pity for him was untinged with contempt, though I scarce know why he
should have cared; and as his sister soon afterward got up and took her
bedroom candlestick he proposed we should go back to his study. We sat
there till after midnight; he put himself into his slippers and an old
velvet jacket, he lighted an ancient pipe, but he talked considerably
less than before. There were longish pauses in our communion, but they
only made me feel we had advanced in intimacy. They helped me further to
understand my friend’s personal situation and to imagine it by no means
the happiest possible. When his face was quiet it was vaguely troubled,
showing, to my increase of interest—if that was all that was wanted!—that
for him too life was the same struggle it had been for so many another
man of genius. At last I prepared to leave him, and then, to my
ineffable joy, he gave me some of the sheets of his forthcoming
book—which, though unfinished, he had indulged in the luxury, so dear to
writers of deliberation, of having “set up,” from chapter to chapter, as
he advanced. These early pages, the _prémices_, in the language of
letters, of that new fruit of his imagination, I should take to my room
and look over at my leisure. I was in the act of leaving him when the
door of the study noiselessly opened and Mrs. Ambient stood before us.
She observed us a moment, her candle in her hand, and then said to her
husband that as she supposed he hadn’t gone to bed she had come down to
let him know Dolcino was more quiet and would probably be better in the
morning. Mark Ambient made no reply; he simply slipped past her in the
doorway, as if for fear she might seize him in his passage, and bounded
upstairs to judge for himself of his child’s condition. She looked so
frankly discomfited that I for a moment believed her about to give him
chase. But she resigned herself with a sigh and her eyes turned,
ruefully and without a ray, to the lamplit room where various books at
which I had been looking were pulled out of their places on the shelves
and the fumes of tobacco hung in mid-air. I bade her good-night and
then, without intention, by a kind of fatality, a perversity that had
already made me address her overmuch on that question of her husband’s
powers, I alluded to the precious proof-sheets with which Ambient had
entrusted me and which I nursed there under my arm. “They’re the opening
chapters of his new book,” I said. “Fancy my satisfaction at being
allowed to carry them to my room!”
She turned away, leaving me to take my candlestick from the table in the
hall; but before we separated, thinking it apparently a good occasion to
let me know once for all since I was beginning, it would seem, to be
quite “thick” with my host—that there was no fitness in my appealing to
her for sympathy in such a case; before we separated, I say, she remarked
to me with her quick fine well-bred inveterate curtness: “I daresay you
attribute to me ideas I haven’t got. I don’t take that sort of interest
in my husband’s proof-sheets. I consider his writings most
objectionable!”
III
I HAD an odd colloquy the next morning with Miss Ambient, whom I found
strolling in the garden before breakfast. The whole place looked as
fresh and trim, amid the twitter of the birds, as if, an hour before, the
housemaids had been turned into it with their dust-pans and
feather-brushes. I almost hesitated to light a cigarette and was doubly
startled when, in the act of doing so, I suddenly saw the sister of my
host, who had, at the best, something of the weirdness of an apparition,
stand before me. She might have been posing for her photograph. Her
sad-coloured robe arranged itself in serpentine folds at her feet; her
hands locked themselves listlessly together in front; her chin rested on
a cinque-cento ruff. The first thing I did after bidding her
good-morning was to ask her for news of her little nephew—to express the
hope she had heard he was better. She was able to gratify this trust—she
spoke as if we might expect to see him during the day. We walked through
the shrubberies together and she gave me further light on her brother’s
household, which offered me an opportunity to repeat to her what his wife
had so startled and distressed me with the night before. _Was_ it the
sorry truth that she thought his productions objectionable?
“She doesn’t usually come out with that so soon!” Miss Ambient returned
in answer to my breathlessness.
“Poor lady,” I pleaded, “she saw I’m a fanatic.”
“Yes, she won’t like you for that. But you mustn’t mind, if the rest of
us like you! Beatrice thinks a work of art ought to have a ‘purpose.’
But she’s a charming woman—don’t you think her charming? I find in her
quite the grand air.”
