IV

There would have been a wonder for us meanwhile in his continued use, as

it were, of his happy formula--brought out to Cornelia Rasch within ten

minutes, or perhaps only within twenty, of his having settled into the

quite comfortable chair that, two days later, she indicated to him by

her fireside. He had arrived at her address through the fortunate chance

of his having noticed her card, as he went out, deposited, in the good

old New York fashion, on one of the rococo tables of Mrs. Worthingham’s

hall. His eye had been caught by the pencilled indication that was to

affect him, the next instant, as fairly placed there for his sake. This

had really been his luck, for he shouldn’t have liked to write to Mrs.

Worthingham for guidance--_that_ he felt, though too impatient just

now to analyze the reluctance. There was nobody else he could have

approached for a clue, and with this reflection he was already aware

of how it testified to their rare little position, his and

Cornelia’s--position as conscious, ironic, pathetic survivors together

of a dead and buried society--that there would have been, in all the

town, under such stress, not a member of their old circle left to turn

to. Mrs. Worthingham had practically, even if accidentally, helped him

to knowledge; the last nail in the coffin of the poor dear extinct

past had been planted for him by his having thus to reach his antique

contemporary through perforation of the newest newness. The note of this

particular recognition was in fact the more prescribed to him that

the ground of Cornelia’s return to a scene swept so bare of the

associational charm was certainly inconspicuous. What had she then come

back for?--he had asked himself that; with the effect of deciding that

it probably would have been, a little, to “look after” her remnant of

property. Perhaps she had come to save what little might still remain of

that shrivelled interest; perhaps she had been, by those who took care

of it for her, further swindled and despoiled, so that she wished to

get at the facts. Perhaps on the other hand--it was a more cheerful

chance--her investments, decently administered, were making larger

returns, so that the rigorous thrift of Bognor could be finally relaxed.

He had little to learn about the attraction of Europe, and rather

expected that in the event of his union with Mrs Worthingham he should

find himself pleading for it with the competence of one more in the

“know” about Paris and Rome, about Venice and Florence, than even she

could be. He could have lived on in _his_ New York, that is in the

sentimental, the spiritual, the more or less romantic visitation of it;

but had it been positive for him that he could live on in hers?--unless

indeed the possibility of this had been just (like the famous _vertige

de l’abîme_, like the solicitation of danger, or otherwise of the

dreadful) the very hinge of his whole dream. However that might be,

his curiosity was occupied rather with the conceivable hinge of poor

Cornelia’s: it was perhaps thinkable that even Mrs. Worthingham’s New

York, once it should have become possible again at all, might have

put forth to this lone exile a plea that wouldn’t be in the chords of

Bognor. For himself, after all, too, the attraction had been much

more of the Europe over which one might move at one’s ease, and which

therefore could but cost, and cost much, right and left, than of the

Europe adapted to scrimping. He saw himself on the whole scrimping with

more zest even in Mrs. Worthingham’s New York than under the inspiration

of Bognor. Apart from which it was yet again odd, not to say perceptibly

pleasing to him, to note where the emphasis of his interest fell in this

fumble of fancy over such felt oppositions as the new, the latest, the

luridest power of money and the ancient reserves and moderations and

mediocrities. These last struck him as showing by contrast the old brown

surface and tone as of velvet rubbed and worn, shabby, and even a bit

dingy, but all soft and subtle and still velvety--which meant still

dignified; whereas the angular facts of current finance were as harsh

and metallic and bewildering as some stacked “exhibit” of ugly patented

inventions, things his mediaeval mind forbade his taking in. He had

for instance the sense of knowing the pleasant little old Rasch

fortune--pleasant as far as it went; blurred memories and impressions

of what it had been and what it hadn’t, of how it had grown and how

languished and how melted; they came back to him and put on such

vividness that he could almost have figured himself testify for them

before a bland and encouraging Board. The idea of taking the field in

any manner on the subject of Mrs. Worthingham’s resources would have

affected him on the other hand as an odious ordeal, some glare of

embarrassment and exposure in a circle of hard unhelpful attention, of

converging, derisive, unsuggestive eyes.

