Генри Джеймс
In the Cage
CHAPTER XXI
It was repeated the next day; it went on for three days; and at the end of that time she knew what to think. When, at the beginning, she had emerged from her temporary shelter Captain Everard had quitted the shop; and he had not come again that evening, as it had struck her he possibly might—might all the more easily that there were numberless persons who came, morning and afternoon, numberless times, so that he wouldn’t necessarily have attracted attention. The second day it was different and yet on the whole worse. His access to her had become possible—she felt herself even reaping the fruit of her yesterday’s glare at Mr. Buckton; but transacting his business with him didn’t simplify—it could, in spite of the rigour of circumstance, feed so her new conviction. The rigour was tremendous, and his telegrams—not now mere pretexts for getting at her—were apparently genuine; yet the conviction had taken but a night to develop. It could be simply enough expressed; she had had the glimmer of it the day before in her idea that he needed no more help than she had already given; that it was help he himself was prepared to render. He had come up to town but for three or four days; he had been absolutely obliged to be absent after the other time; yet he would, now that he was face to face with her, stay on as much longer as she liked. Little by little it was thus clarified, though from the first flash of his re-appearance she had read into it the real essence.
That was what the night before, at eight o’clock, her hour to go, had made her hang back and dawdle. She did last things or pretended to do them; to be in the cage had suddenly become her safety, and she was literally afraid of the alternate self who might be waiting outside. He might be waiting; it was he who was her alternate self, and of him she was afraid. The most extraordinary change had taken place in her from the moment of her catching the impression he seemed to have returned on purpose to give her. Just before she had done so, on that bewitched afternoon, she had seen herself approach without a scruple the porter at Park Chambers; then as the effect of the rush of a consciousness quite altered she had on at last quitting Cocker’s, gone straight home for the first time since her return from Bournemouth. She had passed his door every night for weeks, but nothing would have induced her to pass it now. This change was the tribute of her fear—the result of a change in himself as to which she needed no more explanation than his mere face vividly gave her; strange though it was to find an element of deterrence in the object that she regarded as the most beautiful in the world. He had taken it from her in the Park that night that she wanted him not to propose to her to sup; but he had put away the lesson by this time—he practically proposed supper every time he looked at her. This was what, for that matter, mainly filled the three days. He came in twice on each of these, and it was as if he came in to give her a chance to relent. That was after all, she said to herself in the intervals, the most that he did. There were ways, she fully recognised, in which he spared her, and other particular ways as to which she meant that her silence should be full to him of exquisite pleading. The most particular of all was his not being outside, at the corner, when she quitted the place for the night. This he might so easily have been—so easily if he hadn’t been so nice. She continued to recognise in his forbearance the fruit of her dumb supplication, and the only compensation he found for it was the harmless freedom of being able to appear to say: “Yes, I’m in town only for three or four days, but, you know, I would stay on.” He struck her as calling attention each day, each hour, to the rapid ebb of time; he exaggerated to the point of putting it that there were only two days more, that there was at last, dreadfully, only one.
There were other things still that he struck her as doing with a special intention; as to the most marked of which—unless indeed it were the most obscure—she might well have marvelled that it didn’t seem to her more horrid. It was either the frenzy of her imagination or the disorder of his baffled passion that gave her once or twice the vision of his putting down redundant money—sovereigns not concerned with the little payments he was perpetually making—so that she might give him some sign of helping him to slip them over to her. What was most extraordinary in this impression was the amount of excuse that, with some incoherence, she found for him. He wanted to pay her because there was nothing to pay her for. He wanted to offer her things he knew she wouldn’t take. He wanted to show her how much he respected her by giving her the supreme chance to show him she was respectable. Over the dryest transactions, at any rate, their eyes had out these questions. On the third day he put in a telegram that had evidently something of the same point as the stray sovereigns—a message that was in the first place concocted and that on a second thought he took back from her before she had stamped it. He had given her time to read it and had only then bethought himself that he had better not send it. If it was not to Lady Bradeen at Twindle—where she knew her ladyship then to be—this was because an address to Doctor Buzzard at Brickwood was just as good, with the added merit of its not giving away quite so much a person whom he had still, after all, in a manner to consider. It was of course most complicated, only half lighted; but there was, discernibly enough, a scheme of communication in which Lady Bradeen at Twindle and Dr. Buzzard at Brickwood were, within limits, one and the same person. The words he had shown her and then taken back consisted, at all events, of the brief but vivid phrase “Absolutely impossible.” The point was not that she should transmit it; the point was just that she should see it. What was absolutely impossible was that before he had setted something at Cocker’s he should go either to Twindle or to Brickwood.
