hall; but before we separated, thinking it apparently a good occasion
to let me know once for all--since I was beginning, it would seem, to be
quite “thick” with my host--that there was no fitness in my appealing
to her for sympathy in such a case; before we separated, I say, she
remarked to me with her quick, round, well-bred utterance, “I dare say
you attribute to me ideas that I have n’t got I don’t take that sort
of interest in my husband’s proof-sheets. I consider his writings most
objectionable!”
PART II.
I had some curious conversation the next morning with Miss Ambient, whom
I found strolling in the garden before breakfast The whole place looked
as fresh and trim, amid the twitter of the birds, as if, an hour
before, the housemaids had been turned into it with their dustpans and
feather-brushes, I almost hesitated to light a cigarette, and was doubly
startled when, in the act of doing so, I suddenly perceived the
sister of my host, who had, in any case, something of the oddity of
an apparition, standing before me. She might have been posing for her
photograph. Her sad-colored robe arranged itself in serpentine folds at
her feet; her hands locked themselves listlessly together in front; and
her chin rested upon a cinque-cento ruff. The first thing I did,
after bidding her good-morning, was to ask her for news of her little
nephew,--to express the hope that she had heard he was better. She was
able to gratify this hope, and spoke as if we might expect to see him
during the day. We walked through the shrubberies together, and she gave
me a great deal of information about her brother’s ménage, which offered
me an opportunity to mention to her that his wife had told me, the night
before, that she thought his productions objectionable.
“She does n’t usually come out with that so soon!” Miss Ambient
exclaimed, in answer to this piece of gossip. “Poor lady, she saw that
I am a fanatic.” “Yes, she won’t like you for that. But you must n’t
mind, if the rest of us like you! Beatrice thinks a work of art ought
to have a ‘purpose.’ But she’s a charming woman--don’t you think her
charming?--she’s such a type of the lady.”
“She’s very beautiful,” I answered; while I reflected that though it
was true, apparently, that Mark Ambient was mismated, it was also
perceptible that his sister was perfidious. She told me that her
brother and his wife had no other difference but this one, that she
thought his writings immoral and his influence pernicious. It was a
fixed idea; she was afraid of these things for the child. I answered
that it was not a trifle--a woman’s regarding her husband’s mind as a
well of corruption, and she looked quite struck with the novelty of my
remark. “But there has n’t been any of the sort of trouble that there so
often is among married people,” she said. “I suppose you can judge for
yourself that Beatrice isn’t at all--well, whatever they call it when a
woman misbehaves herself. And Mark does n’t make love to other people,
either. I assure you he does n’t! All the same, of course, from her
point of view, you know, she has a dread of my brother’s influence on
the child--on the formation of his character, of his principles. It is
as if it were a subtle poison, or a contagion, or something that would
rub off on Dolcino when his father kisses him or holds him on his knee.
If she could, she would prevent Mark from ever touching him. Every one
knows it; visitors see it for themselves; so there is no harm in my
telling you. Isn’t it excessively odd? It comes from Beatrice’s being so
religious, and so tremendously moral, and all that and then, of course,
we must n’t forget,” my companion added, unexpectedly, “that some of
Mark’s ideas are--well, really--rather queer!”
I reflected, as we went into the house, where we found Ambient unfolding
the _Observer_ at the breakfast-table, that none of them were probably
quite so queer as his sister. Mrs. Ambient did not appear at breakfast,
being rather tired with her ministrations, during the night, to Dolcino.