In Cornelia’s small and quite cynically modern flat--the house had

a grotesque name, “The Gainsborough,” but at least wasn’t an awful

boarding-house, as he had feared, and she could receive him quite

honourably, which was so much to the good--he would have been ready to

use at once to her the greatest freedom of friendly allusion: “Have

you still your old ‘family interest’ in those two houses in Seventh

Avenue?--one of which was next to a corner grocery, don’t you know? and

was occupied as to its lower part by a candy-shop where the proportion

of the stock of suspectedly stale popcorn to that of rarer and stickier

joys betrayed perhaps a modest capital on the part of your father’s,

your grandfather’s, or whoever’s tenant, but out of which I nevertheless

remember once to have come as out of a bath of sweets, with my very

garments, and even the separate hairs of my head, glued together.

The other of the pair, a tobacconist’s, further down, had before it a

wonderful huge Indian who thrust out wooden cigars at an indifferent

world--you could buy candy cigars too, at the pop-corn shop, and I

greatly preferred them to the wooden; I remember well how I used to gape

in fascination at the Indian and wonder if the last of the Mohicans was

like him; besides admiring so the resources of a family whose ‘property’

was in such forms. I haven’t been round there lately--we must go round

together; but don’t tell me the forms have utterly perished!” It was

after _that_ fashion he might easily have been moved, and with almost

no transition, to break out to Cornelia--quite as if taking up some old

talk, some old community of gossip, just where they had left it; even

with the consciousness perhaps of overdoing a little, of putting at its

maximum, for the present harmony, recovery, recapture (what should he

call it?) the pitch and quantity of what the past had held for them.

He didn’t in fact, no doubt, dart straight off to Seventh Avenue, there

being too many other old things and much nearer and long subsequent;

the point was only that for everything they spoke of after he had fairly

begun to lean back and stretch his legs, and after she had let him,

above all, light the first of a succession of cigarettes--for everything

they spoke of he positively cultivated extravagance and excess, piling

up the crackling twigs as on the very altar of memory; and that by the

end of half an hour she had lent herself, all gallantly, to their game.

It was the game of feeding the beautiful iridescent flame, ruddy and

green and gold, blue and pink and amber and silver, with anything they

could pick up, anything that would burn and flicker. Thick-strown with

such gleanings the occasion seemed indeed, in spite of the truth that

they perhaps wouldn’t have proved, under cross-examination, to have

rubbed shoulders in the other life so very hard. Casual contacts,

qualified communities enough, there had doubtless been, but not

particular “passages,” nothing that counted, as he might think of it,

for their “very own” together, for nobody’s else at all. These shades of

historic exactitude didn’t signify; the more and the less that there

had been made perfect terms--and just by his being there and by her

rejoicing in it--with their present need to have _had_ all their past

could be made to appear to have given them. It was to this tune they

proceeded, the least little bit as if they knowingly pretended--he

giving her the example and setting her the pace of it, and she, poor

dear, after a first inevitable shyness, an uncertainty of wonder, a

breathlessness of courage, falling into step and going whatever length

he would.

She showed herself ready for it, grasping gladly at the perception of

what he must mean; and if she didn’t immediately and completely fall

in--not in the first half-hour, not even in the three or four others

that his visit, even whenever he consulted his watch, still made nothing

of--she yet understood enough as soon as she understood that, if their

finer economy hadn’t so beautifully served, he might have been conveying

this, that, and the other incoherent and easy thing by the comparatively

clumsy method of sound and statement. “No, I never made love to you; it

would in fact have been absurd, and I don’t care--though I almost know,

in the sense of almost remembering!--who did and who didn’t; but you

were always about, and so was I, and, little as you may yourself care

who I did it to, I dare say you remember (in the sense of having known

of it!) any old appearances that told. But we can’t afford at this time

of day not to help each other to have had--well, everything there was,

since there’s no more of it now, nor any way of coming by it except so;

and therefore let us make together, let us make over and recreate, our

lost world; for which we have after all and at the worst such a lot

of material. You were in particular my poor dear sisters’ friend--they

thought you the funniest little brown thing possible; so isn’t that

again to the good? You were mine only to the extent that you were so

much in and out of the house--as how much, if we come to that, wasn’t

one in and out, south of Thirtieth Street and north of Washington

Square, in those days, those spacious, sociable, Arcadian days, that we

flattered ourselves we filled with the modern fever, but that were so

different from any of these arrangements of pretended hourly Time

that dash themselves forever to pieces as from the fiftieth floors of

sky-scrapers.”

