Collected Stories Page 7

  ‘So you read that thing?’ I asked: actually – strange as it may seem – for something to say.

  ‘Yes, while you were ill. It was lying with your pen in it, on the table. I read it because I suspected. Otherwise I wouldn’t have done so.’

  ‘It was the act of a false woman,’ said I.

  ‘A false woman? No, it was the act of any woman – placed as I was placed. You don’t believe it?’ And she began to smile. ‘Come, you may abuse me in your diary if you like – I shall never peep into it again!’

  A LIGHT MAN

  ‘And I – what I seem to my friend, you see –

  What I soon shall seem to his love, you guess.

  What I seem to myself, do you ask of me?

  No hero, I confess.’

  A Light Woman – Browning’s Men and Women

  APRIL 4, 1857 – I have changed my sky without changing my mind. I resume these old notes in a new world. I hardly know of what use they are; but it’s easier to stick to the habit than to drop it. I have been at home now a week – at home, forsooth! And yet, after all, it is home. I am dejected, I am bored, I am blue. How can a man be more at home than that? Nevertheless, I am the citizen of a great country, and for that matter, of a great city. I walked to-day some ten miles or so along Broadway, and on the whole I don’t blush for my native land. We are a capable race and a good-looking withal; and I don’t see why we shouldn’t prosper as well as another. This, by the way, ought to be a very encouraging reflection. A capable fellow and a good-looking withal; I don’t see why he shouldn’t die a millionaire. At all events he must do something. When a man has, at thirty-two, a net income of considerably less than nothing, he can scarcely hope to overtake a fortune before he himself is overtaken by age and philosophy – two deplorable obstructions. I am afraid that one of them has already planted itself in my path. What am I? What do I wish? Whither do I tend? What do I believe? I am constantly beset by these impertinent whisperings. Formerly it was enough that I was Maximus Austin; that I was endowed with a cheerful mind and a good digestion; that one day or another, when I had come to the end, I should return to America and begin at the beginning; that, meanwhile, existence was sweet in – in the Rue Tronchet. But now? Has the sweetness really passed out of life? Have I eaten the plums and left nothing but the bread and milk and corn-starch, or whatever the horrible concoction is? – I had it to-day for dinner. Pleasure, at least, I imagine – pleasure pure and simple, pleasure crude, brutal and vulgar – this poor flimsy delusion has lost all its charm. I shall never again care for certain things – and indeed for certain persons. Of such things, of such persons, I firmly maintain, however, that I was never an enthusiastic votary. It would be more to my credit, I suppose, if I had been. More would be forgiven me if I had loved a little more, if into all my folly and egotism I had put a little more naïveté and sincerity. Well, I did the best I could, I was at once too bad and too good for it all. At present, it’s far enough off; I have put the sea between us; I am stranded. I sit high and dry, scanning the horizon for a friendly sail, or waiting for a high tide to set me afloat. The wave of pleasure has deposited me here in the sand. Shall I owe my rescue to the wave of pain? At moments I feel a kind of longing to expiate my stupid little sins. I see, as through a glass, darkly, the beauty of labour and love. Decidedly, I am willing to work. It’s written.

  7th – My sail is in sight; it’s at hand; I have all but boarded the vessel. I received this morning a letter from the best man in the world. Here it is:

  DEAR MAX: I see this very moment, in an old newspaper which had already passed through my hands without yielding up its most precious item, the announcement of your arrival in New York. To think of your having perhaps missed the welcome you had a right to expect from me! Here it is dear Max – as cordial as you please. When I say I have just read of your arrival, I mean that twenty minutes have elapsed by the clock. These have been spent in conversation with my excellent friend Mr Sloane – we having taken the liberty of making you the topic. I haven’t time to say more about Frederick Sloane than that he is very anxious to make your acquaintance, and that, if your time is not otherwise engaged, he would like you very much to spend a month with him. He is an excellent host, or I shouldn’t be here myself. It appears that he knew your mother very intimately, and he has a taste for visiting the amenities of the parents upon the children; the original ground of my own connection with him was that he had been a particular friend of my father. You may have heard your mother speak of him. He is a very strange old fellow, but you will like him. Whether or no you come for his sake, come for mine.

