I
Densher became aware, afresh, that he disliked his hotel--and all the
more promptly that he had had occasion of old to make the same
discrimination. The establishment, choked at that season with the
polyglot herd, cockneys of all climes, mainly German, mainly American,
mainly English, it appeared as the corresponding sensitive nerve was
touched, sounded loud and not sweet, sounded anything and everything
but Italian, but Venetian. The Venetian was all a dialect, he knew; yet
it was pure Attic beside some of the dialects at the bustling inn. It
made, "abroad," both for his pleasure and his pain that he had to feel
at almost any point how he had been through every thing before. He had
been three or four times, in Venice, during other visits, through this
pleasant irritation of paddling away--away from the concert of false
notes in the vulgarised hall, away from the amiable American families
and overfed German porters. He had in each case made terms for a
lodging more private and not more costly, and he recalled with
tenderness these shabby but friendly asylums, the windows of which he
should easily know again in passing on canal or through campo. The
shabbiest now failed of an appeal to him, but he found himself at the
end of forty-eight hours forming views in respect to a small
independent _quartiere_, far down the Grand Canal, which he had once
occupied for a month with a sense of pomp and circumstance and yet also
with a growth of initiation into the homelier Venetian mysteries. The
humour of those days came back to him for an hour, and what further
befell in this interval, to be brief, was that, emerging on a traghetto
in sight of the recognised house, he made out on the green shutters of
his old, of his young windows the strips of white pasted paper that
figure in Venice as an invitation to tenants. This was in the course of
his very first walk apart, a walk replete with impressions to which he
responded with force. He had been almost without cessation, since his
arrival, at Palazzo Leporelli, where, as happened, a turn of bad
weather on the second day had kept the whole party continuously at
home. The episode had passed for him like a series of hours in a
museum, though without the fatigue of that; and it had also resembled
something that he was still, with a stirred imagination, to find a name
for. He might have been looking for the name while he gave himself up,
subsequently, to the ramble--he saw that even after years he couldn't
lose his way--crowned with his stare across the water at the little
white papers.
He was to dine at the palace in an hour or two, and he had lunched
there, at an early luncheon, that morning. He had then been out with
the three ladies, the three being Mrs. Lowder, Mrs. Stringham and Kate,
and had kept afloat with them, under a sufficient Venetian spell, until
Aunt Maud had directed him to leave them and return to Miss Theale. Of
two circumstances connected with this disposition of his person he was
even now not unmindful; the first being that the lady of Lancaster Gate
had addressed him with high publicity and as if expressing equally the
sense of her companions, who had not spoken, but who might have been
taken--yes, Susan Shepherd quite equally with Kate--for inscrutable
parties to her plan. What he could as little contrive to forget was
that he had, before the two others, as it struck him--that was to say
especially before Kate--done exactly as he was bidden; gathered himself
up without a protest and retraced his way to the palace. Present with
him still was the question of whether he looked a fool for it, of
whether the awkwardness he felt as the gondola rocked with the business
of his leaving it--they could but make, in submission, for a
landing-place that was none of the best--had furnished his friends with
such entertainment as was to cause them, behind his back, to exchange
intelligent smiles. He had found Milly Theale twenty minutes later
alone, and he had sat with her till the others returned to tea. The
strange part of this was that it had been very easy, extraordinarily
easy. He knew it for strange only when he was away from her, because
when he was away from her he was in contact with particular things that
made it so. At the time, in her presence, it was as simple as sitting
with his sister might have been, and not, if the point were urged, very
much more thrilling. He continued to see her as he had first seen
her--that remained ineffaceably behind. Mrs. Lowder, Susan Shepherd,
his own Kate, might, each in proportion, see her as a princess, as an
angel, as a star, but for himself, luckily, she hadn't as yet
complications to any point of discomfort: the princess, the angel, the
star, were muffled over, ever so lightly and brightly, with the little
American girl who had been kind to him in New York and to whom
certainly--though without making too much of it for either of them--he
was perfectly willing to be kind in return. She appreciated his coming
in on purpose, but there was nothing in that--from the moment she was
always at home--that they couldn't easily keep up. The only note the
least bit high that had even yet sounded between them was this
admission on her part that she found it best to remain within. She
wouldn't let him call it keeping quiet, for she insisted that her
palace--with all its romance and art and history--had set up round her
a whirlwind of suggestion that never dropped for an hour. It wasn't
therefore, within such walls, confinement, it was the freedom of all
the centuries: in respect to which Densher granted good-humouredly that
they were then blown together, she and he, as much as she liked,
through space.
