THE AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO
by Henry James
CHAPTER I
Much as I wished to see him I had kept my letter of introduction
three weeks in my pocket-book. I was nervous and timid about
meeting him--conscious of youth and ignorance, convinced that he was
tormented by strangers, and especially by my country-people, and not
exempt from the suspicion that he had the irritability as well as the
dignity of genius. Moreover, the pleasure, if it should occur--for
I could scarcely believe it was near at hand--would be so great that
I wished to think of it in advance, to feel it there against my
breast, not to mix it with satisfactions more superficial and usual.
In the little game of new sensations that I was playing with my
ingenuous mind I wished to keep my visit to the author of
"Beltraffio" as a trump-card. It was three years after the
publication of that fascinating work, which I had read over five
times and which now, with my riper judgement, I admire on the whole
as much as ever. This will give you about the date of my first
visit--of any duration--to England for you will not have forgotten
the commotion, I may even say the scandal, produced by Mark Ambient's
masterpiece. It was the most complete presentation that had yet
been made of the gospel of art; it was a kind of aesthetic war-cry.
People had endeavoured to sail nearer to "truth" in the cut of their
sleeves and the shape of their sideboards; but there had not as yet
been, among English novels, such an example of beauty of execution
and "intimate" importance of theme. Nothing had been done in that
line from the point of view of art for art. That served me as a
fond formula, I may mention, when I was twenty-five; how much it
still serves I won't take upon myself to say--especially as the
discerning reader will be able to judge for himself. I had been in
England, briefly, a twelve-month before the time to which I began by
alluding, and had then learned that Mr. Ambient was in distant lands-
-was making a considerable tour in the East; so that there was
nothing to do but to keep my letter till I should be in London again.
It was of little use to me to hear that his wife had not left England
and was, with her little boy, their only child, spending the period
of her husband's absence--a good many months--at a small place they
had down in Surrey. They had a house in London, but actually in the
occupation of other persons. All this I had picked up, and also
that Mrs. Ambient was charming--my friend the American poet, from
whom I had my introduction, had never seen her, his relations with
the great man confined to the exchange of letters; but she wasn't,
after all, though she had lived so near the rose, the author of
"Beltraffio," and I didn't go down into Surrey to call on her. I
went to the Continent, spent the following winter in Italy, and
returned to London in May. My visit to Italy had opened my eyes to
a good many things, but to nothing more than the beauty of certain
pages in the works of Mark Ambient. I carried his productions about
in my trunk--they are not, as you know, very numerous, but he had
preluded to "Beltraffio" by, some exquisite things--and I used to
read them over in the evening at the inn. I used profoundly to
reason that the man who drew those characters and wrote that style
understood what he saw and knew what he was doing. This is my sole
ground for mentioning my winter in Italy. He had been there much in
former years--he was saturated with what painters call the "feeling"
of that classic land. He expressed the charm of the old hill-cities
of Tuscany, the look of certain lonely grass-grown places which, in
the past, had echoed with life; he understood the great artists, he
understood the spirit of the Renaissance; he understood everything.
The scene of one of his earlier novels was laid in Rome, the scene of
another in Florence, and I had moved through these cities in company
with the figures he set so firmly on their feet. This is why I was
now so much happier even than before in the prospect of making his
acquaintance.
At last, when I had dallied with my privilege long enough, I
despatched to him the missive of the American poet. He had already
gone out of town; he shrank from the rigour of the London "season"
and it was his habit to migrate on the first of June. Moreover I
had heard he was this year hard at work on a new book, into which
some of his impressions of the East were to be wrought, so that he
desired nothing so much as quiet days. That knowledge, however,
didn't prevent me--cet age est sans pitie--from sending with my
friend's letter a note of my own, in which I asked his leave to come
down and see him for an hour or two on some day to be named by
himself. My proposal was accompanied with a very frank expression
of my sentiments, and the effect of the entire appeal was to elicit
from the great man the kindest possible invitation. He would be
delighted to see me, especially if I should turn up on the following
Saturday and would remain till the Monday morning. We would take a
walk over the Surrey commons, and I could tell him all about the
other great man, the one in America. He indicated to me the best
train, and it may be imagined whether on the Saturday afternoon I was
punctual at Waterloo. He carried his benevolence to the point of
coming to meet me at the little station at which I was to alight, and
my heart beat very fast as I saw his handsome face, surmounted with a
soft wide-awake and which I knew by a photograph long since enshrined
on my mantel-shelf, scanning the carriage-windows as the train rolled
up. He recognised me as infallibly as I had recognised himself; he
appeared to know by instinct how a young American of critical
pretensions, rash youth, would look when much divided between
eagerness and modesty. He took me by the hand and smiled at me and
said: "You must be--a--YOU, I think!" and asked if I should mind
going on foot to his house, which would take but a few minutes. I
remember feeling it a piece of extraordinary affability that he
should give directions about the conveyance of my bag; I remember
feeling altogether very happy and rosy, in fact quite transported,
when he laid his hand on my shoulder as we came out of the station.
