Produced by David Widger
THE AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO.
By Henry James
1885
PART I.
Much as I wished to see him, I had kept my letter of introduction for
three weeks in my pocket-book. I was nervous and timid about meeting
him,--conscious of youth and ignorance, convinced that he was tormented
by strangers, and especially by my country-people, and not exempt from
the suspicion that he had the irritability as well as the brilliancy of
genius. Moreover, the pleasure, if it should occur (for I could scarcely
believe it was near at hand), would be so great that I wished to think
of it in advance, to feel that it was in my pocket, not to mix it with
satisfactions more superficial and usual In the little game of new
sensations that I was playing with my ingenuous mind, I wished to keep
my visit to the author of _Beltraffio_ as a trump card. It was three
years after the publication of that fascinating work, which I had read
over five times, and which now, with my riper judgment, I admire on the
whole as much as ever. This will give you about the date of my first
visit (of any duration) to England; for you will not have forgotten
the commotion--I may even say the scandal--produced by Mark Ambient’s
masterpiece. It was the most complete presentation that had yet been
made of the gospel of art; it was a kind of aesthetic war-cry. People
had endeavored to sail nearer to “truth” in the cut of their sleeves
and the shape of their sideboards; but there had not as yet been, among
English novels, such an example of beauty of execution and genuineness
of substance. Nothing had been done in that line from the point of view
of art for art This was my own point of view, I may mention, when I
was twenty-five; whether it is altered now I won’t take upon myself
to say--especially as the discerning reader will be able to judge for
himself. I had been in England, briefly, a twelvemonth before the time
to which I began by alluding, and had learned then that Mr. Ambient was
in distant lands--was making a considerable tour in the East: so there
was nothing to do but to keep my letter till I should be in London
again. It was of little use to me to hear that his wife had not left
England, and, with her little boy, their only child, was spending the
period of her husband’s absence--a good many months--at a small place
they had down in Surrey. They had a house in London which was let. All
this I learned, and also that Mrs. Ambient was charming (my friend the
American poet, from whom I had my introduction, had never seen her, his
relations with the great man being only epistolary); but she was
not, after all, though she had lived so near the rose, the author of
_Beltraffio_, and I did not go down into Surrey to call on her. I went
to the Continent, spent the following winter in Italy, and returned to
London in May. My visit to Italy opened my eyes to a good many things,
but to nothing more than the beauty of certain pages in the works of
Mark Ambient I had every one of his productions in my portmanteau,--they
are not, as you know, very numerous, but he had preluded to _Beltraffio_
by some exquisite things,--and I used to read them over in the evening
at the inn. I used to say to myself that the man who drew those
characters and wrote that style understood what he saw and knew what he
was doing. This is my only reason for mentioning my winter in Italy.
He had been there much in former years, and he was saturated with what
painters call the “feeling” of that classic land. He expressed the
charm of the old hill-cities of Tuscany, the look of certain lonely
grass-grown places which, in the past, had echoed with life; he
understood the great artists, he understood the spirit of the
Renaissance, he understood everything. The scene of one of his earlier
novels was laid in Borne, the scene of another in Florence, and I moved
through these cities in company with the figures whom Mark Ambient had
set so vividly upon their feet. This is why I was now so much happier
even than before in the prospect of making his acquaintance.
At last, when I had dallied with this privilege long enough, I
despatched to him the missive of the American poet He had already gone
out of town; he shrank from the rigor of the London “season” and it was
his habit to migrate on the first of June. Moreover, I had heard that
this year he was hard at work on a new book, into which some of his
impressions of the East were to be wrought, so that he desired nothing
so much as quiet days. This knowledge, however, did not prevent me--_cet
âge est sans pitié_--from sending with my friend’s letter a note of my
own, in which I asked Mr. Ambient’s leave to come down and see him for
an hour or two, on a day to be designated by himself. My proposal was
accompanied with a very frank expression of my sentiments, and the
effect of the whole projectile was to elicit from the great man the
kindest possible invitation. He would be delighted to see me, especially
if I should turn up on the following Saturday and would remain till
the Monday morning. We would take a walk over the Surrey commons, and
I could tell him all about the other great man, the one in America. He
indicated to me the best train, and it may be imagined whether on
the Saturday afternoon I was punctual at Waterloo. He carried his
benevolence to the point of coming to meet me at the little station at
which I was to alight, and my heart beat very fast as I saw his
handsome face, surmounted with a soft wide-awake, and which I knew by
a photograph long since enshrined upon my mantelshelf, scanning the
carriage windows as the train rolled up. He recognized me as infallibly
as I had recognized him; he appeared to know by instinct how a young
American of an æsthetic turn would look when much divided between
eagerness and modesty. He took me by the hand, and smiled at me, and
said: “You must be--a--_you_, I think!” and asked if I should mind going
on foot to his house, which would take but a few minutes. I remember
thinking it a piece of extraordinary affability that he should give
directions about the conveyance of my bag, and feeling altogether very
happy and rosy, in fact quite transported, when he laid his hand on my
shoulder as we came out of the station.
