Henry James: Complete Stories 1864-1874 (20 page)

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Authors: Henry James

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Page 109
He has broken my heart, Rachel said. He tells me it is not a Watteau.
Do you believe everything he tells you, my dear? His word is the word of the betrayer.
Well, I know Watteau didn't paint fans, Florimond remarked, any more than Michael Angelo.
I suppose you think he painted ceilings, said Rachel Torrance. I have painted a great many myself.
A great many ceilings? I should like to see that! Florimond exclaimed.
Rachel Torrance, with her usual promptness, adopted this fantasy. Yes, I have decorated half the churches in Brooklyn; you know how many there are.
If you mean fans, I wish men carried them, the young man went on; I should like to have one
de votre facon.
You're cool enough as you are; I should be sorry to give you anything that would make you cooler!
This retort, which may not strike the reader by its originality, was pregnant enough for Mrs. Daintry; it seemed to her to denote that the situation was critical; and she proposed to retire. Florimond walked home with her; but it was only as they reached their door that she ventured to say to him what had been on her tougue's end since they left Arlington Street.
Florimond, I want to ask you something. I think it is important, and you mustn't be surprised. Are you in love with Rachel Torrance?
Florimond stared, in the light of the street-lamp. The collar of his overcoat was turned up; he stamped a little as he stood still; the breath of the February evening pervaded the empty vistas of the new land. In love with Rachel Torrance?
Jamais de la vie!
What put that into your head?
Seeing you with her, that way, this evening. You know you are very attentive.
How do you mean, attentive?
You go there very often. Isn't it almost every day?
Florimond hesitated, and, in spite of the frigid dusk, his mother could see that there was irritation in his eye. Where else can I go, in this precious place? It's the pleasantest house here.
 
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Yes, I suppose it's very pleasant, Mrs. Daintry murmured. But I would rather have you return to Paris than go there too often, she added, with sudden energy.
How do you mean, too often?
Qu'est-ce qui vous prend, ma mère?
said Florimond.
Is RachelRachel in love with
you?
she inquired solemnly. She felt that this question, though her heart beat as she uttered it, should not be mitigated by a circumlocution.
Good heavens! mother, fancy talking about love in this temperature! Florimond exclaimed. Let one at least get into the house.
Mrs. Daintry followed him reluctantly; for she always had a feeling that if anything disagreeable were to be done one should not make it less drastic by selecting agreeable conditions. In the drawing-room, before the fire, she returned to her inquiry. My son, you have not answered me about Rachel.
Is she in love with me? Why, very possibly!
Are you serious, Florimond?
Why shouldn't I be? I have seen the way women go off.
Mrs. Daintry was silent a moment. Florimond, is it true? she said presently.
Is what true? I don't see where you want to come out.
Is it true that that girl has fixed her affections and Mrs. Daintry's voice dropped.
Upon me,
ma mère?
I don't say it's true, but I say it's possible. You ask me, and I can only answer you. I am not swaggering, I am simply giving you decent satisfaction. You wouldn't have me think it impossible that a woman should fall in love with me? You know what women are, and how there is nothing, in that way, too queer for them to do.
Mrs. Daintry, in spite of the knowledge of her sex that she might be supposed to possess, was not prepared to rank herself on the side of this axiom. I wished to warn you, she simply said; do be very careful.
Yes, I'll be careful; but I can't give up the house.
There are other houses, Florimond.
Yes, but there is a special charm there.
I would rather you should return to Paris than do any harm.
 
Page 111
Oh, I shan't do any harm; don't worry,
ma mère,
said Florimond.
It was a relief to Mrs. Daintry to have spoken, and she endeavoured not to worry. It was doubtless this effort that, for the rest of the winter, gave her a somewhat rigid, anxious look. People who met her in Beacon Street missed something from her face. It was her usual confidence in the clearness of human duty; and some of her friends explained the change by saying that she was disappointed about Florimondshe was afraid he was not particularly liked.
VII.
By the first of March this young man had received a good many optical impressions, and had noted in water-colours several characteristic winter effects. He had perambulated Boston in every direction, he had even extended his researches to the suburbs; and if his eye had been curious, his eye was now almost satisfied. He perceived that even amid the simple civilisation of New England there was material for the naturalist; and in Washington Street of a winter's afternoon, it came home to him that it was a fortunate thing the impressionist was not exclusively preoccupied with the beautiful. He became familiar with the slushy streets, crowded with thronging pedestrians and obstructed horse-cars, bordered with strange, promiscuous shops, which seemed at once violent and indifferent, overhung with snowbanks from the housetops; the avalanche that detached itself at intervals, fell with an enormous thud amid the dense processions of women, made for a moment a clear space, splashed with whiter snow, on the pavement, and contributed to the gaiety of the Puritan capital. Supreme in the thoroughfare was the rigid groove of the railway, where oblong receptacles, of fabulous capacity, governed by familiar citizens, jolted and jingled eternally, close on each other's rear, absorbing and emitting innumerable specimens of a single type. The road on either side, buried in mounds of pulverised, mud-coloured ice, was ploughed across by labouring vehicles, and traversed periodically by the sisterhood of shoppers, laden with satchels and parcels, and protected by a round-backed policeman. Florimond looked at the shops,
 
