IV

The girl was for the time stillness incarnate; she carried the burden of

what she had done very much after the fashion of a glass filled to the

brim, held out at arm's length and sure to overflow at the first jostle.

What she had been mutely doing as she stood there must have been to beg

her brother to refrain from any word that would make her position more

awkward, and that she felt some confidence for this might have appeared,

the next instant, in her large grave look at his companion, which struck

Ralph as a sign of greeting the most intended, and yet at the same time

the shyest, ever made him. She might scarce have expected recognition,

but she seemed to take him in with so little felt restriction on staring

that he measured at once the relief she enjoyed at finding him only with

Perry. She had been wound up, he felt, for something more difficult, and

now this was blest, was a reprieve, for he was quickly certain that with

Perry she could easily deal--all the more that what he had just said to

her wasn't the deprecated jog, inasmuch as it didn't at all reflect upon

her, but reflected only on their cousin. Ralph had in her presence still

a couple more of extraordinarily swift reflections--one of these perhaps

the very most immediate, in its sweetness and clearness, that had

visited his consciousness of these rich hours and bearing upon the fact

exactly that he was her cousin, hers much more for instance than

Molly's, in respect to whom the nature of the relative was swallowed up

in the nature of the lover; bearing on it so happily that in the course

of another moment he had brought out the beautiful sense in his own

greeting, which had the effect of reading into hers everything either he

or she could have desired. He didn't grin for this, as he had been doing

for Perry--he breathed it softly, but ever so gravely: "Cousin, cousin,

cousin!" though after it too, with the same gravity, which yet, as he

felt even in uttering the words, was a perfect extravagance: "Isn't it

great, _great?_"

"Great that we're cousins--'great'?" It had broken her stillness happily

and, as he figured, without the jostle of her arm; for again it not only

left her intrusion ideally unchallenged, but instantly gave it such

importance of ground as could in no way whatever be taken from it.

"Well, what _I_ call great," he returned in the liveliest promptitude of

explanation; well aware, on the second thought, that it was one of the

wrong kinds of turns, one of those that had made the rest of the family

exchange wonderments, but eager, within the moment, to be able to judge

whether it hadn't perhaps even positively pleased her.

"He calls things in such ways as you've never heard," Perry declared to

her as for further and possibly still more convenient information; which

Ralph, rejoicing at the comparative sociability of it, straightway took

up.

"Of course I do, I know it at once as soon as I've done it, know it by

the sound after, _after_, don't you see?"--he addressed the earnest

emphasis only to the girl. "Of course we have different expressions--but

I'm going to make _you_ like them. I'm going to make you understand

them," he explained in the most serious way.

The happiest thing was that though her appearance had determined in him

this sudden earnestness, the confidence shown in her and so quickly

heaped up made her break into a smile. "I'm not supposed to understand

unless I very much want to. Therefore----!" She only smiled, but it gave

Ralph an immediate chance.

"Therefore it's clear that you want to so far as I'm concerned; which

it's a grand comfort to feel--for I'm not in the least afraid."

"What have you to be afraid of?" she asked with a readiness that made

her brother break in before Ralph could reply.

"You understand between you then, damme, things that I don't!" Which

comment, looking from one to the other, he at once and most surprisingly

backed up. "You've smashed the great jar at Drydown, and he already

knows it, and that you've come up to make your confession."

"Oh I don't in the least know _that!_" Ralph declared. "What I should

like to believe," he said to the girl, "is that you've wanted so to see

your new kinsman that you've risked the adventure." His rejoicing

gravity was at such a pitch in it that she turned, under this address,

from pale to red, and that something in the expression thus produced in

her, which was like a rush of some purer intelligence than he had yet

touched among them all, determined in him the strangest inward cry. "Why

she's modern, _modern!_" he felt he was thinking--and it seemed to

launch him with one push on an extraordinary sea. He in fact wouldn't

have been sure the next moment whether he hadn't uttered the queer

words, queer, in their sense, even to his own apprehension; though he

was afterwards to take it that they had appeared to find no echo, even

if he had himself kept on knowing for the moment more or less what he

meant by them.

What he meant and what if the air _had_ vibrated to them they would

vividly have signified was the very aspect and figure of this slight,

fine, concentrated little person, who suffered this last measure mainly

indeed as an offered contrast to her splendid sister, and whose

appearance was of a fashion so different from any that either Molly or

their mother might have set her that she affected him as linked to them

but in the degree of one of those sacrificed creatures he had read of in

records of the old Catholic world, the oblation made of the plainer and

weaker and more thankless daughter to the cloistered life, the glory of

God, and the muster in the house of means for no more than one nuptial

outfit. All of which, glimmering before him in what was perhaps, if we

may choose, his quite most quickened perception, would have married ill

with the special intensity of his recognition and qualification had the

girl not, by some light and exquisite influence, pleaded against the

idea that she concurred in the law of her effacement. She was as

sober-hued as any nun, and might well, so far as the material side of

her presence went, have been trained to fasts and vigils; but wasn't she

rather distinguishably aware of more things in all the world than they,

and of different ones from theirs, upon his honour?--so that her

longish, narrowish, almost colourless face (with the forehead, markedly

high and clear, such as to recall a like feature of some mothering

Virgin by Van Eyck or Memling who dimly haunted him, though he couldn't

possibly have met her in New York) showed a sort of concentration of

consciousness, a strain and degree of expression, which were all that

could be referred to as in any way tricking it out.

He had been spending a long time, as it seemed to him, with

persons--positively to the number of three--who were indicated to him

now as having known, or at least as having been instructed by society,

that they were pretty well clever enough for anything they might

supposably be concerned with; whereas the light that hung during these

moments about sweet Nan, since sweet Nan she at last, and not quite

other than disconcertingly, was, appeared rather that of an intelligence

rather at sea, or guessing free application to have been so perversely

denied it that exactly this mild comfort was what it might have hovered

and wavered there to appeal for. They hadn't denied her understanding

and Sir Cantopher had in the most pointed manner expressed her

possession of it, but if there might have been a sense in Ralph's

private greeting to her imaginable energies, it could scarce have helped

involving the certitude that the family friend at any rate had read her

most wrongly when he had quite most wished to distinguish her. She had

suffered from what was wrong, though indeed without being at all

pointedly aware of what was right--and this even if it broke upon him as

formidable that he should perhaps figure to her as a source of

initiation. There were things in her world of imagination, it had taken

him so few instants to surmise, which might verily have matched with

some of those, the shyer, the stranger, the as yet least embodied, that

confusedly peopled his own--though, again, how any such verification of

identities, felicities, sublimities, or whatever they might be, could

make her "modern" without by the same stroke making _him_ so, he

naturally as yet failed of attention to discern. He hadn't, that he knew

of, missed from the others any note of their direct command either of

their future or of his own; he had only measured some disparities

between his and their connection with the past, the effect of his sense

of which was that they had the advantage of their perch upon

accumulations and continuities more substantially and above all more

locally determined. This placed them so little less in the forefront of

time that he should by rights at least have appeared to himself

comparatively backward in the race--whereby what would there have been

in him to make in any special degree for fellowship with this young

woman's originality? Never, let us hasten to add, could originality, or

any other inspired, independent strain, have more renounced the benefit

of a superficial show. The others, as he had seen, weren't proof against

bewilderment--which, if she was so different she ought to have been; but

the first thing he now next asked himself was how he could ever--let

what would come of this precipitated meeting be what it would--press

upon her to the least confusion of her at best so troubled fineness.

"Modern" was she?--all the more reason then why he should be at once as

explanatory as he could. Certain passages of his recent past were

affecting him by this time as almost superlatively ancient, and wasn't

there one of them that it would at once concern him, in common kindness,

let alone common honesty, to make known to her?

"I wasn't aware of your existence," he at all events said to her on

taking to himself this perception; "I mean I had never heard of you when

I sailed--any more, naturally enough, than when I arrived. It has only

been to-day. It came out unexpectedly. But now I'm sure," he went on to

the relief of his conscience, of his reason, of his imagination, of he

could scarce have said what; to the rectification in any case of

something he now knew, the confession made, to have been hurting him

like some limb kept in a posture adverse to its function. The gained

ease was even too great for joking--he couldn't too plainly state it.

"You see I knew all about _them_--or I felt as if I had done so as soon

as I got here; which comes to the same thing, doesn't it?" There he was

asking her _that_, by the way; as if she could tell him whether or no it

came to the same thing. Would he have put such a question to her mother,

to her sister, to her brother, or even to wondrous Sir Cantopher? It was

the kind of question that tended to produce in them that arrest of

intercourse; and, extraordinarily enough, it seemed now to hang but by a

hair that it might under this new relation make everything easier. Was

she going, sweet Nan, to be drawn to him just exactly by certain

features of the play of freedom that he had felt warn the others off?

Strange certainly that such a satisfaction should within so few moments

have begun to breathe upon him--since as a satisfaction, and quite of

the freshest, he should know it, that was beyond mistake; and there was

nothing to light the anomaly to any degree in his impression that he

should be able to make her conceive him better simply by treating her,

that is by simply looking at her even, as if she naturally would. This

act would be on his part a more conceiving, if withal a more wondering,

thing than any yet--though what had, for that matter, ever been so

strange as that the shyest, vaguest, least directly protesting pair of

eyes ever raised to him should at the same time submit to search after a

fashion that was in itself a sort of engagement? "Don't you think you

can persuade your brother to accept an accommodation?" he finally asked.

She hadn't replied to his inquiry about its coming or not to the same

thing as a proved case that he should have entertained the fancy of

assurances--she had but left the appeal in the air. This, however,

hadn't in the least stamped her to his vision as stupid; he had only

felt at once how many still other things he could put to her. Here was

one as to which he should really like her weight thrown if she would let

it be and since Perry had named his occasion; as to which too the idea

of the explanatory grew in attraction instant. Clearly she didn't yet

understand, none the less, too many things at once awaiting her, and the

accommodation to Perry, let alone to herself, not having had time to

profit by what had at first been said. Here was something of a tangle,

but she cut the knot, after another moment, by the light force of her

own readiest pressure. "Do you like my mother and my sister now that

you've seen them?"

Ralph stared, for beautifully important as this point had been she

suddenly made it more so. "Why, cousin, I'm here as Molly's true

lover--to marry her, you know, as soon as ever the banns can be

published and her wedding-gown bought: so that what sort of a figure

should I cut if she wasn't as dear to me as life? She is greater even

than I dreamed."

"'Greater'----?" She hung again on this term as she had done before; but

it was as if something had happened since then, and she now met his idea

in time. "Won't it be that you'll make her great?"

"I hope with all my heart I shall make her happy, but she's splendid,"

Ralph gravely, almost sententiously, said, "beyond any power of mine to

show her off." He clung to his gravity, which somehow steadied him--so

odd it was that the sense of her understanding wouldn't be abated, which

even a particular lapse, he could see . . .

