He was indeed to learn on arrival to what he had been committed; but
that was for a while so much a part of his first general impression that
the particular truth took time to detach itself, the first general
impression demanding verily all his faculties of response. He almost
felt for a day or two the victim of a practical joke, a gross abuse of
confidence. He had presented himself with the moderate amount of flutter
involved in a sense of due preparation; but he had then found that,
however primed with prefaces and prompted with hints, he hadn't been
prepared at all. How COULD he be, he asked himself, for anything so
foreign to his experience, so alien to his proper world, so little to be
preconceived in the sharp north light of the newest impressionism, and
yet so recognised after all in the event, so noted and tasted and
assimilated? It was a case he would scarce have known how to
describe--could doubtless have described best with a full clean brush,
supplemented by a play of gesture; for it was always his habit to see an
occasion, of whatever kind, primarily as a picture, so that he might get
it, as he was wont to say, so that he might keep it, well together. He
had been treated of a sudden, in this adventure, to one of the sweetest
fairest coolest impressions of his life--one moreover visibly complete
and homogeneous from the start. Oh it was THERE, if that was all one
wanted of a thing! It was so "there" that, as had befallen him in Italy,
in Spain, confronted at last, in dusky side-chapel or rich museum, with
great things dreamed of or with greater ones unexpectedly presented, he
had held his breath for fear of breaking the spell; had almost, from the
quick impulse to respect, to prolong, lowered his voice and moved on
tiptoe. Supreme beauty suddenly revealed is apt to strike us as a
possible illusion playing with our desire--instant freedom with it to
strike us as a possible rashness.
This fortunately, however--and the more so as his freedom for the time
quite left him--didn't prevent his hostess, the evening of his advent
and while the vision was new, from being exactly as queer and rare and
IMPAYABLE, as improbable, as impossible, as delightful at the eight
o'clock dinner--she appeared to keep these immense hours--as she had
overwhelmingly been at the five o'clock tea. She was in the most natural
way in the world one of the oddest apparitions, but that the particular
means to such an end COULD be natural was an inference difficult to
make. He failed in fact to make it for a couple of days; but
then--though then only--he made it with confidence. By this time indeed
he was sure of everything, luckily including himself. If we compare his
impression, with slight extravagance, to some of the greatest he had
ever received, this is simply because the image before him was so
rounded and stamped. It expressed with pure perfection, it exhausted its
character. It was so absolutely and so unconsciously what it was. He had
been floated by the strangest of chances out of the rushing stream into
a clear still backwater--a deep and quiet pool in which objects were
sharply mirrored. He had hitherto in life known nothing that was old
except a few statues and pictures; but here everything was old, was
immemorial, and nothing so much so as the very freshness itself. Vaguely
to have supposed there were such nooks in the world had done little
enough, he now saw, to temper the glare of their opposites. It was the
fine touches that counted, and these had to be seen to be believed.
Miss Wenham, fifty-five years of age and unappeasably timid,
unaccountably strange, had, on her reduced scale, an almost Gothic
grotesqueness; but the final effect of one's sense of it was an amenity
that accompanied one's steps like wafted gratitude. More flurried, more
spasmodic, more apologetic, more completely at a loss at one moment and
more precipitately abounding at another, he had never before in all his
days seen any maiden lady; yet for no maiden lady he had ever seen had
he so promptly conceived a private enthusiasm. Her eyes protruded, her
chin receded and her nose carried on in conversation a queer little
independent motion. She wore on the top of her head an upright circular
cap that made her resemble a caryatid disburdened, and on other parts of
her person strange combinations of colours, stuffs, shapes, of metal,
mineral and plant. The tones of her voice rose and fell, her facial
convulsions, whether tending--one could scarce make out--to expression
or REpression, succeeded each other by a law of their own; she was
embarrassed at nothing and at everything, frightened at everything and
at nothing, and she approached objects, subjects, the simplest questions
and answers and the whole material of intercourse, either with the
indirectness of terror or with the violence of despair. These things,
none the less, her refinements of oddity and intensities of custom, her
betrayal at once of conventions and simplicities, of ease and of agony,
her roundabout retarded suggestions and perceptions, still permitted her
to strike her guest as irresistibly charming. He didn't know what to
call it; she was a fruit of time. She had a queer distinction. She had
been expensively produced and there would be a good deal more of her to
come.
