Transcribed from the 1922 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org. Proofed by Chris Jelley, Micky McClure and David.
[Picture: Book cover]
THE
AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO
* * * * *
BY
HENRY JAMES
* * * * *
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1922
I
MUCH as I wished to see him I had kept my letter of introduction three
weeks in my pocket-book. I was nervous and timid about meeting
him—conscious of youth and ignorance, convinced that he was tormented by
strangers, and especially by my country-people, and not exempt from the
suspicion that he had the irritability as well as the dignity of genius.
Moreover, the pleasure, if it should occur—for I could scarcely believe
it was near at hand—would be so great that I wished to think of it in
advance, to feel it there against my breast, not to mix it with
satisfactions more superficial and usual. In the little game of new
sensations that I was playing with my ingenuous mind I wished to keep my
visit to the author of “Beltraffio” as a trump-card. It was three years
after the publication of that fascinating work, which I had read over
five times and which now, with my riper judgement, I admire on the whole
as much as ever. This will give you about the date of my first visit—of
any duration—to England for you will not have forgotten the commotion, I
may even say the scandal, produced by Mark Ambient’s masterpiece. It
was the most complete presentation that had yet been made of the gospel
of art; it was a kind of æsthetic war-cry. People had endeavoured to
sail nearer to “truth” in the cut of their sleeves and the shape of their
sideboards; but there had not as yet been, among English novels, such an
example of beauty of execution and “intimate” importance of theme.
Nothing had been done in that line from the point of view of art for art.
That served me as a fond formula, I may mention, when I was twenty-five;
how much it still serves I won’t take upon myself to say—especially as
the discerning reader will be able to judge for himself. I had been in
England, briefly, a twelve-month before the time to which I began by
alluding, and had then learned that Mr. Ambient was in distant lands—was
making a considerable tour in the East; so that there was nothing to do
but to keep my letter till I should be in London again. It was of
little use to me to hear that his wife had not left England and was, with
her little boy, their only child, spending the period of her husband’s
absence—a good many months—at a small place they had down in Surrey.
They had a house in London, but actually in the occupation of other
persons. All this I had picked up, and also that Mrs. Ambient was
charming—my friend the American poet, from whom I had my introduction,
had never seen her, his relations with the great man confined to the
exchange of letters; but she wasn’t, after all, though she had lived so
near the rose, the author of “Beltraffio,” and I didn’t go down into
Surrey to call on her. I went to the Continent, spent the following
winter in Italy, and returned to London in May. My visit to Italy had
opened my eyes to a good many things, but to nothing more than the beauty
of certain pages in the works of Mark Ambient. I carried his
productions about in my trunk—they are not, as you know, very numerous,
but he had preluded to “Beltraffio” by, some exquisite things—and I used
to read them over in the evening at the inn. I used profoundly to
reason that the man who drew those characters and wrote that style
understood what he saw and knew what he was doing. This is my sole
ground for mentioning my winter in Italy. He had been there much in
former years—he was saturated with what painters call the “feeling” of
that classic land. He expressed the charm of the old hill-cities of
Tuscany, the look of certain lonely grass-grown places which, in the
past, had echoed with life; he understood the great artists, he
understood the spirit of the Renaissance; he understood everything. The
scene of one of his earlier novels was laid in Rome, the scene of another
in Florence, and I had moved through these cities in company with the
figures he set so firmly on their feet. This is why I was now so much
happier even than before in the prospect of making his acquaintance.
At last, when I had dallied with my privilege long enough, I despatched
to him the missive of the American poet. He had already gone out of
town; he shrank from the rigour of the London “season” and it was his
habit to migrate on the first of June. Moreover I had heard he was this
year hard at work on a new book, into which some of his impressions of
the East were to be wrought, so that he desired nothing so much as quiet
days. That knowledge, however, didn’t prevent me—_cet âge est sans
pitié_—from sending with my friend’s letter a note of my own, in which I
asked his leave to come down and see him for an hour or two on some day
to be named by himself. My proposal was accompanied with a very frank
expression of my sentiments, and the effect of the entire appeal was to
elicit from the great man the kindest possible invitation. He would be
delighted to see me, especially if I should turn up on the following
Saturday and would remain till the Monday morning. We would take a walk
over the Surrey commons, and I could tell him all about the other great
man, the one in America. He indicated to me the best train, and it may
be imagined whether on the Saturday afternoon I was punctual at Waterloo.
He carried his benevolence to the point of coming to meet me at the
little station at which I was to alight, and my heart beat very fast as I
saw his handsome face, surmounted with a soft wide-awake and which I knew
by a photograph long since enshrined on my mantel-shelf, scanning the
carriage-windows as the train rolled up. He recognised me as infallibly
as I had recognised himself; he appeared to know by instinct how a young
American of critical pretensions, rash youth, would look when much
divided between eagerness and modesty. He took me by the hand and
smiled at me and said: “You must be—a—_you_, I think!” and asked if I
should mind going on foot to his house, which would take but a few
minutes. I remember feeling it a piece of extraordinary affability that
he should give directions about the conveyance of my bag; I remember
feeling altogether very happy and rosy, in fact quite transported, when
he laid his hand on my shoulder as we came out of the station.
