It had made for him, all the same, an immense difference; it had given him
an extraordinary lift, so that a certain sweet aftertaste of his freedom
might a couple of months later have been suspected of aiding to produce for
him another and really a more considerable adventure. It was an absurd way
to reason, but he had been, to his imagination, for twenty minutes in good
society--that being the term that best described for him the company of
people to whom he hadn't to talk, as he phrased it, rot. It was his title
to good society that he had, in his doubtless awkward way, affirmed; and
the difficulty was just that, having affirmed it, he couldn't take back the
affirmation. Few things had happened to him in life, that is few that were
agreeable, but at least _this_ had, and he wasn't so constructed that he
could go on as if it hadn't. It was going on as if it had, however, that
landed him, alas! in the situation unmistakably marked by a visit from
Grant-Jackson late one afternoon toward the end of October. This had been
the hour of the call of the young Americans. Every day that hour had come
round something of the deep throb of it, the successful secret, woke up;
but the two occasions were, of a truth, related only by being so intensely
opposed. The secret had been successful in that he had said nothing of it
to Isabel, who, occupied in their own quarter while the incident lasted,
had neither heard the visitors arrive nor seen them depart. It was on the
other hand scarcely successful in guarding itself from indirect betrayals.
There were two persons in the world at least who felt as he did; they were
persons also who had treated him, benignly, as feeling after _their_ style;
who had been ready in fact to overflow in gifts as a sign of it, and though
they were now off in space they were still with him sufficiently in spirit
to make him play, as it were, with the sense of their sympathy. This in
turn made him, as he was perfectly aware, more than a shade or two
reckless, so that, in his reaction from that gluttony of the public for
false facts which had from the first tormented him, he fell into the habit
of sailing, as he would have said, too near the wind, or in other
words--all in presence of the people--of washing his hands of the legend.
He had crossed the line--he knew it; he had struck wild--They drove him to
it; he had substituted, by a succession of uncontrollable profanities, an
attitude that couldn't be understood for an attitude that but too evidently
_had_ been.
This was of course the franker line, only he hadn't taken it, alas! for
frankness--hadn't in the least really adopted it at all, but had been
simply himself caught up and disposed of by it, hurled by his fate against
the bedizened walls of the temple, quite in the way of a priest possessed
to excess of the god, or, more vulgarly, that of a blind bull in a
china-shop--an animal to which he often compared himself. He had let
himself fatally go, in fine, just for irritation, for rage, having, in his
predicament, nothing whatever to do with frankness--a luxury reserved for
quite other situations. It had always been his view that one lived to
learn; he had learned something every hour of his life, though people
mostly never knew what, in spite of its having generally been--hadn't
it?--at somebody's expense. What he was at present continually learning was
the sense of a form of words heretofore so vain--the famous "false
position" that had so often helped out a phrase. One used names in that way
without knowing what they were worth; then of a sudden, one fine day, their
meaning grew bitter in the mouth. This was a truth with the relish of which
his fireside hours were occupied, and he was aware of how much it exposed a
man to look so perpetually as if something had disagreed with him. The look
to be worn at the Birthplace was properly the beatific, and when once it
had fairly been missed by those who took it for granted, who indeed paid
sixpence for it--like the table-wine in provincial France it was
_compris_--one would be sure to have news of the remark.
News accordingly was what Gedge had been expecting--and what he knew, above
all, had been expected by his wife, who had a way of sitting at present as
with an ear for a certain knock. She didn't watch him, didn't follow him
about the house, at the public hours, to spy upon his treachery; and that
could touch him even though her averted eyes went through him more than her
fixed. Her mistrust was so perfectly expressed by her manner of showing she
trusted that he never felt so nervous, never tried so to keep straight, as
when she most let him alone. When the crowd thickened and they had of
necessity to receive together he tried himself to get off by allowing her
as much as possible the word. When people appealed to him he turned to
her--and with more of ceremony than their relation warranted: he couldn't
help _this_ either, if it seemed ironic--as to the person most concerned or
most competent. He flattered himself at these moments that no one would
have guessed her being his wife; especially as to do her justice, she met
his manner with a wonderful grim bravado--grim, so to say, for himself,
grim by its outrageous cheerfulness for the simple-minded. The lore she
_did_ produce for them, the associations of the sacred spot she developed,
multiplied, embroidered; the things in short she said and the stupendous
way she said them! She wasn't a bit ashamed, since why need virtue be ever
ashamed? It was virtue, for it put bread into his mouth--he meanwhile on
his side taking it out of hers. He had seen Grant-Jackson on the October
day in the Birthplace itself--the right setting of course for such an
interview; and what had occurred was that, precisely, when the scene had
ended and he had come back to their own sitting-room, the question she put
to him for information was: "Have you settled it that I'm to starve?"
