He was really, notwithstanding, to hear more from her of what she saw;
and the very next occasion had for him still other surprises than that.
He received from Mrs. Lowder on the morning after his visit to Kate the
telegraphic expression of a hope that he might be free to dine with
them that evening; and his freedom affected him as fortunate even
though in some degree qualified by her missive. "Expecting American
friends whom I'm so glad to find you know!" His knowledge of American
friends was clearly an accident of which he was to taste the fruit to
the last bitterness. This apprehension, however, we hasten to add,
enjoyed for him, in the immediate event, a certain merciful shrinkage;
the immediate event being that, at Lancaster Gate, five minutes after
his due arrival, prescribed him for eight-thirty, Mrs. Stringham came
in alone. The long daylight, the postponed lamps, the habit of the
hour, made dinners late and guests still later; so that, punctual as he
was, he had found Mrs. Lowder alone, with Kate herself not yet in the
field. He had thus had with her several bewildering
moments--bewildering by reason, fairly, of their tacit invitation to
him to be supernaturally simple. This was exactly, goodness knew, what
he wanted to be; but he had never had it so largely and freely--_so_
supernaturally simply, for that matter--imputed to him as of easy
achievement. It was a particular in which Aunt Maud appeared to offer
herself as an example, appeared to say quite agreeably: "What I want of
you, don't you see? is to be just exactly as _I_ am." The quantity of
the article required was what might especially have caused him to
stagger--he liked so, in general, the quantities in which Mrs. Lowder
dealt. He would have liked as well to ask her how feasible she supposed
it for a poor young man to resemble her at any point; but he had after
all soon enough perceived that he was doing as she wished by letting
his wonder show just a little as silly. He was conscious moreover of a
small strange dread of the results of discussion with her--strange,
truly, because it was her good nature, not her asperity, that he
feared. Asperity might have made him angry--in which there was always a
comfort; good nature, in his conditions, had a tendency to make him
ashamed--which Aunt Maud indeed, wonderfully, liking him for himself,
quite struck him as having guessed. To spare him therefore she also
avoided discussion; she kept him down by refusing to quarrel with him.
This was what she now proposed to him to enjoy, and his secret
discomfort was his sense that on the whole it was what would best suit
him. Being kept down was a bore, but his great dread, verily, was of
being ashamed, which was a thing distinct; and it mattered but little
that he was ashamed of that too. It was of the essence of his position
that in such a house as this the tables could always be turned on him.
"What do you offer, what do you offer?"--the place, however muffled in
convenience and decorum, constantly hummed for him with that thick
irony. The irony was a renewed reference to obvious bribes, and he had
already seen how little aid came to him from denouncing the bribes as
ugly in form. That was what the precious metals--they alone--could
afford to be; it was vain enough for him accordingly to try to impart a
gloss to his own comparative brummagem. The humiliation of this
impotence was precisely what Aunt Maud sought to mitigate for him by
keeping him down; and as her effort to that end had doubtless never yet
been so visible he had probably never felt so definitely placed in the
world as while he waited with her for her half-dozen other guests. She
welcomed him genially back from the States, as to his view of which her
few questions, though not coherent, were comprehensive, and he had the
amusement of seeing in her, as through a clear glass, the outbreak of a
plan and the sudden consciousness of a curiosity. She became aware of
America, under his eyes, as a possible scene for social operations; the
idea of a visit to the wonderful country had clearly but just occurred
to her, yet she was talking of it, at the end of a minute, as her
favourite dream. He didn't believe in it, but he pretended to; this
helped her as well as anything else to treat him as harmless and
blameless. She was so engaged, with the further aid of a complete
absence of allusions, when the highest effect was given her method by
the beautiful entrance of Kate. The method therefore received support
all round, for no young man could have been less formidable than the
person to the relief of whose shyness her niece ostensibly came. The
ostensible, in Kate, struck him altogether, on this occasion, as
prodigious; while scarcely less prodigious, for that matter, was his
own reading, on the spot, of the relation between his companions--a
relation lighted for him by the straight look, not exactly loving nor
lingering, yet searching and soft, that, on the part of their hostess,
the girl had to reckon with as she advanced. It took her in from head
to foot, and in doing so it told a story that made poor Densher again
the least bit sick: it marked so something with which Kate habitually
and consummately reckoned.
