The Bostonians (61 page)

He indulged not in the smallest recognition of her request, and simply said, “Surely Olive must have believed, must have known, I would come.”

“She would have been sure if you hadn’t become so unexpectedly quiet after I left Marmion. You seemed to concur, to be willing to wait.”

“So I was, for a few weeks. But they ended yesterday. I was furious that morning, when I learned your flight, and during the week that followed I made two or three attempts to find you. Then I stopped—I thought it better. I saw you were very well hidden; I determined not even to write. I felt I could wait—with that last day at Marmion to think of. Besides, to leave you with her awhile, for the last, seemed more decent. Perhaps you’ll tell me now where you were.”

“I was with father and mother. She sent me to them that morning, with a letter. I don’t know what was in it. Perhaps there was money,” said Verena, who evidently now would tell him everything.

“And where did they take you?”

“I don’t know—to places. I was in Boston once, for a day; but only in a carriage. They were as frightened as Olive; they were bound to save me!”

“They shouldn’t have brought you here to-night then. How could you possibly doubt of my coming?”

“I don’t know what I thought, and I didn’t know, till I saw you, that all the strength I had hoped for would leave me in a flash, and that if I attempted to speak—with you sitting there—I should make the most shameful failure. We had a sickening scene here—I begged for delay, for time to recover. We waited and waited, and when I heard you at the door talking to the policeman, it seemed to me everything was gone. But it will still come back, if you will leave me. They are quiet again—father must be interesting them.”

“I hope he is!” Ransom exclaimed. “If Miss Chancellor ordered the policeman, she must have expected me.”

“That was only after she knew you were in the house. She flew out into the lobby with father, and they seized him and posted him there. She locked the door; she seemed to think they would break it down. I didn’t wait for that, but from the moment I knew you were on the other side of it I couldn’t go on—I was paralysed. It has made me feel better to talk to you—and now I could appear,” Verena added.

“My darling child, haven’t you a shawl or a mantle?” Ransom returned, for all answer, looking about him. He perceived, tossed upon a chair, a long, furred cloak, which he caught up, and, before she could resist, threw over her. She even let him arrange it and, standing there, draped from head to foot in it, contented herself with saying, after a moment:

“I don’t understand—where shall we go? Where will you take me?”

“We shall catch the night-train for New York, and the first thing in the morning we shall be married.”

Verena remained gazing at him, with swimming eyes. “And what will the people do? Listen, listen!”

“Your father is ceasing to interest them. They’ll howl and thump, according to their nature.”

“Ah, their nature’s fine!” Verena pleaded.

“Dearest, that’s one of the fallacies I shall have to woo you from. Hear them, the senseless brutes!” The storm was now raging in the hall, and it deepened to such a point that Verena turned to him in a supreme appeal.

“I could soothe them with a word!”

“Keep your soothing words for me—you will have need of them all, in our coming time,” Ransom said, laughing. He pulled open the door again, which led into the lobby, but he was driven back, with Verena, by a furious onset from Mrs. Tarrant. Seeing her daughter fairly arrayed for departure, she hurled herself upon her, half in indignation, half in a blind impulse to cling, and with an outpouring of tears, reproaches, prayers, strange scraps of argument and iterations of farewell, closed her about with an embrace which was partly a supreme caress, partly the salutary castigation she had, three minutes before, expressed the wish to administer, and altogether for the moment a check upon the girl’s flight.

