He had been warned by Mr. Vetch as to what brilliant women might do
with him—it was only a word on the old fiddler’s lips, but the word
had had a point; he had been warned by Paul Muniment, and now he was
admonished by a person supremely well placed for knowing: a fact that
couldn’t fail to deepen the emotion which, any time these three days,
had made him draw his breath more quickly. That emotion, nevertheless,
didn’t actually make him fear remote consequences; as he looked
over the Princess Casamassima’s drawing-room and inhaled an air that
seemed to him inexpressibly delicate and sweet he hoped his adventure
would throw him on his mettle only half as much as the old lady had
wished to intimate. He considered, one after the other, the different
chairs, couches and ottomans the room contained—he wished to treat
himself to the most sumptuous—and then for reasons he knew best sank
into a seat covered with rose-coloured brocade and of which the legs
and frame appeared of pure gold. Here he sat perfectly still, only
with his heart beating very sensibly and his eyes coursing again and
again from one object to another. The splendours and suggestions of
Captain Sholto’s apartment were thrown completely into the shade by
the scene before him, and as the Princess didn’t scruple to keep him
waiting twenty minutes (during which the butler came in and set out
on a small table a glittering tea-service) Hyacinth had time to count
over the innumerable _bibelots_ (most of which he had never dreamed of)
involved in the character of a woman of high fashion and to feel that
their beauty and oddity revealed not only whole provinces of art, but
refinements of choice on the part of their owner, complications of mind
and—almost—terrible depths of temperament.
When at last the door opened and the servant, reappearing, threw it
far back as to make a wide passage for a person of the importance of
his mistress, Hyacinth’s suspense became very acute; it was much the
same feeling with which, at the theatre, he had sometimes awaited
the entrance of a celebrated actress. In this case the actress was to
perform for him alone. There was still a moment before she came on, and
when she arrived she was so simply dressed—besides his seeing her now
on her feet—that she looked quite a different figure. She approached
him rapidly and a little stiffly and shyly, but in the prompt manner
in which she shook hands was an evident desire to be very direct and
perfectly easy. She might have been another person, but that person
had a beauty even more radiant; the fairness of her face shone forth at
our young man as if to dissipate any doubts assailing and bewildering
him as to the reality of the vision bequeathed to him by his former
interview. And in this peculiar high grace of her presence he couldn’t
have told you if she struck him as more proud or more kind.
“I’ve kept you a long time, but it’s supposed not usually to be a
bad place, my salon; there are various things to look at and perhaps
you’ve noticed some of them. Over on that side for instance is rather
a curious collection of miniatures.” She spoke abruptly, quickly, as
if conscious that their communion might be awkward and she were trying
to strike instantly (to conjure that element away) the sort of note
that would make them both most comfortable. Quickly too she sat down
before her tea-tray and poured him out a cup, which she handed him
without asking if he would have it. He accepted it with a trembling
hand, though he had no desire for it; he was too nervous to swallow
the tea, but it wouldn’t have appeared to him possible to decline. When
he had murmured that he had indeed looked at all her things, but that
it would take hours to do justice to such treasures, she asked if he
were fond of works of art; immediately adding, however, that she was
afraid he had not many opportunities of seeing them, though of course
there were the public collections, open to all. He replied with perfect
veracity that some of the happiest moments of his life had been spent
at the British Museum and the National Gallery, and this fact appeared
to interest her greatly, so that she straightway begged him to tell her
what he thought of certain pictures and antiques. In this way it was
that in an incredibly short time, as appeared to him, he found himself
discussing the Bacchus and Ariadne and the Elgin Marbles with one
of the most remarkable women in Europe. It was true that she herself
talked most, passing precipitately from one point to another, putting
questions and not waiting for answers, describing and qualifying
things, expressing feelings, by the aid of phrases that he had never
heard before but which seemed to him illuminating and happy—as when
for instance she asked what art was, after all, but a synthesis made
in the interest of pleasure, or said that she didn’t like England in
the least, but absurdly loved it. It didn’t occur to him to think these
discriminations pedantic. Suddenly she threw off, “Madame Grandoni told
me you saw my husband.”
“Ah, was the gentleman your husband?”
“Unfortunately! What do you think of him?”
“Oh, I can’t think—!” Hyacinth decently pleaded.
“I wish I couldn’t either! I haven’t seen him for nearly three years.
