by Henry James
‘Yes, people wouldn’t believe – they wouldn’t believe,’ Lady Aurora murmured softly, appreciatively. She was evidently very much pleased with what Hyacinth was saying. It was moreover a pleasure to himself to place on record his opinion of his friend; it seemed to make that opinion more clear, to give it the force of an invocation, a prophecy. This was especially the case when he asked why on earth nature had endowed Paul Muniment with such extraordinary powers of mind, and powers of body too – because he was as strong as a horse – if it had not been intended that he should do something great for his fellow-men. Hyacinth confided to her ladyship that he thought the people in his own class generally very stupid - what he should call third-rate minds. He wished it were not so, for heaven knew that he felt kindly to them and only asked to cast his lot with theirs; but he was obliged to confess that centuries of poverty, of ill-paid toil, of bad, insufficient food and wretched homes, had not a favourable effect upon the higher faculties. All the more reason that when there was a splendid exception, like Paul Muniment, it should count for a tremendous force – it had so much to make up for, to act for. And then Hyacinth repeated that in his own low walk of life people had really not the faculty of thought; their minds had been simplified – reduced to two or three elements. He saw that this declaration made his interlocutress very uncomfortable; she turned and twisted herself, vaguely, as if she wished to protest, but she was far too considerate to interrupt him. He had no desire to distress her, but there were times in which it was impossible for him to withstand the perverse satisfaction he took in insisting on his lowliness of station, in turning the knife about in the wound inflicted by such explicit reference, and in letting it be seen that if his place in the world was immeasurably small he at least had no illusions about either himself or his fellows. Lady Aurora replied, as quickly as possible, that she knew a great deal about the poor – not the poor like Rose Muniment, but the terribly, hopelessly poor, with whom she was more familiar than Hyacinth would perhaps believe – and that she was often struck with their great talents, with their quick wit, with their conversation being really much more entertaining, to her at least, than what one usually heard in drawing-rooms. She often found them immensely clever.
Hyacinth smiled at her, and said, ‘Ah, when you get to the lowest depths of poverty, they may become very brilliant again. But I’m afraid I haven’t gone so far down. In spite of my opportunities, I don’t know many absolute paupers.’
‘I know a great many.’ Lady Aurora hesitated, as if she didn’t like to boast, and then she added, ‘I daresay I know more than any one.’ There was something touching, beautiful, to Hyacinth, in this simple, diffident admission; it confirmed his impression that Lady Aurora was in some mysterious, incongruous, and even slightly ludicrous manner a heroine, a creature of a noble ideal. She perhaps guessed that he was indulging in reflections that might be favourable to her, for she said, precipitately, the next minute, as if there were nothing she dreaded so much as the danger of a compliment, ‘I think your aunt’s so very attractive – and I’m sure Rose Muniment thinks so.’ No sooner had she spoken than she blushed again; it appeared to have occurred to her that he might suppose she wished to contradict him by presenting this case of his aunt as a proof that the baser sort, even in a prosaic upper layer, were not without redeeming points. There was no reason why she should not have had this intention; so without sparing her, Hyacinth replied –
‘You mean that she’s an exception to what I was saying?’
Lady Aurora stammered a little; then, at last, as if, since he wouldn’t spare her, she wouldn’t spare him, either, ‘Yes, and you’re an exception, too; you’ll not make me believe you’re wanting in intelligence. The Muniments don’t think so,’ she added.
‘No more do I myself; but that doesn’t prove that exceptions are not frequent. I have blood in my veins that is not the blood of the people.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Lady Aurora, sympathetically. And with a smile she went on: ‘Then you’re all the more of an exception – in the upper class!’