NOTES FOR

THE SENSE OF THE PAST

[1] The Ambassador _does_ of course think him a curious and interesting

case of dementia, feels a kind of superior responsibility about him

accordingly, is really in a manner "fascinated" and mystified too; and

in short quite naturally and inevitably stretches a point to see him, as

it were, safely home. This he has it on his mind and his nerves, on his

sense of responsibility, effectively to do. But, as naturally, he

mustn't acknowledge his conviction, even though Ralph invites him to;

and I get I think what I want by making him come down to the street in

the cab as from curiosity to test his visitor's extraordinary statement,

and then plausibly propose or insist on getting in with him and tracking

him, as it were, to his lair: so as to be able to have first-hand

evidence of his material situation in the event of whatever further

occupation. It's in the street and at the cab door that he makes the

point of "seeing home", as if then and there merely extemporised; and

with the advantage that I thus seem to get what I remember originally

groping for, _having_ groped for, when I broke this off just here so

many years ago. I gave up taking time to excogitate my missing link, my

jump or transition from this last appearance of my young man's in the

modern world, so to speak, and his coming up again, where we next find

him, after the dive, in the "old". I think I now have quite sufficiently

got that transition--I have it perfectly before me. It passes between

them; Ralph himself, on their way, in the cab, or probably better still,

outside, on the pavement in Mansfield Square and before the house,

expresses all I want; puts it, that is, to his benevolent friend, that

he _knows_ now perfectly that on opening the door of the house with his

latchkey he lets himself into the Past. He disappears into the Past, and

what he has wanted is that his companion shall know he is there; shall

be able to give that account of him if he is missed or wanted; shall

also perhaps be able to take in all, whatever it is to be, that may yet

happen, and believe in his experience if he ever rises to the surface

again with it. This of course but clinches the Ambassador's sense of the

refined beauty of his mania; though at the same time the very law of my

procedure here is to show what is passing in his excellency's mind only

through Ralph's detection and interpretation, Ralph's own expression of

it--so leaving my own exhibition of it to stand over for my final

chapter, my supreme dénoûment, when Aurora What's-her-name, under a

tremendous "psychic" anxiety and distress of her own, which has been

growing and growing within her commensurately with Ralph's own

culmination of distress and anguish in _his_ drama, which we so

centrally and interestingly assist at, comes out to London for relief

and throws herself upon the Ambassador with the strange story of her

condition, matching and balancing so remarkably poor Ralph's own story

of the number of months before. An essential point is that the time of

duration of Ralph's plunge or dive is exactly the real time that has

elapsed for those on the surface--some six months being about what I

provisionally see. The horrid little old conceit of the dream that has

only taken half an hour, or whatever, any analogy with that, I mean, to

be utterly avoided. The duration is in short the real duration, and I

know what I mean when I say that everything altogether corresponds. Then

it is, in the final situation, that we get, by a backward reference or

action, the real logic and process of the Ambassador's view of how it

has seemed best to take the thing, and what it has seemed best to "do"

in connection with his strange visitor's exhibition. He gives, he

states, what has then determined and guided him; and I see that he

states it to Aurora all sufficiently and vividly, so that we don't have

any clumsiness of his going back to it, I mean to his account of his own

procedure, with Ralph himself when we have Ralph at last restored and,

as what all that has gone on in the interval makes it, saved: saved from

all the horror of the growing fear of _not_ being saved, of being lost,

of being _in_ the past to stay, heart-breakingly to stay and never know

his own original precious Present again; that horror which his

conception of his adventure had never reckoned with, and his manner of

_getting_ saved from which, saved by the sacrifice, the self-sacrifice

of the creature to whom he confesses, in his anguish of fear, the secret

of who and what and how etc. he _is_, constitutes the clou and crisis

and climax of my action as I see it. It will take more working out,

which will come but too abundantly, I seem to apprehend, as I go; but I

have the substance of it, I have that still, as I had it of old, in my

vision, even if a trifle rough, of the two sisters, the mother, Mrs.

So-and-so of Drydown, the brother of that period, and whoever or

whatever else I may subordinately need--even to the point very possibly

of a second young man, the third, that is, in all, who is a

wooer or suitor of the younger sister and, for my full kind of

quasi-Turn-of-Screw effect, is of a type, a type of the period, entirely

opposed to that of the brother. I see him, I have him and his affair,

too thoroughly to have to waste words on him here. The more I get into

my drama itself the more magnificent, upon my word, I seem to see it and

feel it; with such a tremendous lot of possibilities in it that I

positively quake in dread of the muchness with which they threaten me.

The slow growth on the part of the others of their fear of Ralph, even

in the midst of their making much of him, as abnormal, as uncanny, as

not _like_ those they know of their own kind etc., etc.; and his fear

just _of_ theirs, with his double consciousness, alas, his being almost

as right as possible for the "period", and yet so intimately and

secretly wrong; with his desire to mitigate so far as he can the malaise

that he feels himself, do what he will, more and more produce. There

must be an importance for him, I mean about him, in the view of the

others; and this must be definite and consist of some two or three very

strong and vivid facts--vivid that is to the imagination of people of

1820. Rather beautiful does it seem to me to have two or three of his

actual modern facts stick to him and operate in this sense that I try to

project: notably his "refinement", though he tries to conceal it, to

dissimulate it; notably his being in 1820 as "rich" as he is, or was, in

1910--which counts for an immense well-offness at the earlier period.

And then his whole true modern attribute and quality, with a

distinguished appearance to match it, and certain things dont il ne peut

pas se défaire, that are of the modern pitch of material civilisation,

like his perfect and soignées teeth, for example, which that

undentisted age can't have known the like of, and which constitute a

part of his troubled consciousness of complication. He dissimulates, he

succeeds, he fits in above all because he pleases, pleases at the same

time that he creates malaise, by not being _like_ them all; which it is

that gives me what I just above threw out this question for, his

"importance". Without the importance I don't see the situation for him

at all as I want it, and yet I must bring it in on lines of sufficient

verisimilitude--even though while I say this the element so visualised

fills me with the effect to be got out of it: I mean the charm and

interest and fineness of that. In short once I have the importance, as I

say, I have everything: the rest all clusters round it. Yes, the more I

think of the little man (he must be little) who circles about the

younger sister, and of whom she has an intimate horror--_he_ rich, by

the way, too, and thereby desired by the mother, and with a small sort

of raffiné (of that time) Horace Walpole atmosphere about him--but in

short I needn't talk of him thus; I possess him too entirely. I keep

missing, at the same time, all the while, my fact of putting the essence

of what I see straight enough thus--the postulate of the young man from

America arriving, coming upon the scene, somehow designated or arranged

for in advance as to one or other of the sisters (I leave it rough and a

little in the air, so to speak, for the moment. The just how and just

why I can dispose of in a page when in closer quarters.) The point is

that the wrong sister, abetted by the mother, pounces on him, as it

were--it's the elder one I see doing this; and it so befalls that he is

booked, as we say, to marry her, before, with all the precautions he has

to keep, he can, as we also say, turn round. So it is that after a

little, after the flush of the amusement of his extraordinary

consciousness having begun a bit to abate in the light of the

brutalities etc., what I call to myself most conveniently his dawning

anguish glimmers and glimmers; what it means to see himself married to

the elder sister and locked up with her there in that form of the Past.

He conceals, he successfully does so, his growing malaise, all the

effort and unrest of which, by the by, makes him, he sees, appear to

them "clever" beyond anything they have ever dreamed of (they, also, by

the way, must pass for clever, as 1820 understood it;) and I catch also,

parenthetically, at my need for their not being, with all their pride of

gentility, at all as conveniently well-off as they would like, or must

require, this fact helping greatly the importance for them that he is

possessed of means that seem to them quite blessedly large. The note of

their thrift, a certain hardness of meanness, the nature of their

economies, the brutality (I keep coming back to that) of their various

expedients--this and that and the other Ralph has to take in. Meanwhile

he is committed to the elder sister--and we have the effect on her of

his importance, his means, his cleverness, mixed up with that in him

which is mystifying to all of them, but which the elder sister at first

at least sets down to the action and the play of a cleverness, a strange

cleverness from over the sea, such as she has never before conceived.

She holds on and on to him even after the malaise, and his sense of it

in them, with his still greater sense of it in himself, has quite begun,

as it were, to rage; with which: oh I see somehow such beautiful things

that I can hardly keep step with myself to expatiate and adumbrate

coherently enough. Let me just nail 2 or 3 things, by 2 or 3 of the

roughest simplest strokes, in order to catch and hold them fast before I

go on. All the while, all the while, the younger sister, who is ever so

touching, charming, really appealing for him--all the while, all the

while. I know what I mean by this sufficiently just to see and note here

that the elder does after a while break off under the action of the

malaise, which Ralph is in the extraordinary position of having in a way

to work against and being also, as a means of release to him, grateful

to. I can't take time to catch at this moment, but keep it till the next

chance, my notation of how and where the younger sister, the one who

really would have been meant for him, the one for the sake of whom he

would almost really swing off backward--my notation, I say (after a

break of dictation) of the origin and growth of the special relation

between Ralph and herself; she being of course the nearest approach--and

in fact it's very much of an approach--that I have in the whole thing to

a Heroine. I seem to myself now to have intended somehow, in my original

view, an accident, a complication, a catastrophic perversity or

fatality, as it were, through which Ralph has addressed himself from the

first to the elder, the wrong, sister instead of the younger, the

right--and when I try to recover what I so long ago had in my head about

this there glimmers out, there floats shyly back to me from afar, the

sense of something like this, a bit difficult to put, though entirely

expressible with patience, and that as I catch hold of the tip of the

tail of it yet again strikes me as adding to my action but another

admirable twist. Of course I am afraid of twists, I mean of their

multiplying on my hands to the effect of too much lengthening and

enlarging and sprawling; but the bit that I speak of now is surely of

the very essence of the situation. It connects itself with something so

interesting and effective, so strong and fine, to express--from the

moment one successfully tackles it. "This" then, what I mentioned above,

is that Ralph has "taken over" from the other party to his extraordinary

arrangement certain indications that have been needed for starting the

thing, and which I think of him as having, under the operation of the

whole prodigy, very considerably, very enormously, assimilated.

Enormous, however, as the assimilation may be, it is not absolutely

perfect, and don't I exactly get out of this wavering margin, this

occurrence of spots and moments, so to speak, where it falls short, just

one of those effects of underlying distress, of sense of danger, as I

comprehensively call it, which are of the very finest essence of one's

general intention? He knows his way so much and so far, knows it

wonderfully, finds his identity, the one he wears for the occasion,

extraordinarily easy considering the miracle of it all; but the very

beauty of the subject is in the fact of his at the same time watching

himself, watching his success, criticising his failure, being both the

other man and not the other man, being just sufficiently the other, his

prior, his own, self, not to be able to help living in that a bit too.

