Collected Stories by Henry James
‘Surely not if the child is ill,’ I ventured to remark, by way of pleading for Mrs Ambient.
‘My dear fellow, you are not married – you don’t know the nature of wives!’ my host exclaimed.
‘Possibly not; but I know the nature of mothers.’
‘Beatrice is perfect as a mother,’ said Miss Ambient, with a tremendous sigh and her fingers interlaced on her embroidered knees.
‘I shall go up and see the child,’ her brother went on. ‘Do you suppose he’s asleep?’
‘Beatrice won’t let you see him, Mark,’ said the young lady, looking at me, though she addressed our companion.
‘Do you call that being perfect as a mother?’ Ambient inquired.
‘Yes, from her point of view.’
‘Damn her point of view!’ cried the author of Beltraffio. And he left the room; after which we heard him ascend the stairs.
I sat there for some ten minutes with Miss Ambient, and we, naturally, had some conversation, which was begun, I think, by my asking her what the point of view of her sister-in-law could be.
‘Oh, it’s so very odd,’ she said. ‘But we are so very odd, altogether. Don’t you find us so? We have lived so much abroad. Have you people like us in America?’
‘You are not all alike, surely; so that I don’t think I understand your question. We have no one like your brother – I may go so far as that.’
‘You have probably more persons like his wife,’ said Miss Ambient, smiling.
‘I can tell you that better when you have told me about her point of view.’
‘Oh yes – oh yes. Well, she doesn’t like his ideas. She doesn’t like them for the little boy. She thinks them undesirable.’
Being quite fresh from the contemplation of some of Mark Ambient’s arcana, I was particularly in a position to appreciate this announcement. But the effect of it was to make me (after staring a moment) burst into laughter, which I instantly checked when I remembered that there was a sick child above.
‘What has that infant to do with ideas?’ I asked. ‘Surely, he can’t tell one from another. Has he read his father’s novels?’
‘He’s very precocious and very sensitive, and his mother thinks she can’t begin to guard him too early.’ Miss Ambient’s head drooped a little to one side, and her eyes fixed themselves on futurity. Then, suddenly, there was a strange alteration in her face; she gave a smile that was more joyless than her gravity – a conscious, insincere smile, and added, ‘When one has children, it’s a great responsibility – what one writes.’
‘Children are terrible critics,’ I answered. ‘I am rather glad I haven’t got any.’
‘Do you also write then? And in the same style as my brother? And do you like that style? And do people appreciate it in America? I don’t write, but I think I feel.’ To these and various other inquiries and remarks the young lady treated me, till we heard her brother’s step in the hall again and Mark Ambient reappeared. He looked flushed and serious, and I supposed that he had seen something to alarm him in the condition of his child. His sister apparently had another idea; she gazed at him a moment as if he were a burning ship on the horizon, and simply murmured – ‘Poor old Mark!’
‘I hope you are not anxious,’ I said.
‘No, but I am disappointed. She won’t let me in. She has locked the door, and I’m afraid to make a noise.’ I suppose there might have been something ridiculous in a confession of this kind, but I liked my new friend so much that for me it didn’t detract from his dignity. ‘She tells me – from behind the door – that she will let me know if he is worse.’
‘It’s very good of her,’ said Miss Ambient.
I had exchanged a glance with Mark in which it is possible that he read that my pity for him was untinged with contempt – though I know not why he should have cared; and as, presently, his sister got up and took her bedroom candlestick, he proposed that we should go back to his study. We sat there till after midnight; he put himself into his slippers, into an old velvet jacket, lighted an ancient pipe and talked considerably less than he had done before. There were longish pauses in our communion, but they only made me feel that we had advanced in intimacy. They helped me, too, to understand my friend’s personal situation, and to perceive that it was by no means the happiest possible. When his face was quiet, it was vaguely troubled; it seemed to me to show that for him, too, life was a struggle, as it has been for many other men of genius. At last I prepared to leave him, and then, to my ineffable joy, he gave me some of the sheets of his forthcoming book – it was not finished, but he had indulged in the luxury, so dear to writers of deliberation, of having it ‘set up’, from chapter to chapter, as he advanced – he gave me, I say, the early pages, the prémices, as the French have it, of this new fruit of his imagination, to take to my room and look over at my leisure. I was just quitting him when the door of his study was noiselessly pushed open, and Mrs Ambient stood before us. She looked at us a moment with her candle in her hand, and then she said to her husband that as she supposed he had not gone to bed she had come down to tell him that Dolcino was more quiet and would probably be better in the morning. Mark Ambient made no reply; he simply slipped past her, in the doorway, as if he were afraid she would seize him in his passage, and bounded upstairs, to judge for himself of his child’s condition. Mrs Ambient looked slightly discomfited, and for a moment I thought she was going to give chase to her husband. But she resigned herself, with a sigh, while her eyes wandered over the lamp-lit room, where various books, at which I had been looking, were pulled out of their places on the shelves, and the fumes of tobacco seemed to hang in mid-air. I bade her good-night, and then, without intention, by a kind of fatality, the perversity which had already made me insist unduly on talking with her about her husband’s achievements, I alluded to the precious proof-sheets with which Ambient had entrusted me, and which I was nursing there under my arm. ‘It is the opening chapters of his new book,’ I said. ‘Fancy my satisfaction at being allowed to carry them to my room!’
