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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Private Life, by Henry James
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
using this eBook.
Title: The Private Life
The wheel of time, Lord Beaupré, The visits, Collaboration, Owen
Wingrave.
Author: Henry James
Release Date: January 26, 2021 [eBook #64396]
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
Produced by: Dagny and Laura Natal Rodrigues at Free Literature (Images
generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRIVATE LIFE ***
THE PRIVATE LIFE
THE WHEEL OF TIME LORD BEAUPRÉ
THE VISITS COLLABORATION
OWEN WINGRAVE
BY
HENRY JAMES
LONDON
JAMES R. OSGOOD, McILVAINE & CO.
45, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1893
CONTENTS
The Private Life
The Wheel of Time
Lord Beaupré
The Visits
Collaboration
Owen Wingrave
THE PRIVATE LIFE
We talked of London, face to face with a great bristling, primeval
glacier. The hour and the scene were one of those impressions which make
up a little, in Switzerland, for the modern indignity of travel--the
promiscuities and vulgarities, the station and the hotel, the gregarious
patience, the struggle for a scrappy attention, the reduction to a
numbered state. The high valley was pink with the mountain rose, the
cool air as fresh as if the world were young. There was a faint flush of
afternoon on undiminished snows, and the fraternizing tinkle of the
unseen cattle came to us with a cropped and sun-warmed odour. The
balconied inn stood on the very neck of the sweetest pass in the
Oberland, and for a week we had had company and weather. This was felt
to be great luck, for one would have made up for the other had either
been bad.
The weather certainly would have made up for the company; but it was not
subjected to this tax, for we had by a happy chance the _fleur des
pois_: Lord and Lady Mellifont, Clare Vawdrey, the greatest (in the
opinion of many) of our literary glories, and Blanche Adney, the
greatest (in the opinion of all) of our theatrical. I mention these
first, because they were just the people whom in London, at that time,
people tried to "get." People endeavoured to "book" them six weeks
ahead, yet on this occasion we had come in for them, we had all come in
for each other, without the least wire-pulling. A turn of the game had
pitched us together, the last of August, and we recognized our luck by
remaining so, under protection of the barometer. When the golden days
were over--that would come soon enough--we should wind down opposite
sides of the pass and disappear over the crest of surrounding heights.
We were of the same general communion, we participated in the same
miscellaneous publicity. We met, in London, with irregular frequency; we
were more or less governed by the laws and the language, the traditions
and the shibboleths of the same dense social state. I think all of us,
even the ladies, "did" something, though we pretended we didn't when it
was mentioned. Such things are not mentioned indeed in London, but it
was our innocent pleasure to be different here. There had to be some way
to show the difference, inasmuch as we were under the impression that
this was our annual holiday. We felt at any rate that the conditions
were more human than in London, or that at least we ourselves were. We
were frank about this, we talked about it: it was what we were talking
about as we looked at the flushing glacier, just as some one called
attention to the prolonged absence of Lord Mellifont and Mrs. Adney. We
were seated on the terrace of the inn, where there were benches and
little tables, and those of us who were most bent on proving that we had
returned to nature were, in the queer Germanic fashion, having coffee
before meat.
The remark about the absence of our two companions was not taken up, not
even by Lady Mellifont, not even by little Adney, the fond composer; for
it had been dropped only in the briefest intermission of Clare Vawdrey's
talk. (This celebrity was "Clarence" only on the title-page.) It was
just that revelation of our being after all human that was his theme. He
asked the company whether, candidly, every one hadn't been tempted to
say to every one else: "I had no idea you were really so nice." I had
had, for my part, an idea that he was, and even a good deal nicer, but
that was too complicated to go into then; besides it is exactly my
story. There was a general understanding among us that when Vawdrey
talked we should be silent, and not, oddly enough, because he at all
expected it. He didn't, for of all abundant talkers he was the most
unconscious, the least greedy and professional. It was rather the
religion of the host, of the hostess, that prevailed among us: it was
their own idea, but they always looked for a listening circle when the
great novelist dined with them. On the occasion I allude to there was
probably no one present with whom, in London, he had not dined, and we
felt the force of this habit. He had dined even with me; and on the
evening of that dinner, as on this Alpine afternoon, I had been at no
pains to hold my tongue, absorbed as I inveterately was in a study of
the question which always rose before me, to such a height, in his fair,
square, strong stature.
This question was all the more tormenting that he never suspected
himself (I am sure) of imposing it, any more than he had ever observed
that every day of his life every one listened to him at dinner. He used
to be called "subjective" in the weekly papers, but in society no
distinguished man could have been less so. He never talked about
himself; and this was a topic on which, though it would have been
tremendously worthy of him, he apparently never even reflected. He had
his hours and his habits, his tailor and his hatter, his hygiene and his
particular wine, but all these things together never made up an
attitude. Yet they constituted the only attitude he ever adopted, and it
was easy for him to refer to our being "nicer" abroad than at home. _He_
was exempt from variations, and not a shade either less or more nice in
one place than in another. He differed from other people, but never from
himself (save in the extraordinary sense which I will presently
explain), and struck me as having neither moods nor sensibilities nor
preferences. He might have been always in the same company, so far as he
recognized any influence from age or condition or sex: he addressed
himself to women exactly as he addressed himself to men, and gossiped
with all men alike, talking no better to clever folk than to dull. I
used to feel a despair at his way of liking one subject--so far as I
could tell--precisely as much as another: there were some I hated so
myself. I never found him anything but loud and cheerful and copious,
and I never heard him utter a paradox or express a shade or play with an
idea. That fancy about our being "human" was, in his conversation, quite
an exceptional flight. His opinions were sound and second-rate, and of
his perceptions it was too mystifying to think. I envied him his
magnificent health.
