Well, it was all confounding enough, but this indication in particular
would have jostled our friend’s grasp of the presented cup had he
had, during the next ten minutes, more independence of thought. That,
however, was out of the question when one positively felt, as with a
pang somewhere deep within, or even with a smothered cry for alarm,
one’s whole sense of proportion shattered at a blow and ceasing to
serve. “Not _straight_, and not too fast, shall we?” was the ineffable
young woman’s appeal to him, a few minutes later, beneath the wide glass
porch-cover that sheltered their brief wait for their chariot of fire.
It was there even as she spoke; the capped charioteer, with a great
clean curve, drew up at the steps of the porch, and the Princess’s
footman, before rejoining him in front, held open the door of the car.
She got in, and Berridge was the next instant beside her; he could only
say: “As you like, Princess--where you will; certainly let us prolong
it; let us prolong everything; don’t let us have it over--strange and
beautiful as it can only be!--a moment sooner than we must.” So
he spoke, in the security of their intimate English, while the
perpendicular imperturbable _valet-de-pied_, white-faced in the electric
light, closed them in and then took his place on the box where the rigid
liveried backs of the two men, presented through the glass, were like a
protecting wall; such a guarantee of privacy as might come--it occurred
to Berridge’s inexpugnable fancy--from a vision of tall guards erect
round Eastern seraglios.
His companion had said something, by the time they started, about their
taking a turn, their looking out for a few of the night-views of Paris
that were so wonderful; and after that, in spite of his constantly
prized sense of knowing his enchanted city and his way about, he ceased
to follow or measure their course, content as he was with the particular
exquisite assurance it gave him. _That_ was knowing Paris, of a wondrous
bland April night; that was hanging over it from vague consecrated
lamp-studded heights and taking in, spread below and afar, the great
scroll of all its irresistible story, pricked out, across river and
bridge and radiant _place_, and along quays and boulevards and avenues,
and around monumental circles and squares, in syllables of fire, and
sketched and summarised, further and further, in the dim fire-dust of
endless avenues; that was all of the essence of fond and thrilled and
throbbing recognition, with a thousand things understood and a flood of
response conveyed, a whole familiar possessive feeling appealed to and
attested.
“From you, you know, it _would_ be such a pleasure, and I think--in fact
I’m sure--it would do so much for the thing in America.” Had she gone
on as they went, or had there been pauses of easy and of charmed and
of natural silence, breaks and drops from talk, but only into greater
confidence and sweetness?--such as her very gesture now seemed a part
of; her laying her gloved hand, for emphasis, on the back of his own,
which rested on his knee and which took in from the act he scarce knew
what melting assurance. The emphasis, it was true--this came to him even
while for a minute he held his breath--seemed rather that of Amy Evans;
and if her talk, while they rolled, had been in the sense of these words
(he had really but felt that they were shut intimately in together, all
his consciousness, all his discrimination of meanings and indications
being so deeply and so exquisitely merged in that) the case wasn’t as
surely and sublimely, as extravagantly, as fabulously romantic for him
as his excited pulses had been seeming to certify. Her hand was there on
his own, in precious living proof, and splendid Paris hung over them,
as a consecrating canopy, her purple night embroidered with gold; yet he
waited, something stranger still having glimmered for him, waited though
she left her hand, which expressed emphasis and homage and tenderness,
and anything else she liked indeed--since it was all then a matter of
what he next heard and what he slowly grew cold as he took from her.
“You know they do it here so charmingly--it’s a compliment a clever man
is always so glad to pay a literary friend, and sometimes, in the case
of a great name like yours, it renders such a service to a poor little
book like mine!” She spoke ever so humbly and yet ever so gaily--and
still more than before with this confidence of the sincere admirer and
the comrade. That, yes, through his sudden sharpening chill, was
what first became distinct for him; she was mentioning somehow her
explanation and her conditions--her motive, in fine, disconcerting,
deplorable, dreadful, in respect to the experience, otherwise so
boundless, that he had taken her as having opened to him; and she
was doing it, above all, with the clearest coolness of her general
privilege. What in particular she was talking about he as yet, still
holding his breath, wondered; it was something she wanted him to do for
her--which was exactly what he had hoped, but something of what trivial
and, heaven forgive them both, of what dismal order? Most of all,
meanwhile, he felt the dire penetration of two or three of the words
she had used; so that after a painful minute the quaver with which he
repeated them resembled his-drawing, slowly, carefully, timidly, some
barbed dart out of his flesh.
