by Henry James
During this little address the Princess, who made no rejoinder to that part of it which concerned herself, remained hidden behind her fan; but after Madame Grandoni had wandered away she lowered this emblazoned shield and rested her eyes for a while on Hyacinth. At last she said, ‘Don’t sit half a mile off. Come nearer to me. I want to say something to you that I can’t shout across the room.’ Hyacinth instantly got up, but at the same moment she also rose; so that, approaching each other, they met half-way, before the great marble chimney-piece. She stood a little, opening and closing her fan; then she remarked, ‘You must be surprised at my not having yet spoken to you about our great interest.’
‘No, indeed, I am not surprised at anything.’
‘When you take that tone I feel as if we should never, after all, become friends,’ said the Princess.
‘I hoped we were, already. Certainly, after the kindness you have shown me, there is no service of friendship that you might ask of me –’
‘That you wouldn’t gladly perform? I know what you are going to say, and have no doubt you speak truly. But what good would your service do me if, all the while, you think of me as a hollow-headed, hollow-hearted trifler, behaving in the worst possible taste and oppressing you with her attentions? Perhaps you can think of me as – what shall I call it? – as a kind of coquette.’
Hyacinth demurred. ‘That would be very conceited.’
‘Surely, you have the right to be as conceited as you please, after the advances I have made you! Pray, who has a better one? But you persist in remaining humble, and that is very provoking.’
‘It is not I that am provoking; it is life, and society, and all the difficulties that surround us.’
‘I am precisely of that opinion – that they are exasperating; that when I appeal to you, frankly, candidly, disinterestedly – simply because I like you, for no other reason in the world – to help me to disregard and surmount these obstructions, to treat them with the contempt they deserve, you drop your eyes, you even blush a little, and make yourself small, and try to edge out of the situation by pleading general devotion and insignificance. Please remember this: you cease to be insignificant from the moment I have anything to do with you. My dear fellow,’ the Princess went on, in her free, audacious, fraternising way, to which her beauty and simplicity gave nobleness, ‘there are people who would be very glad to enjoy, in your place, that form of obscurity.’
‘What do you wish me to do?’ Hyacinth asked, as quietly as he could.
If he had had an idea that this question, to which, as coming from his lips, and even as being uttered with perceptible impatience, a certain unexpectedness might attach, would cause her a momentary embarrassment, he was completely out in his calculation. She answered on the instant: ‘I want you to give me time! That’s all I ask of my friends, in general – all I ever asked of the best I have had. But none of them ever did it; none of them, that is, save the excellent creature who has just left us. She understood me long ago.’
‘That’s all I, on my side, ask of you,’ said Hyacinth, smiling. ‘Give me time, give me time,’ he murmured, looking up at her splendour.
‘Dear Mr Hyacinth, I have given you months! – months since our first meeting. And at present, haven’t I given you the whole day? It has been intentional, my not speaking to you of our plans. Yes, our plans; I know what I am saying. Don’t try to look stupid; you will never succeed. I wished to leave you free to amuse yourself.’
‘Oh, I have amused myself,’ said Hyacinth.
‘You would have been very fastidious if you hadn’t! However, that is precisely, in the first place, what I wished you to come here for. To observe the impression made by such a place as this on such a nature as yours, introduced to it for the first time, has been, I assure you, quite worth my while. I have already given you a hint of how extraordinary I think it that you should be what you are without having seen – what shall I call them? – beautiful, delightful old things. I have been watching you; I am frank enough to tell you that. I want you to see more – more – more!’ the Princess exclaimed, with a sudden flicker of passion. ‘And I want to talk with you about this matter, as well as others. That will be for to-morrow.’
‘To-morrow?’
‘I noticed Madame Grandoni took for granted just now that you are going. But that has nothing to do with the business. She has so little imagination!’
Hyacinth shook his head, smiling. ‘I can’t stay!’ He had an idea his mind was made up.
She returned his smile, but there was something strangely touching – it was so sad, yet, as a rebuke, so gentle – in the tone in which she replied, ‘You oughtn’t to force me to beg. It isn’t nice.’
He had reckoned without that tone; all his reasons suddenly seemed to fall from under him, to liquefy. He remained a moment, looking on the ground; then he said, ‘Princess, you have no idea – how should you have? – into the midst of what abject, pitiful preoccupations you thrust yourself. I have no money – I have no clothes.’
‘What do you want of money? This isn’t an hotel.’
‘Every day I stay here I lose a day’s wages; and I live on my wages from day to day.’
‘Let me, then, give you wages. You will work for me.’
‘What do you mean – work for you?’
‘You will bind all my books. I have ever so many foreign ones, in paper.’
‘You speak as if I had brought my tools!’
