Генри Джеймс
Lady Barbarina, The Siege of London, An International Episode, and Other Tales
“In Le Demi-Monde?” Littlemore was not quick at catching literary allusions.
“Don’t you remember the play we saw in Paris? Or like Don Fabrice in L’Aventurière. A bad woman tries to marry an honourable man, who doesn’t know how bad she is, and they who do know step in and push her back.”
“Yes, it comes to me. There was a good deal of lying,” Littlemore recalled, “all round.”
“They prevented the marriage, however—which is the great thing.”
“The great thing if your heart’s set! One of the active parties was the intimate friend of the man in love, the other was his son. Demesne’s nothing at all to me.”
“He’s a very good fellow,” said Waterville.
“Then go and talk to him.”
“Play the part of Olivier de Jalin? Oh I can’t. I’m not Olivier. But I think I do wish he’d corner me of himself. Mrs. Headway oughtn’t really to be allowed to pass.”
“I wish to heaven they’d let me alone,” Littlemore murmured ruefully and staring a while out of the window.
“Do you still hold to that theory you propounded in Paris? Are you willing to commit perjury?” Waterville asked.
“Assuredly I can refuse to answer questions—even that one.”
“As I told you before, that will amount to a condemnation.”
Longmore frowningly debated. “It may amount to what it pleases. I guess I’ll go back to Paris.”
“That will be the same as not answering. But it’s quite the best thing you can do. I’ve really been thinking it out,” Waterville continued, “and I don’t hold that from the point of view of social good faith she’s an article we ought to contribute—!” He looked at the matter clearly now from a great elevation; his tone, the expression of his face, betrayed this lofty flight; the effect of which, as he glanced down at his didactic young friend, Littlemore found peculiarly irritating.
He shifted about. “No, after all, hanged if they shall drive me away!” he exclaimed abruptly; and he walked off while his companion wondered.
X
The morning after this the elder man received a note from Mrs. Headway—a short and simple note, consisting merely of the words: “I shall be at home this afternoon; will you come and see me at five? I’ve something particular to say to you.” He sent no answer to the question, but went to the little house in Chesterfield Street at the hour its mistress had proposed.
“I don’t believe you know what sort of a woman I am!” she began as soon as he stood before her.
“Oh Lord!” Littlemore groaned as he dropped into a chair. Then he added: “Please don’t strike up that air!”
“Ah, but it’s exactly what I’ve wanted to say. It’s very important. You don’t know me—you don’t understand me. You think you do—but you don’t.”
“It isn’t for the want of your having told me—many many times!” And Littlemore had a hard critical smile, irritated as he was at so austere a prospect. The last word of all was decidedly that Mrs. Headway was a dreadful bore. It was always the last word about such women, who never really deserved to be spared.
She glared at him a little on this; her face was no longer the hospitable inn-front with the showy sign of the Smile. The sign had come down; she looked sharp and strained, almost old; the change was complete. It made her serious as he had never seen her—having seen her always only either too pleased or too disgusted. “Yes, I know; men are so stupid. They know nothing about women but what women tell them. And women tell them things on purpose to see how stupid they can be. I’ve told you things like that just for amusement when it was dull. If you believed them it was your own fault. But now I want you really to know.”
“I don’t want to know. I know enough.”
“How do you mean you know enough?” she cried with all her sincerity. “What business have you to know anything?” The poor little woman, in her passionate purpose, was not obliged to be consistent, and the loud laugh with which Littlemore greeted this must have seemed to her unduly harsh. “You shall know what I want you to know, however. You think me a bad woman—you don’t respect me; I told you that in Paris. I’ve done things I don’t understand, myself, to-day; that I admit as fully as you please. But I’ve completely changed, and I want to change everything. You ought to enter into that, you ought to see what I want. I hate everything that has happened to me before this; I loathe it, I despise it. I went on that way trying—trying one thing and another. But now I’ve got what I want. Do you expect me to go down on my knees to you? I believe I will, I’m so anxious. You can help me—no one else can do a thing; they’re only waiting to see if he’ll do it. I told you in Paris you could help me, and it’s just as true now. Say a good word for me for Christ’s sake! You haven’t lifted your little finger, or I should know it by this time. It will just make the difference. Or if your sister would come and see me I should be all right. Women are pitiless, pitiless, and you’re pitiless too. It isn’t that Mrs. Dolphin’s anything so great, most of my friends are better than that!—but she’s the one woman who knows, and every one seems to know she knows. He knows it, and he knows she doesn’t come. So she kills me—she kills me! I understand perfectly what he wants—I’ll do everything, be anything, I’ll be the most perfect wife. The old woman will adore me when she knows me—it’s too stupid of her not to see. Everything in the past’s over; it has all fallen away from me; it’s the life of another woman. This was what I wanted; I knew I should find it some day. I knew I should be at home in the best—and with the highest. What could I do in those horrible places? I had to take what I could. But now I’ve got nice surroundings. I want you to do me justice. You’ve never done me justice. That’s what I sent for you for.”
