Генри Джеймс
Roderick Hudson
“Won’t you have a cup of tea?” Cecilia asked. “Perhaps that will restore your equanimity.”
“Aye, by keeping me awake all night!” said Hudson. “At the best, it ‘s hard enough to go down to the office. With my nerves set on edge by a sleepless night, I should perforce stay at home and be brutal to my poor mother.”
“Your mother is well, I hope.”
“Oh, she ‘s as usual.”
“And Miss Garland?”
“She ‘s as usual, too. Every one, everything, is as usual. Nothing ever happens, in this benighted town.”
“I beg your pardon; things do happen, sometimes,” said Cecilia. “Here is a dear cousin of mine arrived on purpose to congratulate you on your statuette.” And she called to Rowland to come and be introduced to Mr. Hudson. The young man sprang up with alacrity, and Rowland, coming forward to shake hands, had a good look at him in the light projected from the parlor window. Something seemed to shine out of Hudson’s face as a warning against a “compliment” of the idle, unpondered sort.
“Your statuette seems to me very good,” Rowland said gravely. “It has given me extreme pleasure.”
“And my cousin knows what is good,” said Cecilia. “He ‘s a connoisseur.”
Hudson smiled and stared. “A connoisseur?” he cried, laughing. “He ‘s the first I ‘ve ever seen! Let me see what they look like;” and he drew Rowland nearer to the light. “Have they all such good heads as that? I should like to model yours.”
“Pray do,” said Cecilia. “It will keep him a while. He is running off to Europe.”
“Ah, to Europe!” Hudson exclaimed with a melancholy cadence, as they sat down. “Happy man!”
But the note seemed to Rowland to be struck rather at random, for he perceived no echo of it in the boyish garrulity of his later talk. Hudson was a tall, slender young fellow, with a singularly mobile and intelligent face. Rowland was struck at first only with its responsive vivacity, but in a short time he perceived it was remarkably handsome. The features were admirably chiseled and finished, and a frank smile played over them as gracefully as a breeze among flowers. The fault of the young man’s whole structure was an excessive want of breadth. The forehead, though it was high and rounded, was narrow; the jaw and the shoulders were narrow; and the result was an air of insufficient physical substance. But Mallet afterwards learned that this fair, slim youth could draw indefinitely upon a mysterious fund of nervous force, which outlasted and outwearied the endurance of many a sturdier temperament. And certainly there was life enough in his eye to furnish an immortality! It was a generous dark gray eye, in which there came and went a sort of kindling glow, which would have made a ruder visage striking, and which gave at times to Hudson’s harmonious face an altogether extraordinary beauty. There was to Rowland’s sympathetic sense a slightly pitiful disparity between the young sculptor’s delicate countenance and the shabby gentility of his costume. He was dressed for a visit—a visit to a pretty woman. He was clad from head to foot in a white linen suit, which had never been remarkable for the felicity of its cut, and had now quite lost that crispness which garments of this complexion can as ill spare as the back-scene of a theatre the radiance of the footlights. He wore a vivid blue cravat, passed through a ring altogether too splendid to be valuable; he pulled and twisted, as he sat, a pair of yellow kid gloves; he emphasized his conversation with great dashes and flourishes of a light, silver-tipped walking-stick, and he kept constantly taking off and putting on one of those slouched sombreros which are the traditional property of the Virginian or Carolinian of romance. When this was on, he was very picturesque, in spite of his mock elegance; and when it was off, and he sat nursing it and turning it about and not knowing what to do with it, he could hardly be said to be awkward. He evidently had a natural relish for brilliant accessories, and appropriated what came to his hand. This was visible in his talk, which abounded in the florid and sonorous. He liked words with color in them.
Rowland, who was but a moderate talker, sat by in silence, while Cecilia, who had told him that she desired his opinion upon her friend, used a good deal of characteristic finesse in leading the young man to expose himself. She perfectly succeeded, and Hudson rattled away for an hour with a volubility in which boyish unconsciousness and manly shrewdness were singularly combined. He gave his opinion on twenty topics, he opened up an endless budget of local gossip, he described his repulsive routine at the office of Messrs. Striker and Spooner, counselors at law, and he gave with great felicity and gusto an account of the annual boat-race between Harvard and Yale, which he had lately witnessed at Worcester. He had looked at the straining oarsmen and the swaying crowd with the eye of the sculptor. Rowland was a good deal amused and not a little interested. Whenever Hudson uttered some peculiarly striking piece of youthful grandiloquence, Cecilia broke into a long, light, familiar laugh.