  Yours always,

  THEODORE LISLE

  Theodore’s letter is of course very kind, but it’s remarkably obscure. My mother may have had the highest regard for Mr Sloane, but she never mentioned his name in my hearing. Who is he, what is he, and what is the nature of his relations with Theodore? I shall learn betimes. I have written to Theodore that I gladly accept (I believe I suppressed the ‘gladly’ though) his friend’s invitation, and that I shall immediately present myself. What can I do that is better? Speaking sordidly, I shall obtain food and lodging while I look about me. I shall have a base of operations. D-, it appears, is a long day’s journey, but enchanting when you reach it. I am curious to see an enchanting American town. And to stay a month! Mr Frederick Sloane, whoever you are, vous faites bien les choses, and the little that I know of you is very much to your credit. You enjoyed the friendship of my dear mother, you possess the esteem of the virtuous Theodore, you commend yourself to my own affection. At this rate, I shall not grudge it.

  D–, 14th. – I have been here since Thursday evening – three days. As we rattled up to the tavern in the village, I perceived from the top of the coach, in the twilight, Theodore beneath the porch, scanning the vehicle, with all his amiable disposition in his eyes. He has grown older, of course, in these five years, but less so than I had expected. His is one of those smooth, unwrinkled souls that keep their bodies fair and fresh. As tall as ever, moreover, and as lean and clean. How short and fat and dark and debauched he makes one feel! By nothing he says or means, of course, but merely by his old unconscious purity and simplicity – that slender straightness which makes him remind you of the spire of an English abbey. He greeted me with smiles, and stares, and alarming blushes. He assures me that he never would have known me, and that five years have altered me – sehr! I asked him if it were for the better? He looked at me hard for a moment, with his eyes of blue, and then, for an answer, he blushed again.

  On my arrival we agreed to walk over from the village. He dismissed his waggon with my luggage, and we went arm-in-arm through the dusk. The town is seated at the foot of certain mountains, whose names I have yet to learn, and at the head of a big sheet of water, which, as yet, too, I know only as ‘the Lake’. The road hitherward soon leaves the village and wanders in rural loveliness by the margin of this expanse. Sometimes the water is hidden by clumps of trees, behind which we heard it lapping and gurgling in the darkness; sometimes it stretches out from your feet in shining vagueness, as if it were tired of making, all day, a million little eyes at the great stupid hills. The walk from the tavern takes some half an hour, and in this interval Theodore made his position a little more clear. Mr Sloane is a rich old widower; his age is seventy-two, and as his health is thoroughly broken, is practically even greater; and his fortune – Theodore, characteristically, doesn’t know anything definite about that. It’s probably about a million. He has lived much in Europe, and in the ‘great world’; he has had adventures and passions and all that sort of thing; and now, in the evening of his days, like an old French diplomatist, he takes it into his head to write his memoirs. To this end he has lured poor Theodore to his gruesome side, to mend his pens for him. He has been a great scribbler, says Theodore, all his days, and he proposes to incorporate a large amount of promiscuous literary matter into these souvenirs intimes. Theodore’s principal function seems to be to get him to leave thi
ngs out. In fact, the poor youth seems troubled in conscience. His patron’s lucubrations have taken the turn of many other memoirs, and have ceased to address themselves virginibus puerisque. On the whole, he declares they are a very odd mixture – a medley of gold and tinsel, of bad taste and a good sense. I can readily understand it. The old man bores me, puzzles me, and amuses me.

