I
"I say, you know, Kate--you _did_ stay!" had been Merton Densher's
punctual remark on their adventure after they had, as it were, got out
of it; an observation which she not less promptly, on her side, let him
see that she forgave in him only because he was a man. She had to
recognise, with whatever disappointment, that it was doubtless the most
helpful he could make in this character. The fact of the adventure was
flagrant between them; they had looked at each other, on gaining the
street, as people look who have just rounded together a dangerous
corner, and there was therefore already enough unanimity sketched out
to have lighted, for her companion, anything equivocal in her action.
But the amount of light men _did_ need!--Kate could have been eloquent
at this moment about that. What, however, on his seeing more, struck
him as most distinct in her was her sense that, reunited after his
absence and having been now half the morning together, it behooved them
to face without delay the question of handling their immediate future.
That it would require some handling, that they should still have to
deal, deal in a crafty manner, with difficulties and delays, was the
great matter he had come back to, greater than any but the refreshed
consciousness of their personal need of each other. This need had had
twenty minutes, the afternoon before, to find out where it stood, and
the time was fully accounted for by the charm of the demonstration. He
had arrived at Euston at five, having wired her from Liverpool the
moment he landed, and she had quickly decided to meet him at the
station, whatever publicity might attend such an act. When he had
praised her for it on alighting from his train she had answered frankly
enough that such things should be taken at a jump. She didn't care
to-day who saw her, and she profited by it for her joy. To-morrow,
inevitably, she should have time to think and then, as inevitably,
would become a baser creature, a creature of alarms and precautions. It
was none the less for to-morrow at an early hour that she had appointed
their next meeting, keeping in mind for the present a particular
obligation to show at Lancaster Gate by six o'clock. She had given,
with imprecations, her reason--people to tea, eternally, and a promise
to Aunt Maud; but she had been liberal enough on the spot and had
suggested the National Gallery for the morning quite as with an idea
that had ripened in expectancy. They might be seen there too, but
nobody would know them; just as, for that matter, now, in the
refreshment-room to which they had adjourned, they would incur the
notice but, at the worst, of the unacquainted. They would "have
something" there for the facility it would give. Thus had it already
come up for them again that they had no place of convenience.
He found himself on English soil with all sorts of feelings, but he
hadn't quite faced having to reckon with a certain ruefulness in regard
to that subject as one of the strongest. He was aware later on that
there were questions his impatience had shirked; whereby it actually
rather smote him, for want of preparation and assurance, that he had
nowhere to "take" his love. He had taken it thus, at Euston--and on
Kate's own suggestion--into the place where people had beer and buns,
and had ordered tea at a small table in the corner; which, no doubt, as
they were lost in the crowd, did well enough for a stop-gap. It perhaps
did as well as her simply driving with him to the door of his lodging,
which had had to figure as the sole device of his own wit. That wit,
the truth was, had broken down a little at the sharp prevision that
once at his door they would have to hang back. She would have to stop
there, wouldn't come in with him, couldn't possibly; and he shouldn't
be able to ask her, would feel he couldn't without betraying a
deficiency of what would be called, even at their advanced stage,
respect for her: that again was all that was clear except the further
fact that it was maddening. Compressed and concentrated, confined to a
single sharp pang or two, but none the less in wait for him there on
the Euston platform and lifting its head as that of a snake in the
garden, was the disconcerting sense that "respect," in their game,
seemed somehow--he scarce knew what to call it--a fifth wheel to the
coach. It was properly an inside thing, not an outside, a thing to make
love greater, not to make happiness less. They had met again for
happiness, and he distinctly felt, during his most lucid moment or two,
how he must keep watch on anything that really menaced that boon. If
Kate had consented to drive away with him and alight at his house there
would probably enough have occurred for them, at the foot of his steps,
one of those strange instants between man and woman that blow upon the
red spark, the spark of conflict, ever latent in the depths of passion.
