"Come out with me, Miss Tarrant; come out with me. _Do_ come out with
me." That was what Basil Ransom had been saying to Verena when they
stood where Olive perceived them, in the embrasure of the window. It had
of course taken considerable talk to lead up to this; for the tone, even
more than the words, indicated a large increase of intimacy. Verena was
mindful of this when he spoke; and it frightened her a little, made her
uneasy, which was one of the reasons why she got up from her chair and
went to the window--an inconsequent movement, inasmuch as her wish was
to impress upon him that it was impossible she should comply with his
request. It would have served this end much better for her to sit, very
firmly, in her place. He made her nervous and restless; she was
beginning to perceive that he produced a peculiar effect upon her.
Certainly, she had been out with him at home the very first time he
called upon her; but it seemed to her to make an important difference
that she herself should then have proposed the walk--simply because it
was the easiest thing to do when a person came to see you in Monadnoc
Place.
They had gone out that time because she wanted to, not because he did.
And then it was one thing for her to stroll with him round Cambridge,
where she knew every step and had the confidence and freedom which came
from being on her own ground, and the pretext, which was perfectly
natural, of wanting to show him the colleges, and quite another thing to
go wandering with him through the streets of this great strange city,
which, attractive, delightful as it was, had not the suitableness even
of being his home, not his real one. He wanted to show her something, he
wanted to show her everything; but she was not sure now--after an hour's
talk--that she particularly wanted to see anything more that he could
show her. He had shown her a great deal while he sat there, especially
what balderdash he thought it--the whole idea of women's being equal to
men. He seemed to have come only for that, for he was all the while
revolving round it; she couldn't speak of anything but what he brought
it back to the question of some new truth like that. He didn't say so in
so many words; on the contrary, he was tremendously insinuating and
satirical, and pretended to think she had proved all and a great deal
more than she wanted to prove; but his exaggeration, and the way he rung
all the changes on two or three of the points she had made at Mrs.
Burrage's, were just the sign that he was a scoffer of scoffers. He
wouldn't do anything but laugh; he seemed to think that he might laugh
at her all day without her taking offence. Well, he might if it amused
him; but she didn't see why she should ramble round New York with him to
give him his opportunity.
She had told him, and she had told Olive, that she was determined to
produce some effect on him; but now, suddenly, she felt differently
about that--she ceased to care whether she produced any effect or not.
She didn't see why she should take him so seriously, when he wouldn't
take her so; that is, wouldn't take her ideas. She had guessed before
that he didn't want to discuss them; this had been in her mind when she
said to him at Cambridge that his interest in her was personal, not
controversial. Then she had simply meant that, as an inquiring young
Southerner, he had wanted to see what a bright New England girl was
like; but since then it had become a little more clear to her--her short
talk with Ransom at Mrs. Burrage's threw some light upon the
question--what the personal interest of a young Southerner (however
inquiring merely) might amount to. Did he too want to make love to her?
This idea made Verena rather impatient, weary in advance. The thing she
desired least in the world was to be put into the wrong with Olive; for
she had certainly given her ground to believe (not only in their scene
the night before, which was a simple repetition, but all along, from the
very first) that she really had an interest which would transcend any
attraction coming from such a source as that. If yesterday it seemed to
her that she should like to struggle with Mr. Ransom, to refute and
convince him, she had this morning gone into the parlour to receive him
with the idea that, now they were alone together in a quiet, favourable
place, he would perhaps take up the different points of her address one
by one, as several gentlemen had done after hearing her on other
occasions. There was nothing she liked so well as that, and Olive never
had anything to say against it. But he hadn't taken up anything; he had
simply laughed and chaffed, and unrolled a string of queer fancies about
the delightful way women would fix things when, as she said in her
address, they should get out of their box. He kept talking about the
box; he seemed as if he wouldn't let go that simile. He said that he had
come to look at her through the glass sides, and if he wasn't afraid of
hurting her he would smash them in. He was determined to find the key
that would open it, if he had to look for it all over the world; it was
tantalising only to be able to talk to her through the keyhole. If he
didn't want to take up the subject, he at least wanted to take _her_
up--to keep his hand upon her as long as he could. Verena had had no
such sensation since the first day she went in to see Olive Chancellor,
when she felt herself plucked from the earth and borne aloft.
"It's the most lovely day, and I should like so much to show you New
York, as you showed me your beautiful Harvard," Basil Ransom went on,
pressing her to accede to his proposal. "You said that was the only
thing you could do for me then, and so this is the only thing I can do
for you here. It would be odious to see you go away, giving me nothing
but this stiff little talk in a boarding-house parlour."
