"He _is_!"
Mrs. Briss was superb, but, as I quickly felt I might remind her, there
was her possibly weak judgment. "Your confidence is splendid; only
mustn't I remember that your sense of the finer kinds of cleverness
isn't perhaps absolutely secure? Don't you know?--you also, till just
now, thought _me_ a prize fool."
If I had hoped, however, here to trip her up, I had reckoned without the
impulse, and even perhaps the example, that she properly owed to me.
"Oh, no--not anything of that sort, you, at all. Only an intelligent man
gone wrong."
I followed, but before I caught up, "Whereas Long's only a stupid man
gone right?" I threw out.
It checked her too briefly, and there was indeed something of my own it
brought straight back. "I thought that just what you told me, this
morning or yesterday, was that you had never known a case of the
conversion of an idiot."
I laughed at her readiness. Well, I had wanted to make her fight! "It's
true it would have been the only one."
"Ah, you'll have to do without it!" Oh, she was brisk now. "And if you
know what I think of him, you know no more than _he_ does."
"You mean you told him?"
She hung fire but an instant. "I told him, practically--and it was in
fact all I did have to say to him. It was enough, however, and he
disgustedly left me on it. Then it was that, as you gave me the chance,
I tried to telegraph you--to say to you on the spot and under the sharp
impression: 'What on earth do you mean by your nonsense? It doesn't hold
water!' It's a pity I didn't succeed!" she continued--for she had become
almost voluble. "It would have settled the question, and I should have
gone to bed."
I weighed it with the grimace that, I feared, had become almost as fixed
as Mrs. Server's. "It would have settled the question perhaps; but I
should have lost this impression of you."
"Oh, this impression of me!"
"Ah, but don't undervalue it: it's what I want! What was it then Long
had said?"
She had it more and more, but she had it as nothing at all. "Not a word
to repeat--you wouldn't believe! He does say nothing at all. One can't
remember. It's what I mean. I tried him on purpose, while I thought of
you. But he's perfectly stupid. I don't see how we can have
fancied----!" I had interrupted her by the movement with which again,
uncontrollably tossed on one of my surges of certitude, I turned away.
_How_ deep they must have been in together for her to have so at last
gathered herself up, and in how doubly interesting a light, above all,
it seemed to present Long for the future! That was, while I warned
myself, what I most read in--literally an implication of the enhancement
of this latter side of the prodigy. If his cleverness, under the alarm
that, first stirring their consciousness but dimly, had so swiftly
developed as to make next of each a mirror for the other, and then to
precipitate for them, in some silence deeper than darkness, the exchange
of recognitions, admissions and, as they certainly would have phrased
it, tips--if his excited acuteness was henceforth to protect itself by
dissimulation, what wouldn't perhaps, for one's diversion, be the new
spectacle and wonder? I could in a manner already measure this larger
play by the amplitude freshly determined in Mrs. Briss, and I was for a
moment actually held by the thought of the possible finish our friend
would find it in him to give to a represented, a fictive ineptitude.
The sharpest jostle to my thought, in this rush, might well have been,
I confess, the reflection that as it was I who had arrested, who had
spoiled their unconsciousness, so it was natural they should fight
against me for a possible life in the state I had given them instead. I
had spoiled their unconsciousness, I had destroyed it, and it was
consciousness alone that could make them effectively cruel. Therefore,
if they were cruel, it was I who had determined it, inasmuch as,
consciously, they could only want, they could only intend, to live.
Wouldn't that question have been, I managed even now to ask myself, the
very basis on which they had inscrutably come together? "It's life, you
know," each had said to the other, "and I, accordingly, can only cling
to mine. But you, poor dear--shall _you_ give up?" "Give up?" the other
had replied; "for what do you take me? I shall fight by your side,
please, and we can compare and exchange weapons and manoeuvres, and
you may in every way count upon me."
That was what, with greater vividness, was for the rest of the occasion
before me, or behind me; and that I had done it all and had only myself
to thank for it was what, from this minute, by the same token, was more
and more for me the inner essence of Mrs. Briss's attitude. I know not
what heavy admonition of my responsibility had thus suddenly descended
on me; but nothing, under it, was indeed more sensible than that
practically it paralysed me. And I could only say to myself that this
was the price--the price of the secret success, the lonely liberty and
the intellectual joy. There were things that for so private and splendid
a revel--that of the exclusive king with his Wagner opera--I could only
let go, and the special torment of my case was that the condition of
light, of the satisfaction of curiosity and of the attestation of
triumph, was in this direct way the sacrifice of feeling. There was no
point at which my assurance could, by the scientific method, judge
itself complete enough not to regard feeling as an interference and, in
consequence, as a possible check. If it had to go I knew well who went
with it, but I wasn't there to save _them_. I was there to save my
priceless pearl of an inquiry and to harden, to that end, my heart. I
should need indeed all my hardness, as well as my brightness, moreover,
to meet Mrs. Briss on the high level to which I had at last induced her
to mount, and, even while I prolonged the movement by which I had
momentarily stayed her, the intermission of her speech became itself for
me a hint of the peculiar pertinence of caution. It lasted long enough,
this drop, to suggest that her attention was the sharper for my having
turned away from it, and I should have feared a renewed challenge if she
hadn't, by good luck, presently gone on: "There's really nothing in him
at all!"