“Mother, dearest, it’s all for the best, I can’t help it, I love you just the same; let me go, let me go!” Verena stammered, kissing her again, struggling to free herself, and holding out her hand to Ransom. He saw now that she only wanted to get away, to leave everything behind her. Olive was close at hand, on the threshold of the room, and as soon as Ransom looked at her he became aware that the weakness she had just shown had passed away. She had straightened herself again, and she was upright in her desolation. The expression of her face was a thing to remain with him for ever; it was impossible to imagine a more vivid presentment of blighted hope and wounded pride. Dry, desperate, rigid, she yet wavered and seemed uncertain; her pale, glittering eyes straining forward, as if they were looking for death. Ransom had a vision, even at that crowded moment, that if she could have met it there and then, bristling with steel or lurid wfth fire, she would have rushed on it without a tremor, like the heroine that she was. All this while the great agitation in the hall rose and fell, in waves and surges, as if Selah Tarrant and the agent were talking to the multitude, trying to calm them, succeeding for the moment, and then letting them loose again. Whirled down by one of the fitful gusts, a lady and a gentleman issued from the passage, and Ransom, glancing at them, recognised Mrs. Farrinder and her husband.

“Well, Miss Chancellor,” said that more successful woman, with considerable asperity, “if this is the way you’re going to reinstate our sex!” She passed rapidly through the room, followed by Amariah, who remarked in his transit that it seemed as if there had been a want of organisation, and the two retreated expeditiously, without the lady’s having taken the smallest notice of Verena, whose conflict with her mother prolonged itself. Ransom, striving, with all needful consideration for Mrs. Tarrant, to separate these two, addressed not a word to Olive; it was the last of her, for him, and he neither saw how her livid face suddenly glowed, as if Mrs. Farrinder’s words had been a lash, nor how, as if with a sudden inspiration, she rushed to the approach to the platform. If he had observed her, it might have seemed to him that she hoped to find the fierce expiation she sought for in exposure to the thousands she had disappointed and deceived, in offering herself to be trampled to death and torn to pieces. She might have suggested to him some feminine firebrand of Paris revolutions, erect on a barricade, or even the sacrificial figure of Hypatia,
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whirled through the furious mob of Alexandria. She was arrested an instant by the arrival of Mrs. Burrage and her son, who had quitted the stage on observing the withdrawal of the Farrinders, and who swept into the room in the manner of people seeking shelter from a thunderstorm. The mother’s face expressed the well-bred surprise of a person who should have been asked out to dinner and seen the cloth pulled off the table; the young man, who supported her on his arm, instantly lost himself in the spectacle of Verena disengaging herself from Mrs. Tarrant, only to be again overwhelmed, and in the unexpected presence of the Mississippian. His handsome blue eyes turned from one to the other, and he looked infinitely annoyed and bewildered. It even seemed to occur to him that he might, perhaps, interpose with effect, and he evidently would have liked to say that, without really bragging, he would at least have kept the affair from turning into a row. But Verena, muffled and escaping, was deaf to him, and Ransom didn’t look the right person to address such a remark as that to. Mrs. Burrage and Olive, as the latter shot past, exchanged a glance which represented quick irony on one side and indiscriminating defiance on the other.

“Oh, are you going to speak?” the lady from New York inquired, with her cursory laugh.

Olive had already disappeared; but Ransom heard her answer flung behind her into the room. “I am going to be hissed and hooted and insulted!”

“Olive, Olive!” Verena suddenly shrieked; and her piercing cry might have reached the front. But Ransom had already, by muscular force, wrenched her away, and was hurrying her out, leaving Mrs. Tarrant to heave herself into the arms of Mrs. Burrage, who, he was sure, would, within the minute, loom upon her attractively through her tears, and supply her with a reminiscence, destined to be valuable, of aristocratic support and clever composure. In the outer labyrinth hasty groups, a little scared, were leaving the hall, giving up the game. Ransom, as he went, thrust the hood of Verena’s long cloak over her head, to conceal her face and her identity. It quite prevented recognition, and as they mingled in the issuing crowd he perceived the quick, complete, tremendous silence which, in the hall, had greeted Olive Chancellor’s rush to the front. Every sound instantly dropped, the hush was respectful, the great public waited, and whatever she should say to them (and he thought she might indeed be rather embarrassed), it was not apparent that they were likely to hurl the benches at her. Ransom, palpitating with his victory, felt now a little sorry for her, and was relieved to know that, even when exasperated, a Boston audience is not ungenerous. “Ah, now I am glad!” said Verena, when they reached the street. But though she was glad, he presently discovered that, beneath her hood, she was in tears. It is to be feared that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these were not the last she was destined to shed.