Isn't it a part of what I call the beauty that this concomitant, this

watchful and critical, living in his "own" self inevitably grows and

grows from a certain moment on?--and isn't it for instance quite

magnificent that one sees this growth of it as inevitably promoted more

and more by his sense of what I have noted as the malaise on the part of

the others? Don't I see his divination and perception of that so affect

and act upon him that little by little he begins to live more, to live

most, and most uneasily, in what I refer to as his own, his prior self,

and less, uneasily less, in his borrowed, his adventurous, that of his

tremendous speculation, so to speak--rather than the other way round as

has been the case at first. When his own, his original, conquers so much

of the ground of that, then it is that what I have called his anguish

gets fuller possession of it--it being so one thing to "live in the

Past" _with_ the whole spirit, the whole candour of confidence and

confidence of candour, that he would then have naturally had--and a

totally different thing to find himself living in it without those helps

to possibility, those determinations of relation, those preponderant

right instincts and, say, saving divinations. Don't I put it at first

that he is excited and amused and exhilarated by the presence of these

latter, by the freedom with which he lives and enjoys and sees and

knows: the exhilaration proceeding during the "at first" time, as I put

it, by the sense, the fairly intoxicating and spell-casting

consciousness of how the inordinate business is going. His sense of

success, which there is just enough of his critical margin or edge to

appreciate, to estimate, and thus relate to his former consciousness and

his whole starting-point, this _creates_ for him a part of the success,

the success with the others, by the very spirit and glamour (to them)

that it gives him and that keeps up till the change I visualise, the

inevitable difference, to phrase it roughly, begins--begins by something

that _happens_, something that springs out of the very situation itself

for portent, for determination, and which I must work out, or work into,

exactly the right dramatic identity for. This I guarantee; but meanwhile

I am ahead of my argument, and must hark back for a few minutes to what

I left standing and waiting above--that "this" which I was there about

to follow up. At once, withal, I see it in images, which I must put as

they come, and which make for me thus, don't I seem to feel? one of the

first, if not _the_ very first passages of my action. An action, an

action, an action must it thus insuperably be--as it has moreover so

well started with being--from the first pulse to the last. Ralph, taking

leave of the Ambassador, the depositary of his extraordinary truth and

the (as he hopes) secured connection with the world he cuts himself

loose from, dropping as from a balloon thousands of feet up in the air,

and not really knowing what smash or what magically _soft_ concussion

awaits him--Ralph, I say, in entering the house then walks at a step

straight into 1820 and, closing the door behind him, shuts out

everything to which he has hitherto belonged. He is from that minute, to

his own eyes and all his own faculties, the young man in the portrait,

the young man we have seen advance to him that night of his vigil in the

drawing-room. This bridge or effective transition from the visit at the

Embassy to the central drama is thus _found_ and is as good as another

for my purpose--swift and straight and simple and direct; as I have on a

foregoing page, however, sufficiently stated. Well then, I want to make

it, _within_, his arrival, practically, from America to the London

family: as to which, however, on consideration don't I see myself catch

a bright betterment by not at all making him use a latch-key?--to the

fact of which an awkwardness and a difficulty would, I seem to make out,

or _do_, rather, immediately attach. No, no--no latch-key--but a

rat-tat-tat, on his own part, at the big brass knocker; having effected

which he stands there a moment, I think, his head very triumphantly high

and confident, looking from the steps down at the Ambassador on the

pavement; this latter isolated now, by Ralph's having paid and

discharged the cab, which has driven away, the moment they got out. What

I glanced at as happening between them just thereafter takes place on

the pavement, as I have noted, but with this difference, I see with a

minute's further intensity of focussing, that he does--well, what I have

just stated. Only I seem to want a dumb passage between the two men

while the Ambassador just stands, just lingers, as if now at last verily

spellbound. I mustn't forget, by the way, that I have spoken of the

rain, or that Ralph has, at the Embassy, and that his Excellency can't

be represented as standing there without a vehicle and under his

umbrella. So it has been constate on their coming out of the Embassy

that the rain has stopped during Ralph's visit, so that it's all the

more quite over when they reach the square. The Ambassador has said, in

reference to the cab, "Oh I won't keep it--I'll walk home; you've really

made me need to shake myself!" Thereby I get him held there for the

minute seeing the last of Ralph after the latter has knocked and before

the door is opened. Ralph turns on its opening--it is held open wide for

the moment, and as I seem to see this altogether in latish daylight of a

spring, say of a March or April, season, it is no lighted interior that

is for a moment exhibited, but just such a Bloomsbury entrance hall as

may very well meet the eye to-day. Within then, Ralph arrives; and what

for the moment I want summarily to mark is simply that the elder sister

is the first person in the "drama" that he sees. She must be handsome,

very--handsomer in an obvious way than the younger; not yet at all in

sight--not in sight, I think, till after the three others have been, the

mother and the two young men, who a little announce and prepare her. It

even may be a little, I think, that she is for the time away from home

and doesn't return till after the situation is otherwise started. Well

then, here it is that what Ralph _knows_, what he is in possession of

and has the general preparation for, is so far precarious and, so to

speak, treacherous, that--well, all I want to say now is, before I break

off, that he takes her, takes the elder one, for the right young woman.

This seems easy--so right, in her way, does she appear to be. He knows,

he has "had it", from the 1820 young man, what is expected of him in

regard to one of the young women; how, in what manner and on what terms

and by what understanding it has come to be expected, remaining

questions that I shall adequately, not to say brilliantly, dispose of.

What I seem to want is to get the relation between these two started on

the spot, before any other relation whatever takes place for my young

man; feeling as I do that once it is started I can abundantly take care

of it. I even ask myself whether I mayn't have my hero's very first

impression, the very first of all, of my second man, as I call him, the

one other than the brother, who is there for the second sister and whom

he should perhaps do well to find alone in the room when he is

introduced, waiting there for the others, the objects of his call, and

constituting Ralph's immediate impression. It is to _them_, say, that

the first sister enters--so indefeasibly and luminously, as it were, do

I see my procedure ruled by the drama, the quasi-scenic movement, or

essential march and logic and consistency, at any rate. However, I am

not pretending in these words, in this rough scenario, to go into any

but the most provisional and general particulars. What I want is that my

young man should inevitably and naturally _dazzle_, and become aware of

it, by the very force of his feeling the distinction and privilege of

the prodigious element that has launched him. The others don't in the

least know what it is in him, but what I want to make ressortir from it

is that he "does" the other fellow, his ancient prototype, the expected

cousin from America, with no end of gentility etc. There must be at the

same time, of course I see, enormous foreshortenings, great compression

and presentation of picture: I want something of this sort to show

before the second daughter turns up. Of course such questions as whether

it was of the period that the elder one, bred as girls of that time were

bred, would "come down" to a couple of "gentlemen visitors" alone, and

as by a kind of anticipation of our current modernity--of course such a

detail as that is a perfectly easy thing to handle and make right. At

the same time withal, in respect to what I said just above about the

scenic, let me keep before me how the very essence of all this is to

stick as fast as possible to the precedent of the "Screw", in which

foreshortening abounded and I didn't, and couldn't, at all hand my

subject over to the scenic. The present is of course a much larger and

more complicated affair, lending itself much more to the scenic, even in

a manner insisting on it a little, or a good bit; but I must guard,

guard and all the while intensely guard, myself, none the less--or I

shall sprawl out over ever so much more ground than I shall want, or at

all need, for my best effect, to cover. If I may but look it well in the

face that the thing can only afford in a very minor degree, not in the

least in a preponderant one, to express itself scenically, it takes very

little further thinking to see how vital that is, and that the

particular effect I want most to catch, that of the crescendo of the

malaise, really demands and depends upon the non-scenic for its full

triumph. I grasp this entirely; I see how "narrative representation"

most permits, most effectively prepares and accompanies, my turning of

my present screw, and what a part picture and image and evoked aspect

and sense can play for me in that connection.

I catch, it seems to me, with a certain amount of vision already two or

three, not to say three or four, of my essential hinges or, as I have

called 'em, _clous_, that mark the turns or steps of the action. The

first of these is the appearance on the scene of the second daughter

after things have got well under way in respect to the first. The first

is the fullblown flower--she mustn't be at all too young, by the way;

must be going on to thirty, say--and very little trumpet-blow takes

place about her, on the part of the others, in advance: all pointing to

the fact that she's a sort of neglected quantity--whom nevertheless the

little Horace Walpole man does appreciate and pretend to; under all

encouragement from the others who think him quite _more_ than good

enough for her, though not good enough, no, for the elder sister.

Beware, by the way, of any little false step here: don't make the

pretender in question too too eligible or, in the modern lingo, smart;

