The Wings of the Dove

by Henry James

  This something was only a thought, but a thought precisely of such freshness and such delicacy as made the precious, of whatever sort, most subject to the hunger of time. The thought was all his own, and his intimate companion was the last person he might have shared it with. He kept it back like a favorite pang; left it behind him, so to say, when he went out, but came home again the sooner for the certainty of finding it there. Then he took it out of its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one, handling them, handling it, as a father, baffled and tender, might handle a maimed child. But so it was before him—in his dread of who else might see it. Then he took to himself at such hours, in other words, that he should never, never know what had been in Milly’s letter. The intention announced in it he should but too probably know; only that would have been, but for the depths of his spirit, the least part of it. The part of it missed for ever was the turn she would have given her act. This turn had possibilities that, somehow, by wondering about them, his imagination had extraordinarily filled out and refined. It had made of them a revelation the loss of which was like the sight of a priceless pearl cast before his eyes—his pledge given not to save it—into the fathomless sea, or rather even it was like the sacrifice of something sentient and throbbing, something that, for the spiritual ear, might have been audible as a faint far wail. This was the sound he cherished when alone in the stillness of his rooms. He sought and guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till the inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively coarse and harsh, should smother and deaden it—doubtless by the same process with which they would officiously heal the ache in his soul that was somehow one with it. It moreover deepened the sacred hush that he couldn’t complain. He had given poor Kate her freedom.

  The great and obvious thing, as soon as she stood there on the occasion we have already named, was that she was now in high possession of it. This would have marked immediately the difference—had there been nothing else to do it—between their actual terms and their other terms, the character of their last encounter in Venice. That had been his idea, whereas her present step was her own; the few marks they had in common were, from the first moment, to his conscious vision, almost pathetically plain. She was as grave now as before; she looked around her, to hide it, as before; she pretended, as before, in an air in which her words at the moment itself fell flat, to an interest in the place and a curiosity about his “things”; there was a recall in the way in which, after she had failed a little to push up her veil symmetrically and he had said she had better take it off altogether, she had acceded to his suggestion before the glass. It was just these things that were vain; and what was real was that his fancy figured her after the first few minutes as literally now providing the element of reassurance which had previously been his care. It was she, supremely, who had the presence of mind. She made indeed for that matter very prompt use of it. “You see I’ve not hesitated this time to break your seal.”

  She had laid on the table from the moment of her coming in the long envelope, substantially filled, which he had sent her enclosed in another of still ampler make. He had however not looked at it—his belief being that he wished never again to do so; besides which it had happened to rest with its addressed side up. So he “saw” nothing, and it was only into her eyes that her remark made him look, declining any approach to the object indicated. “It’s not ‘my’ seal, my dear; and my intention—which my note tried to express—was all to treat it to you as not mine.”

  “Do you mean that it’s to that extent mine then?”

  “Well, let us call it if we like, theirs—that of the good people in New York, the authors of our communication. If the seal is broken well and good; but we might, you know,” he presently added, “have sent it back to them intact and inviolate. Only accompanied,” he smiled with his heart in his mouth, “by an absolutely kind letter.”

  Kate took it with the mere brave blink with which a patient of courage signifies to the exploring medical hand that the tender place is touched. He saw on the spot that she was prepared, and with this signal sign that she was too intelligent not to be, came a flicker of possibilities. She was—merely to put it at that—intelligent enough for anything. “Is it what you’re proposing we should do?”

  “Ah it’s too late to do it—well, ideally. Now, with that sign that we know—!”

  “But you don’t know,” she said very gently.

  “I refer,” he went on without noticing it, “to what would have been the handsome way. Its being dispatched again, with no cognisance taken but one’s assurance of the highest consideration, and the proof of this in the state of the envelope—that would have been really satisfying.”

  She thought an instant. “The state of the envelope proving refusal, you mean, not to be based on the insufficiency of the sum?”

  Densher smiled again as for the play, however whimsical, of her humour. “Well yes—something of that sort.”

  “So that if cognisance has been taken—so far as I’m concerned—it spoils the beauty?”

  “It makes the difference that I’m disappointed in the hope—which I confess I entertained—that you’d bring the thing back to me as you had received it.”

  “You didn’t express that hope in your letter.”

  “I didn’t want to. I wanted to leave it to yourself. I wanted—oh yes, if that’s what you wish to ask me—to see what you’d do.”

  “You wanted to measure the possibilities of my departure from delicacy?”

  He continued steady now; a kind of ease—from the presence, as in the air, of something he couldn’t yet have named—had come to him. “Well, I wanted—in so good a case—to test you.”

  She was struck—it showed in her face—by his expression. “It is a good case. I doubt whether a better,” she said with her eyes on him, “has ever been known.”

  “The better the case then the better the test!”

  “How do you know,” she asked in reply to this, “what I’m capable of?”

  “I don’t, my dear! Only with the seal unbroken I should have known sooner.”

  “I see”—she took it in. “But I myself shouldn’t have known at all. And you wouldn’t have known, either, what I do know.”