Kate had found on the present occasion a moment to say to him that he
suggested a clever cousin calling on a cousin afflicted, and bored for
his pains; and though he denied on the spot the "bored" he could so far
see it as an impression he might make that he wondered if the same
image wouldn't have occurred to Milly. As soon as Kate appeared again
the difference came up--the oddity, as he then instantly felt it, of
his having sunk so deep. It was sinking because it was all doing what
Kate had conceived for him; it wasn't in the least doing--and that had
been his notion of his life--anything he himself had conceived. The
difference, accordingly, renewed, sharp, sore, was the irritant under
which he had quitted the palace and under which he was to make the best
of the business of again dining there. He said to himself that he must
make the best of everything; that was in his mind, at the traghetto,
even while, with his preoccupation about changing quarters, he studied,
across the canal, the look of his former abode. It had done for the
past, would it do for the present? would it play in any manner into the
general necessity of which he was conscious? That necessity of making
the best was the instinct--as he indeed himself knew--of a man somehow
aware that if he let go at one place he should let go everywhere. If he
took off his hand, the hand that at least helped to hold it together,
the whole queer fabric that built him in would fall away in a minute
and admit the light. It was really a matter of nerves; it was exactly
because he was nervous that he _could_ go straight; yet if that
condition should increase he must surely go wild. He was walking in
short on a high ridge, steep down on either side, where the
proprieties--once he could face at all remaining there--reduced
themselves to his keeping his head. It was Kate who had so perched him,
and there came up for him at moments, as he found himself planting one
foot exactly before another, a sensible sharpness of irony as to her
management of him. It wasn't that she had put him in danger--to be in
real danger with her would have had another quality. There glowed for
him in fact a kind of rage at what he wasn't having; an exasperation, a
resentment, begotten truly by the very impatience of desire, in respect
to his postponed and relegated, his so extremely manipulated state. It
was beautifully done of her, but what was the real meaning of it unless
that he was perpetually bent to her will? His idea from the first, from
the very first of his knowing her, had been to be, as the French called
it, _bon prince_ with her, mindful of the good humour and generosity,
the contempt, in the matter of confidence, for small outlays and small
savings, that belonged to the man who wasn't generally afraid. There
were things enough, goodness knew--for it was the moral of his
plight--that he couldn't afford; but what had had a charm for him if
not the notion of living handsomely, to make up for it, in another way?
of not at all events reading the romance of his existence in a cheap
edition. All he had originally felt in her came back to him, was indeed
actually as present as ever--how he had admired and envied what he
called to himself her pure talent for life, as distinguished from his
own, a poor weak thing of the occasion, amateurishly patched up; only
it irritated him the more that this was exactly what was now, ever so
characteristically, standing out in her.
