Henry James: Complete Stories 1864-1874 (34 page)

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Authors: Henry James

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BOOK: Henry James: Complete Stories 1864-1874
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Page 195
with myself, and after a little, on the seat next to her becoming vacant, I went and stood before her. She looked up at me a moment, staring, as if she could not imagine who I was or what I wanted; then, smiling and extending her hands, she broke out, Ah, my dear old friendwhat a delight! If she had waited to see what I would do, in order to choose her own line, she at least carried out this line with the utmost grace. She was cordial, friendly, artless, interested, and indeed I am sure she was very glad to see me. I may as well say immediately, however, that she gave neither then nor later any sign of a disposition to borrow money. She had none too muchthat I learnedbut for the moment she seemed able to pay her way. I took the empty chair and we remained talking for an hour. After a while she made me sit on the other side of her, next to her daughter, whom she wished to know meto love meas one of their oldest friends. It goes back, back, back, doesn't it? said Mrs. Pallant; and of course she remembers you as a child. Linda smiled very sweetly and indefinitely, and I saw she remembered me not at all. When her mother intimated that they had often talked about me she failed to take it up, though she looked extremely nice. Looking nice was her strong point; she was prettier even than her mother had been. She was such a little lady that she made me ashamed of having doubted, however vaguely and for a moment, of her position in the scale of propriety. Her appearance seemed to say that if she had no acquaintances, it was because she did not want tobecause there was nobody there who struck her as attractive: there was not the slightest difficulty about her choosing her friends. Linda Pallant, young as she was, and fresh and fair and charming and gentle and sufficiently shy, looked somehow exclusiveas if the dust of the common world had never been meant to settle upon her. She was simpler than her mother and was evidently not a young woman of professionsexcept in so far as she was committed to an interest in you by her bright, pure, intelligent smile. A girl who had such a lovely way of showing her teeth could never pass for heartless.
As I sat between the pair I felt that I had been taken possession of and that for better or worse my stay at Homburg would be intimately associated with theirs. We gave each other
 
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a great deal of news and expressed unlimited interest in each other's history since our last meeting. I know not what Mrs. Pallant kept back, but for myself I was frank enough. She let me see at any rate that her life had been a good deal what I supposed, though the terms she used to describe it were less crude than those of my thought. She confessed that they had drifted and that they were drifting still. Her narrative rambled and got what is vulgarly called somewhat mixed, as I thought Linda perceived while she sat watching the passers in a manner which betrayed no consciousness of their attention, without coming to her mother's aid. Once or twice Mrs. Pallant made me feel like a cross-questioner, which I had no intention of being. I took it that if the girl never put in a word it was because she had perfect confidence in her mother's ability to come out straight. It was suggested to me, I scarcely knew how, that this confidence between the two ladies went to a great length; that their union of thought, their system of reciprocal divination, was remarkable, and that they probably seldom needed to resort to the clumsy and in some cases dangerous expedient of putting their ideas into words. I suppose I made this reflection not all at onceit was not wholly the result of that first meeting. I was with them constantly for the next several days and my impressions had time to clarify.
I do remember however that it was on this first evening that Archie's name came up. She attributed her own stay at Homburg to no refined nor exalted motivedid not say that she was there because she always came or because a high medical authority had ordered her to drink the waters; she frankly admitted that the reason of her visit had been simply that she did not know where else to turn. But she appeared to assume that my behaviour rested on higher grounds and even that it required explanation, the place being frivolous and moderndevoid of that interest of antiquity which I used to value. Don't you rememberever so long agothat you wouldn't look at anything in Europe that was not a thousand years old? Well, as we advance in life I suppose we don't think that's quite such a charm. And when I told her that I had come to Homburg because it was as good a place as another to wait for my nephew, she exclaimed: Your nephewwhat nephew? He must have come up of late. I answered that he was a
 
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youth named Archer Pringle and very modern indeed; he was coming of age in a few months and was in Europe for the first time. My last news of him had been from Paris and I was expecting to hear from him from one day to the other. His father was dead, and though a selfish bachelor, little versed in the care of children, I was considerably counted on by his mother to see that he did not smoke too much nor fall off an Alp.
Mrs. Pallant immediately guessed that his mother was my sister Charlotte, whom she spoke of familiarly, though I knew she had seen her but once or twice. Then in a moment it came to her which of the Pringles Charlotte had married; she remembered the family perfectly, in the old New York daysthat disgustingly rich lot. She said it was very nice having the boy come out that way to my care; to which I replied that it was very nice for him. She declared that she meant for meI ought to have had children; there was something so parental about me and I would have brought them up so well. She could make an allusion like thatto all that might have been and had not beenwithout a gleam of guilt in her eye; and I foresaw that before I left the place I should have confided to her that though I detested her and was very glad we had fallen out, yet our old relations had left me no heart for marrying another woman. If I was a maundering old bachelor to-day it was no one's fault but hers. She asked me what I meant to do with my nephew and I said it was much more a question of what he would do with me. She inquired whether he were a nice young man and had brothers and sisters and any particular profession. I told her that I had really seen but little of him; I believed him to be six feet high and of tolerable parts. He was an only son, but there was a little sister at home, a delicate, unsuccessful child, demanding all the mother's care.
So that makes your responsibility greater, as it were, about the boy, doesn't it? said Mrs. Pallant.
Greater? I'm sure I don't know.
Why, if the girl's life is uncertain he may be, some moment, all the mother has. So that being in your hands_____
Oh, I shall keep him alive, I suppose, if you mean that, I rejoined.
 