I surveyed him, askance, as we walked together; I had already, I had
indeed instantly, seen him as all delightful. His face is so well known
that I needn’t describe it; he looked to me at once an English gentleman
and a man of genius, and I thought that a happy combination. There was
a brush of the Bohemian in his fineness; you would easily have guessed
his belonging to the artist guild. He was addicted to velvet jackets,
to cigarettes, to loose shirt-collars, to looking a little dishevelled.
His features, which were firm but not perfectly regular, are fairly
enough represented in his portraits; but no portrait I have seen gives
any idea of his expression. There were innumerable things in it, and
they chased each other in and out of his face. I have seen people who
were grave and gay in quick alternation; but Mark Ambient was grave and
gay at one and the same moment. There were other strange oppositions
and contradictions in his slightly faded and fatigued countenance. He
affected me somehow as at once fresh and stale, at once anxious and
indifferent. He had evidently had an active past, which inspired one
with curiosity; yet what was that compared to his obvious future? He was
just enough above middle height to be spoken of as tall, and rather lean
and long in the flank. He had the friendliest frankest manner possible,
and yet I could see it cost him something. It cost him small spasms of
the self-consciousness that is an Englishman’s last and dearest
treasure—the thing he pays his way through life by sacrificing small
pieces of even as the gallant but moneyless adventurer in “Quentin
Durward” broke off links of his brave gold chain. He had been
thirty-eight years old at the time “Beltraffio” was published. He asked
me about his friend in America, about the length of my stay in England,
about the last news in London and the people I had seen there; and I
remember looking for the signs of genius in the very form of his
questions and thinking I found it. I liked his voice as if I were
somehow myself having the use of it.
There was genius in his house too I thought when we got there; there was
imagination in the carpets and curtains, in the pictures and books, in
the garden behind it, where certain old brown walls were muffled in
creepers that appeared to me to have been copied from a masterpiece of
one of the pre-Raphaelites. That was the way many things struck me at
that time, in England—as reproductions of something that existed
primarily in art or literature. It was not the picture, the poem, the
fictive page, that seemed to me a copy; these things were the originals,
and the life of happy and distinguished people was fashioned in their
image. Mark Ambient called his house a cottage, and I saw afterwards he
was right for if it hadn’t been a cottage it must have been a villa, and
a villa, in England at least, was not a place in which one could fancy
him at home. But it was, to my vision, a cottage glorified and
translated; it was a palace of art, on a slightly reduced scale—and might
besides have been the dearest haunt of the old English _genius loci_.
It nestled under a cluster of magnificent beeches, it had little creaking
lattices that opened out of, or into, pendent mats of ivy, and gables,
and old red tiles, as well as a general aspect of being painted in
water-colours and inhabited by people whose lives would go on in chapters
and volumes. The lawn seemed to me of extraordinary extent, the
garden-walls of incalculable height, the whole air of the place
delightfully still, private, proper to itself. “My wife must be
somewhere about,” Mark Ambient said as we went in. “We shall find her
perhaps—we’ve about an hour before dinner. She may be in the garden.
I’ll show you my little place.”
We passed through the house and into the grounds, as I should have called
them, which extended into the rear. They covered scarce three or four
acres, but, like the house, were very old and crooked and full of traces
of long habitation, with inequalities of level and little flights of
steps—mossy and cracked were these—which connected the different parts
with each other. The limits of the place, cleverly dissimulated, were
muffled in the great verdurous screens. They formed, as I remember, a
thick loose curtain at the further end, in one of the folds of which, as
it were, we presently made out from afar a little group. “Ah there she
is!” said Mark Ambient; “and she has got the boy.” He noted that last
fact in a slightly different tone from any in which he yet had spoken.
I wasn’t fully aware of this at the time, but it lingered in my ear and I
afterwards understood it.
“Is it your son?” I inquired, feeling the question not to be brilliant.
“Yes, my only child. He’s always in his mother’s pocket. She coddles
him too much.” It came back to me afterwards too—the sound of these
critical words. They weren’t petulant; they expressed rather a sudden
coldness, a mechanical submission. We went a few steps further, and
then he stopped short and called the boy, beckoning to him repeatedly.
“Dolcino, come and see your daddy!” There was something in the way he
stood still and waited that made me think he did it for a purpose. Mrs.
Ambient had her arm round the child’s waist, and he was leaning against
her knee; but though he moved at his father’s call she gave no sign of
releasing him. A lady, apparently a neighbour, was seated near her, and
before them was a garden-table on which a tea-service had been placed.