Littlemore had suddenly ceased to be bored, but a variety of feelings had taken the place of that one. It was impossible not to be touched; she really meant what she said. People don’t change their nature, but they change their desires, their ideal, their effort. This incoherent passionate plea was an assurance that she was literally panting to be respectable. But the poor woman, whatever she did, was condemned, as he had said of old, in Paris, to Waterville, to be only half right. The colour rose to her visitor’s face as he listened to her outpouring of anxiety and egotism; she hadn’t managed her early life very well, but there was no need of her going down on her knees. “It’s very painful to me to hear all this. You’re under no obligation to say such things to me. You entirely misconceive my attitude—my influence.”
“Oh yes, you shirk it—you only wish to shirk it!” she cried, flinging away fiercely the sofa-cushion on which she had been resting.
“Marry whom you damn please!” Littlemore quite shouted, springing to his feet.
He had hardly spoken when the door was thrown open and the servant announced Sir Arthur Demesne. This shy adventurer entered with a certain briskness, but stopped short on seeing Mrs. Headway engaged with another guest. Recognising Littlemore, however, he gave a light exclamation which might have passed for a greeting. Mrs. Headway, who had risen as he came in, looked with wonderful eyes from one of the men to the other; then, like a person who had a sudden inspiration, she clasped her hands together and cried out: “I’m so glad you’ve met. If I had arranged it it couldn’t be better!”
“If you had arranged it?” said Sir Arthur, crinkling a little his high white forehead, while the conviction rose before Littlemore that she had indeed arranged it.
“I’m going to do something very queer”—and her extravagant manner confirmed her words.
“You’re excited, I’m afraid you’re ill.” Sir Arthur stood there with his hat and his stick; he was evidently much annoyed.
“It’s an excellent opportunity; you must forgive me if I take advantage.” And she flashed a tender touching ray at the Baronet. “I’ve wanted this a long time—perhaps you’ve seen I wanted it. Mr. Littlemore has known me from far back; he’s an old old friend. I told you that in Paris, don’t you remember? Well he’s my only one, and I want him to speak for me.” Her eyes had turned now to Littlemore; they rested upon him with a sweetness that only made the whole proceeding more audacious. She had begun to smile again, though she was visibly trembling. “He’s my only one,” she continued; “it’s a great pity, you ought to have known others. But I’m very much alone and must make the best of what I have. I want so much that some one else than myself should speak for me. Women usually can ask that service of a relative or of another woman. I can’t; it’s a great pity, but it’s not my fault, it’s my misfortune. None of my people are here—I’m terribly alone in the world. But Mr. Littlemore will tell you; he’ll say he has known me for ever so long. He’ll tell you if he knows any reason—if there’s anything against me. He has been wanting the chance—he thought he couldn’t begin himself. You see I treat you as an old friend, dear Mr. Littlemore. I’ll leave you with Sir Arthur. You’ll both excuse me.” The expression of her face, turned towards Littlemore as she delivered herself of this singular proposal, had the intentness of a magician who wishes to work a spell. She darted at Sir Arthur another pleading ray and then swept out of the room.
The two men remained in the extraordinary position she had created for them; neither of them moved even to open the door for her. She closed it behind her, and for a moment there was a deep portentous silence. Sir Arthur Demesne, very pale, stared hard at the carpet.
