Henry James: Complete Stories 1864-1874 (3 page)

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Authors: Henry James

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her mother when, at the end of nearly a whole afternoon of vague peregrination with her lover, this rustling, bristling matron asked her where she had been. Georgina was capable of simply telling the truth; and yet if she simply told the truth it was a wonder that she had not been still more simply packed off to Europe. Benyon's ignorance of her pretexts is a proof that this rather oddly-mated couple never arrived at perfect intimacy, in spite of a fact which remains to be related. He thought of this afterwards, and thought how strange it was that he had not felt more at liberty to ask her what she did for him, and how she did it, and how much she suffered for him. She would probably not have admitted that she suffered at all, and she had no wish to pose for a martyr.
Benyon remembered this, as I say, in the after years, when he tried to explain to himself certain things which simply puzzled him; it came back to him with the vision, already faded, of shabby cross-streets, straggling toward rivers, with red sunsets, seen through a haze of dust, at the end; a vista through which the figures of a young man and a girl slowly receded and disappeared, strolling side by side, with the relaxed pace of desultory talk, but more closely linked as they passed into the distance, linked by its at last appearing safe to themin the Tenth Avenuethat the young lady should take his arm. They were always approaching that inferior thoroughfare; but he could scarcely have told you, in those days, what else they were approaching. He had nothing in the world but his pay, and he felt that this was rather a mean income to offer Miss Gressie. Therefore he didn't put it forward; what he offered, instead, was the expressioncrude often, and almost boyishly extravagantof a delighted admiration of her beauty, the tenderest tones of his voice, the softest assurances of his eye, and the most insinuating pressure of her hand at those moments when she consented to place it in his arm. All this was an eloquence which, if necessary, might have been condensed into a single sentence; but those few words were scarcely needed when it was as plain that he expected, in general, she would marry him, as it was indefinite that he counted upon her for living on a few hundred a year. If she had been a different girl he might have asked her to wait, might have talked to her of the coming of better days, of his prospective
 
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promotion, of its being wiser, perhaps, that he should leave the navy and look about for a more lucrative career. With Georgina it was difficult to go into such questions; she had no taste whatever for detail. She was delightful as a woman to love, because when a young man is in love he discovers that; but she could not be called helpful, for she never suggested anything. That is, she never had done so till the day she really proposedfor that was the form it tookto become his wife without more delay. Oh yes, I will marry you: these words, which I quoted a little way back, were not so much the answer to something he had said at the moment as the light conclusion of a report she had just made (for the first time) of her actual situation in her father's house.
III.
I am afraid I shall have to see less of you, she had begun by saying. They watch me so much.
It is very little already, he answered. What is once or twice a week?
That's easy for you to say. You are your own master, but you don't know what I go through.
Do they make it very bad for you, dearest? Do they make scenes? Benyon asked.
No, of course not. Don't you know us enough to know how we behave? No scenes; that would be a relief. However, I never make them myself, and I never willthat's one comfort for you, for the future, if you want to know. Father and mother keep very quiet, looking at me as if I were one of the lost, with little hard, piercing eyes, like gimlets. To me they scarcely say anything, but they talk it all over with each other, and try and decide what is to be done. It's my belief that my father has written to the people in Washingtonwhat do you call it?the Departmentto have you moved away from Brooklynto have you sent to sea.
I guess that won't do much good. They want me in Brooklyn; they don't want me at sea.
Well, they are capable of going to Europe for a year, on purpose to take me, Georgina said.
How can they take you if you won't go? And if you should
 
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go, what good would it do if you were only to find me here when you came back, just the same as you left me?
Oh, well! said Georgina, with her lovely smile, of course they think that absence would cure me ofcure me of And she paused, with a kind of cynical modesty, not saying exactly of what.
Cure you of what, darling? Say it, please say it, the young man murmured, drawing her hand surreptitiously into his arm.
Of my absurd infatuation!
And would it, dearest?
Yes, very likely. But I don't mean to try. I shall not go to Europenot when I don't want to. But it's better I should see less of youeven that I should appeara littleto give you up.
A little? What do you call a little?
Georgina said nothing for a moment. Well, that, for instance, you shouldn't hold my hand quite so tight! And she disengaged this conscious member from the pressure of his arm.
What good will that do? Benyon asked.
It will make them think it's all overthat we have agreed to part.
And as we have done nothing of the kind, how will that help us?
They had stopped at the crossing of a street; a heavy dray was lumbering slowly past them. Georgina, as she stood there, turned her face to her lover and rested her eyes for some moments on his own. At last, Nothing will help us; I don't think we are very happy, she answered, while her strange, ironical, inconsequent smile played about her beautiful lips.
I don't understand how you see things. I thought you were going to say you would marry me, Benyon rejoined, standing there still, though the dray had passed.
Oh yes, I will marry you! And she moved away across the street. That was the way she had said it, and it was very characteristic of her. When he saw that she really meant it, he wished they were somewhere elsehe hardly knew where the proper place would beso that he might take her in his arms. Nevertheless, before they separated that day he had said to
 
