I saw other things, many things, after this, but I had already so much
matter for reflection that I saw them almost in spite of myself. The
difficulty with me was in the momentum already acquired by the act--as
well as, doubtless, by the general habit--of observation. I remember
indeed that on separating from Mrs. Brissenden I took a lively resolve
to get rid of my ridiculous obsession. It was absurd to have consented
to such immersion, intellectually speaking, in the affairs of other
people. One had always affairs of one's own, and I was positively
neglecting mine. Such, for a while, was my foremost reflection; after
which, in their order or out of it, came an inevitable train of others.
One of the first of these was that, frankly, my affairs were by this
time pretty well used to my neglect. There were connections enough in
which it had never failed. A whole cluster of such connections,
effectually displacing the centre of interest, now surrounded me, and I
was--though always but intellectually--drawn into their circle. I did my
best for the rest of the day to turn my back on them, but with the
prompt result of feeling that I meddled with them almost more in
thinking them over in isolation than in hovering personally about them.
Reflection was the real intensity; reflection, as to poor Mrs. Server in
particular, was an indiscreet opening of doors. She became vivid in the
light of the so limited vision of her that I already possessed--try
positively as I would not further to extend it. It was something not to
ask another question, to keep constantly away both from Mrs. Brissenden
and from Ford Obert, whom I had rashly invited to a degree of
participation; it was something to talk as hard as possible with other
persons and on other subjects, to mingle in groups much more superficial
than they supposed themselves, to give ear to broader jokes, to discuss
more tangible mysteries.
The day, as it developed, was large and hot, an unstinted splendour of
summer; excursions, exercise, organised amusement were things admirably
spared us; life became a mere arrested ramble or stimulated lounge, and
we profited to the full by the noble freedom of Newmarch, that
overarching ease which in nothing was so marked as in the tolerance of
talk. The air of the place itself, in such conditions, left one's powers
with a sense of play; if one wanted something to play at one simply
played at being there. I did this myself, with the aid, in especial, of
two or three solitary strolls, unaccompanied dips, of half an hour
a-piece, into outlying parts of the house and the grounds. I must add
that while I resorted to such measures not to see I only fixed what I
_had_ seen, what I did see, the more in my mind. One of these things had
been the way that, at luncheon, Gilbert Long, watching the chance given
him by the loose order in which we moved to it, slipped, to the visible
defeat of somebody else, into the chair of conspicuity beside clever
Lady John. A second was that Mrs. Server then occupied a place as remote
as possible from this couple, but not from Guy Brissenden, who had found
means to seat himself next her while my notice was engaged by the
others. What I was at the same time supremely struck with could
doubtless only be Mrs. Server's bright ubiquity, as it had at last come
to seem to me, and that of the companions she had recruited for the
occasion. Attended constantly by a different gentleman, she was in the
range of my vision wherever I turned--she kept repeating her picture in
settings separated by such intervals that I wondered at the celerity
with which she proceeded from spot to spot. She was never discernibly
out of breath, though the associate of her ecstasy at the given moment
might have been taken as being; and I kept getting afresh the impression
which, the day before, had so promptly followed my arrival, the odd
impression, as of something the matter with each party, that I had
gathered, in the grounds, from the sight of her advance upon me with
Obert. I had by this time of course made out--and it was absurd to shut
my eyes to it--what _that_ particular something, at least, was. It was
that Obert had quickly perceived something to be the matter with _her_,
and that she, on her side, had become aware of his discovery.
I wondered hereupon if the discovery were inevitable for each gentleman
in succession, and if this were their reason for changing so often. Did
everyone leave her, like Obert, with an uneasy impression of her, and
were these impressions now passed about with private hilarity or
profundity, though without having reached me save from the source I have
named? I affected myself as constantly catching her eye, as if she
wished to call my attention to the fact of who was with her and who was
not. I had kept my distance since our episode with the pastels, and yet
nothing could more come home to me than that I had really not, since
then, been absent from her. We met without talk, but not, thanks to
these pointed looks, without contact. I daresay that, for that matter,
my cogitations--for I must have bristled with them--would have made me
as stiff a puzzle to interpretative minds as I had suffered other
phenomena to become to my own. I daresay I wandered with a tell-tale
restlessness of which the practical detachment might well have mystified
those who hadn't suspicions. Whenever I caught Mrs. Server's eye it was
really to wonder how many suspicions _she_ had. I came upon her in great
dim chambers, and I came upon her before sweeps of view. I came upon
her once more with the Comte de Dreuil, with Lord Lutley, with Ford
Obert, with almost every other man in the house, and with several of
these, as if there had not been enough for so many turns, two or three
times over. Only at no moment, whatever the favouring frame, did I come
upon her with Gilbert Long. It was of course an anomaly that, as an easy
accident, I was not again myself set in the favouring frame. That I
consistently escaped being might indeed have been the meaning most
marked in our mute recognitions.