"Mercy, if you call this stiff!" Verena exclaimed, laughing, while at
that moment Olive passed out of the house and descended the steps before
her eyes.
"My poor cousin's stiff; she won't turn her head a hair's breadth to
look at us," said the young man. Olive's figure, as she went by, was,
for Verena, full of a queer, touching, tragic expression, saying ever so
many things, both familiar and strange; and Basil Ransom's companion
privately remarked how little men knew about women, or indeed about what
was really delicate, that he, without any cruel intention, should attach
an idea of ridicule to such an incarnation of the pathetic, should speak
rough, derisive words about it. Ransom, in truth, to-day, was not
disposed to be very scrupulous, and he only wanted to get rid of Olive
Chancellor, whose image, at last, decidedly bothered and bored him. He
was glad to see her go out; but that was not sufficient, she would come
back quick enough; the place itself contained her, expressed her. For
to-day he wanted to take possession of Verena, to carry her to a
distance, to reproduce a little the happy conditions they had enjoyed
the day of his visit to Cambridge. And the fact that in the nature of
things it could only be for to-day made his desire more keen, more full
of purpose. He had thought over the whole question in the last
forty-eight hours, and it was his belief that he saw things in their
absolute reality. He took a greater interest in her than he had taken in
any one yet, but he proposed, after to-day, not to let that accident
make any difference. This was precisely what gave its high value to the
present limited occasion. He was too shamefully poor, too shabbily and
meagrely equipped, to have the right to talk of marriage to a girl in
Verena's very peculiar position. He understood now how good that
position was, from a worldly point of view; her address at Mrs.
Burrage's gave him something definite to go upon, showed him what she
could do, that people would flock in thousands to an exhibition so
charming (and small blame to them); that she might easily have a big
career, like that of a distinguished actress or singer, and that she
would make money in quantities only slightly smaller than performers of
that kind. Who wouldn't pay half a dollar for such an hour as he had
passed at Mrs. Burrage's? The sort of thing she was able to do, to say,
was an article for which there was more and more demand--fluent, pretty,
third-rate palaver, conscious or unconscious perfected humbug; the
stupid, gregarious, gullible public, the enlightened democracy of his
native land, could swallow unlimited draughts of it. He was sure she
could go, like that, for several years, with her portrait in the
druggists' windows and her posters on the fences, and during that time
would make a fortune sufficient to keep her in affluence for evermore. I
shall perhaps expose our young man to the contempt of superior minds if
I say that all this seemed to him an insuperable impediment to his
making up to Verena. His scruples were doubtless begotten of a false
pride, a sentiment in which there was a thread of moral tinsel, as there
was in the Southern idea of chivalry; but he felt ashamed of his own
poverty, the positive flatness of his situation, when he thought of the
gilded nimbus that surrounded the protégée of Mrs. Burrage. This shame
was possible to him even while he was conscious of what a mean business
it was to practise upon human imbecility, how much better it was even to
be seedy and obscure, discouraged about one's self. He had been born to
the prospect of a fortune, and in spite of the years of misery that
followed the war had never rid himself of the belief that a gentleman
who desired to unite himself to a charming girl couldn't yet ask her to
come and live with him in sordid conditions. On the other hand it was no
possible basis of matrimony that Verena should continue for his
advantage the exercise of her remunerative profession; if he should
become her husband he should know a way to strike her dumb. In the midst
of this an irrepressible desire urged him on to taste, for once, deeply,
all that he was condemned to lose, or at any rate forbidden to attempt
to gain. To spend a day with her and not to see her again--that
presented itself to him at once as the least and the most that was
possible. He did not need even to remind himself that young Mr. Burrage
was able to offer her everything _he_ lacked, including the most amiable
adhesion to her views.
"It will be charming in the Park to-day. Why not take a stroll with me
there as I did with you in the little park at Harvard?" he asked, when
Olive had disappeared.
"Oh, I have seen it, very well, in every corner. A friend of mine kindly
took me to drive there yesterday," Verena said.
"A friend?--do you mean Mr. Burrage?" And Ransom stood looking at her
with his extraordinary eyes. "Of course, I haven't a vehicle to drive
you in; but we can sit on a bench and talk." She didn't say it was Mr.
Burrage, but she was unable to say it was not, and something in her face
showed him that he had guessed. So he went on: "Is it only with him you
can go out? Won't he like it, and may you only do what he likes? Mrs.
