Ghost stories of henry j.., p.15
Ghost Stories of Henry James, page 15
I carried out the vow I had made her; I held my tongue for my three months. Unexpectedly to myself there were moments of this time when she did strike me as capable of missing my homage even though she might be indifferent to my happiness. I wanted so to make her like me that I became subtle and ingenious, wonderfully alert, patiently diplomatic. Sometimes I thought I had earned my reward, brought her to the point of saying: ‘Well, well, you’re the best of them all – you may speak to me now.’ Then there was a greater blankness than ever in her beauty and on certain days a mocking light in her eyes, a light of which the meaning seemed to be: ‘If you don’t take care I will accept you, to have done with you the more effectually.’ Mrs Marden was a great help to me simply by believing in me, and I valued her faith all the more that it continued even through a sudden intermission of the miracle that had been wrought for me. After our visit to Tranton, Sir Edmund Orme gave us a holiday, and I confess it was at first a disappointment to me. I felt myself by so much less designated, less involved and connected – all with Charlotte I mean to say. ‘Oh don’t cry till you’re out of the wood,’ was her mother’s comment; ‘he has let me off sometimes for six months. He’ll break out again when you least expect it – he understands his game.’ For her these weeks were happy, and she was wise enough not to talk about me to the girl. She was so good as to assure me I was taking the right line, that I looked as if I felt secure and that in the long run women give way to this. She had known them do it even when the man was a fool for that appearance, for that confidence – a fool indeed on any terms. For herself she felt it a good time, almost her best, a Saint Martin’s summer [10] of the soul. She was better than she had been for years, and had me to thank for it. The sense of visitation was light on her – she wasn’t in anguish every time she looked round. Charlotte contradicted me repeatedly, but contradicted herself still more. That winter by the old Sussex sea was a wonder of mildness, and we often sat out in the sun. I walked up and down with my young woman, and Mrs Marden, sometimes on a bench, sometimes in a Bath-chair, waited for us and smiled at us as we passed. I always looked out for a sign in her face – ‘He’s with you, he’s with you’ (she would see him before I should) but nothing came; the season had brought us as well a sort of spiritual softness. Towards the end of April, the air was so like June that, meeting my two friends one night at some Brighton sociability – an evening party with amateur music – I drew the younger unresistingly out upon a balcony to which a window in one of the rooms stood open. The night was close and thick, the stars dim, and below us under the cliff we heard the deep rumble of the tide. We listened to it a little and there came to us, mixed with it from within the house, the sound of a violin accompanied by a piano – a performance that had been our pretext for escaping.
‘Do you like me a little better?’ I broke out after a minute. ‘Could you listen to me again?’
I had no sooner spoken than she laid her hand quickly, with a certain force, on my arm. ‘Hush! – isn’t there someone there?’ She was looking into the gloom of the far end of the balcony. This balcony ran the whole width of the house, a width very great in the best of the old houses at Brighton. We were to some extent lighted by the open window behind us, but the other windows, curtained within, left the darkness undiminished, so that I made out but dimly the figure of a gentleman standing there and looking at us. He was in evening dress, like a guest – I saw the vague sheen of his white shirt and the pale oval of his face – and he might perfectly have been a guest who had stepped out in advance of us to take the air. Charlotte took him for one at first – then evidently, even in a few seconds, saw that the intensity of his gaze was unconventional. What else she saw I couldn’t determine; I was too occupied with my own impression to do more than feel the quick contact of her uneasiness. My own impression was in fact the strongest of sensations, a sensation of horror; for what could the thing mean but that the girl at last saw? I heard her give a sudden, gasping ‘Ah!’ and move quickly into the house. It was only afterwards I knew that I myself had had a totally new emotion – my horror passing into anger and my anger into a stride along the balcony with a gesture of reprobation. The case was simplified to the vision of an adorable girl menaced and terrified. I advanced to vindicate her security, but I found nothing there to meet me. It was either all a mistake or Sir Edmund Orme had vanished.