“A ‘literary friend’?” he echoed as he turned his face more to her; so
that, as they sat, the whites of her eyes, near to his own, gleamed in
the dusk like some silver setting of deep sapphires.
It made her smile--which in their relation now was like the breaking
of a cool air-wave over the conscious sore flush that maintained itself
through his general chill. “Ah, of course you don’t allow that I
_am_ literary--and of course if you’re awfully cruel and critical and
incorruptible you won’t let it say for me what I so want it should!”
“Where are we, where, in the name of all that’s damnably, of all that’s
grotesquely delusive, are we?” he said, without a sign, to himself;
which was the form of his really being quite at sea as to what she was
talking about. That uncertainty indeed he could but frankly betray by
taking her up, as he cast about him, on the particular ambiguity that
his voice perhaps already showed him to find most irritating. “Let it
show? ‘It,’ dear Princess----?”
“Why, my dear man, let your Preface show, the lovely, friendly,
irresistible log-rolling Preface that I’ve been asking you if you
wouldn’t be an angel and write for me.”
He took it in with a deep long gulp--he had never, it seemed to him,
had to swallow anything so bitter. “You’ve been asking me if I wouldn’t
write you a Preface?”
“To ‘The Velvet Glove’--after I’ve sent it to you and you’ve judged
if you really can. Of course I don’t want you to perjure yourself;
but”--and she fairly brushed him again, at their close quarters, with
her fresh fragrant smile--“I do want you so to like me, and to say it
all out beautifully and publicly.” “You want me to like you, Princess?”
“But, heaven help us, haven’t you understood?” Nothing stranger could
conceivably have been, it struck him--if he was right now--than this
exquisite intimacy of her manner of setting him down on the other side
of an abyss. It was as if she had lifted him first in her beautiful
arms, had raised him up high, high, high, to do it, pressing him to
her immortal young breast while he let himself go, and then, by some
extraordinary effect of her native force and her alien quality, setting
him down exactly where she wanted him to be--which was a thousand miles
away from her. Once more, so preposterously face to face with her for
these base issues, he took it all in; after which he felt his eyes
close, for amazement, despair and shame, and his head, which he had some
time before, baring his brow to the mild night, eased of its crush-hat,
sink to confounded rest on the upholstered back of the seat. The act,
the ceasing to see, and if possible to hear, was for the moment a
retreat, an escape from a state that he felt himself fairly flatter
by thinking of it as “awkward”; the state of really wishing that his
humiliation might end, and of wondering in fact if the most decent
course open to him mightn’t be to ask her to stop the motor and let him
down.
He spoke no word for a long minute, or for considerably more than that;
during which time the motor went and went, now even somewhat faster,
and he knew, through his closed eyes, that the outer lights had begun to
multiply and that they were getting back somewhere into the spacious and
decorative quarters. He knew this, and also that his retreat, for all
his attitude as of accommodating thought, his air--_that_ presently
and quickly came to him--of having perhaps gathered himself in, for
an instant, at her behest, to turn over, in his high ingenuity, some
humbugging “rotten” phrase or formula that he might place at her service
and make the note of such an effort; he became aware, I say, that
his lapse was but a half-retreat, with her strenuous presence and
her earnest pressure and the close cool respiration of her good faith
absolutely timing the moments of his stillness and the progress of the
car. Yes, it was wondrous well, he had all but made the biggest of
all fools of himself, almost as big a one as _she_ was still, to every
appearance, in her perfect serenity, trying to make of him; and the one
straight answer to it _would_ be that he should reach forward and touch
the footman’s shoulder and demand that the vehicle itself should make an
end.
