Books: Madame de Mauves
H >>
Henry James >> Madame de Mauves
Pages:
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7
Fortune had played Madame Clairin a terrible trick, but had found an
adversary and not a victim. Though quite without beauty she had always
had what is called the grand air, and her air from this time forth was
grander than ever. As she trailed about in her sable furbelows, tossing
back her well-dressed head and holding up her vigilant long-handled
eyeglass, she seemed to be sweeping the whole field of society and
asking herself where she should pluck her revenge. Suddenly she espied
it, ready made to her hand, in poor Longmore's wealth and amiability.
American dollars and American complaisance had made her brother's
fortune; why shouldn't they make hers? She overestimated the wealth and
misinterpreted the amiability; for she was sure a man could neither be
so contented without being rich nor so "backward" without being weak.
Longmore met her advances with a formal politeness that covered a good
deal of unflattering discomposure. She made him feel deeply
uncomfortable; and though he was at a loss to conceive how he could be
an object of interest to a sharp Parisienne he had an indefinable sense
of being enclosed in a magnetic circle, of having become the victim of
an incantation. If Madame Clairin could have fathomed his Puritanic soul
she would have laid by her wand and her book and dismissed him for an
impossible subject. She gave him a moral chill, and he never named her
to himself save as that dreadful woman--that awful woman. He did justice
to her grand air, but for his pleasure he preferred the small air of
Madame de Mauves; and he never made her his bow, after standing frigidly
passive for five minutes to one of her gracious overtures to intimacy,
without feeling a peculiar desire to ramble away into the forest, fling
himself down on the warm grass and, staring up at the blue sky, forget
that there were any women in nature who didn't please like the swaying
tree-tops. One day, on his arrival at the house, she met him in the
court with the news that her sister-in-law was shut up with a headache
and that his visit must be for HER. He followed her into the drawing-
room with the best grace at his command, and sat twirling his hat for
half an hour. Suddenly he understood her; her caressing cadences were so
almost explicit an invitation to solicit the charming honour of her
hand. He blushed to the roots of his hair and jumped up with
uncontrollable alacrity; then, dropping a glance at Madame Clairin, who
sat watching him with hard eyes over the thin edge of her smile,
perceived on her brow a flash of unforgiving wrath. It was not pleasing
in itself, but his eyes lingered a moment, for it seemed to show off her
character. What he saw in the picture frightened him and he felt himself
murmur "Poor Madame de Mauves!" His departure was abrupt, and this time
he really went into the forest and lay down on the grass.
After which he admired his young countrywoman more than ever; her
intrinsic clearness shone out to him even through the darker shade cast
over it. At the end of a month he received a letter from a friend with
whom he had arranged a tour through the Low Countries, reminding him of
his promise to keep their tryst at Brussels. It was only after his
answer was posted that he fully measured the zeal with which he had
declared that the journey must either be deferred or abandoned--since he
couldn't possibly leave Saint-Germain. He took a walk in the forest and
asked himself if this were indeed portentously true. Such a truth
somehow made it surely his duty to march straight home and put together
his effects. Poor Webster, who, he knew, had counted ardently on this
excursion, was the best of men; six weeks ago he would have gone through
anything to join poor Webster. It had never been in his books to throw
overboard a friend whom he had loved ten years for a married woman whom
he had six weeks--well, admired. It was certainly beyond question that
he hung on at Saint-Germain because this admirable married woman was
there; but in the midst of so much admiration what had become of his
fine old power to conclude? This was the conduct of a man not judging
but drifting, and he had pretended never to drift. If she were as
unhappy as he believed the active sympathy of such a man would help her
very little more than his indifference; if she were less so she needed
no help and could dispense with his professions. He was sure moreover
that if she knew he was staying on her account she would be extremely
annoyed. This very feeling indeed had much to do with making it hard to
go; her displeasure would be the flush on the snow of the high cold
stoicism that touched him to the heart. At moments withal he assured
himself that staying to watch her--and what else did it come to?--was
simply impertinent; it was gross to keep tugging at the cover of a book
so intentionally closed. Then inclination answered that some day her
self-support would fail, and he had a vision of this exquisite creature
calling vainly for help. He would just be her friend to any length, and
it was unworthy of either to think about consequences. He was a friend,
however, who nursed a brooding regret for his not having known her five
years earlier, as well as a particular objection to those who had
smartly anticipated him. It seemed one of fortune's most mocking strokes
that she should be surrounded by persons whose only merit was that they
threw every side of her, as she turned in her pain, into radiant relief.