since if this were so Ralph wouldn't pass for more desirable. I must

keep him a bit down, in the right sort of way and degree, in comparison

with Ralph; bearing in mind at the same time that a sort of leading note

in it all is his, our's, sense of the hard old class rigour governing

the life about him and of which he sees the salience at every turn. The

reappearance at home of the second girl, from wherever she has been

(expressible in 10 words) at any rate is, as it were, my first clou or

hinge; a fact, an impression, an apprehension, that immediately makes

such a difference for Ralph. I forget already whether I said just above

that the H.W. man talks to him, takes him into his confidence about her,

even to the point of recognising to R. that she doesn't care for his

suit and has much incurred her mother's, sister's and even brother's

reprobation by that attitude. Vividness to R. of the reign of authority

at that time, the much harder rule and discipline; and how half

terrified at what she is doing by hanging back, by resisting, the poor

girl herself is all the while. Her first relation to him is that of her

appealing exactly from this rigour; her first impression of him and

emotion about him, he sees, he gives us to see, is that of a sudden this

fine young American relation is a person who may side with her, may help

her, may intervene and back her up in not accepting addresses from a

person she can't get over her dislike of. Yes, that's their first basis,

and for this appeal Ralph must have been prepared by his own sense of

the kind of uncanny, to put it in a simplified way, little personage her

aspirant is. They come nearer together on that, they meet on that, they

talk, they begin to understand each other on that--very great though

Ralph's responsibility in the matter, the matter of backing up her

refusal, may be. It's at any rate the way the real relation with them,

with him--his sense of the ancient brutality of the others to her, her

mother, her brother, her sister, stirring finely within him. She hasn't

dreamed herself, he sees, of any real equality of transaction, of

relation with him at all; for if the others are under the dazzle, so

much the more under it is she. She sees--that is _he_ sees _that_ she

sees; he likes her to like him;--which is what gives her the sense of a

privilege she trembles up into the enjoyment of, astonished at herself

in her exquisite humility (this so touching to R.) even while doing so,

The great thing is that he gets into relation with them, and that by the

time he has done so the sense of how he needs it, the dim vagueness as

yet of how she may perhaps help him, has begun to work in him. He sees,

he feels, I make out, that she, as it were, understands him--though how

and why she does demands full specification; that in fine what affects

the others as his secret, as his queerness, as what they don't know what

to make of in him, does the reverse of putting _her_ off--it makes her

somehow feel that beneath or within all his dazzle he is an object for

pity, for pity "about which" she could perhaps do something. The ideal

thing for dramatic interest and sharpness would be that there is just

one matter in which, just one point at which, just one link with his

other identity by which, he betrays himself, gives himself away,

testifies supremely to his alienism, abnormalism, the nature of his

identity in fine; the ideal thing would be that, I say, and that it

should be definite and visible, absolutely catchable-in-the-act, enough

for her to seize it, come into possession of it, and yet not merely

terrify or horrify her: affect her in short, on the contrary, with but a

finer yearningness of interest. The ideal, as I say, would be that this

fact or circumstance should be tremendously right from the tone of the

"Screw" point of view, should be intensely in the note of that tone,

should be a concrete and definite thing. Find it find it; get it right

and it will be the making of the story. It must consist of something he

has to do, some condition he has to execute, some moment he has to

traverse, or rite or sacrifice he has to perform--say even some

liability he has to face and the occurrence of which depends somehow on

the state in which he keeps himself. I seem to see it, it glimmers upon

me; though I didn't think of it at first--I hadn't originally got as far

as it--it hovers before me though in the form of the only thing it _can_

be. When I call it a liability I seem to catch it by the tip of the

tail; seem to get a sort of sense of what it _may_ in a manner be. Let

me figure it out a bit, and under gentle, or rather patiently firm,

direct pressure it will come out. He is liable then say to glimpses of

vision of the other man, the one portrayed in the picture and whom he

had had the portentous passage with before going to the Ambassador; he

is liable, put it, to recurrences of a sense of that presence--which

thus, instead of being off in the boundless vast of the modern, that is

of the Future, as he has described its being to the Ambassador, _does_

seem to him at times to hover and to menace: only not to the appearance

or effect of reassuring or relieving him, but only to that of really

quite mocking and not pitying him, of showing him to himself as "sold",

horribly sold. Say it's as if the man of 1820, the Pendrel of that age,

is having so much better a time in the modern, that is in the Future,

than he is having in the present, _his_ Present, which is the Past, that

a chill and a fear, the growth of a despair and a terror, drop upon him

from it and signify somehow that he must begin to feel himself lost.

That's it, that's it, that may be admirable, if I can get the right

hinge or play for it--which of course I can. He hasn't expected it, I

think--unless I represent something of it as coming back to him, while

he wonders, from that passage between him and the other fellow which we

know, so far as we do know, only by his projection of it to the

Ambassador--after our having seen the other fellow approach, that is, at

the climax of the first, or the critical, night spent by Ralph in the

house. We have come to know something of this later on by our sight of

his own mental references to it; so that these relations may quite

sufficiently hang together for us. Well, what I want is that once he has

the extraordinary experience (the experience _within_ the experience) of

his being under observation by his alter ego, once he has had it in an

acute form and connected it wonderingly with some cause, he feels liable

to it again if the same kind of cause shall recur; which by the time the

phenomenon takes place has for him much more, as I have said above, a

suggestion of menace than a suggestion of relief. That's it--it's as if

the other fellow feels, knows, has some incalculable divination, of his,

Ralph's _weakening_, while nothing is further from himself _than_ to

weaken; whereby Ralph connects, as I quite grasp, the consequence with

the cause. There must be sequences here of the strongest, I make

out--the successive driving in of the successive silver-headed nails at

the very points and under the very taps that I reserve for them. That's

it, the silver nail, the recurrence of it in the right place, the

perfection and salience of each, and the trick is played. I seem to see

it thus a silver nail that my young man recognises--well--what he does

recognise--when the younger girl (for whom, as for them all, I should do

well to provide a name without more delay) swims into his ken, and it's

another one, another clou d'argent, when the wave of his confidence

seems to have begun to spend itself, doing this, however, in face of

something that has taken place. Just what this thing is must constitute

another silver nail, and I see it thereby as some symptom given, on the

part of the others, of a change of attitude, a change of sensibility, as

I must call it, or at least may, for want of a better word. I think it

of superior force that they, the others, all except my young heroine,

shall begin on _their_ side the betrayal of malaise, which Ralph is then

affected by; rather than that he should begin it, making it thus that

they are by the operation, the outward betrayal, of that condition of

his own. Here I have the action of the little H.W., who, moved thereto

(I express myself thus roughly) by the situation determined for his own

interest through the terms appearing destined to develop between R. and

the girl, and this though R. isn't at all free for the girl, opens

himself on the subject to the three others and so calls their attention

to certain things that they before long find themselves, and confess it

to him and to each other, affected too in the sense he communicates. To

be perfectly definite it seems to me I must have it that the marriage of

Ralph and the elder daughter is definitely arranged and fixed for a

tolerably near date; since I want the elder girl, "under the effect," to

break off something, and there is nothing so good for her to break off

as their engagement. The rupture of that, with R's apprehension of how

and why it is coming and has come, is of course a silver nail of perfect

salience; just as it is another, I see, that this catastrophe, or

whatever one may call it, places Ralph and the younger girl face to face

as they have not yet been placed. Their recognition of that, his at

least, which is also a perception and a comprehension of hers, what has

_this_, in its concreteness, but one more silver nail? What I see

myself, at the same time, here concerned with is the question of the

outward footing Ralph remains on, finds or makes possible, with the two

other women etc. when the rupture developes and after it has occurred. I

can't have it end the relation, everything so collapsing--so that there

must be still grounds for the relation, and they must be strong and

positive, or at least definite and presentable. I get something by the

provision that the engagement has not been given out nor the marriage

announced as to take place; which, meanwhile, is not at all natural

unless some advantage not to be too lightly sacrificed is involved with

their still superficially keeping on. This requires thinking of, but

doesn't in the least defy handling; and indeed I think I get it at a

stroke by the fact that they all cling to him, in a sort, even in spite

of the malaise, by reason of the convenience proceeding from his means.

Decidedly, yes, they must be, through disorders, extravagances,

turpitudes or whatever, of the late head of the family, and

vraisemblablement through like actualities on the part of the son who

has succeeded him in the proprietorship of Drydown, they must be on a

hollow and quaking pecuniary basis--which makes Ralph have to have

money, even though this wasn't in the least a _common_ felicity or

luxury in the American world of that period. None the less were there

_some_ fortunes, without overstrain of the point, and in short I have

only to make Ralph all disposed, very peculiarly disposed indeed and

very particularly inspired and inwardly needing and wanting, to pay his

way handsomely, to be the free-handed-from-over-the-sea relative of the

house, in order to pick up whatever link might have seemed missing here,

and make it serve my turn. He pays his way, he regales and "treats",

right and left; and nothing can be more in the note of the time I give

him the sense of than the extraordinary readiness he finds in everyone

to profit by this, the want of delicacy and dignity, by our modern

measure, in the general attitude toward pecuniary favours. The smaller

still lives on the greater, the minor folk on the great, and Ralph

literally sees himself, feels himself, enjoys in a manner feeling

himself, figure verily as one of the great by his taste of this play of

money-patronage that is open to him. There it is: if I get a clou

d'argent by the rupture, in short, I get another, still another, by some

"dramatic" demonstration of the fashion after which they are going in

spite of their malaise to hold on to him as beneficiaries of a sort.

Yes, yes, yes, I have it, I have it: the brother has borrowed money,

borrowed it of him bravely, from the first; and the brother opposes the

rupture of the marriage for fear that, a complete rupture thus also

involved, he will have to pay up to his creditor, his so probably

indignant creditor, in consequence of the changed situation. The other

two women know this, and what it means for him; and then thereafter see

that it needn't mean what they fear, what _he_ fears, and isn't going

to--for here I just get a sublime little silver nail in the fact that

Ralph, comprehending this, beautifully seeing the way it may help him,

quite seems to show on the contrary that he won't push his hand, won't

expose their private gene; seeing what he can get for himself by not

doing so. Doesn't he in fact even "lend" the brother more money, lend it

after the very rupture, in order to reassure them and keep on with them

and show he doesn't "mind" the breach on the part of the elder

girl?--this all because it keeps him along and on the footing of his

still possible relation with the younger. In plain terms mayn't one put

it that he buys, pays for, in hard cash, the pursuance of his

opportunity?--as well as put it that his "dramatic" assurance of this,

with its readjustment of his footing, constitutes again a silver nail.

(There's nothing, I think, that one must so keep before one as that at

first he is made ever so much of--much more of than he could at all have

hoped.)

Well then, there he is with the question of the marriage ended--as to

which, let me catch myself up to remember, I shall have to give _her_ a

motive, a presentable ground, since it's ended by her act, which won't

make it too anomalous on his part that relations with the house are kept

up. I must have him, by the way, not "stay" with them--I see advantages

and naturalnesses, facilitations of several sorts, in his not doing

that, but, much rather, putting up at one of the inns of the day, or

better still in a lodging in one of the old Westend streets. Why not let

the young woman make it quite frank and outspoken--happy thought!--and

say in so many words that she can't marry him because, heaven help her,

she's afraid of him; just that, simply afraid of him, even if he (with

his own malaise at this note) can't get out of her any _why_, when he

challenges her, as in dignity and decency he must, for a reason. This

much affects and impresses him--for there isn't in it, mind, the

smallest hint or implication of its being through any jealousy of her

sister, whom she doesn't so much as honour with a suspicion. (The sort

of Cinderella quality, so to call it, of the younger one, to be shown as

more or less felt by him.) The position thus taken with practical

suddenness by his prospective bride is the first definite note, at all

really sharp one, that he has to reckon with on the subject of the

queerness that hangs, that may so well hang, about him; and it sets up

thereby the beginnings of the great feeling that I want to impute to

him. He thinks all the same, at first, he expects and apprehends, not

with pleasure, however, that this attitude of hers won't be supported by

her mother and her brother: the thing having taken place between

themselves only, and quite abruptly; she striking him as acting by her

own sudden impulse alone, and in a manner not at all to suit the others.

