The Wings of the Dove

by Henry James

  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.ao 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.

  —IV—

  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,” Derisher 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 disregard 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. ”

  “Well,” Densher dropped with some humour, “life’s very interesting ! I hope it’s really as much so for you as you make it for others ; I mean judging by what you make it for me. You seem to me to represent it as thrilling for ces dames, ap and in a different way for each: Aunt Maud, Susan Shepherd, Milly. But what is,” he wound up, “the matter? Do you mean she’s as ill as she looks?”

  Kate’s face struck him as replying at first that his derisive speech deserved no satisfaction; then she appeared to yield to a need of her own—the need to make the point that “as ill as she looked” was what Milly scarce could be. If she had been as ill as she looked she could scarce be a question with them, for her end would in that case be near. She believed herself nevertheless—and Kate couldn’t help believing her too—seriously menaced. There was always the fact that they had been on the point of leav- ing town, the two ladies, and had suddenly been pulled up. “We bade them good-bye—or all but—Aunt Maud and I, the night before Milly, popping so very oddly into the National Gallery for a farewell look, found you and me together. They were then to get off a day or two later. But they’ve not got off—they’re not getting off. When I see them—and I saw them this morning—they have showy reasons. They do mean to go, but they’ve postponed it.” With which the girl brought out: “They’ve postponed it for you.” He protested so far as a man might without fatuity, since a protest was itself credulous; but Kate, as ever, understood herself. “You’ve made Milly change her mind. She wants not to miss you—though she wants also not to show she wants you; which is why, as I hinted a moment ago, she may consciously have hung back to-night. She doesn’t know when she may see you again—she doesn’t know she ever may. She doesn’t see the future. It has opened out before her in these last weeks as a dark confused thing.”

&
nbsp; Densher wondered. “After the tremendous time you’ve all been telling me she has had?”

  “That’s it. There’s a shadow across it.”

  “The shadow, you consider, of some physical break-up?”

  “Some physical break-down. Nothing less. She’s scared. She has so much to lose. And she wants more.”

  “Ah well,” said Densher with a sudden strange sense of discomfort, “couldn’t one say to her that she can’t have everything?”

  “No—for one wouldn’t want to. She really,” Kate went on, “has been somebody here. Ask Aunt Maud—you may think me prejudiced,” the girl oddly smiled. “Aunt Maud will tell you—the world’s before her. It has all come since you saw her, and it’s a pity you’ve missed it, for it certainly would have amused you. She has really been a perfect success—I mean of course so far as possible in the scrap of time—and she has taken it like a perfect angel. If you can imagine an angel with a thumping bank-account you’ll have the simplest expression of the kind of thing. Her fortune’s absolutely huge; Aunt Maud has had all the facts, or enough of them, in the last confidence, from ‘Susie,’ and Susie speaks by book. Take them then, in the last confidence, from me. There she is.” Kate expressed above all what it most came to. “It’s open to her to make, you see, the very greatest marriage. I assure you we’re not vulgar about her. Her possibilities are quite plain.”

  Densher showed he neither disbelieved nor grudged them. “But what good then on earth can I do her?”

  Well, she had it ready. “You can console her.”

  “And for what?”

  “For all that, if she’s stricken, she must see swept away. I shouldn’t care for her if she hadn’t so much,” Kate very simply said. And then as it made him laugh not quite happily: “I shouldn’t trouble about her if there were one thing she did have.” The girl spoke indeed with a noble compassion. “She has nothing.”

  “Not all the young dukes?”

  “Well we must see—see if anything can come of them. She at any rate does love life. To have met a person like you,” Kate further explained, “is to have felt you become, with all the other fine things, a part of life. Oh she has you arranged!”

  “You have, it strikes me, my dear”—and he looked both detached and rueful. “Pray what am I to do with the dukes?”

  “Oh the dukes will be disappointed!”

  “Then why shan’t I be?”

  “You’ll have expected less,” Kate wonderfully smiled. “Besides, you will be. You’ll have expected enough for that.”

  “Yet it’s what you want to let me in for?”

  “I want,” said the girl, “to make things pleasant for her. I use, for the purpose, what I have. You’re what I have of most precious, and you’re therefore what I use most.”

  He looked at her long. “I wish I could use you a little more.” After which, as she continued to smile at him, “Is it a bad case of lungs?” he asked.

  Kate showed for a little as if she wished it might be. “Not lungs, I think. Isn’t consumption, taken in time, now curable?”

  “People are, no doubt, patched up.” But he wondered. “Do you mean she has something that’s past patching?” And before she could answer: “It’s really as if her appearance put her outside of such things—being, in spite of her youth, that of a person who has been through all it’s conceivable she should be exposed to. She affects one, I should say, as a creature saved from a shipwreck. Such a creature may surely, in these days, on the doctrine of chances, go to sea again with confidence. She has had her wreck—she has met her adventure.”