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saw the women disgorged, surging, ebbing, dodged the avalanches, squeezed in and out of the horse-cars, made himself, on their little platforms, where flatness was enforced, as perpendicular as possible. The horses steamed in the sunny air, the conductor punched the tickets and poked the passengers, some of whom were under and some above, and all alike stabled in trampled straw. They were precipitated, collectively, by stoppages and starts; the tight, silent interior stuffed itself more and more, and the whole machine heaved and reeled in its interrupted course. Florimond had forgotten the look of many things, the details of American publicity; in some cases, indeed, he only pretended to himself that he had forgotten them, because it helped to entertain him. The housesa bristling, jagged line of talls and shorts, a parti-coloured surface, expressively commercialwere spotted with staring signs, with labels and pictures, with advertisements familiar, colloquial, vulgar; the air was traversed with the tangle of the telegraph, with festoons of bunting, with banners not of war, with inexplicable loops and ropes; the shops, many of them enormous, had heterogenous fronts, with queer juxtapositions in the articles that peopled them, an incompleteness of array, the stamp of the latest modern ugliness. They had pendant stuffs in the doorways, and flapping tickets outside. Every fifty yards there was a candy store; in the intervals was the painted panel of a chiropodist, representing him in his professional attitude. Behind the plates of glass, in the hot interiors, behind the counters, were pale, familiar, delicate, tired faces of women, with polished hair and glazed complexions. Florimond knew their voices; he knew how women would speak when their hair was treated, as they said in the studios, like that. But the women that passed through the streets were the main spectacle. Florimond had forgotten their extraordinary numerosity, and the impression that they produced of a deluge of petticoats. He could see that they were perfectly at home on the road; they had an air of possession, of perpetual equipment, a look, in the eyes, of always meeting the gaze of crowds, always seeing people pass, noting things in shop-windows, and being on the watch at crossings; many of them evidently passed most of their time in these conditions, and Florimond wondered what sort of
intèrieurs
they
 
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could have. He felt at moments that he was in a city of women, in a country of women. The same impression came to him
dans le monde,
as he used to say, for he made the most incongruous application of his little French phrases to Boston. The talk, the social life, were so completely in the hands of the ladies, the masculine note was so subordinate, that on certain occasions he could have believed himself (putting the brightness aside) in a country stricken by a war, where the men had all gone to the army, or in a seaport half depopulated by the absence of its vessels. This idea had intermissions; for instance, when he walked out to Cambridge. In this little excursion he often indulged; he used to go and see one of his college-mates, who was now a tutor at Harvard. He stretched away across the long, mean bridge that spans the mouth of the Charlesa mile of wooden piles, supporting a brick pavement, a roadway deep in mire, and a rought timber fence, over which the pedestrian enjoys a view of the frozen bay, the backs of many new houses, and a big brown marsh. The horse-cars bore him company, relieved here of the press of the streets, though not of their internal congestion, and constituting the principal feature of the wide, blank avenue, where the puddles lay large across the bounding rails. He followed their direction through a middle region, in which the small wooden houses had an air of tent-like impermanence, and the February mornings, splendid and indiscreet, stared into bare windows and seemed to make civilisation transparent. Further, the suburb remained wooden, but grew neat, and the painted houses looked out on the car-track with an expression almost of superiority. At Harvard, the buildings were square and fresh; they stood in a yard planted with slender elms, which the winter had reduced to spindles; the town stretched away from the horizontal palings of the collegiate precinct, low, flat and immense, with vague, featureless spaces and the air of a clean encampment. Florimond remembered that when the summer came in, the whole place was transformed. It was pervaded by verdure and dust, the slender elms became profuse, arching over the unpaved streets, the green shutters bowed themselves before the windows, the flowers and creeping-plants bloomed in the small gardens, and on the piazzas, in the gaps of dropped awnings, light dresses arrested the eye. At night, in
 
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the warm darknessfor Cambridge is not festooned with lampsthe bosom of nature would seem to palpitate, there would be a smell of earth and vegetationa smell more primitive than the odour of Europeand the air would vibrate with the sound of insects. All this was in reserve, if one would have patience, especially from March to June; but for the present the seat of the University struck our poor little critical Florimond as rather hard and bare. As the winter went on, and the days grew longer, he knew that Mrs. Daintry often believed him to be in Arlington Street when he was walking out to see his friend the tutor, who had once spent a winter in Paris and never tired of talking about it. It is to be feared that he did not undeceive her so punctually as he might; for, in the first place, he was at Mrs. Mesh's very often; in the second, he failed to understand how worried his mother was; and in the third, the idea that he should be thought to have the peace of mind of a brilliant girl in his keeping was not disagreeable to him.
One day his Aunt Lucretia found him in Arlington Street; it occurred to her about the middle of the winter that, considering she liked Rachel Torrance so much, she had not been to see her very often. She had little time for such indulgences; but she caught a moment in its flight, and was told at Mrs. Mesh's door that this lady had not yet come in, but that her companion was accessible. Florimond was in his customary chair by the chimney-corner (his aunt perhaps did not know quite how customary it was), and Rachel, at the piano, was regaling him with a composition of Schubert. Florimond, up to this time, had not become very intimate with his aunt, who had not, as it were, given him the key of her house, and in whom he detected a certain want of interest in his affairs. He had a limited sympathy with people who were interested only in their own, and perceived that Miss Daintry belonged to this preoccupied and ungraceful class. It seemed to him that it would have been more becoming in her to feign at least a certain attention to the professional and social prospects of the most promising of her nephews. If there was one thing that Florimond disliked more than another, it was an eager self-absorption; and he could not see that it was any better for people to impose their personality upon committees and char-

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