That was the story--that she was always, for her beneficent dragon,
under arms; living up, every hour, but especially at festal hours, to
the "value" Mrs. Lowder had attached to her. High and fixed, this
estimate ruled on each occasion at Lancaster Gate the social scene; so
that he now recognised in it something like the artistic idea, the
plastic substance, imposed by tradition, by genius, by criticism, in
respect to a given character, on a distinguished actress. As such a
person was to dress the part, to walk, to look, to speak, in every way
to express, the part, so all this was what Kate was to do for the
character she had undertaken, under her aunt's roof, to represent. It
was made up, the character, of definite elements and touches--things
all perfectly ponderable to criticism; and the way for her to meet
criticism was evidently at the start to be sure her make-up had had the
last touch and that she looked at least no worse than usual. Aunt
Maud's appreciation of that to-night was indeed managerial, and the
performer's own contribution fairly that of the faultless soldier on
parade. Densher saw himself for the moment as in his purchased stall at
the play; the watchful manager was in the depths of a box and the poor
actress in the glare of the footlights. But she _passed_, the poor
performer--he could see how she always passed; her wig, her paint, her
jewels, every mark of her expression impeccable, and her entrance
accordingly greeted with the proper round of applause. Such impressions
as we thus note for Densher come and go, it must be granted, in very
much less time than notation demands; but we may none the less make the
point that there was, still further, time among them for him to feel
almost too scared to take part in the ovation. He struck himself as
having lost, for the minute, his presence of mind--so that in any case
he only stared in silence at the older woman's technical challenge and
at the younger one's disciplined face. It was as if the drama--it thus
came to him, for the fact of a drama there was no blinking--was between
_them_, them quite preponderantly; with Merton Densher relegated to
mere spectatorship, a paying place in front, and one of the most
expensive. This was why his appreciation had turned for the instant to
fear--had just turned, as we have said, to sickness; and in spite of
the fact that the disciplined face did offer him over the footlights,
as he believed, the small gleam, fine faint but exquisite, of a special
intelligence. So might a practised performer, even when raked by
double-barrelled glasses, seem to be all in her part and yet convey a
sign to the person in the house she loved best.
The drama, at all events, as Densher saw it, meanwhile went
on--amplified soon enough by the advent of two other guests, stray
gentlemen both, stragglers in the rout of the season, who visibly
presented themselves to Kate during the next moments as subjects for a
like impersonal treatment and sharers in a like usual mercy. At
opposite ends of the social course, they displayed, in respect to the
"figure" that each, in his way, made, one the expansive, the other the
contractile effect of the perfect white waistcoat. A scratch company of
two innocuous youths and a pacified veteran was therefore what now
offered itself to Mrs. Stringham, who rustled in a little breathless
and full of the compunction of having had to come alone. Her companion,
at the last moment, had been indisposed--positively not well enough,
and so had packed her off, insistently, with excuses, with wild
regrets. This circumstance of their charming friend's illness was the
first thing Kate took up with Densher on their being able after dinner,
without bravado, to have ten minutes "naturally," as she called
it--which wasn't what _he_ did--together; but it was already as if the
young man had, by an odd impression, throughout the meal, not been
wholly deprived of Miss Theale's participation. Mrs. Lowder had made
dear Milly the topic, and it proved, on the spot, a topic as familiar
to the enthusiastic younger as to the sagacious older man. Any
knowledge they might lack Mrs. Lowder's niece was moreover alert to
supply, while Densher himself was freely appealed to as the most
privileged, after all, of the group. Wasn't it he who had in a manner
invented the wonderful creature--through having seen her first, caught
her in her native jungle? Hadn't he more or less paved the way for her
by his prompt recognition of her rarity, by preceding her, in a
friendly spirit--as he had the "ear" of society--with a sharp
flashlight or two?