This was the kind of thing that was in the air, whether he said it or

not, and that could hang there even with such quite other things as

more crudely came out; came in spite of its being perhaps calculated to

strike us that these last would have been rather and most the unspoken

and the indirect. They were Cornelia’s contribution, and as soon as she

had begun to talk of Mrs. Worthingham--_he_ didn’t begin it!--they had

taken their place bravely in the centre of the circle. There they made,

the while, their considerable little figure, but all within the ring

formed by fifty other allusions, fitful but really intenser irruptions

that hovered and wavered and came and went, joining hands at moments

and whirling round as in chorus, only then again to dash at the slightly

huddled centre with a free twitch or peck or push or other taken

liberty, after the fashion of irregular frolic motions in a country

dance or a Christmas game.

“You’re so in love with her and want to marry her!”--she said it all

sympathetically and yearningly, poor crapy Cornelia; as if it were to be

quite taken for granted that she knew all about it. And then when he had

asked how she knew--why she took so informed a tone about it; all on

the wonder of her seeming so much more “in” it just at that hour than

he himself quite felt he could figure for: “Ah, how but from the dear

lovely thing herself? Don’t you suppose _she_ knows it?”

“Oh, she absolutely ‘knows’ it, does she?”--he fairly heard himself ask

that; and with the oddest sense at once of sharply wanting the certitude

and yet of seeing the question, of hearing himself say the words,

through several thicknesses of some wrong medium. He came back to it

from a distance; as he would have had to come back (this was again vivid

to him) should he have got round again to his ripe intention three days

before--after his now present but then absent friend, that is, had left

him planted before his now absent but then present one for the purpose.

“Do you mean she--at all confidently!--expects?” he went on, not much

minding if it couldn’t but sound foolish; the time being given it for

him meanwhile by the sigh, the wondering gasp, all charged with the

unutterable, that the tone of his appeal set in motion. He saw his

companion look at him, but it might have been with the eyes of thirty

years ago; when--very likely.--he had put her some such question about

some girl long since dead. Dimly at first, then more distinctly, didn’t

it surge back on him for the very strangeness that there had been some

such passage as this between them--yes, about Mary Cardew!--in the

autumn of ‘68?

“Why, don’t you realise your situation?” Miss Rasch struck him as quite

beautifully wailing--above all to such an effect of deep interest, that

is, on her own part and in him.

“My situation?”--he echoed, he considered; but reminded afresh, by

the note of the detached, the far-projected in it, of what he had

last remembered of his sentient state on his once taking ether at the

dentist’s.

“Yours and hers--the situation of her adoring you. I suppose you at

least know it,” Cornelia smiled.

Yes, it was like the other time and yet it wasn’t. She was like--poor

Cornelia was--everything that used to be; that somehow was most definite

to him. Still he could quite reply “Do you call it--her adoring me--_my_

situation?”

“Well, it’s a part of yours, surely--if you’re in love with her.”

“Am I, ridiculous old person! in love with her?” White-Mason asked.

“I may be a ridiculous old person,” Cornelia returned--“and, for that

matter, of course I am! But she’s young and lovely and rich and clever:

so what could be more natural?”

“Oh, I was applying that opprobrious epithet--!” He didn’t finish,

though he meant he had applied it to himself. He had got up from his

seat; he turned about and, taking in, as his eyes also roamed, several

objects in the room, serene and sturdy, not a bit cheap-looking, little

old New York objects of ‘68, he made, with an inner art, as if to

recognise them--made so, that is, for himself; had quite the sense for

the moment of asking them, of imploring them, to recognise _him_, to be

for him things of his own past. Which they truly were, he could have

the next instant cried out; for it meant that if three or four of

them, small sallow carte-de-visite photographs, faithfully framed but

spectrally faded, hadn’t in every particular, frames and balloon skirts

and false “property” balustrades of unimaginable terraces and all,

the tone of time, the secret for warding and easing off the perpetual

imminent ache of one’s protective scowl, one would verily but have to

let the scowl stiffen, or to take up seriously the question of blue

goggles, during what might remain of life.