The logic of this, in turn, for herself, was that she could lend herself to no settlement so long as she so intensely knew. What she knew was that he was, almost under peril of life, clenched in a situation: therefore how could she also know where a poor girl in the P.O. might really stand? It was more and more between them that if he might convey to her he was free, with all the impossible locked away into a closed chapter, her own case might become different for her, she might understand and meet him and listen. But he could convey nothing of the sort, and he only fidgeted and floundered in his want of power. The chapter wasn’t in the least closed, not for the other party; and the other party had a pull, somehow and somewhere: this his whole attitude and expression confessed, at the same time that they entreated her not to remember and not to mind. So long as she did remember and did mind he could only circle about and go and come, doing futile things of which he was ashamed. He was ashamed of his two words to Dr. Buzzard; he went out of the shop as soon as he had crumpled up the paper again and thrust it into his pocket. It had been an abject little exposure of dreadful impossible passion. He appeared in fact to be too ashamed to come back. He had once more left town, and a first week elapsed, and a second. He had had naturally to return to the real mistress of his fate; she had insisted—she knew how to insist, and he couldn’t put in another hour. There was always a day when she called time. It was known to our young friend moreover that he had now been dispatching telegrams from other offices. She knew at last so much that she had quite lost her earlier sense of merely guessing. There were no different shades of distinctness—it all bounced out.
CHAPTER XXII
Eighteen days elapsed, and she had begun to think it probable she should never see him again. He too then understood now: he had made out that she had secrets and reasons and impediments, that even a poor girl at the P.O. might have her complications. With the charm she had cast on him lightened by distance he had suffered a final delicacy to speak to him, had made up his mind that it would be only decent to let her alone. Never so much as during these latter days had she felt the precariousness of their relation—the happy beautiful untroubled original one, if it could only have been restored—in which the public servant and the casual public only were concerned. It hung at the best by the merest silken thread, which was at the mercy of any accident and might snap at any minute. She arrived by the end of the fortnight at the highest sense of actual fitness, never doubting that her decision was now complete. She would just give him a few days more to come back to her on a proper impersonal basis—for even to an embarrassing representative of the casual public a public servant with a conscience did owe something—and then would signify to Mr. Mudge that she was ready for the little home. It had been visited, in the further talk she had had with him at Bournemouth, from garret to cellar, and they had especially lingered, with their respectively darkened brows, before the niche into which it was to be broached to her mother that she must find means to fit.
He had put it to her more definitely than before that his calculations had allowed for that dingy presence, and he had thereby marked the greatest impression he had ever made on her. It was a stroke superior even again to his handling of the drunken soldier. What she considered that in the face of it she hung on at Cocker’s for was something she could only have described as the common fairness of a last word. Her actual last word had been, till it should be superseded, that she wouldn’t forsake her other friend, and it stuck to her through thick and thin that she was still at her post and on her honour. This other friend had shown so much beauty of conduct already that he would surely after all just re-appear long enough to relieve her, to give her something she could take away. She saw it, caught it, at times, his parting present; and there were moments when she felt herself sitting like a beggar with a hand held out to almsgiver who only fumbled. She hadn’t taken the sovereigns, but she would take the penny. She heard, in imagination, on the counter, the ring of the copper. “Don’t put yourself out any longer,” he would say, “for so bad a case. You’ve done all there is to be done. I thank and acquit and release you. Our lives take us. I don’t know much—though I’ve really been interested—about yours, but I suppose you’ve got one. Mine at any rate will take me—and where it will. Heigh-ho! Good-bye.” And then once more, for the sweetest faintest flower of all: “Only, I say—see here!” She had framed the whole picture with a squareness that included also the image of how again she would decline to “see there,” decline, as she might say, to see anywhere, see anything. Yet it befell that just in the fury of this escape she saw more than ever.