‘No, I don’t imagine that. I will give you the wages now, and you can do the work, at your leisure and convenience, afterwards. Then, if you want anything, you can go over to Bonchester and buy it. There are very good shops; I have used them.’ Hyacinth thought of a great many things at this juncture; the Princess had that quickening effect upon him. Among others, he thought of these two: first, that it was indelicate (though such an opinion was not very strongly held either in Pentonville or in Soho) to accept money from a woman; and second, that it was still more indelicate to make such a woman as that go down on her knees to him. But it took more than a minute for one of these convictions to prevail over the other, and before that he had heard the Princess continue, in the tone of mild, disinterested argument: ‘If we believe in the coming democracy, if it seems to us right and just, and we hold that in sweeping over the world the great wave will wash away a myriad iniquities and cruelties, why not make some attempt, with our own poor means – for one must begin somewhere – to carry out the spirit of it in our lives and our manners? I want to do that. I try to do it – in my relations with you, for instance. But you hang back; you are not democratic!’
The Princess accusing him of a patrician offishness was a very fine stroke; nevertheless it left him lucidity enough (though he still hesitated an instant, wondering whether the words would not offend her) to say, with a smile, ‘I have been strongly warned against you.’
The offence seemed not to touch her. ‘I can easily understand that. Of course my proceedings – though, after all, I have done little enough as yet – must appear most unnatural. Che vuole? as Madame Grandoni says.’
A certain knot of light blue ribbon, which formed part of the trimming of her dress, hung down, at her side, in the folds of it. On these glossy loops Hyacinth’s eyes happened for a moment to have rested, and he now took one of them up and carried it to his lips. ‘I will do all the work for you that you will give me. If you give it on purpose, by way of munificence, that is your own affair. I myself will estimate the price. What decides me is that I shall do it so well; at least it shall be better than any one else can do – so that if you employ me there will have been that reason. I have brought you a book – so you can see. I did it for you last year, and went to South Street to give it to you, but you had already gone.’
‘Give it to me to-morrow.’ These words appeared to express so exclusively the calmness of relief at finding that he could be reasonable, as well as that of a friendly desire to see the proof of his talent, that he was surprised when she said, in the ne
xt breath, irrelevantly, ‘Who was it warned you against me?’
He feared she might suppose he meant Madame Grandoni, so he made the plainest answer, having no desire to betray the old lady, and reflecting that, as the likelihood was small that his friend in Camberwell would ever consent to meet the Princess (in spite of her plan of going there), no one would be hurt by it. ‘A friend of mine in London – Paul Muniment.’
‘Paul Muniment?’
‘I think I mentioned him to you the first time we met.’
‘The person who said something good? I forget what it was.’
‘It was sure to be something good if he said it; he is very wise.’
‘That makes his warning very flattering to me! What does he know about me?’
‘Oh, nothing, of course, except the little that I could tell him. He only spoke on general grounds.’
‘I like his name – Paul Muniment,’ the Princess said. ‘If he resembles it, I think I should like him.’
‘You would like him much better than me.’
‘How do you know how much – or how little – I like you? I am determined to keep hold of you, simply for what you can show me.’ She paused a moment, with her beautiful, intelligent eyes smiling into his own, and then she continued, ‘On general grounds, bien entendu,183 your friend was quite right to warn you. Now those geneial grounds are just what I have undertaken to make as small as possible. It is to reduce them to nothing that I talk to you, that I conduct myself with regard to you as I have done. What in the world is it I am trying to do but, by every device that my ingenuity suggests, fill up the inconvenient gulf that yawns between my position and yours? You know what I think of “positions”; I told you in London. For Heaven’s sake let me feel that I have – a little – succeeded!’ Hyacinth satisfied her sufficiently to enable her, five minutes later, apparently to entertain no further doubt on the question of his staying over. On the contrary, she burst into a sudden ebullition of laughter, exchanging her bright, lucid insistence for one of her singular sallies. ‘You must absolutely go with me to call on the Marchants; it will be too delightful to see you there!’
As he walked up and down the empty drawing-room it occurred to him to ask himself whether that was mainly what she was keeping him for – so that he might help her to play one of her tricks on the good people at Broome. He paced there, in the still candlelight, for a longer time than he measured; until the butler came and stood in the doorway, looking at him silently and fixedly, as if to let him know that he interfered with the custom of the house. He had told the Princess that what determined him was the thought of the manner in which he might exercise his craft in her service; but this was only half the influence that pressed him into forgetfulness of what he had most said to himself when, in Lomax Place, in an hour of unprecedented introspection, he wrote the letter by which he accepted the invitation to Medley. He would go there (so he said), because a man must be gallant, especially if he be a little bookbinder; but after he should be there he would insist at every step upon knowing what he was in for. The change that had taken place in him now, from one moment to another, was that he had simply ceased to care what he was in for. All warnings, reflections, considerations of verisimilitude, of the delicate, the natural and the possible, of the value of his independence, had become as nothing to him. The cup of an exquisite experience – a week in that enchanted palace, a week of such immunity from Lomax Place and old Crookenden as he had never dreamed of – was at his lips; it was purple with the wine of novelty, of civilisation, and he couldn’t push it aside without drinking. He might go home ashamed, but he would have for evermore in his mouth the taste of nectar. He went upstairs, under the eye of the butler, and on his way to his room, at the turning of a corridor, found himself face to face with Madame Grandoni. She had apparently just issued from her own apartment, the door of which stood open, near her; she might have been hovering there in expectation of his footstep. She had donned her dressing-gown, which appeared to give her every facility for respiration, but she had not yet parted with her wig. She still had her pink French book under her arm; and her fat little hands, tightly locked together in front of her, formed the clasp of her generous girdle.
