CHAPTER III
I had an odd colloquy 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 dust-
pans and feather-brushes. I almost hesitated to light a cigarette
and was doubly startled when, in the act of doing so, I suddenly saw
the sister of my host, who had, at the best, something of the
weirdness of an apparition, stand 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; her chin rested on 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 she had heard he was better.
She was able to gratify this trust--she spoke as if we might expect
to see him during the day. We walked through the shrubberies
together and she gave me further light on her brother's household,
which offered me an opportunity to repeat to her what his wife had so
startled and distressed me with the night before. WAS it the sorry
truth that she thought his productions objectionable?
"She doesn't usually come out with that so soon!" Miss Ambient
returned in answer to my breathlessness.
"Poor lady," I pleaded, "she saw I'm a fanatic."
"Yes, she won't like you for that. But you mustn't mind, if the rest
of us like you! Beatrice thinks a work of art ought to have a
'purpose.' But she's a charming woman--don't you think her charming?
I find in her quite the grand air."
"She's very beautiful," I produced with an effort; while I reflected
that though it was apparently true that Mark Ambient was mismated it
was also perceptible that his sister was perfidious. She assured me
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 in all conscience enough, the trifle of a
woman's regarding her husband's mind as a well of corruption, and she
seemed much 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 kicks
over! And poor Mark doesn't make love to other people either. You
might think he would, but 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,
his 'ideals,' poor little brat, his principles. It's as if it were a
subtle poison or a contagion--something that would rub off on his
tender sensibility when his father kisses him or holds him on his
knee. If she could she'd prevent Mark from even so much as touching
him. Every one knows it--visitors see it for themselves; so there's
no harm in my telling you. Isn't it excessively odd? It comes from
Beatrice's being so religious and so tremendously moral--so a cheval
on fifty thousand riguardi. And then of course we mustn't forget,"
my companion added, a little unexpectedly, to this polyglot
proposition, "that some of Mark's ideas are--well, really--rather
impossible, don't you know?"
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 "impossible, don't you know?" as his sister. Mrs.
Ambient, a little "the worse," as was mentioned, for her
ministrations, during the night, to Dolcino, didn't appear at
breakfast. Her husband described her, however, as hoping to go to
church. I afterwards learnt that she did go, but nothing naturally
was less on the cards than that we should accompany her. It was
while the church-bell droned near at hand that the author of
"Beltraffio" led me forth for the ramble he had spoken of in his
note. I shall attempt here no record of where we went or of 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 acquaintance with
English objects, but part of the general texture of the small dense
landscape, which looked as if the harvest were gathered by the shears
and with all nature bleating and braying for the violence.
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 whitewashed 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 hedge-rows, 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 struck, dear man,
with some of my observations as I was with the literary allusions of
the landscape. We sat and smoked on 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 coverts which rustled here and there as we
passed, and we stretched ourselves at last on a heathery hillside
where if the sun wasn't 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 him what I thought of his new novel, having the
previous night read every word of the opening chapters before I went
to bed.
"I'm not without hope of being able to make it decent enough," 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 stuff--and there are
plenty of them, I believe--will dislike this thing (if it does turn
out well) most." This was the first time I had heard him allude to
the people who couldn't read him--a class so generally conceived to
sit heavy on the consciousness of the man of letters. A being
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 active. I won't
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 at least then judged (and had occasion to be
sure later on) that stupidity ruffled him visibly but little, that he
had an air of thinking it quite natural he should leave many simple
folk, tasting of him, as simple as ever he found them, and that he
very seldom talked about the newspapers, which, by the way, were
always even abnormally vulgar about him. Of course he may have
thought them over--the newspapers--night and day; the only point I
make is that he didn't show it while at the same time he didn't
strike one as a man actively on his guard. I may add that, touching
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 quite believe, however, that he had at the
moment of which I speak no sense of having declined; he was in love
with his idea, which was indeed magnificent, and though for him, as I
suppose for every sane artist, the act of execution had in it as much
torment as joy, he saw his result grow like the crescent of the young
moon and promise to fill the disk. "I want to be truer than I've
ever been," he said, settling himself on his back with his hands
clasped behind his head; "I want to give the impression of life
itself. No, you may say what you will, I've 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've been a
slave to the old superstitions."
"You a slave, my dear Mark Ambient? You've 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 'Natalina,' for instance,
which could never really have taken place. That sort of thing's
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 worries 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
Life herself, the brazen hussy, 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 youth. It isn't till one
has been watching her some 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 poor reproducer
himself is doubtless in a position to appreciate better than any one
else. Of course one mustn't worry 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
ingeniously observing.