I surveyed him, askance, as we walked together; I had already, I had
indeed instantly, seen him as all delightful. His face is so well
known that I needn't describe it; he looked to me at once an English
gentleman and a man of genius, and I thought that a happy
combination. There was a brush of the Bohemian in his fineness; you
would easily have guessed his belonging to the artist guild. He was
addicted to velvet jackets, to cigarettes, to loose shirt-collars, to
looking a little dishevelled. His features, which were firm but not
perfectly regular, are fairly enough represented in his portraits;
but no portrait I have seen gives any idea of his expression. There
were innumerable things in it, and they chased each other in and out
of his face. I have seen people who were grave and gay in quick
alternation; but Mark Ambient was grave and gay at one and the same
moment. There were other strange oppositions and contradictions in
his slightly faded and fatigued countenance. He affected me somehow
as at once fresh and stale, at once anxious and indifferent. He had
evidently had an active past, which inspired one with curiosity; yet
what was that compared to his obvious future? He was just enough
above middle height to be spoken of as tall, and rather lean and long
in the flank. He had the friendliest frankest manner possible, and
yet I could see it cost him something. It cost him small spasms of
the self-consciousness that is an Englishman's last and dearest
treasure--the thing he pays his way through life by sacrificing small
pieces of even as the gallant but moneyless adventurer in "Quentin
Durward" broke off links of his brave gold chain. He had been
thirty-eight years old at the time "Beltraffio" was published. He
asked me about his friend in America, about the length of my stay in
England, about the last news in London and the people I had seen
there; and I remember looking for the signs of genius in the very
form of his questions and thinking I found it. I liked his voice as
if I were somehow myself having the use of it.
There was genius in his house too I thought when we got there; there
was imagination in the carpets and curtains, in the pictures and
books, in the garden behind it, where certain old brown walls were
muffled in creepers that appeared to me to have been copied from a
masterpiece of one of the pre-Raphaelites. That was the way many
things struck me at that time, in England--as reproductions of
something that existed primarily in art or literature. It was not
the picture, the poem, the fictive page, that seemed to me a copy;
these things were the originals, and the life of happy and
distinguished people was fashioned in their image. Mark Ambient
called his house a cottage, and I saw afterwards he was right for if
it hadn't been a cottage it must have been a villa, and a villa, in
England at least, was not a place in which one could fancy him at
home. But it was, to my vision, a cottage glorified and translated;
it was a palace of art, on a slightly reduced scale--and might
besides have been the dearest haunt of the old English genius loci.
It nestled under a cluster of magnificent beeches, it had little
creaking lattices that opened out of, or into, pendent mats of ivy,
and gables, and old red tiles, as well as a general aspect of being
painted in water-colours and inhabited by people whose lives would go
on in chapters and volumes. The lawn seemed to me of extraordinary
extent, the garden-walls of incalculable height, the whole air of the
place delightfully still, private, proper to itself. "My wife must
be somewhere about," Mark Ambient said as we went in. "We shall
find her perhaps--we've about an hour before dinner. She may be in
the garden. I'll show you my little place."
We passed through the house and into the grounds, as I should have
called them, which extended into the rear. They covered scarce
three or four acres, but, like the house, were very old and crooked
and full of traces of long habitation, with inequalities of level and
little flights of steps--mossy and cracked were these--which
connected the different parts with each other. The limits of the
place, cleverly dissimulated, were muffled in the great verdurous
screens. They formed, as I remember, a thick loose curtain at the
further end, in one of the folds of which, as it were, we presently
made out from afar a little group. "Ah there she is!" said Mark
Ambient; "and she has got the boy." He noted that last fact in a
slightly different tone from any in which he yet had spoken. I
wasn't fully aware of this at the time, but it lingered in my ear and
I afterwards understood it.
"Is it your son?" I inquired, feeling the question not to be
brilliant.