The result of the whole quality of her welcome, at any rate, was that
the first evening, in his room, before going to bed, he relieved his
mind in a letter to Addie, which, if space allowed us to embody it in
our text, would usefully perform the office of a "plate." It would
enable us to present ourselves as profusely illustrated. But the process
of reproduction, as we say, costs. He wished his friend to know how
grandly their affair turned out. She had put him in the way of something
absolutely special--an old house untouched, untouchable, indescribable,
an old corner such as one didn't believe existed, and the holy calm of
which made the chatter of studios, the smell of paint, the slang of
critics, the whole sense and sound of Paris, come back as so many signs
of a huge monkey-cage. He moved about, restless, while he wrote; he
lighted cigarettes and, nervous and suddenly scrupulous, put them out
again; the night was mild and one of the windows of his large high room,
which stood over the garden, was up. He lost himself in the things about
him, in the type of the room, the last century with not a chair moved,
not a point stretched. He hung over the objects and ornaments,
blissfully few and adorably good, perfect pieces all, and never one, for
a change, French. The scene was as rare as some fine old print with the
best bits down in the corners. Old books and old pictures, allusions
remembered and aspects conjectured, reappeared to him; he knew not what
anxious islanders had been trying for in their backward hunt for the
homely. But the homely at Flickerbridge was all style, even as style at
the same time was mere honesty. The larger, the smaller past--he scarce
knew which to call it--was at all events so hushed to sleep round him as
he wrote that he had almost a bad conscience about having come. How one
might love it, but how one might spoil it! To look at it too hard was
positively to make it conscious, and to make it conscious was positively
to wake it up. Its only safety, of a truth, was to be left still to
sleep--to sleep in its large fair chambers and under its high clean
canopies.
He added thus restlessly a line to his letter, maundered round the room
again, noted and fingered something else, and then, dropping on the old
flowered sofa, sustained by the tight cubes of its cushions, yielded
afresh to the cigarette, hesitated, stared, wrote a few words more. He
wanted Addie to know, that was what he most felt, unless he perhaps
felt, more how much she herself would want to. Yes, what he supremely
saw was all that Addie would make of it. Up to his neck in it there he
fairly turned cold at the sense of suppressed opportunity, of the
outrage of privation that his correspondent would retrospectively and,
as he even divined with a vague shudder, almost vindictively nurse.
Well, what had happened was that the acquaintance had been kept for her,
like a packet enveloped and sealed for delivery, till her attention was
free. He saw her there, heard her and felt her--felt how she would feel
and how she would, as she usually said, "rave." Some of her young
compatriots called it "yell," and in the reference itself, alas!
illustrated their meaning. She would understand the place at any rate,
down to the ground; there wasn't the slightest doubt of that. Her sense
of it would be exactly like his own, and he could see, in anticipation,
just the terms of recognition and rapture in which she would abound. He
knew just what she would call quaint, just what she would call bland,
just what she would call weird, just what she would call wild. She would
take it all in with an intelligence much more fitted than his own, in
fact, to deal with what he supposed he must regard as its literary
relations. She would have read the long-winded obsolete memoirs and
novels that both the figures and the setting ought clearly to remind one
of; she would know about the past generations--the lumbering country
magnates and their turbaned wives and round-eyed daughters, who, in
other days, had treated the ruddy sturdy tradeless town,--the solid
square houses and wide walled gardens, the streets to-day all grass and
gossip, as the scene of a local "season." She would have warrant for the
assemblies, dinners, deep potations; for the smoked sconces in the dusky
parlours; for the long muddy century of family coaches, "holsters,"
highwaymen. She would put a finger in short, just as he had done, on the
vital spot--the rich humility of the whole thing, the fact that neither
Flickerbridge in general nor Miss Wenham in particular, nor anything nor
any one concerned, had a suspicion of their characters and their merit.
Addie and he would have to come to let in light.
He let it in then, little by little, before going to bed, through the
eight or ten pages he addressed to her; assured her that it was the
happiest case in the world, a little picture--yet full of "style"
too--absolutely composed and transmitted, with tradition, and tradition
only, in every stroke, tradition still noiselessly breathing and visibly
flushing, marking strange hours in the tall mahogany clocks that were
never wound up and that yet audibly ticked on. All the elements, he was
sure he should see, would hang together with a charm, presenting his
hostess--a strange iridescent fish for the glazed exposure of an
aquarium--as afloat in her native medium. He left his letter open on the
table, but, looking it over next morning, felt of a sudden indisposed to
send it. He would keep it to add more, for there would be more to know;
yet when three days had elapsed he still had not sent it. He sent
instead, after delay, a much briefer report, which he was moved to make
different and, for some reason, less vivid. Meanwhile he learned from
Miss Wenham how Addie had introduced him. It took time to arrive with
her at that point, but after the Rubicon was crossed they went far
afield.