They will overbear her, he imagines; her mother in particular will bring

her round again and into line. He positively fears this even--so that

his surprise is great, and his malaise even greater, when the mother,

with a full opportunity, by this time, doesn't so much as speak to him

on the subject. There must be a passage between them, him and the

Mother, in which he wonderingly and observantly, watching now all

symptoms and portents, as it were, waits for Mrs. So-and-So to speak, to

broach the matter herself, to show him her knowledge of what her

daughter has done. He must know, or must believe, that she has now the

knowledge--this point having been treated between him and the daughter,

as it were, in the scene of the rupture. He _has_ of course to ask her

if she throws him over with her mother's privity and approval, to which

she replies that she doesn't, up to then, that she has broken down but

then and there, but that now at once of course she will report herself,

so to speak, to her mother. I see it must be the case that she is plain

and honest, not at all tortuous or perfidious, and so far as

calculating, why calculating quite boldly and confessedly, as to the

material advantages accruing; and thereby the more eloquent as to the

inward feeling she can't surmount when she renounces these advantages so

flatly. Well, the point is, from all this, that our young man is waiting

for the mother to express to him that he mustn't on his side take

advantage of the girl's backing out, but insistently claim his right not

to be so trifled with (the attitude of the family being that they are,

for all their straitened means, great people themselves, greater truly

than he, and with a greatness for him in the connection,) and is going

on as if nothing has happened. He has expected from her, as in

character, the information that she has dealt herself, and with the high

maternal rigour that then prevailed, _with_ the ridiculous child, whom

she has thus reduced again to reason and docility. But nothing of that

sort comes--the lady of Drydown not only doesn't break ground to him

herself in that sense, but betrays to his now considerably excited

imagination a fear that he will: which will be, truly, awkward,

embarrassing and even "scaring" to her; so that what I seem to see

happening is verily that when he thus watches her not speak, notes her

as forbearing to for reasons of her own, he doesn't take her up on it,

decides in fact not to, decides that the question is really had out

between them without either of them so speaking, and only by his looking

her very hard in the eye, and her so looking at him, and his keeping it

up on this and her keeping it up on that. It simply drops thus, by its

own force, the question of the marriage, and the fact that he doesn't

have it out, and that she allows him, as by taking care, no opportunity

to, constitutes another silver nail, likewise, of as good a salience as

I could desire. There it is then, so far as that goes; and after I have

dealt for an instant now with the question of what the brother's

attitude also is in the connection, I see I shall have got what I was

reaching out for considerably above, _the particular thing taking, or

having taken, place_ which must serve for me as the determinant of the

phenomenon, the factor, I have settled to tackle. The "other fellow

appears" to Ralph, and makes him ask himself why, contrary to all

consistency or logic, the laws of the game, this extraordinary

occurrence should take place. He feels it as portentous--feels it, I

see, in a way altogether different from the way in which he felt it on

the first great occasion; when it only uplifted and thrilled him, making

him conscious of all his force--whereas it now disquiets and alarms him,

makes him sound it for its logic and its reason; which he clearly enough

interprets to himself. A difficult and intricate thread of exhibition

here, but as fine and sharp as I require it if I only keep it so. It

comes back to him, it comes over him, that he has freedom, and that his

acting in independence, or at least acting with inevitability, has laid

this trap for him--that he has deviated, and of necessity, from what

would have happened in the other fellow's place and time. What would

have happened is that _he wouldn't_ have feared his prospective bride,

he being the other fellow; and that thus he, Ralph, has done the other

fellow a violence, has wronged the personality of the other fellow _in

him_, in himself, Ralph, by depriving him of the indicated, the

consonant union with the fine handsome desirable girl whom the 1820 man

would perfectly and successfully have been in love with, and whom he

would have kept all unalarmedly and unsuspiciously in love with him.

Deviation, violation, practical treachery, in fact--that is what Ralph's

production and his effect on the two women (the mother sharing so in the

"off"-ness of her daughter) amounts to and represents for him,

aggravated moreover by the interest taken in, the community of feeling

enjoyed with, the younger girl--for whom, putting it in rough summary

fashion, the other fellow wouldn't have cared a jot. I cling thus to, I

work thus admirably, what I have called Ralph's insuperable and

ineffaceable margin of independence, clinging taint of modernity--it

being by his fine modern sense that the exquisite, the delicate, the

worthy-herself-to-be-modern younger girl has affected him, in utter

defiance of any capacity on the other fellow's part to appreciate or

conceive any such value in her. Off in his inscrutable fact of being and

of action the other fellow then has had too _his_ insuperable margin of

antiquity, as opposed to modernity, his independent sensibility, though

of a simpler and ruder, a harsher and heavier sort; and it is as a

hovering messenger of this that my young man has, so to put it, drawn

him down upon him. There it is--I get so my cause of my effect; I get my

fact that the other party to the agreed--to experience turns up, all

unexpectedly, all "alarmingly" to _my_ party after a fashion to show

that violence, that injury, as above formulated, has been done him, and

as a protest against its being done further. I mustn't have this fact, I

see, as repetitive, mustn't cheapen it with recurrence; must only have

it, I seem to grasp, take place three times, each time with its own

weight of meaning for that time, and then not take place again. It

becomes thus each time a clou d'argent of the very sharpest salience. I

see the first time as what one may call a warning. I see the

second--taking place after Ralph has told the younger girl of what has

happened, and what must take place between them on it _has_ taken

place--I see that as a retribution, or in other words as a thumping, a

tremendous aggravator of malaise; and I see the third as something which

I will state in a minute after having said a word more about the second.

The second constitutes--by which I mean the occasion of it does----a

reflection of the intimacy, or at least the beautifully good

understanding, with the younger girl, determined for Ralph by his

opening himself to her after the sensation, just above formulated,

proceeding from the rupture and the way the two other women have acted

about it. It's only at this moment, and from this moment, that she

becomes his _confidante_, all the difference being made by that; and

don't I see it as an enormous little fact that whereas he goes on in

silence, as it were, with the others (putting the two men out of the

question, which is a point to be treated separately,) he finds her in no

ignorance, either real or pretended, but welling up, virtually, with

readiness to let him see that she knows. She _knows_--and I think he

doesn't even quite understand why or how she knows; her possession of

what she does know striking him as a matter beyond, in its "quality",

any communication of it that the others may have been capable of making

her. The passage between them representing all this becomes then the

determinant of what I have called the retributive, as distinguished from

the merely warning, reappearance of the other party. I just want to tuck

in here provisionally, and before breaking off for the day, that I hold

tight the "motive", the dramatic value, of the third reappearance; which

resides in my heroine's relation to it--that is not, definitely not, in

her having it at all herself, that is not at all directly, but in her

becoming aware of _his_ having it and, as it were, catching him in the

act of the same. Work this out, express this better, or at least

entirely, in my next go: I perfectly see it--it only wants clear

statement.

I want the business just glanced at, in the four or five foregoing

lines, to be as ideally right of course as it can possibly be made; want

to squeeze all the effective virtue out of it, in the sense of my

generally intended colour and tone, generally intended production of the

"new" frisson, as artfully as can be managed. Focussing on it a bit I

seem to catch the tip of the tail of the right possibility--though on

further thought indeed I am pulled up a little, not being sure it can't

be bettered. For I was thinking a moment that she _should_, after all,

have herself the direct apprehension, perception or, speaking plainly,

vision; have it in the sense that she exhibits herself to R. at a given

moment as plunged in stupefaction or confusion by having apparently seen

him in double, that is seen him, been sure of him, in a place where, in

the conditions gone into or examined and discussed between them, he

couldn't possibly have been. In other words she has it to tell him--that

to her perception as well, by her experience of it the hour ago or

whatever, he rose before her for certain moments in a reality with which

everything proves in conflict. That, I say, was what a minute since

glimmered upon me--Ralph's having it from _her_ as the form of what I

call in this connection my third big determinant. But no, but no: what

is immeasurably better than that he should have anything of the sort

through herself is that she shall have it all absolutely through him.

Pressing harder and more intelligently, I come back to the image, the so

obviously finest, of her _catching_ him under the squeeze, under the

dire apprehension, of this third occasion--which I seem to see I can

make adequate and operative by her recognising him, just that, after the

right fashion, as doing his damnedest _not_ to show her, not to betray

to her, his intelligence of what he has to infer from, to read into,

seeing it in an awful light, something that has just befallen him. It

seems to me that I get it and give it, for my best interest, by our

having it _all_ in the form in which her taxing him with being in a

state, a state that she divines, yet but only half understands,

determines his at last more or less abjectly confessing to. He breaks

down under the beautiful pity of her divination, the wonder of her so

feeling for him that she virtually knows, or knows enough; and the

question is here of course, isn't it? whether for full lucidity of

interest, full logic of movement, he doesn't let her know all or, in

vulgar fictional parlance, reveal his secret. That's what it comes to,

what it _has_ to come to, very much indeed it would seem; that's what

the situation would seem to mean, would appear to have to give, as who

should say, of finest: their being face to face over all the prodigious

truth--which I think there ought to be a magnificent scène à faire in

illustration of. The beauty, the pathos, the terror of it dwells thus in

his throwing himself upon her for help--for help to "get out",

literally, help which she can somehow give him. The logic, the

exquisite, of this to be kept tight hold of, with one's finger on every

successive link of the chain. But voyons un peu the logic; which,

expressed in the plainest, the most mathematical terms possible, is that

what this "retributive" admonition signifies for him is, he feels, that

he is going to be _left_, handed over to the conditions of where and

what and above all _when_ he is; never saved, never rescued, never

restored again, by the termination of his adventure and his experience,

to his native temporal conditions, which he yearns for with an

unutterable yearning. He has come to have his actual ones, the

benighted, the dreadful ones, in horror--and he just lets her know _how_

horrible everything that surrounds her, everything that she herself is

surrounded with and makes part of, have become for him, and under what a

weight of despair he sinks if what has just again for the third time

happened to him means that his fate is sealed. He breaks down to her,

has the one outward, the one communicated despair that I see for him in

the course of the affair; his throwing himself upon her for what she can

do to avert that doom, his beseeching her, all selfishly, to help him. I

say _all selfishly_ for the dramatic, clumsily so to call it, value,

working value, of this; connected, identical, as it is with his

readiness, in fact his intense hope of being able to, profit

by the idea of a liberation for him purchased on her part by some

sacrifice--sacrifice, by no means sufficiently, of any hope of _him_,

but of the very stuff of herself, and this up to the hilt. The more I

look into this, the more I see in it; but with proportionately much

therefore to be stated about it with a supreme lucidity. Reduced to its

simplest expression the case stands that he has fallen in love with

her--done so in absolute rebound from the distress that her sister's,

her mother's, breach has brought to an end for him; leaving him

_originally_ to throw himself so much on _her_ by reaction, by already

acquired and assimilated sense that with her, too blessedly, almost

_any_ ease for him, whether but comparatively or absolutely, is

possible. Thus had he given way to his having, as who should say, fallen

in love with her; and thus does that fact work, to his perception, both

toward his prime relief and toward his understanding of what he has to

fear. Here I come to something pretty intricate and difficult, yet full

of life and force, say frankly of beauty, if I can get it straight;

which is what I must proceed to. _Why_ has what passes, what has passed

up to then, between this pair, _why_ does it bring on or draw down the

third, the "retributive" recurrence? Well, let us see if we don't make

out, and thereby but store up still more beauty and intensity. Put it

simply for the moment that the Predecessor has been in love with the

elder sister _while_, all unknowably (at the time,) the younger has been

in love with him. That condition on her part, it appears to me, gives

the link I want, the exact one, for what Ralph finds of prepared, as it

were, of reciprocal, of ground laid, for his first understandings with

her _when once he has begun to feel_ the interfering malaise of the

others. I am here, I quite recognise, brought up against the question of

why if the Predecessor has been so in love, then and there, in the old

time, he should have had this impulse to swing off into conditions so

remote from those of the object of this sentiment. I get partly in

answer to this the fact that Ralph, shown as so much in love in the

first Book, has all the same embraced his opportunity to swing off into

where we now have him; but I want something more than this, and I don't

get it by simply leaning strongly on the attachment inspired in the man

of 1820; inasmuch as the more he has been attached the more explaining

will the matter take, the matter flowering into that inordinate

phenomenon of the original nocturnal meeting of the two men. If I give

full value to the idea that the present Pendrel's pressure, his

hovering, penetrating force has had much the most to do with what has

taken place, that though the man of 1820 has drawn the man of 1910,

exact, (though as to this I must make no modern date explicit of that)

