Henry James

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She is 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 does n’t do it badly, as exposition—is a thing so false that it makes me blush. It is 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She had sat up very late,—after me, after Mark,—and before going to bed had knocked at the door of the child’s room, which was opened to her by the nurse. This good woman had admitted her, and she had found Dolcino quiet, but flushed and “unnatural,” with his mother sitting beside his bed. “She held his hand in one of hers,” said Miss Ambient, “and in the other—what do you think?—the proof-sheets of Mark’s new book! She was reading them there, intently: did you ever hear of anything so extraordinary? Such a very odd time to be reading an author whom she never could abide!” ”

“ Ambient kept her eyes fixed on the opposite end of the grounds, as if she were watching for her husband’s return with the child. “Is Mr. Ambient fond of gardening?” it occurred to me to inquire, irresistibly impelled as I felt myself, moreover, to bring the conversation constantly back to him. ”

“ Mrs. Ambient had looked up from her reading with her finger on her lips—I recognised the gesture she had addressed me in the afternoon—and, though the nurse was about to go to rest, had not encouraged her sister-in-law to relieve her of any part of her vigil. But certainly at that time the boy’s state was far from reassuring—his poor little breathing so painful; and what change could have taken place in him in those few hours that would justify Beatrice in denying Mackintosh access? This was the moral of Miss Ambient’s anecdote, the moral for herself at least. ”

“ This will give you about the date of my first visit—of any duration—to England for you will not have forgotten the commotion, I may even say the scandal, produced by Mark Ambient’s masterpiece. It was the most complete presentation that had yet been made of the gospel of art; it was a kind of æsthetic war-cry. People had endeavoured to sail nearer to “truth” in the cut of their sleeves and the shape of their sideboards; but there had not as yet been, among English novels, such an example of beauty of execution and “intimate” importance of theme. ”

“ 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! ”

“ My trepidations, however, were delightful; they were just what I had hoped for, and their only fault was that they passed away too quickly; for I found that, as regards most things, I very soon seized Mark Ambient’s point of view. It was the point of view of the artist to whom every manifestation of human energy was a thrilling spectacle, and who felt forever the desire to resolve his experience of life into a literary form. ”

“ It costs me something to speak in this irreverent manner of Mark Ambient’s sister, but I shall have still more disagreeable things to say before I have finished my little anecdote, and moreover,—I confess it,—I owe the young lady a sort of grudge. Putting aside the curious cast of her face, she had no natural aptitude for an artistic development,—she had little real intelligence. But her affectations rubbed off on her brother’s renown, and as there were plenty of people who disapproved of him totally, they could easily point to his sister as a person formed by his influence. ”

“ The effort to arrive at a surface—if you think a surface 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 have to content myself. Life is really too short for art—one hasn’t time to make one’s shell ideally hard. Firm and bright—firm and bright!—the devilish thing has a way, sometimes, of being bright without being firm. ”

“ She listened to me with her face grave again and her lips a little compressed, listened as if in no doubt, of course, that her husband was remarkable, but as if at the same time she had heard it frequently enough and couldn’t treat it as stirring news. There was even in her manner a suggestion that I was so young as to expose myself to being called forward—an imputation and a word I had always loathed; as well as a hinted reminder that people usually got over their early extravagance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They formed, as I remember, a thick loose curtain at the further end, in one of the folds of which, as it were, we presently made out from afar a little group. “Ah there she is!” said Mark Ambient; “and she has got the boy.” He noted that last fact in a slightly different tone from any in which he yet had spoken. I wasn’t fully aware of this at the time, but it lingered in my ear and I afterwards understood it.
“Is it your son?” I inquired, feeling the question not to be brilliant.
“Yes, my only child. He’s always in his mother’s pocket. She coddles him too much.” ”

“ Miss Ambient’s head drooped a little to one side and her eyes fixed themselves on futurity. Then of a sudden came a strange alteration; her face lighted to an effect more joyless than any gloom, to that indeed of a conscious insincere grimace, and she added “When one has children what one writes becomes a great responsibility.” ”

“ 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!” ”

“ He was addicted to velvet jackets, to cigarettes, to loose shirt-collars, to looking a little dishevelled. His features, which were firm but not perfectly regular, are fairly enough represented in his portraits; but no portrait I have seen gives any idea of his expression. There were innumerable things in it, and they chased each other in and out of his face. I have seen people who were grave and gay in quick alternation; but Mark Ambient was grave and gay at one and the same moment. ”

“ The lawn seemed to me of extraordinary extent, the garden-walls of incalculable height, the whole air of the place delightfully still, private, proper to itself. “My wife must be somewhere about,” Mark Ambient said as we went in. “We shall find her perhaps—we’ve about an hour before dinner. She may be in the garden. ”

“ I had been in England, briefly, a twelve-month before the time to which I began by alluding, and had then learned that Mr. Ambient was in distant lands—was making a considerable tour in the East; so that there was nothing to do but to keep my letter till I should be in London again. It was of little use to me to hear that his wife had not left England and was, with her little boy, their only child, spending the period of her husband’s absence—a good many months—at a small place they had down in Surrey. They had a house in London, but actually in the occupation of other persons. ”

“ I have seen poets married to women of whom it was difficult to conceive that they should gratify the poetic fancy,—women with dull faces and glutinous minds, who were none the less, however, excellent wives. But there was no obvious incongruity in Mark Ambient’s union. Mrs. Ambient, delicate and quiet, in a white dress, with her beautiful child at her side, was worthy of the author of a work so distinguished as Beltraffio. ”

“ Well,” said my entertainer, “she doesn’t like his ideas. She doesn’t like them for the child. She thinks them undesirable.”
Being quite fresh from the contemplation of some of Mark Ambient’s arcana I was particularly in a position to appreciate this announcement. But the effect of it was to make me, after staring a moment, burst into laughter which I instantly checked when I remembered the indisposed child above and the possibility of parents nervously or fussily anxious.
“What has that infant to do with ideas?” I asked. “Surely he can’t tell one from another. Has he read his father’s novels?” ”

“ I bade her good-night, and then, without intention, by a kind of fatality, the perversity which had already made me insist unduly on talking with her about her husband’s achievements, I alluded to the precious proof-sheets with which Ambient had intrusted me and which I was nursing there under my arm. ”

“ Ambient! There are pages in each of his books that have a perfection that classes them with the greatest things. Therefore, for me to see him in this familiar way,—in his habit as he lives,—and to find, apparently, the man as delightful as the artist, I can’t tell you how much too good to be true it seems, and how great a privilege I think it. ”

“ Miss Ambient promptly returned.
“Refused to let Mackintosh see him? By heaven I’ll smash in the door!” And Mark brought his fist down upon the sideboard, which he had now approached, so that all the breakfast-service rang.
I begged Miss Ambient to go up and try to have speech of her sister-in-law, and I drew Mark out into the garden. “You’re exceedingly nervous, and Mrs. Ambient’s probably right,” I there undertook to plead. “Women know; women should be supreme in such a situation. Trust a mother—a devoted mother, my dear friend!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”