Discretion, then, I finally felt, played an odd part when it simply left
one more attached, morally, to one's prey. What was most evident to me
by five o'clock in the afternoon was that I was too preoccupied not to
find it the best wisdom to accept my mood. It was all very well to run
away; there would be no effectual running away but to have my things
quickly packed and catch, if possible, a train for town. On the spot I
had to _be_ on it; and it began to dawn before me that there was
something quite other I possibly might do with Mrs. Server than
endeavour ineffectually to forget her. What was none of one's business
might change its name should importunity take the form of utility. In
resisted observation that was vivid thought, in inevitable thought that
was vivid observation, through a succession, in short, of phases in
which I shall not pretend to distinguish one of these elements from the
other, I found myself cherishing the fruit of the seed dropped equally
by Ford Obert and by Mrs. Briss. What was the matter with _me_?--so much
as that I had ended by asking myself; and the answer had come as an
unmistakable return of the anxiety produced in me by my first seeing
that I had fairly let Grace Brissenden loose. My original protest
against the flash of inspiration in which she had fixed responsibility
on Mrs. Server had been in fact, I now saw, but the scared presentiment
of something in store for myself. This scare, to express it sharply, had
verily not left me from that moment; and if I had been already then
anxious it was because I had felt myself foredoomed to be sure the poor
lady herself would be. Why I should have minded this, should have been
anxious at her anxiety and scared at her scare, was a question troubling
me too little on the spot for me to suffer it to trouble me, as a
painter of my state, in this place. It is sufficient that when so much
of the afternoon had waned as to bring signs of the service of tea in
the open air, I knew how far I was gone in pity for her. For I had at
last had to take in what my two interlocutors had given me. Their
impression, coinciding and, as one might say, disinterested, couldn't,
after a little, fail in some degree to impose itself. It had its value.
Mrs. Server _was_ "nervous."
It little mattered to me now that Mrs. Briss had put it to me--that I
had even whimsically put it to myself--that I was perhaps in love with
her. That was as good a name as another for an interest springing up in
an hour, and was moreover a decent working hypothesis. The sentiment had
not indeed asserted itself at "first sight," though it might have taken
its place remarkably well among the phenomena of what is known as
second. The real fact was, none the less, that I was quite too sorry for
her to be anything except sorry. This odd feeling was something that I
may as well say I shall not even now attempt to account for--partly, it
is true, because my recital of the rest of what I was to see in no small
measure does so. It was a force that I at this stage simply found I had
already succumbed to. If it was not the result of what I had granted to
myself was the matter with her, then it was rather the very cause of my
making that concession. It was a different thing from my first prompt
impulse to shield her. I had already shielded her--fought for her so far
as I could or as the case immediately required. My own sense of how I
was affected had practically cleared up, in short, in the presence of
this deeper vision of her. My divinations and inductions had finally
brought home to me that in the whole huge, brilliant, crowded place I
was the only person save one who was in anything that could be called a
relation to her. The other person's relation was concealed, and mine,
so far as she herself was concerned, was unexpressed--so that I suppose
what most, at the juncture in question, stirred within me was the wonder
of how I might successfully express it. I felt that so long as I didn't
express it I should be haunted with the idea of something infinitely
touching and tragic in her loneliness--possibly in her torment, in her
terror. If she was "nervous" to the tune I had come to recognise, it
could only be because she had grounds. And what might her grounds more
naturally be than that, arranged and arrayed, disguised and decorated,
pursuing in vain, through our careless company, her search for the right
shade of apparent security, she felt herself none the less all the while
the restless victim of fear and failure?