"Yes, my only child. He's always in his mother's pocket. She
coddles him too much." It came back to me afterwards too--the sound
of these critical words. They weren't petulant; they expressed
rather a sudden coldness, a mechanical submission. We went a few
steps further, and then he stopped short and called the boy,
beckoning to him repeatedly.
"Dolcino, come and see your daddy!" There was something in the way
he stood still and waited that made me think he did it for a purpose.
Mrs. Ambient had her arm round the child's waist, and he was leaning
against her knee; but though he moved at his father's call she gave
no sign of releasing him. A lady, apparently a neighbour, was
seated near her, and before them was a garden-table on which a tea-
service had been placed.
Mark Ambient called again, and Dolcino struggled in the maternal
embrace; but, too tightly held, he after two or three fruitless
efforts jerked about and buried his head deep in his mother's lap.
There was a certain awkwardness in the scene; I thought it odd Mrs.
Ambient should pay so little attention to her husband. But I
wouldn't for the world have betrayed my thought, and, to conceal it,
I began loudly to rejoice in the prospect of our having tea in the
garden. "Ah she won't let him come!" said my host with a sigh; and
we went our way till we reached the two ladies. He mentioned my
name to his wife, and I noticed that he addressed her as "My dear,"
very genially, without a trace of resentment at her detention of the
child. The quickness of the transition made me vaguely ask myself
if he were perchance henpecked--a shocking surmise which I instantly
dismissed. Mrs. Ambient was quite such a wife as I should have
expected him to have; slim and fair, with a long neck and pretty eyes
and an air of good breeding. She shone with a certain coldness and
practised in intercourse a certain bland detachment, but she was
clothed in gentleness as in one of those vaporous redundant scarves
that muffle the heroines of Gainsborough and Romney. She had also a
vague air of race, justified by my afterwards learning that she was
"connected with the aristocracy." I have seen poets married to women
of whom it was difficult to conceive that they should gratify the
poetic fancy--women with dull faces and glutinous minds, who were
none the less, however, excellent wives. But there was no obvious
disparity in Mark Ambient's union. My hostess--so far as she could
be called so--delicate and quiet, in a white dress, with her
beautiful child at her side, was worthy of the author of a work so
distinguished as "Beltraffio." Round her neck she wore a black
velvet ribbon, of which the long ends, tied behind, hung down her
back, and to which, in front, was attached a miniature portrait of
her little boy. Her smooth shining hair was confined in a net. She
gave me an adequate greeting, and Dolcino--I thought this small name
of endearment delightful--took advantage of her getting up to slip
away from her and go to his father, who seized him in silence and
held him high for a long moment, kissing him several times.
I had lost no time in observing that the child, not more than seven
years old, was extraordinarily beautiful. He had the face of an
angel--the eyes, the hair, the smile of innocence, the more than
mortal bloom. There was something that deeply touched, that almost
alarmed, in his beauty, composed, one would have said, of elements
too fine and pure for the breath of this world. When I spoke to him
and he came and held out his hand and smiled at me I felt a sudden
strange pity for him--quite as if he had been an orphan or a
changeling or stamped with some social stigma. It was impossible to
be in fact more exempt from these misfortunes, and yet, as one kissed
him, it was hard to keep from murmuring all tenderly "Poor little
devil!" though why one should have applied this epithet to a living
cherub is more than I can say. Afterwards indeed I knew a trifle
better; I grasped the truth of his being too fair to live, wondering
at the same time that his parents shouldn't have guessed it and have
been in proportionate grief and despair. For myself I had no doubt
of his evanescence, having already more than once caught in the fact
the particular infant charm that's as good as a death-warrant.
The lady who had been sitting with Mrs. Ambient was a jolly ruddy
personage in velveteen and limp feathers, whom I guessed to be the
vicar's wife--our hostess didn't introduce me--and who immediately
began to talk to Ambient about chrysanthemums. This was a safe
subject, and yet there was a certain surprise for me in seeing the
author of "Beltraffio" even in such superficial communion with the
Church of England. His writings implied so much detachment from that
institution, expressed a view of life so profane, as it were, so
independent and so little likely in general to be thought edifying,
that I should have expected to find him an object of horror to vicars
and their ladies--of horror repaid on his own part by any amount of
effortless derision. This proved how little I knew as yet of the
English people and their extraordinary talent for keeping up their
forms, as well as of some of the mysteries of Mark Ambient's hearth
and home. I found afterwards that he had, in his study, between
nervous laughs and free cigar-puffs, some wonderful comparisons for
his clerical neighbours; but meanwhile the chrysanthemums were a
source of harmony, he and the vicaress were equally attached to them,
and I was surprised at the knowledge they exhibited of this
interesting plant. The lady's visit, however, had presumably been
long, and she presently rose for departure and kissed Mrs. Ambient.