Mark Ambient called again, and Dolcino struggled in the maternal embrace;
but, too tightly held, he after two or three fruitless efforts jerked
about and buried his head deep in his mother’s lap. There was a certain
awkwardness in the scene; I thought it odd Mrs. Ambient should pay so
little attention to her husband. But I wouldn’t for the world have
betrayed my thought, and, to conceal it, I began loudly to rejoice in the
prospect of our having tea in the garden. “Ah she won’t let him come!”
said my host with a sigh; and we went our way till we reached the two
ladies. He mentioned my name to his wife, and I noticed that he
addressed her as “My dear,” very genially, without a trace of resentment
at her detention of the child. The quickness of the transition made me
vaguely ask myself if he were perchance henpecked—a shocking surmise
which I instantly dismissed. Mrs. Ambient was quite such a wife as I
should have expected him to have; slim and fair, with a long neck and
pretty eyes and an air of good breeding. She shone with a certain
coldness and practised in intercourse a certain bland detachment, but she
was clothed in gentleness as in one of those vaporous redundant scarves
that muffle the heroines of Gainsborough and Romney. She had also a
vague air of race, justified by my afterwards learning that she was
“connected with the aristocracy.” I have seen poets married to women of
whom it was difficult to conceive that they should gratify the poetic
fancy—women with dull faces and glutinous minds, who were none the less,
however, excellent wives. But there was no obvious disparity in Mark
Ambient’s union. My hostess—so far as she could be called so—delicate
and quiet, in a white dress, with her beautiful child at her side, was
worthy of the author of a work so distinguished as “Beltraffio.” Round
her neck she wore a black velvet ribbon, of which the long ends, tied
behind, hung down her back, and to which, in front, was attached a
miniature portrait of her little boy. Her smooth shining hair was
confined in a net. She gave me an adequate greeting, and Dolcino—I
thought this small name of endearment delightful—took advantage of her
getting up to slip away from her and go to his father, who seized him in
silence and held him high for a long moment, kissing him several times.
I had lost no time in observing that the child, not more than seven years
old, was extraordinarily beautiful. He had the face of an angel—the
eyes, the hair, the smile of innocence, the more than mortal bloom.
There was something that deeply touched, that almost alarmed, in his
beauty, composed, one would have said, of elements too fine and pure for
the breath of this world. When I spoke to him and he came and held out
his hand and smiled at me I felt a sudden strange pity for him—quite as
if he had been an orphan or a changeling or stamped with some social
stigma. It was impossible to be in fact more exempt from these
misfortunes, and yet, as one kissed him, it was hard to keep from
murmuring all tenderly “Poor little devil!” though why one should have
applied this epithet to a living cherub is more than I can say.
Afterwards indeed I knew a trifle better; I grasped the truth of his
being too fair to live, wondering at the same time that his parents
shouldn’t have guessed it and have been in proportionate grief and
despair. For myself I had no doubt of his evanescence, having already
more than once caught in the fact the particular infant charm that’s as
good as a death-warrant.
The lady who had been sitting with Mrs. Ambient was a jolly ruddy
personage in velveteen and limp feathers, whom I guessed to be the
vicar’s wife—our hostess didn’t introduce me—and who immediately began to
talk to Ambient about chrysanthemums. This was a safe subject, and yet
there was a certain surprise for me in seeing the author of “Beltraffio”
even in such superficial communion with the Church of England. His
writings implied so much detachment from that institution, expressed a
view of life so profane, as it were, so independent and so little likely
in general to be thought edifying, that I should have expected to find
him an object of horror to vicars and their ladies—of horror repaid on
his own part by any amount of effortless derision. This proved how
little I knew as yet of the English people and their extraordinary talent
for keeping up their forms, as well as of some of the mysteries of Mark
Ambient’s hearth and home. I found afterwards that he had, in his study,
between nervous laughs and free cigar-puffs, some wonderful comparisons
for his clerical neighbours; but meanwhile the chrysanthemums were a
source of harmony, he and the vicaress were equally attached to them, and
I was surprised at the knowledge they exhibited of this interesting
plant. The lady’s visit, however, had presumably been long, and she
presently rose for departure and kissed Mrs. Ambient. Mark started to
walk with her to the gate of the grounds, holding Dolcino by the hand.
“Stay with me, darling,” Mrs. Ambient said to the boy, who had
surrendered himself to his father.
Mark paid no attention to the summons but Dolcino turned and looked at
her in shy appeal, “Can’t I go with papa?”
“Not when I ask you to stay with me.”
“But please don’t ask me, mamma,” said the child in his small clear new
voice.
“I must ask you when I want you. Come to me, dearest.” And Mrs.
Ambient, who had seated herself again, held out her long slender slightly
too osseous hands.
Her husband stopped, his back turned to her, but without releasing the
child. He was still talking to the vicaress, but this good lady, I
think, had lost the thread of her attention. She looked at Mrs. Ambient
and at Dolcino, and then looked at me, smiling in a highly amused
cheerful manner and almost to a grimace.
“Papa,” said the child, “mamma wants me not to go with you.”
“He’s very tired—he has run about all day. He ought to be quiet till he
goes to bed. Otherwise he won’t sleep.” These declarations fell
successively and very distinctly from Mrs. Ambient’s lips.