Vawdrey had marched, with his even pace and his perfectly good
conscience, into the flat country of anecdote, where stories are visible
from afar like windmills and signposts; but I observed after a little
that Lady Mellifont's attention wandered. I happened to be sitting next
her. I noticed that her eyes rambled a little anxiously over the lower
slopes of the mountains. At last, after looking at her watch, she said
to me: "Do you know where they went?"
"Do you mean Mrs. Adney and Lord Mellifont?"
"Lord Mellifont and Mrs. Adney." Her ladyship's speech
seemed--unconsciously indeed--to correct me, but it didn't occur to me
that this was because she was jealous. I imputed to her no such vulgar
sentiment: in the first place, because I liked her, and in the second
because it would always occur to one quickly that it was right, in any
connection, to put Lord Mellifont first. He _was_ first--extraordinarily
first. I don't say greatest or wisest or most renowned, but essentially
at the top of the list and the head of the table. That is a position by
itself, and his wife was naturally accustomed to see him in it. My
phrase had sounded as if Mrs. Adney had taken him; but it was not
possible for him to be taken--he only took. No one, in the nature of
things, could know this better than Lady Mellifont. I had originally
been rather afraid of her, thinking her, with her stiff silences and the
extreme blackness of almost everything that made up her person, somewhat
hard, even a little saturnine. Her paleness seemed slightly grey, and
her glossy black hair metallic, like the brooches and bands and combs
with which it was inveterately adorned. She was in perpetual mourning,
and wore numberless ornaments of jet and onyx, a thousand clicking
chains and bugles and beads. I had heard Mrs. Adney call her the queen
of night, and the term was descriptive if you understood that the night
was cloudy. She had a secret, and if you didn't find it out as you knew
her better you at least perceived that she was gentle and unaffected and
limited, and also rather submissively sad. She was like a woman with a
painless malady. I told her that I had merely seen her husband and his
companion stroll down the glen together about an hour before, and
suggested that Mr. Adney would perhaps know something of their
intentions.
Vincent Adney, who, though he was fifty years old, looked like a good
little boy on whom it had been impressed that children should not talk
before company, acquitted himself with remarkable simplicity and taste
of the position of husband of a great exponent of comedy. When all was
said about her making it easy for him, one couldn't help admiring the
charmed affection with which he took everything for granted. It is
difficult for a husband who is not on the stage, or at least in the
theatre, to be graceful about a wife who is; but Adney was more than
graceful--he was exquisite, he was inspired. He set his beloved to
music; and you remember how genuine his music could be--the only English
compositions I ever saw a foreigner take an interest in. His wife was in
them, somewhere, always; they were like a free, rich translation of the
impression she produced. She seemed, as one listened, to pass laughing,
with loosened hair, across the scene. He had been only a little fiddler
at her theatre, always in his place during the acts; but she had made
him something rare and misunderstood. Their superiority had become a
kind of partnership, and their happiness was a part of the happiness of
their friends. Adney's one discomfort was that he couldn't write a play
for his wife, and the only way he meddled with her affairs was by asking
impossible people if _they_ couldn't.
Lady Mellifont, after looking across at him a moment, remarked to me
that she would rather not put any question to him. She added the next
minute: "I had rather people shouldn't see I'm nervous."
"_Are_ you nervous?"
"I always become so if my husband is away from me for any time."
"Do you imagine something has happened to him?"
"Yes, always. Of course I'm used to it."
"Do you mean his tumbling over precipices--that sort of thing?"
"I don't know exactly what it is: it's the general sense that he'll
never come back."
She said so much and kept back so much that the only way to treat the
condition she referred to seemed the jocular. "Surely he'll never
forsake you!" I laughed.
She looked at the ground a moment. "Oh, at bottom I'm easy."
"Nothing can ever happen to a man so accomplished, so infallible, so
armed at all points," I went on, encouragingly.
"Oh, you don't know how he's armed!" she exclaimed, with such an odd
quaver that I could account for it only by her being nervous. This idea
was confirmed by her moving just afterwards, changing her seat rather
pointlessly, not as if to cut our conversation short, but because she
was in a fidget. I couldn't know what was the matter with her, but I was
presently relieved to see Mrs. Adney come toward us. She had in her hand
a big bunch of wild flowers, but she was not closely attended by Lord
Mellifont. I quickly saw, however, that she had no disaster to announce;
yet as I knew there was a question Lady Mellifont would like to hear
answered, but did not wish to ask, I expressed to her immediately the
hope that his lordship had not remained in a crevasse.
"Oh, no; he left me but three minutes ago. He has gone into the house."