He wanted to see me to-day, but I refused.”
“Ah!”—and the young man stared, not knowing how he ought to receive so
unexpected a confidence. Then as the suggestions of inexperience are
sometimes the happiest of all he spoke simply what was in his mind and
said gently: “It has made you—naturally—nervous.” Later on, when he had
left the house, he wondered how at that stage he could have ventured on
such a familiar remark.
But she had taken it with a quick, surprised laugh. “How do you know
that?” Before he had time to tell she added: “Your saying that—that
way—shows me how right I was to ask you to come to see me. You know I
hesitated. It shows me you’ve perceptions; I guessed as much the other
night at the theatre. If I hadn’t I wouldn’t have asked you. I may be
wrong, but I like people who understand what one says to them, and also
what one doesn’t say.”
“Don’t think I understand too much. You might easily exaggerate that,”
Hyacinth declared conscientiously.
“You confirm completely my first impression,” the Princess returned,
smiling in a way that showed him he really amused her. “We shall
discover the limits of your comprehension! I am atrociously nervous.
But it will pass. How’s your cousin the dressmaker?” she inquired
abruptly. And when Hyacinth had briefly given some account of poor
Pinnie—described her as tolerably well for her, but old and tired
and sad and not very successful—she exclaimed impatiently, “Ah, well,
she’s not the only one!” and came back with irrelevance to the former
question. “It’s not only my husband’s visit—absolutely unexpected!—that
has made me fidgety, but the idea that now you’ve been so kind as to
come here you may wonder why, after all, I made such a point of it,
and even think any explanation I might be able to give you entirely
insufficient.”
“I don’t want any explanation,” said Hyacinth with a sense of great
presence of mind.
“It’s charming of you to say that, and I shall take you at your word.
Explanations usually make things worse. All the same I don’t want you
to think (as you might have done so easily the other evening) that I
wish only to treat you as a curious animal.”
“I don’t care how you treat me!” he smiled.
There was a considerable silence, after which she pursued: “All I ask
of my husband is to let me alone. But he won’t. He won’t return my
indifference.”
Hyacinth wondered what reply he ought to make to such an announcement
as that, and it seemed to him the least civility demanded was that he
should say—as he could with such conviction—“It can’t be easy to be
indifferent to you.”
“Why not if I’m odious? I _can_ be—oh there’s no doubt of that!
However, I can honestly say that with the Prince I’ve been exceedingly
reasonable and that most of the wrongs—the big ones, those that
settled the question—have been on his side. You may tell me of course
that that’s the pretension of every woman who has made a mess of her
marriage. But ask Madame Grandoni.”
“She’ll tell me it’s none of my business.”
“Very true—she might!” the Princess inconsequently laughed. “And I
don’t know either why I should bore you with my domestic affairs;
except that I’ve been wondering what I could do to show you confidence
in return for your showing so much in me. As this matter of my
separation from my husband happens to have been turned uppermost by his
sudden descent on me I just mention it, though the subject’s tiresome
enough. Moreover, I ought to let you know that I’ve very little respect
for distinctions of class—the sort of thing they make so much of in
this country. They’re doubtless convenient in some ways, but when one
has a reason—a reason of feeling—for overstepping them, and one allows
one’s self to be deterred by some dreary superstition about one’s place
or some one else’s place, then I think it’s ignoble. It always belongs
to one’s place not to be a poor creature. I take it that if you’re
a socialist you think about this as I do; but lest by chance, as the
sense of those differences is the English religion, it may have rubbed
off even on you (though I’m more and more impressed with the fact that
you’re scarcely more British than I am): lest you should in spite of
your theoretic democracy be shocked at some of the applications that
I, who cherish the creed, am capable of making of it, let me assure
you without delay that in that case we shouldn’t get on together at
all and had better part company before we go further.” She paused long
enough for Hyacinth to declare with a great deal of emphasis that he
wasn’t easily shocked; and then restlessly, eagerly, as if it relieved
her to talk and made their queer conjunction less abnormal that she
should talk most, she arrived at the point that she wanted to know
the _people_, and know them intimately—the toilers and strugglers and
sufferers—because she was convinced they were the most interesting
portion of society, and at the question, “What could really be in worse
taste than for me to carry into such an undertaking a pretension of
greater delicacy and finer manners? If I must do that,” she continued,
“it’s simpler to leave them alone. But I can’t leave them alone; they
press on me, they haunt me, they fascinate me. There it is—after all
it’s very simple: I want to know them and I want you to help me.”