V

What he actually took up from a little old Twelfth-Street table that

piously preserved the plain mahogany circle, with never a curl nor a

crook nor a hint of a brazen flourish, what he paused there a moment for

commerce with, his back presented to crapy Cornelia, who sat taking that

view of him, during this opportunity, very protrusively and frankly and

fondly, was one of the wasted mementos just mentioned, over which he

both uttered and suppressed a small comprehensive cry. He stood there

another minute to look at it, and when he turned about still kept it in

his hand, only holding it now a litde behind him. “You _must_ have come

back to stay--with all your beautiful things. What else does it mean?”

“‘Beautiful’?” his old friend commented with her brow all wrinkled and

her lips thrust out in expressive dispraise. They might at that rate

have been scarce more beautiful than she herself. “Oh, don’t talk

so--after Mrs. Worthingham’s! _They’re_ wonderful, if you will: such

things, such things! But one’s own poor relics and odds and ends are

one’s own at least; and one _has_--yes--come back to them. They’re all

I have in the world to come back to. They were stored, and what I was

paying--!” Miss Rasch wofully added.

He had possession of the small old picture; he hovered there; he put his

eyes again to it intently; then again held it a little behind him as if

it might have been snatched away or the very feel of it, pressed against

him, was good to his palm. “Mrs. Worthingham’s things? You think them

beautiful?”

Cornelia did now, if ever, show an odd face. “Why certainly prodigious,

or whatever. Isn’t that conceded?”

“No doubt every horror, at the pass we’ve come to, is conceded. That’s

just what I complain of.”

“Do you _complain?_”--she drew it out as for surprise: she couldn’t have

imagined such a thing.

“To me her things are awful. They’re the newest of the new.”

“Ah, but the old forms!”

“Those are the most blatant. I mean the swaggering reproductions.”

“Oh but,” she pleaded, “we can’t all be _really_ old.”

“No, we can’t, Cornelia. But _you_ can--!” said White-Mason with the

frankest appreciation.

She looked up at him from where she sat as he could imagine her

looking up at the curate at Bognor. “Thank you, sir! If that’s all you

want----!”

“It _is_” he said, “all I want--or almost.”

“Then no wonder such a creature as that,” she lightly moralised, “won’t

suit you!”

He bent upon her, for all the weight of his question, his smoothest

stare. “You hold she certainly won’t suit me?”

“Why, what can I tell about it? Haven’t you by this time found out?”

“No, but I think I’m finding.” With which he began again to explore.

Miss Rasch immensely wondered. “You mean you don’t expect to come to an

understanding with her?” And then as even to this straight challenge he

made at first no answer: “Do you mean you give it up?”

He waited some instants more, but not meeting her eyes--only looking

again about the room. “What do you think of my chance?”

“Oh,” his companion cried, “what has what I think to do with it? How can

I think anything but that she must like you?”

“Yes--of course. But how much?”

“Then don’t you really know?” Cornelia asked.

He kept up his walk, oddly preoccupied and still not looking at her. “Do

you, my dear?”

She waited a little. “If you haven’t really put it to her I don’t

suppose she knows.”

This at last arrested him again. “My dear Cornelia, she doesn’t

know----!”

He had paused as for the desperate tone, or at least the large emphasis

of it, so that she took him up. “The more reason then to help her to

find it out.”

“I mean,” he explained, “that she doesn’t know anything.”

“Anything?”

“Anything else, I mean--even if she does know _that_.”

Cornelia considered of it. “But what else need she--in particular--know?

Isn’t that the principal thing?”

“Well”--and he resumed his circuit--“she doesn’t know anything that we

know. But nothing,” he re-emphasised--“nothing whatever!”

“Well, can’t she do without that?”

“Evidently she can--and evidently she does, beautifully. But the

question is whether _I_ can!”

He had paused once more with his point--but she glared, poor Cornelia,

with her wonder. “Surely if you know for yourself----!”