Her husband, still without turning round, bent over the boy and looked at
him in silence. The vicaress gave a genial irrelevant laugh and observed
that he was a precious little pet. “Let him choose,” said Mark Ambient.
“My dear little boy, will you go with me or will you stay with your
mother?”
“Oh it’s a shame!” cried the vicar’s lady with increased hilarity.
“Papa, I don’t think I can choose,” the child answered, making his voice
very low and confidential. “But I’ve been a great deal with mamma
to-day,” he then added.
“And very little with papa! My dear fellow, I think you _have_ chosen!”
On which Mark Ambient walked off with his son, accompanied by re-echoing
but inarticulate comments from my fellow-visitor.
His wife had seated herself again, and her fixed eyes, bent on the
ground, expressed for a few moments so much mute agitation that anything
I could think of to say would be but a false note. Yet she none the less
quickly recovered herself, to express the sufficiently civil hope that I
didn’t mind having had to walk from the station. I reassured her on this
point, and she went on: “We’ve got a thing that might have gone for you,
but my husband wouldn’t order it.” After which and another longish
pause, broken only by my plea that the pleasure of a walk with our friend
would have been quite what I would have chosen, she found for reply: “I
believe the Americans walk very little.”
“Yes, we always run,” I laughingly allowed.
She looked at me seriously, yet with an absence in her pretty eyes. “I
suppose your distances are so great.”
“Yes, but we break our marches! I can’t tell you the pleasure to me of
finding myself here,” I added. “I’ve the greatest admiration for Mr.
Ambient.”
“He’ll like that. He likes being admired.”
“He must have a very happy life, then. He has many worshippers.”
“Oh yes, I’ve seen some of them,” she dropped, looking away, very far
from me, rather as if such a vision were before her at the moment. It
seemed to indicate, her tone, that the sight was scarcely edifying, and I
guessed her quickly enough to be in no great intellectual sympathy with
the author of “Beltraffio.” I thought the fact strange, but somehow, in
the glow of my own enthusiasm, didn’t think it important it only made me
wish rather to emphasise that homage.
“For me, you know,” I returned—doubtless with a due _suffisance_—“he’s
quite the greatest of living writers.”
“Of course I can’t judge. Of course he’s very clever,” she said with a
patient cheer.
“He’s nothing less than supreme, Mrs. Ambient! There are pages in each
of his books of a perfection classing them with the greatest things.
Accordingly for me to see him in this familiar way, in his habit as he
lives, and apparently to find the man as delightful as the artist—well, I
can’t tell you how much too good to be true it seems and how great a
privilege I think it.” I knew I was gushing, but I couldn’t help it, and
what I said was a good deal less than what I felt. I was by no means
sure I should dare to say even so much as this to the master himself, and
there was a kind of rapture in speaking it out to his wife which was not
affected by the fact that, as a wife, she appeared peculiar. She
listened to me with her face grave again and her lips a little
compressed, listened as if in no doubt, of course, that her husband was
remarkable, but as if at the same time she had heard it frequently enough
and couldn’t treat it as stirring news. There was even in her manner a
suggestion that I was so young as to expose myself to being called
forward—an imputation and a word I had always loathed; as well as a
hinted reminder that people usually got over their early extravagance.
“I assure you that for me this is a red-letter day,” I added.
She didn’t take this up, but after a pause, looking round her, said
abruptly and a trifle dryly: “We’re very much afraid about the fruit this
year.”
My eyes wandered to the mossy mottled garden-walls, where plum-trees and
pears, flattened and fastened upon the rusty bricks, looked like
crucified figures with many arms. “Doesn’t it promise well?”
“No, the trees look very dull. We had such late frosts.”
Then there was another pause. She addressed her attention to the
opposite end of the grounds, kept it for her husband’s return with the
child. “Is Mr. Ambient fond of gardening?” it occurred to me to ask,
irresistibly impelled as I felt myself, moreover, to bring the
conversation constantly back to him.
“He’s very fond of plums,” said his wife.
“Ah well, then, I hope your crop will be better than you fear. It’s a
lovely old place,” I continued. “The whole impression’s that of certain
places he has described. Your house is like one of his pictures.”
She seemed a bit frigidly amused at my glow. “It’s a pleasant little
place. There are hundreds like it.”
“Oh it has his _tone_,” I laughed, but sounding my epithet and insisting
on my point the more sharply that my companion appeared to see in my
appreciation of her simple establishment a mark of mean experience.
It was clear I insisted too much. “His tone?” she repeated with a harder
look at me and a slightly heightened colour.
“Surely he has a tone, Mrs. Ambient.”
“Oh yes, he has indeed! But I don’t in the least consider that I’m
living in one of his books at all. I shouldn’t care for that in the
least,” she went on with a smile that had in some degree the effect of
converting her really sharp protest into an insincere joke. “I’m afraid
I’m not very literary. And I’m not artistic,” she stated.