She would have shaken her head--oh sadly, divinely--on the question of
coming in; and he, though doing all justice to her refusal, would have
yet felt his eyes reach further into her own than a possible word at
such a time could reach. This would have meant the suspicion, the dread
of the shadow, of an adverse will. Lucky therefore in the actual case
that the scant minutes took another turn and that by the half-hour she
did in spite of everything contrive to spend with him Kate showed so
well how she could deal with things that maddened. She seemed to ask
him, to beseech him, and all for his better comfort, to leave her, now
and henceforth, to treat them in her own way.
She had still met it in naming so promptly, for their early
convenience, one of the great museums; and indeed with such happy art
that his fully seeing where she had placed him hadn't been till after
he left her. His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an
effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the
night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of
the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity.
He hadn't in other words at any point doubted he was on his way to say
to her that really their mistake must end. Their mistake was to have
believed that they _could hold out_--hold out, that is, not against
Aunt Maud, but against an impatience that, prolonged and exasperated,
made a man ill. He had known more than ever, on their separating in the
court of the station, how ill a man, and even a woman, could feel from
such a cause; but he struck himself as also knowing that he had already
suffered Kate to begin finely to apply antidotes and remedies and
subtle sedatives. It had a vulgar sound--as throughout, in love, the
names of things, the verbal terms of intercourse, were, compared with
love itself, horribly vulgar; but it was as if, after all, he might
have come back to find himself "put off," though it would take him of
course a day or two to see. His letters from the States had pleased
whom it concerned, though not so much as he had meant they should; and
he should be paid according to agreement and would now take up his
money. It wasn't in truth very much to take up, so that he hadn't in
the least come back flourishing a cheque-book; that new motive for
bringing his mistress to terms he couldn't therefore pretend to
produce. The ideal certainty would have been to be able to present a
change of prospect as a warrant for the change of philosophy, and
without it he should have to make shift but with the pretext of the
lapse of time. The lapse of time--not so many weeks after all, she
might always of course say--couldn't at any rate have failed to do
something for him; and that consideration it was that had just now
tided him over, all the more that he had his vision of what it had done
personally for Kate. This had come out for him with a splendour that
almost scared him even in their small corner of the room at
Euston--almost scared him because it just seemed to blaze at him that
waiting was the game of dupes. Not yet had she been so the creature he
had originally seen; not yet had he felt so soundly safely sure. It was
all there for him, playing on his pride of possession as a hidden
master in a great dim church might play on the grandest organ. His
final sense was that a woman couldn't be like that and then ask of one
the impossible.
She had been like that afresh on the morrow; and so for the hour they
had been able to float in the mere joy of contact--such contact as
their situation in pictured public halls permitted. This poor makeshift
for closeness confessed itself in truth, by twenty small signs of
unrest even on Kate's part, inadequate; so little could a decent
interest in the interesting place presume to remind them of its claims.