“She’s very beautiful,” I produced with an effort; while I reflected that
though it was apparently true that Mark Ambient was mismated it was also
perceptible that his sister was perfidious. She assured me her brother
and his wife had no other difference but this—one that she thought his
writings immoral and his influence pernicious. It was a fixed idea; she
was afraid of these things for the child. I answered that it was in all
conscience enough, the trifle of a woman’s regarding her husband’s mind
as a well of corruption, and she seemed much struck with the novelty of
my remark. “But there hasn’t been any of the sort of trouble that there
so often is among married people,” she said. “I suppose you can judge
for yourself that Beatrice isn’t at all—well, whatever they call it when
a woman kicks over! And poor Mark doesn’t make love to other people
either. You might think he would, but I assure you he doesn’t. All the
same of course, from her point of view, you know, she has a dread of my
brother’s influence on the child on the formation of his character, his
‘ideals,’ poor little brat, his principles. It’s as if it were a subtle
poison or a contagion—something that would rub off on his tender
sensibility when his father kisses him or holds him on his knee. If she
could she’d prevent Mark from even so much as touching him. Every one
knows it—visitors see it for themselves; so there’s no harm in my telling
you. Isn’t it excessively odd? It comes from Beatrice’s being so
religious and so tremendously moral—so _à cheval_ on fifty thousand
_riguardi_. And then of course we mustn’t forget,” my companion added, a
little unexpectedly, to this polyglot proposition, “that some of Mark’s
ideas are—well, really—rather impossible, don’t you know?”
I reflected as we went into the house, where we found Ambient unfolding
_The Observer_ at the breakfast-table, that none of them were probably
quite so “impossible, don’t you know?” as his sister. Mrs. Ambient, a
little “the worse,” as was mentioned, for her ministrations, during the
night, to Dolcino, didn’t appear at breakfast. Her husband described
her, however, as hoping to go to church. I afterwards learnt that she
did go, but nothing naturally was less on the cards than that we should
accompany her. It was while the church-bell droned near at hand that the
author of “Beltraffio” led me forth for the ramble he had spoken of in
his note. I shall attempt here no record of where we went or of what we
saw. We kept to the fields and copses and commons, and breathed the same
sweet air as the nibbling donkeys and the browsing sheep, whose
woolliness seemed to me, in those early days of acquaintance with English
objects, but part of the general texture of the small dense landscape,
which looked as if the harvest were gathered by the shears and with all
nature bleating and braying for the violence. Everything was full of
expression for Mark Ambient’s visitor—from the big bandy-legged geese
whose whiteness was a “note” amid all the tones of green as they wandered
beside a neat little oval pool, the foreground of a thatched and
whitewashed inn, with a grassy approach and a pictorial sign—from these
humble wayside animals to the crests of high woods which let a gable or a
pinnacle peep here and there and looked even at a distance like trees of
good company, conscious of an individual profile. I admired the
hedge-rows, I plucked the faint-hued heather, and I was for ever stopping
to say how charming I thought the thread-like footpaths across the
fields, which wandered in a diagonal of finer grain from one smooth stile
to another. Mark Ambient was abundantly good-natured and was as much
struck, dear man, with some of my observations as I was with the literary
allusions of the landscape. We sat and smoked on stiles, broaching
paradoxes in the decent English air; we took short cuts across a park or
two where the bracken was deep and my companion nodded to the old woman
at the gate; we skirted rank coverts which rustled here and there as we
passed, and we stretched ourselves at last on a heathery hillside where
if the sun wasn’t too hot neither was the earth too cold, and where the
country lay beneath us in a rich blue mist. Of course I had already told
him what I thought of his new novel, having the previous night read every
word of the opening chapters before I went to bed.
“I’m not without hope of being able to make it decent enough,” he said as
I went back to the subject while we turned up our heels to the sky. “At
least the people who dislike my stuff—and there are plenty of them, I
believe—will dislike this thing (if it does turn out well) most.” This
was the first time I had heard him allude to the people who couldn’t read
him—a class so generally conceived to sit heavy on the consciousness of
the man of letters. A being organised for literature as Mark Ambient was
must certainly have had the normal proportion of sensitiveness, of
irritability; the artistic _ego_, capable in some cases of such monstrous
development, must have been in his composition sufficiently erect and
active. I won’t therefore go so far as to say that he never thought of
his detractors or that he had any illusions with regard to the number of
his admirers—he could never so far have deceived himself as to believe he
was popular, but I at least then judged (and had occasion to be sure
later on) that stupidity ruffled him visibly but little, that he had an
air of thinking it quite natural he should leave many simple folk,
tasting of him, as simple as ever he found them, and that he very seldom
talked about the newspapers, which, by the way, were always even
abnormally vulgar about him. Of course he may have thought them over—the
newspapers—night and day; the only point I make is that he didn’t show it
while at the same time he didn’t strike one as a man actively on his
guard. I may add that, touching his hope of making the work on which he
was then engaged the best of his books, it was only partly carried out.
