Hyacinth had been warned by Mr Vetch as to what brilliant women might
do with him (it was only a word on the old fiddler’s lips, but the word
had had a point), he had been warned by Paul Muniment, and now he was
admonished by a person supremely well placed for knowing—a fact that
could not fail to deepen the emotion which, any time these three days,
had made him draw his breath more quickly. That emotion, however, was
now not of a kind to make him fear remote consequences; as he looked
over the Princess Casamassima’s drawing-room and inhaled an air that
seemed to him inexpressibly delicate and sweet, he hoped that his
adventure would throw him upon his mettle only half as much as the old
lady had wished to intimate. He considered, one after the other, the
different chairs, couches and ottomans the room contained—he wished to
treat himself to the most sumptuous—and then, for reasons he knew best,
sank into a seat covered with rose-coloured brocade, of which the legs
and frame appeared to be of pure gold. Here he sat perfectly still,
with only his heart beating very sensibly and his eyes coursing again
and again from one object to another. The splendours and suggestions of
Captain Sholto’s apartment were thrown completely into the shade by the
scene before him, and as the Princess did not scruple to keep him
waiting for twenty minutes (during which the butler came in and set
out, on a small table, a glittering tea-service), Hyacinth had time to
count over the innumerable _bibelots_ (most of which he had never
dreamed of) involved in the personality of a woman of high fashion, and
to feel that their beauty and oddity revealed not only whole provinces
of art, but refinements of choice, on the part of their owner,
complications of mind, and—almost—terrible depths of character.
When at last the door opened and the servant, reappearing, threw it far
back, as if to make a wide passage for a person of the importance of
his mistress, Hyacinth’s suspense became very acute; it was much the
same feeling with which, at the theatre, he had sometimes awaited the
entrance of a celebrated actress. In this case the actress was to
perform for him alone. There was still a moment before she came on, and
when she did so she was so simply dressed—besides his seeing her now on
her feet—that she looked like a different person. She approached him
rapidly, and a little stiffly and shyly, but in the manner in which she
shook hands with him there was an evident desire to be frank, and even
fraternal. She looked like a different person, but that person had a
beauty even more radiant; the fairness of her face shone forth at our
young man as if to dissipate any doubts that might have crept over him
as to the reality of the vision bequeathed to him by his former
interview. And in this brightness and richness of her presence he could
not have told you whether she struck him as more proud or more kind.
“I have kept you a long time, but it’s supposed not, usually, to be a
bad place, my salon; there are various things to look at, and perhaps
you have noticed them. Over on that side, for instance, there is rather
a curious collection of miniatures.” She spoke abruptly, quickly, as if
she were conscious that their communion might be awkward and she were
trying to strike, instantly (to conjure that element away), the sort of
note that would make them both most comfortable. Quickly, too, she sat
down before her tea-tray and poured him out a cup, which she handed him
without asking whether he would have it. He accepted it with a
trembling hand, though he had no desire for it; he was too nervous to
swallow the tea, but it would not have occurred to him that it was
possible to decline. When he had murmured that he had indeed looked at
all her things but that it would take hours to do justice to such
treasures, she asked if he were fond of works of art; adding, however,
immediately, that she was afraid he had not many opportunities of
seeing them, though of course there were the public collections, open
to all. Hyacinth said, with perfect veracity, that some of the happiest
moments of his life had been spent at the British Museum and the
National Gallery, and this reply appeared to interest her greatly, so
that she immediately begged him to tell her what he thought of certain
pictures and antiques. In this way it was that in an incredibly short
space of time, as it appeared to him, he found himself discussing the
Bacchus and Ariadne and the Elgin marbles with one of the most
remarkable woman in Europe. It is true that she herself talked most,
passing precipitately from one point to another, asking him questions
and not waiting for answers; describing and qualifying things,
expressing feelings, by the aid of phrases that he had never heard
before but which seemed to him illuminating and happy—as when, for
instance, she asked what art was, after all, but a synthesis made in
the interest of pleasure, or said that she didn’t like England at all,
but loved it. It did not occur to him to think these discriminations
pedantic. Suddenly she remarked, “Madame Grandoni told me you saw my
husband.”
“Ah, was the gentleman your husband?”
“Unfortunately! What do you think of him?”
“Oh, I can’t think—” Hyacinth murmured.
