The Wings of the Dove

by Henry James

  “He’s a dear. I’m to come again.”

  “But what does he say?”

  Milly was almost gay. “That I’m not to worry about anything in the world, and that if I’ll be a good girl and do exactly what he tells me he’ll take care of me for ever and ever.”

  Kate wondered as if things scarce fitted. “But does he allow then that you’re ill?”

  “I don’t know what he allows, and I don’t care. I shall know, and whatever it is it will be enough. He knows all about me, and I like it. I don’t hate it a bit.”

  Still, however, Kate stared. “But could he, in so few minutes, ask you enough—?”

  “He asked me scarcely anything—he doesn’t need to do anything so stupid,” Milly said. “He can tell. He knows,” she repeated; “and when I go back—for he’ll have thought me over a little—it will be all right.”

  Kate after a moment made the best of this. “Then when are we to come?”

  It just pulled her friend up, for even while they talked—at least it was one of the reasons—she stood there suddenly, irrelevantly, in the light of her other identity, the identity she would have for Mr. Densher. This was always, from one instant to another, an incalculable light, which, though it might go off faster than it came on, necessarily disturbed. It sprang, with a perversity all its own, from the fact that, with the lapse of hours and days, the chances themselves that made for his being named continued so oddly to fail. There were twenty, there were fifty, but none of them turned up. This in particular was of course not a juncture at which the least of them would naturally be present; but it would make, none the less, Milly saw, another day practically all stamped with avoidance. She saw in a quick glimmer, and with it all Kate’s unconsciousness; and then she shook off the obsession. But it had lasted long enough to qualify her response. No, she had shown Kate how she trusted her; and that, for loyalty, would somehow do. “Oh, dear thing, now that the ice is broken I shan’t trouble you again.”13 “You’ll come alone?” “Without a scruple. Only I shall ask you, please, for your absolute discretion still.”

  Outside, at a distance from the door, on the wide pavement of the great contiguous square, they had to wait again while their carriage, which Milly had kept, completed a further turn of exercise, engaged in by the coachman for reasons of his own. The footman was there and had indicated that he was making the circuit; so Kate went on while they stood. “But don’t you ask a good deal, darling, in proportion to what you give?”

  This pulled Milly up still shorter—so short in fact that she yielded as soon as she had taken it in. But she continued to smile. “I see. Then you can tell.”

  “I don’t want to ‘tell,’” said Kate. “I’ll be as silent as the tomb if I can only have the truth from you. All I want is that you shouldn’t keep from me how you find out that you really are.”

  “Well then I won’t ever. But you see for yourself,” Milly went on, “how I really am. I’m satisfied. I’m happy.”

  Kate looked at her long. “I believe you like it. The way things turn out for you—!”

  Milly met her look now without a thought of anything but the spoken. She had ceased to be Mr. Densher’s image; she stood for nothing but herself, and she was none the less fine. Still, still, what had passed was a fair bargain and it would do. “Of course I like it. I feel—I can’t otherwise describe it—as if I had been on my knees to the priest. I’ve confessed and I’ve been absolved. It has been lifted off.”

  Kate’s eyes never quitted her. “He must have liked you.”

  “Oh—doctors!” Milly said. “But I hope,” she added, “he didn’t like me too much.” Then as if to escape a little from her friend’s deeper sounding, or as impatient for the carriage, not yet in sight, her eyes, turning away, took in the great stale square. As its staleness, however, was but that of London fairly fatigued, the late hot London with its dance all danced and its story all told, the air seemed a thing of blurred pictures and mixed echoes, and an impression met the sense—an impression that broke the next moment through the girl’s tightened lips. “Oh it’s a beautiful big world, and every one, yes, every one—!” it presently brought her back to Kate, and she hoped she didn’t actually look as much as if she were crying as she must have looked to Lord Mark among the portraits at Matcham.ah

  Kate at all events understood. “Every one wants to be so nice?”

  “So nice,” said the grateful Milly.

  “Oh,” Kate laughed, “we’ll pull you through! And won’t you now bring Mrs. Stringham?”

  But Milly after an instant was again clear about that. “Not till I’ve seen him once more.”