“I’m placed in an impossible situation,” Littlemore said at last, “and I don’t imagine you accept it any more than I do.” His fellow-visitor kept the same attitude, neither looking up nor answering. Littlemore felt a sudden gush of pity for him. Of course he couldn’t accept the situation, but all the same he was half-sick with anxiety to see how this nondescript American, who was both so precious and so superfluous, so easy and so abysmal, would consider Mrs. Headway’s challenge. “Have you any question to ask me?” Littlemore went on. At which Sir Arthur looked up. The other had seen the look before; he had described it to Waterville after Mrs. Headway’s admirer came to call on him in Paris. There were other things mingled with it now—shame, annoyance, pride; but the great thing, the intense desire to know, was paramount. “Good God, how can I tell him?” seemed to hum in Littlemore’s ears.
Sir Arthur’s hesitation would have been of the briefest; but his companion heard the tick of the clock while it lasted. “Certainly I’ve no question to ask,” the young man said in a voice of cool almost insolent surprise.
“Good-day then, confound you.”
“The same to you!”
But Littlemore left him in possession. He expected to find Mrs. Headway at the foot of the staircase; but he quitted the house without interruption.
On the morrow, after luncheon, as he was leaving the vain retreat at Queen Anne’s Gate, the postman handed him a letter. Littlemore opened and read it on the steps, an operation which took but a moment.
Dear Mr. Littlemore—It will interest you to know that I’m engaged to be married to Sir Arthur Demesne and that our marriage is to take place as soon as their stupid old Parliament rises. But it’s not to come out for some days, and I’m sure I can trust meanwhile to your complete discretion.
Yours very sincerely,Nancy H.
P.S.—He made me a terrible scene for what I did yesterday, but he came back in the evening and we fixed it all right. That’s how the thing comes to be settled. He won’t tell me what passed between you—he requested me never to allude to the subject. I don’t care—I was bound you should speak!
Littlemore thrust this epistle into his pocket and marched away with it. He had come out on various errands, but he forgot his business for the time and before he knew it had walked into Hyde Park. He left the carriages and riders to one side and followed the Serpentine into Kensington Gardens, of which he made the complete circuit. He felt annoyed, and more disappointed than he understood—than he would have understood if he had tried. Now that Nancy Beck had succeeded her success was an irritation, and he was almost sorry he hadn’t said to Sir Arthur: “Oh well, she was pretty bad, you know.” However, now they were at one they would perhaps leave him alone. He walked the irritation off and before he went about his original purposes had ceased to think of Mrs. Headway. He went home at six o’clock, and the servant who admitted him informed him in doing so that Mrs. Dolphin had requested he should be told on his return that she wished to see him in the drawing-room. “It’s another trap!” he said to himself instinctively; but in spite of this reflexion he went upstairs. On entering his sister’s presence he found she had a visitor. This visitor, to all appearance on the point of departing, was a tall elderly woman, and the two ladies stood together in the middle of the room.
“I’m so glad you’ve come back,” said Mrs. Dolphin without meeting her brother’s eye. “I want so much to introduce you to Lady Demesne that I hoped you’d come in. Must you really go—won’t you stay a little?” she added, turning to her companion; and without waiting for an answer went on hastily: “I must leave you a moment—excuse me. I’ll come back!” Before he knew it Littlemore found himself alone with her ladyship and understood that since he hadn’t been willing to go and see her she had taken upon herself to make an advance. It had the queerest effect, all the same, to see his sister playing the same tricks as Nancy Beck!
“Ah, she must be in a fidget!” he said to himself as he stood before Lady Demesne. She looked modest and aloof, even timid, as far as a tall serene woman who carried her head very well could look so; and she was such a different type from Mrs. Headway that his present vision of Nancy’s triumph gave her by contrast something of the dignity of the vanquished. It made him feel as sorry for her as he had felt for her son. She lost no time; she went straight to the point. She evidently felt that in the situation in which she had placed herself her only advantage could consist in being simple and business-like.
“I’m so fortunate as to catch you. I wish so much to ask you if you can give me any information about a person you know and about whom I have been in correspondence with Mrs. Dolphin. I mean Mrs. Headway.”
“Won’t you sit down?” asked Littlemore.
“No, thank you. I’ve only a moment.”
“May I ask you why you make this inquiry?”
“Of course I must give you my reason. I’m afraid my son will marry her.”