“I’m very sure you’re not ignorant, not stupid,” I ventured to reply,
with the accompaniment of feeling immediately afterwards that I had been
both familiar and patronising. My only consolation was in the sense that
she had begun it, had fairly dragged me into it. She had thrust forward
her limitations.
“Well, whatever I am I’m very different from my husband. If you like him
you won’t like me. You needn’t say anything. Your liking me isn’t in
the least necessary!”
“Don’t defy me!” I could but honourably make answer.
She looked as if she hadn’t heard me, which was the best thing she could
do; and we sat some time without further speech. Mrs. Ambient had
evidently the enviable English quality of being able to be mute without
unrest. But at last she spoke—she asked me if there seemed many people
in town. I gave her what satisfaction I could on this point, and we
talked a little of London and of some of its characteristics at that time
of the year. At the end of this I came back irrepressibly to Mark.
“Doesn’t he like to be there now? I suppose he doesn’t find the proper
quiet for his work. I should think his things had been written for the
most part in a very still place. They suggest a great stillness
following on a kind of tumult. Don’t you think so?” I laboured on. “I
suppose London’s a tremendous place to collect impressions, but a refuge
like this, in the country, must be better for working them up. Does he
get many of his impressions in London, should you say?” I proceeded from
point to point in this malign inquiry simply because my hostess, who
probably thought me an odious chattering person, gave me time; for when I
paused—I’ve not represented my pauses—she simply continued to let her
eyes wander while her long fair fingers played with the medallion on her
neck. When I stopped altogether, however, she was obliged to say
something, and what she said was that she hadn’t the least idea where her
husband got his impressions. This made me think her, for a moment,
positively disagreeable; delicate and proper and rather aristocratically
fine as she sat there. But I must either have lost that view a moment
later or been goaded by it to further aggression, for I remember asking
her if our great man were in a good vein of work and when we might look
for the appearance of the book on which he was engaged. I’ve every
reason now to know that she found me insufferable.
She gave a strange small laugh as she said: “I’m afraid you think I know
much more about my husband’s work than I do. I haven’t the least idea
what he’s doing,” she then added in a slightly different, that is a more
explanatory, tone and as if from a glimpse of the enormity of her
confession. “I don’t read what he writes.”
She didn’t succeed, and wouldn’t even had she tried much harder, in
making this seem to me anything less than monstrous. I stared at her and
I think I blushed. “Don’t you admire his genius? Don’t you admire
‘Beltraffio’?”
She waited, and I wondered what she could possibly say. She didn’t
speak, I could see, the first words that rose to her lips; she repeated
what she had said a few minutes before. “Oh of course he’s very clever!”
And with this she got up; our two absentees had reappeared.
II
MRS. AMBIENT left me and went to meet them; she stopped and had a few
words with her husband that I didn’t hear and that ended in her taking
the child by the hand and returning with him to the house. Her husband
joined me in a moment, looking, I thought, the least bit conscious and
constrained, and said that if I would come in with him he would show me
my room. In looking back upon these first moments of my visit I find it
important to avoid the error of appearing to have at all fully measured
his situation from the first or made out the signs of things mastered
only afterwards. This later knowledge throws a backward light and makes
me forget that, at least on the occasion of my present reference—I mean
that first afternoon—Mark Ambient struck me as only enviable. Allowing
for this he must yet have failed of much expression as we walked back to
the house, though I remember well the answer he made to a remark of mine
on his small son.
“That’s an extraordinary little boy of yours. I’ve never seen such a
child.”
“Why,” he asked while we went, “do you call him extraordinary?”
“He’s so beautiful, so fascinating. He’s like some perfect little work
of art.”
He turned quickly in the passage, grasping my arm. “Oh don’t call him
that, or you’ll—you’ll—!”
But in his hesitation he broke off suddenly, laughing at my surprise.
Immediately afterwards, however, he added: “You’ll make his little future
very difficult.”
I declared that I wouldn’t for the world take any liberties with his
little future—it seemed to me to hang by threads of such delicacy. I
should only be highly interested in watching it.
“You Americans are very keen,” he commented on this. “You notice more
things than we do.”
“Ah if you want visitors who aren’t struck with you,” I cried, “you
shouldn’t have asked me down here!”
He showed me my room, a little bower of chintz, with open windows where
the light was green, and before he left me said irrelevantly: “As for my
small son, you know, we shall probably kill him between us before we’ve
done with him!” And he made this assertion as if he really believed it,
without any appearance of jest, his fine near-sighted expressive eyes
looking straight into mine.
“Do you mean by spoiling him?”
“No, by fighting for him!”
“You had better give him to me to keep for you,” I said. “Let me remove
the apple of discord!”
It was my extravagance of course, but he had the air of being perfectly
serious. “It would be quite the best thing we could do. I should be all
ready to do it.”
“I’m greatly obliged to you for your confidence.”
