The Princess Casamassima

by Henry James

  ‘Hullo, I didn’t know you were so advanced!’ exclaimed Paul Muniment, who had been sitting silent, sidewise, in a chair that was too narrow for him, with his big arm hugging the back. ‘Have we been entertaining an angel unawares?’

  Hyacinth seemed to see that he was laughing at him, but he knew the way to face that sort of thing was to exaggerate his meaning. ‘You didn’t know I was advanced? Why, I thought that was the principal thing about me. I think I go about as far as it is possible to go.’

  ‘I thought the principal thing about you was that you knew French,’ Paul Muniment said, with an air of derision which showed Hyacinth that he wouldn’t put that ridicule upon him unless he liked him, at the same time that it revealed to him that he himself had just been posturing a little.

  ‘Well, I don’t know it for nothing. I’ll say something very neat and sharp to you, if you don’t look out – just the sort of thing they say so much in French.’

  ‘Oh, do say something of that kind; we should enjoy it so much!’ cried Rosy, in perfect good faith, clasping her hands in expectation.

  The appeal was embarrassing, but Hyacinth was saved from the consequences of it by a remark from Lady Aurora, who quavered out the words after two or three false starts, appearing to address him, now that she spoke to him directly, with a sort of overdone consideration. ‘I should like so very much to know – it would be so interesting – if you don’t mind – how far exactly you do go.’ She threw back her head very far, and thrust her shoulders forward, and if her chin had been more adapted to such a purpose would have appeared to point it at him.

  This challenge was hardly less alarming than the other, for Hyacinth was far from having ascertained the extent of his advance. He replied, however, with an earnestness with which he tried to make up as far as possible for his vagueness: ‘Well, I’m very strong indeed. I think I see my way to conclusions, from which even Monsieur and Madame Poupin would shrink. Poupin, at any rate; I’m not so sure about his wife.’

  ‘I should like so much to know Madame,’ Lady Aurora murmured, as if politeness demanded that she should content herself with this answer.

  ‘Oh, Puppin isn’t strong,’ said Muniment; ‘you can easily look over his head! He has a sweet assortment of phrases – they are really pretty things to hear, some of them; but he hasn’t had a new idea these thirty years. It’s the old stock that has been withering in the window. All the same, he warms one up; he has got a spark of the sacred fire. The principal conclusion that Mr Robinson sees his way to,’ he added to Lady Aurora, ‘is that your father ought to have his head chopped off and carried on a pike.’

  ‘Ah, yes, the French Revolution.’

  ‘Lord, I don’t know anything about your father, my lady!’ Hyacinth interposed.

  ‘Didn’t you ever hear of the Earl of Inglefield?’ cried Rose Muniment.

  ‘He is one of the best,’ said Lady Aurora, as if she were pleading for him.

  ‘Very likely, but he is a landlord, and he has an hereditary seat and a park of five thousand acres all to himself, while we are bundled together into this sort of kennel.’ Hyacinth admired the young man’s consistency until he saw that he was chaffing; after which he still admired the way he mixed up merriment with the tremendous opinions our hero was sure he entertained. In his own imagination Hyacinth associated bitterness with the revolutionary passion; but the young chemist, at the same time that he was planning far ahead, seemed capable of turning revolutionists themselves into ridicule, even for the entertainment of the revolutionised.

  ‘Well, I have told you often enough that I don’t go with you at all,’ said Rose Muniment, whose recumbency appeared not in the least to interfere with her sense of responsibility. ‘You’ll make a tremendous mistake if you try to turn everything round. There ought to be differences, and high and low, and there always will be, true as ever I lie here. I think it’s against everything, pulling down them that’s above.’

  ‘Everything points to great changes in this country, but if once our Rosy’s against them, how can you be sure? That’s the only thing that makes me doubt,’ her brother went on, looking at her with a placidity which showed the habit of indulgence.

  ‘Well, I may be ill, but I ain’t buried, and if I’m content with my position – such a position as it is – surely other folk might be with theirs. Her ladyship may think I’m as good as her, if she takes that notion; but she’ll have a deal to do to make me believe it.’

  ‘I think you are much better than I, and I know very few people so good as you,’ Lady Aurora remarked, blushing, not for her opinions, but for her timidity. It was easy to see that, though she was original, she would have liked to be even more original than she was. She was conscious, however, that such a declaration might appear rather gross to persons who didn’t see exactly how she meant it; so she added, as quickly as her hesitating manner permitted, to cover it up, ‘You know there’s one thing you ought to remember, à propos of revolutions and changes and all that sort of thing; I just mention it because we were talking of some of the dreadful things that were done in France. If there were to be a great disturbance in this country – and of course one hopes there won’t – it would be my impression that the people would behave in a different way altogether.’