I followed her at once, but there were symptoms of confusion in the drawing-room when I passed in. A lady had fainted, the music had stopped; there was a shuffling of chairs and a pressing forward. The lady was not Charlotte, as I feared, but Mrs Marden, who had suddenly been taken ill. I remember the relief with which I learned this, for to see Charlotte stricken would have been anguish, and her mother’s condition gave a channel to her agitation. It was of course all a matter for the people of the house and for the ladies, and I could have no share in attending to my friends or in conducting them to their carriage. Mrs Marden revived and insisted on going home, after which I uneasily withdrew.
I called the next morning for better news and I learnt she was more at ease, but on my asking if Charlotte would see me the message sent down was an excuse. There was nothing for me to do all day but roam with a beating heart. Towards evening, however, I received a line in pencil, brought by hand – ‘Please come; mother wishes you.’ Five minutes later, I was at the door again and ushered into the drawing-room. Mrs Marden lay on the sofa, and as soon as I looked at her I saw the shadow of death in her face. But the first thing she said was that she was better, ever so much better; her poor old fluttered heart had misbehaved again, but now was decently quiet. She gave me her hand and I bent over her, my eyes on her eyes, and in this way was able to read what she didn’t speak – ‘I’m really very ill, but appear to take what I say exactly as I say it.’ Charlotte stood there beside her, looking not frightened now, but intensely grave, and meeting no look of my own. ‘She has told me – she has told me!’ her mother went on.
‘She has told you?’ I stared from one of them to the other, wondering if my friend meant that the girl had named to her the unexplained appearance on the balcony.
‘That you spoke to her again – that you’re admirably faithful.’
I felt a thrill of joy at this; it showed me that memory uppermost, and also that her daughter had wished to say the thing that would most soothe her, not the thing that would alarm her. Yet I was myself now sure, as sure as if Mrs Marden had told me, that she knew and had known at the moment what her daughter had seen. ‘I spoke – I spoke, but she gave me no answer,’ I said.
‘She will now, won’t you, Chartie? I want it so, I want it!’ our companion murmured with ineffable wistfulness.
‘You’re very good to me’ – Charlotte addressed me, seriously and sweetly, but with her eyes fixed on the carpet. There was something different in her, different from all the past. She had recognised something, she felt a coercion. I could see her uncontrollably tremble.
‘Ah if you would let me show you how good I can be!’ I cried as I held out my hands to her. As I uttered the words, I was touched with the knowledge that something had happened. A form had constituted itself on the other side of the couch, and the form leaned over Mrs Marden. My whole being went forth into a mute prayer that Charlotte shouldn’t see it and that I should be able to betray nothing. The impulse to glance towards her mother was even stronger than the involuntary movement of taking in Sir Edmund Orme; but I could resist even that, and Mrs Marden was perfectly still. Charlotte got up to give me her hand, and then – with the definite act – she dreadfully saw. She gave, with a shriek, one stare of dismay, and another sound, the wail of one of the lost, fell at the same instant on my ear. But I had already sprung towards the creature I loved, to cover her, to veil her face, and she had as passionately thrown herself into my arms. I held her there a moment – pressing her close, given up to her, feeling each of her throbs with my own and not knowing which was which; then all of a sudden, coldly, I was sure we were alone. She released herself. The figure beside the sofa had vanished, but Mrs Marden lay in her place with closed eyes, with something in her stillness that gave us both a fresh terror. Charlotte expressed it in the cry of ‘Mother, mother!’ with which she flung herself down. I fell on my knees beside her – Mrs Marden had passed away.
Was the sound I heard when Chartie shrieked – the other and still more tragic sound I mean – the despairing cry of the poor lady’s death-shock or the articulate sob (it was like a waft from a great storm) of the exorcised and pacified spirit? Possibly the latter, for that was mercifully the last of Sir Edmund Orme.