It was thanks to her pure talent for life, verily, that he was just
where he was and that he was above all just _how_ he was. The proof of
a decent reaction in him against so much passivity was, with no great
richness, that he at least knew--knew, that is, how he was, and how
little he liked it as a thing accepted in mere helplessness. He was,
for the moment, wistful--that above all described it; that was so large
a part of the force that, as the autumn afternoon closed in, kept him,
on his traghetto, positively throbbing with his question. His question
connected itself, even while he stood, with his special smothered
soreness, his sense almost of shame; and the soreness and the shame
were less as he let himself, with the help of the conditions about him,
regard it as serious. It was born, for that matter, partly of the
conditions, those conditions that Kate had so almost insolently braved,
had been willing, without a pang, to see him ridiculously--ridiculously
so far as just complacently--exposed to. How little it _could_ be
complacently he was to feel with the last thoroughness before he had
moved from his point of vantage. His question, as we have called it,
was the interesting question of whether he had really no will left. How
could he know--that was the point--without putting the matter to the
test? It had been right to be _bon prince,_ and the joy, something of
the pride, of having lived, in spirit, handsomely, was even now
compatible with the impulse to look into their account; but he held his
breath a little as it came home to him with supreme sharpness that,
whereas he had done absolutely everything that Kate had wanted, she had
done nothing whatever that he had. So it was in fine that his idea of
the test by which he must try that possibility kept referring itself,
in the warm early dusk, the approach of the Southern
night--"conditions" these, such as we just spoke of--to the glimmer,
more and more ghostly as the light failed, of the little white papers
on his old green shutters. By the time he looked at his watch he had
been for a quarter of an hour at this post of observation and
reflexion; but by the time he walked away again he had found his answer
to the idea that had grown so importunate. Since a proof of his will
was wanted it was indeed very exactly in wait for him--it lurked there
on the other side of the Canal. A ferryman at the little pier had from
time to time accosted him; but it was a part of the play of his
nervousness to turn his back on that facility. He would go over, but he
walked, very quickly, round and round, crossing finally by the Rialto.
The rooms, in the event, were unoccupied; the ancient padrona was there
with her smile all a radiance but her recognition all a fable; the
ancient rickety objects too, refined in their shabbiness, amiable in
their decay, as to which, on his side, demonstrations were tenderly
veracious; so that before he took his way again he had arranged to come
in on the morrow.
He was amusing about it that evening at dinner--in spite of an odd
first impulse, which at the palace quite melted away, to treat it
merely as matter for his own satisfaction. This need, this propriety,
he had taken for granted even up to the moment of suddenly perceiving,
in the course of talk, that the incident would minister to innocent
gaiety. Such was quite its effect, with the aid of his picture--an
evocation of the quaint, of the humblest rococo, of a Venetian interior
in the true old note. He made the point for his hostess that her own
high chambers, though they were a thousand grand things, weren't really
this; made it in fact with such success that she presently declared it
his plain duty to invite her on some near day to tea. She had expressed
as yet--he could feel it as felt among them all--no such clear wish to
go anywhere, not even to make an effort for a parish feast, or an
autumn sunset, nor to descend her staircase for Titian or Gianbellini.
It was constantly Densher's view that, as between himself and Kate,
things were understood without saying, so that he could catch in her,
as she but too freely could in him, innumerable signs of it, the whole
soft breath of consciousness meeting and promoting consciousness. This
view was so far justified to-night as that Milly's offer to him of her
company was to his sense taken up by Kate in spite of her doing nothing
to show it. It fell in so perfectly with what she had desired and
foretold that she was--and this was what most struck him--sufficiently
gratified and blinded by it not to know, from the false quality of his
response, from his tone and his very look, which for an instant
instinctively sought her own, that he had answered inevitably, almost
shamelessly, in a mere time-gaining sense. It gave him on the spot, her
failure of perception, almost a beginning of the advantage he had been
planning for--that is at least if she too were not darkly dishonest.
She might, he was not unaware, have made out, from some deep part of
her, the bearing, in respect to herself, of the little fact he had
announced; for she was after all capable of that, capable of guessing
and yet of simultaneously hiding her guess. It wound him up a turn or
two further, none the less, to impute to her now a weakness of vision
by which he could himself feel the stronger. Whatever apprehension of
his motive in shifting his abode might have brushed her with its wings,
she at all events certainly didn't guess that he was giving their
friend a hollow promise. That was what she had herself imposed on him;
there had been in the prospect from the first a definite particular
point at which hollowness, to call it by its least compromising name,
would have to begin. Therefore its hour had now charmingly sounded.