I surveyed him, askance, as we walked together; I had already--I had
indeed instantly--seen that he was a delightful creature. His face is
so well known that I need n’t describe it; he looked to me at once
an English gentleman and a man of genius, and I thought that a happy
combination. There was just a little of the Bohemian in his appearance;
you would easily have guessed that he belonged to the guild of artists
and men of letters. He was addicted to velvet jackets, to cigarettes,
to loose shirt-collars, to looking a little dishevelled. His features,
which were fine, but not perfectly regular, are fairly enough
represented in his portraits; but no portrait that I have seen gives any
idea of his expression. There were so many things in it, and they chased
each other in and out of his face. I have seen people who were grave and
gay in quick alternation; but Mark Ambient was grave and gay at one and
the same moment. There were other strange oppositions and contradictions
in his slightly faded and fatigued countenance. He seemed both young and
old, both anxious and indifferent. He had evidently had an active past,
which inspired one with curiosity, and yet it was impossible not to be
more curious still about his future. He was just enough above middle
height to be spoken of as tall, and rather lean and long in the flank.
He had the friendliest, frankest manner possible, and yet I could see
that he was shy. He was thirty-eight years old at the time _Beltraffio_
was published. He asked me about his friend in America, about the length
of my stay in England, about the last news in London and the people I
had seen there; and I remember looking for the signs of genius in the
very form of his questions, and thinking I found it. I liked his voice.
There was genius in his house, too, I thought, when we got there; there
was imagination in the carpets and curtains, in the pictures and books,
in the garden behind it, where certain old brown walls were muffled in
creepers that appeared to me to have been copied from a masterpiece of
one of the pre-Raphaelites. That was the way many things struck me at
that time, in England; as if they were reproductions of something that
existed primarily in art or literature. It was not the picture, the
poem, the fictive page, that seemed to me a copy; these things were the
originals, and the life of happy and distinguished people was fashioned
in their image. Mark Ambient called his house a cottage, and I perceived
afterwards that he was right; for if it had not been a cottage it must
have been a villa, and a villa, in England at least, was not a place in
which one could fancy him at home. But it was, to my vision, a cottage
glorified and translated; it was a palace of art, on a slightly reduced
scale,--it was an old English demesne. It nestled under a cluster of
magnificent beeches, it had little creaking lattices that opened out of,
or into, pendent mats of ivy, and gables, and old red tiles, as well
as a general aspect of being painted in water-colors and inhabited by
people whose lives would go on in chapters and volumes. The lawn seemed
to me of extraordinary extent, the garden-walls of incalculable height,
the whole air of the place delightfully still, private, proper to
itself. “My wife must be somewhere about,” Mark Ambient said, as we went
in. “We shall find her perhaps; we have got about an hour before dinner.
She may be in the garden. I will show you my little place.”
We passed through the house, and into the grounds, as I should have
called them, which extended into the rear. They covered but three or
four acres, but, like the house, they were very old and crooked, and
full of traces of long habitation, with inequalities of level and little
steps--mossy and cracked were these--which connected the different parts
with each other. The limits of the place, cleverly dissimulated, were
muffled in the deepest verdure. They made, as I remember, a kind of
curtain at the further end, in one of the folds of which, as it were,
we presently perceived, from afar, a little group. “Ah, there she is!”
said Mark Ambient; “and she has got the boy.” He made this last remark
in a slightly different tone from any in which he yet had spoken. I
was not fully aware of it at the time, but it lingered in my ear and I
afterwards understood it.
“Is it your son?” I inquired, feeling the question not to be brilliant.
“Yes, my only child. He’s always in his mother’s pocket She coddles him
too much.” It came back to me afterwards, too--the manner in which
he spoke these words. They were not petulant; they expressed rather a
sudden coldness, a kind of mechanical submission. We went a few steps
further, and then he stopped short and called the boy, beckoning to him
repeatedly.
“Dolcino, come and see your daddy!” There was something in the way he
stood still and waited that made me think he did it for a purpose. Mrs.
Ambient had her arm round the child’s waist, and he was leaning against
her knee; but though he looked up at the sound of his father’s voice,
she gave no sign of releasing him. A lady, apparently a neighbor,
was seated near her, and before them was a garden-table, on which a
tea-service had been placed.
Mark Ambient called again, and Dolcino struggled in the maternal
embrace, but he was too tightly held, and after two or three fruitless
efforts he suddenly turned round and buried his head deep in his
mother’s lap. There was a certain awkwardness in the scene; I thought
it rather odd that Mrs. Ambient should pay so little attention to her
husband. But I would not for the world have betrayed my thought, and, to
conceal it, I observed that it must be such a pleasant thing to have tea
in the garden. “Ah, she won’t let him come!” said Mark Ambient, with a
sigh; and we went our way ‘till we reached the two ladies. He mentioned
my name to his wife, and I noticed that he addressed her as “My dear,”
very genially, without any trace of resentment at her detention of
the child. The quickness of the transition made me vaguely ask myself
whether he were henpecked,--a shocking conjecture, which I instantly
dismissed. Mrs. Ambient was quite such a wife as I should have expected
him to have; slim and fair, with a long neck and pretty eyes and an air
of great refinement. She was a little cold, and a little shy; but she
was very sweet, and she had a certain look of race, justified by my
afterwards learning that she was “connected” with two or three great
families. I have seen poets married to women of whom it was difficult
to conceive that they should gratify the poetic fancy,--women with dull
faces and glutinous minds, who were none the less, however, excellent
wives. But there was no obvious incongruity in Mark Ambient’s union.