"Ah polishing one's plate--that's the torment of execution!" he
exclaimed, jerking himself up and sitting forward. "The effort to
arrive at a surface, if you think anything of that decent sort
necessary--some people don't, happily for them! My dear fellow, if
you could see the surface I dream of as compared with the one with
which I've to content myself. Life's really too short for art--one
hasn't time to make one's shell ideally hard. Firm and bright, firm
and bright is very well to say--the devilish thing has a way
sometimes of being bright, and even of being hard, as mere tough
frozen pudding is hard, without being firm. When I rap it with my
knuckles it doesn't give the right sound. There are horrible sandy
stretches where I've taken the wrong turn because I couldn't for the
life of me find the right. If you knew what a dunce I am sometimes!
Such things figure to me now base pimples and ulcers on the brow of
beauty!"
"They're very bad, very bad," I said as gravely as I could.
"Very bad? They're the highest social offence I know; it ought--it
absolutely ought; I'm quite serious--to be capital. If I knew I
should be publicly thrashed else I'd manage to find the true word.
The people who can't--some of them don't so much as know it when they
see it--would shut their inkstands, and we shouldn't be deluged by
this flood of rubbish!"
I shall not attempt to repeat everything that passed between us, nor
to explain just how it was that, every moment I spent in his company,
Mark Ambient revealed to me more and more the consistency of his
creative spirit, the spirit in him that felt all life as plastic
material. I could but envy him the force of that passion, and it was
at any rate through the receipt of this impression that by the time
we returned I had gained the sense of intimacy with him that 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." He must have been unaware
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 how
much he hoped 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.
"And meanwhile do you propose to hide them--to lock them up in a
drawer?" Mrs. Ambient had proceeded.
"Oh no--we must simply tell him they're not intended for small boys.
If you bring him up properly after that he won't touch them."
To this Mrs. Ambient had made answer that it might be very awkward
when he was about fifteen, say; and I asked her husband if it were
his opinion in general, then, that young people shouldn't read
novels.
"Good ones--certainly not!" said my companion. I suppose I had had
other views, for I remember saying that for myself I wasn't sure it
was bad for them if the novels were "good" to the right intensity of
goodness. "Bad for THEM, I don't say so much!" my companion
returned. "But very bad, I'm afraid, for the poor dear old novel
itself." That oblique accidental allusion to his wife's attitude was
followed by a greater breadth of reference as we walked home. "The
difference between us is simply the opposition between two distinct
ways of looking at the world, which have never succeeded in getting
on together, or in making any kind of common household, since the
beginning of time. They've borne all sorts of names, and my wife
would tell you it's the difference between Christian and Pagan. I
may be a pagan, but I don't like the name; it sounds sectarian. She
thinks me at any rate no better than an ancient Greek. It's the
difference between making the most of life and making the least, so
that you'll get another better one in some other time and place.
Will it be a sin to make the most of that one, too, I wonder; and
shall we have to be bribed off in the future state as well as in the
present? Perhaps I care too much for beauty--I don't know, I doubt
if a poor devil CAN; I delight in it, I adore it, I think of it
continually, I try to produce it, to reproduce it. My wife holds
that we shouldn't cultivate or enjoy it without extraordinary
precautions and reserves. She's always afraid of it, always on her
guard. I don't know what it can ever have done to her, what grudge
it owes her or what resentment rides. And she's so pretty, too,
herself! Don't you think she's lovely? She was at any rate when we
married. At that time I wasn't aware of that difference I speak of--
I thought it all came to the same thing: in the end, as they say.
Well, perhaps it will in the end. I don't know what the end will be.
Moreover, I care for seeing things as they are; that's the way I try
to show them in any professed picture. But you mustn't talk to Mrs.
Ambient about things as they are. She has a mortal dread of things
as they are."
"She's afraid of them for Dolcino," I said: surprised a moment
afterwards at being in a position--thanks to Miss Ambient--to be so
explanatory; and surprised even now that Mark shouldn't have shown
visibly that he wondered what the deuce I knew about it. But he
didn't; he simply declared with a tenderness that touched me: "Ah
nothing shall ever hurt HIM!"