Whatever in life he had recovered his old rooms for, he had not
recovered them to receive Milly Theale: which made no more difference
in his expression of happy readiness than if he had been--just what he
was trying not to be--fully hardened and fully base. So rapid in fact
was the rhythm of his inward drama that the quick vision of
impossibility produced in him by his hostess's direct and unexpected
appeal had the effect, slightly sinister, of positively scaring him. It
gave him a measure of the intensity, the reality of his now mature
motive. It prompted in him certainly no quarrel with these things, but
it made them as vivid as if they already flushed with success. It was
before the flush of success that his heart beat almost to dread. The
dread was but the dread of the happiness to be compassed; only that was
in itself a symptom. That a visit from Milly should, in this projection
of necessities, strike him as of the last incongruity, quite as a
hateful idea, and above all as spoiling, should one put it grossly, his
game--the adoption of such a view might of course have an identity with
one of those numerous ways of being a fool that seemed so to abound for
him. It would remain none the less the way to which he should be in
advance most reconciled. His mature motive, as to which he allowed
himself no grain of illusion, had thus in an hour taken imaginative
possession of the place: that precisely was how he saw it seated there,
already unpacked and settled, for Milly's innocence, for Milly's
beauty, no matter how short a time, to be housed with. There were
things she would never recognise, never feel, never catch in the air;
but this made no difference in the fact that her brushing against them
would do nobody any good. The discrimination and the scruple were for
_him_. So he felt all the parts of the case together, while Kate showed
admirably as feeling none of them. Of course, however--when hadn't it
to be his last word?--Kate was always sublime.
That came up in all connexions during the rest of these first days;
came up in especial under pressure of the fact that each time our
plighted pair snatched, in its passage, at the good fortune of half an
hour together, they were doomed--though Densher felt it as all by _his_
act--to spend a part of the rare occasion in wonder at their luck and
in study of its queer character. This was the case after he might be
supposed to have got, in a manner, used to it; it was the case after
the girl--ready always, as we say, with the last word--had given him
the benefit of her righting of every wrong appearance, a support
familiar to him now in reference to other phases. It was still the case
after he possibly might, with a little imagination, as she freely
insisted, have made out, by the visible working of the crisis, what
idea on Mrs. Lowder's part had determined it. Such as the idea was--and
that it suited Kate's own book she openly professed--he had only to see
how things were turning out to feel it strikingly justified. Densher's
reply to all this vividness was that of course Aunt Maud's intervention
hadn't been occult, even for _his_ vividness, from the moment she had
written him, with characteristic concentration, that if he should see
his way to come to Venice for a fortnight she should engage he would
find it no blunder. It took Aunt Maud really to do such things in such
ways; just as it took him, he was ready to confess, to do such others
as he must now strike them all--didn't he?--as committed to. Mrs.
Lowder's admonition had been of course a direct reference to what she
had said to him at Lancaster Gate before his departure the night Milly
had failed them through illness; only it had at least matched that
remarkable outbreak in respect to the quantity of good nature it
attributed to him. The young man's discussions of his situation--which
were confined to Kate; he had none with Aunt Maud herself--suffered a
little, it may be divined, by the sense that he couldn't put everything
off, as he privately expressed it, on other people. His ears, in
solitude, were apt to burn with the reflexion that Mrs. Lowder had
simply tested him, seen him as he was and made out what could be done
with him. She had had but to whistle for him and he had come. If she
had taken for granted his good nature she was as justified as Kate
declared. This awkwardness of his conscience, both in respect to his
general plasticity, the fruit of his feeling plasticity, within limits,
to be a mode of life like another--certainly better than some, and
particularly in respect to such confusion as might reign about what he
had really come for--this inward ache was not wholly dispelled by the
style, charming as that was, of Kate's poetic versions. Even the high
wonder and delight of Kate couldn't set him right with himself when
there was something quite distinct from these things that kept him
wrong.