  “Let me tell you at once,” he returned, “that if you’ve been moved to correct my ignorance I very particularly request you not to.”

  She just hesitated. “Are you afraid of the effect of the corrections ? Can you only do it by doing it blindly?”

  He waited a moment. “What is it that you speak of my doing?”

  “Why the only thing in the world that I take you as thinking of. Not accepting—what she has done. Isn’t there some regular name in such cases? Not taking up the bequest.”

  “There’s something you forget in it,” he said after a moment. “My asking you to join with me in doing so.”

  Her wonder but made her softer, yet at the same time didn’t make her less firm. “How can I ‘join’ in a matter with which I’ve nothing to do?”

  “How? By a single word.”

  “And what word?”

  “Your consent to my giving up.”

  “My consent has no meaning when I can’t prevent you.”

  “You can perfectly prevent me. Understand that well,” he said.

  She seemed to face a threat in it. “You mean you won’t give up if I don’t consent?”

  “Yes. I do nothing.”

  “That, as I understand, is accepting.”

  Densher paused. “I do nothing formal.”

  “You won’t, I suppose you mean, touch the money.”

  “I won’t touch the money.”

  It had a sound—though he had been coming to it—that made for gravity. “Who then in such an event will?”

  “Any one who wants or who can.”

  Again a little she said nothing: she might say too much. But by the time she spoke he had covered ground. “How can I touch it but through you?”

  “
You can’t. Any more,” he added, “then I can renounce it except through you.”

  “Oh ever so much less! There’s nothing,” she explained, “in my power.”

  “I’m in your power,” Merton Densher said.

  “In what way?”

  “In the way I show—and the way I’ve always shown. When have I shown,” he asked as with a sudden cold impatience, “anything else? You surely must feel—so that you needn’t wish to appear to spare me in it—how you ‘have’ me.”

  “It’s very good of you, my dear,” she nervously laughed, “to put me so thoroughly up to it!”

  “I put you up to nothing. I didn’t even put you up to the chance that, as I said a few moments ago, I saw for you in forwarding that thing. Your liberty is therefore in every way complete.”

  It had come to the point really that they showed each other pale faces, and that all the unspoken between them looked out of their eyes in a dim terror of their further conflict. Something even rose between them in one of their short silences- something that was like an appeal from each to the other not to be too true. Their necessity was somehow before them, but which of them must meet it first? “Thank you!” Kate said for his word about her freedom, but taking for the minute no further action on it. It was blest at least that all ironies failed them, and during another slow moment their very sense of it cleared the air.

  There was an effect of this in the way he soon went on. “You must intensely feel that it’s the thing for which we worked together.”

  She took up the remark, however, no more than if it were commonplace ; she was already again occupied with a point of her own. “Is it absolutely true—for if it is, you know, it’s tremendously interesting- that you haven’t so much as a curiosity about what she has done for you?”

  “Would you like,” he asked, “my formal oath on it?”

  “No—but I don’t understand. It seems to me in your place—!”

  “Ah,” he couldn’t help breaking in, “what do you know of my place? Pardon me,” he at once added; “my preference is the one I express.

  She had in an instant nevertheless a curious thought. “But won’t the facts be published.”

  “‘Published’?”—he winced

  “I mean won’t you see them in the papers?”

  “Ah never! I shall know how to escape that.”

  It seemed to settle the subject, but she had the next minute another insistence. “Your desire is to escape everything?”

  “Everything.”

  “And do you need no more definite sense of what it is you ask me to help you to renounce?”

  “My sense is sufficient without being definite. I’m willing to believe that the amount of money’s not small.”

  “Ah there you are!” she exclaimed.

  “If she was to leave me a remembrance,” he quietly pursued, “it would inevitably not be meagre.”

  Kate waited as for how to say it. “It’s worthy of her. It’s what she was herself—if you remember what we once said that was.”

  He hesitated-as if there had been many things. But he remembered one of them. “Stupendous?”

  “Stupendous.” A faint smile for it—ever so small—had flickered in her face, but had vanished before the omen of tears, a little less uncertain, had shown themselves in his own. His eyes filled—but that made her continue. She continued gently. “I think that what it really is must be that you’re afraid. I mean,” she explained, “that you’re afraid of all the truth. If you’re in love with her without it, what indeed can you be more? And you’re afraid—it’s wonderful! —to be in love with her.”

  “I never was in love with her,” said Densher.

  She took it, but after a little she met it. “I believe that now—for the time she lived. I believe it at least for the time you were there. But your change came—as it might well—the day you last saw her; she died for you then that you might understand her. From that hour you did.” With which Kate slowly rose. “And I do now. She did it for us.” Densher rose to face her, and she went on with her thought. “I used to call her, in my stupidity—for want of anything better—a dove. Well she stretched out her wings, and it was to that they reached. They cover us.”

  “They cover us,” Densher said.

  “That’s what I give you,” Kate gravely wound up. “That’s what I’ve done for you.”

  His look at her had a slow strangeness that had dried on the moment, his tears. “Do I understand then—?”

