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Henry James: Complete Stories 1864-1874 (136 page)

BOOK: Henry James: Complete Stories 1864-1874
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Page 816
time, and she had a general impression that Mrs. Tramore was to-day a more complete productionfor instance as regarded her air of youththan she had ever been. There was no excitement on her sidethat was all her visitor's; there was no emotionthat was excluded by the plan, to say nothing of conditions more primal. Rose had from the first a glimpse of her mother's plan. It was to mention nothing and imply nothing, neither to acknowledge, to explain nor to extenuate. She would leave everything to her child; with her child she was secure. She only wanted to get back into society; she would leave even that to her child, whom she treated not as a high-strung and heroic daughter, a creature of exaltation, of devotion, but as a new, charming, clever, useful friend, a little younger than herself. Already on that first day she had talked about dressmakers. Of course, poor thing, it was to be remembered that in her circumstances there were not many things she
could
talk about. She wants to go out again; that's the only thing in the wide world she wants, Rose had promptly, compendiously said to herself. There had been a sequel to this observation, uttered, in intense engrossment, in her own room half an hour before she had, on the important evening, made known her decision to her grandmother: Then I'll
take
her out!
She'll drag you down, she'll drag you down! Julia Tramore permitted herself to remark to her niece, the next day, in a tone of feverish prophecy.
As the girl's own theory was that all the dragging there might be would be upward, and moreover administered by herself, she could look at her aunt with a cold and inscrutable eye.
Very well, then, I shall be out of your sight, from the pinnacle you occupy, and I sha'n't trouble you.
Do you reproach me for my disinterested exertions, for the way I've toiled over you, the way I've lived for you? Miss Tramore demanded.
Don't reproach
me
for being kind to my mother and I won't reproach you for anything.
She'll keep you out of everythingshe'll make you miss everything, Miss Tramore continued.
 
Page 817
Then she'll make me miss a great deal that's odious, said the girl.
You're too young for such extravagances, her aunt declared.
And yet Edith, who is younger than I, seems to be too old for them: how do you arrange that? My mother's society will make me older, Rose replied.
Don't speak to me of your mother; you
have
no mother.
Then if I'm an orphan I must settle things for myself.
Do you justify her, do you approve of her? cried Miss Tramore, who was inferior to her niece in capacity for retort and whose limitations made the girl appear pert.
Rose looked at her a moment in silence; then she said, turning away: I think she's charming.
And do you propose to become charming in the same manner?
Her manner is perfect; it would be an excellent model. But I can't discuss my mother with you.
You'll have to discuss her with some other people! Miss Tramore proclaimed, going out of the room.
Rose wondered whether this were a general or a particular vaticination. There was something her aunt might have meant by it, but her aunt rarely meant the best thing she might have meant. Miss Tramore had come up from St. Leonard's in response to a telegram from her own parent, for an occasion like the present brought with it, for a few hours, a certain relaxation of their dissent. Do what you can to stop her, the old lady had said; but her daughter found that the most she could do was not much. They both had a baffled sense that Rose had thought the question out a good deal further than they; and this was particularly irritating to Mrs. Tramore, as consciously the cleverer of the two. A question thought out as far as
she
could think it had always appeared to her to have performed its human uses; she had never encountered a ghost emerging from that extinction. Their great contention was that Rose would cut herself off; and certainly if she wasn't afraid of that she wasn't afraid of anything. Julia Tramore could only tell her mother how little the girl was afraid. She was already prepared to leave the house, taking with her the
 
Page 818
possessions, or her share of them, that had accumulated there during her father's illness. There had been a going and coming of her maid, a thumping about of boxes, an ordering of four-wheelers; it appeared to old Mrs. Tramore that something of the objectionableness, the indecency, of her granddaughter's prospective connection had already gathered about the place. It was a violation of the decorum of bereavement which was still fresh there, and from the indignant gloom of the mistress of the house you might have inferred not so much that the daughter was about to depart as that the mother was about to arrive. There had been no conversation on the dreadful subject at luncheon; for at luncheon at Mrs. Tramore's (her son never came to it) there were always, even after funerals and other miseries, stray guests of both sexes whose policy it was to be cheerful and superficial. Rose had sat down as if nothing had happenednothing worse, that is, than her father's death; but no one had spoken of anything that any one else was thinking of.
Before she left the house a servant brought her a message from her grandmotherthe old lady desired to see her in the drawing-room. She had on her bonnet, and she went down as if she were about to step into her cab. Mrs. Tramore sat there with her eternal knitting, from which she forebore even to raise her eyes as, after a silence that seemed to express the fulness of her reprobation, while Rose stood motionless, she began: I wonder if you really understand what you're doing.
I think so. I'm not so stupid.
I never thought you were; but I don't know what to make of you now. You're giving up everything.
The girl was tempted to inquire whether her grandmother called herself everything; but she checked this question, answering instead that she knew she was giving up much.
You're taking a step of which you will feel the effect to the end of your days, Mrs. Tramore went on.
In a good conscience, I heartily hope, said Rose.
Your father's conscience was good enough for his mother; it ought to be good enough for his daughter.
Rose sat downshe could afford toas if she wished to be very attentive and were still accessible to argument. But this
 