  ‘What people do you mean?’ Hyacinth allowed himself to inquire.

  ‘Oh, the upper class, the people that have got all the things.’

  ‘We don’t call them the people,’ observed Hyacinth, reflecting the next instant that his remark was a little primitive.

  ‘I suppose you call them the wretches, the villains!’ Rose Muniment suggested, laughing merrily.

  ‘All the things, but not all the brains,’ her brother said.

  ‘No, indeed, aren’t they stupid?’ exclaimed her ladyship. ‘All the same, I don’t think they would go abroad.’

  ‘Go abroad?’

  ‘I mean like the French nobles, who emigrated so much. They would stay at home and resist; they would make more of a fight. I think they would fight very hard.’

  ‘I’m delighted to hear it, and I’m sure they would win!’ cried Rosy.

  ‘They wouldn’t collapse, don’t you know,’ Lady Aurora continued. ‘They would struggle till they were beaten.’

  ‘And you think they would be beaten in the end?’ Hyacinth asked.

  ‘Oh dear, yes,’ she replied, with a familiar brevity at which he was greatly surprised. ‘But of course one hopes it won’t happen.’

  ‘I infer from what you say that they talk it over a good deal among themselves, to settle the line they will take,’ said Paul Muniment.

  But Rosy intruded before Lady Aurora could answer. ‘I think it’s wicked to talk it over, and I’m sure we haven’t any business to talk it over here! When her ladyship says that the aristocracy will make a fine stand, I like to hear her say it, and I think she speaks in a manner that becomes her own position. But there is something else in her tone which, if I may be allowed to say so, I think a great mistake. If her ladyship expects, in case of the lower classes coming up in that odious manner, to be let off easily, for the sake of the concessions she may have made in advance, I would just advise her to save herself the disappointment and the trouble. They won’t be a bit the wiser, and they won’t either know or care. If they are going to trample over their betters, it isn’t on account of her having seemed to give up everything to us here that they will let her off. They will trample on her just the same as on the others, and they’ll say that she has got to pay for her title and her grand relations and her fine appearance. Therefore I advise her not to waste her good nature in trying to let herself down. When you’re up so high as that you’ve got to stay there; and if Providence has made you a lady, the best thing you can do is to hold up your head. I can promise your ladyship I would!’

  The close logic of this speech and the quaint self-possession with which the little bedridden speaker delivered it struck Hyacinth as amazing, and confirmed his idea that the brother an
d sister were a most extraordinary pair. It had a terrible effect upon poor Lady Aurora, by whom so stern a lesson from so humble a quarter had evidently not been expected, and who sought refuge from her confusion in a series of bewildered laughs, while Paul Muniment, with his humorous density, which was deliberate, and clever too, not seeing, or at any rate not heeding, that she had been sufficiently snubbed by his sister, inflicted a fresh humiliation by saying, ‘Rosy’s right, my lady. It’s no use trying to buy yourself off. You can’t do enough; your sacrifices don’t count. You spoil your fun now, and you don’t get it made up to you later. To all you people nothing will ever be made up. Enjoy your privileges while they last; it may not be for long.’

  Lady Aurora listened to him with her eyes on his face; and as they rested there Hyacinth scarcely knew what to make of her expression. Afterwards he thought he could attach a meaning to it. She got up quickly when Muniment had ceased speaking; the movement suggested that she had taken offence, and he would have liked to show her that he thought she had been rather roughly used. But she gave him no chance, not glancing at him for a moment. Then he saw that he was mistaken and that, if she had flushed considerably, it was only with the excitement of pleasure, the enjoyment of such original talk and of seeing her friends at last as free and familiar as she wished them to be. ‘You are the most delightful people – I wish every one could know you!’ she broke out. ‘But I must really be going.’ She went to the bed, and bent over Rosy and kissed her.

  ‘Paul will see you as far as you like on your way home,’ this young woman remarked.

  Lady Aurora protested against this, but Paul, without protesting in return, only took up his hat and looked at her, smiling, as if he knew his duty; upon which her ladyship said, ‘Well, you may see me downstairs; I forgot it was so dark.’

  ‘You must take her ladyship’s own candle, and you must call a cab,’ Rosy directed.

  ‘Oh, I don’t go in cabs. I walk.’

  ‘Well, you may go on the top of a ’bus, if you like; you can’t help being superb,’ Miss Muniment declared, watching her sympathetically.