Littlemore was puzzled—then saw she wasn’t yet aware of the fact imparted to him in Mrs. Headway’s note. “You don’t like her?” he asked, exaggerating, in spite of himself, the interrogative inflexion.
“Not at all,” said Lady Demesne, smiling and looking at him. Her smile was gentle, without rancour; he thought it almost beautiful.
“What would you like me to say?” he asked.
“Whether you think her respectable.”
“What good will that do you? How can it possibly affect the event?”
“It will do me no good, of course, if your opinion’s favourable. But if you tell me it’s not I shall be able to say to my son that the one person in London who has known her more than six months thinks so and so of her.”
This speech, on Lady Demesne’s clear lips, evoked no protest from her listener. He had suddenly become conscious of the need to utter the simple truth with which he had answered Rupert Waterville’s first question at the Théâtre Français. He brought it out. “I don’t think Mrs. Headway respectable.”
“I was sure you would say that.” She seemed to pant a little.
“I can say nothing more—not a word. That’s my opinion. I don’t think it will help you.”
“I think it will. I wanted to have it from your own lips. That makes all the difference,” said Lady Demesne. “I’m exceedingly obliged to you.” And she offered him her hand; after which he accompanied her in silence to the door.
He felt no discomfort, no remorse, at what he had said; he only felt relief—presumably because he believed it would make no difference. It made a difference only in what was at the bottom of all things—his own sense of fitness. He only wished he had driven it home that Mrs. Headway would probably be for her son a capital wife. But that at least would make no difference. He requested his sister, who had wondered greatly at the brevity of his interview with her friend, to spare him all questions on the subject; and Mrs. Dolphin went about for some days in the happy faith that there were to be no dreadful Americans in English society compromising her native land.
Her faith, however, was short-lived. Nothing had made any difference; it was perhaps too late. The London world heard in the first days of July, not that Sir Arthur Demesne was to marry Mrs. Headway, but that the pair had been privately and, it was to be hoped as regards Mrs. Headway on this occasion, indissolubly united. His mother gave neither sign nor sound; she only retired to the country.
“I think you might have done differently,” said Mrs. Dolphin, very pale, to her brother. “But of course everything will come out now.”
“Yes, and make her more the fashion than ever!” Littlemore answered with cynical laughter. After his little interview with the elder Lady Demesne he didn’t feel at liberty to call again on the younger; and he never learned—he never even wished to know—whether in the pride of her success she forgave him.
Waterville—it was very strange—was positively scandalised at this success. He held that Mrs. Headway ought never to have been allowed to marry a confiding gentleman, and he used in speaking to Littlemore the same words as Mrs. Dolphin. He thought Littlemore might have done differently. But he spoke with such vehemence that Littlemore looked at him hard—hard enough to make him blush. “Did you want to marry her yourself?” his friend inquired. “My dear fellow, you’re in love with her! That’s what’s the matter with you.”
This, however, blushing still more, Waterville indignantly denied. A little later he heard from New York that people were beginning to ask who in the world Lady Demesne “had been.”
AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE
I
Four years ago—in 1874—two young Englishmen had occasion to go to the United States. They crossed the ocean at midsummer and, arriving in New York on the first day of August, were much struck with the high, the torrid temperature. Disembarking upon the wharf they climbed into one of the huge high-hung coaches that convey passengers to the hotels, and with a great deal of bouncing and bumping they took their course through Broadway. The midsummer aspect of New York is doubtless not the most engaging, though nothing perhaps could well more solicit an alarmed attention. Of quite other sense and sound from those of any typical English street was the endless rude channel, rich in incongruities, through which our two travellers advanced—looking out on either side at the rough animation of the sidewalks, at the high-coloured heterogeneous architecture, at the huge white marble façades that, bedizened with gilded lettering, seemed to glare in the strong crude light, at the multifarious awnings, banners and streamers, at the extraordinary number of omnibuses, horse-cars and other democratic vehicles, at the vendors of cooling fluids, the white trousers and big straw hats of the policemen, the tripping gait of the modish young persons on the pavement, the general brightness, newness, juvenility, both of people and things. The young men had exchanged few observations, but in crossing Union Square, in front of the monument to Washington—in the very shadow indeed projected by the image of the pater patriae—one of them remarked to the other: “Awfully rum place.”