“What are you laughing at?” the young man then demanded. “Have I said anything so ridiculous?”
“Go on, go on,” Cecilia replied. “You are too delicious! Show Mr. Mallet how Mr. Striker read the Declaration of Independence.”
Hudson, like most men with a turn for the plastic arts, was an excellent mimic, and he represented with a great deal of humor the accent and attitude of a pompous country lawyer sustaining the burden of this customary episode of our national festival. The sonorous twang, the see-saw gestures, the odd pronunciation, were vividly depicted. But Cecilia’s manner, and the young man’s quick response, ruffled a little poor Rowland’s paternal conscience. He wondered whether his cousin was not sacrificing the faculty of reverence in her clever protege to her need for amusement. Hudson made no serious rejoinder to Rowland’s compliment on his statuette until he rose to go. Rowland wondered whether he had forgotten it, and supposed that the oversight was a sign of the natural self-sufficiency of genius. But Hudson stood a moment before he said good night, twirled his sombrero, and hesitated for the first time. He gave Rowland a clear, penetrating glance, and then, with a wonderfully frank, appealing smile: “You really meant,” he asked, “what you said a while ago about that thing of mine? It is good—essentially good?”
“I really meant it,” said Rowland, laying a kindly hand on his shoulder. “It is very good indeed. It is, as you say, essentially good. That is the beauty of it.”
Hudson’s eyes glowed and expanded; he looked at Rowland for some time in silence. “I have a notion you really know,” he said at last. “But if you don’t, it does n’t much matter.”
“My cousin asked me to-day,” said Cecilia, “whether I supposed you knew yourself how good it is.”
Hudson stared, blushing a little. “Perhaps not!” he cried.
“Very likely,” said Mallet. “I read in a book the other day that great talent in action—in fact the book said genius—is a kind of somnambulism. The artist performs great feats, in a dream. We must not wake him up, lest he should lose his balance.”
“Oh, when he ‘s back in bed again!” Hudson answered with a laugh. “Yes, call it a dream. It was a very happy one!”
“Tell me this,” said Rowland. “Did you mean anything by your young Water-drinker? Does he represent an idea? Is he a symbol?”
Hudson raised his eyebrows and gently scratched his head. “Why, he ‘s youth, you know; he ‘s innocence, he ‘s health, he ‘s strength, he ‘s curiosity. Yes, he ‘s a good many things.”
“And is the cup also a symbol?”
“The cup is knowledge, pleasure, experience. Anything of that kind!”
“Well, he ‘s guzzling in earnest,” said Rowland.
Hudson gave a vigorous nod. “Aye, poor fellow, he ‘s thirsty!” And on this he cried good night, and bounded down the garden path.
“Well, what do you make of him?” asked Cecilia, returning a short time afterwards from a visit of investigation as to the sufficiency of Bessie’s bedclothes.
“I confess I like him,” said Rowland. “He ‘s very immature,—but there ‘s stuff in him.”
“He ‘s a strange being,” said Cecilia, musingly.
“Who are his people? what has been his education?” Rowland asked.
“He has had no education, beyond what he has picked up, with little trouble, for himself. His mother is a widow, of a Massachusetts country family, a little timid, tremulous woman, who is always on pins and needles about her son. She had some property herself, and married a Virginian gentleman of good estates. He turned out, I believe, a very licentious personage, and made great havoc in their fortune. Everything, or almost everything, melted away, including Mr. Hudson himself. This is literally true, for he drank himself to death. Ten years ago his wife was left a widow, with scanty means and a couple of growing boys. She paid her husband’s debts as best she could, and came to establish herself here, where by the death of a charitable relative she had inherited an old-fashioned ruinous house. Roderick, our friend, was her pride and joy, but Stephen, the elder, was her comfort and support. I remember him, later; he was an ugly, sturdy, practical lad, very different from his brother, and in his way, I imagine, a very fine fellow. When the war broke out he found that the New England blood ran thicker in his veins than the Virginian, and immediately obtained a commission. He fell in some Western battle and left his mother inconsolable. Roderick, however, has given her plenty to think about, and she has induced him, by some mysterious art, to abide, nominally at least, in a profession that he abhors, and for which he is about as fit, I should say, as I am to drive a locomotive. He grew up a la grace de Dieu, and was horribly spoiled. Three or four years ago he graduated at a small college in this neighborhood, where I am afraid he had given a good deal more attention to novels and billiards than to mathematics and Greek. Since then he has been reading law, at the rate of a page a day. If he is ever admitted to practice I ‘m afraid my friendship won’t avail to make me give him my business. Good, bad, or indifferent, the boy is essentially an artist—an artist to his fingers’ ends.”