Once my imagination had seen her in this light the touches it could add
to the picture might be trusted to be telling. Further observation was
to convince me of their truth, but while I waited for it with my
apprehension that it would come in spite of me I easily multiplied and
lavished them. I made out above all what she would most be trying to
hide. It was not, so to speak, the guarded primary fact--it could only
be, wretched woman, that produced, that disastrous, treacherous
consequence of the fact which her faculties would exhibit, and most of
all the snapped cord of her faculty of talk. Guy Brissenden had, at the
worst, his compromised face and figure to show and to shroud--if he
were really, that is, as much aware of them as one had suspected. She
had her whole compromised machinery of thought and speech, and if these
signs were not, like his, external, that made her case but the harder,
for she had to create, with intelligence rapidly ebbing, with wit half
gone, the illusion of an unimpaired estate. She was like some unhappy
lady robbed of her best jewels--obliged so to dispose and distribute the
minor trinkets that had escaped as still to give the impression of a
rich _ecrin_. Was not that embarrassment, if one analysed a little, at
the bottom of her having been all day, in the vulgar phrase and as the
three of us had too cruelly noted, all over the place? _Was_ indeed, for
that matter, this observation confined to us, or had it at last been
irrepressibly determined on the part of the company at large? This was a
question, I hasten to add, that I would not now for the world have put
to the test. I felt I should have known how to escape had any rumour of
wonder at Mrs. Server's ways been finally conveyed to me. I might from
this moment have, as much as I liked, my own sense of it, but I was
definitely conscious of a sort of loyalty to her that would have
rendered me blank before others: though not indeed that--oh, at last,
quite the contrary!--it would have forbidden me to watch and watch. I
positively dreaded the accident of my being asked by one of the men if I
knew how everyone was talking about her. If everyone was talking about
her, I wanted positively not to know. But nobody was, probably--they
scarcely could be as yet. Without suggestive collateral evidence there
would be nobody in the house so conscientiously infernal as Mrs.
Brissenden, Obert and I.
Newmarch had always, in our time, carried itself as the great asylum of
the finer wit, more or less expressly giving out that, as invoking
hospitality or other countenance, none of the stupid, none even of the
votaries of the grossly obvious, need apply; but I could luckily at
present reflect that its measurements in this direction had not always
been my own, and that, moreover, whatever precision they possessed,
human blandness, even in such happy halls, had not been quite abolished.
There was a sound law in virtue of which one could always--alike in
privileged and unprivileged circles--rest more on people's density than
on their penetrability. Wasn't it their density too that would be
practically nearest their good nature? Whatever her successive partners
of a moment might have noticed, they wouldn't have discovered in her
reason for dropping them quickly a principle of fear that they might
notice her failure articulately to keep up. My own actual vision, which
had developed with such affluence, was that, in a given case, she could
keep up but for a few minutes and was therefore obliged to bring the
contact to an end before exposure. I had consistently mastered her
predicament: she had at once to cultivate contacts, so that people
shouldn't guess her real concentration, and to make them a literal touch
and go, so that they shouldn't suspect the enfeeblement of her mind. It
was obviously still worth everything to her that she was so charming. I
had theorised with Mrs. Brissenden on her supposititious inanity, but
the explanation of such cynicism in either of us could only be a
sensibility to the truth that attractions so great might float her even
a long time after intelligence pure and simple should have collapsed.
Was not my present uneasiness, none the less, a private curiosity to
ascertain just how much or how little of that element she had saved from
the wreck? She dodged, doubled, managed, broke off, clutching occasions,
yet doubtless risking dumbnesses, vaguenesses and other betrayals,
depending on attitudes, motions, expressions, a material personality, in
fine, in which a plain woman would have found nothing but failure; and
peace therefore might rule the scene on every hypothesis but that of her
getting, to put it crudely, worse. How I remember saying to myself that
if she didn't get better she surely _must_ get worse!--being aware that
I referred on the one side to her occult surrender and on the other to
its awful penalty. It became present to me that she possibly might
recover if anything should happen that would pull her up, turn her into
some other channel. If, however, that consideration didn't detain me
longer the fact may stand as a sign of how little I believed in any
check. Gilbert Long might die, but not the intensity he had inspired.
The analogy with the situation of the Brissendens here, I further
considered, broke down; I at any rate rather positively welcomed the
view that the sacrificed party to _that_ union might really find the
arrest of his decline, if not the renewal of his youth, in the loss of
his wife. Would this lady indeed, as an effect of _his_ death, begin to
wrinkle and shrivel? It would sound brutal to say that this was what I
should have preferred to hold, were it not that I in fact felt forced to
recognise the slightness of such a chance. She would have loved his
youth, and have made it her own, in death as in life, and he would have
quitted the world, in truth, only the more effectually to leave it to
her. Mrs. Server's quandary--which was now all I cared for--was exactly
in her own certitude of every absence of issue. But I need give little
more evidence of how it had set me thinking.
