That’s just half my tale--the extraordinary way it was hindered. This
was the fault of a series of accidents; but the accidents continued
for years and became, for me and for others, a subject of hilarity with
either party. They were droll enough at first; then they grew rather
a bore. The odd thing was that both parties were amenable: it wasn’t a
case of their being indifferent, much less of their being indisposed. It
was one of the caprices of chance, aided I suppose by some opposition of
their interests and habits. His were centred in his office, his eternal
inspectorship, which left him small leisure, constantly calling him
away and making him break engagements. He liked society, but he found it
everywhere and took it at a run. I never knew at a given moment where he
was, and there were times when for months together I never saw him. She
was on her side practically suburban: she lived at Richmond and never
went “out.” She was a woman of distinction, but not of fashion,
and felt, as people said, her situation. Decidedly proud and rather
whimsical she lived her life as she had planned it. There were things
one could do with her, but one couldn’t make her come to one’s parties.
One went indeed a little more than seemed quite convenient to hers,
which consisted of her cousin, a cup of tea and the view. The tea was
good; but the view was familiar, though perhaps not, like the cousin--a
disagreeable old maid who had been of the group at the museum and with
whom she now lived--offensively so. This connection with an inferior
relative, which had partly an economical motive--she proclaimed her
companion a marvellous manager--was one of the little perversities we
had to forgive her. Another was her estimate of the proprieties created
by her rupture with her husband. That was extreme--many persons called
it even morbid. She made no advances; she cultivated scruples; she
suspected, or I should perhaps rather say she remembered slights: she
was one of the few women I have known whom that particular predicament
had rendered modest rather than bold. Dear thing! she had some delicacy.
Especially marked were the limits she had set to possible attentions
from men: it was always her thought that her husband was waiting to
pounce on her. She discouraged if she didn’t forbid the visits of male
persons not senile: she said she could never be too careful.
When I first mentioned to her that I had a friend whom fate had
distinguished in the same weird way as herself I put her quite at
liberty to say “Oh, bring him out to see me!” I should probably have
been able to bring him, and a situation perfectly innocent or at any
rate comparatively simple would have been created. But she uttered no
such word; she only said: “I must meet him certainly; yes, I shall look
out for him!” That caused the first delay, and meanwhile various things
happened. One of them was that as time went on she made, charming as
she was, more and more friends, and that it regularly befell that
these friends were sufficiently also friends of his to bring him up in
conversation. It was odd that without belonging, as it were, to the same
world or, according to the horrid term, the same set, my baffled pair
should have happened in so many cases to fall in with the same people
and make them join in the funny chorus. She had friends who didn’t know
each other but who inevitably and punctually recommended _him_. She had
also the sort of originality, the intrinsic interest that led her to be
kept by each of us as a kind of private resource, cultivated jealously,
more or less in secret, as a person whom one didn’t meet in society,
whom it was not for every one--whom it was not for the vulgar--to
approach, and with whom therefore acquaintance was particularly
difficult and particularly precious. We saw her separately, with
appointments and conditions, and found it made on the whole for harmony
not to tell each other. Somebody had always had a note from her still
later than somebody else. There was some silly woman who for a long
time, among the unprivileged, owed to three simple visits to Richmond
a reputation for being intimate with “lots of awfully clever
out-of-the-way people.”
Every one has had friends it has seemed a happy thought to bring
together, and every one remembers that his happiest thoughts have not
been his greatest successes; but I doubt if there was ever a case in
which the failure was in such direct proportion to the quantity of
influence set in motion. It is really perhaps here the quantity of
influence that was most remarkable. My lady and gentleman each declared
to me and others that it was like the subject of a roaring farce. The
reason first given had with time dropped-out of sight and fifty better
ones flourished on top of it. They were so awfully alike: they had the
same ideas and tricks and tastes, the same prejudices and superstitions
and heresies; they said the same things and sometimes did them; they
liked and disliked the same persons and places, the same books, authors
and styles; any one could see a certain identity even in their looks
and their features. It established much of a propriety that they were
in common parlance equally “nice” and almost equally handsome. But the
great sameness, for wonder and chatter, was their rare perversity in
regard to being photographed. They were the only persons ever heard of
who had never been “taken” and who had a passionate objection to it.
They just _wouldn’t_ be, for anything any one could say. I had loudly
complained of this; him in particular I had so vainly desired to be able
to show on my drawing-room chimney-piece in a Bond Street frame. It was
at any rate the very liveliest of all the reasons why they ought to know
each other--all the lively reasons reduced to naught by the strange law
that had made them bang so many doors in each other’s face, made them
the buckets in the well, the two ends of the see-saw, the two parties in
the state, so that when one was up the other was down, when one was out
the other was in; neither by any possibility entering a house till the
other had left it, or leaving it, all unawares, till the other was at
hand. They only arrived when they had been given up, which was precisely
also when they departed. They were in a word alternate and incompatible;
they missed each other with an inveteracy that could be explained only
by its being preconcerted. It was however so far from preconcerted
that it had ended--literally after several years--by disappointing and
annoying them. I don’t think their curiosity was lively till it had been
proved utterly vain. A great deal was of course done to help them, but
it merely laid wires for them to trip. To give examples I should have
to have taken notes; but I happen to remember that neither had ever been
able to dine on the right occasion. The right occasion for each was the
occasion that would be wrong for the other. On the wrong one they
were most punctual, and there were never any but wrong ones. The very
elements conspired and the constitution of man reinforced them. A cold,
a headache, a bereavement, a storm, a fog, an earthquake, a cataclysm
infallibly intervened. The whole business was beyond a joke.
Yet as a joke it had still to be taken, though one couldn’t help feeling
that the joke had made the situation serious, had produced on the part
of each a consciousness, an awkwardness, a positive dread of the last
accident of all, the only one with any freshness left, the accident that
would bring them face to face. The final effect of its predecessors had
been to kindle this instinct. They were quite ashamed--perhaps even a
little of each other. So much preparation, so much frustration: what
indeed could be good enough for it all to lead up to? A mere meeting
would be mere flatness. Did I see them at the end of years, they often
asked, just stupidly confronted? If they were bored by the joke they
might be worse bored by something else. They made exactly the same
reflections, and each in some manner was sure to hear of the other’s.
I really think it was this peculiar diffidence that finally controlled
the situation. I mean that if they had failed for the first year or
two because they couldn’t help it they kept up the habit because they
had--what shall I call it?--grown nervous. It really took some lurking
volition to account for anything so absurd.