“Why, then,” asked Rowland, “does n’t he deliberately take up the chisel?”
“For several reasons. In the first place, I don’t think he more than half suspects his talent. The flame is smouldering, but it is never fanned by the breath of criticism. He sees nothing, hears nothing, to help him to self-knowledge. He ‘s hopelessly discontented, but he does n’t know where to look for help. Then his mother, as she one day confessed to me, has a holy horror of a profession which consists exclusively, as she supposes, in making figures of people without their clothes on. Sculpture, to her mind, is an insidious form of immorality, and for a young man of a passionate disposition she considers the law a much safer investment. Her father was a judge, she has two brothers at the bar, and her elder son had made a very promising beginning in the same line. She wishes the tradition to be perpetuated. I ‘m pretty sure the law won’t make Roderick’s fortune, and I ‘m afraid it will, in the long run, spoil his temper.”
“What sort of a temper is it?”
“One to be trusted, on the whole. It is quick, but it is generous. I have known it to breathe flame and fury at ten o’clock in the evening, and soft, sweet music early on the morrow. It ‘s a very entertaining temper to observe. I, fortunately, can do so dispassionately, for I ‘m the only person in the place he has not quarreled with.”
“Has he then no society? Who is Miss Garland, whom you asked about?”
“A young girl staying with his mother, a sort of far-away cousin; a good plain girl, but not a person to delight a sculptor’s eye. Roderick has a goodly share of the old Southern arrogance; he has the aristocratic temperament. He will have nothing to do with the small towns-people; he says they ‘re ‘ignoble.’ He cannot endure his mother’s friends—the old ladies and the ministers and the tea-party people; they bore him to death. So he comes and lounges here and rails at everything and every one.”
This graceful young scoffer reappeared a couple of evenings later, and confirmed the friendly feeling he had provoked on Rowland’s part. He was in an easier mood than before, he chattered less extravagantly, and asked Rowland a number of rather naif questions about the condition of the fine arts in New York and Boston. Cecilia, when he had gone, said that this was the wholesome effect of Rowland’s praise of his statuette. Roderick was acutely sensitive, and Rowland’s tranquil commendation had stilled his restless pulses. He was ruminating the full-flavored verdict of culture. Rowland felt an irresistible kindness for him, a mingled sense of his personal charm and his artistic capacity. He had an indefinable attraction—the something divine of unspotted, exuberant, confident youth. The next day was Sunday, and Rowland proposed that they should take a long walk and that Roderick should show him the country. The young man assented gleefully, and in the morning, as Rowland at the garden gate was giving his hostess Godspeed on her way to church, he came striding along the grassy margin of the road and out-whistling the music of the church bells. It was one of those lovely days of August when you feel the complete exuberance of summer just warned and checked by autumn. “Remember the day, and take care you rob no orchards,” said Cecilia, as they separated.
The young men walked away at a steady pace, over hill and dale, through woods and fields, and at last found themselves on a grassy elevation studded with mossy rocks and red cedars. Just beneath them, in a great shining curve, flowed the goodly Connecticut. They flung themselves on the grass and tossed stones into the river; they talked like old friends. Rowland lit a cigar, and Roderick refused one with a grimace of extravagant disgust. He thought them vile things; he did n’t see how decent people could tolerate them. Rowland was amused, and wondered what it was that made this ill-mannered speech seem perfectly inoffensive on Roderick’s lips. He belonged to the race of mortals, to be pitied or envied according as we view the matter, who are not held to a strict account for their aggressions. Looking at him as he lay stretched in the shade, Rowland vaguely likened him to some beautiful, supple, restless, bright-eyed animal, whose motions should have no deeper warrant than the tremulous delicacy of its structure, and be graceful even when they were most inconvenient. Rowland watched the shadows on Mount Holyoke, listened to the gurgle of the river, and sniffed the balsam of the pines. A gentle breeze had begun to tickle their summits, and brought the smell of the mown grass across from the elm-dotted river meadows. He sat up beside his companion and looked away at the far-spreading view. It seemed to him beautiful, and suddenly a strange feeling of prospective regret took possession of him. Something seemed to tell him that later, in a foreign land, he would remember it lovingly and penitently.
