Call it an eagle—with a gilded beak as well, and with wings for great flights. If she’s a thing of the air, in short—say at once a great seamed silk balloon—I never myself got into her car. I was her choice.”

  It had really, her sketch of the affair, a high colour and a great style; at all of which he gazed a minute as at a picture by a master. “What she must see in you!”

  “Wonders!” And, speaking it loud, she stood straight up. “Everything. There it is.”

  Yes, there it was, and as she remained before him he continued to face it. “So that what you mean is that I’m to do my part in somehow squaring her?”

  “See her, see her,” Kate said with impatience.

  “And grovel to her?”

  “Ah do what you like!” And she walked in her impatience away.

  —II—

  His eyes had followed her at this time quite long enough, before he overtook her, to make out more than ever in the poise of her head, the pride of her step—he didn’t know what best to call it—a part at least of Mrs. Lowder’s reasons. He consciously winced while he figured his presenting himself as a reason opposed to these; though at the same moment, with the source of Aunt Maud’s inspiration thus before him, he was prepared to conform, by almost any abject attitude or profitable compromise, to his companion’s easy injunction. He would do as she liked—his own liking might come off as it would. He would help her to the utmost of his power; for, all the rest of this day and the next, her easy injunction, tossed off that way as she turned her beautiful back, was like the crack of a great whip in the blue air, the high element in which Mrs. Lowder hung. He wouldn’t grovel perhaps—he wasn’t quite ready for that; but he would be patient, ridiculous, reasonable, unreasonable, and above all deeply diplomatic. He would be clever with all his cleverness—which he now shook hard, as he sometimes shook his poor dear shabby old watch, to start it up again. It wasn’t, thank goodness, as if there weren’t plenty of that “factor” (to use one of his great newspaper-words), and with what they could muster between them it would be little to the credit of their star, however pale, that defeat and surrender—surrender so early, so immediate—should have to ensue. It was not indeed that he thought of that disaster as at the worst a direct sacrifice of their possibilities: he imaged it—which was enough—as some proved vanity, some exposed fatuity in the idea of bringing Mrs. Lowder round. When shortly afterwards, in this lady’s vast drawing-room-the apartments at Lancaster Gate had struck him from the first as of prodigious extent—he awaited her, at her request, conveyed in a “reply-paid” telegram, his theory was that of their still clinging to their idea, though with a sense of the difficulty of it really enlarged to the scale of the place.

  He had the place for a long time—it seemed to him a quarter of an hour—to himself; and while Aunt Maud kept him and kept him, while observation and reflexion crowded on him, he asked himself what was to be expected of a person who could treat one like that.7 The visit, the hour were of her own proposing, so that her delay, no doubt, was but part of a general plan of putting him to inconvenience. As he walked to and fro, however, taking in the message of her massive florid furniture, the immense expression of her signs and symbols, he had as little doubt of the inconvenience he was prepared to suffer. He found himself even facing the thought that he had nothing to fall back on, and that that was as great an humiliation in a good cause as a proud man could desire. It hadn’t yet been so distinct to him that he made no show—literally not the smallest; so complete a show seemed made there all about him; so almost abnormally affirmative, so aggressively erect, were the huge heavy objects that syllabled his hostess’s story. “When all’s said and done, you know, she’s colossally vulgar”—he had once all but noted that of her to her niece; only just keeping it back at the last, keeping it to himself with all its danger about it. It mattered because it bore so directly, and he at all events quite felt it a thing that Kate herself would some day bring out to him. It bore directly at present, and really all the more that somehow, strangely, it didn’t in the least characterise the poor woman as dull or stale. She was vulgar with freshness, almost with beauty, since there was beauty, to a degree, in the play of so big and bold a temperament. She was in fine quite the largest possible quantity to deal with; and he was in the cage of the lioness without his whip—the whip, in a word, of a supply of proper retorts. He had no retort but that he loved the girl—which in such a house as that was painfully cheap. Kate had mentioned to him more than once that her aunt was Passionate, speaking of it as a kind of offset and uttering it as with a capital P, marking it as something that he might, that he in fact ought to, turn about in some way to their advantage. He wondered at this hour to what advantage he could turn it; but the case grew less simple the longer he waited. Decidedly there was something he hadn’t enough of.