  He was in waiting to receive me. We found him in his library – which, by the way, is simply the most delightful apartment that I ever smoked a cigar in – a room arranged for a lifetime. At one end stands a great fireplace, with a florid, fantastic mantelpiece in carved white marble – an importation, of course, and, as one may say, an interpolation; the groundwork of the house, the ‘fixtures’, being throughout plain, solid and domestic. Over the mantel-shelf is a large landscape, a fine Gainsborough, full of the complicated harmonies of an English summer. Beneath it stands a row of bronzes of the Renaissance and potteries of the Orient. Facing the door, as you enter, is an immense window set in a recess, with cushioned seats and large clear panes, stationed as it were at the very apex of the lake (which forms an almost perfect oval) and commanding a view of its whole extent. At the other end, opposite the fireplace, the wall is studded, from floor to ceiling, with choice foreign paintings, placed in relief against the orthodox crimson screen. Elsewhere the walls are covered with books, arranged neither in formal regularity nor quite helter-skelter, but in a sort of genial incongruity, which tells that sooner or later each volume feels sure of leaving the ranks and returning into different company. Mr Sloane makes use of his books. His two passions, according to Theodore, are reading and talking; but to talk he must have a book in his hand. The charm of the room lies in the absence of certain pedantic tones – the browns, blacks and greys – which distinguish most libraries. The apartment is of the feminine gender. There are half a dozen light colours scattered about – pink in the carpet, tender blue in the curtains, yellow in the chairs. The result is a general look of brightness and lightness; it expresses even a certain cynicism. You perceive the place to be the home, not of a man of learning, but of a man of fancy.

  He rose from his chair – the man of fancy, to greet me – the man of fact. As I looked at him, in the lamplight, it seemed to me, for the first five minutes, that I had seldom seen an uglier little person. It took me five minutes to get the point of view; then I began to admire. He is diminutive, or at best of my own moderate stature, and bent and contracted with his seventy years; lean and delicate, moreover, and very highly finished. He is curiously pale, with a kind of opaque yellow pallor. Literally, it’s a magnificent yellow. His skin is of just the hue and apparent texture of some old crumpled Oriental scroll. I know a dozen painters who would give more than they have to arrive at the exact ‘tone’ of his thick-veined, bloodless hands, his polished ivory knuckles. His eyes are circled with red, but in the battered little setting of their orbits they have the lustre of old sapphires. His nose, owing to the falling away of other portions of his face, has assumed a grotesque, unnatural prominence; it describes an immense arch, gleaming like a piece of parchment stretched on ivory. He has, apparently, all his teeth, but has muffled his cranium in a dead black wig; of course he’s clean shaven. In his dress he has a muffled, wadded look and an apparent aversion to linen, inasmuch as none is visible on his person. He seems neat enough, but not fastidious. At first, as I say, I fancied him monstrously ugly; but on further acquaintance I perceived that what I had taken for ugliness is nothing but the incomplete remains of remarkable good looks. The line of his features is pure; his nose, cœteris paribus, would be extremely handsome; his eyes are the oldest eyes I ever saw, and yet they are wonderfully living. He has something remarkably insinuating.

  He offered his two hands, as Theodore introduced me; I gave him my own, and he stood smiling at me like some quaint old image in ivory and ebony, scanning my face with a curiosity which he took no pains to conceal. ‘God bless me,’ he said, at last, ‘how much you look like your father!’ I sat down, and for half an hour we talked of many things – of my journey, of my impressions of America, of my reminiscences of Europe, and, by implication, of my prospects. His voice is weak and cracked, but he makes it express everything. Mr Sloane is not yet in his dotage – oh no! He nevertheless makes himself out a poor creature. In reply to an inquiry of mine about his health, he favoured me with a long list of his infirmities (some of which are very trying, certainly) and assured me that he was quite finished.

  ‘I live out of mere curiosity,’ he said.

  ‘I have heard of people dying from the same motive.’

  He looked at me a moment, as if to ascertain whether I were laughing at him. And then, after a pause, ‘Perhaps you don’t know that I disbelieve in a future life,’ he remarked, blandly.

  At these words Theodore got up and walked to the fire.