Page 819
demonstration only ushered in, after a moment, the surprising words I don't think papa had any conscience.
What in the name of all that's unnatural do you mean? Mrs. Tramore cried, over her glasses. The dearest and best creature that ever lived!
He was kind, he had charming impulses, he was delightful. But he never reflected.
Mrs. Tramore stared, as if at a language she had never heard, a farrago, a
galimatias.
Her life was made up of items, but she had never had to deal, intellectually, with a fine shade. Then while her needles, which had paused an instant, began to fly again, she rejoined: Do you know what you are, my dear? You're a dreadful little prig. Where do you pick up such talk?
Of course I don't mean to judge between them, Rose pursued. I can only judge between my mother and myself. Papa couldn't judge for me. And with this she got up.
One would think you were horrid. I never thought so before.
Thank you for that.
You're embarking on a struggle with society, continued Mrs. Tramore, indulging in an unusual flight of oratory. Society will put you in your place.
Hasn't it too many other things to do? asked the girl.
This question had an ingenuity which led her grandmother to meet it with a merely provisional and somewhat sketchy answer. Your ignorance would be melancholy if your behaviour were not so insane.
Oh, no; I know perfectly what she'll do! Rose replied, almost gaily. She'll drag me down.
She won't even do that, the old lady declared contradictiously. She'll keep you forever in the same dull hole.
I shall come and see
you,
granny, when I want something more lively.
You may come if you like, but you'll come no further than the door. If you leave this house now you don't enter it again.
Rose hesitated a moment. Do you really mean that?
You may judge whether I choose such a time to joke.
Good-bye, then, said the girl.
 
Page 820
Good-bye.
Rose quitted the room successfully enough; but on the other side of the door, on the landing, she sank into a chair and buried her face in her hands. She had burst into tears, and she sobbed there for a moment, trying hard to recover herself, so as to go downstairs without showing any traces of emotion, passing before the servants and again perhaps before aunt Julia. Mrs. Tramore was too old to cry; she could only drop her knitting and, for a long time, sit with her head bowed and her eyes closed.
Rose had reckoned justly with her aunt Julia; there were no footmen, but this vigilant virgin was posted at the foot of the stairs. She offered no challenge however; she only said: There's some one in the parlour who wants to see you. The girl demanded a name, but Miss Tramore only mouthed inaudibly and winked and waved. Rose instantly reflected that there was only one man in the world her aunt would look such deep things about. Captain Jay? her own eyes asked, while Miss Tramore's were those of a conspirator: they were, for a moment, the only embarrassed eyes Rose had encountered that day. They contributed to make aunt Julia's further response evasive, after her niece inquired if she had communicated in advance with this visitor. Miss Tramore merely said that he had been upstairs with her motherhadn't she mentioned it?and had been waiting for her. She thought herself acute in not putting the question of the girl's seeing him before her as a favour to him or to herself; she presented it as a duty, and wound up with the proposition: It's not fair to him, it's not kind, not to let him speak to you before you go.
What does he want to say? Rose demanded.
Go in and find out.
She really knew, for she had found out before; but after standing uncertain an instant she went in. The parlour was the name that had always been borne by a spacious sitting-room downstairs, an apartment occupied by her father during his frequent phases of residence in Hill Streetepisodes increasingly frequent after his house in the country had, in consequence, as Rose perfectly knew, of his spending too much money, been disposed of at a sacrifice which he always char-
 
Page 821
acterised as horrid. He had been left with the place in Hertfordshire and his mother with the London house, on the general understanding that they would change about; but during the last years the community had grown more rigid, mainly at his mother's expense. The parlour was full of his memory and his habits and his thingshis books and pictures and
bibelots,
objects that belonged now to Eric. Rose had sat in it for hours since his death; it was the place in which she could still be nearest to him. But she felt far from him as Captain Jay rose erect on her opening the door. This was a very different presence. He had not liked Captain Jay. She herself had, but not enough to make a great complication of her father's coldness. This afternoon however she foresaw complications. At the very outset for instance she was not pleased with his having arranged such a surprise for her with her grandmother and her aunt. It was probably aunt Julia who had sent for him; her grandmother wouldn't have done it. It placed him immediately on their side, and Rose was almost as disappointed at this as if she had not known it was quite where he would naturally be. He had never paid her a special visit, but if that was what he wished to do why shouldn't he have waited till she should be under her mother's roof? She knew the reason, but she had an angry prospect of enjoyment in making him express it. She liked him enough, after all, if it were measured by the idea of what she could make him do.
In Bertram Jay the elements were surprisingly mingled; you would have gone astray, in reading him, if you had counted on finding the complements of some of his qualities. He would not however have struck you in the least as incomplete, for in every case in which you didn't find the complement you would have found the contradiction. He was in the Royal Engineers, and was tall, lean and high-shouldered. He looked every inch a soldier, yet there were people who considered that he had missed his vocation in not becoming a parson. He took a public interest in the spiritual life of the army. Other persons still, on closer observation, would have felt that his most appropriate field was neither the army nor the church, but simply the worldthe social, successful, worldly world. If he had a sword in one hand and a Bible in the other he had a Court Guide concealed somewhere about his person. His
BOOK: Henry James: Complete Stories 1864-1874
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