Endnotes

Chapter I

1
(title page)
The Bostonians:
The title refers specifically to Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant; James described the book as “a study of one of those friendships between women which are so common in New England.” The novel was influenced by Alphonse Daudet’s
L‘Évangéliste
(1883) and was James’s attempt to write a “very American tale,” examining both “the situation of women” and the “agitation on their behalf.” It was meant to be a critical satire both of Boston and of the radical groups so prolific in the late nineteenth century, but the novel never reached the popularity James hoped for it, and he omitted it from his New York Edition, a single edition of his collected works. Toward the end of James’s career, Charles Scribner’s Sons offered him the opportunity to publish the twenty-four volumes under the overall title
The Novels and Tales of Henry James, New York Edition
(1907-1909), and James took on the major task of establishing his literary legacy, revising the texts extensively and adding prefaces that have since become classic texts on prose aesthetics and the art of the novel. It is therefore the only one of his great novels not reviewed in a preface. However, he said toward the end of his life, “I should have liked to review it for the Edition—it would have come out a much truer and more curious thing (it was meant to be curious from the first)” (reprinted in
The Notebooks of Henry James;
see “For Further Reading.” See also Geismar,
Henry James and the Jacobites).

2
(p. 5)
Jacobin:
A Jacobin was a sympathizer with the principles of the Jacobins of the French Revolution of 1789, a group that advocated extreme democracy and absolute equality; by about 1800 the term was a nickname for any radical political reformer.

3
(p. 5) nihilist: Nihilism, a revolutionary anarchist movement in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russia, asserted a philosophy of negation, rejecting all forms of government and seeking to overthrow established order, using violence if necessary to do so.

4
(p. 6)
Boeotian ignorance:
Boeotia was a district in ancient Greece that in 335 B.C. rose against Alexander III and was destroyed. Boeotian has now come to mean “dull” or “stupid.”

5
(p. 7)
Washington:
Construction for the planned capital of Washington, D.C. (originally designed by Pierre L’Enfant) began in 1793, but the city remained a fairly isolated area. During the American Civil War (1861-1865), Washington was a major source of operations for the Union side, and its population nearly doubled with the influx of tens of thousands of freed slaves, forever changing the city’s racial makeup.

Chapter II

1
(p. 11)
had plunged the country into blood and tears:
The American Civil War (1861-1865) began with the secession of eleven southern states from the Union. The divide was over differing interpretations of the U.S. Constitution: the southern, or Confederate, states fought for their states’ rights, which would include, among other issues, a lower tariff for the exportation of their cotton crop to Europe and the continuation of slavery. The North, however, favored the federal expansion of powers: the development of railroads and canals, high tariffs for the protection of northern manufacturers, free farming in the frontier states (which threatened the old slave-holding plantation owners in the South), and, most importantly, the abolition of slavery. Though the North triumphed, the casualties were disastrous, and close to 1 million soldiers from the North and South combined were injured or killed. Olive would have seen Basil as part of the movement that had caused the deaths of her two brothers. Two of James’s own brothers fought in the war.

2
(p. 12)
Charles Street:
Olive Chancellor lives on Charles Street in Beacon Hill, on a property that overlooks the Back Bay across the Charles River. She is well-to-do but not one of the very wealthy who were then building enormous homes in the Back Bay neighborhood (see chapter III, note 1).

Chapter III

1
(p. 16)
Back Bay:
The Back Bay was created by a dam that ran from Boston’s Beacon Street to the town of Brookline and created a marshy area at the mouth of the Charles River. In the years 1851-1882 it was filled in and developed with boulevards and large homes built by the wealthy.

2
(p. 17)
Bohemianism:
A bohemian is a gypsy of society—that is, a person, such as an artist or writer, who leads a vagabond or unconventional life outside the accepted norms of a society to which he is otherwise fit to belong.