The Jolly Corner
by Henry James
CHAPTER I
"Every one asks me what I 'think' of everything," said Spencer
Brydon; "and I make answer as I can - begging or dodging the
question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn't matter
to any of them really," he went on, "for, even were it possible to
meet in that stand-and-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a
subject, my 'thoughts' would still be almost altogether about
something that concerns only myself." He was talking to Miss
Staverton, with whom for a couple of months now he had availed
himself of every possible occasion to talk; this disposition and
this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in fact
presented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in
the considerable array of rather unattenuated surprises attending
his so strangely belated return to America. Everything was somehow
a surprise; and that might be natural when one had so long and so
consistently neglected everything, taken pains to give surprises so
much margin for play. He had given them more than thirty years -
thirty-three, to be exact; and they now seemed to him to have
organised their performance quite on the scale of that licence. He
had been twenty-three on leaving New York - he was fifty-six to-
day; unless indeed he were to reckon as he had sometimes, since his
repatriation, found himself feeling; in which case he would have
lived longer than is often allotted to man. It would have taken a
century, he repeatedly said to himself, and said also to Alice
Staverton, it would have taken a longer absence and a more averted
mind than those even of which he had been guilty, to pile up the
differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the
bignesses, for the better or the worse, that at present assaulted
his vision wherever he looked.
The great fact all the while, however, had been the
incalculability; since he HAD supposed himself, from decade to
decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent
manner, for brilliancy of change. He actually saw that he had
allowed for nothing; he missed what he would have been sure of
finding, he found what he would never have imagined. Proportions
and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected, the
ugly things of his far-away youth, when he had too promptly waked
up to a sense of the ugly - these uncanny phenomena placed him
rather, as it happened, under the charm; whereas the "swagger"
things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had
more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every
year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay. They
were as so many set traps for displeasure, above all for reaction,
of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring. It
was interesting, doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been
too disconcerting hadn't a certain finer truth saved the situation.
He had distinctly not, in this steadier light, come over ALL for
the monstrosities; he had come, not only in the last analysis but
quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with which they had
nothing to do. He had come - putting the thing pompously - to look
at his "property," which he had thus for a third of a century not
been within four thousand miles of; or, expressing it less
sordidly, he had yielded to the humour of seeing again his house on
the jolly corner, as he usually, and quite fondly, described it -
the one in which he had first seen the light, in which various
members of his family had lived and had died, in which the holidays
of his overschooled boyhood had been passed and the few social
flowers of his chilled adolescence gathered, and which, alienated
then for so long a period, had, through the successive deaths of
his two brothers and the termination of old arrangements, come
wholly into his hands. He was the owner of another, not quite so
"good" - the jolly corner having been, from far back, superlatively
extended and consecrated; and the value of the pair represented his
main capital, with an income consisting, in these later years, of
their respective rents which (thanks precisely to their original
excellent type) had never been depressingly low. He could live in
"Europe," as he had been in the habit of living, on the product of
these flourishing New York leases, and all the better since, that
of the second structure, the mere number in its long row, having
within a twelvemonth fallen in, renovation at a high advance had
proved beautifully possible.
These were items of property indeed, but he had found himself since
his arrival distinguishing more than ever between them. The house
within the street, two bristling blocks westward, was already in
course of reconstruction as a tall mass of flats; he had acceded,
some time before, to overtures for this conversion - in which, now
that it was going forward, it had been not the least of his
astonishments to find himself able, on the spot, and though without
a previous ounce of such experience, to participate with a certain
intelligence, almost with a certain authority. He had lived his
life with his back so turned to such concerns and his face
addressed to those of so different an order that he scarce knew
what to make of this lively stir, in a compartment of his mind
never yet penetrated, of a capacity for business and a sense for
construction. These virtues, so common all round him now, had been
dormant in his own organism - where it might be said of them
perhaps that they had slept the sleep of the just. At present, in
the splendid autumn weather - the autumn at least was a pure boon
in the terrible place - he loafed about his "work" undeterred,
secretly agitated; not in the least "minding" that the whole
proposition, as they said, was vulgar and sordid, and ready to
climb ladders, to walk the plank, to handle materials and look wise
about them, to ask questions, in fine, and challenge explanations
and really "go into" figures.