That place belongs incontestably to “Beltraffio,” in spite of the beauty
of certain parts of its successor. I quite believe, however, that he had
at the moment of which I speak no sense of having declined; he was in
love with his idea, which was indeed magnificent, and though for him, as
I suppose for every sane artist, the act of execution had in it as much
torment as joy, he saw his result grow like the crescent of the young
moon and promise to fill the disk. “I want to be truer than I’ve ever
been,” he said, settling himself on his back with his hands clasped
behind his head; “I want to give the impression of life itself. No, you
may say what you will, I’ve always arranged things too much, always
smoothed them down and rounded them off and tucked them in—done
everything to them that life doesn’t do. I’ve been a slave to the old
superstitions.”
“You a slave, my dear Mark Ambient? You’ve the freest imagination of our
day!”
“All the more shame to me to have done some of the things I have! The
reconciliation of the two women in ‘Natalina,’ for instance, which could
never really have taken place. That sort of thing’s ignoble—I blush when
I think of it! This new affair must be a golden vessel, filled with the
purest distillation of the actual; and oh how it worries me, the shaping
of the vase, the hammering of the metal! I have to hammer it so fine, so
smooth; I don’t do more than an inch or two a day. And all the while I
have to be so careful not to let a drop of the liquor escape! When I see
the kind of things Life herself, the brazen hussy, does, I despair of
ever catching her peculiar trick. She has an impudence, Life! If one
risked a fiftieth part of the effects she risks! It takes ever so long
to believe it. You don’t know yet, my dear youth. It isn’t till one has
been watching her some forty years that one finds out half of what she’s
up to! Therefore one’s earlier things must inevitably contain a mass of
rot. And with what one sees, on one side, with its tongue in its cheek,
defying one to be real enough, and on the other the _bonnes gens_ rolling
up their eyes at one’s cynicism, the situation has elements of the
ludicrous which the poor reproducer himself is doubtless in a position to
appreciate better than any one else. Of course one mustn’t worry about
the _bonnes gens_,” Mark Ambient went on while my thoughts reverted to
his ladylike wife as interpreted by his remarkable sister.
“To sink your shaft deep and polish the plate through which people look
into it—that’s what your work consists of,” I remember ingeniously
observing.
“Ah polishing one’s plate—that’s the torment of execution!” he exclaimed,
jerking himself up and sitting forward. “The effort to arrive at a
surface, if you think anything of that decent sort necessary—some people
don’t, happily for them! My dear fellow, if you could see the surface I
dream of as compared with the one with which I’ve to content myself.
Life’s really too short for art—one hasn’t time to make one’s shell
ideally hard. Firm and bright, firm and bright is very well to say—the
devilish thing has a way sometimes of being bright, and even of being
hard, as mere tough frozen pudding is hard, without being firm. When I
rap it with my knuckles it doesn’t give the right sound. There are
horrible sandy stretches where I’ve taken the wrong turn because I
couldn’t for the life of me find the right. If you knew what a dunce I
am sometimes! Such things figure to me now base pimples and ulcers on
the brow of beauty!”
“They’re very bad, very bad,” I said as gravely as I could.
“Very bad? They’re the highest social offence I know; it ought—it
absolutely ought; I’m quite serious—to be capital. If I knew I should be
publicly thrashed else I’d manage to find the true word. The people who
can’t—some of them don’t so much as know it when they see it—would shut
their inkstands, and we shouldn’t be deluged by this flood of rubbish!”
I shall not attempt to repeat everything that passed between us, nor to
explain just how it was that, every moment I spent in his company, Mark
Ambient revealed to me more and more the consistency of his creative
spirit, the spirit in him that felt all life as plastic material. I
could but envy him the force of that passion, and it was at any rate
through the receipt of this impression that by the time we returned I had
gained the sense of intimacy with him that I have noted. Before we got
up for the homeward stretch he alluded to his wife’s having once—or
perhaps more than once—asked him whether he should like Dolcino to read
“Beltraffio.” He must have been unaware at the moment of all that this
conveyed to me—as well doubtless of my extreme curiosity to hear what he
had replied. He had said how much he hoped Dolcino would read _all_ his
works—when he was twenty; he should like him to know what his father had
done. Before twenty it would be useless; he wouldn’t understand them.
“And meanwhile do you propose to hide them—to lock them up in a drawer?”
Mrs. Ambient had proceeded.
“Oh no—we must simply tell him they’re not intended for small boys. If
you bring him up properly after that he won’t touch them.”