  “That I do consent?” She gravely shook her head. “No—for I see. You’ll marry me without the money; you won’t marry me with it. If I don’t consent you don’t.”

  “You lose me?” He showed, though naming it frankly, a sort of awe of her high grasp. “Well, you lose nothing else. I make over to you every penny.”

  Prompt was his own clearness, but she had no smile this time to spare. “Precisely—so that I must choose.”

  “You must choose.”

  Strange it was for him then that she stood in his own rooms doing it, while, with an intensity now beyond any that had ever made his breath come slow, he waited for her act. “There’s but one thing that can save you from my choice.”

  “From your choice of my surrender to you?”

  “Yes”—and she gave a nod at the long envelope on the table—“your surrender of that.”

  “What is it then?”

  “Your word of honour that you’re not in love with her memory.”

  “Oh—her memory!”

  “Ah”—she made a high gesture—“don’t speak of it as if you couldn’t be. I could in your place; and you’re one for whom it will do. Her memory’s your love. You want no other.”

  He heard her out in stillness, watching her face but not moving. Then he only said: “I’ll marry you, mind you, in an hour.”

  “As we were?”

  “As we were. ”

  But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. “We shall never be again as we were!”

  THE END

  Endnotes

  1 (p. 3) Long had I turned it over ... seeing the theme as formidable: Henry James is writing the preface in 1909, years after he first sketched out his ideas for the story in his notebooks (1894), and after the actual writing of the novel (1901-1902). In The Ambassadors, he worked from a lengthy and very detailed outline that he had submitted to his publishers; this outline survives, and is now in the Widener Library at Harvard University. James prepared a similar but shorter and less detailed outline for Wings at some point and submitted it to his publishers, but it has been lost.

  2 (p. 4) the poet essentially can’t be concerned with the act of dying.... it is still by the act of living that [the sick] appeal to him, and appeal the more as the conditions plot against them and prescribe the battle: This is as clear a statement as one finds in the novel summing up James’s negative attitude toward the death scene of the nineteenth-century novelistic tradition. Characters in James’s novels are not depicted on a death bed, surrounded by mourning relatives and gasping out final words. Death is more of a disappearance. Characters die offstage and out of sight, and the focus is on the impact of the death on the living.

  3 (p. 13) There is no economy of treatment without an adopted, a related point of view: James’s conception of the well-made novel stressed the importance of the point of view from which the story is told or narrated, an idea that has been influential in modern literary criticism. See R. P. Blackmur, “Introduction,” in James’s The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, pp. vii-xxxix (see “For Further Reading”).

  4 (p. 33) He put the question with a charming air of sudden spiritual heat.... “what’s called in the business world, I believe, an ‘asset’ ”: James seems to have originally projected a larger role for Lionel Croy in the story, but Croy disappears after book first. Croy’s comments on the business world, as well as subsequent references by Lord Mark, display a hostility to all things commercial that was probably close to what James hi
mself felt. James never had much direct experience with or knowledge of industry and commerce, but he was keenly aware of the business details of publishing. He did not like the tendencies that were evident even in his own time for publishers to push the popular “blockbuster” over serious fiction. Some of these issues are explored in James’s short story “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896); see Peter Rawlings, ed., Henry james’ Shorter Masterpieces, vol. 2, pp. 46-88.

  5 (p. 53) the present winter’s end: James does not tell us exactly when the novel takes place. We infer that it is set at the end of the Victorian era—around the turn of the century. The 1997 lain Softley movie version of The Wings of the Dove assigns a later date (1910), perhaps to bring the setting closer to World War I and heighten the sense of foreboding that hovers over the action.

  6 (p. 55) all the high dim things she lumped together as of the mind: James does not tell us in detail what education Kate Croy has received. We learn that she has attended schools on the Continent and has become attracted to all things foreign. In post-Victorian England, women were not yet “in business” or in “the professions.” While young Victorian women of any social standing usually received enough education to become governesses if they were not able to marry, the general intent was to have one’s daughters exposed to art, music, and modern languages with a view to finding a desirable partner in marriage. Kate Croy felt shortchanged in the life of the mind and was attracted to Densher in part because he filled this need. His eclectic knowledge, along with his schooling on the continent, impressed her deeply.

  7 (p. 72) he asked himself what was to be expected of a person who could treat one like that: This passage and the several long paragraphs that follow are good examples of how James enters into the minds of his protagonists and reveals to us what they are thinking. Nothing much is actually happening here. Densher is waiting and is pacing the room. But his mind wanders as he ponders his situation. James summarizes and paraphrases Densher’s thoughts, a literary device that critics refer to as “the first person attached” point of view. James does this more with Densher, who is a reflective and intellectual type, and with Milly Theale, whose consciousness is more important to us than her frail body, than he does with Kate Croy. We get to know Kate more by what she says and does or by a look or gesture, a shake of the head, than by James telling us what she is thinking. Kate is a less cerebral and a more forceful person than Densher, so the device of exploring her thoughts is less necessary.