It amused, it verily quite charmed him; and, by the same stroke, it
amused, and even more, Alice Staverton, though perhaps charming her
perceptibly less. She wasn't, however, going to be better-off for
it, as HE was - and so astonishingly much: nothing was now likely,
he knew, ever to make her better-off than she found herself, in the
afternoon of life, as the delicately frugal possessor and tenant of
the small house in Irving Place to which she had subtly managed to
cling through her almost unbroken New York career. If he knew the
way to it now better than to any other address among the dreadful
multiplied numberings which seemed to him to reduce the whole place
to some vast ledger-page, overgrown, fantastic, of ruled and criss-
crossed lines and figures - if he had formed, for his consolation,
that habit, it was really not a little because of the charm of his
having encountered and recognised, in the vast wilderness of the
wholesale, breaking through the mere gross generalisation of wealth
and force and success, a small still scene where items and shades,
all delicate things, kept the sharpness of the notes of a high
voice perfectly trained, and where economy hung about like the
scent of a garden. His old friend lived with one maid and herself
dusted her relics and trimmed her lamps and polished her silver;
she stood oft, in the awful modern crush, when she could, but she
sallied forth and did battle when the challenge was really to
"spirit," the spirit she after all confessed to, proudly and a
little shyly, as to that of the better time, that of THEIR common,
their quite far-away and antediluvian social period and order. She
made use of the street-cars when need be, the terrible things that
people scrambled for as the panic-stricken at sea scramble for the
boats; she affronted, inscrutably, under stress, all the public
concussions and ordeals; and yet, with that slim mystifying grace
of her appearance, which defied you to say if she were a fair young
woman who looked older through trouble, or a fine smooth older one
who looked young through successful indifference with her precious
reference, above all, to memories and histories into which he could
enter, she was as exquisite for him as some pale pressed flower (a
rarity to begin with), and, failing other sweetnesses, she was a
sufficient reward of his effort. They had communities of
knowledge, "their" knowledge (this discriminating possessive was
always on her lips) of presences of the other age, presences all
overlaid, in his case, by the experience of a man and the freedom
of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity, by passages of
life that were strange and dim to her, just by "Europe" in short,
but still unobscured, still exposed and cherished, under that pious
visitation of the spirit from which she had never been diverted.
She had come with him one day to see how his "apartment-house" was
rising; he had helped her over gaps and explained to her plans, and
while they were there had happened to have, before her, a brief but
lively discussion with the man in charge, the representative of the
building firm that had undertaken his work. He had found himself
quite "standing up" to this personage over a failure on the
latter's part to observe some detail of one of their noted
conditions, and had so lucidly argued his case that, besides ever
so prettily flushing, at the time, for sympathy in his triumph, she
had afterwards said to him (though to a slightly greater effect of
irony) that he had clearly for too many years neglected a real
gift. If he had but stayed at home he would have anticipated the
inventor of the sky-scraper. If he had but stayed at home he would
have discovered his genius in time really to start some new variety
of awful architectural hare and run it till it burrowed in a gold
mine. He was to remember these words, while the weeks elapsed, for
the small silver ring they had sounded over the queerest and
deepest of his own lately most disguised and most muffled
vibrations.
It had begun to be present to him after the first fortnight, it had
broken out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton
wonderment: it met him there - and this was the image under which
he himself judged the matter, or at least, not a little, thrilled
and flushed with it - very much as he might have been met by some
strange figure, some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the
dim passages of an empty house. The quaint analogy quite
hauntingly remained with him, when he didn't indeed rather improve
it by a still intenser form: that of his opening a door behind
which he would have made sure of finding nothing, a door into a
room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed
start, on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted
in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk. After
that visit to the house in construction he walked with his
companion to see the other and always so much the better one, which
in the eastward direction formed one of the corners, - the "jolly"
one precisely, of the street now so generally dishonoured and
disfigured in its westward reaches, and of the comparatively
conservative Avenue. The Avenue still had pretensions, as Miss
Staverton said, to decency; the old people had mostly gone, the old
names were unknown, and here and there an old association seemed to
stray, all vaguely, like some very aged person, out too late, whom
you might meet and feel the impulse to watch or follow, in
kindness, for safe restoration to shelter.