The Private Life
1
We talked of London face to face with a great bristling primeval glacier. The hour and the scene were one of those impressions that make up a little in Switzerland for the modern indignity of travel – the promiscuities and vulgarities, the station and the hotel, the gregarious patience, the struggle for a scrappy attention, the reduction to a numbered state. The high valley was pink with the mountain rose, the cool air as fresh as if the world were young. There was a faint flush of afternoon on undiminished snows, and the fraternising tinkle of the unseen cattle came to us with a cropped and sun-warmed odour. The balconied inn stood on the very neck of the sweetest pass in the Oberland, and for a week we had had company and weather. This was felt to be great luck, for one would have made up for the other had either been bad.
The weather certainly would have made up for the company; but it wasn’t subjected to this tax, for we had by a happy chance the fleur des pois: [1] Lord and Lady Mellifont, Clare Vawdrey, [2] the greatest (in the opinion of many) of our literary glories, and Blanche Adney, the greatest (in the opinion of all) of our theatrical. I mention these first because they were just the people whom in London, at that time, people tried to ‘get’. People endeavoured to ‘book’ them six weeks ahead, yet on this occasion we had come in for them, we had all come in for each other, without the least wire-pulling. A turn of the game had pitched us together the last of August, and we recognised our luck by remaining so, under protection of the barometer. When the golden days were over – that would come soon enough – we should wind down opposite sides of the pass and disappear over the crest of surrounding heights. We were of the same general communion, chalk-marked for recognition by signs from the same alphabet. We met, in London, with irregular frequency; we were more or less governed by the laws and the language, the traditions and the shibboleths [3] of the same dense social state. I think all of us, even the ladies, ‘did’ something, though we pretended we didn’t when it was mentioned. Such things aren’t mentioned indeed in London, but it was our innocent pleasure to be different here. There had to be some way to show the difference, inasmuch as we were under the impression that this was our annual holiday. We felt at any rate that the conditions were more human than in London, or at least that we ourselves were. We were frank about this, we talked about it: it was what we were talking about as we looked at the flushing glacier, just as someone called attention to the prolonged absence of Lord Mellifont and Mrs Adney. We were seated on the terrace of the inn, where there were benches and little tables, and those of us most bent on showing with what a rush we had returned to nature were, in the queer Germanic fashion, having coffee before meat.
The remark about the absence of our two companions was not taken up, not even by Lady Mellifont, not even by little Adney, the fond composer; for it had been dropped only in the briefest intermission of Clare Vawdrey’s talk. (This celebrity was ‘Clarence’ only on the title-page.) It was just that revelation of our being after all human that was his theme. He asked the company whether, candidly, everyone hadn’t been tempted to say to everyone else: ‘I had no idea you were really so nice.’ I had had, for my part, an idea that he was, and even a good deal nicer, but that was too complicated to go into then; besides it’s exactly my story. There was a general understanding among us that when Vawdrey talked we should be silent, and not, oddly enough, because he at all expected it. He didn’t, for of all copious talkers he was the most undesigning, the least greedy and professional. It was rather the religion of the host, of the hostess, that prevailed among us; it was their own idea, but they always looked for a listening circle when the great novelist dined with them. On the occasion I allude to, there was probably no one present with whom in London he hadn’t dined, and we felt the force of this habit. He had dined even with me; and on the evening of that dinner, as on this Alpine afternoon, I had been at no pains to hold my tongue, absorbed as I inveterately was in a study of the question that always rose before me to such a height in his fair square strong stature.