She turned away, leaving me to take my candlestick from the table in the hall; but before we separated, thinking it apparently a good occasion to let me know once for all – since I was beginning, it would seem, to be quite ‘thick’ with my host – that there was no fitness in my appealing to her for sympathy in such a case; before we separated, I say, she remarked to me, with her quick, round, well-bred utterance, ‘I daresay you attribute to me ideas that I haven’t got. I don’t take that sort of interest in my husband’s proof-sheets. I consider his writings most objectionable!’
II
I HAD some curious conversation the next morning with Miss Ambient, whom I found strolling in the garden before breakfast. The whole place looked as fresh and trim, amid the twitter of the birds, as if, an hour before, the housemaids had been turned into it with their dustpans and feather-brushes. I almost hesitated to light a cigarette, and was doubly startled when, in the act of doing so, I suddenly perceived the sister of my host, who had, in any case, something of the oddity of an apparition, standing before me. She might have been posing for her photograph. Her sad-coloured robe arranged itself in serpentine folds at her feet; her hands locked themselves listlessly together in front; and her chin rested upon a cinque-cento ruff. The first thing I did, after bidding her good morning, was to ask her for news of her little nephew – to express the hope that she had heard he was better. She was able to gratify this hope, and spoke as if we might expect to see him during the day. We walked through the shrubberies together, and she gave me a great deal of information about her brother’s ménage, which offered me an opportunity to mention to her that his wife had told me, the night before, that she thought his productions objectionable.
‘She doesn’t usually come out with that so soon!’ Miss Ambient exclaimed, in answer to this piece of gossip.
‘Poor lady, she saw that I am a fanatic.’
‘Yes, she won’t like you for that. But you mustn’t mind, if the rest of us l
‘She’s very beautiful,’ I answered; while I reflected that though it was true, apparently, that Mark Ambient was mismated, it was also perceptible that his sister was perfidious. She told me that her brother and his wife had no other difference but this one, that she thought his writings immoral and his influence pernicious. It was a fixed idea; she was afraid of these things for the child. I answered that it was not a trifle – a woman’s regarding her husband’s mind as a well of corruption; and she looked quite struck with the novelty of my remark. ‘But there hasn’t been any of the sort of trouble that there so often is among married people,’ she said. ‘I suppose you can judge for yourself that Beatrice isn’t at all – well, whatever they call it when a woman misbehaves herself. And Mark doesn’t make love to other people, either. I assure you he doesn’t! All the same, of course, from her point of view, you know, she has a dread of my brother’s influence on the child – on the formation of his character, of his principles. It is as if it were a subtle poison, or a contagion, or something that would rub off on Dolcino when his father kisses him or holds him on his knee. If she could, she would prevent Mark from ever touching him. Every one knows it; visitors see it for themselves; so there is no harm in my telling you. Isn’t it excessively odd? It comes from Beatrice’s being so religious, and so tremendously moral, and all that. And then, of course, we mustn’t forget,’ my companion added, unexpectedly, ‘that some of Mark’s ideas are – well, really – rather queer!’
I reflected, as we went into the house, where we found Ambient unfolding the Observer at the breakfast-table, that none of them were probably quite so queer as his sister. Mrs Ambient did not appear at breakfast, being rather tired with her ministrations, during the night, to Dolcino. Her husband mentioned, however, that she was hoping to go to church. I afterwards learned that she did go, but I may as well announce without delay that he and I did not accompany her. It was while the church-bell was murmuring in the distance that the author of Beltraffio led me forth for the ramble he had spoken of in his note. I will not attempt to say where we went, or to describe what we saw. We kept to the fields and copses and commons, and breathed the same sweet air as the nibbling donkeys and the browsing sheep, whose woolliness seemed to me, in those early days of my acquaintance with English objects, but a part of the general texture of the small, dense landscape, which looked as if the harvest were gathered by the shears. Everything was full of expression for Mark Ambient’s visitor – from the big, bandy-legged geese, whose whiteness was a ‘note’, amid all the tones of green, as they wandered beside a neat little oval pool, the foreground of a thatched and white-washed inn, with a grassy approach and a pictorial sign – from these humble wayside animals to the crests of high woods which let a gable or a pinnacle peep here and there, and looked, even at a distance, like trees of good company, conscious of an individual profile. I admired the hedgerows, I plucked the faint-hued heather, and I was for ever stopping to say how charming I thought the thread-like footpaths across the fields, which wandered, in a diagonal of finer grain, from one smooth stile to another. Mark Ambient was abundantly good-natured, and was as much entertained with my observations as I was with the literary allusions of the landscape. We sat and smoked upon stiles, broaching paradoxes in the decent English air; we took short cuts across a park or two, where the bracken was deep, and my companion nodded to the old woman at the gate; we skirted rank covers, which rustled here and there as we passed, and we stretched ourselves at last on a heathery hillside where, if the sun was not too hot, neither was the earth too cold, and where the country lay beneath us in a rich blue mist. Of course I had already told Ambient what I thought of his new novel, having the previous night read every word of the opening chapters before I went to bed.