“I wish I couldn’t, either! I haven’t seen him for nearly three years.
He wanted to see me to-day, but I refused.”
“Ah!” said Hyacinth, staring and not knowing how he ought to receive so
unexpected a confidence. Then, as the suggestions of inexperience are
sometimes the happiest of all, he spoke simply what was in his mind and
said, gently, “It has made you very nervous.” Afterwards, when he had
left the house, he wondered how, at that stage, he could have ventured
on such a familiar remark.
The Princess took it with a quick, surprised laugh. “How do you know
that?” But before he had time to tell how, she added, “Your saying
that—that way—shows me how right I was to ask you to come to see me.
You know, I hesitated. It shows me you have perceptions; I guessed as
much the other night at the theatre. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have asked
you. I may be wrong, but I like people who understand what one says to
them, and also what one doesn’t say.”
“Don’t think I understand too much. You might easily exaggerate that,”
Hyacinth declared, conscientiously.
“You confirm, completely, my first impression,” the Princess returned,
smiling in a way that showed him he really amused her. “We shall
discover the limits of your comprehension! I _am_ atrociously nervous.
But it will pass. How is your friend the dressmaker?” she inquired,
abruptly. And when Hyacinth had briefly given some account of poor
Pinnie—told her that she was tolerably well for her, but old and tired
and sad, and not very successful—she exclaimed, impatiently, “Ah, well,
she’s not the only one!” and came back, with irrelevance, to the former
question. “It’s not only my husband’s visit—absolutely unexpected!—that
has made me fidgety, but the idea that now you have been so kind as to
come here you may wonder why, after all, I made such a point of it, and
even think any explanation I might be able to give you entirely
insufficient.”
“I don’t want any explanation,” said Hyacinth.
“It’s very nice of you to say that, and I shall take you at your word.
Explanations usually make things worse. All the same, I don’t want you
to think (as you might have done so easily the other evening) that I
wish only to treat you as a curious animal.”
“I don’t care how you treat me!” said Hyacinth, smiling.
There was a considerable silence, after which the Princess remarked,
“All I ask of my husband is to let me alone. But he won’t. He won’t
reciprocate my indifference.”
Hyacinth asked himself what reply he ought to make to such an
announcement as that, and it seemed to him that the least civility
demanded was that he should say—as he could with such conviction—“It
can’t be easy to be indifferent to you.”
“Why not, if I am odious? I can be—oh, there is no doubt of that!
However, I can honestly say that with the Prince I have been
exceedingly reasonable, and that most of the wrongs—the big ones, those
that settled the question—have been on his side. You may tell me of
course that that’s the pretension of every woman who has made a mess of
her marriage. But ask Madame Grandoni.”
“She will tell me it’s none of my business.”
“Very true—she might!” the Princess admitted, laughing. “And I don’t
know, either, why I should talk to you about my domestic affairs;
except that I have been wondering what I could do to show confidence in
you, in return for your showing so much in me. As this matter of my
separation from my husband happens to have been turned uppermost by his
sudden descent upon me, I just mention it, though the subject is
tiresome enough. Moreover I ought to let you know that I have very
little respect for distinctions of class—the sort of thing they make so
much of in this country. They are doubtless convenient in some ways,
but when one has a reason—a reason of feeling—for overstepping them,
and one allows one’s self to be deterred by some dreary superstition
about one’s place, or some one else’s place, then I think it’s ignoble.
It always belongs to one’s place not to be a poor creature. I take it
that if you are a socialist you think about this as I do; but lest, by
chance, as the sense of those differences is the English religion, it
may have rubbed off even on you, though I am more and more impressed
with the fact that you are scarcely more British than I am; lest you
should, in spite of your theoretic democracy, be shocked at some of the
applications that I, who cherish the creed, am capable of making of it,
let me assure you without delay that in that case we shouldn’t get on
together at all, and had better part company before we go further.” She
paused, long enough for Hyacinth to declare, with a great deal of
emphasis, that he was not easily shocked; and then, restlessly,
eagerly, as if it relieved her to talk, and made their queer interview
less abnormal that she should talk most, she arrived at the point that
she wanted to know the _people_, and know them intimately—the toilers
and strugglers and sufferers—because she was convinced they were the
most interesting portion of society, and at the inquiry, “What could
possibly be in worse taste than for me to carry into such an
undertaking a pretension of greater delicacy and finer manners? If I
must do that,” she continued, “it’s simpler to leave them alone. But I
can’t leave them alone; they press upon me, they haunt me, they
fascinate me. There it is (after all, it’s very simple): I want to know
them, and I want you to help me!”