Luna told me he wants to marry you, and I saw at his mother's how he
stuck to you. If you are going to marry him, you can drive with him
every day in the year, and that's just a reason for your giving me an
hour or two now, before it becomes impossible." He didn't mind much what
he said--it had been his plan not to mind much to-day--and so long as he
made her do what he wanted he didn't care much how he did it. But he saw
that his words brought the colour to her face; she stared, surprised at
his freedom and familiarity. He went on, dropping the hardness, the
irony of which he was conscious, out of his tone. "I know it's no
business of mine whom you marry, or even whom you drive with, and I beg
your pardon if I seem indiscreet and obtrusive; but I would give
anything just to detach you a little from your ties, your belongings,
and feel for an hour or two, as if--as if----" And he paused.
"As if what?" she asked, very seriously.
"As if there were no such person as Mr. Burrage--as Miss Chancellor--in
the whole place." This had not been what he was going to say; he used
different words.
"I don't know what you mean, why you speak of other persons. I can do as
I like, perfectly. But I don't know why you should take so for granted
that _that_ would be it!" Verena spoke these words not out of coquetry,
or to make him beg her more for a favour, but because she was thinking,
and she wanted to gain a moment. His allusion to Henry Burrage touched
her, his belief that she had been in the Park under circumstances more
agreeable than those he proposed. They were not; somehow, she wanted him
to know that. To wander there with a companion, slowly stopping,
lounging, looking at the animals as she had seen the people do the day
before; to sit down in some out-of-the-way part where there were distant
views, which she had noticed from her high perch beside Henry
Burrage--she had to look down so, it made her feel unduly fine: that was
much more to her taste, much more her idea of true enjoyment. It came
over her that Mr. Ransom had given up his work to come to her at such an
hour; people of his kind, in the morning, were always getting their
living, and it was only for Mr. Burrage that it didn't matter, inasmuch
as he had no profession. Mr. Ransom simply wanted to give up his whole
day. That pressed upon her; she was, as the most good-natured girl in
the world, too entirely tender not to feel any sacrifice that was made
for her; she had always done everything that people asked. Then, if
Olive should make that strange arrangement for her to go to Mrs.
Burrage's he would take it as a proof that there was something serious
between her and the gentleman of the house, in spite of anything she
might say to the contrary; moreover, if she should go she wouldn't be
able to receive Mr. Ransom there. Olive would trust her not to, and she
must certainly, in future, not disappoint Olive nor keep anything back
from her, whatever she might have done in the past. Besides, she didn't
want to do that; she thought it much better not. It was this idea of the
episode which was possibly in store for her in New York, and from which
her present companion would be so completely excluded, that worked upon
her now with a rapid transition, urging her to grant him what he asked,
so that in advance she should have made up for what she might not do for
him later. But most of all she disliked his thinking she was engaged to
some one. She didn't know, it is true, why she should mind it; and
indeed, at this moment, our young lady's feelings were not in any way
clear to her. She did not see what was the use of letting her
acquaintance with Mr. Ransom become much closer (since his interest did
really seem personal); and yet she presently asked him why he wanted her
to go out with him, and whether there was anything particular he wanted
to say to her (there was no one like Verena for making speeches
apparently flirtatious, with the best faith and the most innocent
intention in the world); as if that would not be precisely a reason to
make it well she should get rid of him altogether.
"Of course I have something particular to say to you--I have a
tremendous lot to say to you!" the young man exclaimed. "Far more than I
can say in this stuck-up, confined room, which is public, too, so that
any one may come in from one moment to another. Besides," he added
sophistically, "it isn't proper for me to pay a visit of three hours."
Verena did not take up the sophistry, nor ask him whether it would be
more proper for her to ramble about the city with him for an equal
period; she only said, "Is it something that I shall care to hear, or
that will do me any good?"
"Well, I hope it will do you good; but I don't suppose you will care
much to hear it." Basil Ransom hesitated a moment, smiling at her; then
he went on: "It's to tell you, once for all, how much I really do differ
from you!" He said this at a venture, but it was a happy inspiration.
If it was only that, Verena thought she might go, for that was not
personal. "Well, I'm glad you care so much," she answered musingly. But
she had another scruple still, and she expressed it in saying that she
should like Olive very much to find her when she came in.
"That's all very well," Ransom returned; "but does she think that she
only has a right to go out? Does she expect you to keep the house
because she's abroad? If she stays out long enough, she will find you
when she comes in."
"Her going out that way--it proves that she trusts me," Verena said,
with a candour which alarmed her as soon as she had spoken.
Her alarm was just, for Basil Ransom instantly caught up her words, with
a great mocking amazement. "Trusts you? and why shouldn't she trust you?