Mrs. Ambient, delicate and quiet, in a white dress, with her beautiful
child at her side, was worthy of the author of a work so distinguished
as _Beltraffio_. Bound her neck she wore a black velvet ribbon, of which
the long ends, tied behind, hung down her back, and to which, in front,
was attached a miniature portrait of her little boy. Her smooth, shining
hair was confined in a net She gave me a very pleasant greeting, and
Dolcino--I thought this little name of endearment delightful--took
advantage of her getting up to slip away from her and go to his father,
who said nothing to him, but simply seized him and held him high in his
arms for a moment, kissing him several times.
I had lost no time in observing that the child, who was not more than
seven years old, was extraordinarily beautiful He had the face of an
angel,--the eyes, the hair, the more than mortal bloom, the smile of
innocence. There was something touching, almost alarming, in his beauty,
which seemed to be composed of elements too fine and pure for the breath
of this world. When I spoke to him, and he came and held out his hand
and smiled at me, I felt a sudden pity for him, as if he had been an
orphan, or a changeling, or stamped with some social stigma. It was
impossible to be, in fact, more exempt from these misfortunes, and
yet, as one kissed him, it was hard to keep from murmuring “Poor little
devil!” though why one should have applied this epithet to a living
cherub is more than I can say. Afterwards, indeed, I knew a little
better; I simply discovered that he was too charming to live, wondering
at the same time that his parents should not have perceived it, and
should not be in proportionate grief and despair. For myself, I had no
doubt of his evanescence, having already noticed that there is a kind of
charm which is like a death-warrant.
The lady who had been sitting with Mrs. Ambient was a jolly, ruddy
personage, dressed in velveteen and rather limp feathers, whom I guessed
to be the vicar’s wife,--our hostess did not introduce me,--and who
immediately began to talk to Ambient about chrysanthemums. This was a
safe subject, and yet there was a certain surprise for me in seeing
the author of _Beltraffio_ even in such superficial communion with the
Church of England. His writings implied so much detachment from that
institution, expressed a view of life so profane, as it were, so
independent, and so little likely, in general, to be thought edifying,
that I should have expected to find him an object of horror to vicars
and their ladies--of horror repaid on his own part by good-natured but
brilliant mockery. This proves how little I knew as yet of the English
people and their extraordinary talent for keeping up their forms, as
well as of some of the mysteries of Mark Ambient’s hearth and home.
I found afterwards that he had, in his study, between smiles and
cigar-smoke, some wonderful comparisons for his clerical neighbors; but
meanwhile the chrysanthemums were a source of harmony, for he and the
vicaress were equally fond of them, and I was surprised at the knowledge
they exhibited of this interesting plant. The lady’s visit, however, had
presumably already been long, and she presently got up, saying she must
go, and kissed Mrs. Ambient Mark started to walk with her to the gate of
the grounds, holding Dolcino by the hand.
“Stay with me, my darling,” Mrs. Ambient said to the boy, who was
wandering away with his father.
Mark Ambient paid no attention to the summons, but Dolcino turned round
and looked with eyes of shy entreaty at his mother. “Can’t I go with
papa?”
“Not when I ask you to stay with me.”
“But please don’t ask me, mamma,” said the child, in his little clear,
new voice.
“I must ask you when I want you. Come to me, my darling.” And Mrs.
Ambient, who had seated herself again, held out her long, slender hands.
Her husband stopped, with his back turned to her, but without releasing
the child. He was still talking to the vicaress, but this good lady, I
think, had lost the thread of her attention. She looked at Mrs. Ambient
and at Dolcino, and then she looked at me, smiling very hard, in an
extremely fixed, cheerful manner.
“Papa,” said the child, “mamma wants me not to go with you.”
“He’s very tired--he has run about all day. He ought to be quiet till
he goes to bed. Otherwise he won’t sleep.” These declarations fell
successively and gravely from Mrs. Ambient’s lips.
Her husband, still without turning round, bent over the boy and looked
at him in silence. The vicaress gave a genial, irrelevant laugh, and
observed that he was a precious little pet “Let him choose,” said Mark
Ambient. “My dear little boy, will you go with me or will you stay with
your mother?”
“Oh, it’s a shame!” cried the vicar’s lady, with increased hilarity.
“Papa, I don’t think I can choose,” the child answered, making his voice
very low and confidential. “But I have been a great deal with mamma
to-day,” he added in a moment.
“And very little with papa! My dear fellow, I think you have chosen!”
And Mark Ambient walked off with his son, accompanied by re-echoing but
inarticulate comments from my fellow-visitor.
His wife had seated herself again, and her fixed eyes, bent upon the
ground, expressed for a few moments so much mute agitation that I felt
as if almost any remark from my own lips would be a false note. But Mrs.