He met, poor Densher, these enquiries as he could, listening with
interest, yet with discomfort; wincing in particular, dry journalist as
he was, to find it seemingly supposed of him that he had put his
pen--oh his "pen!"--at the service of private distinction. The ear of
society?--they were talking, or almost, as if he had publicly
paragraphed a modest young lady. They dreamt dreams, in truth, he
appeared to perceive, that fairly waked _him_ up, and he settled
himself in his place both to resist his embarrassment and to catch the
full revelation. His embarrassment came naturally from the fact that if
he could claim no credit for Miss Theale's success, so neither could he
gracefully insist on his not having been concerned with her. What
touched him most nearly was that the occasion took on somehow the air
of a commemorative banquet, a feast to celebrate a brilliant if brief
career. There was of course more said about the heroine than if she
hadn't been absent, and he found himself rather stupefied at the range
of Milly's triumph. Mrs. Lowder had wonders to tell of it; the two
wearers of the waistcoat, either with sincerity or with hypocrisy,
professed in the matter an equal expertness; and Densher at last seemed
to know himself in presence of a social "case." It was Mrs. Stringham,
obviously, whose testimony would have been most invoked hadn't she
been, as her friend's representative, rather confined to the function
of inhaling the incense; so that Kate, who treated her beautifully,
smiling at her, cheering and consoling her across the table, appeared
benevolently both to speak and to interpret for her. Kate spoke as if
she wouldn't perhaps understand _their_ way of appreciating Milly, but
would let them none the less, in justice to their good will, express it
in their coarser fashion. Densher himself wasn't unconscious in respect
to this of a certain broad brotherhood with Mrs. Stringham; wondering
indeed, while he followed the talk, how it might move American nerves.
He had only heard of them before, but in his recent tour he had caught
them in the remarkable fact, and there was now a moment or two when it
came to him that he had perhaps--and not in the way of an escape--taken
a lesson from them. They quivered, clearly, they hummed and drummed,
they leaped and bounded in Mrs. Stringham's typical organism--this lady
striking him as before all things excited, as, in the native phrase,
keyed-up, to a perception of more elements in the occasion than he was
himself able to count. She was accessible to sides of it, he imagined,
that were as yet obscure to him; for, though she unmistakeably rejoiced
and soared, he none the less saw her at moments as even more agitated
than pleasure required. It was a state of emotion in her that could
scarce represent simply an impatience to report at home. Her little dry
New England brightness--he had "sampled" all the shades of the American
complexity, if complexity it were--had its actual reasons for finding
relief most in silence; so that before the subject was changed he
perceived (with surprise at the others) that they had given her enough
of it. He had quite had enough of it himself by the time he was asked
if it were true that their friend had really not made in her own
country the mark she had chalked so large in London. It was Mrs. Lowder
herself who addressed him that enquiry; while he scarce knew if he were
the more impressed with her launching it under Mrs. Stringham's nose or
with her hope that he would allow to London the honour of discovery.
The less expansive of the white waistcoats propounded the theory that
they saw in London--for all that was said--much further than in the
States: it wouldn't be the first time, he urged, that they had taught
the Americans to appreciate (especially when it was funny) some native
product. He didn't mean that Miss Theale was funny--though she was
weird, and this was precisely her magic; but it might very well be that
New York, in having her to show, hadn't been aware of its luck. There
_were_ plenty of people who were nothing over there and yet were
awfully taken up in England; just as--to make the balance right, thank
goodness--they sometimes sent out beauties and celebrities who left the
Briton cold. The Briton's temperature in truth wasn't to be
calculated--a formulation of the matter that was not reached, however,
without producing in Mrs. Stringham a final feverish sally. She
announced that if the point of view for a proper admiration of her
young friend _had_ seemed to fail a little in New York, there was no
manner of doubt of her having carried Boston by storm. It pointed the
moral that Boston, for the finer taste, left New York nowhere; and the
good lady, as the exponent of this doctrine--which she set forth at a
certain length--made, obviously, to Densher's mind, her nearest
approach to supplying the weirdness in which Milly's absence had left
them deficient. She made it indeed effective for him by suddenly
addressing him. "You know nothing, sir--but not the least little
bit--about my friend."
He hadn't pretended he did, but there was a purity of reproach in Mrs.
Stringham's face and tone, a purity charged apparently with solemn
meanings; so that for a little, small as had been his claim, he
couldn't but feel that she exaggerated. He wondered what she did mean,
but while doing so he defended himself. "I certainly don't know
enormously much--beyond her having been most kind to me, in New York,
as a poor bewildered and newly landed alien, and my having tremendously
appreciated it." To which he added, he scarce knew why, what had an
immediate success. "Remember, Mrs. Stringham, that you weren't then
present."