Blanche Adney rested her eyes on mine an instant--a mode of intercourse
to which no man, for himself, could ever object. The interest, on this
occasion, was quickened by the particular thing the eyes happened to
say. What they usually said was only: "Oh, yes, I'm charming, I know,
but don't make a fuss about it. I only want a new part--I do, I do!" At
present they added, dimly, surreptitiously, and of course sweetly--for
that was the way they did everything: "It's all right, but something did
happen. Perhaps I'll tell you later." She turned to Lady Mellifont, and
the transition to simple gaiety suggested her mastery of her profession.
"I've brought him safe. We had a charming walk."
"I'm so very glad," returned Lady Mellifont, with her faint smile;
continuing vaguely, as she got up: "He must have gone to dress for
dinner. Isn't it rather near?" She moved away, to the hotel, in her
leave-taking, simplifying fashion, and the rest of us, at the mention of
dinner, looked at each other's watches, as if to shift the
responsibility of such grossness. The head-waiter, essentially, like all
head-waiters, a man of the world, allowed us hours and places of our
own, so that in the evening, apart under the lamp, we formed a compact,
an indulged little circle. But it was only the Mellifonts who "dressed"
and as to whom it was recognized that they naturally _would_ dress: she
in exactly the same manner as on any other evening of her ceremonious
existence (she was not a woman whose habits could take account of
anything so mutable as fitness); and he, on the other hand, with
remarkable adjustment and suitability. He was almost as much a man of
the world as the head-waiter, and spoke almost as many languages; but he
abstained from courting a comparison of dress-coats and white
waistcoats, analyzing the occasion in a much finer way--into black
velvet and blue velvet and brown velvet, for instance, into delicate
harmonies of necktie and subtle informalities of shirt. He had a costume
for every function and a moral for every costume; and his functions and
costumes and morals were ever a part of the amusement of life--a part at
any rate of its beauty and romance--for an immense circle of spectators.
For his particular friends indeed these things were more than an
amusement; they were a topic, a social support and of course, in
addition, a subject of perpetual suspense. If his wife had not been
present before dinner they were what the rest of us probably would have
been putting our heads together about.
Clare Vawdrey had a fund of anecdote on the whole question: he had known
Lord Mellifont almost from the beginning. It was a peculiarity of this
nobleman that there could be no conversation about him that didn't
instantly take the form of anecdote, and a still further distinction
that there could apparently be no anecdote that was not on the whole to
his honour. If he had come into a room at any moment, people might have
said frankly: "Of course we were telling stories about you!" As
consciences go, in London, the general conscience would have been good.
Moreover it would have been impossible to imagine his taking such a
tribute otherwise than amiably, for he was always as unperturbed as an
actor with the right cue. He had never in his life needed the
prompter--his very embarrassments had been rehearsed. For myself, when
he was talked about I always had an odd impression that we were speaking
of the dead--it was with that peculiar accumulation of relish. His
reputation was a kind of gilded obelisk, as if he had been buried
beneath it; the body of legend and reminiscence of which he was to be
the subject had crystallized in advance.
This ambiguity sprang, I suppose, from the fact that the mere sound of
his name and air of his person, the general expectation he created,
were, somehow, too exalted to be verified. The experience of his
urbanity always came later; the prefigurement, the legend paled before
the reality. I remember that on the evening I refer to the reality was
particularly operative. The handsomest man of his period could never
have looked better, and he sat among us like a bland conductor
controlling by an harmonious play of arm an orchestra still a little
rough. He directed the conversation by gestures as irresistible as they
were vague; one felt as if without him it wouldn't have had anything to
call a tone. This was essentially what he contributed to any
occasion--what he contributed above all to English public life. He
pervaded it, he coloured it, he embellished it, and without him it would
scarcely have had a vocabulary. Certainly it would not have had a style;
for a style was what it had in having Lord Mellifont. He _was_ a style.
I was freshly struck with it as, in the _salle à manger_ of the little
Swiss inn, we resigned ourselves to inevitable veal. Confronted with his
form (I must parenthesize that it was not confronted much), Clare
Vawdrey's talk suggested the reporter contrasted with the bard. It was
interesting to watch the shock of characters from which, of an evening,
so much would be expected. There was however no concussion--it was all
muffled and minimized in Lord Mellifont's tact. It was rudimentary with
him to find the solution of such a problem in playing the host, assuming
responsibilities which carried with them their sacrifice. He had indeed
never been a guest in his life; he was the host, the patron, the
moderator at every board. If there was a defect in his manner (and I
suggest it under my breath), it was that he had a little more art than
any conjunction--even the most complicated--could possibly require. At
any rate one made one's reflections in noticing how the accomplished
peer handled the situation and how the sturdy man of letters was
unconscious that the situation (and least of all he himself as part of
it), was handled. Lord Mellifont poured forth treasures of tact, and
Clare Vawdrey never dreamed he was doing it.
Vawdrey had no suspicion of any such precaution even when Blanche Adney
asked him if he saw yet their third act--an inquiry into which she
introduced a subtlety of her own. She had a theory that he was to write
her a play and that the heroine, if he would only do his duty, would be
the part for which she had immemorially longed. She was forty years old
(this could be no secret to those who had admired her from the first),
and she could now reach out her hand and touch her uttermost goal. This
gave a kind of tragic passion--perfect actress of comedy as she was--to
her desire not to miss the great thing. The years had passed, and still
she had missed it; none of the things she had done was the thing she had
dreamed of, so that at present there was no more time to lose. This was
the canker in the rose, the ache beneath the smile. It made her
touching--made her sadness even sweeter than her laughter. She had done
the old English and the new French, and had charmed her generation; but
she was haunted by the vision of a bigger chance, of something truer to
the conditions that lay near her. She was tired of Sheridan and she
hated Bowdler; she called for a canvas of a finer grain. The worst of
it, to my sense, was that she would never extract her modern comedy from
the great mature novelist, who was as incapable of producing it as he
was of threading a needle. She coddled him, she talked to him, she made
love to him, as she frankly proclaimed; but she dwelt in illusions--she
would have to live and die with Bowdler.