“Ah, it doesn’t seem enough for me to know for myself! One wants a

woman,” he argued--but still, in his prolonged tour, quite without his

scowl--“to know _for_ one, to know _with_ one. That’s what you do now,”

he candidly put to her.

It made her again gape. “Do you mean you want to marry _me?_”

He was so full of what he did mean, however, that he failed even to

notice it. “She doesn’t in the least know, for instance, how old I am.”

“That’s because you’re so young!”

“Ah, there you are!”--and he turned off afresh and as if almost in

disgust. It left her visibly perplexed--though even the perplexed

Cornelia was still the exceedingly pointed; but he had come to her aid

after another turn. “Remember, please, that I’m pretty well as old as

you.”

She had all her point at least, while she bridled and blinked, for this.

“You’re exactly a year and ten months older.”

It checked him there for delight. “You remember my birthday?”

She twinkled indeed like some far-off light of home. “I remember every

one’s. It’s a little way I’ve always had--and that I’ve never lost.”

He looked at her accomplishment, across the room, as at some striking,

some charming phenomenon. “Well, _that’s_ the sort of thing I want!” All

the ripe candour of his eyes confirmed it.

What could she do therefore, she seemed to ask him, but repeat her

question of a moment before?--which indeed presently she made up her

mind to. “Do you want to marry _me?_”

It had this time better success--if the term may be felt in any degree

to apply. All his candour, or more of it at least, was in his slow,

mild, kind, considering head-shake. “No, Cornelia--not to _marry_ you.”

His discrimination was a wonder; but since she was clearly treating him

now as if everything about him was, so she could as exquisitely meet it.

“Not at least,” she convulsively smiled, “until you’ve honourably tried

Mrs. Worthingham. Don’t you really _mean_ to?” she gallantly insisted.

He waited again a little; then he brought out: “I’ll tell you

presently.” He came back, and as by still another mere glance over

the room, to what seemed to him so much nearer. “That table was old

Twelfth-Street?”

“Everything here was.”

“Oh, the pure blessings! With you, ah, with you, I haven’t to wear a

green shade.” And he had retained meanwhile his small photograph, which

he again showed himself. “Didn’t we talk of Mary Cardew?”

“Why, do you remember it?” She marvelled to extravagance.

“You make me. You connect me with it. You connect it with we.” He liked

to display to her this excellent use she thus had, the service she

rendered. “There are so many connections--there will be so many. I

feel how, with you, they must all come up again for me: in fact you’re

bringing them out already, just while I look at you, as fast as ever you

can. The fact that you knew every one--!” he went on; yet as if there

were more in that too than he could quite trust himself about.

“Yes, I knew every one,” said Cornelia Rasch; but this time with perfect

simplicity. “I knew, I imagine, more than you do--or more than you did.”

It kept him there, it made him wonder with his eyes on her. “Things

about _them_--our people?”

“Our people. Ours only now.”

Ah, such an interest as he felt in this--taking from her while, so far

from scowling, he almost gaped, all it might mean! “Ours indeed--and it’s

awfully good they are; or that we’re still here for them! Nobody else

is--nobody but you: not a cat!”

“Well, I _am_ a cat!” Cornelia grinned.

“Do you mean you can tell me things--?” It was too beautiful to believe.

“About what really _was?_” she artfully considered, holding him

immensely now. “Well, unless they’ve come to you with time; unless

you’ve learned--or found out.”

“Oh,” he reassuringly cried--reassuringly, it most seemed, for

himself--“nothing has come to me with time, everything has gone from me.

How can I find out now! What creature has an idea----?”

She threw up her hands with the shrug of old days--the sharp little

shrug his sisters used to imitate and that she hadn’t had to go to

Europe for. The only thing was that he blessed her for bringing it back.

“Ah, the ideas of people now----!”

“Yes, their ideas are certainly not about us” But he ruefully faced it.

“We’ve none the less, however, to live with them.”

“With their ideas--?” Cornelia questioned.

“With _them_--these modern wonders; such as they are!” Then he went on:

“It must have been to help me you’ve come back.”

She said nothing for an instant about that, only nodding instead at his

photograph. “What has become of yours? I mean of _her_.”

