Henry James: Complete Stories 1864-1874 (97 page)

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Authors: Henry James

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Page 576

now, of a fine Sunday, half the world went out of town, and that made it better for those who didn't go, when they were in sympathy. It was the defect of London (one of two or three, the very short list of those she recognised in the teeming world-city that she adored,) that there were too few good chances for talk; one never had time to carry anything far.

Too many thingstoo many things! Paul Overt said, quoting St. George's exclamation of a few days before.

Ah yes, for him there are too many; his life is too complicated.

Have you seen it
near?
That's what I should like to do; it might explain some mysteries, Paul Overt went on. The girl asked him what mysteries he meant, and he said: Oh, peculiarities of his work, inequalities, superficialities. For one who looks at it from the artistic point of view it contains a bottomless ambiguity.

Oh, do describe that moreit's so interesting. There are no such suggestive questions. I'm so fond of them. He thinks he's a failurefancy! Miss Fancourt added.

That depends upon what his ideal may have been. Ah, with his gifts it ought to have been high. But till one knows what he really proposed to himselfDo
you
know, by chance? the young man asked, breaking off.

Oh, he doesn't talk to me about himself. I can't make him. It's too provoking.

Paul Overt was on the point of asking what then he did talk about; but discretion checked this inquiry, and he said instead: Do you think he's unhappy at home?

At home?

I mean in his relations with his wife. He has a mystifying little way of alluding to her.

Not to me, said Marian Fancourt, with her clear eyes. That wouldn't be right, would it? she asked, seriously.

Not particularly; so I am glad he doesn't mention her to you. To praise her might bore you, and he has no business to do anything else. Yet he knows you better than me.

Ah, but he respects
you
! the girl exclaimed, enviously.

Her visitor stared a moment; then he broke into a laugh. Doesn't he respect you?

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Of course, but not in the same way. He respects what you've donehe told me so, the other day.

When you went to look at types?

Ah, we found so manyhe has such an observation of them! He talked a great deal about your book. He says it's really important.

Important! Ah! the grand creature, Paul murmured, hilarious.

He was wonderfully amusing, he was inexpressibly droll, while we walked about. He sees everything; he has so many comparisons, and they are always exactly right.
C'est d'un trouvé!
as they say.

Yes, with his gifts, such things as he ought to have done! Paul Overt remarked.

And don't you think he
has
done them?

He hesitated a moment. A part of themand of course even that part is immense. But he might have been one of the greatest! However, let us not make this an hour of qualifications. Even as they stand, his writings are a mine of gold.

To this proposition Marian Fancourt ardently responded, and for half an hour the pair talked over the master's principal productions. She knew them wellshe knew them even better than her visitor, who was struck with her critical intelligence and with something large and bold in the movement in her mind. She said things that startled him and that evidently had come to her directly; they were not picked-up phrases, she placed them too well. St. George had been right about her being first-rate, about her not being afraid to gush, not remembering that she must be proud. Suddenly something reminded her, and she said: I recollect that he did speak of Mrs. St. George to me once. He said,
à propos
of something or other, that she didn't care for perfection.

That's a great crime, for an artist's wife, said Paul Overt.

Yes, poor thing! and the young lady sighed, with a suggestion of many reflections, some of them mitigating. But she added in a moment, Ah, perfection, perfectionhow one ought to go in for it! I wish I could.

Every one can, in his way, said Paul Overt.

In
his
way, yes; but not in hers. Women are so ham-

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peredso condemned! But it's a kind of dishonour if you don't, when you want to
do
something, isn't it? Miss Fancourt pursued, dropping one train in her quickness to take up another, an accident that was common with her. So these two young persons sat discussing high themes in their eclectic drawing-room, in their London seasondiscussing, with extreme seriousness, the high theme of perfection. And it must be said, in extenuation of this eccentricity, that they were interested in the business; their tone was genuine, their emotion real; they were not posturing for each other or for some one else.

The subject was so wide that they found it necessary to contract it; the perfection to which for the moment they agreed to confine their speculations was that of which the valid work of art is susceptible. Miss Fancourt's imagination, it appeared, had wandered far in that direction, and her visitor had the rare delight of feeling that their conversation was a full interchange. This episode will have lived for years in his memory and even in his wonder; it had the quality that fortune distils in a single drop at a timethe quality that lubricates ensuing weeks and months. He has still a vision of the room, whenever he likesthe bright, red, sociable, talkative room, with the curtains that, by a stroke of successful audacity, had the note of vivid blue. He remembers where certain things stood, the book that was open on the table and the particular odour of the flowers that were placed on the left, somewhere behind him. These facts were the fringe, as it were, of a particular consciousness which had its birth in those two hours and of which perhaps the most general description would be to mention that it led him to say over and over again to himself: I had no idea there was any one like thisI had no idea there was any one like this! Her freedom amazed him and charmed himit seemed so to simplify the practical question. She was on the footing of an independent person-agea motherless girl who had passed out of her teens and had a position, responsibilities, and was not held down to the limitations of a little miss. She came and went without the clumsiness of a chaperon; she received people alone and, though she was totally without hardness, the question of protection or patronage had no relevancy in regard to her. She