  “Oh I grant you her wreck!”—Kate was all response so far. “But do let her have still her adventure. There are wrecks that are not adventures.”

  “Well—if there be also adventures that are not wrecks!” Densher in short was willing, but he came back to his point. “What I mean is that she has none of the effect—on one’s nerves or whatever—of an invalid.”

  Kate on her side did this justice. “No—that’s the beauty of her.”

  “The beauty-?”

  “Yes, she’s so wonderful. She won’t show for that, any more than your watch, when it’s about to stop for want of being wound up, gives you convenient notice or shows as different from usual. She won’t die, she won’t live, by inches. She won’t smell, as it were, of drugs. She won’t taste, as it were, of medicine. No one will know.”

  “Then what,” he demanded, frankly mystified now, “are we talking about? In what extraordinary state is she?”

  Kate went on as if, at this, making it out in a fashion for herself. “I believe that if she’s ill at all she’s very ill. I believe that if she’s bad she’s not a little bad. I can’t tell you why, but that’s how I see her. She’ll really live or she’ll really not. She’ll have it all or she’ll miss it all. Now I don’t think she’ll have it all.”

  Densher had followed this with his eyes upon her, her own having thoughtfully wandered, and as if it were more impressive than ++cid. “You ‘think’ and you ‘don’t think,’ and yet you remain all the while without an inkling of her complaint?”

  “No, not without an inkling; but it’s a matter in which I don’t want knowledge. She moreover herself doesn’t want one to want it: she has, as to what may be preying upon her, a kind of ferocity of modesty, a kind of—I don’t know what to call it—intensity of pride. And then and then—” But with this she faltered.

  “And then what?”

  “I’m a brute about illness. I hate it. It’s well for you, my dear,” Kate continued, “that you’re as sound as a bell.”

  “Thank you!” Densher laughed. “It’s rather good then for yourself too that you’re as strong as the sea.”

  She looked at him now a moment as for the selfish gladness of their young immunities. It was all they had together, but they had it at least without a flaw—each had the beauty, the physical felicity, the personal virtue, love and desire of the other. Yet it was as if that very consciousness threw them back the next moment into pity for the poor girl who had everything else in the world, the great genial good they, alas, didn’t have, but failed on the other hand of this. “How we’re talking about her!” Kate compunctiously sighed. But there were the facts. “From illness I keep away.”

  “But you don’t—since here you are, in spite of all you say, in the midst of it.”

  “Ah I’m only watching—!”

  “And putting me forward in your place? Thank you!”

  “Oh,” said Kate, “I’m breaking you in. Let it give you the measure of what I shall expect of you. One can’t begin too soon.”

  She drew away, as from the impression of a stir on the balcony, the hand of which he had a minute before possessed himself; and the warning brought him back to attention. “You haven’t even an idea if it’s a case for surgery?”

  “I dare say it may be; that is that if it comes to anything it may come to that. Of course she’s in the highest hands.”

  “The doctors are after her then?”

  “She’s after them—it’s the same thing. I think I’m free to say it now—she sees Sir Luke Strett.”

  It made him quickly wince. “Ah fifty thousand knives!” Then after an instant: “One seems to guess.”

  Yes, but she waved it away. “Don’t guess. Only do as I tell you.”

  For a moment now, in silence, he took it all in, might have had it before him. “What you want of me then is to make up to a sick girl.”

  “Ah but you admit yourself that she doesn’t affect you as sick. You understand moreover just how much—and just how little.”

  “It’s amazing,” he presently answered, “what you think I understand.”

  “Well, if you’ve brought me to it, my dear,” she returned, “that has been your way of breaking me in. Besides which, so far as making up to her goes, plenty of others will.”

  Densher for a little, under this suggestion, might have been seeing their young friend on a pile of cushions and in a perpetual
tea-gown, amid flowers and with drawn blinds, surrounded by the higher nobility. “Others can follow their tastes. Besides, others are free.”

  “But so are you, my dear!”

  She had spoken with impatience, and her suddenly quitting him had sharpened it; in spite of which he kept his place, only looking up at her. “You’re prodigious!”

  “Of course I’m prodigious!”—and, as immediately happened, she gave a further sign of it that he fairly sat watching. The door from the lobby had, as she spoke, been thrown open for a gentleman who, immediately finding her within his view, advanced to greet her before the announcement of his name could reach her companion. Densher none the less felt himself brought quickly into relation; Kate’s welcome to the visitor became almost precipitately an appeal to her friend, who slowly rose to meet it. “I don’t know whether you know Lord Mark.” And then for the other party: “Mr. Merton Densher—who has just come back from America.”