Her husband mentioned, however, that she was hoping to go to church. I
afterwards learned that she did go, but I may as well announce without
delay that he and I did not accompany her. It was while the church-bell
was murmuring in the distance that the author of _Beltraffio_ led me
forth for the ramble he had spoken of in his note. I will not attempt to
say where we went, or to describe what we saw. We kept to the fields
and copses and commons, and breathed the same sweet air as the nibbling
donkeys and the browsing sheep, whose woolliness seemed to me, in those
early days of my acquaintance with English objects, but a part of the
general texture of the small, dense landscape, which looked as if the
harvest were gathered by the shears. Everything was full of expression
for Mark Ambient’s visitor,--from the big, bandy-legged geese, whose
whiteness was a “note,” amid all the tones of green, as they wandered
beside a neat little oval pool, the foreground of a thatched and
whitewashed inn, with a grassy approach and a pictorial sign,--from
these humble wayside animals to the crests of high woods which let a
gable or a pinnacle peep here and there, and looked, even at a distance,
like trees of good company, conscious of an individual profile. I
admired the hedgerows, I plucked the faint-hued heather, and I was
forever stopping to say how charming I thought the thread-like footpaths
across the fields, which wandered, in a diagonal of finer grain, from
one smooth stile to another. Mark Ambient was abundantly good-natured,
and was as much entertained with my observations as I was with the
literary allusions of the landscape. We sat and smoked upon stiles,
broaching paradoxes in the decent English air; we took short cuts across
a park or two, where the bracken was deep and my companion nodded to the
old woman at the gate; we skirted rank covers, which rustled here and
there as wo passed, and we stretched ourselves at last on a heathery
hillside, where, if the sun was not too hot, neither was the earth
too cold, and where the country lay beneath us in a rich blue mist.
Of course I had already told Ambient what I thought of his new novel,
having the previous night read every word of the opening chapters before
I went to bed.
“I am not without hope of being able to make it my best,” he said, as I
went back to the subject, while we turned up our heels to the sky. “At
least the people who dislike my prose--and there are a great many of
them, I believe--will dislike this work most” This was the first time I
had heard him allude to the people who couldn’t read him,--a class which
is supposed always to sit heavy upon the consciousness of the man of
letters. A man organized for literature, as Mark Ambient was,
must certainly have had the normal proportion of sensitiveness,
of irritability; the artistic _ego_, capable in some cases of such
monstrous development, must have been, in his composition, sufficiently
erect and definite. I will not therefore go so far as to say that he
never thought of his detractors, or that he had any illusions with
regard to the number of his admirers (he could never so far have
deceived himself as to believe he was popular); but I may at least
affirm that adverse criticism, as I had occasion to perceive later,
ruffled him visibly but little, that he had an air of thinking it quite
natural he should be offensive to many minds, and that he very seldom
talked about the newspapers, which, by the way, were always very stupid
in regard to the author of _Beltraffio_. Of course he may have thought
about them--the newspapers--night and day; the only point I wish to make
is that he did n’t show it; while, at the same time, he did n’t strike
one as a man who was on his guard. I may add that, as regards his hope
of making the work on which he was then engaged the best of his books,
it was only partly carried out. That place belongs, incontestably, to
_Beltraffio_, in spite of the beauty of certain parts of its successor.
I am pretty sure, however, that he had, at the moment of which I speak,
no sense of failure; he was in love with his idea, which was indeed
magnificent, and though for him, as, I suppose, for every artist, the
act of execution had in it as much torment as joy, he saw his work
growing a little every day and filling-out the largest plan he had yet
conceived. “I want to be truer than I have ever been,” he said, settling
himself on his back, with his hands clasped behind his head; “I want to
give an impression of life itself. No, you may say what you will, I have
always arranged things too much, always smoothed them down and rounded
them off and tucked them in,--done everything to them that life does n’t
do. I have been a slave to the old superstitions.”
“You a slave, my dear Mark Ambient? You have the freest imagination of
our day!”
“All the more shame to me to have done some of the things I have! The
reconciliation of the two women in _Ginistrella_, for instance, which
could never really have taken place. That sort of thing is ignoble;
I blush when I think of it! This new affair must be a golden vessel,
filled with the purest distillation of the actual; and oh, how it
bothers me, the shaping of the vase--the hammering of the metal! I have
to hammer it so fine, so smooth; I don’t do more than an inch or two a
day. And all the while I have to be so careful not to let a drop of the
liquor escape! When I see the kind of things that Life does, I despair
of ever catching her peculiar trick. She has an impudence, life! If one
risked a fiftieth part of the effects she risks! It takes ever so long
to believe it. You don’t know yet, my dear fellow. It is n’t till one
has been watching life for forty years that one finds out half of what
she’s up to! Therefore one’s earlier things must inevitably contain a
mass of rot. And with what one sees, on one side, with its tongue in its
cheek, defying one to be real enough, and on the other the _bonnes gens_
rolling up their eyes at one’s cynicism, the situation has elements of
the ludicrous which the artist himself is doubtless in a position to
appreciate better than any one else. Of course one mustn’t bother about
the _bonnes gens_.” Mark Ambient went on, while my thoughts reverted to
his ladylike wife, as interpreted by his remarkable sister.