  ‘Superb? Oh, mercy!’ cried the poor devoted, grotesque lady, leaving the room with Paul, who asked Hyacinth to wait for him a little. She neglected to bid good-night to our young man, and he asked himself what was to be hoped from that sort of people, when even the best of them – those that wished to be agreeable to the demos90 – reverted inevitably to the supercilious. She had said no more about lending him her books.

  9

  ‘She lives in Belgrave Square; she has ever so many brothers and sisters; one of her sisters is married to Lord Warmington,’ Rose Muniment instantly began, not apparently in the least discomposed at being left alone with a strange young man in a room which was now half dark again, thanks to her brother’s having carried off the second and more brilliant candle. She was so interested, for the time, in telling Hyacinth the history of Lady Aurora, that she appeared not to remember how little she knew about himself. Her ladyship had dedicated her life and her pocket-money to the poor and sick; she cared nothing for parties, and races, and dances, and picnics, and life in great houses, the usual amusements of the aristocracy; she was like one of the saints of old come to life again out of a legend. She had made their acquaintance, Paul’s and hers, about a year before, through a friend of theirs, such a fine, brave, young woman, who was in St Thomas’s Hospital for a surgical operation. She had been laid up there for weeks, during which Lady Aurora, always looking out for those who couldn’t help themselves, used to come and talk to her and read to her, till the end of her time in the ward, when the poor girl, parting with her kind friend, told her how she knew of another unfortunate creature (for whom there was no place there, because she was incurable), who would be mighty thankful for any little attention of that sort. She had given Lady Aurora the address in Audley Court, and the very next day her ladyship had knocked at their door. It wasn’t because she was poor – though in all conscience they were pinched enough – but because she had so little satisfaction in her limbs. Lady Aurora came very often, for several months, without meeting Paul, because he was always at his work; but one day he came home early, on purpose to find her, to thank her for her goodness, and also to see (Miss Muniment rather shyly intimated) whether she were really so good as his extravagant little sister made her out. Rosy had a triumph after that: Paul had to admit that her ladyship was beyond anything that any one in his waking senses would believe. She seemed to want to give up everything to those who were below her, and never to expect any thanks at all. And she wasn’t always preaching and showing you your duty; she wanted to talk to you sociable-like, as if you were just her own sister. And her own sisters were the highest in the land, and you might see her name in the newspapers the day they were presented to the Queen.91 Lady Aurora had been presented too, with feathers in her head and a long tail to her gown; but she had turned her back upon it all with a kind of terror – a sort of shivering, sinking feeling, which she had often described to Miss Muniment. The day she had first seen Paul was the day they became so intimate (the three of them together), if she might apply such a word as that to such a peculiar connection. The little woman, the little girl, as she lay there (Hyacinth scarcely knew how to characterise her), told our young man a very great secret, in which he found himself too much interested to think of criticising so headlong a burst of confidence. The secret was that, of all the people she had ever seen in the world, her ladyship thought Rosy’s Paul the very cleverest. And she had seen the greatest, the most famous, the brightest of every kind, for they all came to stay at Inglefield, thirty and forty of them at once. She had talked with them all and heard them say their best (and you could fancy how they would try to give it out at such a place as that, where there was nearly a mile of conservatories and a hundred wax candles were lighted at a time), and at the end of it all she had made the remark to herself – and she had made it to Rosy too – that there was none of them had such a head on his shoulders as the young man in Audley Court. Rosy wouldn’t spread such a rumour as that in the court itself, but she wanted every friend of her brother’s (and she could see Hyacinth was that, by the way he listened) to know what was thought of him by them that had an experience of talent. She didn’t wish to give it out that her ladyship had lowered herself in any manner to a person that earned his bread in a dirty shop (clever as he might be), but it was easy to see she minded what he said as if he had been a bishop – or more, indeed, for she didn’t think much of bishops, any more than Paul himself, and that was an idea she had got from him. Oh, she took it none so ill if he came back from his work before she had gone; and to-night Hyacinth could see for himself how she had lingered. This evening, she was sure, her ladyship would let him walk home with her half the way. This announcement gave Hyacinth the prospect of a considerable session with his communicative hostess; but he was very glad to wait, for he was vaguely, strangely excited by her talk, fascinated by the little queer-smelling, high-perched interior, encumbered with relics, treasured and polished, of a poor north-country home, bedecked with penny ornaments and related in so unexpected a manner to Belgrave Square and the great landed estates. He spent half an hour with Paul Muniment’s small, odd, crippled, chattering, clever, trenchant sister, who gave him an impression of education and native wit (she expressed herself far better than Pinnie, or than Millicent Henning), and who startled, puzzled, and at the same time rather distressed, him by the manner in which she referred herself to the most abject class – the class that prostrated itself, that was in a fever and flutter in the presence of its betters. That was Pinnie’s attitude, of course; but Hyacinth had long ago perceived that his adoptive mother had generations of plebeian patience in her blood, and that though she had a tender soul she had not a great one. He was more entertained than afflicted, however, by Miss Muniment’s tone, and he was thrilled by the frequency and familiarity of her allusions to a kind of life he had often wondered about; this was the first time he had heard it de
scribed with that degree of authority. By the nature of his mind he was perpetually, almost morbidly, conscious that the circle in which he lived was an infinitesimally small, shallow eddy in the roaring vortex of London, and his imagination plunged again and again into the waves that whirled past it and round it, in the hope of being carried to some brighter, happier vision – the vision of societies in which, in splendid rooms, with smiles and soft voices, distinguished men, with women who were both proud and gentle, talked about art, literature and history. When Rosy had delivered herself to her complete satisfaction on the subject of Lady Aurora, she became more quiet, asking, as yet, however, no questions about Hyacinth, whom she seemed to take very much for granted. He presently remarked that she must let him come very soon again, and he added, to explain this wish, ‘You know you seem to me very curious people.’