He came back one night with a rush, near the moment of their closing, and showed her a face so different and new, so upset and anxious, that almost anything seemed to look out of it but clear recognition. He poked in a telegram very much as if the simple sense of pressure, the distress of extreme haste, had blurred the remembrance of where in particular he was. But as she met his eyes a light came; it broke indeed on the spot into a positive conscious glare. That made up for everything, since it was an instant proclamation of the celebrated “danger”; it seemed to pour things out in a flood. “Oh yes, here it is—it’s upon me at last! Forget, for God’s sake, my having worried or bored you, and just help me, just save me, by getting this off without the loss of a second!” Something grave had clearly occurred, a crisis declared itself. She recognised immediately the person to whom the telegram was addressed—the Miss Dolman of Parade Lodge to whom Lady Bradeen had wired, at Dover, on the last occasion, and whom she had then, with her recollection of previous arrangements, fitted into a particular setting. Miss Dolman had figured before and not figured since, but she was now the subject of an imperative appeal. “Absolutely necessary to see you. Take last train Victoria if you can catch it. If not, earliest morning, and answer me direct either way.”
“Reply paid?” said the girl. Mr. Buckton had just departed and the counter-clerk was at the sounder. There was no other representative of the public, and she had never yet, as it seemed to her, not even in the street or in the Park, been so alone with him.
“Oh yes, reply paid, and as sharp as possible, please.”
She affixed the stamps in a flash. “She’ll catch the train!” she then declared to him breathlessly, as if she could absolutely guarantee it.
“I don’t know—I hope so. It’s awfully important. So kind of you. Awfully sharp, please.” It was wonderfully innocent now, his oblivion of all but his danger. Anything else that had ever passed between them was utterly out of it. Well, she had wanted him to be impersonal!
There was less of the same need therefore, happily, for herself; yet she only took time, before she flew to the sounder, to gasp at him: “You‘re in trouble?”
“Horrid, horrid—there’s a row!” But they parted, on it, in the next breath; and as she dashed at the sounder, almost pushing, in her violence, the counter-clerk off the stool, she caught the bang with which, at Cocker’s door, in his further precipitation, he closed the apron of the cab into which he had leaped. As he rebounded to some other precaution suggested by his alarm, his appeal to Miss Dolman flashed straight away.
But she had not, on the morrow, been in the place five minutes before he was with her again, still more discomposed and quite, now, as she said to herself, like a frightened child coming to its mother. Her companions were there, and she felt it to be remarkable how, in the presence of his agitation, his mere scared exposed nature, she suddenly ceased to mind. It came to her as it had never come to her before that with absolute directness and assurance they might carry almost anything off. He had nothing to send—she was sure he had been wiring all over—and yet his business was evidently huge. There was nothing but that in his eyes—not a glimmer of reference or memory. He was almost haggard with anxiety and had clearly not slept a wink. Her pity for him would have given her any courage, and she seemed to know at last why she had been such a fool. “She didn’t come?” she panted.
“Oh yes, she came; but there has been some mistake. We want a telegram.”
“A telegram?”
“One that was sent from here ever so long ago. There was something in it that has to be recovered. Something very, very important, please—we want it immediately.”
He really spoke to her as if she had been some strange young woman at Knightsbridge or Paddington; but it had no other effect on her than to give her the measure of his tremendous flurry. Then it was that, above all, she felt how much she had missed in the gaps and blanks and absent answers—how much she had had to dispense with: it was now black darkness save for this little wild red flare. So much as that she saw, so much her mind dealt with. One of the lovers was quaking somewhere out of town, and the other was quaking just where he stood. This was vivid enough, and after an instant she knew it was all she wanted. She wanted no detail, no fact—she wanted no nearer vision of discovery or shame. “When was your telegram? Do you mean you sent it from here?” She tried to do the young woman at Knightsbridge.