But he lingered with his hands in his pockets. I felt as if within a few
moments I had, morally speaking, taken several steps nearer to him. He
looked weary, just as he faced me then, looked preoccupied and as if
there were something one might do for him. I was terribly conscious of
the limits of my young ability, but I wondered what such a service might
be, feeling at bottom nevertheless that the only thing I could do for him
was to like him. I suppose he guessed this and was grateful for what was
in my mind, since he went on presently: “I haven’t the advantage of being
an American, but I also notice a little, and I’ve an idea that”—here he
smiled and laid his hand on my shoulder—“even counting out your
nationality you’re not destitute of intelligence. I’ve only known you
half an hour, but—!” For which again he pulled up. “You’re very young,
after all.”
“But you may treat me as if I could understand you!” I said; and before
he left me to dress for dinner he had virtually given me a promise that
he would.
When I went down into the drawing-room—I was very punctual—I found that
neither my hostess nor my host had appeared. A lady rose from a sofa,
however, and inclined her head as I rather surprisedly gazed at her. “I
daresay you don’t know me,” she said with the modern laugh. “I’m Mark
Ambient’s sister.” Whereupon I shook hands with her, saluting her very
low. Her laugh was modern—by which I mean that it consisted of the vocal
agitation serving between people who meet in drawing-rooms as the solvent
of social disparities, the medium of transitions; but her appearance
was—what shall I call it?—medieval. She was pale and angular, her long
thin face was inhabited by sad dark eyes and her black hair intertwined
with golden fillets and curious clasps. She wore a faded velvet robe
which clung to her when she moved and was “cut,” as to the neck and
sleeves, like the garments of old Italians. She suggested a symbolic
picture, something akin even to Dürer’s Melancholia, and was so perfect
an image of a type which I, in my ignorance, supposed to be extinct, that
while she rose before me I was almost as much startled as if I had seen a
ghost. I afterwards concluded that Miss Ambient wasn’t incapable of
deriving pleasure from this weird effect, and I now believe that
reflexion concerned in her having sunk again to her seat with her long
lean but not ungraceful arms locked together in an archaic manner on her
knees and her mournful eyes addressing me a message of intentness which
foreshadowed what I was subsequently to suffer. She was a singular
fatuous artificial creature, and I was never more than half to penetrate
her motives and mysteries. Of one thing I’m sure at least: that they
were considerably less insuperable than her appearance announced. Miss
Ambient was a restless romantic disappointed spinster, consumed with the
love of Michael-Angelesque attitudes and mystical robes; but I’m now
convinced she hadn’t in her nature those depths of unutterable thought
which, when you first knew her, seemed to look out from her eyes and to
prompt her complicated gestures. Those features in especial had a
misleading eloquence; they lingered on you with a far-off dimness, an air
of obstructed sympathy, which was certainly not always a key to the
spirit of their owner; so that, of a truth, a young lady could scarce
have been so dejected and disillusioned without having committed a crime
for which she was consumed with remorse, or having parted with a hope
that she couldn’t sanely have entertained. She had, I believe, the usual
allowance of rather vain motives: she wished to be looked at, she wished
to be married, she wished to be thought original.
It costs me a pang to speak in this irreverent manner of one of Ambient’s
name, but I shall have still less gracious things to say before I’ve
finished my anecdote, and moreover—I confess it—I owe the young lady a
bit of a grudge. Putting aside the curious cast of her face she had no
natural aptitude for an artistic development, had little real
intelligence. But her affectations rubbed off on her brother’s renown,
and as there were plenty of people who darkly disapproved of him they
could easily point to his sister as a person formed by his influence. It
was quite possible to regard her as a warning, and she had almost
compromised him with the world at large. He was the original and she the
inevitable imitation. I suppose him scarce aware of the impression she
mainly produced, beyond having a general idea that she made up very well
as a Rossetti; he was used to her and was sorry for her, wishing she
would marry and observing how she didn’t. Doubtless I take her too
seriously, for she did me no harm, though I’m bound to allow that I can
only half-account for her. She wasn’t so mystical as she looked, but was
a strange indirect uncomfortable embarrassing woman. My story gives the
reader at best so very small a knot to untie that I needn’t hope to
excite his curiosity by delaying to remark that Mrs. Ambient hated her
sister-in-law. This I learned but later on, when other matters came to
my knowledge. I mention it, however, at once, for I shall perhaps not
seem to count too much on having beguiled him if I say he must promptly
have guessed it. Mrs. Ambient, a person of conscience, put the best face
on her kinswoman, who spent a month with her twice a year; but it took no
great insight to recognise the very different personal paste of the two
ladies, and that the usual feminine hypocrisies would cost them on either
side much more than the usual effort. Mrs. Ambient, smooth-haired,
thin-lipped, perpetually fresh, must have regarded her crumpled and
dishevelled visitor as an equivocal joke; she herself so the opposite of
a Rossetti, she herself a Reynolds or a Lawrence, with no more
far-fetched note in her composition than a cold ladylike candour and a
well-starched muslin dress.