  His slow march to and fro seemed to give him the very measure; as he paced and paced the distance it became the desert of his poverty; at the sight of which expanse moreover he could pretend to himself as little as before that the desert looked redeemable. Lancaster Gate looked rich—that was all the effect; which it was unthinkable that any state of his own should ever remotely resemble. He read more vividly, more critically, as has been hinted, the appearances about him; and they did nothing so much as make him wonder at his aesthetic reaction. He hadn’t known—and in spite of Kate’s repeated reference to her own rebellions of taste—that he should “mind” so much how an independent lady might decorate her house. It was the language of the house itself that spoke to him, writing out for him with surpassing breadth and freedom the associations and conceptions, the ideals and possibilities of the mistress. Never, he felt sure, had he seen so many things so unanimously ugly—operatively, ominously so cruel. He was glad to have found this last name for the whole character; “cruel” somehow played into the subject for an article—an article that his impression put straight into his mind. He would write about the heavy horrors that could still flourish, that lifted their undiminished heads, in an age so proud of its short way with false gods; and it would be funny if what he should have got from Mrs. Lowder were to prove after all but a small amount of copy. Yet the great thing, really the dark thing, was that, even while he thought of the quick column he might add up, he felt it less easy to laugh at the heavy horrors than to quail before them. He couldn’t describe and dismiss them collectively, call them either Mid-Victorian or Early—not being certain they were rangeable under one rubric. It was only manifest they were splendid and were furthermore conclusively British. They constituted an order and abounded in rare material—precious woods, metals, stuffs, stones. He had never dreamed of anything so fringed and scalloped, so buttoned and corded, drawn everywhere so tight and curled everywhere so thick. He had never dreamed of so much gilt and glass, so much satin and plush, so much rosewood and marble and malachite. But it was above all the solid forms, the wasted finish, the misguided cost, the general attestation of morality and money, a good conscience and a big balance. These things finally represented for him a portentous negation of his own world of thought—of which, for that matter, in presence of them, he became as for the first time hopelessly aware. They revealed it to him by their merciless difference.

  His interview with Aunt Maud, none the less, took by no means the turn he had expected. Passionate though her nature, no doubt, Mrs. Lowder on this occasion neither threatened nor appealed. Her arms of aggression, her weapons of defence, were presumably close at hand, but she left them untouched and unmentioned, and was in fact so bland that he properly perceived only afterwards how adroit she had been. He properly perceived something else as well, which complicated his case; he shouldn’t have known what to call it if he hadn’t called it her really imprudent good nature. Her blandness, in other words, wasn’t mere policy—he wasn’t dangerous enough for policy: it was the result, he could see, of her fairly liking him a little. From t
he moment she did that she herself became more interesting, and who knew what might happen should he take to liking her? Well, it was a risk he naturally must face. She fought him at any rate but with one hand, with a few loose grains of stray powder. He recognised at the end of ten minutes, and even without her explaining it, that if she had made him wait it hadn’t been to wound him; they had by that time almost directly met on the fact of her intention. She had wanted him to think for himself of what she proposed to say to him—not having otherwise announced it; wanted to let it come home to him on the spot, as she had shrewdly believed it would. Her first question, on appearing, had practically been as to whether he hadn’t taken her hint, and this enquiry assumed so many things that it immediately made discussion frank and large. He knew, with the question put, that the hint was just what he had taken; knew that she had made him quickly forgive her the display of her power; knew that if he didn’t take care he should understand her, and the strength of her purpose, to say nothing of that of her imagination, nothing of the length of her purse, only too well. Yet he pulled himself up with the thought too that he wasn’t going to be afraid of understanding her; he was just going to understand and understand without detriment to the feeblest, even, of his passions. The play of one’s mind gave one away, at the best, dreadfully, in action, in the need for action, where simplicity was all; but when one couldn’t prevent it the thing was to make it complete. There would never be mistakes but for the original fun of mistakes. What he must use his fatal intelligence for was to resist. Mrs. Lowder meanwhile might use it for whatever she liked.