‘Do tell me it is positive, Mr Robinson!’ she said, stopping short.
‘What is positive, Madame Grandoni?’
‘That you take the train in the morning.’
‘I can’t tell you that, because it wouldn’t be true. On the contrary, it has been settled that I shall stay over. I am very sorry if it distresses you – but che vuole?’ Hyacinth added, smiling.
Madame Grandoni was a humorous woman, but she gave him no smile in return; she only looked at him a moment, and then, shrugging her shoulders silently but expressively, shuffled back to her room.
24
‘I can give you your friend’s name – in a single guess. He is Diedrich Hoffendahl!’ They had been strolling more and more slowly, the next morning, and as she made this announcement the Princess stopped altogether, standing there under a great beech with her eyes upon Hyacinth’s and her hands full of primroses. He had breakfasted at noon, with his hostess and Madame Grandoni, but the old lady had fortunately not joined them when the Princess afterwards proposed that he should accompany her on her walk in the park. She told him that her venerable friend had let her know, while the day was still very young, that she thought it in the worst possible taste of the Princess not to have allowed Mr Robinson to depart; to which Christina had replied that concerning tastes there was no disputing and that they had disagreed on such matters before without any one being the worse. Hyacinth expressed the hope that they wouldn’t dispute about him – of all thankless subjects in the world; and the Princess assured him that she never disputed about anything. She held that there were other ways than that of arranging one’s relations with people; and Hyacinth guessed that she meant that when a difference became sharp she broke off altogether. On her side, then, there was as little possibility as on his that they should ever quarrel; their acquaintance would be a solid friendship or it would be nothing at all. The Princess gave it from hour to hour more of this quality, and it may be imagined how safe Hyacinth felt by the time he began to tell her that something had happened to him, in London, three months before, one night (or rather in the small hours of the morning), that had altered his life altogether – had, indeed, as he might say, changed the terms on which he held it. He was aware that he didn’t know exactly what he meant by this last phrase; but it expressed sufficiently well the new feeling that had come over him since that interminable, tantalising cab-drive in the rain.
The Princess had led to this, almost as soon as they left the house; making up for her avoidance of such topics the day before by saying, suddenly, ‘Now tell me what is going on among your friends. I don’t mean your worldly acquaintances, but your colleagues, your brothers. Où en êtes-vous,184 at the present time? Is there anything new, is anything going to be done; I am afraid you are always simply dawdling and muddling.’ Hyacinth felt as if, of late, he had by no means either dawdled or muddled; but before he had committed himself so far as to refute the imputation the Princess exclaimed, in another tone, ‘How annoying it is that I can’t ask you anything without giving you the right to say to yourself, “After all, what do I know? May she not be in the pay of the police?” ’
‘Oh, that doesn’t occur to me,’ said Hyacinth, with a smile.
‘It might, at all events; by which I mean it may, at any moment. Indeed, I think it ought.’
‘If you were in the pay of the police you wouldn’t trouble your head about me.’
‘I should make you think that, certainly! That would be my first care. However, if you have no tiresome suspicions so much the better,’ said the Princess; and she pressed him again for some news from behind the scenes.
In spite of his absence of doubt on the subject of her honesty – he felt that he should never again entertain any such trumpery idea as that she might be an agent on the wr
ong side – he did not open himself immediately; but at the end of half an hour he let her know that the most important event of his life had taken place, scarcely more than the other day, in the most unexpected manner. And to explain in what it had consisted, he said, ‘I pledged myself, by everything that is sacred.’
‘To what did you pledge yourself?’
‘I took a vow – a tremendous, terrible vow – in the presence of four witnesses,’ Hyacinth went on.
‘And what was it about, your vow?’
‘I gave my life away,’ said Hyacinth, smiling.
She looked at him askance, as if to see how he would make such an announcement as that; but she wore no smile – her face was politely grave. They moved together a moment, exchanging a glance, in silence, and then she said, ‘Ah, well, then, I’m all the more glad you stayed!’
‘That was one of the reasons.’
‘I wish you had waited – till after you had been here,’ the Princess remarked.
‘Why till after I had been here?’
‘Perhaps then you wouldn’t have given away your life. You might have seen reasons for keeping it.’ And now, at last, she treated the matter gaily, as Hyacinth had done. He replied that he had not the least doubt that, on the whole, her influence was relaxing; but without heeding this remark she went on: ‘Be so good as to tell me what you are talking about.’