Mark started to walk with her to the gate of the grounds, holding
Dolcino by the hand.
"Stay with me, darling," Mrs. Ambient said to the boy, who had
surrendered himself to his father.
Mark paid no attention to the summons but Dolcino turned and looked
at her in shy appeal, "Can't I go with papa?"
"Not when I ask you to stay with me."
"But please don't ask me, mamma," said the child in his small clear
new voice.
"I must ask you when I want you. Come to me, dearest." And Mrs.
Ambient, who had seated herself again, held out her long slender
slightly too osseous hands.
Her husband stopped, his back turned to her, but without releasing
the child. He was still talking to the vicaress, but this good lady,
I think, had lost the thread of her attention. She looked at Mrs.
Ambient and at Dolcino, and then looked at me, smiling in a highly
amused cheerful manner and almost to a grimace.
"Papa," said the child, "mamma wants me not to go with you."
"He's very tired--he has run about all day. He ought to be quiet
till he goes to bed. Otherwise he won't sleep." These declarations
fell successively and very distinctly from Mrs. Ambient's lips.
Her husband, still without turning round, bent over the boy and
looked at him in silence. The vicaress gave a genial irrelevant
laugh and observed that he was a precious little pet. "Let him
choose," said Mark Ambient. "My dear little boy, will you go with me
or will you stay with your mother?"
"Oh it's a shame!" cried the vicar's lady with increased hilarity.
"Papa, I don't think I can choose," the child answered, making his
voice very low and confidential. "But I've been a great deal with
mamma to-day," he then added.
"And very little with papa! My dear fellow, I think you HAVE
chosen!" On which Mark Ambient walked off with his son, accompanied
by re-echoing but inarticulate comments from my fellow-visitor.
His wife had seated herself again, and her fixed eyes, bent on the
ground, expressed for a few moments so much mute agitation that
anything I could think of to say would be but a false note. Yet she
none the less quickly recovered herself, to express the sufficiently
civil hope that I didn't mind having had to walk from the station. I
reassured her on this point, and she went on: "We've got a thing
that might have gone for you, but my husband wouldn't order it."
After which and another longish pause, broken only by my plea that
the pleasure of a walk with our friend would have been quite what I
would have chosen, she found for reply: "I believe the Americans
walk very little."
"Yes, we always run," I laughingly allowed.
She looked at me seriously, yet with an absence in her pretty eyes.
"I suppose your distances are so great."
"Yes, but we break our marches! I can't tell you the pleasure to me
of finding myself here," I added. "I've the greatest admiration for
Mr. Ambient."
"He'll like that. He likes being admired."
"He must have a very happy life, then. He has many worshippers."
"Oh yes, I've seen some of them," she dropped, looking away, very far
from me, rather as if such a vision were before her at the moment.
It seemed to indicate, her tone, that the sight was scarcely
edifying, and I guessed her quickly enough to be in no great
intellectual sympathy with the author of "Beltraffio." I thought the
fact strange, but somehow, in the glow of my own enthusiasm, didn't
think it important it only made me wish rather to emphasise that
homage.
"For me, you know," I returned--doubtless with a due suffisance--
"he's quite the greatest of living writers."
"Of course I can't judge. Of course he's very clever," she said with
a patient cheer.
"He's nothing less than supreme, Mrs. Ambient! There are pages in
each of his books of a perfection classing them with the greatest
things. Accordingly for me to see him in this familiar way, in his
habit as he lives, and apparently to find the man as delightful as
the artist--well, I can't tell you how much too good to be true it
seems and how great a privilege I think it." I knew I was gushing,
but I couldn't help it, and what I said was a good deal less than
what I felt. I was by no means sure I should dare to say even so
much as this to the master himself, and there was a kind of rapture
in speaking it out to his wife which was not affected by the fact
that, as a wife, she appeared peculiar. She listened to me with her
face grave again and her lips a little compressed, listened as if in
no doubt, of course, that her husband was remarkable, but as if at
the same time she had heard it frequently enough and couldn't treat
it as stirring news. There was even in her manner a suggestion that
I was so young as to expose myself to being called forward--an
imputation and a word I had always loathed; as well as a hinted
reminder that people usually got over their early extravagance. "I
assure you that for me this is a red-letter day," I added.
