"They're more civil than you," she returned; "for if, when they flee
before it, they bump up against me in their flight, they don't explain
that by intimating that they're come from bad to worse. Besides, I see
what they suffer."
"And do you hear it?"
"What they suffer? No, I've taken care not to suffer myself. I don't
listen. It's none of my business."
"Is that a way of gently expressing," I ventured to ask, "that it's also
none of mine?"
"It might be," she replied, "if I had, as you appear to, the
imagination of atrocity. But I don't pretend to so much as conceive
what's your business."
"I wonder if it isn't just now," I said after a moment, "to convict you
of an attempt at duplicity that has not even had the saving grace of
success! Was it for Brissenden himself that you spoke just now as if you
believed him to wish to cling to you?"
"Well, I'm kind enough for anything," she goodnaturedly enough laughed.
"But what," she asked more sharply, "are you trying to find out?"
Such an awful lot, the answer to this would politely have been, that I
daresay the aptness of the question produced in my face a shade of
embarrassment. I felt, however, the next moment that I needn't fear too
much. What I, on approaching Lady John, had found myself moved to test,
using her in it as a happy touchstone, was the degree of the
surrounding, the latent, sense of things: an impulse confirmed by the
manner in which she had momentarily circled about the phenomenon of Mrs.
Server's avidity, about the mystery of the terms made with it by our
friend. It was present to me that if I could catch, on the part of my
interlocutress, anything of a straight scent, I might take that as the
measure of a diffused danger. I mentally applied this term to the
possibility of diffusion, because I suddenly found myself thinking with
a kind of horror of any accident by which I might have to expose to the
world, to defend against the world, to share with the world, that now so
complex tangle of hypotheses that I have had for convenience to speak of
as my theory. I could toss the ball myself, I could catch it and send it
back, and familiarity had now made this exercise--in my own inner
precincts--easy and safe. But the mere brush of Lady John's clumsier
curiosity made me tremble for the impunity of my creation. If there had
been, so to speak, a discernment, however feeble, of _my_ discernment,
it would have been irresistible to me to take this as the menace of some
incalculable catastrophe or some public ugliness. It wasn't for me
definitely to image the logical result of a verification by the sense of
others of the matter of my vision; but the thing had only to hang before
me as a chance for me to feel that I should utterly object to it, though
I may appear to weaken this statement if I add that the opportunity to
fix the degree of my actual companion's betrayed mystification was
almost a spell. This, I conceive, was just by reason of what was at
stake. How could I happily tell her what I was trying to find out?--tell
her, that is, not too much for security and yet enough for relief? The
best answer seemed a brave jump. I was conscious of a certain credit
open with her in my appearance of intellectual sympathy.
"Well," I brought out at last, "I'm quite aching to ask you if you'll
forgive me a great liberty, which I owe to your candid challenge my
opportunity to name. Will you allow me to say frankly that I think you
play a dangerous game with poor Briss, in whom I confess I'm interested?
I don't of course speak of the least danger to yourself; but it's an
injustice to any man to make use of him quite so flagrantly. You don't
in the least flatter yourself that the poor fellow is in love with
you--you wouldn't care a bit if he were. Yet you're willing to make him
think you like him, so far as that may be necessary to explain your so
frequently ingenious appropriation of him. He doesn't like you _too_
much, as yet; doesn't even like you quite enough. But your potency may,
after all, work on him, and then, as your interest is so obviously quite
elsewhere, what will happen will be that you'll find, to your
inconvenience, that you've gone too far. A man never likes a woman
enough unless he likes her _more_ than enough. Unfortunately it's what
the inveterate ass is sure sooner or later to do."
Lady John looked just enough interested to look detached from most of
the more vulgar liabilities to offence. "Do I understand that to be the
pretty name by which you describe Mr. Briss?"
"He has his share of it, for I'm thinking of the idiots that we everyone
of us are. I throw out a warning against a contingency."
"Are you providing for the contingency of his ceasing to care for his
wife? If you are"--and Lady John's amusement took on a breadth--"you
may be said to have a prudent mind and to be taking time by the
forelock."