She had for a long time said nothing to him so straight--which was but a proof
of her real anxiety; the straightness of Grant-Jackson's visit, following on the
very slight sinuosity of a note shortly before received from him, made tension
show for what it was. By this time, really, however, his decision had been
taken; the minutes elapsing between his reappearance at the domestic fireside
and his having, from the other threshold, seen Grant-Jackson's broad well-fitted
back, the back of a banker and a patriot, move away, had, though few, presented
themselves to him as supremely critical. They formed, as it were, the hinge of
his door, that door actually ajar so as to show him a possible fate beyond it,
but which, with his hand, in a spasm, thus tightening on the knob, he might
either open wide or close partly or altogether. He stood at autumn dusk in the
little museum that constituted the vestibule of the temple, and there, as with a
concentrated push at the crank of a windlass, he brought himself round. The
portraits on the walls seemed vaguely to watch for it; it was in their august
presence--kept dimly august for the moment by Grant-Jackson's impressive check
of his application of a match to the vulgar gas--that the great man had uttered,
as if it said all, his "You know, my dear fellow, really----!" He had managed it
with the special tact of a fat man, always, when there _was_ any, very fine;
he had got the most out of the time, the place, the setting, all the little
massed admonitions and symbols; confronted there with his victim on the spot
that he took occasion to name afresh as, to _his_ piety and patriotism, the most
sacred on earth, he had given it to be understood that in the first place he was
lost in amazement and that in the second he expected a single warning now to
suffice. Not to insist too much moreover on the question of gratitude, he would
let his remonstrance rest, if need be, solely on the question of taste. _As_ a
matter of taste alone----! But he was surely not to be obliged to follow that
up. Poor Gedge indeed would have been sorry to oblige him, for he saw it was
exactly to the atrocious taste of unthankfulness the allusion was made. When he
said he wouldn't dwell on what the fortunate occupant of the post owed him for
the stout battle originally fought on his behalf, he simply meant he _would_.
That was his tact--which, with everything else that has been mentioned, in the
scene, to help, really had the ground to itself. The day _had_ been when Gedge
couldn't have thanked him enough--though he had thanked him, he considered,
almost fulsomely--and nothing, nothing that he could coherently or reputably
name, had happened since then. From the moment he was pulled up, in short, he
had no case, and if he exhibited, instead of one, only hot tears in his eyes,
the mystic gloom of the temple either prevented his friend from seeing them or
rendered it possible that they stood for remorse. He had dried them, with the
pads formed by the base of his bony thumbs, before he went in to Isabel. This
was the more fortunate as, in spite of her inquiry, prompt and pointed, he but
moved about the room looking at her hard. Then he stood before the fire a little
with his hands behind him and his coat-tails divided, quite as the person in
permanent possession. It was an indication his wife appeared to take in; but she
put nevertheless presently another question. "You object to telling me what he
said?"
"He said 'You know, my dear fellow, really----!'"
"And is that all?"
"Practically. Except that I'm a thankless beast."
"Well!" she responded, not with dissent.
"You mean that I _am_?"
"Are those the words he used?" she asked with a scruple.
Gedge continued to think. "The words he used were that I give away the Show
and that, from several sources, it has come round to Them."
"As of course a baby would have known!" And then as her husband said
nothing: "Were _those_ the words he used?"
"Absolutely. He couldn't have used better ones."
"Did he call it," Mrs. Gedge inquired, "the 'Show'?"
"Of course he did. The Biggest on Earth."
She winced, looking at him hard--she wondered, but only for a moment.
"Well, it _is_."
"Then it's something," Gedge went on, "to have given _that_ away. But," he
added, "I've taken it back."
"You mean you've been convinced?"
"I mean I've been scared."
"At last, at last!" she gratefully breathed.
"Oh it was easily done. It was only two words. But here I am."