by Henry James
She disowned the idea with a headshake that, put on what face she would, couldn’t help betraying to him something of her suppressed view of the possibility—ever, ever perhaps—of any such proceedings. They weren’t at any rate for her now. “Dear no. We go abroad for a few weeks somewhere of high air. That has been before us for many days; we’ve only been kept on by last necessities here. However, everything’s done and the wind’s in our sails.”
“May you scud then happily before it! But when,” he asked, “do you come back?”
She looked ever so vague; then as if to correct it: “Oh when the wind turns. And what do you do with your summer?”
“Ah I spend it in sordid toil. I drench it with mercenary ink. My work in your country counts for play as well. You see what’s thought of the pleasure your country can give. My holiday’s over.”
“I’m sorry you had to take it,” said Milly, “at such a different time from ours. If you could but have worked while we’ve been working—”
“I might be playing while you play? Oh the distinction isn’t so great with me. There’s a little of each for me, of work and of play, in either. But you and Mrs. Stringham, with Miss Croy and Mrs. Lowder—you all,” he went on, “have been given up, like navvies or niggers, to real physical toil. Your rest is something you’ve earned and you need. My labour’s comparatively light.”
“Very true,” she smiled; “but all the same I like mine.”
“It doesn’t leave you ‘done’?”
“Not a bit. I don’t get tired when I’m interested. Oh I could go far.”
He bethought himself. “Then why don’t you?—since you’ve got here, as I learn, the whole place in your pocket.”
“Well, it’s a kind of economy—I’m saving things up. I’ve enjoyed so what you speak of—though your account of it’s fantastic—that I’m watching over its future, that I can’t help being anxious and careful. I want—in the interest itself of what I’ve had and may still have—not to make stupid mistakes. The way not to make them is to get off again to a distance and see the situation from there. I shall keep it fresh,” she wound up as if herself rather pleased with the ingenuity of her statement—“I shall keep it fresh, by that prudence, for my return.”
“Ah then you will return? Can you promise one that?”
Her face fairly lighted at his asking for a promise; but she made as if bargaining a little. “Isn’t London rather awful in winter?”
He had been going to ask her if she meant for the invalid; but he checked the infelicity of this and took the enquiry as referring to social life. “No—I like it, with one thing and another; it’s less of a mob than later on; and it would have for us the merit—should you come here then—that we should probably see more of you. So do reappear for us—if it isn’t a question of climate.”
She looked at that a little graver. “If what isn’t a question—?”
“Why the determination of your movements. You spoke just now of going somewhere for that.”
“For better air?”—she remembered. “Oh yes, one certainly wants to get out of London in August.”
“Rather, of course!”—he fully understood. “Though I’m glad you’ve hung on long enough for me to catch you. Try us at any rate,” he continued, “once more.”
“Whom do you mean by ‘us’?” she presently asked.
It pulled him up an instant—representing, as he saw it might have seemed, an allusion to himself as conjoined with Kate, whom he was proposing not to mention any more than his hostess did. But the issue was easy. “I mean all of us together, every one you’ll find ready to surround you with sympathy.”
It made her, none the less, in her odd charming way, challenge him afresh. “Why do you say sympathy?”
“Well, it’s doubtless a pale word. What we shall feel for you will be much nearer worship.”
“As near then as you like!” With which at last Kate’s name was sounded. “The people I’d most come back for are the people you know. I’d do it for Mrs. Lowder, who has been beautifully kind to me.”
“So she has to me,” said Densher. “I feel,” he added as she at first answered nothing, “that, quite contrary to anything I originally expected, I’ve made a good friend of her.”
“I didn’t expect it either—its turning out as it has. But I did,” said Milly, “with Kate. I shall come back for her too. I’d do anything—she kept it up—“for Kate”.
Looking at him as with conscious clearness while she spoke, she might for the moment have effectively laid a trap for whatever remains of the ideal straightness in him were still able to pull themselves together and operate. He was afterwards to say to himself that something had at that moment hung for him by a hair. “Oh I know what one would do for Kate!”—it had hung for him by a hair to break out with that, which he felt he had really been kept from by an element in his consciousness stronger still. The proof of the truth in question was precisely in his silence; resisting the impulse to break out was what he was doing for Kate. This at the time moreover came and went quickly enough; he was trying the next minute but to make Milly’s allusion easy for herself. “Of course I know what friends you are—and of course I understand,” he permitted himself to add, “any amount of devotion to a person so charming. That’s the good turn then she’ll do us all—I mean her working for your return.”
“Oh you don’t know,” said Milly, “how much I’m really on her hands.”
He could but accept the appearance of wondering how much he might show he knew. “Ah she’s very masterful.”
“She’s great. Yet I don’t say she bullies me.”
“No—that’s not the way. At any rate it isn’t hers,” he smiled. He remembered, however, then that an undue acquaintance with Kate’s ways was just what he mustn’t show; and he pursued the subject no further than to remark with a good intention that had the further merit of representing a truth: “I don’t feel as if I knew her—really to call know.”