“To sink your shaft deep, and polish the plate through which people look
into it--that’s what your work consists of,” I remember remarking.
“Ah, polishing one’s plate--that is the torment of execution!” he
exclaimed, jerking himself up and sitting forward. “The effort to arrive
at a surface--if you think a surface necessary--some people don’t,
happily for them! My dear fellow, if you could see the surface I dream
of, as compared with the one with which I have to content myself. Life
is really too short for art--one hasn’t time to make one’s shell ideally
hard. Firm and bright--firm and bright!--the devilish thing has a way,
sometimes, of being bright without being firm. When I rap it with my
knuckles it doesn’t give the right sound. There are horrible little
flabby spots where I have taken the second-best word, because I could
n’t for the life of me think of the best. If you knew how stupid I am
sometimes! They look to me now like pimples and ulcers on the brow of
beauty!”
“That’s very bad--very bad,” I said, as gravely as I could.
“Very bad? It’s the highest social offence I know; it ought--it
absolutely ought--I’m quite serious--to be capital If I knew I should be
hanged else, I should manage to find the best word. The people who
could n’t--some of them don’t know it when they see it--would shut their
inkstands, and we should n’t be deluged by this flood of rubbish!”
I will not attempt to repeat everything that passed between us, or to
explain just how it was that, every moment I spent in his company, Mark
Ambient revealed to me more and more that he looked at all things from
the standpoint of the artist, felt all life as literary material There
are people who will tell me that this is a poor way of feeling it, and
I am not concerned to defend my statement, having space merely to remark
that there is something to be said for any interest which makes a man
feel so much. If Mark Ambient did really, as I suggested above, have
imaginative contact with “all life,” I, for my part, envy him his
_arriere-pensée_. At any rate it was through the receipt of this
impression of him that by the time we returned I had acquired the
feeling of intimacy I have noted. Before we got up for the homeward
stretch, he alluded to his wife’s having once--or perhaps more than
once--asked him whether he should like Dolcino to read _Beltraffio_.
I think he was unconscious at the moment of all that this conveyed to
me--as well, doubtless, of my extreme curiosity to hear what he had
replied. He had said that he hoped very much Dolcino would read all his
works--when he was twenty; he should like him to know what his father
had done. Before twenty it would be useless; he would n’t understand
them.
“And meanwhile do you propose to hide them,--to lock them up in a
drawer?” Mrs. Ambient had inquired.
“Oh, no; we must simply tell him that they are not intended for small
boys. If you bring him up properly, after that he won t touch them.”
To this Mrs. Ambient had made answer that it would be very awkward when
he was about fifteen; and I asked her husband if it was his opinion in
general, then, that young people should not read novels.
“Good ones--certainly not!” said my companion. I suppose I had had other
views, for I remember saying that, for myself, I was not sure it was bad
for them, if the novels were “good” enough. “Bad for _them_, I don’t say
so much!” Ambient exclaimed. “But very bad, I am afraid, for the novel!”