It is difficult to be cursory over this charming woman, who was
beautiful without beauty and complete with a dozen deficiencies. The
perspective of the stage made her over, and in society she was like the
model off the pedestal. She was the picture walking about, which to the
artless social mind was a perpetual surprise--a miracle. People thought
she told them the secrets of the pictorial nature, in return for which
they gave her relaxation and tea. She told them nothing and she drank
the tea; but they had, all the same, the best of the bargain. Vawdrey
was really at work on a play; but if he had begun it because he liked
her I think he let it drag for the same reason. He secretly felt the
atrocious difficulty--knew that from his hand the finished piece would
have received no active life. At the same time nothing could be more
agreeable than to have such a question open with Blanche Adney, and from
time to time he put something very good into the play. If he deceived
Mrs. Adney it was only because in her despair she was determined to be
deceived. To her question about their third act he replied that, before
dinner, he had written a magnificent passage.
"Before dinner?" I said. "Why, _cher maître_, before dinner you were
holding us all spellbound on the terrace."
My words were a joke, because I thought his had been; but for the first
time that I could remember I perceived a certain confusion in his face.
He looked at me hard, throwing back his head quickly, the least bit like
a horse who has been pulled up short. "Oh, it was before that," he
replied, naturally enough.
"Before that you were playing billiards with _me,_" Lord Mellifont
intimated.
"Then it must have been yesterday," said Vawdrey.
But he was in a tight place. "You told me this morning you did nothing
yesterday," the actress objected.
"I don't think I really know when I do things." Vawdrey looked vaguely,
without helping himself, at a dish that was offered him.
"It's enough if _we_ know," smiled Lord Mellifont.
"I don't believe you've written a line," said Blanche Adney.
"I think I could repeat you the scene." Vawdrey helped himself to
_haricots verts._
"Oh, do--oh, do!" two or three of us cried.
"After dinner, in the salon; it will be an immense _régal_," Lord
Mellifont declared.
"I'm not sure, but I'll try," Vawdrey went on.
"Oh, you lovely man!" exclaimed the actress, who was practising
Americanisms, being resigned even to an American comedy.
"But there must be this condition," said Vawdrey: "you must make your
husband play."
"Play while you're reading? Never!"
"I've too much vanity," said Adney.
Lord Mellifont distinguished him. "You must give us the overture, before
the curtain rises. That's a peculiarly delightful moment."
"I sha'n't read--I shall just speak," said Vawdrey.
"Better still, let me go and get your manuscript," the actress
suggested.
Vawdrey replied that the manuscript didn't matter; but an hour later, in
the salon, we wished he might have had it. We sat expectant, still under
the spell of Adney's violin. His wife, in the foreground, on an ottoman,
was all impatience and profile, and Lord Mellifont, in the chair--it was
always _the_ chair, Lord Mellifont's--made our grateful little group
feel like a social science congress or a distribution of prizes.
Suddenly, instead of beginning, our tame lion began to roar out of
tune--he had clean forgotten every word. He was very sorry, but the
lines absolutely wouldn't come to him; he was utterly ashamed, but his
memory was a blank. He didn't look in the least ashamed--Vawdrey had
never looked ashamed in his life; he was only imperturbably and merrily
natural. He protested that he had never expected to make such a fool of
himself, but we felt that this wouldn't prevent the incident from taking
its place among his jolliest reminiscences. It was only _we_ who were
humiliated, as if he had played us a premeditated trick. This was an
occasion, if ever, for Lord Mellifont's tact, which descended on us all
like balm: he told us, in his charming artistic way, his way of bridging
over arid intervals (he had a _débit_--there was nothing to approach it
in England--like the actors of the Comédie Française), of his own
collapse on a momentous occasion, the delivery of an address to a mighty
multitude, when, finding he had forgotten his memoranda, he fumbled, on
the terrible platform, the cynosure of every eye, fumbled vainly in
irreproachable pockets for indispensable notes. But the point of his
story was finer than that of Vawdrey's pleasantry; for he sketched with
a few light gestures the brilliancy of a performance which had risen
superior to embarrassment, had resolved itself, we were left to divine,
into an effort recognised at the moment as not absolutely a blot on what
the public was so good as to call his reputation.
"Play up--play up!" cried Blanche Adney, tapping her husband and
remembering how, on the stage, a _contretemps_ is always drowned in
music. Adney threw himself upon his fiddle, and I said to Clare Vawdrey
that his mistake could easily be corrected by his sending for the
manuscript. If he would tell me where it was I would immediately fetch
it from his room. To this he replied: "My dear fellow, I'm afraid there
_is_ no manuscript."
"Then you've not written anything?"
"I'll write it to-morrow."
"Ah, you trifle with us," I said, in much mystification.