It was in a garment and with an expression of this kind that she made her
entrance after I had exchanged a few words with Miss Ambient. Her
husband presently followed her and, there being no other company, we went
to dinner. The impressions I received at that repast are present to me
still. The elements of oddity in the air hovered, as it were, without
descending—to any immediate check of my delight. This came mainly, of
course, from Ambient’s talk, the easiest and richest I had ever heard. I
mayn’t say to-day whether he laid himself out to dazzle a rather juvenile
pilgrim from over the sea; but that matters little—it seemed so natural
to him to shine. His spoken wit or wisdom, or whatever, had thus a charm
almost beyond his written; that is if the high finish of his printed
prose be really, as some people have maintained, a fault. There was such
a kindness in him, however, that I’ve no doubt it gave him ideas for me,
or about me, to see me sit as open-mouthed as I now figure myself. Not
so the two ladies, who not only were very nearly dumb from beginning to
end of the meal, but who hadn’t even the air of being struck with such an
exhibition of fancy and taste. Mrs. Ambient, detached, and inscrutable,
met neither my eye nor her husband’s; she attended to her dinner, watched
her servants, arranged the puckers in her dress, exchanged at wide
intervals a remark with her sister-in-law and, while she slowly rubbed
her lean white hands between the courses, looked out of the window at the
first signs of evening—the long June day allowing us to dine without
candles. Miss Ambient appeared to give little direct heed to anything
said by her brother; but on the other hand she was much engaged in
watching its effect upon me. Her “die-away” pupils continued to attach
themselves to my countenance, and it was only her air of belonging to
another century that kept them from being importunate. She seemed to
look at me across the ages, and the interval of time diminished for me
the inconvenience. It was as if she knew in a general way that he must
be talking very well, but she herself was so at home among such allusions
that she had no need to pick them up and was at liberty to see what would
become of the exposure of a candid young American to a high æsthetic
temperature.
The temperature was æsthetic certainly, but it was less so than I could
have desired, for I failed of any great success in making our friend
abound about himself. I tried to put him on the ground of his own
genius, but he slipped through my fingers every time and shifted the
saddle to one or other of his contemporaries. He talked about Balzac and
Browning, about what was being done in foreign countries, about his
recent tour in the East and the extraordinary forms of life to be
observed in that part of the world. I felt he had reasons for holding
off from a direct profession of literary faith, a full consistency or
sincerity, and therefore dealt instead with certain social topics,
treating them with extraordinary humour and with a due play of that power
of ironic evocation in which his books abound. He had a deal to say
about London as London appears to the observer who has the courage of
some of his conclusions during the high-pressure time—from April to
July—of its gregarious life. He flashed his faculty of playing with the
caught image and liberating the wistful idea over the whole scheme of
manners or conception of intercourse of his compatriots, among whom there
were evidently not a few types for which he had little love. London in
short was grotesque to him, and he made capital sport of it; his only
allusion that I can remember to his own work was his saying that he meant
some day to do an immense and general, a kind of epic, social satire.
Miss Ambient’s perpetual gaze seemed to put to me: “Do you perceive how
artistic, how very strange and interesting, we are? Frankly now is it
possible to be _more_ artistic, _more_ strange and interesting, than
this? You surely won’t deny that we’re remarkable.” I was irritated by
her use of the plural pronoun, for she had no right to pair herself with
her brother; and moreover, of course, I couldn’t see my way to—at all
genially—include Mrs. Ambient. Yet there was no doubt they were, taken
together, unprecedented enough, and, with all allowances, I had never
been left, or condemned, to draw so many rich inferences.
After the ladies had retired my host took me into his study to smoke,
where I appealingly brought him round, or so tried, to some disclosure of
fond ideals. I was bent on proving I was worthy to listen to him, on
repaying him for what he had said to me before dinner, by showing him how
perfectly I understood. He liked to talk; he liked to defend his
convictions and his honour (not that I attacked them); he liked a little
perhaps—it was a pardonable weakness—to bewilder the youthful mind even
while wishing to win it over. My ingenuous sympathy received at any rate
a shock from three or four of his professions—he made me occasionally
gasp and stare. He couldn’t help forgetting, or rather couldn’t know,
how little, in another and drier clime, I had ever sat in the school in
which he was master; and he promoted me as at a jump to a sense of its
penetralia. My trepidations, however, were delightful; they were just
what I had hoped for, and their only fault was that they passed away too
quickly; since I found that for the main points I was essentially, I was
quite constitutionally, on Mark Ambient’s “side.” This was the taken
stand of the artist to whom every manifestation of human energy was a
thrilling spectacle and who felt for ever the desire to resolve his
experience of life into a literary form. On that high head of the
passion for form the attempt at perfection, the quest for which was to
his mind the real search for the holy grail—he said the most interesting,
the most inspiring things. He mixed with them a thousand illustrations
from his own life, from other lives he had known, from history and
fiction, and above all from the annals of the time that was dear to him
beyond all periods, the Italian cinque-cento. It came to me thus that in
his books he had uttered but half his thought, and that what he had kept
back from motives I deplored when I made them out later—was the finer and
braver part. It was his fate to make a great many still more “prepared”
people than me not inconsiderably wince; but there was no grain of
bravado in his ripest things (I’ve always maintained it, though often
contradicted), and at bottom the poor fellow, disinterested to his
finger-tips and regarding imperfection not only as an æsthetic but quite
also as a social crime, had an extreme dread of scandal. There are
critics who regret that having gone so far he didn’t go further; but I
regret nothing—putting aside two or three of the motives I just
mentioned—since he arrived at a noble rarity and I don’t see how you can
go beyond that. The hours I spent in his study—this first one and the
few that followed it; they were not, after all, so numerous—seem to glow,
as I look back on them, with a tone that is partly that of the brown old
room, rich, under the shaded candle-light where we sat and smoked, with
the dusky delicate bindings of valuable books; partly that of his voice,
of which I still catch the echo, charged with the fancies and figures
that came at his command. When we went back to the drawing-room we found
Miss Ambient alone in possession and prompt to mention that her
sister-in-law had a quarter of an hour before been called by the nurse to
see the child, who appeared rather unwell—a little feverish.