  She was to have found this preference, two days later, abundantly justified; and yet when, in prompt accordance with what had passed between them, she reappeared before her distinguished friend—that character having for him in the interval built itself up still higher—the first thing he asked her was whether she had been accompanied. She told him, on this, straightway, every-thing;completely free at present from her first embarrassment, disposed even-as she felt she might become—to undue volubility, and conscious moreover of no alarm from his thus perhaps wishing she had not come alone. It was exactly as if, in the forty-eight hours that had passed, her acquaintance with him had somehow increased and his own knowledge in particular received mysterious additions. They had been together, before, scarce ten minutes; but the relation, the one the ten minutes had so beautifully created, was there to take straight up: and this not, on his own part, from mere professional heartiness, mere bedside manner, which she would have disliked—much rather from a quiet pleasant air in him of having positively asked about her, asked here and asked there and found out. Of course he couldn’t in the least have asked, or have wanted to; there was no source of information to his hand, and he had really needed none: he had found out simply by his genius—and found out, she meant, literally everything. Now she knew not only that she didn’t dislike this—the state of being found out about; but that on the contrary it was truly what she had come for, and that for the time at least it would give her something firm to stand on. She struck herself as aware, aware as she had never been, of really not having had from the beginning anything firm. It would be strange for the firmness to come, after all, from her learning in these agreeable conditions that she was in some way doomed; but above all it would prove how little she had hitherto had to hold her up. If she was now to be held up by the mere process—since that was perhaps on the cards—of being let down, this would only testify in turn to her queer little history. That sense of loosely rattling had been no process at all; and it was ridiculously true that her thus sitting there to see her life put into the scales represented her first approach to the taste of orderly living. Such was Milly’s romantic version—that her life, especially by the fact of this second interview, was put into the scales; and just the best part of the relation established might have been, for that matter, that the great grave charming man knew, had known at once, that it was romantic, and in that measure allowed for it. Her only doubt, her only fear, was whether he perhaps wouldn’t even take advantage of her being a little romantic to treat her as romantic altogether. This doubtless was her danger with him; but she should see, and dangers in general meanwhile dropped and dropped.

  The very place, at the end of a few minutes, the commodious “handsome” room, far back in the fine old house, soundless from position, somewhat sallow with years of celebrity, somewhat sombre even at midsummer—the very place put on for her a look of custom and use, squared itself solidly round her as with promises and certainties. She had come forth to see the world, and this then was to be the world’s light, the rich dusk of a London “back,” these the world’s walls, those the world’s curtains and carpet. She should be intimate with the great bronze clock and mantel-ornaments, conspicuously presented in gratitude and long ago; she should be as one of the circle of eminent contemporaries, photographed, engraved, signatured, and in particular framed and glazed, who made
up the rest of the decoration, and made up as well so much of the human comfort; and while she thought of all the clean truths, un-fringed, unfingered, that the listening stillness, strained into pauses and waits, would again and again, for years, have kept distinct, she also wondered what she would eventually decide upon to present in gratitude. She would give something better at least than the brawny Victorian bronzes. This was precisely an instance of what she felt he knew of her before he had done with her: that she was secretly romancing at that rate, in the midst of so much else that was more urgent, all over the place. So much for her secrets with him, none of which really required to be phrased. It would have been thoroughly a secret for her from any one else that without a dear lady she had picked up just before coming over she wouldn’t have a decently near connexion of any sort, for such an appeal as she was making, to put forward: no one in the least, as it were, to produce for respectability. But his seeing it she didn’t mind a scrap, and not a scrap either his knowing how she had left the dear lady in the dark. She had come alone, putting her friend off with a fraud: giving a pretext of shops, of a whim, of she didn’t know what—the amusement of being for once in the streets by herself. The streets by herself were new to her—she had always had in them a companion or a maid; and he was never to believe moreover that she couldn’t take full in the face anything he might have to say. He was softly amused at her account of her courage; though he yet showed it somehow without soothing her too grossly. Still, he did want to know whom she had. Hadn’t there been a lady with her on Wednesday?

  “Yes—a different one. Not the one who’s travelling with me. I’ve told her.”

  Distinctly he was amused, and it added to his air—the greatest charm of all—of giving her lots of time. “You’ve told her what?”

  “Well,” said Milly, “that I visit you in secret.”

  “And how many persons will she tell?”

  “Oh she’s devoted. Not one.”

  “Well, if she’s devoted doesn’t that make another friend for you?”

  It didn’t take much computation, but she nevertheless had to think a moment, conscious as she was that he distinctly would want to fill out his notion of her—even a little, as it were, to warm the air for her. That however—and better early than late - he must accept as of no use; and she herself felt for an instant quite a competent certainty on the subject of any such warming. The air, for Milly Theale, was, from the very nature of the case, destined never to rid itself of a considerable chill. This she could tell him with authority, if she could tell him nothing else; and she seemed to see now, in short, that it would importantly simplify. “Yes, it makes another; but they all together wouldn’t make—well, I don’t know what to call it but the difference. I mean when one !s—really alone. I’ve never seen anything like the kindness.” She pulled up a minute while he waited—and waited again as if with his reasons for letting her, for almost making her, talk. What she herself wanted was not, for the third time, to cry, as it were, in public. She had never seen anything like the kindness, and she wished to do it justice; but she knew what she was about, and justice was not wronged by her being able presently to stick to her point. “Only one’s situation is what it is. It’s me it concerns. The rest is delightful and useless. Nobody can really help. That’s why I’m by myself to-day. I want to be—in spite of Miss Croy, who came with me last. If you can help, so much the better—and also of course if one can a little one’s self. Except for that—you and me doing our best—I like you to see me just as I am. Yes, I like it—and I don’t exaggerate. Shouldn’t one, at the start, show the worst—so that anything after that may be better? It wouldn’t make any real difference—it won’t make any, anything that may happen won’t—to any one. Therefore I feel myself, this way, with you, just as I am; and—if you do in the least care to know—it quite positively bears me up.”