At this I pricked up my ears. "Do you mean because of his apparently
incorruptible constancy?"
"I mean because the whole thing's so before one. She has him so in hand
that they're neither of them in as much danger as would count for a
mouse. It doesn't prevent his liking to dally by the way--for _she_
dallies by the way, and he does everything she does. Haven't I observed
her," Lady John continued, "dallying a little, so far as that goes, with
_you_? You've the tact to tell me that he doesn't think me good enough,
but I don't require, do I?--for such a purpose as his--to be very
extraordinarily good. You may say that you wrap it up immensely and try
to sugar the dose! Well, all the same, give up, for a quiet life, the
attempt to be a providence. You can't be a providence and not be a bore.
A real providence _knows_; whereas you," said Lady John, making her
point neatly, "have to find out--and to find out even by asking 'the
likes of' _me_. Your fine speech meanwhile doesn't a bit tell me what."
It affected me again that she could get so near without getting nearer.
True enough it was that I wanted to find out; and though I might expect,
or fear, too much of her, I wondered at her only seeing this--at her
not reading deeper. The peril of the public ugliness that haunted me
rose or fell, at this moment, with my varying view of her density. Or
rather, to be more exact, I already saw her as necessarily stupid
because I saw her as extravagantly vain. What I see now of course is
that I was on my own side almost stupidly hard with her--as I may also
at that hour have been subject to her other vice. Didn't I perhaps, in
proportion as I felt how little she saw, think awfully well of myself,
as we said at Newmarch, for seeing so much more? It comes back to me
that the sense thus established of my superior vision may perfectly have
gone a little to my head. If it was a frenzied fallacy I was all to
blame, but if it was anything else whatever it was naturally
intoxicating. I really remember in fact that nothing so much as this
confirmed presumption of my impunity had appeared to me to mark the fine
quality of my state. I think there must fairly have been a pitch at
which I was not sure that not to partake of that state was, on the part
of others, the sign of a gregarious vulgarity; as if there were a
positive advantage, an undiluted bliss, in the intensity of
consciousness that I had reached. _I_ alone was magnificently and
absurdly aware--everyone else was benightedly out of it. So I reflected
that there would be almost nothing I mightn't with safety mention to my
present subject of practice as an acknowledgment that I was meddlesome.
I could put no clue in her hand that her notorious acuteness would make
of the smallest use to her. The most she could do would be to make it of
use to myself, and the clue it seemed best to select was therefore a
complete confession of guilt.
"You've a lucidity of your own in which I'm forced to recognise that the
highest purity of motive looks shrivelled and black. You bring out
accordingly what has made me thus beat about the bush. Have you really
such a fund of indulgence for Gilbert Long as we most of us, I
gather--though perhaps in our blindness--seem to see it stick out again
that he supposes? _May_ he fondly feel that he can continue to count on
it? Or, if you object to my question in that form, is it not, frankly,
to making his attitude--after all so thoroughly public--more convenient
to each of you that (without perhaps quite measuring what you're about,)
you've gone on sacrificing poor Briss? I call it sacrificing, you see,
in spite of there having been as yet no such great harm done. And if you
ask me again what business of mine such inquiries may represent, why,
the best thing will doubtless be to say to you that, with a smaller dose
of irrepressible irony in my composition than you have in yours, I can't
make so light as you of my tendency to worry on behalf of those I care
for. Let me finally hasten to add that I'm not now including in that
category either of the two gentlemen I've named."
I freely concede, as I continue my record, that to follow me at all, at
this point, gave proof on Lady John's part of a faculty that should have
prevented my thinking of her as inordinately backward. "Then who in the
world _are_ these objects of your solicitude?"
I showed, over and above my hesitation, my regret for the need of it.
"I'm afraid I can't tell you."
At this, not unnaturally, she fairly scoffed. "Asking me everything and
telling me nothing, you nevertheless look to me to satisfy you? Do you
mean," she pursued, "that you speak for persons whose interest is more
legitimately founded than the interest you so flatteringly attribute to
myself?"