That oblique, accidental allusion to his wife’s attitude was followed by
a franker style of reference as we walked home. “The difference between
us is simply the opposition between two distinct ways of looking at the
world, which have never succeeded in getting on together, or making any
kind of common ménage, since the beginning of time. They have borne all
sorts of names, and my wife would tell you it’s the difference between
Christian and Pagan. I may be a pagan, but I don’t like the name; it
sounds sectarian. She thinks me, at any rate, no better than an ancient
Greek. It’s the difference between making the most of life and making
the least, so that you ‘ll get another better one in some other time and
place. Will it be a sin to make the most of that one too, I wonder; and
shall we have to be bribed off in the future state, as well as in the
present? Perhaps I care too much for beauty--I don’t know; I delight
in it, I adore it, I think of it continually, I try to produce it, to
reproduce it. My wife holds that we shouldn’t think too much about it
She’s always afraid of that, always on her guard. I don’t know what she
has got on her back! And she’s so pretty, too, herself! Don’t you think
she’s lovely? She was, at any rate, when I married her. At that time I
was n’t aware of that difference I speak of--I thought it all came to
the same thing: in the end, as they say. Well, perhaps it will, in the
end. I don’t know what the end will be. Moreover, I care for seeing
things as they are; that’s the way I try to show them in my novels. But
you must n’t talk to Mrs. Ambient about things as they are. She has a
mortal dread of things as they are.”
“She’s afraid of them for Dolcino,” I said: surprised a moment
afterwards at being in a position--thanks to Miss Ambient--to be so
explanatory; and surprised even now that Mark should n’t have shown
visibly that he wondered what the deuce I knew about it But he did n’t;
he simply exclaimed, with a tenderness that touched me,--
“Ah, nothing shall ever hurt _him!_” He told me more about his wife
before we arrived at the gate of his house, and if it be thought that he
was querulous, I am afraid I must admit that he had some of the foibles
as well as the gifts of the artistic temperament; adding, however,
instantly, that hitherto, to the best of my belief, he had very rarely
complained. “She thinks me immoral--that’s the long and short of it,” he
said, as we paused outside a moment, and his hand rested on one of
the bars of his gate; while his conscious, demonstrative, expressive,
perceptive eyes,--the eyes of a foreigner, I had begun to account them,
much more than of the usual Englishman,--viewing me now evidently
as quite a familiar friend, took part in the declaration. “It’s very
strange, when one thinks it all over, and there’s a grand comicality
in it which I should like to bring out. She is a very nice woman,
extraordinarily well behaved, upright and clever, and with a tremendous
lot of good sense about a good many matters. Yet her conception of a
novel--she has explained it to me once or twice, and she does n’t do it
badly, as exposition--is a thing so false that it makes me blush. It is
a thing so hollow, so dishonest, so lying, in which life is so blinked
and blinded, so dodged and disfigured, that it makes my ears burn. It’s
two different ways of looking at the whole affair,” he repeated, pushing
open the gate. “And they are irreconcilable!” he added, with a sigh.
We went forward to the house, but on the walk, half way to the door,
he stopped, and said to me, “If you are going into this kind of
thing, there’s a fact you should know beforehand; it may save you
some disappointment. There’s a hatred of art, there’s a hatred of
literature!” I looked up at the charming house, with its genial color
and crookedness, and I answered, with a smile, that those evil passions
might exist, but that I should never have expected to find them there.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter, after all,” he said, laughing; which I was glad
to hear, for I was reproaching myself with having excited him.
If I had, his excitement soon passed off, for at lunch he was
delightful; strangely delightful, considering that the difference
between himself and his wife was, as he had said, irreconcilable. He
had the art, by his manner, by his smile, by his natural kindliness, of
reducing the importance of it in the common concerns of life; and Mrs.
Ambient, I must add, lent herself to this transaction with a very good
grace. I watched her, at table, for further illustrations of that fixed
idea of which Miss Ambient had spoken to me; for, in the light of the
united revelations of her sister-in-law and her husband, she had come to
seem to me a very singular personage. I am obliged to say that the signs
of a fanatical temperament were not more striking in my hostess
than before; it was only after a while that her air of incorruptible
conformity, her tapering, monosyllabic correctness, began to appear to
be themselves a cold, thin flame. Certainly, at first, she looked like a
woman with as few passions as possible; but if she had a passion at all,
it would be that of Philistinism. She might have been--for there are
guardian-spirits, I suppose, of all great principles--the angel of
propriety. Mark Ambient, apparently, ten years before, had simply
perceived that she was an angel, without asking himself of what He had
been quite right in calling my attention to her beauty. In looking for
the reason why he should have married her, I saw, more than before, that
she was, physically speaking, a wonderfully cultivated human plant--that
she must have given him many ideas and images. It was impossible to be
more pencilled, more garden-like, more delicately tinted and petalled.