Ambient quickly recovered herself, and said to me civilly enough
that she hoped I did n’t mind having had to walk from the station. I
reassured her on this point, and she went on, “We have got a thing that
might have gone for you, but my husband wouldn’t order it.”
“That gave me the pleasure of a walk with him,” I rejoined.
She was silent a minute, and then she said, “I believe the Americans
walk very little.”
“Yes, we always run,” I answered laughingly.
She looked at me seriously, and I began to perceive a certain coldness
in her pretty eyes. “I suppose your distances are so great?”
“Yes; but we break our marches I I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is
for me to find myself here,” I added. “I have the greatest admiration
for Mr. Ambient.”
“He will like that. He likes being admired.”
“He must have a very happy life, then. He has many worshippers.”
“Oh, yes, I have seen some of them,” said Mrs. Ambient, looking away,
very far from me, rather as if such a vision were before her at the
moment Something in her tone seemed to indicate that the vision was
scarcely edifying, and I guessed very quickly that she was not in
sympathy with the author of _Beltraffio_. I thought the fact strange,
but, somehow, in the glow of my own enthusiasm, I did n’t think it
important; it only made me wish to be rather explicit about that
enthusiasm.
“For me, you know,” I remarked, “he is quite the greatest of living
writers.”
“Of course I can’t judge. Of course he’s very clever,” said Mrs.
Ambient, smiling a little.
“He’s magnificent, Mrs. Ambient! There are pages in each of his books
that have a perfection that classes them with the greatest things.
Therefore, for me to see him in this familiar way,--in his habit as he
lives,--and to find, apparently, the man as delightful as the artist,
I can’t tell you how much too good to be true it seems, and how great a
privilege I think it.” I knew that I was gushing, but I could n’t help
it, and what I said was a good deal less than what I felt. I was by no
means sure that I should dare to say even so much as this to Ambient
himself, and there was a kind of rapture in speaking it out to his
wife which was not affected by the fact that, as a wife, she appeared
peculiar. She listened to me with her face grave again, and with her
lips a little compressed, as if there were no doubt, of course, that
her husband was remarkable, but at the same time she had heard all this
before and couldn’t be expected to be particularly interested in it.
There was even in her manner an intimation that I was rather young, and
that people usually got over that sort of thing. “I assure you that for
me this is a red-letter day,” I added.
She made no response, until after a pause, looking round her, she said
abruptly, though gently, “We are very much afraid about the fruit this
year.”
My eyes wandered to the mossy, mottled, garden walls, where plum-trees
and pear-trees, flattened and fastened upon the rusty bricks, looked
like crucified figures with many arms. “Does n’t it promise well?” I
inquired.
“No, the trees look very dull. We had such late frosts.”
Then there was another pause. Mrs. Ambient kept her eyes fixed on the
opposite end of the grounds, as if she were watching for her husband’s
return with the child. “Is Mr. Ambient fond of gardening?” it occurred
to me to inquire, irresistibly impelled as I felt myself, moreover, to
bring the conversation constantly back to him.
“He’s very fond of plums,” said his wife.
“Ah, well then, I hope your crop will be better than you fear. It’s a
lovely old place,” I continued. “The whole character of it is that
of certain places that he describes. Your house is like one of his
pictures.”
“It’s a pleasant little place. There are hundreds like it”
“Oh, it has got his tone,” I said, laughing, and insisting on my point
the more that Mrs. Ambient appeared to see in my appreciation of her
simple establishment a sign of limited experience.
It was evident that I insisted too much. “His tone?” she repeated, with
a quick look at me, and a slightly heightened color.
“Surely he has a tone, Mrs. Ambient”
“Oh, yes, he has indeed! But I don’t in the least consider that I am
living in one of his books; I should n’t care for that, at all,” she
went on, with a smile which had in some degree the effect of converting
her slightly sharp protest into a joke deficient in point “I am afraid I
am not very literary,” said Mrs. Ambient. “And I am not artistic.”
“I am very sure you are not ignorant, not stupid,” I ventured to reply,
with the accompaniment of feeling immediately afterwards that I had been
both familiar and patronizing. My only consolation was in the reflection
that it was she, and not I, who had begun it She had brought her
idiosyncrasies into the discussion.
“Well, whatever I am, I am very different from my husband. If you like
him, you won’t like me. You need n’t say anything. Your liking me is n’t
in the least necessary!”
“Don’t defy me!” I exclaimed.
She looked as if she had not heard me, which was the best thing she
could do; and we sat some time without further speech. Mrs. Ambient
had evidently the enviable English quality of being able to be silent
without being restless. But at last she spoke; she asked me if there
seemed to be many people in town. I gave her what satisfaction I could
on this point, and we talked a little about London and of some pictures
it presented at that time of the year. At the end of this I came back,
irrepressibly, to Mark Ambient.