“I’ll help you with pleasure to the best of my humble ability. But
you’ll be awfully disappointed,” Hyacinth said. Very strange it seemed
to him that within so few days two ladies of rank should have found
occasion to express to him the same mysterious longing. A breeze
from a thoroughly unexpected quarter was indeed blowing through the
aristocracy. Nevertheless, though there was much of the same accent
of passion in the Princess Casamassima’s communication that there
had been in Lady Aurora’s, and though he felt bound to discourage his
present interlocutress as he had done the other, the force that drove
her struck him as a very different mixture from the shy, conscientious,
anxious heresies of Rose Muniment’s friend. The temper varied in the
two women as much as the aspect and the address, and that perhaps made
their curiosity the more significant.
“I haven’t the least doubt of it,” this investigator answered; “there’s
nothing in life in which I’ve not been awfully disappointed. But
disappointment for disappointment I shall like it better than some
others. You’ll not persuade me either that among the people I speak
of characters and passions and motives are not more natural, more
complete, more _naïfs_. The upper classes are so deadly _banals_.
My husband traces his descent from the fifth century, and he’s the
greatest bore in Europe. That’s the kind of people I was condemned to
by my marriage. Oh, if you knew what I’ve been through you’d allow
that intelligent mechanics (of course I don’t want to know idiots)
would be a pleasant change. I must begin with some one—mustn’t I?—so I
began the other night with you!” As soon as she had uttered these words
the Princess added a correction with the consciousness of her mistake
in her face. It made that face, to Hyacinth, more nobly, tenderly
beautiful. “The only objection to you individually is that you’ve
nothing of the people about you—to-day not even the dress.” Her eyes
wandered over him from head to foot, and their recognitions made him
ashamed. “I wish you had come in the clothes you wear at your work.”
“You see you do regard me as a curious animal,” he returned.
It was perhaps to contradict this that, after a moment, she began
to tell him more about her domestic affairs. He ought to know who
she was, unless Captain Sholto had told him; and she mentioned her
parentage—American on the mother’s side, Italian on the father’s—and
how she had led from her youngest years a wandering Bohemian life in
a thousand different places (always in Europe, she had never been in
America and knew very little about it, though she wanted greatly to
cross the Atlantic) and largely at one period in Rome. She had been
married by her people, in a mercenary way, for the sake of a fortune
and a great name, and it had turned out as badly as her worst enemy
could have wished. Her parents were dead, luckily for them, and she had
no one near her of her own except Madame Grandoni, who belonged to her
only in the sense that she had known her as a girl; was an association
of her—what should she call them?—her uneasy but innocent years. Not
that she had ever been very innocent; she had had a horrible education.
However, she had known a few good people—people she respected then;
but Madame Grandoni was the only one who had stuck to her. She too was
liable to leave her any day; the Princess appeared to intimate that her
destiny might require her to take some step which would test severely
the old woman’s attachment. It would detain her too long to make him
understand the stages by which she had arrived at her present state of
mind: her disgust with a thousand social arrangements, her rebellion
against the selfishness, the corruption, the iniquity, the cruelty,
the imbecility of the people who all over Europe had the upper hand.
If he could have seen her life, the _milieu_ in which she had for
several years been condemned to move, the evolution of her opinions
(Hyacinth was delighted to hear her use that term) would strike him
as perfectly logical. She had been humiliated, outraged, tortured; she
considered that she too was one of the numerous class who could be put
on a tolerable footing only by a revolution. At any rate she had some
self-respect left, and there was still more that she wanted to recover;
the only way to arrive at which was to throw herself into some effort
that would make her forget her own affairs and comprehend the troubles
and efforts of others. Hyacinth listened to her with a wonderment
which, as she went on, was transformed into willing submission; she
seemed so natural, so vivid, so exquisitely generous and sincere. By
the time he had been with her half an hour she had made the situation
itself easy and usual, and a third person who should have joined them
at this moment would have noticed nothing to suggest that friendly
social intercourse between little bookbinders and Neapolitan princesses
was not in London a matter of daily occurrence.