They went in together, our friends; he admitted himself with his
key, as he kept no one there, he explained, preferring, for his
reasons, to leave the place empty, under a simple arrangement with
a good woman living in the neighbourhood and who came for a daily
hour to open windows and dust and sweep. Spencer Brydon had his
reasons and was growingly aware of them; they seemed to him better
each time he was there, though he didn't name them all to his
companion, any more than he told her as yet how often, how quite
absurdly often, he himself came. He only let her see for the
present, while they walked through the great blank rooms, that
absolute vacancy reigned and that, from top to bottom, there was
nothing but Mrs. Muldoon's broomstick, in a corner, to tempt the
burglar. Mrs. Muldoon was then on the premises, and she
loquaciously attended the visitors, preceding them from room to
room and pushing back shutters and throwing up sashes - all to show
them, as she remarked, how little there was to see. There was
little indeed to see in the great gaunt shell where the main
dispositions and the general apportionment of space, the style of
an age of ampler allowances, had nevertheless for its master their
honest pleading message, affecting him as some good old servant's,
some lifelong retainer's appeal for a character, or even for a
retiring-pension; yet it was also a remark of Mrs. Muldoon's that,
glad as she was to oblige him by her noonday round, there was a
request she greatly hoped he would never make of her. If he should
wish her for any reason to come in after dark she would just tell
him, if he "plased," that he must ask it of somebody else.
The fact that there was nothing to see didn't militate for the
worthy woman against what one MIGHT see, and she put it frankly to
Miss Staverton that no lady could be expected to like, could she?
"craping up to thim top storeys in the ayvil hours." The gas and
the electric light were off the house, and she fairly evoked a
gruesome vision of her march through the great grey rooms - so many
of them as there were too! - with her glimmering taper. Miss
Staverton met her honest glare with a smile and the profession that
she herself certainly would recoil from such an adventure. Spencer
Brydon meanwhile held his peace - for the moment; the question of
the "evil" hours in his old home had already become too grave for
him. He had begun some time since to "crape," and he knew just why
a packet of candles addressed to that pursuit had been stowed by
his own hand, three weeks before, at the back of a drawer of the
fine old sideboard that occupied, as a "fixture," the deep recess
in the dining-room. Just now he laughed at his companions -
quickly however changing the subject; for the reason that, in the
first place, his laugh struck him even at that moment as starting
the odd echo, the conscious human resonance (he scarce knew how to
qualify it) that sounds made while he was there alone sent back to
his ear or his fancy; and that, in the second, he imagined Alice
Staverton for the instant on the point of asking him, with a
divination, if he ever so prowled. There were divinations he was
unprepared for, and he had at all events averted enquiry by the
time Mrs. Muldoon had left them, passing on to other parts.
There was happily enough to say, on so consecrated a spot, that
could be said freely and fairly; so that a whole train of
declarations was precipitated by his friend's having herself broken
out, after a yearning look round: "But I hope you don't mean they
want you to pull THIS to pieces!" His answer came, promptly, with
his re-awakened wrath: it was of course exactly what they wanted,
and what they were "at" him for, daily, with the iteration of
people who couldn't for their life understand a man's liability to
decent feelings. He had found the place, just as it stood and
beyond what he could express, an interest and a joy. There were
values other than the beastly rent-values, and in short, in short -
! But it was thus Miss Staverton took him up. "In short you're to
make so good a thing of your sky-scraper that, living in luxury on
THOSE ill-gotten gains, you can afford for a while to be
sentimental here!" Her smile had for him, with the words, the
particular mild irony with which he found half her talk suffused;
an irony without bitterness and that came, exactly, from her having
so much imagination - not, like the cheap sarcasms with which one
heard most people, about the world of "society," bid for the
reputation of cleverness, from nobody's really having any. It was
agreeable to him at this very moment to be sure that when he had
answered, after a brief demur, "Well, yes; so, precisely, you may
put it!" her imagination would still do him justice. He explained
that even if never a dollar were to come to him from the other
house he would nevertheless cherish this one; and he dwelt,
further, while they lingered and wandered, on the fact of the
stupefaction he was already exciting, the positive mystification he
felt himself create.
He spoke of the value of all he read into it, into the mere sight
of the walls, mere shapes of the rooms, mere sound of the floors,
mere feel, in his hand, of the old silver-plated knobs of the
several mahogany doors, which suggested the pressure of the palms
of the dead the seventy years of the past in fine that these things
represented, the annals of nearly three generations, counting his
grandfather's, the one that had ended there, and the impalpable
ashes of his long-extinct youth, afloat in the very air like
microscopic motes. She listened to everything; she was a woman who
answered intimately but who utterly didn't chatter. She scattered
abroad therefore no cloud of words; she could assent, she could
agree, above all she could encourage, without doing that. Only at
the last she went a little further than he had done himself. "And
then how do you know? You may still, after all, want to live
here." It rather indeed pulled him up, for it wasn't what he had
been thinking, at least in her sense of the words, "You mean I may
decide to stay on for the sake of it?"