  Miss Muniment did not in the least repudiate the imputation. ‘Oh yes, I daresay we seem very curious. I think we are generally thought so; especially me, being so miserable and yet so lively.’ And she laughed till her bed creaked again.

  ‘Perhaps it’s lucky you are ill; perhaps if you had your health you would be all over the place,’ Hyacinth suggested. And he went on, candidly, ‘I can’t make it out, your being so up in everything.’

  ‘I don’t see why you need make it out! But you would, perhaps, if you had known my father and mother.’

  ‘Were they such a rare lot?’

  ‘I think you would say so if you had ever been in the mines. Yes, in the mines, where the filthy coal is dug out. That’s where my father came from – he was working in the pit when he was a child of ten. He never had a day’s schooling in his life; but he climbed up out of his black hole into daylight and air, and he invented a machine, and he married my mother, who came out of Durham, and (by her people) out of the pits and misery too. My father had no great future, but she was magnificent – the finest woman in the country, and the bravest, and the best. She’s in her grave now, and I couldn’t go to look at it even if it were in the nearest churchyard. My father was as black as the coal he worked in: I know I’m just his pattern, barring that he did have his legs, when the liquor hadn’t got into them. But between him and my mother, for grand, high intelligence there wasn’t much to choose. But what’s the use of brains if you haven’t got a backbone? My poor father had even less of that than I, for with me it’s only the body that can’t stand up, and with him it was the spirit. He discovered a kind of wheel, and he sold it, at Bradford, for fifteen pounds: I mean the whole right of it, and every hope and pride of his family. He was always straying, and my mother was always bringing him back. She had plenty to do, with me a puny, ailing brat from the moment I opened my eyes. Well, one night he strayed so far that he never came back; or only came back a loose, bloody bundle of clothes. He had fallen into a gravel-pit; he didn’t know where he was going. That’s the reason my brother will never touch so much as you could wet your finger with, and that I only have a drop once a week or so, in the way of a strengthener. I take what her ladyship brings me, but I take no more. If she could have come to us before my mother went, that would have been a saving! I was only nine when my father died, and I’m three years older than Paul. My mother did for us with all her might, and she kept us decent – if such a useless little mess as me can be said to be decent. At any rate, she kept me alive, and that’s a proof she was handy. She went to the wash-tub,92 and she might have been a queen, as she stood there with her bare arms in the foul linen and her long hair braided on her head. She was terrible handsome, but he would have been a bold man that would have taken upon himself to tell her so. And it was from her we got our education – she was determined we should rise above the common. You might have thought, in her position, that she couldn’t go into such things; but she was a rare one for keeping you at your book. She could hold to her idea when my poor father couldn’t; and her idea, for us, was that Paul should get learning and should look after me. You can see for yourself that that’s what has come about. How he got it is more than I can say, as we never had a penny to pay for it; and of course my mother’s cleverness wouldn’t have been of much use if he hadn’t been clever himself. Well, it was all in the family. Paul was a boy that would learn more from a yellow placard pasted on a wall, or a time-table at a railway station, than many a young fellow from a year at college. That was his only college, poor lad – picking up what he could. Mother was taken when she was still needed, nearly five years ago. There was an epidemic of typhoid,93 and of course it must pass me over, the goose of a thing – only that I’d have made a poor feast – and just lay that gallant creature on her back. Well, she never again made it ache over her soapsuds, straight and broad as it was. Not having seen her, you wouldn’t believe,’ said Rose Muniment, in conclusion; ‘but I just wanted you to understand that our parents had intellect, at least, to give us.’