“Ah, very odd, very odd,” said the other, who was the clever man of the two.
“Pity it’s so beastly hot,” resumed the first speaker after a pause.
“You know we’re in a low latitude,” said the clever man.
“I daresay,” remarked his friend.
“I wonder,” said the second speaker presently, “if they can give one a bath.”
“I daresay not,” the other returned.
“Oh I say!” cried his comrade.
This animated discussion dropped on their arrival at the hotel, recommended to them by an American gentleman whose acquaintance they had made—with whom, indeed, they had become very intimate—on the steamer and who had proposed to accompany them to the inn and introduce them in a friendly way to the proprietor. This plan, however, had been defeated by their friend’s finding his “partner” in earnest attendance on the wharf, with urgent claims on his immediate presence of mind. But the two Englishmen, with nothing beyond their national prestige and personal graces to recommend them, were very well received at the hotel, which had an air of capacious hospitality. They found a bath not unattainable and were indeed struck with the facilities for prolonged and reiterated immersion with which their apartment was supplied. After bathing a good deal—more indeed than they had ever done before on a single occasion—they made their way to the dining-room of the hotel, which was a spacious restaurant with a fountain in the middle, a great many tall plants in ornamental tubs and an array of French waiters. The first dinner on land, after a sea-voyage, is in any connexion a delightful hour, and there was much that ministered to ease in the general situation of our young men. They were formed for good spirits and addicted and appointed to hilarity; they were more observant than they appeared; they were, in an inarticulate accidentally dissimulative fashion, capable of high appreciation. This was perhaps especially the case with the elder, who was also, as I have said, the man of talent. They sat down at a little table which was a very different affair from the great clattering see-saw in the saloon of the steamer. The wide doors and windows of the restaurant stood open, beneath large awnings, to a wide expanse studded with other plants in tubs and rows of spreading trees—beyond which appeared a large shady square without palings and with marble-paved walks. And above the vivid verdure rose other façades of white marble and of pale chocolate-coloured stone, squaring themselves against the deep blue sky. Here, outside, in the light and the shade and the heat, was a great tinkling of the bells of innumerable street-cars and a constant strolling and shuffling and rustling of many pedestrians, extremely frequent among whom were young women in Pompadour-looking dresses. The place within was cool and vaguely lighted; with the plash of water, the odour of flowers and the flitting of French waiters, as I have said, on soundless carpets.
“It’s rather like Paris, you know,” said the younger of our two travellers.
“It’s like Paris—only more so,” his companion returned.
“I suppose it’s the French waiters,” said the first speaker. “Why don’t they have French waiters in London?”
“Ah, but fancy a French waiter at a London club!” said his friend.
The elder man stared as if he couldn’t fancy it. “In Paris I’m very apt to dine at a place where there’s an English waiter. Don’t you know, what’s-his-name’s, close to the thingumbob? They always set an English waiter at me. I suppose they think I can’t speak French.”
“No more you can!” And this candid critic unfolded his napkin.
The other paid no heed whatever to his candour. “I say,” the latter resumed in a moment, “I suppose we must learn to speak American. I suppose we must take lessons.”
“I can’t make them out, you know,” said the clever man.
“What the deuce is he saying?” asked his comrade, appealing from the French waiter.
“He’s recommending some soft-shell crabs,” said the clever man.