"Well, WITH such a home - !" But, quite beautifully, she had too
much tact to dot so monstrous an I, and it was precisely an
illustration of the way she didn't rattle. How could any one - of
any wit - insist on any one else's "wanting" to live in New York?
"Oh," he said, "I MIGHT have lived here (since I had my opportunity
early in life); I might have put in here all these years. Then
everything would have been different enough - and, I dare say,
'funny' enough. But that's another matter. And then the beauty of
it - I mean of my perversity, of my refusal to agree to a 'deal' -
is just in the total absence of a reason. Don't you see that if I
had a reason about the matter at all it would HAVE to be the other
way, and would then be inevitably a reason of dollars? There are
no reasons here BUT of dollars. Let us therefore have none
whatever - not the ghost of one."
They were back in the hall then for departure, but from where they
stood the vista was large, through an open door, into the great
square main saloon, with its almost antique felicity of brave
spaces between windows. Her eyes came back from that reach and met
his own a moment. "Are you very sure the 'ghost' of one doesn't,
much rather, serve - ?"
He had a positive sense of turning pale. But it was as near as
they were then to come. For he made answer, he believed, between a
glare and a grin: "Oh ghosts - of course the place must swarm with
them! I should be ashamed of it if it didn't. Poor Mrs. Muldoon's
right, and it's why I haven't asked her to do more than look in."
Miss Staverton's gaze again lost itself, and things she didn't
utter, it was clear, came and went in her mind. She might even for
the minute, off there in the fine room, have imagined some element
dimly gathering. Simplified like the death-mask of a handsome
face, it perhaps produced for her just then an effect akin to the
stir of an expression in the "set" commemorative plaster. Yet
whatever her impression may have been she produced instead a vague
platitude. "Well, if it were only furnished and lived in - !"
She appeared to imply that in case of its being still furnished he
might have been a little less opposed to the idea of a return. But
she passed straight into the vestibule, as if to leave her words
behind her, and the next moment he had opened the house-door and
was standing with her on the steps. He closed the door and, while
he re-pocketed his key, looking up and down, they took in the
comparatively harsh actuality of the Avenue, which reminded him of
the assault of the outer light of the Desert on the traveller
emerging from an Egyptian tomb. But he risked before they stepped
into the street his gathered answer to her speech. "For me it IS
lived in. For me it is furnished." At which it was easy for her
to sigh "Ah yes!" all vaguely and discreetly; since his parents and
his favourite sister, to say nothing of other kin, in numbers, had
run their course and met their end there. That represented, within
the walls, ineffaceable life.
It was a few days after this that, during an hour passed with her
again, he had expressed his impatience of the too flattering
curiosity - among the people he met - about his appreciation of New
York. He had arrived at none at all that was socially producible,
and as for that matter of his "thinking" (thinking the better or
the worse of anything there) he was wholly taken up with one
subject of thought. It was mere vain egoism, and it was moreover,
if she liked, a morbid obsession. He found all things come back to
the question of what he personally might have been, how he might
have led his life and "turned out," if he had not so, at the
outset, given it up. And confessing for the first time to the
intensity within him of this absurd speculation - which but proved
also, no doubt, the habit of too selfishly thinking - he affirmed
the impotence there of any other source of interest, any other
native appeal. "What would it have made of me, what would it have
made of me? I keep for ever wondering, all idiotically; as if I
could possibly know! I see what it has made of dozens of others,
those I meet, and it positively aches within me, to the point of
exasperation, that it would have made something of me as well.
Only I can't make out what, and the worry of it, the small rage of
curiosity never to be satisfied, brings back what I remember to
have felt, once or twice, after judging best, for reasons, to burn
some important letter unopened. I've been sorry, I've hated it -
I've never known what was in the letter. You may, of course, say
it's a trifle - !"
"I don't say it's a trifle," Miss Staverton gravely interrupted.