“Oh yes, from here—several weeks ago. Five, six, seven”—he was confused and impatient—“don’t you remember?”
“Remember?” she could scarcely keep out of her face, at the word, the strangest of smiles.
But the way he didn’t catch what it meant was perhaps even stranger still. “I mean, don’t you keep the old ones?”
“For a certain time.”
“But how long?”
She thought; she must do the young woman, and she knew exactly what the young woman would say and, still more, wouldn’t. “Can you give me the date?”
“Oh God, no! It was some time or other in August—toward the end. It was to the same address as the one I gave you last night.”
“Oh!” said the girl, knowing at this the deepest thrill she had ever felt. It came to her there, with her eyes on his face, that she held the whole thing in her hand, held it as she held her pencil, which might have broken at that instant in her tightened grip. This made her feel like the very fountain of fate, but the emotion was such a flood that she had to press it back with all her force. That was positively the reason, again, of her flute-like Paddington tone. “You can’t give us anything a little nearer?” Her “little” and her “us” came straight from Paddington. These things were no false note for him—his difficulty absorbed them all. The eyes with which he pressed her, and in the depths of which she read terror and rage and literal tears, were just the same he would have shown any other prim person.
“I don’t know the date. I only know the thing went from here, and just about the time I speak of. It wasn’t delivered, you see. We’ve got to recover it.”
CHAPTER XXIII
She was as struck with the beauty of his plural pronoun as she had judged he might be with that of her own; but she knew now so well what she was about that she could almost play with him and with her new-born joy. “You say ‘about the time you speak of.’ But I don’t think you speak of an exact time—do you?”
He looked splendidly helpless. “That’s just what I want to find out. Don’t you keep the old ones?—can’t you look it up?”
Our young lady—still at Paddington—turned the question over. “It wasn’t delivered?”
“Yes, it was; yet, at the same time, don’t you know? it wasn’t.” He just hung back, but he brought it out. “I mean it was intercepted, don’t you know? and there was something in it.” He paused again and, as if to further his quest and woo and supplicate success and recovery, even smiled with an effort at the agreeable that was almost ghastly and that turned the knife in her tenderness. What must be the pain of it all, of the open gulf and the throbbing fever, when this was the mere hot breath? “We want to get what was in it—to know what it was.”
“I see—I see.” She managed just the accent they had at Paddington when they stared like dead fish. “And you have no clue?”
“Not at all—I’ve the clue I’ve just given you.”
“Oh the last of August?” If she kept it up long enough she would make him really angry.
“Yes, and the address, as I’ve said.”
“Oh the same as last night?”
He visibly quivered, as with a gleam of hope; but it only poured oil on her quietude, and she was still deliberate. She ranged some papers. “Won’t you look?” he went on.
“I remember your coming,” she replied.
He blinked with a new uneasiness; it might have begun to come to him, through her difference, that he was somehow different himself. “You were much quicker then, you know!”
“So were you—you must do me that justice,” she answered with a smile. “But let me see. Wasn’t it Dover?”
“Yes, Miss Dolman—”
“Parade Lodge, Parade Terrace?”
“Exactly—thank you so awfully much!” He began to hope again. “Then you have it—the other one?”
She hesitated afresh; she quite dangled him. “It was brought by a lady?”
“Yes; and she put in by mistake something wrong. That’s what we’ve got to get hold of!” Heavens, what was he going to say?—flooding poor Paddington with wild betrayals! She couldn’t too much, for her joy, dangle him, yet she couldn’t either, for his dignity, warn or control or check him. What she found herself doing was just to treat herself to the middle way. “It was intercepted?”