"Ah there you are!" said Kate with much gay expression, though what it
expressed he failed at the time to make out.
"You weren't present _then_, dearest," Mrs. Lowder richly concurred.
"You don't know," she continued with mellow gaiety, "how far things may
have gone."
It made the little woman, he could see, really lose her head. She had
more things in that head than any of them in any other; unless perhaps
it were Kate, whom he felt as indirectly watching him during this
foolish passage, though it pleased him--and because of the
foolishness--not to meet her eyes. He met Mrs. Stringham's, which
affected him: with her he could on occasion clear it up--a sense
produced by the mute communion between them and really the beginning,
as the event was to show, of something extraordinary. It was even
already a little the effect of this communion that Mrs. Stringham
perceptibly faltered in her retort to Mrs. Lowder's joke. "Oh it's
precisely my point that Mr. Densher _can't_ have had vast
opportunities." And then she smiled at him. "I wasn't away, you know,
long."
It made everything, in the oddest way in the world, immediately right
for him. "And I wasn't _there_ long, either." He positively saw with it
that nothing for him, so far as she was concerned, would again be
wrong. "She's beautiful, but I don't say she's easy to know."
"Ah she's a thousand and one things!" replied the good lady, as if now
to keep well with him.
He asked nothing better. "She was off with you to these parts before I
knew it. I myself was off too--away off to wonderful parts, where I had
endlessly more to see."
"But you didn't forget her!" Aunt Maud interposed with almost menacing
archness.
"No, of course I didn't forget her. One doesn't forget such charming
impressions. But I never," he lucidly maintained, "chattered to others
about her."
"She'll thank you for that, sir," said Mrs. Stringham with a flushed
firmness.
"Yet doesn't silence in such a case," Aunt Maud blandly enquired, "very
often quite prove the depth of the impression?"
He would have been amused, hadn't he been slightly displeased, at all
they seemed desirous to fasten on him. "Well, the impression was as
deep as you like. But I really want Miss Theale to know," he pursued
for Mrs. Stringham, "that I don't figure by any consent of my own as an
authority about her."
Kate came to his assistance--if assistance it was--before their friend
had had time to meet this charge. "You're right about her not being
easy to know. One _sees_ her with intensity--sees her more than one
sees almost any one; but then one discovers that that isn't knowing her
and that one may know better a person whom one doesn't 'see,' as I say,
half so much."
The discrimination was interesting, but it brought them back to the
fact of her success; and it was at that comparatively gross
circumstance, now so fully placed before them, that Milly's anxious
companion sat and looked--looked very much as some spectator in an
old-time circus might have watched the oddity of a Christian maiden, in
the arena, mildly, caressingly, martyred. It was the nosing and
fumbling not of lions and tigers but of domestic animals let loose as
for the joke. Even the joke made Mrs. Stringham uneasy, and her mute
communion with Densher, to which we have alluded, was more and more
determined by it. He wondered afterwards if Kate had made this out;
though it was not indeed till much later on that he found himself, in
thought, dividing the things she might have been conscious of from the
things she must have missed. If she actually missed, at any rate, Mrs.
Stringham's discomfort, that but showed how her own idea held her. Her
own idea was, by insisting on the fact of the girl's prominence as a
feature of the season's end, to keep Densher in relation, for the rest
of them, both to present and to past. "It's everything that has
happened _since_ that makes you naturally a little shy about her. You
don't know what has happened since, but we do; we've seen it and
followed it; we've a little been _of_ it." The great thing for him, at
this, as Kate gave it, _was_ in fact quite irresistibly that the case
was a real one--the kind of thing that, when one's patience was shorter
than one's curiosity, one had vaguely taken for possible in London, but
in which one had never been even to this small extent concerned. The
little American's sudden social adventure, her happy and, no doubt,
harmless flourish, had probably been favoured by several accidents, but
it had been favoured above all by the simple spring-board of the scene,
by one of those common caprices of the numberless foolish flock,
gregarious movements as inscrutable as ocean-currents. The huddled herd
had drifted to her blindly--it might as blindly have drifted away.