  ‘Well, we shan’t quarrel about that,’ said I. Theodore turned round, staring.

  ‘Do you mean that you agree with me?’ the old man asked.

  ‘I certainly haven’t come here to talk theology! Don’t ask me to disbelieve, and I’ll never ask you to believe.’

  ‘Come,’ cried Mr Sloane, rubbing his hands, ‘you’ll not persuade me you are a Christian – like your friend Theodore there.’

  ‘Like Theodore – assuredly not.’ And then, somehow, I don’t know why, at the thought of Theodore’s Christianity I burst into a laugh. ‘Excuse me, my dear fellow,’ I said, ‘you know, for the last ten years I have lived in pagan lands.’

  ‘What do you call pagan?’ asked Theodore, smiling.

  I saw the old man, with his hands locked, eyeing me shrewdly, and waiting for my answer. I hesitated a moment, and then I said, ‘Everything that makes life tolerable!’

  Hereupon Mr Sloane began to laugh till he coughed. Verily, I thought, if he lives for curiosity, he’s easily satisfied.

  We went into dinner, and this repast showed me that some of his curiosity is culinary. I observed, by the way, that for a victim of neuralgia, dyspepsia, and a thousand other ills, Mr Sloane plies a most inconsequential knife and fork. Sauces and spices and condiments seem to be the chief of his diet. After dinner he dismissed us, in consideration of my natural desire to see my friend in private. Theodore has capital quarters – a downy bedroom and a snug little salon. We talked till near midnight – of ourselves, of each other, and of the author of the memoirs, down stairs. That is, I spoke of myself, and Theodore listened; and then Theodore descanted upon Mr Sloane, and I listened. His commerce with the old man has sharpened his wits. Sloane has taught him to observe and judge, and Theodore turns round, observes, judges – him! He has become quite the critic and analyst. There is something very pleasant in the discriminations of a conscientious mind, in which criticism is tempered by an angelic charity. Only, it may easily end by acting on one’s nerves. At midnight we repaired to the library, to take leave of our host till the morrow – an attention which, under all circumstances, he rigidly exacts. As I gave him my hand he held it again and looked at me as he had done on my arrival. ‘Bless my soul,’ he said, at last, ‘how much you look like your mother!’

  To-night, at the end of my third day, I begin to feel decidedly at home. The fact is, I am remarkably comfortable. The house is pervaded by an indefinable, irresistible love of luxury and privacy. Mr Frederick Sloane is a horribly corrupt old mortal. Already in his relaxing presence I have become heartily reconciled to doing nothing. But with Theodore on one side – standing there like a tall interrogation-point – I honestly believe I can defy Mr Sloane on the other. The former asked me this morning, with visible solicitude, in allusion to the bit of dialogue I have quoted above on matters of faith, whether I am really a materialist – whether I don’t believe something? I told him I would believe anything he liked. He looked at me a while, in friendly sadness. ‘I hardly know whether you are not worse than Mr Sloane,’ he said.