‘I am not without hope of being able to make it my best,’ he said, as I went back to the subject, while we turned up our heels to the sky. ‘At least the people who dislike my prose – and there are a great many of them, I believe – will dislike this work most.’ This was the first time I had heard him allude to the people who couldn’t read him – a class which is supposed always to sit heavy upon the consciousness of the man of letters. A man organised for literature, as Mark Ambient was, must certainly have had the normal proportion of sensitiveness, of irritability; the artistic ego, capable in some cases of such monstrous development, must have been, in his composition, sufficiently erect and definite. I will not therefore go so far as to say that he never thought of his detractors, or that he had any illusions with regard to the number of his admirers (he could never so far have deceived himself as to believe he was popular); but I may at least affirm that adverse criticism, as I had occasion to perceive later, ruffled him visibly but little, that he had an air of thinking it quite natural he should be offensive to many minds, and that he very seldom talked about the newspapers – which, by the way, were always very stupid in regard to the author of Beltraffio. Of course he may have thought about them – the newspapers – night and day; the only point I wish to make is that he didn’t show it; while, at the same time, he didn’t strike one as a man who was on his guard. I may add that, as regards his hope of making the work on which he was then engaged the best of his books, it was only partly carried out. That place belongs, incontestably, to Beltraffio, in spite of the beauty of certain parts of its successor. I am pretty sure, however, that he had, at the moment of which I speak, no sense of failure; he was in love with his idea, which was indeed magnificent, and though for him, as (I suppose) for every artist, the act of execution had in it as much torment as joy, he saw his work growing a little every day and filling out the largest plan he had yet conceived. ‘I want to be truer than I have ever been,’ he said, settling himself on his back, with his hands clasped behind his head; ‘I want to give an impression of life itself. No, you may say what you will. I have always arranged things too much, always smoothed them down and rounded them off and tucked them in – done everything to them that life doesn’t do. I have been a slave to the old superstitions.’
‘You a slave, my dear Mark Ambient? You have the freest imagination of our day!’
‘All the more shame to me to have done some of the things I have! The reconciliation of the two women in Ginistrella, for instance – which could never really have taken place. That sort of thing is ignoble; I blush when I think of it! This new affair must be a golden vessel, filled with the purest distillation of the actual; and oh, how it bothers me, the shaping of the vase – the hammering of the metal! I have to hammer it so fine, so smooth; I don’t do more than an inch or two a day. And all the while I have to be so careful not to let a drop of the liquor escape! When I see the kind of things that Life does, I despair of ever catching her peculiar trick. She has an impudence, Life! If one risked a fiftieth part of the effects she risks! It takes ever so long to believe it. You don’t know yet, my dear fellow. It isn’t till one has been watching Life for forty years that one finds out half of what she’s up to! Therefore one’s earlier things must inevitably contain a mass of rot. And with what one sees, on one side, with its tongue in its cheek, defying one to be real enough, and on the other the bonnes gens rolling up their eyes at one’s cynicism, the situation has elements of the ludicrous which the artist himself is doubtless in a position to appreciate better than any one else. Of course one mustn’t bother about the bonnes gens,’ Mark Ambient went on, while my thoughts reverted to his ladylike wife, as interpreted by his remarkable sister.
‘To sink your shaft deep, and polish the plate through which people look into it – that’s what your work consists of,’ I remember remarking.
‘Ah, polishing one’s plate – that is the torment of execution!’ he exclaimed, jerking himself up and sitting forward. ‘The effort to arrive at a surface – if you think a surface necessary – some people don’t, happily for them! My
‘That’s very bad – very bad,’ I said, as gravely as I could.
‘Very bad? It’s the highest social offence I know; it ought – it absolutely ought – I’m quite serious – to be capital. If I knew I should be hanged else, I should manage to find the best word. The people who couldn’t – some of them don’t know it when they see it – would shut their inkstands, and we shouldn’t be deluged by this flood of rubbish!’
I will not attempt to repeat everything that passed between us or to explain just how it was that, every moment I spent in his company, Mark Ambient revealed to me more and more that he looked at all things from the standpoint of the artist, felt all life as literary material. There are people who will tell me that this is a poor way of feeling it, and I am not concerned to defend my statement – having space merely to remark that there is something to be said for any interest which makes a man feel so much. If Mark Ambient did really, as I suggested above, have imaginative contact with ‘all life’, I, for my part, envy him his arrière-pensée. At any rate it was through the receipt of this impression of him that by the time we returned I had acquired the feeling of intimacy I have noted. Before we got up for the homeward stretch he alluded to his wife’s having once – or perhaps more than once – asked him whether he should like Dolcino to read Beltraffio. I think he was unconscious at the moment of all that this conveyed to me – as well, doubtless, of my extreme curiosity to hear what he had replied. He had said that he hoped very much Dolcino would read all his works – when he was twenty; he should like him to know what his father had done. Before twenty it would be useless – he wouldn’t understand them.