This time it made him turn pale. “You remember I _have_ one?”

She kept her eyes on him. “In a ‘pork-pie’ hat, with her hair in a long

net. That was so ‘smart’ then; especially with one’s skirt looped up,

over one’s hooped magenta petticoat, in little festoons, and a row of

very big onyx beads over one’s braided velveteen sack--braided quite

plain and very broad, don’t you know?”

He smiled for her extraordinary possession of these things--she was as

prompt as if she had had them before her. “Oh, rather--‘don’t I know?’

You wore brown velveteen, and, on those remarkably small hands, funny

gauntlets--like mine.”

“Oh, do _you_ remember? But like yours?” she wondered.

“I mean like hers in my photograph.” But he came back to the present

picture. “This is better, however, for really showing her lovely head.”

“Mary’s head was a perfection!” Cornelia testified.

“Yes--it was better than her heart.”

“Ah, don’t say that!” she pleaded. “You weren’t fair.”

“Don’t you think I was fair?” It interested him immensely--and the more

that he indeed mightn’t have been; which he seemed somehow almost to

hope.

“She didn’t think so--to the very end.”

“She didn’t?”--ah the right things Cornelia said to him! But before she

could answer he was studying again closely the small faded face. “No,

she doesn’t, she doesn’t. Oh, her charming sad eyes and the way they say

that, across the years, straight into mine! But I don’t know, I don’t

know!” White-Mason quite comfortably sighed.

His companion appeared to appreciate this effect. “That’s just the way

you used to flirt with her, poor thing. Wouldn’t you like to have it?”

she asked.

“This--for my very own?” He looked up delighted. “I really may?”

“Well, if you’ll give me yours. We’ll exchange.”

“That’s a charming idea. We’ll exchange. But you must come and get it at

my rooms--where you’ll see my things.”

For a little she made no answer--as if for some feeling. Then she said:

“You asked me just now why I’ve come back.”

He stared as for the connection; after which with a smile: “Not to do

_that_----?”

She waited briefly again, but with a queer little look. “I can do those

things now; and--yes!--that’s in a manner why. I came,” she then said,

“because I knew of a sudden one day--knew as never before--that I was

old.”

“I see. I see.” He quite understood--she had notes that so struck him.

“And how did you like it?”

She hesitated--she decided. “Well, if I liked it, it was on the

principle perhaps on which some people like high game!”

“High game--that’s good!” he laughed. “Ah, my dear, we’re ‘high’!”

She shook her head. “No, not you--yet. I at any rate didn’t want any

more adventures,” Cornelia said.

He showed their small relic again with assurance. “You wanted _us_. Then

here we are. Oh how we can talk!--with all those things you know! You

are an invention. And you’ll see there are things J know. I shall turn

up here--well, daily.”

She took it in, but only after a moment answered. “There was something

you said just now you’d tell me. Don’t you mean to try----?”

“Mrs. Worthingham?” He drew from within his coat his pocket-book and

carefully found a place in it for Mary Cardew’s carte-de-visite, folding

it together with deliberation over which he put it back. Finally he

spoke. “No--I’ve decided. I can’t--I don’t want to.”

Cornelia marvelled--or looked as if she did. “Not for all she has?”

“Yes--I know all she has. But I also know all she hasn’t. And, as I told

you, she herself doesn’t--hasn’t a glimmer of a suspicion of it; and

never will have.”

Cornelia magnanimously thought “No--but she knows other things.”

He shook his head as at the portentous heap of them. “Too many--too

many. And other indeed--_so_ other! Do you know,” he went on, “that it’s

as if _you_--by turning up for me--had brought that home to me?”

“‘For you,’” she candidly considered. “But what--since you can’t marry

me!--can you do with me?”

Well, he seemed to have it all. “Everything. I can live with you--just

this way.” To illustrate which he dropped into the other chair by her

fire; where, leaning back, he gazed at the flame. “I can’t give you

up. It’s very curious. It has come over me as it did over you when you

renounced Bognor. That’s it--I know it at last, and I see one can like

it. I’m ‘high.’ You needn’t deny it. That’s my taste. I’m old.” And in

spite of the considerable glow there of her little household altar he

said it without the scowl.