I
THREE times within a quarter of an hour--shifting the while his posture
on his chair of contemplation--had he looked at his watch as for its
final sharp hint that he should decide, that he should get up. His
seat was one of a group fairly sequestered, unoccupied save for his own
presence, and from where he lingered he looked off at a stretch of lawn
freshened by recent April showers and on which sundry small children
were at play. The trees, the shrubs, the plants, every stem and twig
just ruffled as by the first touch of the light finger of the relenting
year, struck him as standing still in the blest hope of more of the same
caress; the quarter about him held its breath after the fashion of the
child who waits with the rigour of an open mouth and shut eyes for the
promised sensible effect of his having been good. So, in the windless,
sun-warmed air of the beautiful afternoon, the Park of the winter’s
end had struck White-Mason as waiting; even New York, under such an
impression, was “good,” good enough--for _him_; its very sounds were
faint, were almost sweet, as they reached him from so seemingly far
beyond the wooded horizon that formed the remoter limit of his large
shallow glade. The tones of the frolic infants ceased to be nondescript
and harsh--were in fact almost as fresh and decent as the frilled and
puckered and ribboned garb of the little girls, which had always a
way, in those parts, of so portentously flaunting the daughters of the
strange native--that is of the overwhelmingly alien--populace at him.
Not that these things in particular were his matter of meditation
now; he had wanted, at the end of his walk, to sit apart a little and
think--and had been doing that for twenty minutes, even though as yet
to no break in the charm of procrastination. But he had looked without
seeing and listened without hearing: all that had been positive for
him was that he hadn’t failed vaguely to feel. He had felt in the first
place, and he continued to feel--yes, at forty-eight quite as much as at
any point of the supposed reign of younger intensities--the great spirit
of the air, the fine sense of the season, the supreme appeal of
Nature, he might have said, to his time of life; quite as if she, easy,
indulgent, indifferent, cynical Power, were offering him the last chance
it would rest with his wit or his blood to embrace. Then with that he
had been entertaining, to the point and with the prolonged consequence
of accepted immobilization, the certitude that if he did call on Mrs.
Worthingham and find her at home he couldn’t in justice to himself not
put to her the question that had lapsed the other time, the last time,
through the irritating and persistent, even if accidental, presence of
others. What friends she had--the people who so stupidly, so wantonly
stuck! If they _should_, he and she, come to an understanding, that
would presumably have to include certain members of her singularly
ill-composed circle, in whom it was incredible to him that he should
ever take an interest. This defeat, to do himself justice--he had bent
rather predominantly on _that_, you see; ideal justice to _her_, with
her possible conception of what it should consist of, being another and
quite a different matter--he had had the fact of the Sunday afternoon to
thank for; she didn’t “keep” that day for him, since they hadn’t, up to
now, quite begun to cultivate the appointment or assignation founded
on explicit sacrifices. He might at any rate look to find this pleasant
practical Wednesday--should he indeed, at his actual rate, stay it
before it ebbed--more liberally and intendingly given him.
The sound he at last most wittingly distinguished in his nook was the
single deep note of half-past five borne to him from some high-perched
public clock. He finally got up with the sense that the time from then
on _ought_ at least to be felt as sacred to him. At this juncture it
was--while he stood there shaking his garments, settling his hat, his
necktie, his shirt-cuffs, fixing the high polish of his fine shoes as
if for some reflection in it of his straight and spare and grizzled, his
refined and trimmed and dressed, his altogether distinguished person,
that of a gentleman abundantly settled, but of a bachelor markedly
nervous--at this crisis it was, doubtless, that he at once most measured
and least resented his predicament. If he should go he would almost to
a certainty find her, and if he should find her he would almost to a
certainty come to the point. He wouldn’t put it off again--there was
that high consideration for him of justice at least to himself. He
had never yet denied himself anything so apparently fraught with
possibilities as the idea of proposing to Mrs. Worthingham--never yet,
in other words, denied himself anything he had so distinctly wanted to
do; and the results of that wisdom had remained for him precisely the
precious parts of experience. Counting only the offers of his honourable
hand, these had been on three remembered occasions at least the
consequence of an impulse as sharp and a self-respect as reasoned;
a self-respect that hadn’t in the least suffered, moreover, from the
failure of each appeal. He had been met in the three cases--the only
ones he at all compared with his present case--by the frank confession
that he didn’t somehow, charming as he was, cause himself to be
superstitiously believed in; and the lapse of life, afterward, had
cleared up many doubts.