“Well, if you come to that, I don’t either!” she laughed. The words gave him, as soon as they were uttered, a sense of responsibility for his own; though during a silence that ensued for a minute he had time to recognize that his own contained after all no element of falsity. Strange enough therefore was it that he could go too far—if it was too far—without being false. His observation was one he would perfectly have made to Kate herself. And before he again spoke, and before Milly did, he took time for more still—for feeling how just here it was that he must break short off if his mind was really made up not to go further. It was as if he had been at a corner—and fairly put there by his last speech; so that it depended on him whether or no to turn it. The silence, if prolonged but an instant, might even have given him a sense of her waiting to see what he would do. It was filled for them the next thing by the sound, rather voluminous for the August afternoon, of the approach, in the street below them, of heavy carriage-wheels and of horses trained to “step.” A rumble, a great shake, a considerable effective clatter, had been apparently succeeded by a pause at the door of the hotel, which was in turn accompanied by a due display of diminished prancing and stamping. “You’ve a visitor,” Densher laughed, “and it must be at least an ambassador.”
“It’s only my own carriage; it does that—isn’t it wonderful?—every day. But we find it, Mrs. Stringham and I, in the innocence of our hearts, very amusing.” She had got up, as she spoke, to assure herself of what she said; and at the end of a few steps they were together on the balcony and looking down at her waiting chariot, which made indeed a brave show. “Is it very awful?”
It was to Densher’s eyes—save for its absurd heaviness—only pleasantly pompous. “It seems to me delightfully rococo. But how do I know? You’re mistress of these things, in contact with the highest wisdom. You occupy a position, moreover, thanks to which your carriage—well, by this time, in the eye of London, also occupies one.” But she was going out, and he mustn’t stand in her way. What had happened the next minut
es was first that she had denied she was going out, so that he might prolong his stay; and second that she had said she would go out with pleasure if he would like to drive—that in fact there were always things to do, that there had been a question for her to-day of several in particular, and that this in short was why the carriage had been ordered so early. They perceived, as she said these things, that an enquirer had presented himself, and, coming back, they found Milly’s servant announcing the carriage and prepared to accompany her. This appeared to have for her the effect of settling the matter—on the basis, that is, of Densher’s happy response. Densher’s happy response, however, had as yet hung fire, the process we have described in him operating by this time with extreme intensity. The system of not pulling up, not breaking off, had already brought him headlong, he seemed to feel, to where they actually stood; and just now it was, with a vengeance, that he must do either one thing or the other. He had been waiting for some moments, which probably seemed to him longer than they were; this was because he was anxiously watching himself wait. He couldn’t keep that up for ever; and since one thing or the other was what he must do, it was for the other that he presently became conscious of having decided. If he had been drifting it settled itself in the manner of a bump, of considerable violence, against a firm object in the stream. “Oh yes; I’ll go with you with pleasure. It’s a charming idea.”
She gave no look to thank him—she rather looked away; she only said at once to her servant, “In ten minutes”; and then to her visitor, as the man went out, “We’ll go somewhere—I shall like that. But I must ask of you time—as little as possible—to get ready.” She looked over the room to provide for him, keep him there. “There are books and things—plenty; and I dress very quickly.” He caught her eyes only as she went, on which he thought them pretty and touching.
Why especially touching at that instant he could certainly scarce have said; it was involved, it was lost in the sense of her wishing to oblige him. Clearly what had occurred was her having wished it so that she had made him simply wish, in civil acknowledgement, to oblige her; which he had now fully done by turning his corner. He was quite round it, his corner, by the time the door had closed upon her and he stood there alone. Alone he remained for three minutes more—remained with several very living little matters to think about. One of these was the phenomenon—typical, highly American, he would have said—of Milly’s extreme spontaneity. It was perhaps rather as if he had sought refuge—refuge from another question—in the almost exclusive contemplation of this. Yet this, in its way, led him nowhere; not even to a sound generalization about American girls. It was spontaneous for his young friend to have asked him to drive with her alone—since she hadn’t mentioned her companion; but she struck him after all as no more advanced in doing it than Kate, for instance, who wasn’t an American girl, might have struck him in not doing it. Besides, Kate would have done it, though Kate wasn’t at all, in the same sense as Milly, spontaneous. And then in addition Kate had done it—or things very like it. Furthermore he was engaged to Kate—even if his ostensibly not being put her public freedom on other grounds. On all grounds, at any rate, the relation between Kate and freedom, between freedom and Kate, was a different one from any he could associate or cultivate, as to anything, with the girl who had just left him to prepare to give herself up to him. It had never struck him before, and he moved about the room while he thought of it, touching none of the books placed at his disposal. Milly was forward, as might be said, but not advanced; whereas Kate was backward—backward still, comparatively, as an English girl—and yet advanced in a high degree. However—though this didn’t straighten it out—Kate was of course two or three years older; which at their time of life considerably counted.