Her smile was the kindest in the world, but it did not blind Hyacinth to the fact that from his own point of view he had been extraordinarily indiscreet. He believed a moment before that he would have been proof against the strongest temptation to refer to the mysteries of his lineage, inasmuch as, if made in a boastful spirit (and he had no desire as yet to make it an exercise in humility) any such reference would inevitably contain an element of the grotesque. He had never opened his lips to any one about his birth (since the dreadful days when the question was discussed, with Mr Vetch’s assistance, in Lomax Place); never even to Paul Muniment, never to Millicent Henning nor to Eustache Poupin. He had an impression that people had ideas about him, and with some of Miss Henning’s he had been made acquainted: they were of such a nature that he sometimes wondered whether the tie which united him to her were not, on her own side, a secret determination to satisfy her utmost curiosity before she had done with him. But he flattered himself that he was impenetrable, and none the less he had begun to swagger, idiotically, the first time a temptation (to call a temptation) presented itself. He turned crimson as soon as he had spoken, partly at the sudden image of what he had to swagger about, and partly at the absurdity of a challenge having appeared to proceed from the bashful gentlewoman before him. He hoped she didn’t particularly regard what he had said (and indeed she gave no sign whatever of being startled by his claim to a pedigree – she had too much quick delicacy for that; she appeared to notice only the symptoms of confusion that followed it), but as soon as possible he gave himself a lesson in humility by remarking, ‘I gather that you spend most of your time among the poor, and I am sure you carry blessings with you. But I frankly confess that I don’t understand a lady giving herself up to people like us when there is no obligation. Wretched company we must be, when there is so much better to be had.’
‘I like it very much – you don’t understand.’
‘Precisely – that is what I say. Our little friend on the bed is perpetually talking about your house, your family, your splendours, your gardens and green-houses; they must be magnificent, of course –’
‘Oh, I wish she wouldn’t; really, I wish she wouldn’t. It makes one feel dreadfully!’ Lady Aurora interposed, with vehemence.
‘Ah, you had better give her her way; it’s such a pleasure to her.’
‘Yes, more than to any of us!’ sighed her ladyship, helplessly.
‘Well, how can you leave all those beautiful things, to come and breathe this beastly air, surround yourself with hideous images, and associate with people whose smallest fault is that they are ignorant, brutal and dirty? I don’t speak of the ladies here present,’ Hyacinth added, with the manner which most made Millicent Henning (who at once admired and hated it), wonder where on earth he had got it.
‘Oh, I wish I could make you understand!’ cried Lady Aurora, looking at him with troubled, appealing eyes, as if he were unexpectedly discouraging.
‘After all, I do understand! Charity exists in your nature as a kind of passion.’
‘Yes, yes, it’s a kind of passion!’ her ladyship repeated, eagerly, very thankful for the word. ‘I don’t know whether it’s charity – I don’t mean that. But whatever it is, it’s a passion – it’s my life – it’s all I care for.’ She hesitated a moment, as if there might be something indecent in the confession, or dangerous in the recipient; and then, evidently, she was mastered by the comfort of being able to justify herself for an eccentricity that had excited notice, as well as by the luxury of discharging her soul of a long accumulation of timid, sacred sentiment. ‘Already, when I was fifteen years old, I wanted to sell all I had and give to the poor. And ever since, I have wanted to do something; it has seemed as if my heart would break if I shouldn’t be able!’
Hyacinth was struck with a great respect, which, however, did not prevent him (the words sounded patronising, even to himself), from saying in a moment, ‘I suppose you are ver
y religious.’