“It ‘s a wretched business,” he said, “this practical quarrel of ours with our own country, this everlasting impatience to get out of it. Is one’s only safety then in flight? This is an American day, an American landscape, an American atmosphere. It certainly has its merits, and some day when I am shivering with ague in classic Italy, I shall accuse myself of having slighted them.”
Roderick kindled with a sympathetic glow, and declared that America was good enough for him, and that he had always thought it the duty of an honest citizen to stand by his own country and help it along. He had evidently thought nothing whatever about it, and was launching his doctrine on the inspiration of the moment. The doctrine expanded with the occasion, and he declared that he was above all an advocate for American art. He did n’t see why we should n’t produce the greatest works in the world. We were the biggest people, and we ought to have the biggest conceptions. The biggest conceptions of course would bring forth in time the biggest performances. We had only to be true to ourselves, to pitch in and not be afraid, to fling Imitation overboard and fix our eyes upon our National Individuality. “I declare,” he cried, “there ‘s a career for a man, and I ‘ve twenty minds to decide, on the spot, to embrace it—to be the consummate, typical, original, national American artist! It ‘s inspiring!”
Rowland burst out laughing and told him that he liked his practice better than his theory, and that a saner impulse than this had inspired his little Water-drinker. Roderick took no offense, and three minutes afterwards was talking volubly of some humbler theme, but half heeded by his companion, who had returned to his cogitations. At last Rowland delivered himself of the upshot of these. “How would you like,” he suddenly demanded, “to go to Rome?”
Hudson stared, and, with a hungry laugh which speedily consigned our National Individuality to perdition, responded that he would like it reasonably well. “And I should like, by the same token,” he added, “to go to Athens, to Constantinople, to Damascus, to the holy city of Benares, where there is a golden statue of Brahma twenty feet tall.”
“Nay,” said Rowland soberly, “if you were to go to Rome, you should settle down and work. Athens might help you, but for the present I should n’t recommend Benares.”
“It will be time to arrange details when I pack my trunk,” said Hudson.
“If you mean to turn sculptor, the sooner you pack your trunk the better.”
“Oh, but I ‘m a practical man! What is the smallest sum per annum, on which one can keep alive the sacred fire in Rome?”
“What is the largest sum at your disposal?”
Roderick stroked his light moustache, gave it a twist, and then announced with mock pomposity: “Three hundred dollars!”
“The money question could be arranged,” said Rowland. “There are ways of raising money.”
“I should like to know a few! I never yet discovered one.”
“One consists,” said Rowland, “in having a friend with a good deal more than he wants, and not being too proud to accept a part of it.”
Roderick stared a moment and his face flushed. “Do you mean—do you mean?”.... he stammered. He was greatly excited.
Rowland got up, blushing a little, and Roderick sprang to his feet. “In three words, if you are to be a sculptor, you ought to go to Rome and study the antique. To go to Rome you need money. I ‘m fond of fine statues, but unfortunately I can’t make them myself. I have to order them. I order a dozen from you, to be executed at your convenience. To help you, I pay you in advance.”
Roderick pushed off his hat and wiped his forehead, still gazing at his companion. “You believe in me!” he cried at last.
“Allow me to explain,” said Rowland. “I believe in you, if you are prepared to work and to wait, and to struggle, and to exercise a great many virtues. And then, I ‘m afraid to say it, lest I should disturb you more than I should help you. You must decide for yourself. I simply offer you an opportunity.”
Hudson stood for some time, profoundly meditative. “You have not seen my other things,” he said suddenly. “Come and look at them.”
“Now?”
“Yes, we ‘ll walk home. We ‘ll settle the question.”