Thus ingeniously discriminating, Densher continued slowly to wander; yet without keeping at bay for long the sense of having rounded his corner. He had so rounded it that he felt himself lose even the option of taking advantage of Milly’s absence to retrace his steps. If he might have turned tail, vulgarly speaking, five minutes before, he couldn’t turn tail now; he must simply wait there with his consciousness charged to the brim. Quickly enough moreover that issue was closed from without; in the course of three minutes more Miss Theale’s servant had returned. He preceded a visitor whom he had met, obviously, at the foot of the stairs and whom, throwing open the door, he loudly announced as Miss Croy. Kate, on following him in, stopped short at sight of Densher—only, after an instant, as the young man saw with free amusement, not from surprise and still less from discomfiture. Densher immediately gave his explanation—Miss Theale had gone to prepare to drive—on receipt of which the servant effaced himself.
“And you’re going with her?” Kate asked.
“Yes—with your approval; which I’ve taken, as you see, for granted.”
“Oh,” she laughed, “my approval’s complete!” She was thoroughly consistent and handsome about it.
“What I mean is of course,” he went on—for he was sensibly affected by her gaiety—“at your so lively instigation.”
She had looked about the room—she might have been vaguely looking for signs of the duration, of the character of his visit, a momentary aid in taking a decision. “Well, instigation then, as much as you like.” She treated it as pleasant, the success of her plea with him; she made a fresh joke of this direct impression of it. “So much so as that? Do you know I think I won’t wait?”
“Not to see her—after coming?”
“Well, with you in the field—! I came for news of her, but she must be all right. If she is—”
But he took her straight up. “Ah how do I know?” He was moved to say more. “It’s not I who am responsible for her, my dear. It seems to me it’s you.” She struck him as making light of a matter that had been costing him sundry qualms; so that they couldn’t both be quite just. Either she was too easy or he had been too anxious. He didn’t want at all events to feel a fool for that. “I’m doing nothing—and shall not, I assure you, do anything but what I’m told.”
Their eyes met with some intensity over the emphasis he had given his words; and he had taken it from her the next moment that he really needn’t get into a state. What in the world was the matter? She asked it, with interest, for all answer. “Isn’t she better—if she’s able to see you?”
“She assures me she’s in perfect health.”
Kate’s interest grew. “I knew she would.” On which she added:
“It won’t have been really for illness that she stayed away last night.”
“For what then?”
“Well—for nervousness.”
“Nervousness about what?”
“Oh you know!” She spoke with a hint of impatience, smiling however the next moment. “I’ve told you that.”
He looked at her to recover in her face what she had told him; then it was as if what he saw there prompted him to say: “What have you told her?”
She gave him her controlled smile, and it was all as if they remembered where they were, liable to surprise, talking with softened voices, even stretching their opportunity, by such talk, beyond a quite right feeling. Milly’s room would be close at hand, and yet they were saying things—! For a moment, none the less, they kept it up. “Ask her, if you like; you’re free—she’ll tell you. Act as you think best; don’t trouble about what you think I may or mayn’t have told. I’m all right with her,” said Kate. “So there you are.”
“If you mean here I am,” he answered, “it’s unmistakable. If you also mean that her believing in you is all I have to do with you’re so far right as that she certainly does believe in you.”
“Well then take example by her.”
“She’s really doing it for you,” Densher continued. “She’s driving me out for you.”
“In that case,” said Kate with her soft tranquillity, “you can do it a little for her. I’m not afraid,” she smiled.
He stood before her a moment, taking in again the face she put on
it and affected again, as he had already so often been, by more things in this face and in her whole person and presence than he was, to his relief, obliged to find words for. It wasn’t, under such impressions, a question of words. “I do nothing for any one in the world but you. But for you I’ll do anything.”
“Good, good,” said Kate. “That’s how I like you.”
He waited again an instant. “Then you swear to it?”
“To ‘it’? To what?”
“Why that you do ‘like’ me. Since it’s all for that, you know, that I’m letting you do—well. God knows what with me.”
She gave at this, with a stare, a disheartened gesture—the sense of which she immediately further expressed. “If you don’t believe in me then, after all, hadn’t you better break off before you’ve gone further?”
“Break off with you?”
“Break off with Milly. You might go now,” she said, “and I’ll stay and explain to her why it is.”
He wondered—as if it struck him. “What would you say?”
“Why that you find you can’t stand her, and that there’s nothing for me but to bear with you as I best may.”
He considered of this. “How much do you abuse me to her?”
“Exactly enough. As much as you see by her attitude.”
Again he thought. “It doesn’t seem to me I ought to mind her attitude.”
“Well then, just as you like. I’ll stay and do my best for you.”
He saw she was sincere, was really giving him a chance; and that of itself made things clearer. The feeling of how far he had gone came back to him not in repentance, but in this very vision of an escape; and it was not of what he had done, but of what Kate offered, that he now weighed the consequence. “Won’t it make her—her not finding me here—be rather more sure there’s something between us?”