This question was all the more tormenting that I’m sure he never suspected himself of imposing it, any more than he had ever observed that every day of his life everyone listened to him at dinner. He used to be called ‘subjective and introspective’ in the weekly papers, but if that meant he was avid of tribute no distinguished man could in society have been less so. He never talked about himself; and this was an article on which, though it would have been tremendously worthy of him, he apparently never even reflected. He had his hours and his habits, his tailor and his hatter, his hygiene and his particular wine, but all these things together never made up an attitude. Yet they constituted the only one he ever adopted, and it was easy for him to refer to our being ‘nicer’ abroad than at home. He was exempt from variations, and not a shade either less or more nice in one place than in another. He differed from other people, but never from himself – save in the extraordinary sense I shall throw my light upon – and he struck me as having neither moods nor sensibilities nor preferences. He might have been always in the same company, so far as he recognised any influence from age or condition or sex: he addressed himself to women exactly as he addressed himself to men, and gossiped with all men alike, talking no better to clever folk than to dull. I used to wail to myself over his way of liking one subject – so far as I could tell – precisely as much as another: there were some I hated so myself. I never found him anything but loud and liberal and cheerful, and I never heard him utter a paradox or express a shade or play with an idea. That fancy about our being ‘human’ was, in his conversation, quite an exceptional flight. His opinions were sound and second-rate, and of his perceptions it was too mystifying to think. I envied him his magnificent health.
Vawdrey had marched with his even pace and his perfectly good conscience into the flat country of anecdote, where stories are visible from afar like windmills and signposts; but I observed after a little that Lady Mellifont’s attention wandered. I happened to be sitting next to her. I noticed that her eyes rambled a little anxiously over the lower slopes of the mountains. At last, after looking at her watch, she said to me: ‘Do you know where they went?’
‘Do you mean Mrs Adney and Lord Mellifont?’
‘Lord Mellifont and Mrs Adney.’ Her Ladyship’s speech seemed – unconsciously indeed – to correct me, but it didn’t occur to me that this might be an effect of jealousy. I imputed to her no such vulgar sentiment: in the first place because I liked her, and in the second because it would always occur to one rather quickly to put Lord Mellifont, whatever the connection, first. He was first – extraordinarily first. I don’t say greatest or wisest or most renowned, but essentially at the top of the list and the head of the table. That’s a position by itself, and his wife was naturally accustomed to see him in it. My phrase had sounded as if Mrs Adney had taken him; but it was not possible for him to be taken – he only took. No one, in the nature of things, could know this better than Lady Mellifont. I had originally been rather afraid of her, thinking her, with her stiff silences and the extreme blackness of almost everything that made up her person, somewhat hard, even a little saturnine. Her paleness seemed slightly grey and her glossy black hair metallic, even as the brooches and bands and combs with which it was inveterately adorned. She was in perpetual mourning and wore numberless ornaments of jet and onyx, a thousand clicking chains and bugles [4] and beads. I had heard Mrs Adney call her the Queen of Night, [5] and the term was descriptive if you took the night for cloudy. She had a secret, and if you didn’t find it out as you knew her better, you at least felt sure she was gentle unaffected and limited, as well as rather submissively sad. She was like a woman with a painless malady. I told her that I had merely seen her husband and his companion stroll down the glen together about an hour before, and suggested that Mr Adney would perhaps know something of their intentions.
Vincent Adney, who, though fifty years old, looked like a good little boy on whom it had been impressed that children shouldn’t talk in company, acquitted himself with remarkable simplicity and taste of the position of husband of a great exponent of comedy. When all was said about her making it easy for him, one couldn’t help admiring the charmed affection with which he took everything for granted. It’s difficult for a husband not on the stage, or at least in the theatre, to be graceful about a wife so conspicuous there; but Adney did more than carry it off, the awkwardness – he taught it ever so oddly to make him interesting. He set his beloved to music; and you remember how genuine his music could be – the only English compositions I ever saw a foreigner care for. His wife was in them somewhere always; they were a free rich translation of the impression she produced. She seemed, as one listened, to pass laughing, with loosened hair and the gait of a wood nymph, across the scene. He had been only a little fiddler at her theatre, always in his place during the acts; but she had made him something rare and brave and misunderstood. Their superiority had become a kind of partnership, and their happiness was a part of the happiness of their friends. Adney’s one discomfort was that he couldn’t write a play for his wife, and the only way he meddled with her affairs was by asking impossible people if they couldn’t.