He told me more about his wife before we arrived at the gate of home,
and if he be judged to have aired overmuch his grievance I'm afraid I
must admit that he had some of the foibles as well as the gifts of
the artistic temperament; adding, however, instantly that hitherto,
to the best of my belief, he had rarely let this particular cat out
of the bag. "She thinks me immoral--that's the long and short of
it," he said as we paused outside a moment and his hand rested on one
of the bars of his gate; while his conscious expressive perceptive
eyes--the eyes of a foreigner, I had begun to account them, much more
than of the usual Englishman--viewing me now evidently as quite a
familiar friend, took part in the declaration. "It's very strange
when one thinks it all over, and there's a grand comicality in it
that I should like to bring out. She's a very nice woman,
extraordinarily well-behaved, upright and clever and with a
tremendous lot of good sense about a good many matters. Yet her
conception of a novel--she has explained it to me once or twice, and
she doesn't do it badly as exposition--is a thing so false that it
makes me blush. It's a thing so hollow, so dishonest, so lying, in
which life is so blinked and blinded, so dodged and disfigured, that
it makes my ears burn. It's two different ways of looking at the
whole affair," he repeated, pushing open the gate. "And they're
irreconcilable!" he added with a sigh. We went forward to the house,
but on the walk, half-way to the door, he stopped and said to me:
"If you're going into this kind of thing there's a fact you should
know beforehand; it may save you some disappointment. There's a
hatred of art, there's a hatred of literature--I mean of the genuine
kinds. Oh the shams--those they'll swallow by the bucket!" I looked
up at the charming house, with its genial colour and crookedness, and
I answered with a smile that those evil passions might exist, but
that I should never have expected to find them there. "Ah it doesn't
matter after all," he a bit nervously laughed; which I was glad to
hear, for I was reproaching myself with having worked him up.
If I had it soon passed off, for at luncheon he was delightful;
strangely delightful considering that the difference between himself
and his wife was, as he had said, irreconcilable. He had the art, by
his manner, by his smile, by his natural amenity, of reducing the
importance of it in the common concerns of life; and Mrs. Ambient, I
must add, lent herself to this transaction with a very good grace. I
watched her at table for further illustrations of that fixed idea of
which Miss Ambient had spoken to me; for in the light of the united
revelations of her sister-in-law and her husband she had come to seem
to me almost a sinister personage. Yet the signs of a sombre
fanaticism were not more immediately striking in her than before; it
was only after a while that her air of incorruptible conformity, her
tapering monosyllabic correctness, began to affect me as in
themselves a cold thin flame. Certainly, at first, she resembled a
woman with as few passions as possible; but if she had a passion at
all it would indeed be that of Philistinism. She might have been
(for there are guardian-spirits, I suppose, of all great principles)
the very angel of the pink of propriety--putting the pink for a
principle, though I'd rather put some dismal cold blue. Mark
Ambient, apparently, ten years before, had simply and quite
inevitably taken her for an angel, without asking himself of what.
He had been right in calling my attention to her beauty. In looking
for some explanation of his original surrender to her I saw more than
before that she was, physically speaking, a wonderfully cultivated
human plant--that he might well have owed her a brief poetic
inspiration. It was impossible to be more propped and pencilled,
more delicately tinted and petalled.
If I had had it in my heart to think my host a little of a hypocrite
for appearing to forget at table everything he had said to me in our
walk, I should instantly have cancelled such a judgement on
reflecting that the good news his wife was able to give him about
their little boy was ground enough for any optimistic reaction. It
may have come partly, too, from a certain compunction at having
breathed to me at all harshly on the cool fair lady who sat there--a
desire to prove himself not after all so mismated. Dolcino continued
to be much better, and it had been promised him he should come
downstairs after his dinner. As soon as we had risen from our own
meal Mark slipped away, evidently for the purpose of going to his
child; and no sooner had I observed this than I became aware his wife
had simultaneously vanished. It happened that Miss Ambient and I,
both at the same moment, saw the tail of her dress whisk out of a
doorway; an incident that led the young lady to smile at me as if I
now knew all the secrets of the Ambients. I passed with her into the
garden and we sat down on a dear old bench that rested against the
west wall of the house. It was a perfect spot for the middle period
of a Sunday in June, and its felicity seemed to come partly from an
antique sun-dial which, rising in front of us and forming the centre
of a small intricate parterre, measured the moments ever so slowly
and made them safe for leisure and talk. The garden bloomed in the
suffused afternoon, the tall beeches stood still for an example, and,
behind and above us, a rose tree of many seasons, clinging to the
faded grain of the brick, expressed the whole character of the scene
in a familiar exquisite smell. It struck me as a place to offer
genius every favour and sanction--not to bristle with challenges and
checks. Miss Ambient asked me if I had enjoyed my walk with her
brother and whether we had talked of many things.
"Well, of most things," I freely allowed, though I remembered we
hadn't talked of Miss Ambient.