Hyacinth had seen plenty of women who chattered about themselves and
their affairs—a vulgar garrulity of confidence was indeed a leading
characteristic of the sex as he had hitherto learned to know it—but
he was quick to perceive that the great lady who now took the trouble
to open herself to him was not of a gossiping habit; that she must be
on the contrary, as a general thing, proudly, ironically reserved,
even to the point of passing with many people for a model of the
unsatisfactory. It was very possible she was capricious; yet the fact
that her present sympathies and curiosities might be a caprice wore
in her visitor’s eyes no sinister aspect. Why was it not a noble and
interesting whim, and why mightn’t he stand for the hour at any rate
in the silvery moonshine it cast on his path? It must be added that he
was far from taking in everything she said, some of her allusions and
implications being so difficult to seize that they mainly served to
reveal to him the limits of his own acquaintance with life. Her words
evoked all sorts of shadowy suggestions of things he was condemned not
to know, touching him most when he had not the key to them. This was
especially the case with her reference to her career in Italy, on her
husband’s estates, and her relations with his family, who considered
that they had done her a great honour in receiving her into their
august circle (putting the best face on a bad business) after they
had moved heaven and earth to keep her out of it. The position made
for her among such people and what she had had to suffer from their
family tone, their opinions and customs (though what these might be
remained vague to her listener) had evidently planted in her soul
a lasting resentment and contempt; and Hyacinth gathered that the
force of reaction and revenge might carry her far, make her modern
and democratic and heretical _à outrance_—lead her to swear by Darwin
and Spencer and all the scientific iconoclasts as well as by the
revolutionary spirit. He surely needn’t have been so sensible of the
weak spots in his comprehension of the Princess when he could already
surmise that personal passion had counted for so much in the formation
of her views. This induction, however, which had no harshness, didn’t
make her affect him any the less as a creature compounded of the
finest elements; brilliant, delicate, complicated, but complicated with
something divine.
It was not till after he had left her that he became conscious she
had forced him to talk in spite of talking so much herself. He drew
a long breath as he reflected that he hadn’t made quite such an ass
of himself as might very well have happened; he had been saved by
the thrill of his interest and admiration, which had not gone to his
head and prompted him to show that he too in his improbable little
way was remarkable, but had kept him in a state of anxious, conscious
tension, as if the occasion had been a great appointed solemnity,
some initiation more formal than any he believed practised even in the
grimmest subterranean circles. He had said indeed much more than he had
warrant for when she questioned him on his “radical” affiliations; he
had spoken as if the movement were vast and mature, whereas in fact, so
far at least as he was as yet concerned with it and could answer for it
from personal knowledge, it was circumscribed by the hideously-papered
walls of the little club-room at the “Sun and Moon.” He reproached
himself with this laxity, but it had not been engendered by pride. He
was only afraid of disappointing his hostess too much, of making her
say, “Why in the world then did you come to see me if you’ve nothing
more remarkable to put before me?”—a question to which of course he
would have had an answer ready but for its being so impossible to say
he had never asked to come and that his coming was her own affair. He
wanted too much to come a second time to have the courage to make that
speech. Nevertheless when she exclaimed, changing the subject abruptly,
as she always did, from something else they had been talking about,
“I wonder if I shall ever see you again!” he replied with perfect
sincerity that it was scarce possible for him to believe anything so
delightful could be repeated. There were some kinds of happiness that
to many people never came at all, and to others could come only once.
He added: “It’s very true I had just that feeling after I left you the
other night at the theatre. And yet here I am!”
“Yes, there you are,” said the Princess thoughtfully—as if this might
be a still graver and more embarrassing fact than she had yet supposed
it. “I take it there’s nothing essentially inconceivable in my seeing
you again; but it may very well be that you’ll never again find it
so pleasant. Perhaps that’s the happiness that comes but once. At any
rate, you know, I’m going away.”
“Oh yes, of course; every one leaves town—!” Hyacinth rose to that
occasion.
“Do _you_, Mr. Robinson?” the Princess asked.
“Well, I don’t as a general thing. Nevertheless it’s possible that this
year I may get three or four days at the seaside. I should like to take
my old lady. I’ve done it before.”
“And except for that shall you be always at work?”
“Yes; but you must understand that I love my work. You must understand
that it’s a great blessing for a young fellow like me to have it.”
“And if you didn’t have it what would you do? Should you starve?”