To this Mrs. Ambient had made answer that it might be very awkward when
he was about fifteen, say; and I asked her husband if it were his opinion
in general, then, that young people shouldn’t read novels.
“Good ones—certainly not!” said my companion. I suppose I had had other
views, for I remember saying that for myself I wasn’t sure it was bad for
them if the novels were “good” to the right intensity of goodness. “Bad
for _them_, I don’t say so much!” my companion returned. “But very bad,
I’m afraid, for the poor dear old novel itself.” That oblique accidental
allusion to his wife’s attitude was followed by a greater breadth of
reference as we walked home. “The difference between us is simply the
opposition between two distinct ways of looking at the world, which have
never succeeded in getting on together, or in making any kind of common
household, since the beginning of time. They’ve borne all sorts of
names, and my wife would tell you it’s the difference between Christian
and Pagan. I may be a pagan, but I don’t like the name; it sounds
sectarian. She thinks me at any rate no better than an ancient Greek.
It’s the difference between making the most of life and making the least,
so that you’ll get another better one in some other time and place. Will
it be a sin to make the most of that one, too, I wonder; and shall we
have to be bribed off in the future state as well as in the present?
Perhaps I care too much for beauty—I don’t know, I doubt if a poor devil
_can_; I delight in it, I adore it, I think of it continually, I try to
produce it, to reproduce it. My wife holds that we shouldn’t cultivate
or enjoy it without extraordinary precautions and reserves. She’s always
afraid of it, always on her guard. I don’t know what it can ever have
done to her, what grudge it owes her or what resentment rides. And she’s
so pretty, too, herself! Don’t you think she’s lovely? She was at any
rate when we married. At that time I wasn’t aware of that difference I
speak of—I thought it all came to the same thing: in the end, as they
say. Well, perhaps it will in the end. I don’t know what the end will
be. Moreover, I care for seeing things as they are; that’s the way I try
to show them in any professed picture. But you mustn’t talk to Mrs.
Ambient about things as they are. She has a mortal dread of things as
they are.”
“She’s afraid of them for Dolcino,” I said: surprised a moment afterwards
at being in a position—thanks to Miss Ambient—to be so explanatory; and
surprised even now that Mark shouldn’t have shown visibly that he
wondered what the deuce I knew about it. But he didn’t; he simply
declared with a tenderness that touched me: “Ah nothing shall ever hurt
_him_!”
He told me more about his wife before we arrived at the gate of home, and
if he be judged to have aired overmuch his grievance I’m afraid I must
admit that he had some of the foibles as well as the gifts of the
artistic temperament; adding, however, instantly that hitherto, to the
best of my belief, he had rarely let this particular cat out of the bag.
“She thinks me immoral—that’s the long and short of it,” he said as we
paused outside a moment and his hand rested on one of the bars of his
gate; while his conscious expressive perceptive eyes—the eyes of a
foreigner, I had begun to account them, much more than of the usual
Englishman—viewing me now evidently as quite a familiar friend, took part
in the declaration. “It’s very strange when one thinks it all over, and
there’s a grand comicality in it that I should like to bring out. She’s
a very nice woman, extraordinarily well-behaved, upright and clever and
with a tremendous lot of good sense about a good many matters. Yet her
conception of a novel—she has explained it to me once or twice, and she
doesn’t do it badly as exposition—is a thing so false that it makes me
blush. It’s a thing so hollow, so dishonest, so lying, in which life is
so blinked and blinded, so dodged and disfigured, that it makes my ears
burn. It’s two different ways of looking at the whole affair,” he
repeated, pushing open the gate. “And they’re irreconcilable!” he added
with a sigh. We went forward to the house, but on the walk, half-way to
the door, he stopped and said to me: “If you’re going into this kind of
thing there’s a fact you should know beforehand; it may save you some
disappointment. There’s a hatred of art, there’s a hatred of
literature—I mean of the genuine kinds. Oh the shams—those they’ll
swallow by the bucket!” I looked up at the charming house, with its
genial colour and crookedness, and I answered with a smile that those
evil passions might exist, but that I should never have expected to find
them there. “Ah it doesn’t matter after all,” he a bit nervously
laughed; which I was glad to hear, for I was reproaching myself with
having worked him up.