As much as anything else, perhaps, it was the fear of what one of the
men might say to me that made me for an hour or two, at this crisis,
continuously shy. Nobody, doubtless, would have said anything worse than
that she was more of a flirt than ever, that they had all compared notes
and would accordingly be interested in some hint of another, possibly a
deeper, experience. It would have been almost as embarrassing to have to
tell them how little experience I had had in fact as to have had to tell
them how much I had had in fancy--all the more that I had as yet only my
thin idea of the line of feeling in her that had led her so to spare me.
Tea on the terraces represented, meanwhile, among us, so much neglect of
everything else that my meditations remained for some time as unobserved
as I could desire. I was not, moreover, heeding much where they carried
me, and became aware of what I owed them only on at last finding myself
anticipated as the occupant of an arbour into which I had strolled. Then
I saw I had reached a remote part of the great gardens, and that for
some of my friends also secluded thought had inducements; though it was
not, I hasten to add, that either of the pair I here encountered
appeared to be striking out in any very original direction. Lady John
and Guy Brissenden, in the arbour, were thinking secludedly together;
they were together, that is, because they were scarce a foot apart, and
they were thinking, I inferred, because they were doing nothing else.
Silence, by every symptom, had definitely settled on them, and whatever
it was I interrupted had no resemblance to talk. Nothing--in the general
air of evidence--had more struck me than that what Lady John's famous
intellect seemed to draw most from Brissenden's presence was the
liberty to rest. Yet it shook off this languor as soon as she saw me; it
threw itself straight into the field; it went, I could see, through all
the motions required of it by her ladyship's fallacious philosophy. I
could mark these emotions, and what determined them, as behind clear
glass.
I found, on my side, a rare intellectual joy, the oddest secret
exultation, in feeling her begin instantly to play the part I had
attributed to her in the irreducible drama. She broke out in a manner
that could only have had for its purpose to represent to me that mere
weak amiability had committed her to such a predicament. It was to
humour her friend's husband that she had strayed so far, for she was
somehow sorry for him, and--good creature as we all knew her--had, on
principle, a kind little way of her own with silly infatuations. His
_was_ silly, but it was unmistakable, and she had for some time been
finding it, in short, a case for a special tact. That he bored her to
death I might have gathered by the way they sat there, and she could
trust me to believe--couldn't she?--that she was only musing as to how
she might most humanely get rid of him. She would lead him safely back
to the fold if I would give her time. She seemed to ask it all, oddly,
of _me_, to take me remarkably into her confidence, to refer me, for a
specimen of his behaviour, to his signal abandonment of his wife the
day before, his having waited over, to come down, for the train in which
poor _she_ was to travel. It was at all events, I felt, one of the
consequences of having caught on to so much that I by this time found
myself catching on to everything. I read into Lady John's wonderful
manner--which quite clamoured, moreover, for an interpretation--all that
was implied in the lesson I had extracted from other portions of the
business. It was distinctly poor she who gave me the lead, and it was
not less definite that she put it to me that I should render her a
service either by remaining with them or by inventing something that
would lure her persecutor away. She desired him, even at the cost of her
being left alone, distracted from his pursuit.
Poor he, in his quarter, I hasten to add, contributed to my picking out
this embroidery nothing more helpful than a sustained detachment. He
said as little as possible, seemed heedless of what was otherwise said,
and only gave me on his own account a look or two of dim suggestiveness.
Yet it was these looks that most told with me, and what they, for their
part, conveyed was a plea that directly contradicted Lady John's. I
understood him that it was he who was bored, he who had been pursued, he
for whom perversity had become a dreadful menace, he, in fine, who
pleaded for my intervention. He was so willing to trust me to relieve
him of his companion that I think he would simply have bolted without
deferring to me if I had not taken my precautions against it. I had, as
it happened, another momentary use for him than this: I wished on the
one hand not to lose him and on the other not to lose Lady John, though
I had quickly enough guessed this brilliant woman's real preference, of
which it in fact soon became my lively wish to see the proof. The union
of these two was too artificial for me not already to have connected
with it the service it might render, in her ladyship's view, to that
undetected cultivation, on her part, of a sentiment for Gilbert Long
which, through his feigned response to it, fitted so completely to the
other pieces in my collection. To see all this was at the time, I
remember, to be as inhumanly amused as if one had found one could create
something. I had created nothing but a clue or two to the larger
comprehension I still needed, yet I positively found myself overtaken by
a mild artistic glow. What had occurred was that, for my full
demonstration, I needed Long, and that, by the same stroke, I became
sure I should certainly get him by temporising a little.