They had met there in order not to meet in the streets and not again,
with an equal want of invention and of style, at a railway-station; not
again, either, in Kensington Gardens, which, they could easily and
tacitly agree, would have had too much of the taste of their old
frustrations. The present taste, the taste that morning in the pictured
halls, had been a variation; yet Densher had at the end of a quarter of
an hour fully known what to conclude from it. This fairly consoled him
for their awkwardness, as if he had been watching it affect her. She
might be as nobly charming as she liked, and he had seen nothing to
touch her in the States; she couldn't pretend that in such conditions
as those she herself _believed_ it enough to appease him. She couldn't
pretend she believed he would believe it enough to render her a like
service. It wasn't enough for that purpose--she as good as showed him
it wasn't. That was what he could be glad, by demonstration, to have
brought her to. He would have said to her had he put it crudely and on
the spot: "_Now_ am I to understand you that you consider this sort of
thing can go on?" It would have been open to her, no doubt, to reply
that to have him with her again, to have him all kept and treasured, so
still, under her grasping hand, as she had held him in their yearning
interval, was a sort of thing that he must allow her to have no quarrel
about; but that would be a mere gesture of her grace, a mere sport of
her subtlety. She knew as well as he what they wanted; in spite of
which indeed he scarce could have said how beautifully he mightn't once
more have named it and urged it if she hadn't, at a given moment,
blurred, as it were, the accord. They had soon seated themselves for
better talk, and so they had remained a while, intimate and
superficial. The immediate things to say had been many, for they hadn't
exhausted them at Euston. They drew upon them freely now, and Kate
appeared quite to forget--which was prodigiously becoming to her--to
look about for surprises. He was to try afterwards, and try in vain, to
remember what speech or what silence of his own, what natural sign of
the eyes or accidental touch of the hand, had precipitated for her, in
the midst of this, a sudden different impulse. She had got up, with
inconsequence, as if to break the charm, though he wasn't aware of what
he had done at the moment to make the charm a danger. She had patched
it up agreeably enough the next minute by some odd remark about some
picture, to which he hadn't so much as replied; it being quite
independently of this that he had himself exclaimed on the dreadful
closeness of the rooms. He had observed that they must go out again to
breathe; and it was as if their common consciousness, while they passed
into another part, was that of persons who, infinitely engaged
together, had been startled and were trying to look natural. It was
probably while they were so occupied--as the young man subsequently
reconceived--that they had stumbled upon his little New York friend. He
thought of her for some reason as little, though she was of about
Kate's height, to which, any more than to any other felicity in his
mistress, he had never applied the diminutive.
What was to be in the retrospect more distinct to him was the process
by which he had become aware that Kate's acquaintance with her was
greater than he had gathered. She had written of it in due course as a
new and amusing one, and he had written back that he had met over
there, and that he much liked, the young person; whereupon she had
answered that he must find out about her at home. Kate, in the event,
however, had not returned to that, and he had of course, with so many
things to find out about, been otherwise taken up. Little Miss Theale's
individual history was not stuff for his newspaper; besides which,
moreover, he was seeing but too many little Miss Theales. They even
went so far as to impose themselves as one of the groups of social
phenomena that fell into the scheme of his public letters. For this
group in especial perhaps--the irrepressible, the supereminent young
persons--his best pen was ready. Thus it was that there could come back
to him in London, an hour or two after their luncheon with the American
pair, the sense of a situation for which Kate hadn't wholly prepared
him. Possibly indeed as marked as this was his recovered perception
that preparations, of more than one kind, had been exactly what, both
yesterday and to-day, he felt her as having in hand. That appearance in
fact, if he dwelt on it, so ministered to apprehension as to require
some brushing away. He shook off the suspicion to some extent, on their
separating first from their hostesses and then from each other, by the
aid of a long and rather aimless walk. He was to go to the office
later, but he had the next two or three hours, and he gave himself as a
pretext that he had eaten much too much. After Kate had asked him to
put her into a cab--which, as an announced, a resumed policy on her
part, he found himself deprecating--he stood a while by a corner and
looked vaguely forth at his London. There was always doubtless a moment
for the absentee recaptured--_the_ moment, that of the reflux of the
first emotion--at which it was beyond disproof that one was back. His
full parenthesis was closed, and he was once more but a sentence, of a
sort, in the general text, the text that, from his momentary
street-corner, showed as a great grey page of print that somehow
managed to be crowded without being "fine." The grey, however, was more
or less the blur of a point of view not yet quite seized again; and
there would be colour enough to come out. He was back, flatly enough,
but back to possibilities and prospects, and the ground he now somewhat
sightlessly covered was the act of renewed possession.