“Feverish! how in the world comes he to be feverish?” Ambient asked. “He
was perfectly right this afternoon.”
“Beatrice says you walked him about too much—you almost killed him.”
“Beatrice must be very happy—she has an opportunity to triumph!” said my
friend with a bright bitterness which was all I could have wished it.
“Surely not if the child’s ill,” I ventured to remark by way of pleading
for Mrs. Ambient.
“My dear fellow, you aren’t married—you don’t know the nature of wives!”
my host returned with spirit.
I tried to match it. “Possibly not; but I know the nature of mothers.”
“Beatrice is perfect as a mother,” sighed Miss Ambient quite tremendously
and with her fingers interlaced on her embroidered knees.
“I shall go up and see my boy,” her brother went on. “Do you suppose
he’s asleep?”
“Beatrice won’t let you see him, dear”—as to which our young lady looked
at me, though addressing our companion.
“Do you call that being perfect as a mother?” Ambient asked.
“Yes, from her point of view.”
“Damn her point of view!” cried the author of “Beltraffio.” And he left
the room; after which we heard him ascend the stairs.
I sat there for some ten minutes with Miss Ambient, and we naturally had
some exchange of remarks, which began, I think, by my asking her what the
point of view of her sister-in-law could be.
“Oh it’s so very odd. But we’re so very odd altogether. Don’t you find
us awfully unlike others of our class?—which indeed mostly, in England,
is awful. We’ve lived so much abroad. I adore ‘abroad.’ Have you
people like us in America?”
“You’re not all alike, you interesting three—or, counting Dolcino,
four—surely, surely; so that I don’t think I understand your question.
We’ve no one like your brother—I may go so far as that.”
“You’ve probably more persons like his wife,” Miss Ambient desolately
smiled.
“I can tell you that better when you’ve told me about her point of view.”
“Oh yes—oh yes. Well,” said my entertainer, “she doesn’t like his ideas.
She doesn’t like them for the child. She thinks them undesirable.”
Being quite fresh from the contemplation of some of Mark Ambient’s
_arcana_ I was particularly in a position to appreciate this
announcement. But the effect of it was to make me, after staring a
moment, burst into laughter which I instantly checked when I remembered
the indisposed child above and the possibility of parents nervously or
fussily anxious.
“What has that infant to do with ideas?” I asked. “Surely he can’t tell
one from another. Has he read his father’s novels?”
“He’s very precocious and very sensitive, and his mother thinks she can’t
begin to guard him too early.” Miss Ambient’s head drooped a little to
one side and her eyes fixed themselves on futurity. Then of a sudden
came a strange alteration; her face lighted to an effect more joyless
than any gloom, to that indeed of a conscious insincere grimace, and she
added “When one has children what one writes becomes a great
responsibility.”
“Children are terrible critics,” I prosaically answered. “I’m really
glad I haven’t any.”
“Do you also write, then? And in the same style as my brother? And do
you like that style? And do people appreciate it in America? I don’t
write, but I think I feel.” To these and various other inquiries and
observations my young lady treated me till we heard her brother’s step in
the hall again and Mark Ambient reappeared. He was so flushed and grave
that I supposed he had seen something symptomatic in the condition of his
child. His sister apparently had another idea; she gazed at him from
afar—as if he had been a burning ship on the horizon—and simply murmured
“Poor old Mark!”
“I hope you’re not anxious,” I as promptly pronounced.
“No, but I’m disappointed. She won’t let me in. She has locked the
door, and I’m afraid to make a noise.” I daresay there might have been a
touch of the ridiculous in such a confession, but I liked my new friend
so much that it took nothing for me from his dignity. “She tells me—from
behind the door—that she’ll let me know if he’s worse.”
“It’s very good of her,” said Miss Ambient with a hollow sound.