Our young man's growing irritation made it more and more difficult for
him to see any other merit than this in Richard de Mauves. And yet,
disinterestedly, it would have been hard to give a name to the pitiless
perversity lighted by such a conclusion, and there were times when
Longmore was almost persuaded against his finer judgement that he was
really the most considerate of husbands and that it was not a man's
fault if his wife's love of life had pitched itself once for all in the
minor key. The Count's manners were perfect, his discretion
irreproachable, and he seemed never to address his companion but,
sentimentally speaking, hat in hand. His tone to Longmore--as the latter
was perfectly aware--was that of a man of the world to a man not quite
of the world; but what it lacked in true frankness it made up in easy
form. "I can't thank you enough for having overcome my wife's shyness,"
he more than once declared. "If we left her to do as she pleased she
would--in her youth and her beauty--bury herself all absurdly alive.
Come often, and bring your good friends and compatriots--some of them
are so amusing. She'll have nothing to do with mine, but perhaps you'll
be able to offer her better son affaire."
M. de Mauves made these speeches with a bright assurance very amazing to
our hero, who had an innocent belief that a man's head may point out to
him the shortcomings of his heart and make him ashamed of them. He
couldn't fancy him formed both to neglect his wife and to take the
derisive view of her minding it. Longmore had at any rate an exasperated
sense that this nobleman thought rather the less of their interesting
friend on account of that very same fine difference of nature which so
deeply stirred his own sympathies. He was rarely present during the
sessions of the American visitor, and he made a daily journey to Paris,
where he had de gros soucis d'affaires as he once mentioned--with an
all-embracing flourish and not in the least in the tone of apology. When
he appeared it was late in the evening and with an imperturbable air of
being on the best of terms with every one and every thing which was
peculiarly annoying if you happened to have a tacit quarrel with him. If
he was an honest man he was an honest man somehow spoiled for
confidence. Something he had, however, that his critic vaguely envied,
something in his address, splendidly positive, a manner rounded and
polished by the habit of conversation and the friction of full
experience, an urbanity exercised for his own sake, not for his
neighbour's, which seemed the fruit of one of those strong temperaments
that rule the inward scene better than the best conscience. The Count
had plainly no sense for morals, and poor Longmore, who had the finest,
would have been glad to borrow his recipe for appearing then so to range
the whole scale of the senses. What was it that enabled him, short of
being a monster with visibly cloven feet and exhaling brimstone, to
misprize so cruelly a nature like his wife's and to walk about the world
with such a handsome invincible grin? It was the essential grossness of
his imagination, which had nevertheless helped him to such a store of
neat speeches. He could be highly polite and could doubtless be damnably
impertinent, but the life of the spirit was a world as closed to him as
the world of great music to a man without an ear. It was ten to one he
didn't in the least understand how his wife felt; he and his smooth
sister had doubtless agreed to regard their relative as a Puritanical
little person, of meagre aspirations and few talents, content with
looking at Paris from the terrace and, as a special treat, having a
countryman very much like herself to regale her with innocent echoes of
their native wit. M. de Mauves was tired of his companion; he liked
women who could, frankly, amuse him better. She was too dim, too
delicate, too modest; she had too few arts, too little coquetry, too
much charity. Lighting a cigar some day while he summed up his
situation, her husband had probably decided she was incurably stupid. It
was the same taste, in essence, our young man moralised, as the taste
for M. Gerome and M. Baudry in painting and for M. Gustave Flaubert and
M. Charles Baudelaire in literature. The Count was a pagan and his wife
a Christian, and between them an impassable gulf. He was by race and
instinct a grand seigneur. Longmore had often heard of that historic
type, and was properly grateful for an opportunity to examine it
closely. It had its elegance of outline, but depended on spiritual
sources so remote from those of which he felt the living gush in his own
soul that he found himself gazing at it, in irreconcileable antipathy,
through a dim historic mist. "I'm a modern bourgeois," he said, "and not
perhaps so good a judge of how far a pretty woman's tongue may go at
supper before the mirrors properly crack to hear. But I've not met one
of the rarest of women without recognising her, without making my
reflexion that, charm for charm, such a maniere d'etre is more
'fetching' even than the worst of Theresa's songs sung by a dissipated
duchess. Wit for wit, I think mine carries me further." It was easy
indeed to perceive that, as became a grand seigneur, M. de Mauves had a
stock of social principles. He wouldn't especially have desired perhaps
that his wife should compete in amateur operettas with the duchesses in
question, for the most part of comparatively recent origin; but he held
that a gentleman may take his amusement where he finds it, that he is
quite at liberty not to find it at home, and that even an adoptive
daughter of his house who should hang her head and have red eyes and
allow herself to make any other response to officious condolence than
that her husband's amusements were his own affair, would have forfeited
every claim to having her finger-tips bowed over and kissed. And yet in
spite of this definite faith Longmore figured him much inconvenienced by
the Countess's avoidance of betrayals. Did it dimly occur to him that
the principle of this reserve was self-control and not self-effacement?