“Does n’t he like to be there now? I suppose he does n’t find the proper
quiet for his work. I should think his things had been written, for
the most part, in a very still place. They suggest a great stillness,
following on a kind of tumult. Don’t you think so? I suppose London is a
tremendous place to collect impressions, but a refuge like this, in the
country, must be much better for working them up. Does he get many of
his impressions in London, do you think?” I proceeded from point to point
in this malign inquiry, simply because my hostess, who probably thought
me a very pushing and talkative young man, gave me time; for when I
paused--I have not represented my pauses--she simply continued to
let her eyes wander, and, with her long fair fingers, played with the
medallion on her neck. When I stopped altogether, however, she was
obliged to say something, and what she said was that she had not the
least idea where her husband got his impressions. This made me think
her, for a moment, positively disagreeable; delicate and proper and
rather aristocratically dry as she sat there. But I must either have
lost the impression a moment later, or been goaded by it to further
aggression, for I remember asking her whether Mr. Ambient were in a good
vein of work, and when we might look for the appearance of the book on
which he was engaged. I have every reason now to know that she thought
me an odious person.
She gave a strange, small laugh as she said, “I am afraid you think I
know a great deal more about my husband’s work than I do. I haven’t
the least idea what he is doing,” she added presently, in a slightly
different, that is a more explanatory, tone, as if she recognized
in some degree the enormity of her confession. “I don’t read what he
writes!”
She did not succeed (and would not, even had she tried much harder) in
making it seem to me anything less than monstrous. I stared at her,
and I think I blushed. “Don’t you admire his genius? Don’t you admire
_Beltraffio?_”
She hesitated a moment, and I wondered what she could possibly say. She
did not speak--I could see--the first words that rose to her lips; she
repeated what she had said a few minutes before. “Oh, of course he ‘s
very clever!” And with this she got up; her husband and little boy had
reappeared. Mrs. Ambient left me and went to meet them; she stopped and
had a few words with her husband, which I did not hear, and which ended
in her taking the child by the hand and returning to the house with him.
Her husband joined me in a moment, looking, I thought, the least bit
conscious and constrained, and said that if I would come in with him he
would show me my room. In looking back upon these first moments of my
visit to him, I find it important to avoid the error of appearing to
have understood his situation from the first, and to have seen in him
the signs of things which I learnt only afterwards. This later knowledge
throws a backward light, and makes me forget that at least on the
occasion of which I am speaking now (I mean that first afternoon), Mark
Ambient struck me as a fortunate man. Allowing for this, I think he was
rather silent and irresponsive as we walked back to the house, though I
remember well the answer he made to a remark of mine in relation to his
child.
“That’s an extraordinary little boy of yours,” I said. “I have never
seen such a child.”
“Why do you call him extraordinary?”
“He’s so beautiful, so fascinating. He’s like a little work of art.”
He turned quickly, grasping my arm an instant. “Oh, don’t call him that,
or you ‘ll--you ‘ll--!”
And in his hesitation he broke off suddenly, laughing at my surprise.
But immediately afterwards he added, “You will make his little future
very difficult.”
I declared that I wouldn’t for the world take any liberties with his
little future--it seemed to me to hang by threads of such delicacy. I
should only be highly interested in watching it.
“You Americans are very sharp,” said Ambient “You notice more things
than we do.”
“Ah, if you want visitors who are not struck with you, you should n’t
ask me down here!”
He showed me my room, a little bower of chintz, with open windows where
the light was green, and before he left me he said irrelevantly, “As for
my little boy, you know, we shall probably kill him between us, before
wo have done with him!” And he made this assertion as if he
really believed it, without any appearance of jest, with his fine,
near-sighted, expressive eyes looking straight into mine.
“Do you mean by spoiling him?”
“No; by fighting for him!”
“You had better give him to me to keep for you,” I said. “Let me remove
the apple of discord.”
I laughed, of course, but he had the air of being perfectly serious.
“It would be quite the best thing we could do. I should be quite ready
to do it.”
“I am greatly obliged to you for your confidence.”
Mark Ambient lingered there, with his hands in his pockets. I felt,
within a few moments, as if I had, morally speaking, taken several
steps nearer to him. He looked weary, just as he faced me then, looked
preoccupied, and as if there were something one might do for him. I was
terribly conscious of the limits of my own ability, but I wondered what
such a service might be, feeling at bottom, however, that the only thing
I could do for him was to like him. I suppose he guessed this, and was
grateful for what was in my mind; for he went on presently, “I have n’t
the advantage of being an American. But I also notice a little, and I
have an idea that--a--” here he smiled and laid his hand on my shoulder,
“that even apart from your nationality, you are not destitute of
intelligence! I have only known you half an hour, but--a--” And here he
hesitated again. “You are very young, after all.”
“But you may treat me as if I could understand you!” I said; and before
he left me to dress for dinner he had virtually given me a promise that
he would.
When I went down into the drawing-room--I was very punctual--I found
that neither my hostess nor my host had appeared. A lady rose from a
sofa, however, and inclined her head as I rather surprisedly gazed at
her. “I dare say you don’t know me,” she said, with the modern laugh.