And so, in a desultory view of the mysteries of the new world bristling about them, the young Englishmen proceeded to dine—going in largely, as the phrase is, for cooling draughts and dishes, as to which their attendant submitted to them a hundred alternatives. After dinner they went out and slowly walked about the neighbouring streets. The early dusk of waning summer was at hand, but the heat still very great. The pavements were hot even to the stout boot-soles of the British travellers, and the trees along the kerb-stone emitted strange exotic odours. The young men wandered through the adjoining square—that queer place without palings and with marble walks arranged in black and white lozenges. There were a great many benches crowded with shabby-looking people, and the visitors remarked very justly that it wasn’t much like Grosvenor Square. On one side was an enormous hotel, lifting up into the hot darkness an immense array of open and brightly-lighted windows. At the base of this populous structure was an eternal jangle of horse-cars, and all round it, in the upper dusk, a sinister hum of mosquitoes. The ground-floor of the hotel, figuring a huge transparent cage, flung a wide glare of gaslight into the street, of which it formed a public adjunct, absorbing and emitting the passers-by promiscuously. The young Englishmen went in with every one else, from curiosity, and saw a couple of hundred men sitting on divans along a great marble-paved corridor, their legs variously stretched out, together with several dozen more standing in a queue, as at the ticket-office of a railway station, before a vast marble altar of sacrifice, a thing shaped like the counter of a huge shop. These latter persons, who carried portmanteaus in their hands, had a dejected exhausted look; their garments were not fresh, as if telling of some rush, or some fight, for life, and they seemed to render mystic tribute to a magnificent young man with a waxed moustache and a shirt front adorned with diamond buttons, who every now and then dropped a cold glance over their multitudinous patience. They were American citizens doing homage to an hotel-clerk.
“I’m glad he didn’t tell us to go there,” said one of our Englishmen, alluding to their friend on the steamer, who had told them so many things. They walked up the Fifth Avenue, where he had, for instance, told them all the first families lived. But the first families were out of town, and our friends had but the satisfaction of seeing some of the second—or perhaps even the third—taking the evening air on balconies and high flights of doorsteps in streets at right angles to the main straight channel. They went a little way down one of these side-streets and there saw young ladies in white dresses—charming-looking persons—seated in graceful attitudes on the chocolate-coloured steps. In one or two places these young ladies were conversing across the street with other young ladies seated in similar postures and costumes in front of the opposite houses, and in the warm night air their colloquial tones sounded strangely in the ears of the young Englishmen. One of the latter, nevertheless—the younger—betrayed a disposition to intercept some stray item of this interchange and see what it would lead to; but his companion observed pertinently enough that he had better be careful. They mustn’t begin by making mistakes.
“But he told us, you know—he told us,” urged the young man, alluding again to the friend on the steamer.
“Never mind what he told us!” answered his elder, who, if he had more years and a more developed wit, was also apparently more of a moralist.
By bedtime—in their impatience to taste of a terrestrial couch again our seafarers went to bed early—it was still insufferably hot, and the buzz of the mosquitoes at the open windows might have passed for an audible crepitation of the temperature. “We can’t stand this, you know,” the young Englishmen said to each other; and they tossed about all night more boisterously than they had been tossed by Atlantic billows. On the morrow their first thought was that they would re-embark that day for England, but it then occurred to them they might find an asylum nearer at hand. The cave of Æolus became their ideal of comfort, and they wondered where the Americans went when wishing to cool off. They hadn’t the least idea, and resolved to apply for information to Mr. J. L. Westgate. This was the name—inscribed in a bold hand on the back of a letter carefully preserved in the pocket-book of our younger gentleman. Beneath the address, in the left-hand corner of the envelope, were the words “Introducing Lord Lambeth and Percy Beaumont Esq.” The letter had been given to the two Englishmen by a good friend of theirs in London, who had been in America two years previously and had singled out Mr. J. L. Westgate from the many friends he had left there as the consignee, as it were, of his compatriots. “He’s really very decent,” the Englishman in London had said, “and he has an awfully pretty wife. He’s tremendously hospitable—he’ll do everything in the world for you, and as he knows every one over there it’s quite needless I should give you any other introduction. He’ll make you see every one—trust him for the right kick-off. He has a tremendously pretty wife.” It was natural that in the hour of tribulation Lord Lambeth and Mr. Percy Beaumont should have bethought themselves of so possible a benefactor; all the more so that he lived in the Fifth Avenue and that the Fifth Avenue, as they had ascertained the night before, was contiguous to their hotel. “Ten to one he’ll be out of town,” said Percy Beaumont; “but we can at least find out where he has gone and can at once give chase. He can’t possibly have gone to a hotter place, you know.”
“Oh there’s only one hotter place,” said Lord Lambeth, “and I hope he hasn’t gone there.”
They strolled along the shady side of the street to the number indicated by the precious letter. The house presented an imposing chocolate-coloured expanse, relieved by facings and window-cornices of florid sculpture and by a couple of dusty rose-trees which clambered over the balconies and the portico. This last-mentioned feature was approached by a monumental flight of steps.