She didn't take this up, but after a pause, looking round her, said
abruptly and a trifle dryly: "We're very much afraid about the fruit
this year."
My eyes wandered to the mossy mottled garden-walls, where plum-trees
and pears, flattened and fastened upon the rusty bricks, looked like
crucified figures with many arms. "Doesn't it promise well?"
"No, the trees look very dull. We had such late frosts."
Then there was another pause. She addressed her attention to the
opposite end of the grounds, kept it for her husband's return with
the child. "Is Mr. Ambient fond of gardening?" it occurred to me to
ask, irresistibly impelled as I felt myself, moreover, to bring the
conversation constantly back to him.
"He's very fond of plums," said his wife.
"Ah well, then, I hope your crop will be better than you fear. It's
a lovely old place," I continued. "The whole impression's that of
certain places he has described. Your house is like one of his
pictures."
She seemed a bit frigidly amused at my glow. "It's a pleasant little
place. There are hundreds like it."
"Oh it has his TONE," I laughed, but sounding my epithet and
insisting on my point the more sharply that my companion appeared to
see in my appreciation of her simple establishment a mark of mean
experience.
It was clear I insisted too much. "His tone?" she repeated with a
harder look at me and a slightly heightened colour.
"Surely he has a tone, Mrs. Ambient."
"Oh yes, he has indeed! But I don't in the least consider that I'm
living in one of his books at all. I shouldn't care for that in the
least," she went on with a smile that had in some degree the effect
of converting her really sharp protest into an insincere joke. "I'm
afraid I'm not very literary. And I'm not artistic," she stated.
"I'm very sure you're not ignorant, not stupid," I ventured to reply,
with the accompaniment of feeling immediately afterwards that I had
been both familiar and patronising. My only consolation was in the
sense that she had begun it, had fairly dragged me into it. She had
thrust forward her limitations.
"Well, whatever I am I'm very different from my husband. If you like
him you won't like me. You needn't say anything. Your liking me
isn't in the least necessary!"
"Don't defy me!" I could but honourably make answer.
She looked as if she hadn't heard me, which was the best thing she
could do; and we sat some time without further speech. Mrs. Ambient
had evidently the enviable English quality of being able to be mute
without unrest. But at last she spoke--she asked me if there seemed
many people in town. I gave her what satisfaction I could on this
point, and we talked a little of London and of some of its
characteristics at that time of the year. At the end of this I came
back irrepressibly to Mark.
"Doesn't he like to be there now? I suppose he doesn't find the
proper quiet for his work. I should think his things had been
written for the most part in a very still place. They suggest a
great stillness following on a kind of tumult. Don't you think so?"
I laboured on. "I suppose London's a tremendous place to collect
impressions, but a refuge like this, in the country, must be better
for working them up. Does he get many of his impressions in London,
should you say?" I proceeded from point to point in this malign
inquiry simply because my hostess, who probably thought me an odious
chattering person, gave me time; for when I paused--I've not
represented my pauses--she simply continued to let her eyes wander
while her long fair fingers played with the medallion on her neck.
When I stopped altogether, however, she was obliged to say something,
and what she said was that she hadn't the least idea where her
husband got his impressions. This made me think her, for a moment,
positively disagreeable; delicate and proper and rather
aristocratically fine as she sat there. But I must either have lost
that view a moment later or been goaded by it to further aggression,
for I remember asking her if our great man were in a good vein of
work and when we might look for the appearance of the book on which
he was engaged. I've every reason now to know that she found me
insufferable.
She gave a strange small laugh as she said: "I'm afraid you think I
know much more about my husband's work than I do. I haven't the
least idea what he's doing," she then added in a slightly different,
that is a more explanatory, tone and as if from a glimpse of the
enormity of her confession. "I don't read what he writes."
She didn't succeed, and wouldn't even had she tried much harder, in
making this seem to me anything less than monstrous. I stared at her
and I think I blushed. "Don't you admire his genius? Don't you
admire 'Beltraffio'?"
She waited, and I wondered what she could possibly say. She didn't
speak, I could see, the first words that rose to her lips; she
repeated what she had said a few minutes before. "Oh of course he's
very clever!" And with this she got up; our two absentees had
reappeared.