Vawdrey hesitated an instant. "If there _is_ anything,
you'll find it on my table."
At this moment one of the others spoke to him, and Lady Mellifont
remarked audibly, as if to correct gently our want of consideration,
that Mr. Adney was playing something very beautiful. I had noticed
before that she appeared extremely fond of music; she always listened to
it in a hushed transport. Vawdrey's attention was drawn away, but it
didn't seem to me that the words he had just dropped constituted a
definite permission to go to his room. Moreover I wanted to speak to
Blanche Adney; I had something to ask her. I had to await my chance,
however, as we remained silent awhile for her husband, after which the
conversation became general. It was our habit to go to bed early, but
there was still a little of the evening left. Before it quite waned I
found an opportunity to tell the actress that Vawdrey had given me leave
to put my hand on his manuscript. She adjured me, by all I held sacred,
to bring it immediately, to give it to her; and her insistence was proof
against my suggestion that it would now be too late for him to begin to
read: besides which the charm was broken--the others wouldn't care. It
was not too late for _her_ to begin; therefore I was to possess myself,
without more delay, of the precious pages. I told her she should be
obeyed in a moment, but I wanted her first to satisfy my just curiosity.
What had happened before dinner, while she was on the hills with Lord
Mellifont?
"How do you know anything happened?"
"I saw it in your face when you came back."
"And they call me an actress!" cried Mrs. Adney.
"What do they call _me_?" I inquired.
"You're a searcher of hearts--that frivolous thing an observer."
"I wish you'd let an observer write you a play!" I broke out.
"People don't care for what you write: you'd break any run of luck."
"Well, I see plays all round me," I declared; "the air is full of them
to-night."
"The air? Thank you for nothing! I only wish my table-drawers were."
"Did he make love to you on the glacier?" I went on.
She stared; then broke into the graduated ecstasy of her laugh. "Lord
Mellifont, poor dear? What a funny place! It would indeed be the place
for _our_ love!"
"Did he fall into a crevasse?" I continued.
Blanche Adney looked at me again as she had done for an instant when she
came up, before dinner, with her hands full of flowers. "I don't know
into what he fell. I'll tell you to-morrow."
"He did come down, then?"
"Perhaps he went up," she laughed. "It's really strange."
"All the more reason you should tell me to-night."
"I must think it over; I must puzzle it out."
"Oh, if you want conundrums I'll throw in another," I said. "What's the
matter with the master?"
"The master of what?"
"Of every form of dissimulation. Vawdrey hasn't written a line."
"Go and get his papers and we'll see."
"I don't like to expose him," I said.
"Why not, if I expose Lord Mellifont?"
"Oh, I'd do anything for that," I conceded. "But why should Vawdrey have
made a false statement? It's very curious."
"It's very curious," Blanche Adney repeated, with a musing air and her
eyes on Lord Mellifont. Then, rousing herself, she added: "Go and look
in his room."
"In Lord Mellifont's?"
She turned to me quickly. "_That_ would be a way!"
"A way to what?"
"To find out--to find out!" She spoke gaily and excitedly, but suddenly
checked herself. "We're talking nonsense," she said.
"We're mixing things up, but I'm struck with your idea. Get Lady
Mellifont to let you."
"Oh, _she_ has looked!" Mrs. Adney murmured, with the oddest dramatic
expression. Then, after a movement of her beautiful uplifted hand, as if
to brush away a fantastic vision, she exclaimed imperiously: "Bring me
the scene--bring me the scene!"
"I go for it," I answered; "but don't tell me I can't write a play."
She left me, but my errand was arrested by the approach of a lady who
had produced a birthday-book--we had been threatened with it for several
evenings--and who did me the honour to solicit my autograph. She had
been asking the others, and she couldn't decently leave me out. I could
usually remember my name, but it always took me some time to recall my
date, and even when I had done so I was never very sure. I hesitated
between two days and I remarked to my petitioner that I would sign on
both if it would give her any satisfaction. She said that surely I had
been born only once; and I replied of course that on the day I made her
acquaintance I had been born again. I mention the feeble joke only to
show that, with the obligatory inspection of the other autographs, we
gave some minutes to this transaction. The lady departed with her book,
and then I became aware that the company had dispersed. I was alone in
the little salon that had been appropriated to our use. My first
impression was one of disappointment: if Vawdrey had gone to bed I
didn't wish to disturb him. While I hesitated, however. I recognised
that Vawdrey had not gone to bed. A window was open, and the sound of
voices outside came in to me: Blanche was on the terrace with her
dramatist, and they were talking about the stars. I went to the window
for a glimpse--the Alpine night was splendid. My friends had stepped out
together; the actress had picked up a cloak; she looked as I had seen
her look in the wing of the theatre. They were silent awhile, and I
heard the roar of a neighbouring torrent. I turned back into the room,
and its quiet lamplight gave me an idea. Our companions had
dispersed--it was late for a pastoral country--and we three should have
the place to ourselves. Clare Vawdrey had written his scene--it was
magnificent; and his reading it to us there, at such an hour, would be
an episode intensely memorable. I would bring down his manuscript and
meet the two with it as they came in.