Lady Aurora looked away, into the thickening dusk, at the smutty housetops, the blurred emanation, above the streets, of lamplight. ‘I don’t know – one has one’s ideas – some of them may be strange. I think a great many clergymen do good, but there are others I don’t like at all. I daresay we had too many, always, at home; my father likes them so much. I think I have known too many bishops; I have had the church too much on my back. I daresay they wouldn’t think at home, you know, that one was quite what one ought to be; but of course they consider me very odd, in every way, as there’s no doubt I am. I should tell you that I don’t tell them everything; for what’s the use, when people don’t understand? We are twelve at home, and eight of us are girls; and if you think it’s so very splendid, and she thinks so, I should like you both to try it for a little! My father isn’t rich, and there is only one of us married, and we are not at all handsome, and – oh, there are all kinds of things,’ the young woman went on, looking round at him an instant, shyly but excitedly. ‘I don’t like society; and neither would you if you were to see the kind there is in London – at least in some parts,’ Lady Aurora added, considerately. ‘I daresay you wouldn’t believe all the humbuggery and the tiresomeness that one has to go through. But I’ve got out of it; I do as I like, though it has been rather a struggle. I have my liberty, and that is the greatest blessing in life, except the reputation of being queer, and even a little mad, which is a greater advantage still. I’m a little mad, you know; you needn’t be surprised if you hear it. That’s because I stop in town when they go into the country; all the autumn, all the winter, when there’s no one here (except three or four millions), and the rain drips, drips, drips, from the trees in the big, dull park, where my people live. I daresay I oughtn’t to say such things to you, but, as I tell you, I’m a little mad, and I might as well keep up my character. When one is one of eight daughters, and there’s very little money (for any of us, at least), and there’s nothing to do but to go out with three or four others in a mackintosh, one can easily go off one’s head. Of course there’s the village, and it’s not at all a nice one, and there are the people to look after, and heaven knows they’re in want of it; but one must work with the vicarage, and at the vicarage there are four more daughters, all old maids, and it’s dreary, and it’s dreadful, and one has too much of it, and they don’t understand what one thinks or feels, or a single word one says to them! Besides they are stupid, I admit – the country poor; they are very, very dense. I like Camberwell better,’ said Lady Aurora, smiling and taking breath, at the end of her nervous, hurried, almost incoherent speech, of which she had delivered herself pantingly, with strange intonations and grotesque movements of her neck, as if she were afraid from one moment to the other that she would repent, not of her confidence, but of her egotism.
It placed her, for Hyacinth, in an unexpected light, and made him feel that her awkward, aristocratic spinsterhood was the cover of tumultuous passions. No one could have less the appearance of being animated by a vengeful irony; but he saw that this delicate, shy, generous, and evidently most tender creature was not a person to spare, wherever she could prick them, the institutions among which she had been brought up and against which she had violently reacted. Hyacinth had always supposed that a reactionary meant a backslider from the liberal faith, but Rosy’s devotee gave a new value to the term; she appeared to have been driven to her present excesses by the squire and the parson and the conservative influences of that upper-class British home which our young man had always supposed to be the highest fruit of civilisation. It was clear that her ladyship was an original, and an original with force; but it gave Hyacinth a real pang to hear her make light of Inglefield (especially the park), and of the opportunities that must have abounded in Belgrave Square. It had been his belief that in a world of suffering and injustice these things were, if not the most righteous, at least the most fascinating. If they didn’t give one the finest sensations, where were such sensations to be had? He looked at Lady Aurora with a face which was a tribute to her sudden vividness, and said, ‘I can easily understand your wanting to do some good in the world, because you’re a kind of saint.’
‘A very curious kind!’ laughed her ladyship.
‘But I don’t understand your not liking what your position gives you.’
‘I don’t know anything about my position. I want to live!’
‘And do you call this life?’
‘I’ll tell you what my position is, if you want to know: it’s the deadness of the grave!’