If I had had it in my heart to think Ambient a little of a hypocrite
for appearing to forget at table everything he had said to me during our
walk, I should instantly have cancelled such a judgment, on reflecting
that the good news his wife was able to give him about their little
boy was reason enough for his sudden air of happiness. It may have come
partly, too, from a certain remorse at having complained to me of the
fair lady who sat there,--a desire to show me that he was after all
not so miserable. Dolcino continued to be much better, and he had been
promised he should come downstairs after he had had his dinner. As soon
as we had risen from our own meal Ambient slipped away, evidently for
the purpose of going to his child; and no sooner had I observed this
than I became aware that his wife had simultaneously vanished. It
happened that Miss Ambient and I, both at the same moment, saw the tail
of her dress whisk out of a doorway, which led the young lady to smile
at me, as if I now knew all the secrets of the Ambients. I passed with
her into the garden, and we sat down on a dear old bench which rested
against the west wall of the house. It was a perfect spot for the middle
period of a Sunday in June, and its felicity seemed to come partly from
an antique sun-dial which, rising in front of us and forming the centre
of a small, intricate parterre, measured the moments ever so slowly, and
made them safe for leisure and talk. The garden bloomed in the suffused
afternoon, the tall beeches stood still for an example, and, behind and
above us, a rose-tree of many seasons, clinging to the faded grain of
the brick, expressed the whole character of the place in a familiar,
exquisite smell. It seemed to me a place for genius to have every
sanction, and not to encounter challenges and checks. Miss Ambient asked
me if I had enjoyed my walk with her brother, and whether we had talked
of many things.
“Well, of most things,” I said, smiling, though I remembered that we had
not talked of Miss Ambient.
“And don’t you think some of his theories are very peculiar?”
“Oh, I guess I agree with them all.” I was very particular, for Miss
Ambient’s entertainment, to guess.
“Do you think art is everything?” she inquired in, a moment.
“In art, of course I do!”
“And do you think beauty is everything?”
“I don’t know about its being everything. But it’s very delightful”
“Of course it is difficult for a woman to know how far to go,” said
my companion. “I adore everything that gives a charm to life. I am
intensely sensitive to form. But sometimes I draw back--don’t you see
what I mean?--I don’t quite see where I shall be landed. I only want
to be quiet, after all,” Miss Ambient continued, in a tone of stifled
yearning which seemed to indicate that she had not yet arrived at her
desire. “And one must be good, at any rate, must not one?” she inquired,
with a cadence apparently intended for an assurance that my answer would
settle this recondite question for her. It was difficult for me to
make it very original, and I am afraid I repaid her confidence with an
unblushing platitude. I remember, moreover, appending to it an inquiry,
equally destitute of freshness, and still more wanting perhaps in tact,
as to whether she did not mean to go to church, as that was an obvious
way of being good. She replied that she had performed this duty in the
morning, and that for her, on Sunday afternoon, supreme virtue consisted
in answering the week’s letters. Then suddenly, without transition, she
said to me, “It’s quite a mistake about Dolcino being better. I have seen
him, and he’s not at all right.”
“Surely his mother would know, would n’t she?” I suggested.
She appeared for a moment to be counting the leaves on one of the great
beeches. “As regards most matters, one can easily say what, in a given
situation, my sister-in-law would do. But as regards this one, there are
strange elements at work.”
“Strange elements? Do you mean in the constitution of the child?”
“No, I mean in my sister-in-law’s feelings.”
“Elements of affection, of course; elements of anxiety. Why do you call
them strange?”
She repeated my words. “Elements of affection, elements of anxiety. She
is very anxious.”
Miss Ambient made me vaguely uneasy; she almost frightened me, and I
wished she would go and write her letters. “His father will have seen
him now,” I said, “and if he is not satisfied he will send for the
doctor.”
“The doctor ought to have been here this morning. He lives only two
miles away.”