In default of being right with himself he had meanwhile, for one thing,
the interest of seeing--and quite for the first time in his
life--whether, on a given occasion, that might be quite so necessary to
happiness as was commonly assumed and as he had up to this moment never
doubted. He was engaged distinctly in an adventure--he who had never
thought himself cut out for them, and it fairly helped him that he was
able at moments to say to himself that he mustn't fall below it. At his
hotel, alone, by night, or in the course of the few late strolls he was
finding time to take through dusky labyrinthine alleys and empty
_campi_, overhung with mouldering palaces, where he paused in disgust
at his want of ease and where the sound of a rare footstep on the
enclosed pavement was like that of a retarded dancer in a banquet-hall
deserted--during these interludes he entertained cold views, even to
the point, at moments, on the principle that the shortest follies are
the best, of thinking of immediate departure as not only possible but
as indicated. He had however only to cross again the threshold of
Palazzo Leporelli to see all the elements of the business compose, as
painters called it, differently. It began to strike him then that
departure wouldn't curtail, but would signally coarsen his folly, and
that above all, as he hadn't really "begun" anything, had only
submitted, consented, but too generously indulged and condoned the
beginnings of others, he had no call to treat himself with
superstitious rigour. The single thing that was clear in complications
was that, whatever happened, one was to behave as a gentleman--to which
was added indeed the perhaps slightly less shining truth that
complications might sometimes have their tedium beguiled by a study of
the question of how a gentleman would behave. This question, I hasten
to add, was not in the last resort Densher's greatest worry. Three
women were looking to him at once, and, though such a predicament could
never be, from the point of view of facility, quite the ideal, it yet
had, thank goodness, its immediate workable law. The law was not to be
a brute--in return for amiabilities. He hadn't come all the way out
from England to be a brute. He hadn't thought of what it might give him
to have a fortnight, however handicapped, with Kate in Venice, to be a
brute. He hadn't treated Mrs. Lowder as if in responding to her
suggestion he had understood her--he hadn't done that either to be a
brute. And what he had prepared least of all for such an anti-climax
was the prompt and inevitable, the achieved surrender--_as_ a
gentleman, oh that indubitably!--to the unexpected impression made by
poor pale exquisite Milly as the mistress of a grand old palace and the
dispenser of an hospitality more irresistible, thanks to all the
conditions, than any ever known to him.
This spectacle had for him an eloquence, an authority, a felicity--he
scarce knew by what strange name to call it--for which he said to
himself that he had not consciously bargained. Her welcome, her
frankness, sweetness, sadness, brightness, her disconcerting poetry, as
he made shift at moments to call it, helped as it was by the beauty of
her whole setting and by the perception at the same time, on the
observer's part, that this element gained from her, in a manner, for
effect and harmony, as much as it gave--her whole attitude had, to his
imagination, meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering,
dropping and quavering forth again, like vague faint snatches, mere
ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music. It was positively
well for him, he had his times of reflecting, that he couldn't put it
off on Kate and Mrs. Lowder, as a gentleman so conspicuously wouldn't,
that--well, that he had been rather taken in by not having known in
advance! There had been now five days of it all without his risking
even to Kate alone any hint of what he ought to have known and of what
in particular therefore had taken him in. The truth was doubtless that
really, when it came to any free handling and naming of things, they
were living together, the five of them, in an air in which an ugly
effect of "blurting out" might easily be produced. He came back with
his friend on each occasion to the blest miracle of renewed
propinquity, which had a double virtue in that favouring air. He
breathed on it as if he could scarcely believe it, yet the time had
passed, in spite of this privilege, without his quite committing
himself, for her ear, to any such comment on Milly's high style and
state as would have corresponded with the amount of recognition it had
produced in him. Behind everything for him was his renewed remembrance,
which had fairly become a habit, that he had been the first to know
her. This was what they had all insisted on, in her absence, that day
at Mrs. Lowder's; and this was in especial what had made him feel its
influence on his immediately paying her a second visit. Its influence
had been all there, been in the high-hung, rumbling carriage with them,
from the moment she took him to drive, covering them in together as if
it had been a rug of softest silk. It had worked as a clear connexion
with something lodged in the past, something already their own. He had
more than once recalled how he had said to himself even at that moment,
at some point in the drive, that he was not _there_, not just as he was
in so doing it, through Kate and Kate's idea, but through Milly and
Milly's own, and through himself and _his_ own, unmistakeably--as well
as through the little facts, whatever they had amounted to, of his time
in New York.