  She put it as to his caring to know, because his manner seemed to give her all her chance, and the impression was there for her to take. It was strange and deep for her, this impression, and she did accordingly take it straight home. It showed him—showed him in spite of himself—as allowing, somewhere far within, things comparatively remote, things in fact quite, as she would have said, outside, delicately to weigh with him; showed him as interested on her behalf in other questions beside the question of what was the matter with her. She accepted such an interest as regular in the highest type of scientific mind—his own being the highest, magnificently—because otherwise obviously it wouldn’t be there; but she could at the same time take it as a direct source of light upon herself, even though that might present her a little as pretending to equal him. Wanting to know more about a patient than how a patient was constructed or deranged couldn’t be, even on the part of the greatest doctors, anything, but some form or other of the desire to let the patient down easily. When that was the case the reason, in turn, could only be, too manifestly, pity; and when pity held up its telltale face like a head on a pike, in a French revolution, bobbing before a window, what was that inference but that the patient was bad? He might say what he would now—she would always have seen the head at the window; and in fact from this moment she only wanted him to say what he would. He might say it too with the greater ease to himself as there wasn’t one of her divinations that—as her own—he would in any way put himself out for. Finally, if he was making her talk she was talking, and what it could at any rate come to for him was that she wasn’t afraid. If he wanted to do the dearest thing in the world for her he would show her he believed she wasn’t; which undertaking of hers—not to have misled him—was what she counted at the moment as her presumptuous little hint to him that she was as good as himself. It put forward the bold idea that he could really be misled; and there actually passed between them for some seconds a sign, a sign of the eyes only, that they knew together where they were. This made, in their brown old temple of truth, its momentary flicker; then what followed it was that he had her, all the same, in his pocket; and the whole thing wound up for that consummation with his kind dim smile. Such kindness was wonderful with such dimness; but brightness—that even of sharp steel—was of course for the other side of the business, and it would all come in for her to one tune or another. “Do you mean,” he asked, “that you’ve no relations at all?—not a parent, not a sister, not even a cousin nor an aunt?”

  She shook her head as with the easy habit of an interviewed heroine or a freak of nature at a show. “Nobody whatever”—but the last thing she had come for was to be dreary about it. “I’m a survivor—a survivor of a general wreck. You see,” she added, “how that’s to be taken into account—that every one else has gone. When I was ten years old there were, with my father and my mother, six of us. I’m all that’s left. But they died,” she went on, to be fair all round, “of different things. Still, there it is. And, as I told you before, I’m American. Not that I mean that makes me worse. However, you’ll probably know what it makes me.”

  “Yes”—he even showed amusement for it. “I know perfectly what it makes you. It makes you, to begin with, a capital case.”

  She sighed, though gratefully, as if again before the social scene. “Ah there you are!”

  “Oh no; there ‘we’ aren’t at all! There I am only—but as much as you like. I’ve no end of American friends: there they are, if you please, and it’s a fact that you couldn’t very well be in a better place than in their company. It puts you with plenty of others—and that isn’t pure solitude.” Then he pursued: “I’m sure you’ve an excellent spirit; but don’t try to bear more things than you need.” Which after an instant he further explained. “Hard things have come to you in youth, but you mustn’t think life will be for you all hard things. You’ve the right to be happy. You must make up your mind to it. You must accept any form in which happiness may come.”

  “Oh I’ll accept any whatever!” she almost gaily returned. “And it seems to me, for that matter, that I’m accepting a new one every day. Now this!” she smi
led.

  “This is very well so far as it goes. You can depend on me,” the great man said, “for unlimited interest. But I’m only, after all, one element in fifty. We must gather in plenty of others. Don’t mind who knows. Knows, I mean, that you and I are friends.”

  “Ah you do want to see some one!” she broke out. “You want to get at some one who cares for me.” With which, however, as he simply met this spontaneity in a manner to show that he had often had it from young persons of her race, and that he was familiar even with the possibilities of their familiarity, she felt her freedom rendered vain by his silence, and she immediately tried to think of the most reasonable thing she could say. This would be, precisely, on the subject of that freedom, which she now quickly spoke of as complete. “That’s of course by itself a great boon; so please don’t think I don’t know it. I can do exactly what I like—anything in all the wide world. I haven’t a creature to ask—there’s not a finger to stop me. I can shake about till I’m black and blue. That perhaps isn’t all joy; but lots of people, I know, would like to try it.” He had appeared about to put a question, but then had let her go on, which she promptly did, for she understood him the next moment as having thus taken it from her that her means were as great as might be. She had simply given it to him so, and this was all that would ever pass between them on the odious head. Yet she couldn’t help also knowing that an important effect, for his judgement, or at least for his amusement—which was his feeling, since, marvellously, he did have feeling—was produced by it. All her little pieces had now then fallen together for him like the morsels of coloured glass that used to make combinations, under the hand, in the depths of one of the polygonal peepshowsai of childhood. “So that if it’s a question of my doing anything under the sun that will help—!”