“I am Mark Ambient’s sister.” Whereupon I shook hands with her, saluting
her very low. Her laugh was modern--by which I mean that it consisted
of the vocal agitation which, between people who meet in drawing-rooms,
serves as the solvent of social mysteries, the medium of transitions;
but her appearance was--what shall I call it?--mediaeval. She was pale
and angular, with a long, thin face, inhabited by sad, dark eyes, and
black hair intertwined with golden fillets and curious chains. She wore
a faded velvet robe, which clung to her when she moved, fashioned, as
to the neck and sleeves, like the garments of old Venetians and
Florentines. She looked pictorial and melancholy, and was so perfect an
image of a type which I, in my ignorance, supposed to be extinct, that
while she rose before me I was almost as much startled as if I had seen
a ghost. I afterwards perceived that Miss Ambient was not incapable
of deriving pleasure from the effect she produced, and I think this
sentiment had something to do with her sinking again into her seat, with
her long, lean, but not ungraceful arms locked together in an archaic
manner on her knees, and her mournful eyes addressing themselves to
me with an intentness which was a menace of what they were destined
subsequently to inflict upon me. She was a singular, self-conscious,
artificial creature, and I never, subsequently, more than half
penetrated her motives and, mysteries. Of one thing I am sure, however:
that they were considerably less extraordinary than her appearance
announced. Miss Ambient was a restless, disappointed, imaginative
spinster, consumed with the love of Michael-Angelesque attitudes and
mystical robes; but I am pretty sure she had not in her nature those
depths of unutterable thought which, when you first knew her, seemed
to look out from her eyes and to prompt her complicated gestures. Those
features, in especial, had a misleading eloquence; they rested upon
you with a far-off dimness, an air of obstructed sympathy, which was
certainly not always a key to the spirit of their owner; and I
suspect that a young lady could not really have been so dejected and
disillusioned as Miss Ambient looked, without having committed a crime
for which she was consumed with remorse, or parted with a hope which
she could not sanely have entertained. She had, I believe, the usual
allowance of vulgar impulses: she wished to be looked at, she wished to
be married, she wished to be thought original. It costs me something to
speak in this irreverent manner of Mark Ambient’s sister, but I shall
have still more disagreeable things to say before I have finished my
little anecdote, and moreover,--I confess it,--I owe the young lady a
sort of grudge. Putting aside the curious cast of her face, she had
no natural aptitude for an artistic development,--she had little real
intelligence. But her affectations rubbed off on her brother’s renown,
and as there were plenty of people who disapproved of him totally, they
could easily point to his sister as a person formed by his influence. It
was quite possible to regard her as a warning, and she had done him but
little good with the world at large. He was the original, and she
was the inevitable imitation. I think he was scarcely aware of the
impression she produced, beyond having a general idea that she made
up very well as a Rossetti; he was used to her, and he was sorry for
her,--wishing she would marry and observing that she did n’t Doubtless I
take her too seriously, for she did me no harm, though I am bound to add
that I feel I can only half account for her. She was not so mystical as
she looked, but she was a strange, indirect, uncomfortable, embarrassing
woman. My story will give the reader at best so very small a knot to
untie that I need not hope to excite his curiosity by delaying to
remark that Mrs. Ambient hated her sister-in-law. This I only found
out afterwards, when I found out some other things. But I mention it at
once, for I shall perhaps not seem to count too much on having enlisted
the imagination of the reader if I say that he will already have guessed
it Mrs. Ambient was a person of conscience, and she endeavored to behave
properly to her kinswoman, who spent a month with her twice a year; but
it required no great insight to discover that the two ladies were made
of a very different paste, and that the usual feminine hypocrisies must
have cost them, on either side, much more than the usual effort. Mrs.
Ambient, smooth-haired, thin-lipped, perpetually fresh, must have
regarded her crumpled and dishevelled visitor as a very stale joke; she
herself was not a Rossetti, but a Gainsborough or a Lawrence, and she
had in her appearance no elements more romantic than a cold, ladylike
candor, and a well-starched muslin dress.
It was in a garment, and with an expression, of this kind, that she made
her entrance, after I had exchanged a few words with Miss Ambient. Her
husband presently followed her, and there being no other company we went
to dinner. The impression I received from that repast is present to me
still. There were elements of oddity in my companions, but they were
vague and latent, and did n’t interfere with my delight It came mainly,
of course, from Ambient’s talk, which was the most brilliant and
interesting I had ever heard. I know not whether he laid himself out
to dazzle a rather juvenile pilgrim from over the sea; but it matters
little, for it was very easy for him to shine. He was almost better as
a talker than as a writer; that is, if the extraordinary finish of his
written prose be really, as some people have maintained, a fault. There
was such a kindness in him, however, that I have no doubt it gave him
ideas to see me sit open-mouthed, as I suppose I did. Not so the two
ladies, who not only were very nearly dumb from beginning to the end
of the meal, but who had not the air of being struck with such an
exhibition of wit and knowledge. Mrs. Ambient, placid and detached, met
neither my eye nor her husband’s; she attended to her dinner, watched
the servants, arranged the puckers in her dress, exchanged at wide
intervals a remark with her sister-in-law, and while she slowly rubbed
her white hands between the courses, looked out of the window at the
first signs of twilight--the long June day allowing us to dine without
candles.. Miss Ambient appeared to give little direct heed to her
brother’s discourse; but on the other hand she was much engaged in
watching its effect upon me. Her lustreless pupils continued to attach
themselves to my countenance, and it was only her air of belonging to
another century that kept them from being importunate. She seemed to
look at me across the ages, and the interval of time diminished the
vividness of the performance. It was as if she knew in a general way
that her brother must be talking very well, but she herself was so rich
in ideas that she had no need to pick them up, and was at liberty to see
what would become of a young American when subjected to a high aesthetic
temperature.