"Well, yes--let them be so described! Can't you guess," I further
risked, "who constitutes at least _one_ of my preoccupations?"
The condescension of her consent to think marked itself handsomely
enough. "Is it your idea to pretend to me that I'm keeping Grace
Brissenden awake?" There was consistency enough in her wonder. "She has
not been anything but nice to me; she's not a person whose path one
crosses without finding it out; and I can't imagine what has got into
her if any such grievance as that is what she has been pouring out to
you in your apparently so deep confabulations."
This toss of the ball was one that, I saw quickly enough, even a taste
for sport wouldn't justify my answering, and my logical interest lay
moreover elsewhere. "Dear no! Mrs. Brissenden certainly feels her
strength, and I should never presume to take under my charge any
personal situation of hers. I had in my mind a very different identity."
Lady John, as if to be patient with me, looked about at our companions
for a hint of it, wondering which of the ladies I might have been
supposed to "care for" so much as to tolerate in her a preference for a
rival; but the effect of this survey was, I the next instant observed, a
drop of her attention from what I had been saying. Her eye had been
caught by the sight of Gilbert Long within range of us, and then had
been just visibly held by the fact that the person seated with him on
one of the small sofas that almost of necessity made conversation
intimate was the person whose name, just uttered between us, was, in
default of the name she was in search of, still in the air. Gilbert Long
and Mrs. Briss were in familiar colloquy--though I was aware, at the
first flush, of nothing in this that should have made my interlocutress
stare. That is I was aware of nothing but that I had simultaneously
myself been moved to some increase of sharpness. What _could_ I have
known that should have caused me to wonder at the momentary existence of
this particular conjunction of minds unless it were simply the fact that
I hadn't seen it occur amid the many conjunctions I had already
noticed--_plus_ the fact that I had a few minutes before, in the
interest of the full roundness of my theory, actually been missing it?
These two persons had met in my presence at Paddington and had travelled
together under my eyes; I had talked of Mrs. Briss with Long and of Long
with Mrs. Briss; but the vivid picture that their social union forthwith
presented stirred within me, though so strangely late in the day, it
might have seemed, for such an emotion, more than enough freshness of
impression. Yet--now that I did have it there--why should it be vivid,
why stirring, why a picture at all? Was _any_ temporary collocation, in
a house so encouraging to sociability, out of the range of nature?
Intensely prompt, I need scarcely say, were both my freshness and my
perceived objections to it. The happiest objection, could I have taken
time to phrase it, would doubtless have been that the particular effect
of this juxtaposition--to my eyes at least--was a thing not to have been
foreseen. The parties to it looked, certainly, as I felt that I hadn't
prefigured them; though even this, for my reason, was not a description
of their aspect. Much less was it a description for the intelligence of
Lady John--to whom, however, after all, some formulation of what she
dimly saw would not be so indispensable.
We briefly watched, at any rate, together, and as our eyes met again we
moreover confessed that we had watched. And we could ostensibly have
offered each other no explanation of that impulse save that we had been
talking of those concerned as separate and that it was in consequence a
little odd to find ourselves suddenly seeing them as one. For that was
it--they _were_ as one; as one, at all events, for _my_ large reading.
My large reading had meanwhile, for the convenience of the rest of my
little talk with Lady John, to make itself as small as possible. I had
an odd sense, till we fell apart again, as of keeping my finger rather
stiffly fixed on a passage in a favourite author on which I had not
previously lighted. I held the book out of sight and behind me; I spoke
of things that were not at all in it--or not at all on that particular
page; but my volume, none the less, was only waiting. What might be
written there hummed already in my ears as a result of my mere glimpse.