She was a model to all the inferior matrons of his line, past and to
come, and an occasional "scene" from her at a manageable hour would have
had something reassuring--would have attested her stupidity rather
better than this mere polish of her patience.
Longmore would have given much to be able to guess how this latter
secret worked, and he tried more than once, though timidly and awkwardly
enough, to make out the game she was playing. She struck him as having
long resisted the force of cruel evidence, and, as though succumbing to
it at last, having denied herself on simple grounds of generosity the
right to complain. Her faith might have perished, but the sense of her
own old deep perversity remained. He believed her thus quite capable of
reproaching herself with having expected too much and of trying to
persuade herself out of her bitterness by saying that her hopes had been
vanities and follies and that what was before her was simply Life. "I
hate tragedy," she once said to him; "I'm a dreadful coward about having
to suffer or to bleed. I've always tried to believe that--without base
concessions--such extremities may always somehow be dodged or
indefinitely postponed. I should be willing to buy myself off, from
having ever to be OVERWHELMED, by giving up--well, any amusement you
like." She lived evidently in nervous apprehension of being fatally
convinced--of seeing to the end of her deception. Longmore, when he
thought of this, felt the force of his desire to offer her something of
which she could be as sure as of the sun in heaven.
IV
His friend Webster meanwhile lost no time in accusing him of the basest
infidelity and in asking him what he found at suburban Saint-Germain to
prefer to Van Eyck and Memling, Rubens and Rembrandt. A day or two after
the receipt of this friend's letter he took a walk with Madame de Mauves
in the forest. They sat down on a fallen log and she began to arrange
into a bouquet the anemones and violets she had gathered. "I've a word
here," he said at last, "from a friend whom I some time ago promised to
join in Brussels. The time has come--it has passed. It finds me terribly
unwilling to leave Saint-Germain."
She looked up with the immediate interest she always showed in his
affairs, but with no hint of a disposition to make a personal
application of his words. "Saint-Germain is pleasant enough, but are you
doing yourself justice? Shan't you regret in future days that instead of
travelling and seeing cities and monuments and museums and improving
your mind you simply sat here--for instance--on a log and pulled my
flowers to pieces?"
"What I shall regret in future days," he answered after some hesitation,
"is that I should have sat here--sat here so much--and never have shown
what's the matter with me. I'm fond of museums and monuments and of
improving my mind, and I'm particularly fond of my friend Webster. But I
can't bring myself to leave Saint-Germain without asking you a question.
You must forgive me if it's indiscreet and be assured that curiosity was
never more respectful. Are you really as unhappy as I imagine you to
be?"
She had evidently not expected his appeal, and, making her change
colour, it took her unprepared. "If I strike you as unhappy," she none
the less simply said, "I've been a poorer friend to you than I wished to
be."
"I, perhaps, have been a better friend of yours than you've supposed,"
he returned. "I've admired your reserve, your courage, your studied
gaiety. But I've felt the existence of something beneath them that was
more YOU--more you as I wished to know you--than they were; some
trouble in you that I've permitted myself to hate and resent."