He walked northward without a plan, without suspicion, quite in the
direction his little New York friend, in her restless ramble, had taken
a day or two before. He reached, like Milly, the Regent's Park; and
though he moved further and faster he finally sat down, like Milly,
from the force of thought. For him too in this position, be it
added--and he might positively have occupied the same bench--various
troubled fancies folded their wings. He had no more yet said what he
really wanted than Kate herself had found time. She should hear enough
of that in a couple of days. He had practically not pressed her as to
what most concerned them; it had seemed so to concern them during these
first hours but to hold each other, spiritually speaking, close. This
at any rate was palpable, that there were at present more things rather
than fewer between them. The explanation about the two ladies would be
part of the lot, yet could wait with all the rest. They were not
meanwhile certainly what most made him roam--the missing explanations
weren't. That was what she had so often said before, and always with
the effect of suddenly breaking off: "Now please call me a good cab."
Their previous encounters, the times when they had reached in their
stroll the south side of the park, had had a way of winding up with
this special irrelevance. It was effectively what most divided them,
for he would generally, but for her reasons, have been able to jump in
with her. What did she think he wished to do to her?--it was a question
he had had occasion to put. A small matter, however, doubtless--since,
when it came to that, they didn't depend on cabs good or bad for the
sense of union: its importance was less from the particular loss than
as a kind of irritating mark of her expertness. This expertness, under
providence, had been great from the first, so far as joining him was
concerned; and he was critical only because it had been still greater,
even from the first too, in respect to leaving him. He had put the
question to her again that afternoon, on the repetition of her
appeal--had asked her once more what she supposed he wished to do. He
recalled, on his bench in the Regent's Park, the freedom of fancy,
funny and pretty, with which she had answered; recalled the moment
itself, while the usual hansom charged them, during which he felt
himself, disappointed as he was, grimacing back at the superiority of
her very "humour," in its added grace of gaiety, to the celebrated
solemn American. Their fresh appointment had been at all events by that
time made, and he should see what her choice in respect to it--a
surprise as well as a relief--would do toward really simplifying. It
meant either new help or new hindrance, though it took them at least
out of the streets. And her naming this privilege had naturally made
him ask if Mrs. Lowder knew of his return.
"Not from me," Kate had replied. "But I shall speak to her now." And
she had argued, as with rather a quick fresh view, that it would now be
quite easy. "We've behaved for months so properly that I've margin
surely for my mention of you. You'll come to see _her_, and she'll
leave you with me; she'll show her good nature, and her lack of
betrayed fear, in that. With her, you know, you've never broken, quite
the contrary, and she likes you as much as ever. We're leaving town; it
will be the end; just now therefore it's nothing to ask. I'll ask
to-night," Kate had wound up, "and if you'll leave it to me--my
cleverness, I assure you, has grown infernal--I'll make it all right."
He had of course thus left it to her and he was wondering more about it
now than he had wondered there in Brook Street. He repeated to himself
that if it wasn't in the line of triumph it was in the line of muddle.
This indeed, no doubt, was as a part of his wonder for still other
questions. Kate had really got off without meeting his little challenge
about the terms of their intercourse with her dear Milly. Her dear
Milly, it was sensible, _was_ somehow in the picture. Her dear Milly,
popping up in his absence, occupied--he couldn't have said quite why he
felt it--more of the foreground than one would have expected her in
advance to find clear. She took up room, and it was almost as if room
had been made for her. Kate had appeared to take for granted he would
know why it had been made; but that was just the point. It was a
foreground in which he himself, in which his connexion with Kate,
scarce enjoyed a space to turn round. But Miss Theale was perhaps at
the present juncture a possibility of the same sort as the softened, if
not the squared, Aunt Maud. It might be true of her also that if she
weren't a bore she'd be a convenience. It rolled over him of a sudden,
after he had resumed his walk, that this might easily be what Kate had
meant. The charming girl adored her--Densher had for himself made out
that--and would protect, would lend a hand, to their interviews. These
might take place, in other words, on her premises, which would remove
them still better from the streets. _That_ was an explanation which did
hang together. It was impaired a little, of a truth, by this fact that
their next encounter was rather markedly not to depend upon her. Yet
this fact in turn would be accounted for by the need of more
preliminaries. One of the things he conceivably should gain on Thursday
at Lancaster Gate would be a further view of that propriety.