Are you a little girl of ten and she your governess? Haven't you any
liberty at all, and is she always watching you and holding you to an
account? Have you such vagabond instincts that you are only thought safe
when you are between four walls?" Ransom was going on to speak, in the
same tone, of her having felt it necessary to keep Olive in ignorance of
his visit to Cambridge--a fact they had touched on, by implication, in
their short talk at Mrs. Burrage's; but in a moment he saw that he had
said enough. As for Verena, she had said more than she meant, and the
simplest way to unsay it was to go and get her bonnet and jacket and let
him take her where he liked. Five minutes later he was walking up and
down the parlour, waiting while she prepared herself to go out.
They went up to the Central Park by the elevated railway, and Verena
reflected, as they proceeded, that anyway Olive was probably disposing
of her somehow at Mrs. Burrage's, and that therefore there wasn't much
harm in her just taking this little run on her own responsibility,
especially as she should only be out an hour--which would be just the
duration of Olive's absence. The beauty of the "elevated" was that it
took you up to the Park and brought you back in a few minutes, and you
had all the rest of the hour to walk about and see the place. It was so
pleasant now that one was glad to see it twice over. The long, narrow
enclosure, across which the houses in the streets that border it look at
each other with their glittering windows, bristled with the raw delicacy
of April, and, in spite of its rockwork grottoes and tunnels, its
pavilions and statues, its too numerous paths and pavements, lakes too
big for the landscape and bridges too big for the lakes, expressed all
the fragrance and freshness of the most charming moment of the year.
Once Verena was fairly launched the spirit of the day took possession of
her; she was glad to have come, she forgot about Olive, enjoyed the
sense of wandering in the great city with a remarkable young man who
would take beautiful care of her, while no one else in the world knew
where she was. It was very different from her drive yesterday with Mr.
Burrage, but it was more free, more intense, more full of amusing
incident and opportunity. She could stop and look at everything now, and
indulge all her curiosities, even the most childish; she could feel as
if she were out for the day, though she was not really--as she had not
done since she was a little girl, when in the country, once or twice,
when her father and mother had drifted into summer quarters, gone out of
town like people of fashion, she had, with a chance companion, strayed
far from home, spent hours in the woods and fields, looking for
raspberries and playing she was a gipsy. Basil Ransom had begun with
proposing, strenuously, that she should come somewhere and have
luncheon; he had brought her out half an hour before that meal was
served in West Tenth Street, and he maintained that he owed her the
compensation of seeing that she was properly fed; he knew a very quiet,
luxurious French restaurant, near the top of the Fifth Avenue: he didn't
tell her that he knew it through having once lunched there in company
with Mrs. Luna. Verena for the present declined his hospitality--said
she was going to be out so short a time that it wasn't worth the
trouble; she should not be hungry, luncheon to her was nothing, she
would eat when she went home. When he pressed her she said she would see
later, perhaps, if she should find she wanted something. She would have
liked immensely to go with him to an eating-house, and yet, with this,
she was afraid, just as she was rather afraid, at bottom, and in the
intervals of her quick pulsations of amusement, of the whole expedition,
not knowing why she had come, though it made her happy, and reflecting
that there was really nothing Mr. Ransom could have to say to her that
would concern her closely enough. He knew what he intended about her
sharing the noon-day repast with him somehow; it had been part of his
plan that she should sit opposite him at a little table, taking her
napkin out of its curious folds--sit there smiling back at him while he
said to her certain things that hummed, like memories of tunes, in his
fancy, and they waited till something extremely good, and a little
vague, chosen out of a French _carte_, was brought them. That was not at
all compatible with her going home at the end of half an hour, as she
seemed to expect to. They visited the animals in the little zoological
garden which forms one of the attractions of the Central Park; they
observed the swans in the ornamental water, and they even considered the
question of taking a boat for half an hour, Ransom saying that they
needed this to make their visit complete. Verena replied that she didn't
see why it should be complete, and after having threaded the devious
ways of the Ramble, lost themselves in the Maze, and admired all the
statues and busts of great men with which the grounds are decorated,
they contented themselves with resting on a sequestered bench, where,
however, there was a pretty glimpse of the distance and an occasional
stroller creaked by on the asphalt walk.