Had _they_ also wonderfully begun to know? Had _she_, most wonderfully,
and had they, in that case, prodigiously come together on it? This was a
possibility into which my imagination could dip even deeper than into
the depths over which it had conceived the other pair as hovering. These
opposed couples balanced like bronze groups at the two ends of a
chimney-piece, and the most I could say to myself in lucid deprecation
of my thought was that I mustn't take them equally for granted merely
_because_ they balanced. Things in the real had a way of not balancing;
it was all an affair, this fine symmetry, of artificial proportion. Yet
even while I kept my eyes away from Mrs. Briss and Long it was vivid to
me that, "composing" there beautifully, they could scarce help playing a
part in my exhibition. The mind of man, furthermore--and my
generalisation pressed hard, with a quick twist, on the supersubtlety as
to which I had just been privately complacent--the mind of man doubtless
didn't know from one minute to the other, under the appeal of
phantasmagoric life, what it would profitably be at. It had struck me a
few seconds before as vulgarly gross in Lady John that she was curious,
or conscious, of so small a part; in spite of which I was already
secretly wincing at the hint that these others had begun to find
themselves less in the dark and perhaps even directly to exchange their
glimmerings.
My personal privilege, on the basis of the full consciousness, had
become, on the spot, in the turn of an eye, more than questionable, and
I was really quite scared at the chance of having to face--of having to
see _them_ face--another recognition. What did this alarm imply but the
complete reversal of my estimate of the value of perception? Mrs.
Brissenden and Long had been hitherto magnificently without it, and I
was responsible perhaps for having, in a mood practically much stupider
than the stupidest of theirs, put them gratuitously and helplessly _on_
it. To be without it was the most consistent, the most successful,
because the most amiable, form of selfishness; and why should people
admirably equipped for remaining so, people bright and insolent in their
prior state, people in whom this state was to have been respected as a
surface without a scratch is respected, be made to begin to vibrate, to
crack and split, from within? Wasn't it enough for _me_ to pay,
vicariously, the tax on being absurd? Were we all to be landed, without
an issue or a remedy, in a condition on which that tax would be
generally levied? It was as if, abruptly, with a new emotion, I had
wished to unthink every thought with which I had been occupied for
twenty-four hours. Let me add, however, that even had this process been
manageable I was aware of not proposing to begin it till I should have
done with Lady John.
The time she took to meet my last remark is naturally not represented by
this prolonged glance of mine at the amount of suggestion that just then
happened to reach me from the other quarter. It at all events duly came
out between us that Mrs. Server was the person I did have on my mind;
and I remember that it had seemed to me at the end of a minute to matter
comparatively little by which of us, after all, she was first
designated. There is perhaps an oddity--which I must set down to my
emotion of the moment--in my not now being able to say. I should have
been hugely startled if the sight of Gilbert Long had appeared to make
my companion suddenly think of her; and reminiscence of that shock is
not one of those I have found myself storing up. What does abide with me
is the memory of how, after a little, my apprehensions, of various
kinds, dropped--most of all under the deepening conviction that Lady
John was not a whit less agreeably superficial than I could even at the
worst have desired. The point established for me was that, whereas she
passed with herself and so many others as taking in everything, she had
taken in nothing whatever that it was to my purpose she should not take.
Vast, truly, was the world of observation, that we could both glean in
it so actively without crossing each other's steps. There we stood close
together, yet--save for the accident of a final dash, as I shall
note--were at opposite ends of the field.
It's a matter as to which the truth sounds priggish, but I can't help it
if--yes, positively--it affected me as hopelessly vulgar to have made
any induction at all about our companions _but_ those I have recorded,
in such detail, on behalf of my own energy. It was better verily not to
have touched them--which was the case of everyone else--than to have
taken them up, with knowing gestures, only to do so little with them.