  It was after she had begun her statement of her own idea about Kate that he began on his side to reflect that—with her manner of offering it as really sufficient if he would take the trouble to embrace it—she couldn’t half hate him. That was all, positively, she seemed to show herself for the time as attempting; clearly, if she did her intention justice she would have nothing more disagreeable to do. “If I hadn’t been ready to go very much further, you understand, I wouldn’t have gone so far. I don’t care what you repeat to her—the more you repeat to her perhaps the better; and at any rate there’s nothing she doesn’t already know. I don’t say it for her; I say it for you—when I want to reach my niece I know how to do it straight.” So Aunt Maud delivered herself—as with homely benevolence, in the simplest but the clearest terms; virtually conveying that, though a word to the wise was doubtless, in spite of the adage, not always enough, a word to the good could never fail to be. The sense our young man read into her words was that she liked him because he was good—was really by her measure good enough: good enough that is to give up her niece for her and go his way in peace. But was he good enough—by his own measure? He fairly wondered, while she more fully expressed herself, if it might be his doom to prove so. “She’s the finest possible creature—of course you flatter yourself you know it. But I know it quite as well as you possibly can—by which I mean a good deal better yet; and the tune to which I’m ready to prove my faith compares favourably enough, I think, with anything you can do. I don’t say it because she’s my niece—that’s nothing to me: I might have had fifty nieces, and I wouldn’t have brought one of them to this place if I hadn’t found her to my taste. I don’t say I wouldn’t have done something else, but I wouldn’t have put up with her presence. Kate’s presence, by good fortune, I marked early. Kate’s presence—unluckily for you—is everything I could possibly wish. Kate’s presence is, in short, as fine as you know, and I’ve been keeping it for the comfort of my declining years. I’ve watched it long; I’ve been saving it up and letting it, as you say of investments, appreciate; and you may judge whether, now it has begun to pay so, I’m likely to consent to treat for it with any but a high bidder. I can do the best with her, and I’ve my idea of the best.”

  “Oh I quite conceive,” said Densher, “that your idea of the best isn’t me.”

  It was an oddity of Mrs. Lowder’s that her face in speech was like a lighted window at night, but that silence immediately drew the curtain. The occasion for reply allowed by her silence was never easy to take, yet she was still less easy to interrupt. The great glaze of her surface, at all events, gave her visitor no present help. “I didn’t ask you to come to hear what it isn’t—I asked you to come to hear what it is.”

  “Of course,” Densher laughed, “that’s very great indeed.”

  His hostess went on as if his contribution to the subject were barely relevant. “I want to see her high, high up—high up and in the light.”

  “Ah you naturally want to marry her to a duke and are eager to smooth away any hitch.”

  She gave him so, on this, the mere effect of the drawn blind that it quite forced him at first into the sense, possibly just, of his having shown for flippant, perhaps even for low. He had been looked at so, in blighted moments of presumptuous youth, by big cold public men, but never, so far as he could recall, by any private lady. More than anything yet it gave him the measure of his companion’s subtlety, and thereby of Kate’s possible career. “Don’t be too impossible!”—he feared from his friend, for a moment, some such answer as that; and then felt, as she spoke otherwise, as if she were letting him off easily. “I want her to marry a great man.” That was all; but, more and more, it was enough; and if it hadn’t been her next words would have made it so. “And I think of her what I think. There you are.”

  They sat for a little face to face upon it, and he was conscious of something deeper still, of something she wished him to understand if he only would. To that extent she did appeal—appealed to the intelligence she desired to show she believed him to possess. He was meanwhile, at all events, not the man wholly to fail of comprehension. “Of course I’m aware how little I can answer to any fond proud dream. You’ve a view—a grand one; into which I perfectly enter. I thoroughly understand what I’m not, and I’m much obliged to you for not reminding me of it in any rougher way.” She said nothing—she kept that up; it might even have been to let him go further, if he was capable of it, in the way of poorness of spirit. It was one of those cases in which a man couldn’t show, if he showed at all, save for poor; unless indeed he preferred to show for asinine. It was the plain truth: he was-on Mrs. Lowder’s basis, the only one in question—a very small quantity, and he did know, damnably, what made quantities large. He desired to be perfectly simple, yet in the midst of that effort a deeper apprehension throbbed. Aunt Maud clearly conveyed it, though he couldn’t later on have said how. “You don’t really matter, I believe, so much as you think, and I’m not going to make you a martyr by banishing you. Your performances with Kate in the Park are ridiculous so far as they’re meant as consideration for me; and I had much rather see you myself—since you‘re, in your way, my dear young man, delightful—and arrange with you, count with you, as I easily, as I perfectly should. Do you suppose me so stupid as to quarrel with you if it’s not really necessary? It won’t—it would be too absurd!—be necessary. I can bite your head off any day, any day I really open my mouth; and I’m dealing with you now, see—and successfully judge—without opening it. I do things handsomely all round—I place you in the presence of the plan with which, from the moment it’s a case of taking you seriously, you’re incompatible. Come then as near as you like, walk all round it—don’t be afraid you’ll hurt it!—and live on with it before you.”