“I will help you with pleasure, to the best of my humble ability. But
you will be awfully disappointed,” Hyacinth said. Very strange it
seemed to him that within so few days two ladies of rank should have
found occasion to express to him the same mysterious longing. A breeze
from a thoroughly unexpected quarter was indeed blowing over the
aristocracy. Nevertheless, though there was much of the accent of
passion in the Princess Casamassima’s communication that there had been
in Lady Aurora’s, and though he felt bound to discourage his present
interlocutress as he had done the other, the force that pushed her
struck him as a very different mixture from the shy, conscientious,
anxious heresies of Rose Muniment’s friend. The temper varied in the
two women as much as the face and the manner, and that perhaps made
their curiosity the more significant.
“I haven’t the least doubt of it: there is nothing in life in which I
have not been awfully disappointed. But disappointment for
disappointment I shall like it better than some others. You’ll not
persuade me, either, that among the people I speak of, characters and
passions and motives are not more natural, more complete, more _naïf_.
The upper classes are so insipid! My husband traces his descent from
the fifth century, and he’s the greatest bore on earth. That is the
kind of people I was condemned to live with after my marriage. Oh, if
you knew what I have been through, you would allow that intelligent
mechanics (of course I don’t want to know idiots) would be a pleasant
change. I must begin with some one—mustn’t I?—so I began, the other
night, with you!” As soon as she had uttered these words the Princess
added a correction, with the consciousness of her mistake in her face.
It made that face, to Hyacinth, more nobly, tenderly pure. “The only
objection to you, individually, is that you have nothing of the people
about you—to-day not even the dress.” Her eyes wandered over him from
head to foot, and their friendly beauty made him ashamed. “I wish you
had come in the clothes you wear at your work!”
“You see you do regard me as a curious animal,” he answered.
It was perhaps to contradict this that, after a moment, she began to
tell him more about her domestic affairs. He ought to know who she was,
unless Captain Sholto had told him; and she related her
parentage—American on the mother’s side, Italian on the father’s—and
how she had led, in her younger years, a wandering, Bohemian life, in a
thousand different places (always in Europe; she had never been in
America and knew very little about it, though she wanted greatly to
cross the Atlantic), and largely, at one period, in Rome. She had been
married by her people, in a mercenary way, for the sake of a fortune
and a title, and it had turned out as badly as her worst enemy could
wish. Her parents were dead, luckily for them, and she had no one near
her of her own except Madame Grandoni, who belonged to her only in the
sense that she had known her as a girl; was an association of her—what
should she call them?—her innocent years. Not that she had ever been
very innocent; she had had a horrible education. However, she had known
a few good people—people she respected, then; but Madame Grandoni was
the only one who had stuck to her. She, too, was liable to leave her
any day; the Princess appeared to intimate that her destiny might
require her to take some step which would test severely the old lady’s
adhesive property. It would detain her too long to make him understand
the stages by which she had arrived at her present state of mind: her
disgust with a thousand social arrangements, her rebellion against the
selfishness, the corruption, the iniquity, the cruelty, the imbecility,
of the people who, all over Europe, had the upper hand. If he could
have seen her life, the _milieu_ in which, for several years, she had
been condemned to move, the evolution of her opinions (Hyacinth was
delighted to hear her use that term) would strike him as perfectly
logical. She had been humiliated, outraged, tortured; she considered
that she too was one of the numerous class who could be put on a
tolerable footing only by a revolution. At any rate, she had some
self-respect left, and there was still more that she wanted to recover;
the only way to arrive at that was to throw herself into some effort
which would make her forget her own affairs and comprehend the troubles
and efforts of others. Hyacinth listened to her with a wonderment
which, as she went on, was transformed into fascinated submission; she
seemed so natural, so vivid, so exquisitely generous and sincere. By
the time he had been with her for half an hour she had made the
situation itself appear natural and usual, and a third person who
should have joined them at this moment would have observed nothing to
make him suppose that friendly social intercourse between little
bookbinders and Neapolitan princesses was not, in London, a matter of
daily occurrence.