That would be an answer, however, he continued intensely to see, only to
inanely importunate, to utterly superfluous Amy Evans--not a bit to his
at last exquisitely patient companion, who was clearly now quite taking
it from him that what kept him in his attitude was the spring of the
quick desire to oblige her, the charming loyal impulse to consider a
little what he could do for her, say “handsomely yet conscientiously”
(oh the loveliness!) before he should commit himself. She was
enchanted--_that_ seemed to breathe upon him; she waited, she hung
there, she quite bent over him, as Diana over the sleeping Endymion,
while all the conscientious man of letters in him, as she might so
supremely have phrased it, struggled with the more peccable, the more
muddled and “squared,” though, for her own ideal, the so much more
_banal_ comrade. Yes, he could keep it up now--that is he could hold out
for his real reply, could meet the rather marked tension of the rest of
their passage as well as she; he should be able somehow or other to
make his wordless detachment, the tribute of his ostensibly deep
consideration of her request, a retreat in good order. She _was_, for
herself, to the last point of her guileless fatuity, Amy Evans and an
asker for “lifts,” a conceiver of twaddle both in herself and in him;
or at least, so far as she fell short of all this platitude, it was
no fault of the really affecting folly of her attempt to become a
mere magazine mortal after the only fashion she had made out, to the
intensification of her self-complacency, that she might.
Nothing might thus have touched him more--if to be touched, beyond a
certain point, hadn’t been to be squared--than the way she failed to
divine the bearing of his thoughts; so that she had probably at no one
small crisis of her life felt so much a promise in the flutter of her
own as on the occasion of the beautiful act she indulged in at the very
moment, he was afterward to recognise, of their sweeping into her
great smooth, empty, costly street--a desert, at that hour, of lavish
lamplight and sculptured stone. She raised to her lips the hand she
had never yet released and kept it there a moment pressed close against
them; he himself closing his eyes to the deepest detachment he was
capable of while he took in with a smothered sound of pain that this
was the conferred bounty by which Amy Evans sought most expressively to
encourage, to sustain and to reward. The motor had slackened and in a
moment would stop; and meanwhile even after lowering his hand again
she hadn’t let it go. This enabled it, while he after a further moment
roused himself to a more confessed consciousness, to form with his
friend’s a more active relation, to possess him of hers, in turn, and
with an intention the straighter that her glove had by this time somehow
come off. Bending over it without hinderance, he returned as firmly
and fully as the application of all his recovered wholeness of feeling,
under his moustache, might express, the consecration the bareness of
his own knuckles had received; only after which it was that, still thus
drawing out his grasp of her, and having let down their front glass by
his free hand, he signified to the footman his view of their stopping
short.
They had arrived; the high, closed _porte-cochere_, in its crested
stretch of wall, awaited their approach; but his gesture took effect,
the car pulled up at the edge of the pavement, the man, in an instant,
was at the door and had opened it; quickly moving across the walk, the
next moment, to press the bell at the gate. Berridge, as his hand now
broke away, felt he had cut his cable; with which, after he had stepped
out, he raised again the glass he had lowered and closed, its own being
already down, the door that had released him. During these motions he
had the sense of his companion, still radiant and splendid, but somehow
momentarily suppressed, suspended, silvered over and celestially
blurred, even as a summer moon by the loose veil of a cloud. So it was
he saw her while he leaned for farewell on the open window-ledge; he
took her in as her visible intensity of bright vagueness filled the
circle that the interior of the car made for her. It was such a state as
she would have been reduced to--he felt this, was certain of it--for the
first time in her life; and it was he, poor John Berridge, after all,
who would have created the condition.
“Good-night, Princess. I sha’n’t see you again.”
Vague was indeed no word for it--shine though she might, in her screened
narrow niche, as with the liquefaction of her pearls, the glimmer of her
tears, the freshness of her surprise. “You won’t come in--when you’ve
had no supper?”