There had been of course a signal, but the great reason was probably
the absence at the moment of a larger lion. The bigger beast would come
and the smaller would then incontinently vanish. It was at all events
characteristic, and what was of the essence of it was grist to his
scribbling mill, matter for his journalising hand. That hand already,
in intention, played over it, the "motive," as a sign of the season, a
feature of the time, of the purely expeditious and rough-and-tumble
nature of the social boom. The boom as in _itself_ required--that would
be the note; the subject of the process a comparatively minor question.
Anything was boomable enough when nothing else was more so: the author
of the "rotten" book, the beauty who was no beauty, the heiress who was
only that, the stranger who was for the most part saved from being
inconveniently strange but by being inconveniently familiar, the
American whose Americanism had been long desperately discounted, the
creature in fine as to whom spangles or spots of any sufficiently
marked and exhibited sort could be loudly enough predicated.
So he judged at least, within his limits, and the idea that what he had
thus caught in the fact was the trick of fashion and the tone of
society went so far as to make him take up again his sense of
independence. He had supposed himself civilised; but if this was
civilisation--! One could smoke one's pipe outside when twaddle was
within. He had rather avoided, as we have remarked, Kate's eyes, but
there came a moment when he would fairly have liked to put it, across
the table, to her: "I say, light of my life, is _this_ the great
world?" There came another, it must be added--and doubtless as a result
of something that, over the cloth, did hang between them--when she
struck him as having quite answered: "Dear no--for what do you take me?
Not the least little bit: only a poor silly, though quite harmless,
imitation." What she might have passed for saying, however, was
practically merged in what she did say, for she came overtly to his
aid, very much as if guessing some of his thoughts. She enunciated, to
relieve his bewilderment, the obvious truth that you couldn't leave
London for three months at that time of the year and come back to find
your friends just where they were. As they had _of course_ been jigging
away they might well be so red in the face that you wouldn't know them.
She reconciled in fine his disclaimer about Milly with that honour of
having discovered her which it was vain for him modestly to shirk. He
_had_ unearthed her, but it was they, all of them together, who had
developed her. She was always a charmer, one of the greatest ever seen,
but she wasn't the person he had "backed."
Densher was to feel sure afterwards that Kate had had in these
pleasantries no conscious, above all no insolent purpose of making
light of poor Susan Shepherd's property in their young friend--which
property, by such remarks, was very much pushed to the wall; but he was
also to know that Mrs. Stringham had secretly resented them, Mrs.
Stringham holding the opinion, of which he was ultimately to have a
glimpse, that all the Kate Croys in Christendom were but dust for the
feet of her Milly. That, it was true, would be what she must reveal
only when driven to her last entrenchments and well cornered in her
passion--the rare passion of friendship, the sole passion of her little
life save the one other, more imperturbably cerebral, that she
entertained for the art of Guy de Maupassant. She slipped in the
observation that her Milly was incapable of change, was just exactly,
on the contrary, the same Milly; but this made little difference in the
drift of Kate's contention. She was perfectly kind to Susie: it was as
if she positively knew her as handicapped for any disagreement by
feeling that she, Kate, had "type," and by being committed to
admiration of type. Kate had occasion subsequently--she found it
somehow--to mention to our young man Milly's having spoken to her of
this view on the good lady's part. She would like--Milly had had it
from her--to put Kate Croy in a book and see what she could so do with
her. "Chop me up fine or serve me whole"--it was a way of being got at
that Kate professed she dreaded. It would be Mrs. Stringham's, however,
she understood, because Mrs. Stringham, oddly, felt that with such
stuff as the strange English girl was made of, stuff that (in spite of
Maud Manningham, who was full of sentiment) she had never known, there
was none other to be employed. These things were of later evidence, yet
Densher might even then have felt them in the air. They were
practically in it already when Kate, waiving the question of her
friend's chemical change, wound up with the comparatively
unobjectionable proposition that he must now, having missed so much,
take them all up, on trust, further on. He met it peacefully, a little
perhaps as an example to Mrs. Stringham--"Oh as far on as you like!"
This even had its effect: Mrs. Stringham appropriated as much of it as
might be meant for herself. The nice thing about her was that she could
measure how much; so that by the time dinner was over they had really
covered ground.