back into his own age, while the latter has drawn the former forward

into _his_, though I do this, I take care, I soigner the effect that

Ralph has begun it, has exerted the original force, has been the

determinant for the other and thrust at him his opportunity. This in a

general way clears up a little the particular aspect of the case that I

am turning over; but don't I still nevertheless want something more than

that? I want something that the predecessor may affect Ralph as

definitely uttering to him and direfully reproaching him with; and

perhaps as I dig into my material and insist on gouging what I want out

of it I meet this ground of resentment and reprobation for the

predecessor that he feels, or rather that Ralph feels him to feel--for

it can all only be _imputation_ on R's part--that he isn't, as it were,

playing the game; ceases quite to play it from the moment that he

inspires the elder girl, whom one had hit it off so with dans le temps,

with the alarm of distress and dislike that has operated for her

rupture. I find something in that, I find I think enough in that--find

it enough that Ralph recognises himself as under displeasure, under

vindictive displeasure for not, as it were, playing the game. Let me

make him put it for himself that the other man doesn't play the game

either, from the moment that he thus "comes in", reappears, as it were,

as with the conscious purpose so to "brouiller" things. Have it clear

that Ralph has no theory at all of what his double's situation is off in

_his_ sphere; put it that he is by way of having no sort of constructive

or inferential or divinatory notion of that at all: which it would make

an extraordinary complication to undertake to give him--by which I mean

an impossible one, an unspeakable tangle, within the limits, altogether.

Yes, yes; the more I think the more I seem to see this conception of

Ralph's to be that the other fellow is endangered and incommoded in his

sphere by what strikes him as R's practical perfidy and

non-accomplishment. What makes this is that the two women, the two other

men etc., and the object of his preference above all, are thereby handed

over to their intensity of malaise--I give Ralph as seeing and feeling

and understanding him as _rendered_ thereby vindictive, as convicting

him accordingly of "perfidy", and of decreeing the punishment which

shall consist of not coming to his help: as I must show it as having

figured in their original entente that each shall come au besoin to the

help of the other. Out of this little store of indications, at any rate,

I shall be able surely to help myself to whatever in the connection, and

in closer quarters, I find my best interest in.

Definite it is then that, caught by his young friend in the fact of his

_intelligent_ alarm he makes a clean breast to her of what he feels and

understands, of what his intelligence most helps him to, of what, in a

word, it is necessary that she shall know--know in order to assist and

relieve him, do the particular thing that _will_ so act for him: and so

bring the whole situation to the point of its dénoûment. What is then

this particular thing?--what can it be when I bring it down to a finer

point, that is bring the question down, than my general first notion

brought it to? Here the very closest and finest logic must govern all

one's sequences. Altogether important and indispensable is it that he

doesn't "confess to her", really appeal and throw himself upon her, till

she has so "caught", as I say, and cornered him, that there is nothing

else for him to do--that is that under the pity and perception and

beauty of this he absolutely can't but give in. I have provided above,

or sought to, for the motive force establishing in her this capacity--I

have sought to do so, I repeat, though I'm not sure I don't still feel a

little uncomfortable at being able to do nothing better for her, as

would appear, than simply recognise his woe. The beautiful thing would

be for her to be able to _refer this woe_ to some particular, some

portentous observation or constatation already made by him: which

question I examined and turned over above without breaking down my

objection to her directly sharing his vision: I at that point stated

that I wished her but indirectly, but derivatively, to do that--through

her apprehension of the state into which it has put him. I seem to feel

that this then isn't quite ideally adequate or good without I know not

what _more_ for her: the ability in her, say, to _challenge him first_

on some entirely concrete matter which has told her something for

herself, something strange and prodigious, or at least deeply

mystifying, in advance of the pressure brought to bear by her on him as

an indicated, approved, a revealed sufferer, the pressure in fine that

makes him break down. The trouble is that so I swing back again this way

to too near the objection-ability, and thereby ask myself if there isn't

a way out, a happy thought, in making her, instead of seeing something

more than the normal, making her, as I have used the term, "catch",

catch in the fact, something in excess of it, see something _less_, have

the queerness of _missing_ something--her miss of which needs to be

explained. The miss, as I call it, corresponds and matches with his

exposure to the retributive visitation, as I have called it; and

something glimmers out for me in the way of the very occurrence itself,

the fact of the visitation for him being marked, marked startlingly and

mystifyingly to her, not by his experience as in any degree detected by

her, discernible to her, but by his apparent exclusion from _any_

experience; or in other words by an inexplicable lapse or suspension of

his state of being at all. I think that if I can arrange that--her not

finding him present when by all the laws and the logic of life he should

_be_ present, and so having to challenge him for an explanation--in

short I believe I do so see something. He is extinguished for her senses

by being in the grip of his face-to-faceness with the other man; and

don't I make it out as arrangeable that this takes place in the very

fact of his having appointed a tryst or rendezvous with her, at which

she has found him, but in the midst of which he then astoundingly fails

and, as it were, evaporates? I seem to see something like her having

gone out to him by appointment, at dusk of evening, in the Square, the

enclosed square itself; where as she approaches she has recognised him

within, has even spoken to him through the rails, while he awaits her,

and there has had an exchanged word or two with her, directing her round

to the gate: which she reaches and enters the enclosure by only to

become sure, after moments and moments and moments of surprise and

stupefaction, that he is definitely _not there._ I think I have it, it

is then; it is at these moments, I mean during them, and under the

"influence" exactly, upon the other man, of the appointment given her,

that the "retributive visitation" takes place. So I get it, get it

enough, get in fact all I need. The visitation over he is in the place

again: he is there before her and what more natural "challenge" can I

have for her than her alarmed question, that is her stupefied one, as to

what in the world had during those moments, which I can make as long or

as short, for intensity, as I like, what in the name of unanswerable

wonder had become of him. He is there before her again, but before her

with what has happened to him overwhelmingly marked upon him.

I see what then takes place between them as a virtual counterpart, in

the way of his telling his story, to his scene with the Ambassador, the

whole contents of Book III; only all in the note of his depression, his

unspeakable homesickness for his own time and place--whereas the other

whole passage had been in the note of his elation, eagerness and

confidence. He makes, as I say, a clean breast to her--as he had made it

under the then essential restriction to the Ambassador; with the immense

difference, however, that whereas the effect in the latter case was to

impress his then confidant with his being out of his mind, the present

effect is, marvellously, prodigiously, to make our heroine believe in

the truth of his extraordinary case, recognise how he puts it to her so

because he is, because he has remained, exactly so sane, and that it is

(prodigiously, marvellously as the force in her to do so may be on her

part) to his sanity, exactly, to his convincing consistency, that she

rallies. This rallying of hers is of course _the_ very point, for

interest and beauty, for the climax of the romantic hocuspocus, of my

sought total effect; the very flower, so to speak, of what I noted a

little back as my scène à faire. As I have already said repeatedly

enough, he tells her all, tells her all, all, all; which involves of

course his telling her what he feels, has come to feel, in his being so

"cut off", so now conclusively and hopelessly cut off, from the life,

from the whole magnificent world from which he is truant, unless

something, something _she_ perhaps can think of, may yet save him. His

whole position becomes thus the plea to be saved, to be liberated--with

his waiting on her devotion, her affection, her ingenuity, in a word her

inspiration, somehow to let him off. All sorts of things to be done with

this, in the beautiful and curious and interesting way, especially with

the idea that she is sole among those of his actual life whom contact

with him, the relation with him, doesn't now make "afraid". Of course

this absence of fear on her part has to be based, has to have its own

logic in order to have all its beauty; and when one asks oneself _why

she_, why she only, thus extraordinarily, one seems both at once to be

reduced for support, for illumination of it to the fact that she loves

him, and that her affection can do it, and to the concomitant

recognition that it will, that it _must_, serve. For it is what exactly

and immediately supplies to the situation between them the idea of her

being able to operate somehow or other by sacrifice, _her_ sacrifice,

and of herself and her affection and her interest, somehow or other; so

far as one doesn't make her interest, her interest in _how_ to do it, by

its very intensity and, so to speak, curiosity, an inspiring motive. I

must have had him put it to her straight, How, how, _how_ can you get me

off, can you release me from this apprehension of having really lost all

I feel and fear I've lost?--so that thus she has to throw herself back

_upon_ herself under pressure of this dire appeal which involves,

obviously, her using everything. For it would seem to me kind of sublime

that he now, at last now, opening up, opening out, everything that he

has had before to keep back, tells her such things about those fruitions

of the Future which have constituted his state, tells her of how poor a

world she is stuck fast in compared with all the wonders and splendours

that he is straining back to, and of which he now sees only the

ripeness, richness, attraction and civilisation, the virtual perfection

without a flaw, that she stands dazzled before it and can only be shut

up in the heartbreak of remaining so far back behind it, so dismally and

excludedly out of it, while he, with her assistance, shaking her off

after he has, as it were, used her, wins his way back to it and out of

her sight and sense for ever. Immense and interesting to show him as

profiting by her assistance without his being thereby mean or abject or

heartless; in which light my affair can't afford, given the whole

romantic note of it, to place him. Besides the "psychological" truth and

consistency here may back me to any extent. The great question is then

_of_ her "assistance", how it's rendered, what it consists of, how he

can take it from her and how she can give it. I feel that my subject

contains the exact, the exquisite rightness for this deep in its breast,

if only I watch hard enough to see said rightness emerge--emerge as it

were of itself and as from the operation of what surrounds it. It dwells

somehow deep in the fact, the great dramatic fact of the whole business,

that she alone hasn't had the mistrust, the malaise and the fear; in

connection with which I seem to see something of no small, in fact of

the greatest, pop out at me. If he has made her his full "confession"

don't I make out that, to balance this, she also tells him about herself

something of the last intimacy--not merely how she loves him, but

something better still than that?--don't I in fact find myself just

leaping and snatching at the idea which answers all my questions of

procedure and has my perfect solution just locked up and waiting within

it? What is more than her confessing to him that she loves _him_, what

gives the exhibitional further twist I was groping for, is that she

tells him she has loved the man he is a substitute for, the man of 1820,

the _real_ one of that actual year, and that in loving himself she has

but obeyed the irresistible continuity and consistency involved in his

force of representation. I seem to see really my ideal rightness in

this--but must keep my head to state here what I see, for my perfect

use, roundabout it. I have already spoken, far above, of her having

loved the other man, the "real" one, and done so as by the implication

that Ralph knows it, is in possession of it, and has seen for himself

what an identity and what a connection reside in it. By what means,

however, has he originally known it, learnt it, got into possession of

it?--unless by one of the others' having stated it to him. I ask myself

which then of the others--but only at once to recognise the matter as

already determined for me by what I have threshed out. He gets the

knowledge effectively and, as I call it, dramatically, to all intents

and purposes scenically, by the fact that the little H.W. man, as I call

him, betrays the wanted jealousy of him from the moment the elder girl

breaks off from him. Up to that moment not, but after it, and on his

turning to the younger, with whom the little H.W. man is, as I have

shown, himself in love, _then_ entirely. This jealousy is practically

what leads to his profession of the truth; so that there can be no

question of his needing it from her--he so reads it in her manière

d'être--up to the time of, and the great revolution constituted by, the

scène à faire. What we get thus is her manière d'être for him, all

sufficient, all infinitely touching, before that _scène_, and her

condition and her action _after_ the same; which are two quite different

things. _Then_, I mean in this latter case, her avowal, the only entire

and direct one, is quite a different thing; out of which I have to pull,

as I say, quite what I want. She has loved the man of 1820 _all in

himself_--keep every shade of discrimination here flawlessly clear. She

has loved him wholly without reward of course, and even under his more

than indifference, his degree of contempt; entirely addressed as he was,

and has been, to her elder sister. Yet I pull up too here, in the midst

of my elation--though after a little I shall straighten everything

out--to see that I introduce an element of confusion in trying to work

the matter out as if anything can have _preceded_ Ralph's own, Ralph's

"conscious" arrival. Awfully important, and not a little difficult,

here, not to let any tangle or any embroilment lay its insidious trap.