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gave such an impression of purity combined with naturalness that, in spite of her eminently modern situation, she suggested no sort of sisterhood with the fast girl. Modern she was, indeed, and made Paul Overt, who loved old colour, the golden glaze of time, think with some alarm of the muddled palette of the future. He couldn't get used to her interest in the arts he cared for; it seemed too good to be realit was so unlikely an adventure to tumble into such a well of sympathy. One might stray into the desert easilythat was on the cards and that was the law of life; but it was too rare an accident to stumble on a crystal well. Yet if her aspirations seemed at one moment too extravagant to be real, they struck him at the next as too intelligent to be false. They were both noble and crude, and whims for whims, he liked them better than any he had met. It was probable enough she would leave them behindexchange them for politics, or smartness, or mere prolific maternity, as was the custom of scribbling, daubing, educated, flattered girls, in an age of luxury and a society of leisure. He noted that the water-colours on the walls of the room she sat in had mainly the quality of being
naïves,
and reflected that
naïveté
in art is like a cipher in a number: its importance depends upon the figure it is united with. But meanwhile he had fallen in love with her.

Before he went away he said to Miss Fancourt: I thought St. George was coming to see you to-daybut he doesn't turn up.

For a moment he supposed she was going to reply,
Comment donc?
Did you come here only to meet him? But the next he became aware of how little such a speech would have fallen in with any flirtatious element he had as yet perceived in her. She only replied: Ah yes, but I don't think he'll come. He recommended me not to expect him. Then she added, laughing: He said it wasn't fair to you. But I think I could manage two.

So could I, Paul Overt rejoined, stretching the point a little to be humorous. In reality his appreciation of the occasion was so completely an appreciation of the woman before him that another figure in the scene, even so esteemed a one as St. George, might for the hour have appealed to him vainly. As he went away he wondered what the great man had meant

Page 580

by its not being fair to him; and, still more than that, whether he had actually stayed away out of the delicacy of such an idea. As he took his course, swinging his stick, through the Sunday solitude of Manchester Square, with a good deal of emotion fermenting in his soul, it appeared to him that he was living in a world really magnanimous. Miss Fancourt had told him that there was an uncertainty about her being, and her father's being, in town on the following Sunday, but that she had the hope of a visit from him if they should not go away. She promised to let him know if they stayed at home, then he could act accordingly. After he had passed into one of the streets that lead out of the square, he stopped, without definite intentions, looking sceptically for a cab. In a moment he saw a hansom roll through the square from the other side and come a part of the way toward him. He was on the point of hailing the driver when he perceived that he carried a fare; then he waited, seeing him prepare to deposit his passenger by pulling up at one of the houses. The house was apparently the one he himself had just quitted; at least he drew that inference as he saw that the person who stepped out of the hansom was Henry St. George. Paul Overt turned away quickly, as if he had been caught in the act of spying. He gave up his cabhe preferred to walk; he would go nowhere else. He was glad St. George had not given up his visit altogetherthat would have been too absurd. Yes, the world was magnanimous, and Overt felt so too as, on looking at his watch, he found it was only six o'clock, so that he could mentally congratulate his successor on having an hour still to sit in Miss Fancourt's drawing-room. He himself might use that hour for another visit, but by the time he reached the Marble Arch the idea of another visit had become incongruous to him. He passed beneath that architectural effort and walked into the Park till he got upon the grass. Here he continued to walk; he took his way across the elastic turf and came out by the Serpentine. He watched with a friendly eye the diversions of the London people, and bent a glance almost encouraging upon the young ladies paddling their sweethearts on the lake, and the guardsmen tickling tenderly with their bearskins the artificial flowers in the Sunday hats of their part-

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ners. He prolonged his meditative walk; he went into Kensington Gardenshe sat upon the penny chairshe looked at the little sail-boats launched upon the round pondhe was glad he had no engagement to dine. He repaired for this purpose, very late, to his club, where he found himself unable to order a repast and told the waiter to bring whatever he would. He did not even observe what he was served with, and he spent the evening in the library of the establishment, pretending to read an article in an American magazine. He failed to discover what it was about; it appeared in a dim way to be about Marian Fancourt.

Quite late in the week she wrote to him that she was not to go into the countryit had only just been settled. Her father, she added, would never settle anythinghe put it all on her. She felt her responsibilityshe had toand since she was forced that was the way she had decided. She mentioned no reasons, which gave Paul Overt all the clearer field for bold conjecture about them. In Manchester Square, on this second Sunday, he esteemed his fortune less good, for she had three or four other visitors. But there were three or four compensations; the greatest, perhaps, of which was that, learning from her that her father had, after all, at the last hour, gone out of town alone, the bold conjecture I just now spoke of found itself becoming a shade more bold. And then her presence was her presence, and the personal red room was there and was full of it, whatever phantoms passed and vanished, emitting incomprehensible sounds. Lastly, he had the resource of staying till every one had come and gone and of supposing that this pleased her, though she gave no particular sign. When they were alone together he said to her: But St. George did comelast Sunday. I saw him as I looked back.

Yes; but it was the last time.

The last time?

He said he would never come again.

Paul Ovet stared. Does he mean that he wishes to cease to see you?

I don't know what he means, the girl replied, smiling. He won't, at any rate, see me here.

And, pray, why not?