“Oh, I don’t think I should starve,” our friend replied judicially.
She looked a little chagrined, but after a moment pursued: “I wonder
whether you’d come to see me in the country somewhere.”
“Oh cracky!” Hyacinth exclaimed, catching his breath. “You’re so kind
I don’t know what to do.”
“Don’t be _banal_, please. That’s what other people are. What’s the
use of my looking for something fresh in other walks of life if you’re
going to be _banal_ too? I ask if you’d come.”
He couldn’t have said at this moment whether he were plunging or
soaring. “Yes, I think I’d come. I don’t know at all how I should do
it—there would be several obstacles; but wherever you should call for
me I’d come.”
“You mean you can’t leave your work like that? You might lose it if you
did, and then be in want of money and much embarrassed?”
“Yes, there would be little difficulties of that kind. You see that
immediately, in practice, great obstacles and complications come up
when it’s a question of a person like you making friends with a person
like me.”
“That’s the way I like you to talk,” said the Princess with a pitying
gentleness that struck her visitor as quite sacred. “After all I don’t
know where I shall be. I’ve got to pay stupid visits myself, visits
where the only comfort will be that I shall make the people jump.
Every one here thinks me exceedingly odd—as there’s no doubt I am!
I might be ever so much more so if you’d only help me a little. Why
shouldn’t I have my bookbinder after all? In attendance, you know—it
would be awfully _chic_. We might have immense fun, don’t you think so?
No doubt it will come. At any rate I shall return to London when I’ve
got through that _corvée_; I shall be here next year. In the meantime
don’t forget me,” she went on as she rose to her feet. “Remember on
the contrary that I expect you to take me into the slums—into very bad
places.” Why the idea of these scenes of misery should have lighted
up her face is more than may be explained; but she smiled down at
Hyacinth—who even as he stood up was of slightly smaller stature—with
all her strange high radiance. Then in a manner almost equally
quaint she added a reference to what she had said a moment before. “I
recognise perfectly the obstacles in practice as you call them; but
though I’m not by nature persevering, and am really very easily put
off, I don’t consider they’ll prove insurmountable. They exist on my
side as well, and if you’ll help me to overcome mine I’ll do the same
for you with yours.”
These words, repeating themselves again and again in his consciousness,
appeared to give him wings, to help him to float and soar as he turned
that afternoon out of South Street. He had at home a copy of Tennyson’s
poems—a single comprehensive volume, with a double column on the page,
in a tolerably neat condition despite much handling. He took it to
pieces that same evening, and during the following week, in his hours
of leisure, at home in his little room, with the tools he kept there
for private use and a morsel of delicate, blue-tinted Russia leather
of which he obtained possession at old Crook’s, he devoted himself to
the task of binding the book as perfectly as he knew how. He worked
with passion, with religion, and produced a masterpiece of firmness
and finish, of which his own appreciation was as high as that of M.
Poupin when at the end of the week he exhibited to him the fruit of his
toil, and much more freely expressed than that of old Crook himself,
who grunted approbation but was always too long-headed to create
precedents. Hyacinth carried the volume to South Street as an offering
to the Princess, hoping she would not yet have left London; in which
case he would ask the servant to deliver it to her along with a little
note he had sat up all night to compose. But the majestic major-domo
in charge of the house, opening the door yet looking down at him as
if from a second-story window, took the life out of his vision and
erected instead of it, by a touch, a high blank wall. The Princess had
been absent for some days; her representative was so good as to inform
the young man with the parcel that she was on a visit to a “Juke” in a
distant part of the country. He offered, however, to receive and even
to forward anything Hyacinth might wish to leave; but our hero felt
a sudden indisposition to launch his humble tribute into the vast,
the possibly cold unknown of a “jucal” circle. He decided to retain
his little package for the present; he would offer it to her when he
should see her again, and he retreated without giving it up. Later on
it seemed to create a manner of material link between the Princess and
himself, and at the end of three months it had almost come to appear
not that the exquisite book was an intended present from his own hand,
but that it had been placed in that hand by the most remarkable woman
in Europe. Rare sensations and impressions, moments of acute happiness,
almost always, with our young man, in retrospect, became rather mythic
and legendary; and the superior piece of work he had done after seeing
her last, in the immediate heat of his emotion, turned to a virtual
proof and gage—as if a ghost in vanishing from sight had left a
palpable relic.