Doesn't Ralph know by his own experience, if he takes up the action from

the moment, and the moment only, of "arriving", arriving for the first

time, all that has happened for his predecessor and exactly what hasn't?

There, however, I gasp with relief, is a question that would be

embarrassing to me only if, on intenser reflection, I didn't see that I

exactly haven't pretended that he doesn't _repeat_, repeat up to a

certain point, the experience of the young man of the portrait? Just

now, a page or two back, I lost my presence of mind, I let myself be

scared, by a momentarily--confused appearance or assumption that he

doesn't repeat it. I see, on recovery of my wits, not to say of my wit,

that he very exactly does; without which where is definitely that Past,

that made and achieved, that once living and enacted Past which is the

field of his business? He deflects in the midst of it, yes, by the

uncontrollability of his modernism--that is, at least, by what was

incalculable beforehand, the exhibition of the way in which "they" were

going to take it. The whole effect of my story is exactly his

disconcerted and practically defeated face-to-faceness with the way in

which they do take it--a matter, a fact, an appearance, that gives me

all I want for accounting for his deflection. Thus is our having, his

having, everything _en double_ regulated and exhibited: he is doing over

what the other fellow has done (though it acts for the other persons in

it as if it were the first time--this quite all right, though not

looking so at first)--and that accordingly hangs together and stands

firm. Therefore accordingly my start, a little above, at being what I

there for a moment called disconcerted and defeated was groundless: I

was going on perfectly straight and right--and am now doing so again. To

repeat, accordingly, I get my full right to deal as by a free hand with

that little historic truth of the girl's concealed sentiment for the

other fellow, accompanied with her equal consciousness that he doesn't

and can't and won't care for her a bit: at least in the same way. This

revolution that has taken place for her--and well before the scène--of

Ralph's differing so from the 1820 man--in short, in short. Note what

occurs to me as to the question or no of whether the portrait, the

portrait _in_ the house in 1910, is done from Ralph in 1820 or not, done

from Ralph himself, or accounted for, as coming into existence

afterwards. _The_ thing, at this ragged edge, is to keep hold of the

clue, as tight as possible, that I have grabbed for my solution in the

line of her _making_ the sacrifice; making it all with a sublime

intelligence _for_ him, on account of what he has told her of his own

epoch--which she stares at in her deprivation.

To clear up a little the page preceding this, instead of doing it over,

I was making a statement, a bit arrested, as to the revolution that has

taken place in the girl, previous, well previous, to the scene of the

great crisis, as to the attitude toward her of her sister's fiancé,

from the moment she feels, exquisitely and almost incredulously feels,

that difference in _him_ (toward her) which has been more completely

defined since her sister's dismissal of him, and which gives her, as

well as it gives him, a liberty never yet enjoyed by her. I shall

presently come back to the rest of this, the enormous value to be got

out of it; but I want not simply to brush by the small hare started

yesterday by that sudden remembrance of the question of the portrait,

the portrait figuring, or having figured, so extraordinarily to Ralph

upwards of a century after its being painted; and which it would seem I

must do something about. I see a chance to play with it, with the 1820

production of it, for illustration and intensification of my most-sought

effect. It's an excrescence perhaps upon the surface I have already in

this rough fashion plotted out; which remark, however, is nonsense, as

nothing is an excrescence that I may interestingly, that I may

contributively, work in. It gives me moreover, the idea I begin to

clutch the tip of the tail of, it gives me another person whom I

suddenly see as a great enhancement for my action; the painter-man who

gets, doesn't one fancy? into a much straighter and closer "psychologic"

and perceptive and mystified and mixed relation with his remarkable

subject than any of the others in _their_ way do. I get the painter-man

as affected in his way too with the famous malaise, and the more

affected with his proportionately greater opportunities, as it were, if

not of observation at least of a kind of wondering and penetrating

consideration. It "kind of" glimmers upon me that there would be

something good, something much to the purpose, in having the painter-man

_begin_ to prepare the turn the situation takes, having him start the

question of _what the matter is_ (crudely speaking) with the genial

young man, after all, and below and outside of his geniality; so that

his wonderment, his felt queerness and queernesses, are inevitably

communicated by him and sow the seed of the rest of what I want. They

sow above all, don't they, or mayn't they be made to? the seed of

Ralph's _suspicion of his being suspected_, putting him on his guard

against this latter, rendering him uneasy, and whatever else, under the

painter's study of him. Wouldn't it be then to the little H.W. man that

the artist speaks of his strange impression, in complete confidence and

secrecy at first, but sowing what I have called the seed so in the most

favourable ground? I recognise that one doesn't quite see how we _know_

he does this, as we don't of course see or hear him do it; yet that

needn't find itself so ill provided for by Ralph's himself making it out

and concluding upon it--which is after all the only way we really know

anything. I don't want to repeat what I have done at least a couple of

times, I seem to remember, and notably in The Liar--the "discovery", or

the tell-tale representation of an element in the sitter written clear

by the artist's projection of it on canvas. At the same time I am not

afraid; I see its office well enough and needn't trouble if once the

idea appeals, as I think it really does. In this case it's worked in

early; the notion of my young man having his portrait as a matter of

course done in London coming in with perfect naturalness. He has it done

for his prospective bride; she takes an interest in it of the very

greatest at first; and it is the little H.W. man who recommends, who

selects, the artist. I see all sorts of curious things in this--it

perfectly bristles with them, and with one's chance, above all, of

making the personage in question (and I do want another figure, to

people the canvas a little more) a real vision to Ralph, a character of

the time, intensely typical for Ralph; through whose sense of all which,

however, I tread the delicate ground of imputations to him, of

perceptions, discriminations, estimates more or less at variance with

his 1820 identity. That delicate ground, I have only to remind myself,

is absolutely the very most attaching ground of my process; solvitur

ambulando--I have only to find myself in close quarters with it to get

from it force and felicity. I present then the painter-man, I make him,

do him, see him and use him; use him to very good purpose. Don't I kind

of see Ralph's suspicion of being suspected come to a head in the sight

of something produced on the little H.W. man's part, on his nerves and

in his fancy, in fine, through an active correspondence with the malaise

the artist has caused in him through divinably feeling it himself? The

foregoing difficult to state, but one is quite possessed of it; there's

a great lot in it--only too much, alas, given my faculty for amplifying

and going far. However, a rigorous tight hand on the excess of that is

my very law of life here. I do feel how an effective further twist or

two hangs about the question of the portrait. We get it surely as

painted full face on--with the rendered face, in other words, that is

turned away from Ralph's 1910 vision of him on that night in the house.

Yes, he sits for it in 1820; he sees it grow, he sees and feels what

grows out of it--I really don't see why the fact of it, the high conceit

of it, mayn't do for me a good deal of my work. It plays a part in the

situation--though I must square the difficulty of the artist "feeling

about his sitter" as he more and more does and yet being able to keep

his method and process, his application of his ability, well in hand, in

order to put the thing through. It's a fine thing, a very fine one--I

need it as that; for the finer it is the more it plays its part in the

state of sensibility, all round, at which we increasingly assist. The

thing is done for the prospective bride--though she would have been much

more likely to have been treated to a fine miniature (alas, but no

matter!) And don't I see that the first stroke in the reaction, on her

part, as I may conveniently call it, is her abrupt, her sudden

inconsequent refusal of the gift? in which she is backed by her mother.

Perhaps she refuses it even before it is quite finished--for I want the

artist to have spoken about it to the little H.W. man, so to put it,

while the work is still in progress; which is also the time of the

latter's opening himself about it (as Ralph "makes out") to the two

women. Here I have something--the picture's having been destined for the

big panel over the principal drawing-room--whereas the place in which my

hero finds it in 1910 is the small inner retreat which I have handled in

Book II. The mother and daughter startle Ralph, in 1820, by their

expression of unwillingness to its hanging where it was intended; but as

I want it still on the premises, want some compromise or right thing

done about it, so that it shall be there for 1910, I see as arrangeable

the business, the tension, the whole significant passage, of its being

relegated to the place where everyone concerned will least see it--short

of its being turned out of the house; a circumstance I _don't_ invoke. I

have it there for the other man, as his own portrait, when he is

restored to his time by Ralph's liberation from it; I have it there

because I want him _in_ it, don't you see? for that wonder over it in

which Ralph is held during his night of 1910. The other man comes back,

the other man is _in_ it, in order to carry out his part--well, of what

I have recorded.