The temperature was æsthetic, certainly, but it was less so than I could
have desired, for I was unsuccessful in certain little attempts to make
Mark Ambient talk about himself I tried to put him on the ground of his
own writings, but he slipped through my fingers every time and shifted
the saddle to one of his contemporaries. He talked about Balzac and
Browning, and what was being done in foreign countries, and about his
recent tour in the East, and the extraordinary forms of life that one
saw in that part of the world. I perceived that he had reasons for not
wishing to descant upon literature, and suffered him without protest
to deliver himself on certain social topics, which he treated with
extraordinary humor and with constant revelations of that power of
ironical portraiture of which his books are full. He had a great deal
to say about London, as London appears to the observer who does n’t fear
the accusation of cynicism, during the high-pressure time--from April
to July--of its peculiarities. He flashed his faculty of making the
fanciful real and the real fanciful over the perfunctory pleasures and
desperate exertions of so many of his compatriots, among whom there were
evidently not a few types for which he had little love. London bored him,
and he made capital sport of it; his only allusion, that I can remember,
to his own work was his saying that he meant some day to write an
immense grotesque epic of London society. Miss Ambient’s perpetual gaze
seemed to say to me: “Do you perceive how artistic we are? Frankly now,
is it possible to be more artistic than this? You surely won’t deny that
we are remarkable.” I was irritated by her use of the plural pronoun,
for she had no right to pair herself with her brother; and moreover, of
course, I could not see my way to include Mrs. Ambient. But there was
no doubt that, for that matter, they were all remarkable, and, with
all allowances, I had never heard anything so artistic. Mark Ambient’s
conversation seemed to play over the whole field of knowledge and taste,
and to flood it with light and color.
After the ladies had left us he took me into his study to smoke, and
here I led him on to talk freely enough about himself. I was bent upon
proving to him that I was worthy to listen to him, upon repaying him
for what he had said to me before dinner, by showing him how perfectly
I understood. He liked to talk; he liked to defend his ideas (not that
I attacked them); he liked a little perhaps--it was a pardonable
weakness--to astonish the youthful mind and to feel its admiration
and sympathy. I confess that my own youthful mind was considerably
astonished at some of his speeches; he startled me and he made me wince.
He could not help forgetting, or rather he could n’t know, how little
personal contact I had had with the school in which he was master; and
he promoted me at a jump, as it were, to the study of its innermost
mysteries. My trepidations, however, were delightful; they were just
what I had hoped for, and their only fault was that they passed away too
quickly; for I found that, as regards most things, I very soon seized
Mark Ambient’s point of view. It was the point of view of the artist to
whom every manifestation of human energy was a thrilling spectacle, and
who felt forever the desire to resolve his experience of life into a
literary form. On this matter of the passion for form,--the attempt at
perfection, the quest for which was to his mind the real search for the
holy grail,--he said the most interesting, the most inspiring things. He
mixed with them a thousand illustrations from his own life, from other
lives that he had known, from history and fiction, and above all from
the annals of the time that was dear to him beyond all periods,--the
Italian _cinque-cento_. I saw that in his books he had only said half
of his thought, and what he had kept back--from motives that I deplored
when I learnt them later--was the richer part It was his fortune to
shock a great many people, but there was not a grain of bravado in his
pages (I have always maintained it, though often contradicted), and at
bottom the poor fellow, an artist to his fingertips, and regarding a
failure of completeness as a crime, had an extreme dread of scandal.
There are people who regret that having gone so far he did not go
further; but I regret nothing (putting aside two or three of the motives
I just mentioned), for he arrived at perfection, and I don’t see how you
can go beyond that The hours I spent in his study--this first one and
the few that followed it; they were not, after all, so numerous--seem
to glow, as I look back on them, with a tone which is partly that of
the brown old room, rich, under the shaded candlelight where we sat and
smoked, with the dusky, delicate bindings of valuable books; partly that
of his voice, of which I still catch the echo, charged with the images
that came at his command. When we went back to the drawing-room we found
Miss Ambient alone in possession of it; and she informed us that her
sister-in-law had a quarter of an hour before been called by the nurse
to see Dolcino, who appeared to be a little feverish.
“Feverish! how in the world does he come to be feverish?” Ambient asked.
“He was perfectly well this afternoon.”
“Beatrice says you walked him about too much--you almost killed him.”
“Beatrice must be very happy--she has an opportunity to triumph!” Mark
Ambient said, with a laugh of which the bitterness was just perceptible.
“Surely not if the child is ill,” I ventured to remark, by way of
pleading for Mrs. Ambient.
“My dear fellow, you are not married--you don’t know the nature of
wives!” my host exclaimed.
“Possibly not; but I know the nature of mothers.”