Lady John was in love with him and had kicked up, to save her credit,
the dust of a fictive relation with another man--the relation one of
mere artifice and the man one in her encouragement of whom nobody would
believe. Yet she was also discoverably divided between her prudence and
her vanity, for if it was difficult to make poor Briss figure at all
vividly as an insistent satellite, the thankless tact she had to employ
gave her exactly, she argued, the right to be refreshingly fanned with
an occasional flap of the flag under which she had, as she ridiculously
fancied, truly conquered. If she was where I found her because her
escort had dragged her there, she had made the best of it through the
hope of assistance from another quarter. She had held out on the
possibility that Mr. Long--whom one _could_ without absurdity sit in an
arbour with--might have had some happy divination of her plight. He had
had such divinations before--thanks to a condition in him that made
sensibility abnormal--and the least a wretched woman could do when
betrayed by the excess of nature's bounty was to play admirer against
admirer and be "talked about" on her own terms. She would just this once
have admitted it, I was to gather, to be an occasion for pleading
guilty--oh, so harmlessly!--to a consciousness of the gentleman mutely
named between us. Well, the "proof" I just alluded to was that I had not
sat with my friends five minutes before Gilbert Long turned up.
I saw in a moment how neatly my being there with them played _his_ game;
I became in this fashion a witness for him that he could almost as
little leave Lady John alone as--well, as other people could. It may
perfectly have been the pleasure of this reflection that again made him
free and gay--produced in him, in any case, a different shade of manner
from that with which, before luncheon, as the consequence perhaps of a
vague _flair_ for my possible penetration, I had suspected him of edging
away from me. Not since my encounter with him at Paddington the
afternoon before had I had so to recognise him as the transfigured
talker. To see Lady John with him was to have little enough doubt of
_her_ recognitions, just as this spectacle also dotted each "i" in my
conviction of his venial--I can only call it that--duplicity. I made up
my mind on the spot that it had been no part of his plan to practise on
her, and that the worst he could have been accused of was a good-natured
acceptance, more apparent than real, for his own purposes, of her
theory--which she from time to time let peep out--that they would have
liked each other better if they hadn't been each, alas! so good. He
profited by the happy accident of having pleased a person so much in
evidence, and indeed it was tolerably clear to me that neither party was
duped. Lady John didn't want a lover; this would have been, as people
say, a larger order than, given the other complications of her
existence, she could meet; but she wanted, in a high degree, the
appearance of carrying on a passion that imposed alike fearless
realisations and conscious renouncements, and this circumstance fully
fell in with the convenience and the special situation of her friend.
Her vanity rejoiced, so far as she dared to let it nibble, and the
mysteries she practised, the dissimulations she elaborated, the general
danger of detection in which she flattered herself that she publicly
walked, were after all so much grist to the mill of that appetite.
By just so much, however, as it could never come up between them that
there was another woman in Gilbert's history, by just so much would it
on the other hand have been an articulate axiom that as many of the poor
Brisses of the world as she might care to accommodate would be welcome
to figure in her own. This personage, under that deeper induction, I
suddenly became aware that I also greatly pitied--pitied almost as much
as I pitied Mrs. Server; and my pity had doubtless something to do with
the fact that, after I had proposed to him that we should adjourn
together and we had, on his prompt, even though slightly dry response,
placed the invidious arbour at a certain distance, I passed my hand into
his arm. There were things I wanted of him, and the first was that he
should let me show him I could be kind to him. I had made of the
circumstance of tea at the house a pretext for our leaving the others,
each of whom I felt as rather showily calling my attention to their good
old ground for not wishing to rejoin the crowd. As to what Brissenden
wished I had made up my mind; I had made up my mind as to the subject of
his thoughts while they wandered, during his detention, from Lady John;
and if the next of my wishes was to enter into his desire, I had decided
on giving it effect by the time we reached the shortest of the vistas at
the end of which the house reared a brave front.