I quitted the salon for this purpose; I had been in Vawdrey's room and
knew it was on the second floor, the last in a long corridor. A minute
later my hand was on the knob of his door, which I naturally pushed open
without knocking. It was equally natural that in the absence of its
occupant the room should be dark; the more so as, the end of the
corridor being at that hour unlighted, the obscurity was not immediately
diminished by the opening of the door. I was only aware at first that I
had made no mistake and that, the window-curtains not being drawn, I was
confronted with a couple of vague starlighted apertures. Their aid,
however, was not sufficient to enable me to find what I had come for,
and my hand, in my pocket, was already on the little box of matches that
I always carried for cigarettes. Suddenly I withdrew it with a start,
uttering an ejaculation, an apology. I had entered the wrong room; a
glance prolonged for three seconds showed me a figure seated at a table
near one of the windows--a figure I had at first taken for a
travelling-rug thrown over a chair. I retreated, with a sense of
intrusion; but as I did so I became aware, more rapidly than it takes me
to express it, in the first place that this was Vawdrey's room and in
the second that, most singularly, Vawdrey himself sat before me.
Checking myself on the threshold I had a momentary feeling of
bewilderment, but before I knew it I had exclaimed: "Hullo! is that you,
Vawdrey?"
He neither turned nor answered me, but my question received an immediate
and practical reply in the opening of a door on the other side of the
passage. A servant, with a candle, had come out of the opposite room,
and in this flitting illumination I definitely recognised the man whom,
an instant before, I had to the best of my belief left below in
conversation with Mrs. Adney. His back was half turned to me, and he
bent over the table in the attitude of writing, but I was conscious that
I was in no sort of error about his identity. "I beg your pardon--I
thought you were downstairs," I said; and as the personage gave no sign
of hearing me I added: "If you're busy I won't disturb you." I backed
out, closing the door--I had been in the place, I suppose, less than a
minute. I had a sense of mystification, which however deepened
infinitely the next instant. I stood there with my hand still on the
knob of the door, overtaken by the oddest impression of my life. Vawdrey
was at his table, writing, and it was a very natural place for him to
be; but why was he writing in the dark and why hadn't he answered me? I
waited a few seconds for the sound of some movement, to see if he
wouldn't rouse himself from his abstraction--a fit conceivable in a
great writer--and call out: "Oh, my dear fellow, is it you?" But I heard
only the stillness, I felt only the starlighted dusk of the room, with
the unexpected presence it enclosed. I turned away, slowly retracing my
steps, and came confusedly downstairs. The lamp was still burning in the
salon, but the room was empty. I passed round to the door of the hotel
and stepped out. Empty too was the terrace. Blanche Adney and the
gentleman with her had apparently come in. I hung about five minutes;
then I went to bed.
I slept badly, for I was agitated. On looking back at these queer
occurrences (you will see presently that they were queer), I perhaps
suppose myself more agitated than I was; for great anomalies are never
so great at first as after we have reflected upon them. It takes us some
time to exhaust explanations. I was vaguely nervous--I had been sharply
startled; but there was nothing I could not clear up by asking Blanche
Adney, the first thing in the morning, who had been with her on the
terrace. Oddly enough, however, when the morning dawned--it dawned
admirably--I felt less desire to satisfy myself on this point than to
escape, to brush away the shadow of my stupefaction. I saw the day would
be splendid, and the fancy took me to spend it, as I had spent happy
days of youth, in a lonely mountain ramble. I dressed early, partook of
conventional coffee, put a big roll into one pocket and a small flask
into the other, and, with a stout stick in my hand, went forth into the
high places. My story is not closely concerned with the charming hours I
passed there--hours of the kind that make intense memories. If I roamed
away half of them on the shoulders of the hills, I lay on the sloping
grass for the other half and, with my cap pulled over my eyes (save a
peep for immensities of view), listened, in the bright stillness, to the
mountain bee and felt most things sink and dwindle. Clare Vawdrey grew
small, Blanche Adney grew dim, Lord Mellifont grew old, and before the
day was over I forgot that I had ever been puzzled. When in the late
afternoon I made my way down to the inn there was nothing I wanted so
much to find out as whether dinner would not soon be ready. To-night I
dressed, in a manner, and by the time I was presentable they were all at
table.
In their company again my little problem came back to me, so that I was
curious to see if Vawdrey wouldn't look at me the least bit queerly. But
he didn't look at me at all; which gave me a chance both to be patient
and to wonder why I should hesitate to ask him my question across the
table. I did hesitate, and with the consciousness of doing so came back
a little of the agitation I had left behind me, or below me, during the
day. I wasn't ashamed of my scruple, however: it was only a fine
discretion. What I vaguely felt was that a public inquiry wouldn't have
been fair. Lord Mellifont was there, of course, to mitigate with his
perfect manner all consequences; but I think it was present to me that
with these particular elements his lordship would not be at home. The
moment we got up, therefore, I approached Mrs. Adney, asking her
whether, as the evening was lovely, she wouldn't take a turn with me
outside.
"You've walked a hundred miles; had you not better be quiet?" she
replied.
"I'd walk a hundred miles more to get you to tell me something."
She looked at me an instant, with a little of the queerness that I had
sought, but had not found, in Clare Vawdrey's eyes. "Do you mean what
became of Lord Mellifont?"
"Of Lord Mellifont?" With my new speculation I had lost that thread.
"Where's your memory, foolish man? We talked of it last evening."