Hyacinth was startled by her tone, but he nevertheless laughed back at her, ‘Ah, as I say, you’re a kind of saint!’ She made no reply, for at that moment the door opened, and Paul Muniment’s tall figure emerged from the blackness of the staircase into the twilight, now very faint, of the room. Lady Aurora’s eyes, as they rested upon him, seemed to declare that such a vision as that, at least, was life. Another person, as tall as himself, appeared behind him, and Hyacinth recognised with astonishment their insinuating friend Captain Sholto. Muniment had brought him up for Rosy’s entertainment, being ready, and more than ready, always, to usher in any one in the world, from the prime minister to the common hangman, who might give that young lady a sensation. They must have met at the ‘Sun and Moon’, and if the Captain, some accident smoothing the way, had made him half as many advances as he had made some other people Hyacinth could see that it wouldn’t take long for Paul to lay him under contribution. But what the mischief was the Captain up to? It cannot be said that our young man arrived, this evening, at an answer to that question. The occasion proved highly festal, and the hostess rose to it without lifting her head from the pillow. Her brother introduced Captain Sholto as a gentleman who had a great desire to know extraordinary people, and she made him take possession of the chair at her bedside, out of which Miss Pynsent quickly edged herself, and asked him who he was, and where he came from, and how Paul had made his acquaintance, and whether he had many friends in Camberwell. Sholto had not the same grand air that hovered about him at the theatre; he was shabbily dressed, very much like Hyacinth himself; but his appearance gave our young man an opportunity to wonder what made him so unmistakably a gentleman in spite of his seedy coat and trousers – in spite too, of his rather overdoing the manner of being appreciative even to rapture and thinking everything and every one most charming and curious. He stood out, in poor Rosy’s tawdry little room, among her hideous attempts at decoration, and looked to Hyacinth a being from another sphere, playing over the place and company a smile (one couldn’t call it false or unpleasant, yet it was distinctly not natural), of which he had got the habit in camps and courts. It became brilliant when it rested on Hyacinth, and the Captain greeted him as he might have done a dear young friend from whom he had been long and painfully separated. He was easy, he was familiar, he was exquisitely benevolent and bland, and altogether incomprehensible.
Rosy was a match for him, however. He evidently didn’t puzzle her in the least; she thought his visit the most natural thing in the world. She expressed all the gratitude that decency required, but appeared to assume that people who climbed her stairs would always find themselves repaid. She remarked that her brother must have met him for the first time that day, for the way that he sealed a new acquaintance was usually by bringing the person immediately to call upon her. And when the Captain said that if she didn’t like them he supposed the poor wretches were dropped on the spot, she admitted that this would be true if it ever happened that she disapproved; as yet, however, she had not been obliged to draw the line. This was perhaps partly because he had not brought up any of his political friends – people that he knew only for political reasons. Of these people, in general, she had a very small opinion, and she would not conceal from Captain Sholto that she hoped he was not one of them. Rosy spoke as if her brother represented the Camberwell district in the House of Commons and she had discovered that a parliamentary career lowered the moral tone. The Captain, however
, entered quite into her views, and told her that it was as common friends of Mr Hyacinth Robinson that Mr Muniment and he had come together; they were both so fond of him that this had immediately constituted a kind of tie. On hearing himself commemorated in such a brilliant way Mr Hyacinth Robinson averted himself; he saw that Captain Sholto might be trusted to make as great an effort for Rosy’s entertainment as he gathered that he had made for that of Millicent Henning, that evening at the theatre. There were not chairs enough to go round, and Paul fetched a three-legged stool from his own apartment, after which he undertook to make tea for the company, with the aid of a tin kettle and a spirit-lamp; these implements having been set out, flanked by half a dozen cups, in honour, presumably, of the little dressmaker, who was to come such a distance. The little dressmaker, Hyacinth observed with pleasure, fell into earnest conversation with Lady Aurora, who bent over her, flushed, smiling, stammering, and apparently so nervous that Pinnie, in comparison, was majestic and serene. They communicated presently to Hyacinth a plan they had unanimously evolved, to the effect that Miss Pynsent should go home to Belgrave Square with her ladyship, to settle certain preliminaries in regard to the pink dressing-gown, toward which, if Miss Pynsent assented, her ladyship hoped to be able to contribute sundry morsels of stuff which had proved their quality in honourable service and might be dyed to the proper tint. Pinnie, Hyacinth could see, was in a state of religious exaltation; the visit to Belgrave Square and the idea of co-operating in such a manner with the nobility were privileges she could not take solemnly enough. The latter luxury, indeed, she began to enjoy without delay; Lady Aurora suggesting that Mr Muniment might be rather awkward about making tea, and that they should take the business off his hands. Paul gave it up to them, with a pretence of compassion for their conceit, remarking that at any rate it took two women to supplant one man; and Hyacinth drew him to the window, to ask where he had encountered Sholto and how he liked him.