It _wouldn’t_ have done, he eventually, he lucidly saw, each time he had
been refused; and the candour of his nature was such that he could
live to think of these very passages as a proof of how right he had
been--right, that is, to have put himself forward always, by the
happiest instinct, only in impossible conditions. He had the happy
consciousness of having exposed the important question to the crucial
test, and of having escaped, by that persistent logic, a grave mistake.
What better proof of his escape than the fact that he was now free to
renew the all-interesting inquiry, and should be exactly, about to do
so in different and better conditions? The conditions were better by as
much more--as much more of his career and character, of his situation,
his reputation he could even have called it, of his knowledge of life,
of his somewhat extended means, of his possibly augmented charm, of
his certainly improved mind and temper--as was involved in the actual
impending settlement. Once he had got into motion, once he had crossed
the Park and passed out of it, entering, with very little space to
traverse, one of the short new streets that abutted on its east side,
his step became that of a man young enough to find confidence, quite to
find felicity, in the sense, in almost any sense, of action. He could
still enjoy almost anything, absolutely an unpleasant thing, in default
of a better, that might still remind him he wasn’t so old. The standing
newness of everything about him would, it was true, have weakened this
cheer by too much presuming on it; Mrs. Worthingham’s house, before
which he stopped, had that gloss of new money, that glare of a piece
fresh from the mint and ringing for the first time on any counter,
which seems to claim for it, in any transaction, something more than the
“face” value.
This could but be yet more the case for the impression of the observer
introduced and committed. On our friend’s part I mean, after his
admission and while still in the hall, the sense of the general shining
immediacy, of the still unhushed clamour of the shock, was perhaps
stronger than he had ever known it. That broke out from every corner as
the high pitch of interest, and with a candour that--no, certainly--he
had never seen equalled; every particular expensive object shrieking at
him in its artless pride that it had just “come home.” He met the whole
vision with something of the grimace produced on persons without goggles
by the passage from a shelter to a blinding light; and if he had--by a
perfectly possible chance--been “snap-shotted” on the spot, would
have struck you as showing for his first tribute to the temple of Mrs.
Worthingham’s charming presence a scowl almost of anguish. He wasn’t
constitutionally, it may at once be explained for him, a goggled
person; and he was condemned, in New York, to this frequent violence of
transition--having to reckon with it whenever he went out, as who should
say, from himself. The high pitch of interest, to his taste, was the
pitch of history, the pitch of acquired and earned suggestion, the
pitch of association, in a word; so that he lived by preference,
incontestably, if not in a rich gloom, which would have been beyond his
means and spirits, at least amid objects and images that confessed to
the tone of time.
He had ever felt that an indispensable presence--with a need of it
moreover that interfered at no point with his gentle habit, not to say
his subtle art, of drawing out what was left him of his youth, of
thinly and thriftily spreading the rest of that choicest jam-pot of the
cupboard of consciousness over the remainder of a slice of life still
possibly thick enough to bear it; or in other words of moving the
melancholy limits, the significant signs, constantly a little further
on, very much as property-marks or staked boundaries are sometimes
stealthily shifted at night. He positively cherished in fact, as against
the too inveterate gesture of distressfully guarding his eyeballs--so
many New York aspects seemed to keep him at it--an ideal of adjusted
appreciation, of courageous curiosity, of fairly letting the world
about him, a world of constant breathless renewals and merciless
substitutions, make its flaring assault on its own inordinate terms.
Newness was value in the piece--for the acquisitor, or at least
sometimes might be, even though the act of “blowing” hard, the act
marking a heated freshness of arrival, or other form of irruption, could
never minister to the peace of those already and long on the field; and
this if only because maturer tone was after all most appreciable
and most consoling when one staggered back to it, wounded, bleeding,
blinded, from the riot of the raw--or, to put the whole experience more
prettily, no doubt, from excesses of light.