"And don't you think some of his theories are very peculiar?"
"Oh I guess I agree with them all." I was very particular, for Miss
Ambient's entertainment, to guess.
"Do you think art's everything?" she put to me in a moment.
"In art, of course I do!"
"And do you think beauty's everything?"
"Everything's a big word, which I think we should use as little as
possible. But how can we not want beauty?"
"Ah there you are!" she sighed, though I didn't quite know what she
meant by it. "Of course it's difficult for a woman to judge how far
to go," she went on. "I adore everything that gives a charm to life.
I'm intensely sensitive to form. But sometimes I draw back--don't
you see what I mean?--I don't quite see where I shall be landed. I
only want to be quiet, after all," Miss Ambient continued as if she
had long been baffled of this modest desire. "And one must be good,
at any rate, must not one?" she pursued with a dubious quaver--an
intimation apparently that what I might say one way or the other
would settle it for her. It was difficult for me to be very original
in reply, and I'm afraid I repaid her confidence with an unblushing
platitude. I remember, moreover, attaching to it an inquiry, equally
destitute of freshness and still more wanting perhaps in tact, as to
whether she didn't mean to go to church, since that was an obvious
way of being good. She made answer that she had performed this duty
in the morning, and that for her, of Sunday afternoons, supreme
virtue consisted in answering the week's letters. Then suddenly and
without transition she brought out: "It's quite a mistake about
Dolcino's being better. I've seen him and he's not at all right."
I wondered, and somehow I think I scarcely believed. "Surely his
mother would know, wouldn't she?"
She appeared for a moment to be counting the leaves on one of the
great beeches. "As regards most matters one can easily say what, in
a given situation, my sister-in-law will, or would, do. But in the
present case there are strange elements at work."
"Strange elements? Do you mean in the constitution of the child?"
"No, I mean in my sister-in-law's feelings."
"Elements of affection of course; elements of anxiety," I concurred.
"But why do you call them strange?"
She repeated my words. "Elements of affection, elements of anxiety.
She's very anxious."
Miss Ambient put me indescribably ill at ease; she almost scared me,
and I wished she would go and write her letters. "His father will
have seen him now," I said, "and if he's not satisfied he will send
for the doctor."
"The doctor ought to have been here this morning," she promptly
returned. "He lives only two miles away."
I reflected that all this was very possibly but a part of the general
tragedy of Miss Ambient's view of things; yet I asked her why she
hadn't urged that view on her sister-in-law. She answered me with a
smile of extraordinary significance and observed that I must have
very little idea of her "peculiar" relations with Beatrice; but I
must do her the justice that she re-enforced this a little by the
plea that any distinguishable alarm of Mark's was ground enough for a
difference of his wife's. He was always nervous about the child, and
as they were predestined by nature to take opposite views, the only
thing for the mother was to cultivate a false optimism. In Mark's
absence and that of his betrayed fear she would have been less easy.
I remembered what he had said to me about their dealings with their
son--that between them they'd probably put an end to him; but I
didn't repeat this to Miss Ambient: the less so that just then her
brother emerged from the house, carrying the boy in his arms. Close
behind him moved his wife, grave and pale; the little sick face was
turned over Ambient's shoulder and toward the mother. We rose to
receive the group, and as they came near us Dolcino twisted himself
about. His enchanting eyes showed me a smile of recognition, in
which, for the moment, I should have taken a due degree of comfort.
Miss Ambient, however, received another impression, and I make haste
to say that her quick sensibility, which visibly went out to the
child, argues that in spite of her affectations she might have been
of some human use. "It won't do at all--it won't do at all," she
said to me under her breath. "I shall speak to Mark about the
Doctor."
Her small nephew was rather white, but the main difference I saw in
him was that he was even more beautiful than the day before. He had
been dressed in his festal garments--a velvet suit and a crimson
sash--and he looked like a little invalid prince too young to know
condescension and smiling familiarly on his subjects.
"Put him down, Mark, he's not a bit at his ease," Mrs. Ambient said.
"Should you like to stand on your feet, my boy?" his father asked.
He made a motion that quickly responded. "Oh yes; I'm remarkably
well."
Mark placed him on the ground; he had shining pointed shoes with
enormous bows. "Are you happy now, Mr. Ambient?"
"Oh yes, I'm particularly happy," Dolcino replied. But the words
were scarce out of his mouth when his mother caught him up and, in a
moment, holding him on her knees, took her place on the bench where
Miss Ambient and I had been sitting. This young lady said something
to her brother, in consequence of which the two wandered away into
the garden together.