They had had by this time a great deal of talk, none of which,
nevertheless, had been serious to Verena's view. Mr. Ransom continued to
joke about everything, including the emancipation of women; Verena, who
had always lived with people who took the world very earnestly, had
never encountered such a power of disparagement or heard so much sarcasm
levelled at the institutions of her country and the tendencies of the
age. At first she replied to him, contradicted, showed a high spirit of
retort, turning his irreverence against himself; she was too quick and
ingenious not to be able to think of something to oppose--talking in a
fanciful strain--to almost everything he said. But little by little she
grew weary and rather sad; brought up, as she had been, to admire new
ideas, to criticise the social arrangements that one met almost
everywhere, and to disapprove of a great many things, she had yet never
dreamed of such a wholesale arraignment as Mr. Ransom's, so much
bitterness as she saw lurking beneath his exaggerations, his
misrepresentations. She knew he was an intense conservative, but she
didn't know that being a conservative could make a person so aggressive
and unmerciful. She thought conservatives were only smug and stubborn
and self-complacent, satisfied with what actually existed; but Mr.
Ransom didn't seem any more satisfied with what existed than with what
she wanted to exist, and he was ready to say worse things about some of
those whom she would have supposed to be on his own side than she
thought it right to say about almost any one. She ceased after a while
to care to argue with him, and wondered what could have happened to him
to make him so perverse. Probably something had gone wrong in his
life--he had had some misfortune that coloured his whole view of the
world. He was a cynic; she had often heard about that state of mind,
though she had never encountered it, for all the people she had seen
only cared, if possible, too much. Of Basil Ransom's personal history
she knew only what Olive had told her, and that was but a general
outline, which left plenty of room for private dramas, secret
disappointments and sufferings. As she sat there beside him she thought
of some of these things, asked herself whether they were what he was
thinking of when he said, for instance, that he was sick of all the
modern cant about freedom and had no sympathy with those who wanted an
extension of it. What was needed for the good of the world was that
people should make a better use of the liberty they possessed. Such
declarations as this took Verena's breath away; she didn't suppose you
could hear any one say such a thing as that in the nineteenth century,
even the least advanced. It was of a piece with his denouncing the
spread of education; he thought the spread of education a gigantic
farce--people stuffing their heads with a lot of empty catchwords that
prevented them from doing their work quietly and honestly. You had a
right to an education only if you had an intelligence, and if you looked
at the matter with any desire to see things as they are you soon
perceived that an intelligence was a very rare luxury, the attribute of
one person in a hundred. He seemed to take a pretty low view of
humanity, anyway. Verena hoped that something really bad had happened to
him--not by way of gratifying any resentment he aroused in her nature,
but to help herself to forgive him for so much contempt and brutality.
She wanted to forgive him, for after they had sat on their bench half an
hour and his jesting mood had abated a little, so that he talked with
more consideration (as it seemed) and more sincerity, a strange feeling
came over her, a perfect willingness not to keep insisting on her own
side and a desire not to part from him with a mere accentuation of their
differences. Strange I call the nature of her reflexions, for they
softly battled with each other as she listened, in the warm, still air,
touched with the far-away hum of the immense city, to his deep, sweet,
distinct voice, expressing monstrous opinions with exotic cadences and
mild, familiar laughs, which, as he leaned towards her, almost tickled
her cheek and ear. It seemed to her strangely harsh, almost cruel, to
have brought her out only to say to her things which, after all, free as
she was to contradict them and tolerant as she always tried to be, could
only give her pain; yet there was a spell upon her as she listened; it
was in her nature to be easily submissive, to like being overborne. She
could be silent when people insisted, and silent without acrimony. Her
whole relation to Olive was a kind of tacit, tender assent to passionate
insistence, and if this had ended by being easy and agreeable to her
(and indeed had never been anything else), it may be supposed that the
struggle of yielding to a will which she felt to be stronger even than
Olive's was not of long duration. Ransom's will had the effect of making
her linger even while she knew the afternoon was going on, that Olive
would have come back and found her still absent, and would have been
submerged again in the bitter waves of anxiety. She saw her, in fact, as
she must be at that moment, posted at the window of her room in Tenth
Street, watching for some sign of her return, listening for her step on
the staircase, her voice in the hall. Verena looked at this image as at
a painted picture, perceived all it represented, every detail. If it
didn't move her more, make her start to her feet, dart away from Basil
Ransom and hurry back to her friend, this was because the very torment
to which she was conscious of subjecting that friend made her say to
herself that it must be the very last. This was the last time she could
ever sit by Mr. Ransom and hear him express himself in a manner that
interfered so with her life; the ordeal had been so personal and so
complete that she forgot, for the moment, it was also the first time it
had occurred. It might have been going on for months. She was perfectly
aware that it could bring them to nothing, for one must lead one's own
life; it was impossible to lead the life of another, especially when
that other was so different, so arbitrary and unscrupulous.