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Well,
we
won't kill him, shall we, Linda? Mrs. Pallant went on, with a laugh.
I don't knowperhaps we shall! said the girl, smiling.
II
I called on them the next day at their lodgings, the modesty of which was enhanced by a hundred pretty feminine devicesflowers and photographs and portable knick-knacks and a hired piano and morsels of old brocade flung over angular sofas. I asked them to drive; I met them again at the Kursaal; I arranged that we should dine together, after the Homburg fashion, at the same
table d'hôte;
and during several days this revived familiar intercourse continued, imitating intimacy if it did not quite achieve it. I liked it, for my companions passed my time for me and the conditions of our life were soothingthe feeling of summer and shade and music and leisure, in the German gardens and woods, where we strolled and sat and gossiped; to which may be added a kind of sociable sense that among people whose challenge to the curiosity was mainly not irresistible we kept quite to ourselves. We were on the footing of old friends who, with regard to each other, still had discoveries to make. We knew each other's nature but we did not know each other's experience; so that when Mrs. Pallant related to me what she had been up to (as I called it) for so many years, the former knowledge attached a hundred interpretative footnotes (as if I had been editing an author who presented difficulties) to the interesting page. There was nothing new to me in the fact that I did not esteem her, but there was a sort of refreshment in finding that this was not necessary at Homburg and that I could like her in spite of it. She seemed to me, in the oddest way, both improved and degenerate, as if in her nature the two processes had gone on together. She was battered and world-worn and, spiritually speaking, vulgarised; something fresh had rubbed off her (it even included the vivacity of her early desire to do the best thing for herself), and something very stale had rubbed on. On the other hand she betrayed a scepticism, and that was rather becoming, as it quenched the eagerness of her prime, which had taken a form so unfortunate for me. She
 
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had grown weary and indifferent, and as she struck me as having seen more of the evil of the world than of the good, that was a gain; in other words the cynicism that had formed itself in her nature had a softer surface than some of her old ambitions. And then I had to recognise that her devotion to her daughter had been a kind of religion; she had done the very best possible for Linda.
Linda was curiousLinda was interesting; I have seen girls I liked better (charming as she was), but I have never seen one who for the time I was with her (the impression passed, somehow, when she was out of sight) occupied me more. I can best describe the sort of attention that she excited by saying that she struck one above all things as a final productjust as some plant or fruit does, some waxen orchid or some perfect peach. More than any girl I ever saw she was the result of a process of calculation; a process patiently educative; a pressure exerted in order that she should reach a high point. This high point had been the star of her mother's heaven (it hung before her so definitely), and had been the source of the only lightin default of a betterthat shone upon the poor lady's path. It stood her in stead of every other religion. The very most and the very bestthat was what the girl had been led on to achieve; I mean, of course (for no real miracle had been wrought), the most and the best that she was capable of. She was as pretty, as graceful, as intelligent, as well-bred, as well-informed, as well-dressed, as it would have been possible for her to be; her music, her singing, her German, her French, her English, her step, her tone, her glance, her manner, and everything in her person and movement, from the shade and twist of her hair to the way you saw her finger-nails were pink when she raised her hand, had been carried so far that one found one's self accepting them as a kind of standard. I regarded her as a model, and yet it was a part of her perfection that she had none of the stiffness of a pattern. If she held the observation it was because one wondered where and when she would break down; but she never did, either in her French accent or in her
rôle
of educated angel.
After Archie had come the ladies were manifestly a great resource to him, and all the world knows that a party of four is more convenient than a party of three. My nephew kept me
 
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waiting a week, with a placidity all his own; but this same placidity was an element of success in our personal relationsso long, that is, as I did not lose my temper with it. I did not, for the most part, because my young man's unsurprised acceptance of the most various forms of good fortune had more than anything else the effect of amusing me. I had seen little of him for the last three or four years. I knew not what his impending majority would have made of him (he did not look himself in the least as if the wind were rising), and I watched him with a solicitude which usually ended in a joke. He was a tall, fresh-coloured youth, with a candid circular countenance and a love of cigarettes, horses and boats which had not been sacrificed to more transcendent studies. He was refreshingly natural, in a supercivilised age, and I soon made up my mind that the formula of his character was a certain simplifying serenity. After that I had time to meditate on the line which divides the serene from the inane and simplification from death. Archie was not cleverthat theory it was not possible to maintain, though Mrs. Pallant tried it once or twice; but on the other hand it seemed to me that his want of wit was a good defensive weapon. It was not the sort of density that would let him in, but the sort that would keep him out. By which I don't mean that he had shortsighted suspicions, but on the contrary that imagination would never be needed to save him, because she would never put him in danger. In short he was a well-grown, well-washed, muscular young American, whose extreme good-nature might have made him pass for conceited. If he looked pleased with himself it was only because he was pleased with life (as well he might be, with the money he was on the point of stepping into), and his big healthy, independent person was an inevitable part of that. I am bound to add that he was accommodatingfor which I was grateful. His own habits were active, but he did not insist on my adopting them and he made noteworthy sacrifices for the sake of my society. When I say for the sake of mine I must of course remember that mine and that of Mrs. Pallant and Linda were now very much the same thing. He was willing to sit and smoke for hours under the trees or, regulating his long legs to the pace of his three companions, stroll through the nearer woods of the charming little hill-

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