“Beatrice is perfect as a mother,” said Miss Ambient, with a tremendous
sigh and her fingers interlaced on her embroidered knees.
“I shall go up and see the child,” her brother went on. “Do you suppose
he’s asleep?”
“Beatrice won’t let you see him, Mark,” said the young lady, looking at
me, though she addressed, our companion.
“Do you call that being perfect as a mother?” Ambient inquired.
“Yes, from her point of view.”
“Damn her point of view!” cried the author of _Beltraffio_. And he left
the room; after which we heard him ascend the stairs.
I sat there for some ten minutes with Miss Ambient, and we naturally had
some conversation, which was begun, I think, by my asking her what the
point of view of her sister-in-law could be.
“Oh, it’s so very odd,” she said. “But we are so very odd, altogether.
Don’t you find us so? We have lived so much abroad. Have you people like
us in America?”
“You are not all alike, surely; so that I don’t think I understand your
question. We have no one like your brother--I may go so far as that.”
“You have probably more persons like his wife,” said Miss Ambient,
smiling.
“I can tell you that better when you have told me about her point of
view.”
“Oh, yes--oh, yes. Well, she does n’t like his ideas. She doesn’t like
them for the child. She thinks them undesirable.”
Being quite fresh from the contemplation of some of Mark Ambient’s
_arcana_, I was particularly in a position to appreciate this
announcement. But the effect of it was to make me, after staring a
moment, burst into laughter, which I instantly checked when I remembered
that there was a sick child above.
“What has that infant to do with ideas?” I asked “Surely, he can’t tell
one from another. Has he read his father’s novels?”
“He’s very precocious and very sensitive, and his mother thinks she
can’t begin to guard him too early.” Miss Ambient’s head drooped a
little to one side, and her eyes fixed themselves on futurity. Then
suddenly there was a strange alteration in her face; she gave a smile
that was more joyless than her gravity--a conscious, insincere smile,
and added, “When one has children, it’s a great responsibility--what one
writes.”
“Children are terrible critics,” I answered. “I am rather glad I have
n’t got any.”
“Do you also write then? And in the same style as my brother? And do you
like that style? And do people appreciate it in America? I don’t write,
but I think I feel.” To these and various other inquiries and remarks
the young lady treated me, till we heard her brother’s step in the hall
again, and Mark Ambient reappeared. He looked flushed and serious, and I
supposed that he had seen something to alarm him in the condition of his
child. His sister apparently had another idea; she gazed at him a moment
as if he were a burning ship on the horizon, and simply murmured, “Poor
old Mark!”
“I hope you are not anxious,” I said.
“No, but I ‘m disappointed. She won’t let me in. She has locked the
door, and I ‘m afraid to make a noise.” I suppose there might have been
something ridiculous in a confession of this kind, but I liked my new
friend so much that for me it did n’t detract from his dignity. “She
tells me--from behind the door--that she will let me know if he is
worse.”
“It’s very good of her,” said Miss Ambient
I had exchanged a glance with Mark in which it is possible that he read
that my pity for him was untinged with contempt, though I know not why
he should have cared; and as, presently, his sister got up and took her
bedroom candlestick, he proposed that we should go back to his study. We
sat there till after midnight; he put himself into his slippers, into an
old velvet jacket, lighted an ancient pipe, and talked considerably less
than he had done before.
There were longish pauses in our communion, but they only made me feel
that we had advanced in intimacy. They helped me, too, to understand my
friend’s personal situation, and to perceive that it was by no means the
happiest possible. When his face was quiet, it was vaguely troubled; it
seemed to me to show that for him, too, life was a struggle, as it has
been for many another man of genius. At last I prepared to leave him,
and then, to my ineffable joy, he gave me some of the sheets of his
forthcoming book,--it was not finished, but he had indulged in the
luxury, so dear to writers of deliberation, of having it “set up,” from
chapter to chapter, as he advanced,--he gave me, I say, the early
pages, the _prémices_, as the French have it, of this new fruit of his
imagination, to take to my room and look over at my leisure. I was just
quitting him when the door of his study was noiselessly pushed open, and
Mrs. Ambient stood before us. She looked at us a moment, with her candle
in her hand, and then she said to her husband that as she supposed he
had not gone to bed, she had come down to tell him that Dolcino was more
quiet and would probably be better in the morning. Mark Ambient made no
reply; he simply slipped past her in the doorway, as if he were afraid
she would seize him in his passage, and bounded upstairs, to judge
for himself of his child’s condition. Mrs. Ambient looked slightly
discomfited, and for a moment I thought she was going to give chase
to her husband. But she resigned herself, with a sigh, while her eyes
wandered over the lamp-lit room, where various books, at which I had
been looking, were pulled out of their places on the shelves, and the
fumes of tobacco seemed to hang in mid-air. I bade her good-night, and
then, without intention, by a kind of fatality, the perversity which had
already made me insist unduly on talking with her about her husband’s
achievements, I alluded to the precious proof-sheets with which Ambient
had intrusted me and which I was nursing there under my arm. “It is the
opening chapters of his new book,” I said. “Fancy my satisfaction at
being allowed to carry them to my room!”