Hyacinth had seen plenty of women who chattered about themselves and
their affairs—a vulgar garrulity of confidence was indeed a leading
characteristic of the sex as he had hitherto learned to know it—but he
was quick to perceive that the great lady who now took the trouble to
open herself to him was not of a gossiping habit; that she must be, on
the contrary, as a general thing, proudly, ironically, reserved, even
to the point of passing, with many people, for a model of the
unsatisfactory. It was very possible she was capricious; yet the fact
that her present sympathies and curiosities might be a caprice wore, in
Hyacinth’s eyes, no sinister aspect. Why was it not a noble and
interesting whim, and why might he not stand, for the hour at any rate,
in the silvery moonshine it threw upon his path? It must be added that
he was far from understanding everything she said, and some of her
allusions and implications were so difficult to seize that they mainly
served to reveal to him the limits of his own acquaintance with life.
Her words evoked all sorts of shadowy suggestions of things he was
condemned not to know, touching him most when he had not the key to
them. This was especially the case with her reference to her career in
Italy, on her husband’s estates, and her relations with his family; who
considered that they had done her a great honour in receiving her into
their august circle (putting the best face on a bad business), after
they had moved heaven and earth to keep her out of it. The position
made for her among these people, and what she had had to suffer from
their family tone, their opinions and customs (though what these might
be remained vague to her listener), had evidently planted in her soul a
lasting resentment and contempt; and Hyacinth gathered that the force
of reaction and revenge might carry her far, make her modern and
democratic and heretical _à outrance_—lead her to swear by Darwin and
Spencer as well as by the revolutionary spirit. He surely need not have
been so sensible of the weak spots in his comprehension of the
Princess, when he could already surmise that personal passion had
counted for so much in the formation of her views. This induction,
however, which had no harshness, did not make her appear to him any the
less a creature compounded of the finest elements; brilliant, delicate,
complicated, but complicated with something divine. It was not until
after he had left her that he became conscious she had forced him to
talk, as well as talked herself. He drew a long breath as he reflected
that he had not made quite such an ass of himself as might very well
have happened; he had been saved by his enjoyment and admiration, which
had not gone to his head and prompted him to show that he too, in his
improbable little way, was remarkable, but had kept him in a state of
anxious, delicious tension, as if the occasion had been a great
solemnity. He had said, indeed, much more than he had warrant for, when
she questioned him about his socialistic affiliations; he had spoken as
if the movement were vast and mature, whereas, in fact, so far, at
least, as he was as yet concerned with it, and could answer for it from
personal knowledge, it was circumscribed by the hideously papered walls
of the little club-room at the ‘Sun and Moon’. He reproached himself
with this laxity, but it had not been engendered by vanity. He was only
afraid of disappointing his hostess too much; of making her say, ‘Why
in the world, then, did you come to see me, if you have nothing more
remarkable to relate?’—an inquiry to which, of course, he would have
had an answer ready, if it had not been impossible to him to say that
he had never asked to come: his coming was her own affair. He wanted
too much to come a second time to have the courage to make that speech.
Nevertheless, when she exclaimed, changing the subject abruptly, as she
always did, from something else they had been talking about, “I wonder
whether I shall ever see you again!”, he replied, with perfect
sincerity, that it was very difficult for him to believe anything so
delightful could be repeated. There were some kinds of happiness that
to many people never came at all, and to others could come only once.
He added, “It is very true I had just that feeling after I left you the
other night at the theatre. And yet here I am!”
“Yes, there you are,” said the Princess thoughtfully, as if this might
be a still graver and more embarrassing fact than she had yet supposed
it. “I take it there is nothing essentially impossible in my seeing you
again; but it may very well be that you will never again find it so
pleasant. Perhaps that’s the happiness that comes but once. At any
rate, you know, I am going away.”
“Oh yes, of course; every one leaves town,” Hyacinth commented,
sagaciously.
“Do you, Mr Robinson?” asked the Princess.
“Well, I don’t as a general thing. Nevertheless, it is possible that,
this year, I may get two or three days at the seaside. I should like to
take my old lady. I have done it before.”
“And except for that you shall be always at work?”
“Yes; but you must understand that I like my work. You must understand
that it’s a great blessing for a young fellow like me to have it.”
“And if you didn’t have it, what would you do? Should you starve?”
“Oh, I don’t think I should starve,” the young man replied, judicially.