If I had it soon passed off, for at luncheon he was delightful; strangely
delightful considering that the difference between himself and his wife
was, as he had said, irreconcilable. He had the art, by his manner, by
his smile, by his natural amenity, of reducing the importance of it in
the common concerns of life; and Mrs. Ambient, I must add, lent herself
to this transaction with a very good grace. I watched her at table for
further illustrations of that fixed idea of which Miss Ambient had spoken
to me; for in the light of the united revelations of her sister-in-law
and her husband she had come to seem to me almost a sinister personage.
Yet the signs of a sombre fanaticism were not more immediately striking
in her than before; it was only after a while that her air of
incorruptible conformity, her tapering monosyllabic correctness, began to
affect me as in themselves a cold thin flame. Certainly, at first, she
resembled a woman with as few passions as possible; but if she had a
passion at all it would indeed be that of Philistinism. She might have
been (for there are guardian-spirits, I suppose, of all great principles)
the very angel of the pink of propriety—putting the pink for a principle,
though I’d rather put some dismal cold blue. Mark Ambient, apparently,
ten years before, had simply and quite inevitably taken her for an angel,
without asking himself of what. He had been right in calling my
attention to her beauty. In looking for some explanation of his original
surrender to her I saw more than before that she was, physically
speaking, a wonderfully cultivated human plant—that he might well have
owed her a brief poetic inspiration. It was impossible to be more
propped and pencilled, more delicately tinted and petalled.
If I had had it in my heart to think my host a little of a hypocrite for
appearing to forget at table everything he had said to me in our walk, I
should instantly have cancelled such a judgement on reflecting that the
good news his wife was able to give him about their little boy was ground
enough for any optimistic reaction. It may have come partly, too, from a
certain compunction at having breathed to me at all harshly on the cool
fair lady who sat there—a desire to prove himself not after all so
mismated. Dolcino continued to be much better, and it had been promised
him he should come downstairs after his dinner. As soon as we had risen
from our own meal Mark slipped away, evidently for the purpose of going
to his child; and no sooner had I observed this than I became aware his
wife had simultaneously vanished. It happened that Miss Ambient and I,
both at the same moment, saw the tail of her dress whisk out of a
doorway; an incident that led the young lady to smile at me as if I now
knew all the secrets of the Ambients. I passed with her into the garden
and we sat down on a dear old bench that rested against the west wall of
the house. It was a perfect spot for the middle period of a Sunday in
June, and its felicity seemed to come partly from an antique sun-dial
which, rising in front of us and forming the centre of a small intricate
parterre, measured the moments ever so slowly and made them safe for
leisure and talk. The garden bloomed in the suffused afternoon, the tall
beeches stood still for an example, and, behind and above us, a rose tree
of many seasons, clinging to the faded grain of the brick, expressed the
whole character of the scene in a familiar exquisite smell. It struck me
as a place to offer genius every favour and sanction—not to bristle with
challenges and checks. Miss Ambient asked me if I had enjoyed my walk
with her brother and whether we had talked of many things.
“Well, of most things,” I freely allowed, though I remembered we hadn’t
talked of Miss Ambient.
“And don’t you think some of his theories are very peculiar?”
“Oh I guess I agree with them all.” I was very particular, for Miss
Ambient’s entertainment, to guess.
“Do you think art’s everything?” she put to me in a moment.
“In art, of course I do!”
“And do you think beauty’s everything?”
“Everything’s a big word, which I think we should use as little as
possible. But how can we not want beauty?”
“Ah there you are!” she sighed, though I didn’t quite know what she meant
by it. “Of course it’s difficult for a woman to judge how far to go,”
she went on. “I adore everything that gives a charm to life. I’m
intensely sensitive to form. But sometimes I draw back—don’t you see
what I mean?—I don’t quite see where I shall be landed. I only want to
be quiet, after all,” Miss Ambient continued as if she had long been
baffled of this modest desire. “And one must be good, at any rate, must
not one?” she pursued with a dubious quaver—an intimation apparently that
what I might say one way or the other would settle it for her. It was
difficult for me to be very original in reply, and I’m afraid I repaid
her confidence with an unblushing platitude. I remember, moreover,
attaching to it an inquiry, equally destitute of freshness and still more
wanting perhaps in tact, as to whether she didn’t mean to go to church,
since that was an obvious way of being good. She made answer that she
had performed this duty in the morning, and that for her, of Sunday
afternoons, supreme virtue consisted in answering the week’s letters.
Then suddenly and without transition she brought out: “It’s quite a
mistake about Dolcino’s being better. I’ve seen him and he’s not at all
right.”
I wondered, and somehow I think I scarcely believed. “Surely his mother
would know, wouldn’t she?”