"Ah, yes!" I cried, recalling; "we shall have lots to discuss." I drew
her out to the terrace, and before we had gone three steps I said to
her: "Who was with you here last night?"
"Last night?" she repeated, as wide of the mark as I had been.
"At ten o'clock--just after our company broke up. You came out here with
a gentleman; you talked about the stars."
She stared a moment; then she gave her laugh. "Are you jealous of dear
Vawdrey?"
"Then it was he?"
"Certainly it was."
"And how long did he stay?"
"You have it badly. He stayed about a quarter of an hour--perhaps rather
more. We walked some distance; he talked about his play. There you have
it all; that is the only witchcraft I have used."
"And what did Vawdrey do afterwards?"
"I haven't the least idea. I left him and went to bed."
"At what time did you go to bed?"
"At what time did _you_? I happen to remember that I parted from Mr.
Vawdrey at ten twenty-five," said Mrs. Adney. "I came back into the
salon to pick up a book, and I noticed the clock."
"In other words you and Vawdrey distinctly lingered here from about five
minutes past ten till the hour you mention?"
"I don't know how distinct we were, but we were very jolly. _Où
voulez-vous en venir_?" Blanche Adney asked.
"Simply to this, dear lady: that at the time your companion was occupied
in the manner you describe, he was also engaged in literary composition
in his own room."
She stopped short at this, and her eyes had an expression in the
darkness. She wanted to know if I challenged her veracity; and I replied
that, on the contrary, I backed it up--it made the case so interesting.
She returned that this would only be if she should back up mine; which,
however, I had no difficulty in persuading her to do, after I had
related to her circumstantially the incident of my quest of the
manuscript--the manuscript which, at the time, for a reason I could now
understand, appeared to have passed so completely out of her own head.
"His talk made me forget it--I forgot I sent you for it. He made up for
his fiasco in the salon: he declaimed me the scene," said my companion.
She had dropped on a bench to listen to me and, as we sat there, had
briefly cross-examined me. Then she broke out into fresh laughter. "Oh,
the eccentricities of genius!"
"They seem greater even than I supposed."
"Oh, the mysteries of greatness!"
"You ought to know all about them, but they take me by surprise."
"Are you absolutely certain it was Mr. Vawdrey?" my companion asked.
"If it wasn't he, who in the world was it? That a strange gentleman,
looking exactly like him, should be sitting in his room at that hour of
the night and writing at his table _in the dark_," I insisted, "would be
practically as wonderful as my own contention."
"Yes, why in the dark?" mused Mrs. Adney.
"Cats can see in the dark," I said.
She smiled at me dimly. "Did it look like a cat?"
"No, dear lady, but I'll tell you what it did look like--it looked like
the author of Vawdrey's admirable works. It looked infinitely more like
him than our friend does himself," I declared.
"Do you mean it was somebody he gets to do them?"
"Yes, while he dines out and disappoints you."
"Disappoints me?" murmured Mrs. Adney artlessly.
"Disappoints _me_--disappoints every one who looks in him for the genius
that created the pages they adore. Where is it in his talk?"
"Ah, last night he was splendid," said the actress.
"He's always splendid, as your morning bath is splendid, or a sirloin of
beef, or the railway service to Brighton. But he's never rare."
"I see what you mean."
"That's what makes you such a comfort to talk to. I've often
wondered--now I know. There are two of them."
"What a delightful idea!"
"One goes out, the other stays at home. One is the genius, the other's
the bourgeois, and it's only the bourgeois whom we personally know. He
talks, he circulates, he's awfully popular, he flirts with you--"
"Whereas it's the genius _you_ are privileged to see!" Mrs. Adney broke
in. "I'm much obliged to you for the distinction."
I laid my hand on her arm. "See him yourself. Try it, test it, go to his
room."
"Go to his room? It wouldn't be proper!" she exclaimed, in the tone of
her best comedy.
"Anything is proper in such an inquiry. If you see him, it settles it."
"How charming--to settle it!" She thought a moment, then she sprang up.
"Do you mean _now_?"
"Whenever you like."
"But suppose I should find the wrong one?" said Blanche Adney, with an
exquisite effect.
"The wrong one? Which one do you call the right?"
"The wrong one for a lady to go and see. Suppose I shouldn't find--the
genius?"
"Oh, I'll look after the other," I replied. Then, as I had happened to
glance about me, I added: "Take care--here comes Lord Mellifont."
"I wish you'd look after _him_," my interlocutress murmured.
"What's the matter with him?"
"That's just what I was going to tell you."
"Tell me now; he's not coming."
Blanche Adney looked a moment. Lord Mellifont, who appeared to have
emerged from the hotel to smoke a meditative cigar, had paused, at a
distance from us, and stood admiring the wonders of the prospect,
discernible even in the dusk. We strolled slowly in another direction,
and she presently said: "My idea is almost as droll as yours."
"I don't call mine droll: it's beautiful."
"There's nothing so beautiful as the droll," Mrs. Adney declared.
"You take a professional view. But I'm all ears." My curiosity was
indeed alive again.
"Well then, my dear friend, if Clare Vawdrey is double (and I'm bound to
say I think that the more of him the better), his lordship there has the
opposite complaint: he isn't even whole."
We stopped once more, simultaneously. "I don't understand."