The Princess looked a little chagrined, but after a moment she
remarked, “I wonder whether you would come to see me, in the country,
somewhere.”
“Oh, dear!” Hyacinth exclaimed, catching his breath. “You are so kind,
I don’t know what to do.”
“Don’t be _banal_, please. That’s what other people are. What’s the use
of my looking for something fresh in other walks of life, if you are
going to be _banal_ too? I ask you, would you come?”
Hyacinth hesitated a moment. “Yes, I think I would come. I don’t know,
at all, how I should do it—there would be several obstacles; but
wherever you should call for me, I would come.”
“You mean you can’t leave your work, like that; you might lose it, if
you did, and be in want of money and much embarrassed?”
“Yes, there would be little difficulties of that kind. You see that
immediately, in practice, great obstacles come up, when it’s a question
of a person like you making friends with a person like me.”
“That’s the way I like you to talk,” said the Princess, with a pitying
gentleness that seemed to her visitor quite sacred. “After all, I don’t
know where I shall be. I have got to pay stupid visits, myself, where
the only comfort will be that I shall make the people jump. Every one
here thinks me exceedingly odd—as there is no doubt I am! I might be
ever so much more so if you would only help me a little. Why shouldn’t
I have my bookbinder, after all? In attendance, you know, it would be
awfully _chic_. We might have immense fun, don’t you think so? No doubt
it will come. At any rate, I shall return to London when I have got
through that _corvée;_ I shall be here next year. In the meantime,
don’t forget me,” she went on, rising to her feet. “Remember, on the
contrary, that I expect you to take me into the slums—into very bad
places.” Why the idea of these scenes of misery should have lighted up
her face is more than may be explained; but she smiled down at
Hyacinth—who, even as he stood up, was of slightly smaller stature—with
all her strange, radiant sweetness. Then, in a manner almost equally
incongruous, she added a reference to what she had said a moment
before: “I recognise perfectly the obstacles, in practice, as you call
them; but though I am not, by nature, persevering, and am really very
easily put off, I don’t consider that they will prove insurmountable.
They exist on my side as well, and if you will help me to overcome mine
I will do the same for you, with yours.”
These words, repeating themselves again and again in Hyacinth’s
consciousness, appeared to give him wings, to help him to float and
soar, as he turned that afternoon out of South Street. He had at home a
copy of Tennyson’s poems—a single, comprehensive volume, with a double
column on the page, in a tolerably neat condition, though he had
handled it much. He took it to pieces that same evening, and during the
following week, in his hours of leisure, at home in his little room,
with the tools he kept there for private use, and a morsel of delicate,
blue-tinted Russia leather, of which he obtained possession at the
place in Soho, he devoted himself to the task of binding the book as
perfectly as he knew how. He worked with passion, with religion, and
produced a masterpiece of firmness and finish, of which his own
appreciation was as high as that of M. Poupin, when, at the end of the
week, he exhibited the fruit of his toil, and much more freely
expressed than that of old Crookenden, who grunted approbation, but was
always too long-headed to create precedents. Hyacinth carried the
volume to South Street, as an offering to the Princess; hoping she
would not yet have left London, in which case he would ask the servant
to deliver it to her, along with a little note he had sat up all night
to compose. But the majestic butler, in charge of the house, opening
the door yet looking down at him as if from a second-storey window,
took the life out of his vision and erected himself as an impenetrable
medium. The Princess had been absent for some days; the butler was so
good as to inform the young man with the parcel that she was on a visit
to a ‘juke’, in a distant part of the country. He offered however to
receive, and even to forward, anything Hyacinth might wish to leave;
but our hero felt a sudden indisposition to launch his humble tribute
into the vast, the possibly cold, unknown of a ducal circle. He decided
to retain his little package for the present; he would give it to her
when he should see her again, and he turned away without parting with
it. Later, it seemed to create a sort of material link between the
Princess and himself, and at the end of three months it almost appeared
to him, not that the exquisite book was an intended present from his
own hand, but that it had been placed in that hand by the most
remarkable woman in Europe. Rare sensations and impressions, moments of
acute happiness, almost always, with Hyacinth, in retrospect, became
rather mythic and legendary; and the superior piece of work he had done
after seeing her last, in the immediate heat of his emotion, turned
into a kind of proof and gage, as if a ghost, in vanishing from sight,
had left a palpable relic.