She was seated by her fire, and before her, on his feet and
restless, he turned to and fro between this intensity of his idea
and a fitful and unseeing inspection, through his single eye-glass,
of the dear little old objects on her chimney-piece. Her
interruption made him for an instant look at her harder. "I
shouldn't care if you did!" he laughed, however; "and it's only a
figure, at any rate, for the way I now feel. NOT to have followed
my perverse young course - and almost in the teeth of my father's
curse, as I may say; not to have kept it up, so, 'over there,' from
that day to this, without a doubt or a pang; not, above all, to
have liked it, to have loved it, so much, loved it, no doubt, with
such an abysmal conceit of my own preference; some variation from
THAT, I say, must have produced some different effect for my life
and for my 'form.' I should have stuck here - if it had been
possible; and I was too young, at twenty-three, to judge, POUR DEUX
SOUS, whether it WERE possible. If I had waited I might have seen
it was, and then I might have been, by staying here, something
nearer to one of these types who have been hammered so hard and
made so keen by their conditions. It isn't that I admire them so
much - the question of any charm in them, or of any charm, beyond
that of the rank money-passion, exerted by their conditions FOR
them, has nothing to do with the matter: it's only a question of
what fantastic, yet perfectly possible, development of my own
nature I mayn't have missed. It comes over me that I had then a
strange ALTER EGO deep down somewhere within me, as the full-blown
flower is in the small tight bud, and that I just took the course,
I just transferred him to the climate, that blighted him for once
and for ever."
"And you wonder about the flower," Miss Staverton said. "So do I,
if you want to know; and so I've been wondering these several
weeks. I believe in the flower," she continued, "I feel it would
have been quite splendid, quite huge and monstrous."
"Monstrous above all!" her visitor echoed; "and I imagine, by the
same stroke, quite hideous and offensive."
"You don't believe that," she returned; "if you did you wouldn't
wonder. You'd know, and that would be enough for you. What you
feel - and what I feel FOR you - is that you'd have had power."
"You'd have liked me that way?" he asked.
She barely hung fire. "How should I not have liked you?"
"I see. You'd have liked me, have preferred me, a billionaire!"
"How should I not have liked you?" she simply again asked.
He stood before her still - her question kept him motionless. He
took it in, so much there was of it; and indeed his not otherwise
meeting it testified to that. "I know at least what I am," he
simply went on; "the other side of the medal's clear enough. I've
not been edifying - I believe I'm thought in a hundred quarters to
have been barely decent. I've followed strange paths and
worshipped strange gods; it must have come to you again and again -
in fact you've admitted to me as much - that I was leading, at any
time these thirty years, a selfish frivolous scandalous life. And
you see what it has made of me."
She just waited, smiling at him. "You see what it has made of ME."
"Oh you're a person whom nothing can have altered. You were born
to be what you are, anywhere, anyway: you've the perfection
nothing else could have blighted. And don't you see how, without
my exile, I shouldn't have been waiting till now - ?" But he
pulled up for the strange pang.
"The great thing to see," she presently said, "seems to me to be
that it has spoiled nothing. It hasn't spoiled your being here at
last. It hasn't spoiled this. It hasn't spoiled your speaking - "
She also however faltered.
He wondered at everything her controlled emotion might mean. "Do
you believe then - too dreadfully! - that I AM as good as I might
ever have been?"
"Oh no! Far from it!" With which she got up from her chair and
was nearer to him. "But I don't care," she smiled.
"You mean I'm good enough?"
She considered a little. "Will you believe it if I say so? I mean
will you let that settle your question for you?" And then as if
making out in his face that he drew back from this, that he had
some idea which, however absurd, he couldn't yet bargain away: "Oh
you don't care either - but very differently: you don't care for
anything but yourself."
Spencer Brydon recognised it - it was in fact what he had
absolutely professed. Yet he importantly qualified. "HE isn't
myself. He's the just so totally other person. But I do want to
see him," he added. "And I can. And I shall."
Their eyes met for a minute while he guessed from something in hers
that she divined his strange sense. But neither of them otherwise
expressed it, and her apparent understanding, with no protesting
shock, no easy derision, touched him more deeply than anything yet,
constituting for his stifled perversity, on the spot, an element
that was like breatheable air. What she said however was
unexpected. "Well, I'VE seen him."
"You -?"
"I've seen him in a dream."
"Oh a 'dream' - !" It let him down.
"But twice over," she continued. "I saw him as I see you now."
"You've dreamed the same dream - ?"
"Twice over," she repeated. "The very same."
This did somehow a little speak to him, as it also gratified him.
"You dream about me at that rate?"
"Ah about HIM!" she smiled.
His eyes again sounded her. "Then you know all about him." And as
she said nothing more: "What's the wretch like?"
She hesitated, and it was as if he were pressing her so hard that,
resisting for reasons of her own, she had to turn away. "I'll tell
you some other time!"