He passed his hand through Rowland’s arm and they retraced their steps. They reached the town and made their way along a broad country street, dusky with the shade of magnificent elms. Rowland felt his companion’s arm trembling in his own. They stopped at a large white house, flanked with melancholy hemlocks, and passed through a little front garden, paved with moss-coated bricks and ornamented with parterres bordered with high box hedges. The mansion had an air of antiquated dignity, but it had seen its best days, and evidently sheltered a shrunken household. Mrs. Hudson, Rowland was sure, might be seen in the garden of a morning, in a white apron and a pair of old gloves, engaged in frugal horticulture. Roderick’s studio was behind, in the basement; a large, empty room, with the paper peeling off the walls. This represented, in the fashion of fifty years ago, a series of small fantastic landscapes of a hideous pattern, and the young sculptor had presumably torn it away in great scraps, in moments of aesthetic exasperation. On a board in a corner was a heap of clay, and on the floor, against the wall, stood some dozen medallions, busts, and figures, in various stages of completion. To exhibit them Roderick had to place them one by one on the end of a long packing-box, which served as a pedestal. He did so silently, making no explanations, and looking at them himself with a strange air of quickened curiosity. Most of the things were portraits; and the three at which he looked longest were finished busts. One was a colossal head of a negro, tossed back, defiant, with distended nostrils; one was the portrait of a young man whom Rowland immediately perceived, by the resemblance, to be his deceased brother; the last represented a gentleman with a pointed nose, a long, shaved upper lip, and a tuft on the end of his chin. This was a face peculiarly unadapted to sculpture; but as a piece of modeling it was the best, and it was admirable. It reminded Rowland in its homely veracity, its artless artfulness, of the works of the early Italian Renaissance. On the pedestal was cut the name—Barnaby Striker, Esq. Rowland remembered that this was the appellation of the legal luminary from whom his companion had undertaken to borrow a reflected ray, and although in the bust there was naught flagrantly set down in malice, it betrayed, comically to one who could relish the secret, that the features of the original had often been scanned with an irritated eye. Besides these there were several rough studies of the nude, and two or three figures of a fanciful kind. The most noticeable (and it had singular beauty) was a small modeled design for a sepulchral monument; that, evidently, of Stephen Hudson. The young soldier lay sleeping eternally, with his hand on his sword, like an old crusader in a Gothic cathedral.
Rowland made no haste to pronounce; too much depended on his judgment. “Upon my word,” cried Hudson at last, “they seem to me very good.”
And in truth, as Rowland looked, he saw they were good. They were youthful, awkward, and ignorant; the effort, often, was more apparent than the success. But the effort was signally powerful and intelligent; it seemed to Rowland that it needed only to let itself go to compass great things. Here and there, too, success, when grasped, had something masterly. Rowland turned to his companion, who stood with his hands in his pockets and his hair very much crumpled, looking at him askance. The light of admiration was in Rowland’s eyes, and it speedily kindled a wonderful illumination on Hudson’s handsome brow. Rowland said at last, gravely, “You have only to work!”
“I think I know what that means,” Roderick answered. He turned away, threw himself on a rickety chair, and sat for some moments with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. “Work—work?” he said at last, looking up, “ah, if I could only begin!” He glanced round the room a moment and his eye encountered on the mantel-shelf the vivid physiognomy of Mr. Barnaby Striker. His smile vanished, and he stared at it with an air of concentrated enmity. “I want to begin,” he cried, “and I can’t make a better beginning than this! Good-by, Mr. Striker!” He strode across the room, seized a mallet that lay at hand, and before Rowland could interfere, in the interest of art if not of morals, dealt a merciless blow upon Mr. Striker’s skull. The bust cracked into a dozen pieces, which toppled with a great crash upon the floor. Rowland relished neither the destruction of the image nor his companion’s look in working it, but as he was about to express his displeasure the door opened and gave passage to a young girl. She came in with a rapid step and startled face, as if she had been summoned by the noise. Seeing the heap of shattered clay and the mallet in Roderick’s hand, she gave a cry of horror. Her voice died away when she perceived that Rowland was a stranger, but she murmured reproachfully, “Why, Roderick, what have you done?”
Roderick gave a joyous kick to the shapeless fragments. “I ‘ve driven the money-changers out of the temple!” he cried.
The traces retained shape enough to be recognized, and she gave a little moan of pity. She seemed not to understand the young man’s allegory, but yet to feel that it pointed to some great purpose, which must be an evil one, from being expressed in such a lawless fashion, and to perceive that Rowland was in some way accountable for it. She looked at him with a sharp, frank mistrust, and turned away through the open door. Rowland looked after her with extraordinary interest.