She listened all gravely, but without an air of offence, and he felt
that while he had been timorously calculating the last consequences of
friendship she had quietly enough accepted them. "You surprise me," she
said slowly, and her flush still lingered. "But to refuse to answer you
would confirm some impression in you even now much too strong. Any
'trouble'--if you mean any unhappiness--that one can sit comfortably
talking about is an unhappiness with distinct limitations. If I were
examined before a board of commissioners for testing the felicity of
mankind I'm sure I should be pronounced a very fortunate woman." There
was something that deeply touched him in her tone, and this quality
pierced further as she continued. "But let me add, with all gratitude
for your sympathy, that it's my own affair altogether. It needn't
disturb you, my dear sir," she wound up with a certain quaintness of
gaiety, "for I've often found myself in your company contented enough
and diverted enough."
"Well, you're a wonderful woman," the young man declared, "and I admire
you as I've never admired any one. You're wiser than anything I, for
one, can say to you; and what I ask of you is not to let me advise or
console you, but simply thank you for letting me know you." He had
intended no such outburst as this, but his voice rang loud and he felt
an unfamiliar joy as he uttered it.
She shook her head with some impatience. "Let us be friends--as I
supposed we were going to be--without protestations and fine words. To
have you paying compliments to my wisdom--that would be real
wretchedness. I can dispense with your admiration better than the
Flemish painters can--better than Van Eyck and Rubens, in spite of all
their worshippers. Go join your friend--see everything, enjoy
everything, learn everything, and write me an excellent letter, brimming
over with your impressions. I'm extremely fond of the Dutch painters,"
she added with the faintest quaver in the world, an impressible break of
voice that Longmore had noticed once or twice before and had interpreted
as the sudden weariness, the controlled convulsion, of a spirit self-
condemned to play a part.
"I don't believe you care a button for the Dutch painters," he said with
a laugh. "But I shall certainly write you a letter."
She rose and turned homeward, thoughtfully rearranging her flowers as
she walked. Little was said; Longmore was asking himself with an
agitation of his own in the unspoken words whether all this meant simply
that he was in love. He looked at the rooks wheeling against the golden-
hued sky, between the tree-tops, but not at his companion, whose
personal presence seemed lost in the felicity she had created. Madame de
Mauves was silent and grave--she felt she had almost grossly failed and
she was proportionately disappointed. An emotional friendship she had
not desired; her scheme had been to pass with her visitor as a placid
creature with a good deal of leisure which she was disposed to devote to
profitable conversation of an impersonal sort. She liked him extremely,
she felt in him the living force of something to which, when she made up
her girlish mind that a needy nobleman was the ripest fruit of time, she
had done too scant justice. They went through the little gate in the
garden-wall and approached the house. On the terrace Madame Clairin was
entertaining a friend--a little elderly gentleman with a white moustache
and an order in his buttonhole. Madame de Mauves chose to pass round the
house into the court; whereupon her sister-in-law, greeting Longmore
with an authoritative nod, lifted her eye-glass and stared at them as
they went by. Longmore heard the little old gentleman uttering some old-
fashioned epigram about "la vieille galanterie francaise"--then by a
sudden impulse he looked at Madame de Mauves and wondered what she was
doing in such a world. She stopped before the house, not asking him to
come in. "I hope you will act on my advice and waste no more time at
Saint-Germain."
For an instant there rose to his lips some faded compliment about his
time not being wasted, but it expired before the simple sincerity of her
look. She stood there as gently serious as the angel of
disinterestedness, and it seemed to him he should insult her by treating
her words as a bait for flattery. "I shall start in a day or two," he
answered, "but I won't promise you not to come back."
"I hope not," she said simply. "I expect to be here a long time."
"I shall come and say good-bye," he returned--which she appeared to
accept with a smile as she went in.
He stood a moment, then walked slowly homeward by the terrace. It seemed
to him that to leave her thus, for a gain on which she herself insisted,
was to know her better and admire her more. But he was aware of a vague
ferment of feeling which her evasion of his question half an hour before
had done more to deepen than to allay. In the midst of it suddenly, on
the great terrace of the Chateau, he encountered M. de Mauves, planted
there against the parapet and finishing a cigar. The Count, who, he
thought he made out, had an air of peculiar affability, offered him his
white plump hand. Longmore stopped; he felt a sharp, a sore desire to
cry out to him that he had the most precious wife in the world, that he
ought to be ashamed of himself not to know it, and that for all his
grand assurance he had never looked down into the depths of her eyes.
Richard de Mauves, we have seen, considered he had; but there was
doubtless now something in this young woman's eyes that had not been
there five years before. The two men conversed formally enough, and M.
de Mauves threw off a light bright remark or two about his visit to
America. His tone was not soothing to Longmore's excited sensibilities.