  But Theodore is, after all, in duty bound to give a man a long rope in these matters. His own rope
is one of the longest. He reads Voltaire with Mr Sloane, and Emerson in his own room. He is the stronger man of the two; he has the larger stomach. Mr Sloane delights, of course, in Voltaire, but he can’t read a line of Emerson. Theodore delights in Emerson, and enjoys Voltaire, though he thinks him superficial. It appears that since we parted in Paris, five years ago, his conscience has dwelt in many lands. C’est tout une histoire – which he tells very prettily. He left college determined to enter the church, and came abroad with his mind full of theology and Tübingen. He appears to have studied, not wisely but too well. Instead of faith full-armed and serene, there sprang from the labour of his brain a myriad sickly questions, piping for answers. He went for a winter to Italy, where, I take it, he was not quite so much afflicted as he ought to have been at the sight of the beautiful spiritual repose that he had missed. It was after this that we spent those three months together in Brittany – the best-spent months of my long residence in Europe. Theodore inoculated me, I think, with some of his seriousness, and I just touched him with my profanity; and we agreed together that there were a few good things left – health, friendship, a summer sky, and the lovely byways of an old French province. He came home, searched the Scriptures once more, accepted a ‘call’, and made an attempt to respond to it. But the inner voice failed him. His outlook was cheerless enough. During his absence his married sister, the elder one, had taken the other to live with her, relieving Theodore of the charge of contribution to her support. But suddenly, behold the husband, the brother-in-law, dies, leaving a mere figment of property; and the two ladies, with their two little girls, are afloat in the wide world. Theodore finds himself at twenty-six without an income, without a profession, and with a family of four females to support. Well, in his quiet way he draws on his courage. The history of the two years that passed before he came to Mr Sloane is really absolutely edifying. He rescued his sisters and nieces from the deep waters, placed them high and dry, established them somewhere in decent gentility – and then found at last that his strength had left him – had dropped dead like an overridden horse. In short, he had worked himself to the bone. It was now his sisters’ turn. They nursed him with all the added tenderness of gratitude for the past and terror of the future, and brought him safely through a grievous malady. Meanwhile Mr Sloane, having decided to treat himself to a private secretary and suffered dreadful mischance in three successive experiments, had heard of Theodore’s situation and his merits; had furthermore recognised in him the son of an early and intimate friend, and had finally offered him the very comfortable position he now occupies. There is a decided incongruity between Theodore as a man – as Theodore, in fine – and the dear fellow as the intellectual agent, confidant, complaisant, purveyor, pander – what you will – of a battered old cynic and dilettante – a worldling if there ever was one. There seems at first sight a perfect want of agreement between his character and his function. One is gold and the other brass, or something very like it. But on reflection I can enter into it – his having, under the circumstances, accepted Mr Sloane’s offer and been content to do his duties. Ce que c’est de nous! Theodore’s contentment in such a case is a theme for the moralist – a better moralist than I. The best and purest mortals are an odd mixture, and in none of us does honesty exist on its own terms. Ideally, Theodore hasn’t the smallest business dans cette galère. It offends my sense of propriety to find him here. I feel that I ought to notify him as a friend that he has knocked at the wrong door, and that he had better retreat before he is brought to the blush. However, I suppose he might as well be here as reading Emerson ‘evenings’ in the back parlour, to those two very plain sisters – judging from their photographs. Practically it hurts no one not to be too much of a prig. Poor Theodore was weak, depressed, out of work. Mr Sloane offers him a lodging and a salary in return for – after all, merely a little tact. All he has to do is to read to the old man, lay down the book a while, with his finger in the place, and let him talk; take it up again, read another dozen pages and submit to another commentary. Then to write a dozen pages under his dictation – to suggest a word, polish off a period, or help him out with a complicated idea or a half-remembered fact. This is all, I say; and yet this is much. Theodore’s apparent success proves it to be much, as well as the old man’s satisfaction. It is a part; he has to simulate. He has to ‘make believe’ a little – a good deal; he has to put his pride in his pocket and send his conscience to the wash. He has to be accommodating – to listen and pretend and flatter; and he does it as well as many a worse man – does it far better than I. I might bully the old man, but I don’t think I could humour him. After all, however, it is not a matter of comparative merit. In every son of woman there are two men – the practical man and the dreamer. We live for our dreams – but, meanwhile, we live by our wits. When the dreamer is a poet, the other fellow is an artist. Theodore, at bottom, is only a man of taste. If he were not destined to become a high priest among moralists, he might be a prince among connoisseurs. He plays his part, therefore, artistically, with spirit, with originality, with all his native refinement. How can Mr Sloane fail to believe that he possesses a paragon? He is no such fool as not to appreciate a nature distinguée when it comes in his way. He confidentially assured me this morning that Theodore has the most charming mind in the world, but that it’s a pity he’s so simple as not to suspect it. If he only doesn’t ruin him with his flattery!