That I felt the interest of May Server, that May Server felt the
interest of poor Briss, and that my feeling incongruously presented
itself as putting up, philosophically, with the inconvenience of the
lady's--these were, in fine, circumstances to which she clearly attached
ideas too commonplace for me to judge it useful to gather them in. She
read all things, Lady John, heaven knows, in the light of the universal
possibility of a "relation"; but most of the relations that she had up
her sleeve could thrust themselves into my theory only to find
themselves, the next minute, eliminated. They were of alien
substance--insoluble in the whole. Gilbert Long had for her no
connection, in my deeper sense, with Mrs. Server, nor Mrs. Server with
Gilbert Long, nor the husband with the wife, nor the wife with the
husband, nor I with either member of either pair, nor anyone with
anything, nor anything with anyone. She was thus exactly where I wanted
her to be, for, frankly, I became conscious, at this climax of my
conclusion, that I a little wanted her to be where she had distinctly
ended by betraying to me that her proper inspiration had placed her. If
I have just said that my apprehensions, of various kinds, had finally
and completely subsided, a more exact statement would perhaps have been
that from the moment our eyes met over the show of our couple on the
sofa, the question of any other calculable thing than _that_ hint of a
relation had simply known itself superseded. Reduced to its plainest
terms, this sketch of an improved acquaintance between our comrades was
designed to make Lady John think. It was designed to make me do no
less, but we thought, inevitably, on different lines.
I have already so represented my successions of reflection as rapid that
I may not appear to exceed in mentioning the amusement and philosophy
with which I presently perceived it as unmistakable that she believed in
the depth of her new sounding. It visibly went down for her much nearer
to the bottom of the sea than any plumb I might be qualified to drop.
Poor Briss was in love with his wife--that, when driven to the wall, she
had had to recognise; but she had not had to recognise that his wife was
in love with poor Briss. What was then to militate, on that lady's part,
against a due consciousness, at the end of a splendid summer day, a day
on which occasions had been so multiplied, of an impression of a special
order? What was to prove that there was "nothing in it" when two persons
sat looking so very exceptionally _much_ as if there were everything in
it, as if they were for the first time--thanks to finer
opportunity--doing each other full justice? Mustn't it indeed at this
juncture have come a little over my friend that Grace had lent herself
with uncommon good nature, the previous afternoon, to the arrangement by
which, on the way from town, her ladyship's reputation was to profit by
no worse company, precisely, than poor Briss's? Mrs. Brissenden's own
was obviously now free to profit by my companion's remembering--if the
fact had reached her ears--that Mrs. Brissenden had meanwhile had Long
for an escort. So much, at least, I saw Lady John as seeing, and my
vision may be taken as representing the dash I have confessed myself as
making from my end of our field. It offers us, to be exact, as jostling
each other just sensibly--though _I_ only might feel the bruise--in our
business of picking up straws. Our view of the improved acquaintance was
only a straw, but as I stooped to it I felt my head bump with my
neighbour's. This might have made me ashamed of my eagerness, but, oddly
enough, that effect was not to come. I felt in fact that, since we had
even pulled against each other at the straw, I carried off, in turning
away, the larger piece.
X
It was in the moment of turning away that I somehow learned, without
looking, that Mrs. Brissenden had also immediately moved. I wanted to
look and yet had my reasons for not appearing to do it too quickly; in
spite of which I found my friends, even after an interval, still
distinguishable as separating for the avoidance of comment. Gilbert
Long, rising directly after his associate, had already walked away, but
this associate, lingering where she stood and meeting me with it,
availed herself of the occasion to show that she wished to speak to me.
Such was the idea she threw out on my forthwith going to her. "For a few
minutes--presently."
"Do you mean alone? Shall I come with you?"
She hesitated long enough for me to judge her as a trifle surprised at
my being so ready--as if indeed she had rather hoped I wouldn't be;
which would have been an easy pretext to her to gain time. In fact, with
a face not quite like the brave face she had at each step hitherto shown
me, yet unlike in a fashion I should certainly not have been able to
define on the spot; with an expression, in short, that struck me as
taking refuge in a general reminder that not my convenience, but her
own, was in question, she replied: "Oh, no--but before it's too late. A
few minutes hence. Where shall you be?" she asked with a shade, as I
imagined, of awkwardness. She had looked about as for symptoms of
acceptance of the evening's end on the part of the ladies, but we could
both see our hostess otherwise occupied. "We don't go up quite yet. In
the morning," she added as with an afterthought, "I suppose you leave
early."