"No more do I. But I have a fancy that if there are two of Mr. Vawdrey,
there isn't so much as one, all told, of Lord Mellifont."
I considered a moment, then I laughed out. "I think I see what you
mean!"
"That's what makes _you_ a comfort. Did you ever see him alone?"
I tried to remember. "Oh, yes; he has been to see me."
"Ah, then he wasn't alone."
"And I've been to see him, in his study."
"Did he know you were there?"
"Naturally--I was announced."
Blanche Adney glanced at me like a lovely conspirator. "You mustn't be
announced!" With this she walked on.
I rejoined her, breathless. "Do you mean one must come upon him when he
doesn't know it?"
"You must take him unawares. You must go to his room--that's what you
must do."
If I was elated by the way our mystery opened out, I was also,
pardonably, a little confused. "When I know he's not there?"
"When you know he _is_."
"And what shall I see?"
"You won't see anything!" Mrs. Adney cried as we turned round.
We had reached the end of the terrace, and our movement brought us face
to face with Lord Mellifont, who, resuming his walk, had now, without
indiscretion, overtaken us. The sight of him at that moment was
illuminating, and it kindled a great backward train, connecting itself
with one's general impression of the personage. As he stood there
smiling at us and waving a practised hand into the transparent night (he
introduced the view as if it had been a candidate and "supported" the
very Alps), as he rose before us in the delicate fragrance of his cigar
and all his other delicacies and fragrances, with more perfections,
somehow, heaped upon his handsome head than one had ever seen
accumulated before, he struck me as so essentially, so conspicuously and
uniformly the public character that I read in a flash the answer to
Blanche Adney's riddle. He was all public and had no corresponding
private life, just as Clare Vawdrey was all private and had no
corresponding public one. I had heard only half my companion's story,
yet as we joined Lord Mellifont (he had followed us--he liked Mrs.
Adney; but it was always to be conceived of him that he accepted society
rather than sought it), as we participated for half an hour in the
distributed wealth of his conversation, I felt with unabashed duplicity
that we had, as it were, found him out. I was even more deeply diverted
by that whisk of the curtain to which the actress had just treated me
than I had been by my own discovery; and if I was not ashamed of my
share of her secret any more than of having divided my own with her
(though my own was, of the two mysteries, the more glorious for the
personage involved), this was because there was no cruelty in my
advantage, but on the contrary an extreme tenderness and a positive
compassion. Oh, he was safe with me, and I felt moreover rich and
enlightened, as if I had suddenly put the universe into my pocket. I had
learned what an affair of the spot and the moment a great appearance may
be. It would doubtless be too much to say that I had always suspected
the possibility, in the background of his lordship's being, of some such
beautiful instance; but it is at least a fact that, patronising as it
sounds, I had been conscious of a certain reserve of indulgence for him.
I had secretly pitied him for the perfection of his performance, had
wondered what blank face such a mask had to cover, what was left to him
for the immitigable hours in which a man sits down with himself, or,
more serious still, with that intenser self, his lawful wife. How was he
at home and what did he do when he was alone? There was something in
Lady Mellifont that gave a point to these researches--something that
suggested that even to her he was still the public character and that
she was haunted by similar questionings. She had never cleared them up:
that was her eternal trouble. We therefore knew more than she did,
Blanche Adney and I; but we wouldn't tell her for the world, nor would
she probably thank us for doing so. She preferred the relative grandeur
of uncertainty. She was not at home with him, so she couldn't say; and
with her he was not alone, so he couldn't show her. He represented to
his wife and he was a hero to his servants, and what one wanted to
arrive at was what really became of him when no eye could see. He
rested, presumably; but what form of rest could repair such a plenitude
of presence? Lady Mellifont was too proud to pry, and as she had never
looked through a keyhole she remained dignified and unassuaged.
It may have been a fancy of mine that Blanche Adney drew out our
companion, or it may be that the practical irony of our relation to him
at such a moment made me see him more vividly: at any rate he never had
struck me as so dissimilar from what he would have been if we had not
offered him a reflection of his image. We were only a concourse of two,
but he had never been more public. His perfect manner had never been
more perfect, his remarkable tact had never been more remarkable. I had
a tacit sense that it would all be in the morning papers, with a leader,
and also a secretly exhilarating one that I knew something that wouldn't
be, that never could be, though any enterprising journal would give one
a fortune for it. I must add, however, that in spite of my enjoyment--it
was almost sensual, like that of a consummate dish--I was eager to be
alone again with Mrs. Adney, who owed me an anecdote. It proved
impossible, that evening, for some of the others came out to see what we
found so absorbing; and then Lord Mellifont bespoke a little music from
the fiddler, who produced his violin and played to us divinely, on our
platform of echoes, face to face with the ghosts of the mountains.
Before the concert was over I missed our actress and, glancing into the
window of the salon, saw that she was established with Vawdrey, who was
reading to her from a manuscript. The great scene had apparently been
achieved and was doubtless the more interesting to Blanche from the new
lights she had gathered about its author. I judged it discreet not to
disturb them, and I went to bed without seeing her again. I looked out
for her betimes the next morning and, as the promise of the day was
fair, proposed to her that we should take to the hills, reminding her of
the high obligation she had incurred. She recognised the obligation and
gratified me with her company; but before we had strolled ten yards up