The "sacrifice", the indispensable, unspeakable sacrifice, on the girl's

part, is involved in her relation to Ralph as she now knows him, and the

quintessential "drama" of it, so to speak, is by the same token involved

in _his knowing her_ as she knows him, and as, above all, she is known

_by_ him. There hovers before me a something-or-other in this, a finer

twist still, a deeper depth or higher flight of the situation, which

seems worth looking into, and which in fact already appears to open out

a good bit before me as I consider it. Isn't there something, isn't

there even much, in the idea that when once these two have arrived, so

to speak, at their understanding, at their mutual disclosures, or at

least, that is, at his disclosure and her avowal, he becomes capable of

a sort of sublimity in presence, as who should say, of her own? so that

there is a kind of struggle between them as to who shall give up

most--if I may put it in such a way without excess of the kind of

romanticism that I don't want; wanting as I do above all, constantly

kept hold of and economised, never let go of nor perverted in the least,

the unfailing presence, drawing in everything to itself, of that force

of "tone" which makes the thing of the parenté of the "Screw". So much

is true and absolute; but doesn't prevent that I am wanting to put my

finger on the very centre of the point from which my young man's

"liberation" is worked. What hovers before me at this pitch, as I just

said, is the _concetto_ that, sincerely affected by her sublimity, he is

moved to match it--and in all sincerity as I say--by offering to remain

with her, as who should say, give up everything _for_ her--from the

moment he thus takes in that she gives him up for what is to herself

utterly nothing, nothing but the exaltation of sacrifice--in short what

I see! I have it all, I possess it here, and now must give pause to this

long outciphering. It seems to give me after all a fourth recurrence of

the man of 1820, called back, as it were, by what takes place. I possess

it, I hold it fast; simply noting the prime point in regard to my last

Book. Rather good and fine, I think, to make it that as the man of 1820

is "called" (since I think I do definitely give him his re-intervention

here, though probably at the cost of still keeping these down to three

in number, and so running two of the others, as who should say, into

one,) so the woman of 1910 is likewise called; so my fundamental idea

that the solution of the solution comes about through Aurora's "coming

out, coming over", takes effect as I had planned it. The penultimate

book ends on the climax I have in mind, as the "Ambassador" Book ended

and broke off with the two at the door of the House; and so the ultimate

one puts Ralph, always in London, and after the lapse of the real six

months or whatever, face to face with his friend of Book I, to whom

exactly what was foreshadowed in that Book for my dénoûment had

happened. Things, things for her consciousness, her imagination, her

growing unrest, her own New York malaise, have happened to _her_ too;

just how we are to know about them giving me, however, a little knot

rightly to untie. I hate its being a "little" knot, savouring so of the

perfunctory and the abbreviated; yet how can I want it in the nature of

things to do more than adequately balance with the dimensions, or

whatever, of Book First? The question is how, with the right sort of

beauty of effect, to work in together the Ambassador's re-participation

_and_ her own, or rather, better put, hers and the Ambassador's own;

since I of course, under penalty of the last infamy, stick here still,

as everywhere, to our knowing these things but through Ralph's knowing

them. It's a bit awkward that I seem to want Aurora's arrival in London

and her appeal to the Ambassador for assuagement of her literal climax

of trouble, I seem to want that passage to precede my young man's

reappearance, re-emergence, so to speak--and yet can't possibly have

anything so artistically base. I want the "rescue", on this side of

time, by Aurora, as the liberation, _for_ rescue on the other side of

time, has been by the girl of 1820; I want it to be, on our actual

ground, by something that Aurora _does_; I want his restoration and

recovery to take place actually and literally through her having got

into such a "psychic" state, passed through such a psychic evolution,

over there, that she takes action at last, takes the very action that

she sort of defied Ralph to make her take in that full, and would-be at

least so rich, "scene" of the most preliminary order. What there took

place essentially was, as he formulated it, that she would look at none

but a man of, as it were, tremendous action and adventure, not being

appealed to (however she might attenuate or sophisticate her arrangement

of her case) by the "mere" person, the mere leader, of the intellectual

life, the mere liver in a cultivated corner, that Ralph has admitted

himself to be to her--with a frankness, an abjection, say, that his

whole subsequent adventure represents his reaction against. The immense

scope his reaction has found then, once he has got over into the "old

world", this has developed to the point that no prodigious adventure of

any such figure as she may have had in mind comes within millions of

miles of the prodigy of his adventure; whereby my conceit is that all

the while he is "having" this, all the while she, left to the aftersense

of what has passed between them, gradually feels her "state of mind",

state of feeling, state of fancy, say, state of nerves in fine, grow and

grow (in a sort of way that is corresponding all the while to the stages

of his experience) till the pitch of unsupportable anxiety and wonder is

reached for her, and being able no longer to stand it, she comes out to

London. I make her come to London through considerations, references or

whatever, plausible enough; and I make her by the same token want to see

the Ambassador--whom she approaches, after the very fashion of Ralph's

approach six months or whenever, before, and as if he were almost, so to

say, a father-confessor. All this is feasible and "amusing", rather

beautiful to do being what I mean; only it must come _after_ and by

reference backward, so to call it--as I can only make the Ambassador

precede her in these renewals, for Ralph, of contact and apprehension.

It isn't so much making him aware of the Ambassador first, so to speak,

that is the trouble, and making him then aware of Aurora _by_ that

personage and what comes of reference on his part to the beautiful

uneasy and inquiring creature of New York; it isn't so much the scene

with that young woman herself then taking place: it isn't these that put

their question to me, but the terms and conditions on and in which I

have his Excellency and his young friend of the previous season

confronted. What a blessing thus to find, accordingly, how the old

gentle firmness of pressure, piously applied, doesn't fail to supply me.

Our young friend is in the house again as he was in it in Book II--the

only little hitch being that I didn't show him as _living_ there, for

the Ambassador, in Book III. He goes to live there, goes _with_ that

escort to do so on the last page of the Book, but by that very fact to

pass into--well everything that we have seen him in and which represents

the rupture of continuity with the Ambassador's period. So in short,

perfectly, I see that, for consummate reasons, he can't receive this

visitor on that exhausted scene at all, but must have the case

otherwise--have it in fact just as it comes to me now. The Ambassador,

after his visit from Aurora (which we don't know about yet, don't know

about till Ralph has _his_ knowledge of it from him,) goes then, walks

then, the day and the season being fine and he walking with the

largeness with which dear J. R. L. used to walk--he goes then, I say, to

the place where he has last had sight of his so interestingly demented

young man of said previous season: he goes there but to have the

sensation, by which I mean of course the actual experience, of seeing

the very conditions in which he then parted with him practically

renewed. The last thing he had stood there on the pavement before the

house to see was Ralph's going in with that last look at him and with

the open door duly again closing on him. So accordingly the first thing

he now sees is Ralph's coming out again with the door closing on him

from behind and the _first_ look the young man addresses to the world of

1910 resting exactly upon the confidant of his former embroilment. I

like that--like Ralph's coming straight out of everything we have been

having, everything up to the very last sharp edge of it, straight back

into this friend's hands. Well, how do I take up, that is how does Ralph

take up, and how does the Ambassador, this fresh situation and relation?

The Ambassador, after his passage with the so handsome and so distracted

young woman from New York, may well have some doubt and some question as

to how, and be in some predicament about it; but I grant at once that

Ralph has emerged from all trouble and now is, for the whole situation,

supreme master and controller. _He_ is "all right" at least, and he

_re-connects_, on the spot, with all the lucidity and authority we can

desire of him. His distinguished friend has come, clearly, on a visit to

him--and he embraces that as well as he embraces their not going back

into the house. At the previous season, as I have called it, he wasn't

yet living in the house, he was only visiting it from his hotel or his

lodgings; yet it isn't to these, none the less, that I see him invite

his caller to adjourn with him, but, under the happiest inspiration,

straight into the Square itself, very pleasant now to sit in (I must

rightly and neatly adjust together the times of the year) and in which,

under its ancient form, by which I mean of course its earlier, he has

been through the scène à faire of 1820. It strikes me as positively

"pretty" that they go into the Square together on the leafy June

afternoon and that there it is, while they sit down, that the Ambassador

reports to him of the visit received at the Embassy from Aurora. He has

those things to _tell_--to tell to the young man who had those others to

do the like with as presented in Book III; whereby it is very much he,

or entirely he, who is the relator, reporter, exhibitor, with Ralph also

for cross-questioner, as the Ambassador himself was on the other

occasion--I myself having of course too my free hand for showing the

elder man as really confessing to his genial bewilderment of interest.

However, the extent to which I am possessed of this requires no dotting

of "i's"; and the great point simply is that thus we get all we require,

as a preliminary to the last pages of all of what has happened to or in,

what has happened for and by, Aurora. I scarcely need state that the

upshot or conclusion of the two men's talk is that Ralph must of course

at once see that young woman; which is the understanding on which the

Ambassador leaves him. But I am almost capable of wondering whether I

had best give this meeting, this reunion of theirs, in the facts and in

the flesh, as it were--so aloof do I feel from the possibility of a kind

of graceless literality. I shall see, I shall make up my mind: it will

come, in true rightness, it _can_ come but so, when I get in close

nearness to it. I do seem to conceive that I can beautifully get all my

needed value for final climax from taking it all out, or putting it all

in, between the two men--especially after they have come out of the

Square together for the Ambassador to go, and they stand on the opposite

pavement, the bit round the Square, with the house over there in view.

Ralph of course has _told_ his Excellency nothing; not a syllable of

repetition of all that we've been having, of course, issues from him for

his friend's illumination. He has only cross-questioned, only extracted

everything about Aurora; only taken in _how_ his triumph is complete and

how that young woman has come down and round. It is thus a question then

of his sending her a message, and of his sending it by the Ambassador

for whom he sees her (justified thereto very vividly by the latter)

simply and all so wonderingly wait. Yes, the message he sends is that he

shall be glad to see her. He summons her to him--doesn't offer to go to

her. He has said to his companion at first and for their going into the

Square that he is not staying at the House, and that his lodgings are

elsewhere. The Ambassador, taking the message, has the question,

virtually: "She's to come then to you at your hotel?" On which, after an

hesitation and resting his eyes a moment over on the house, Ralph says:

"No, no. Over there." But I should say I needn't here and now draw this

out, and that I have it all and more than all, were it not that I just

want to note more emphatically that I provide for everything, provide

against the need of any "small" scene with the young woman from New York

as a sequence to this full passage with the Ambassador, and as a wind up

to the whole thing, together with the balance of such a chapter against

the preliminary Book First--I provide for everything, I say, by putting

_into_ this _finale_ between the two men in the Square, by making Ralph

acquaint his visitor with, so to speak, _all_ the requisite meaning

resident in the appeal, from their young woman, that his Excellency has

called to report on. I said above that Ralph "tells" the Ambassador

nothing--but only receives his own statement and cross-questions him on

it; but that qualification refers only to what has been happening to R.,

in his prodigious alternate character, during the previous six months or

whatever. Not a word about all that; but on the other hand every word

required to enable us to dispense with another scene for the young woman

from N.Y. On that subject Ralph is fully informing, and what I mean and

want is that this action in him, holding his interlocutor

extraordinarily interested, shall so suffice for our own interest and

satisfaction, shall so vividly take the place of it, that we simply

shan't in the least miss, but shall find ourselves admirably do without,

any bringing "on" again of Aurora. The present and conclusive scene in

the Square all sufficiently brings her on, all sufficiently prefigures

Ralph's reunion, not to say union, with her, and in short acquits me of

everything. A far more ingenious stroke, surely, and to be made more

ministrant to effect and to the kind of note of the strange that I want

than the comparatively platitudinous direct _duo_ between the parties!

He has only to give us in advance all that the duo must and will consist

of in order to leave us just where, or at least just _as_, we want!

[Footnote 1: The original version of _The Sense of the Past_, revised by

the author in 1914 (see Preface,) broke off in the middle of the scene

between Ralph Pendrel and the Ambassador (Book III). Having reached this

point in the revision Henry James dictated the following notes before

proceeding further.]