He smiled at her with a purpose of kindness that could never in his life
have been greater; and at first but smiled without a word. He presently
shook his head, however--doubtless also with as great a sadness. “I seem
to have supped to my fill, Princess. Thank you, I won’t come in.”
It drew from her, while she looked at him, a long low anxious wail. “And
you won’t do my Preface?”
“No, Princess, I won’t do your Preface. Nothing would induce me to say
a word in print about you. I’m in fact not sure I shall ever mention you
in any manner at all as long as ever I live.”
He had felt for an instant as if he were speaking to some miraculously
humanised idol, all sacred, all jewelled, all votively hung about, but
made mysterious, in the recess of its shrine, by the very thickness
of the accumulated lustre. And “Then you don’t like me--?” was the
marvellous sound from the image.
“Princess,” was in response the sound of the worshipper, “Princess, I
adore you. But I’m ashamed for you.”
“Ashamed----?”
“You _are_ Romance--as everything, and by what I make out every one,
about you is; so what more do you want? Your Preface--the only one worth
speaking of--was written long ages ago by the most beautiful imagination
of man.”
Humanised at least for these moments, she could understand enough to
declare that she didn’t. “I don’t, I don’t!”
“You don’t need to understand. Don’t attempt such base things. Leave
those to us. Only live. Only be. _We’ll_ do the rest.”
She moved over--she had come close to the window. “Ah, but Mr.
Berridge----!”
He raised both hands; he shook them at her gently, in deep and soft
deprecation. “Don’t sound my dreadful name. Fortunately, however, you
can’t help yourself.”
“Ah, _voyons!_ I so want-----!”
He repeated his gesture, and when he brought down his hands they closed
together on both of hers, which now quite convulsively grasped the
window-ledge. “Don’t speak, because when you speak you really say
things--!” “You _are_ Romance,” he pronounced afresh and with the last
intensity of conviction and persuasion. “That’s all you have to do with
it,” he continued while his hands, for emphasis, pressed hard on her
own.
Their faces, in this way, were nearer together than ever, but with the
effect of only adding to the vividness of that dire non-intelligence
from which, all perversely and incalculably, her very beauty now
appeared to gain relief. This made for him a pang and almost an anguish;
the fear of her saying something yet again that would wretchedly prove
how little he moved her perception. So his eyes, of remonstrant, of
suppliant intention, met hers close, at the same time that these, so far
from shrinking, but with their quite other swimming plea all bedimmed
now, seemed almost to wash him with the tears of her failure. He
soothed, he stroked, he reassured her hands, for tender conveyance of
his meaning, quite as she had just before dealt with his own for brave
demonstration of hers. It was during these instants as if the question
had been which of them _could_ most candidly and fraternally plead.
Full but of that she kept it up. “Ah, if you’d only think, if you’d only
try----!”
He couldn’t stand it--she was capable of believing he had edged away,
excusing himself and trumping up a factitious theory, because he hadn’t
the wit, hadn’t the hand, to knock off the few pleasant pages she asked
him for and that any proper Frenchman, master of the _metier_, would
so easily and gallantly have promised. Should she so begin to commit
herself he’d, by the immortal gods, anticipate it in the manner most
admirably effective--in fact he’d even thus make her further derogation
impossible. Their faces were so close that he could practise any rich
freedom--even though for an instant, while the back of the chauffeur
guarded them on that side and his own presented breadth, amplified
by his loose mantle, filled the whole window-space, leaving him no
observation from any quarter to heed, he uttered, in a deep-drawn final
groan, an irrepressible echo of his pang for what might have been,
the muffled cry of his insistence. “You _are_ Romance!”--he drove it
intimately, inordinately home, his lips, for a long moment, sealing
it, with the fullest force of authority, on her own; after which, as
he broke away and the car, starting again, turned powerfully across
the pavement, he had no further sound from her than if, all divinely
indulgent but all humanly defeated, she had given the question up,
falling back to infinite wonder. He too fell back, but could still wave
his hat for her as she passed to disappearance in the great floridly
framed aperture whose wings at once came together behind her.