“It fell into the wrong hands. But there’s something in it,” he continued to blurt out, “that may be all right. That is, if it’s wrong, don’t you know? It’s all right if it’s wrong,” he remarkably explained.
What was he, on earth, going to say? Mr. Buckton and the counter-clerk were already interested; no one would have the decency to come in; and she was divided between her particular terror for him and her general curiosity. Yet she already saw with what brilliancy she could add, to carry the thing off, a little false knowledge to all her real. “I quite understand,” she said with benevolent, with almost patronising quickness. “The lady has forgotten what she did put.”
“Forgotten most wretchedly, and it’s an immense inconvenience. It has only just been found that it didn’t get there; so that if we could immediately have it—”
“Immediately?”
“Every minute counts. You have,” he pleaded, “surely got them on file?”
“So that you can see it on the spot?”
“Yes, please—this very minute.” The counter rang with his knuckles, with the knob of his stick, with his panic of alarm. “Do, do hunt it up!” he repeated.
“I dare say we could get it for you,” the girl weetly returned.
“Get it?”—he looked aghast. “When?”
“Probably by to-morrow.”
“Then it isn’t here?”—his face was pitiful.
She caught only the uncovered gleams that peeped out of the blackness, and she wondered what complication, even among the most supposable, the very worst, could be bad enough to account for the degree of his terror. There were twists and turns, there were places where the screw drew blood, that she couldn’t guess. She was more and more glad she didn’t want to. “It has been sent on.”
“But how do you know if you don’t look?”
She gave him a smile that was meant to be, in the absolute irony of its propriety, quite divine. “It was August 23rd, and we’ve nothing later here than August 27th.”
Something leaped into his face. “27th—23rd? Then you’re sure? You know?”
She felt she scarce knew what—as if she might soon be pounced upon for some lurid connexion with a scandal. It was the queerest of all sensations, for she had heard, she had read, of these things, and the wealth of her intimacy with them at Cocker’s might be supposed to have schooled and seasoned her. This particular one that she had really quite lived with was, after all, an old story; yet what it had been before was dim and distant beside the touch under which she now winced. Scandal?—it had never been but a silly word. Now it was a great tense surface, and the surface was somehow Captain Everard’s wonderful face. Deep down in his eyes a picture, a scene—a great place like a chamber of justice, where, before a watching crowd, a poor girl, exposed but heroic, swore with a quavering voice to a document, proved an alibi, supplied a link. In this picture she bravely took her place. “It was the 23rd.”
“Then can’t you get it this morning—or some time to-day?”
She considered, still holding him with her look, which she then turned on her two companions, who were by this time unreservedly enlisted. She didn’t care—not a scrap, and she glanced about for a piece of paper. With this she had to recognise the rigour of official thrift—a morsel of blackened blotter was the only loose paper to be seen. “Have you got a card?” she said to her visitor. He was quite away from Paddington now, and the next instant, pocket-book in hand, he had whipped a card out. She gave no glance at the name on it—only turned it to the other side. She continued to hold him, she felt at present, as she had never held him; and her command of her colleagues was for the moment not less marked. She wrote something on the back of the card and pushed it across to him.
He fairly glared at it. “Seven, nine, four—”
“Nine, six, one”—she obligingly completed the number. “Is it right?” she smiled.
He took the whole thing in with a flushed intensity; then there broke out in him a visibility of relief that was simply a tremendous exposure. He shone at them all like a tall lighthouse, embracing even, for sympathy, the blinking young men. “By all the powers—it’s wrong!” And without another look, without a word of thanks, without time for anything or anybody, he turned on them the broad back of his great stature, straightened his triumphant shoulders, and strode out of the place.
She was left confronted with her habitual critics. “‘If it’s wrong it’s all right!’” she extravagantly quoted to them.
The counter-clerk was really awe-stricken. “But how did you know, dear?”
“I remembered, love!”
Mr. Buckton, on the contrary, was rude. “And what game is that, miss?”
No happiness she had ever known came within miles of it, and some minutes elapsed before she could recall herself sufficiently to reply that it was none of his business.