  He afterwards felt that if she hadn’t absolutely phrased all this it was because she so soon made him out as going with her far enough. He was so pleasantly affected by her asking no promise of him, her not proposing he should pay for her indulgence by his word of honour not to interfere, that he gave her a kind of general assurance of esteem. Immediately afterwards then he was to speak of these things to Kate, and what by that time came back to him first of all was the way he had said to her—he mentioned it to the girl—very much as one of a pair of lovers says in a rupture by mutual consent: “I hope immensely of course that you’ll always regard me as a friend.” This had perhaps been going
far—he submitted it all to Kate; but really there had been so much in it that it was to be looked at, as they might say, wholly in its own light. Other things than those we have presented had come up before the close of his scene with Aunt Maud, but this matter of her not treating him as a peril of the first order easily predominated. There was moreover plenty to talk about on the occasion of his subsequent passage with our young woman, it having been put to him abruptly, the night before, that he might give himself a lift and do his newspaper a service—so flatteringly was the case expressed—by going for fifteen or twenty weeks to America. The idea of a series of letters from the United States from the strictly social point of view had for some time been nursed in the inner sanctuary at whose door he sat, and the moment was now deemed happy for letting it loose. The imprisoned thought had, in a word, on the opening of the door, flown straight out into Densher’s face, or perched at least on his shoulder, making him look up in surprise from his mere inky office-table. His account of the matter to Kate was that he couldn’t refuse—not being in a position as yet to refuse anything; but that his being chosen for such an errand confounded his sense of proportion. He was definite as to his scarce knowing how to measure the honour, which struck him as equivocal; he hadn’t quite supposed himself the man for the class of job. This confused consciousness, he intimated, he had promptly enough betrayed to his manager; with the effect, however, of seeing the question surprisingly clear up. What it came to was that the sort of twaddle that wasn’t in his chords was, unexpectedly, just what they happened this time not to want. They wanted his letters, for queer reasons, about as good as he could let them come; he was to play his own little tune and not be afraid; that was the whole point.

  It would have been the whole, that is, had there not been a sharper one still in the circumstance that he was to start at once. His mission, as they called it at the office, would probably be over by the end of June, which was desirable; but to bring that about he must now not lose a week; his enquiries, he understood, were to cover the whole ground, and there were reasons of state—reasons operating at the seat of empire in Fleet Street—why the nail should be struck on the head. Densher made no secret to Kate of his having asked for a day to decide; and his account of that matter was that he felt he owed it to her to speak to her first. She assured him on this that nothing so much as that scruple had yet shown her how they were bound together: she was clearly proud of his letting a thing of such importance depend on her, but she was clearer still as to his instant duty. She rejoiced in his prospect and urged him to his task; she should miss him too dreadfully—of course she should miss him; but she made so little of it that she spoke with jubilation of what he would see and would do. She made so much of this last quantity that he laughed at her innocence, though also with scarce the heart to give her the real size of his drop in the daily bucket. He was struck at the same time with her happy grasp of what had really occurred in Fleet Street—all the more that it was his own final reading. He was to pull the subject up—that was just what they wanted; and it would take more than all the United States together, visit them each as he might, to let him down. It was just because he didn’t nose about and babble, because he wasn’t the usual gossip-monger, that they had picked him out. It was a branch of their correspondence with which they evidently wished a new tone associated, such a tone as, from now on, it would have always to take from his example.