He seemed to have found the country a gigantic joke, and his blandness
went but so far as to allow that jokes on that scale are indeed
inexhaustible. Longmore was not by habit an aggressive apologist for the
seat of his origin, but the Count's easy diagnosis confirmed his worst
estimate of French superficiality. He had understood nothing, felt
nothing, learned nothing, and his critic, glancing askance at his
aristocratic profile, declared that if the chief merit of a long
pedigree was to leave one so fatuously stupid he thanked goodness the
Longmores had emerged from obscurity in the present century and in the
person of an enterprising timber-merchant. M. de Mauves dwelt of course
on that prime oddity of the American order--the liberty allowed the
fairer half of the unmarried young, and confessed to some personal study
of the "occasions" it offered to the speculative visitor; a line of
research in which, during a fortnight's stay, he had clearly spent his
most agreeable hours. "I'm bound to admit," he said, "that in every case
I was disarmed by the extreme candour of the young lady, and that they
took care of themselves to better purpose than I have seen some mammas
in France take care of them." Longmore greeted this handsome concession
with the grimmest of smiles and damned his impertinent patronage.
Mentioning, however, at last that he was about to leave Saint-Germain,
he was surprised, without exactly being flattered, by his interlocutor's
quickened attention. "I'm so very sorry; I hoped we had you for the
whole summer." Longmore murmured something civil and wondered why M. de
Mauves should care whether he stayed or went. "You've been a real
resource to Madame de Mauves," the Count added; "I assure you I've
mentally blessed your visits."
"They were a great pleasure to me," Longmore said gravely. "Some day I
expect to come back."
"Pray do"--and the Count made a great and friendly point of it. "You see
the confidence I have in you." Longmore said nothing and M. de Mauves
puffed his cigar reflectively and watched the smoke. "Madame de Mauves,"
he said at last, "is a rather singular person." And then while our young
man shifted his position and wondered whether he was going to "explain"
Madame de Mauves, "Being, as you are, her fellow countryman," this
lady's husband pursued, "I don't mind speaking frankly. She's a little
overstrained; the most charming woman in the world, as you see, but a
little volontaire and morbid. Now you see she has taken this
extraordinary fancy for solitude. I can't get her to go anywhere, to see
any one. When my friends present themselves she's perfectly polite, but
it cures them of coming again. She doesn't do herself justice, and I
expect every day to hear two or three of them say to me, 'Your wife's
jolie a croquer: what a pity she hasn't a little esprit.' You must have
found out that she has really a great deal. But, to tell the whole
truth, what she needs is to forget herself. She sits alone for hours
poring over her English books and looking at life through that terrible
brown fog they seem to me--don't they?--to fling over the world. I doubt
if your English authors," the Count went on with a serenity which
Longmore afterwards characterised as sublime, "are very sound reading
for young married women. I don't pretend to know much about them; but I
remember that not long after our marriage Madame de Mauves undertook to
read me one day some passages from a certain Wordsworth--a poet highly
esteemed, it appears, chez vous. It was as if she had taken me by the
nape of the neck and held my head for half an hour over a basin of soupe
aux choux: I felt as if we ought to ventilate the drawing-room before
any one called. But I suppose you know him--ce genie-la. Every nation
has its own ideals of every kind, but when I remember some of OUR
charming writers! I think at all events my wife never forgave me and
that it was a real shock to her to find she had married a man who had
very much the same taste in literature as in cookery. But you're a man
of general culture, a man of the world," said M. de Mauves, turning to
Longmore but looking hard at the seal of his watchguard. "You can talk
about everything, and I'm sure you like Alfred de Musset as well as
Monsieur Wordsworth. Talk to her about everything you can, Alfred de
Musset included. Bah! I forgot you're going. Come back then as soon as
possible and report on your travels. If my wife too would make a little
voyage it would do her great good. It would enlarge her horizon"--and M.
de Mauves made a series of short nervous jerks with his stick in the
air--"it would wake up her imagination. She's too much of one piece, you
know--it would show her how much one may bend without breaking." He
paused a moment and gave two or three vigorous puffs. Then turning to
his companion again with eyebrows expressively raised: "I hope you
admire my candour. I beg you to believe I wouldn't say such things to
one of US!"
Pages:
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7