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her he hoped she remembered they would be very poor, reminding her how great a change she would find it. She answered that she shouldn't mind, and presently she said that if this was all that prevented them the sooner they were married the better. The next time he saw her she was quite of the same opinion; but he found, to his surprise, it was now her conviction that she had better not leave her father's house. The ceremony should take place secretly, of course; but they would wait awhile to let their union be known.
What good will it do us, then? Raymond Benyon asked. Georgina coloured. Well, if you don't know, I can't tell you!
Then it seemed to him that he did know. Yet, at the same time, he could not see why, once the knot was tied, secrecy should be required. When he asked what especial event they were to wait for, and what should give them the signal to appear as man and wife, she answered that her parents would probably forgive her if they were to discover, not too abruptly, after six months, that she had taken the great step. Benyon supposed that she had ceased to care whether they forgave her or not; but he had already perceived that the nature of women is a queer mosaic. He had believed her capable of marrying him out of bravado, but the pleasure of defiance was absent if the marriage was kept to themselves. It now appeared that she was not especially anxious to defy; she was disposed rather to manage and temporise.
Leave it to me; leave it to me. You are only a blundering man, Georgina said. I shall know much better than you the right moment for saying, Well, you may as well make the best of it, because we have already done it!
That might very well be, but Benyon didn't quite understand, and he was awkwardly anxious (for a lover) till it came over him afresh that there was one thing at any rate in his favour, which was simply that the finest girl he had ever seen was ready to throw herself into his arms. When he said to her, There is one thing I hate in this plan of yoursthat, for ever so few weeks, so few days, your father should support my wifewhen he made this homely remark, with a little flush of sincerity in his face, she gave him a specimen of that unanswerable laugh of hers, and declared that it would serve Mr.
 
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Gressie right for being so barbarous and so horrid. It was Benyon's view that from the moment she disobeyed her father she ought to cease to avail herself of his protection; but I am bound to add that he was not particularly surprised at finding this a kind of honour in which her feminine nature was little versed. To make her his wife firstat the earliest momentwhenever she would, and trust to fortune and the new influence he should have, to give him, as soon thereafter as possible, complete possession of her: this finally presented itself to the young officer as the course most worthy of a lover and a gentleman. He would be only a pedant who would take nothing because he could not get everything at once. They wandered further than usual this afternoon, and the dusk was thick by the time he brought her back to her father's door. It was not his habit to come so near it, but to-day they had so much to talk about that he actually stood with her for ten minutes at the foot of the steps. He was keeping her hand in his, and she let it rest there while she saidby way of a remark that should sum up all their reasons and reconcile their differences
There's one great thing it will do, you know: it will make me safe.
Safe from what?
From marrying any one else.
Ah, my girl, if you were to do that! Benyon exclaimed; but he didn't mention the other branch of the contingency. Instead of this, he looked aloft at the blind face of the house (there were only dim lights in two or three windows, and no apparent eyes) and up and down the empty street, vague in the friendly twilight; after which he drew Georgina Gressie to his breast and gave her a long, passionate kiss. Yes, decidedly, he felt they had better be married. She had run quickly up the steps, and while she stood there, with her hand on the bell, she almost hissed at him, under her breath, Go away, go away; Amanda's coming! Amanda was the parlour-maid; and it was in those terms that the Twelfth Street Juliet dismissed her Brooklyn Romeo. As he wandered back into the Fifth Avenue, where the evening air was conscious of a vernal fragrance from the shrubs in the little precinct of the pretty Gothic church ornamenting that pleasant
 
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part of the street, he was too absorbed in the impression of the delightful contact from which the girl had violently released herself to reflect that the great reason she had mentioned a moment before was a reason for their marrying, of course, but not in the least a reason for their not making it public. But, as I said in the opening lines of this chapter, if he did not understand his mistress's motives at the end, he cannot be expected to have understood them at the beginning.
IV.
Mrs. Portico, as we know, was always talking about going to Europe; but she had not yetI mean a year after the incident I have just relatedput her hand upon a youthful cicerone. Petticoats, of course, were required; it was necessary that her companion should be of the sex which sinks most naturally upon benches, in galleries and cathedrals, and pauses most frequently upon staircases that ascend to celebrated views. She was a widow with a good fortune and several sons, all of whom were in Wall Street, and none of them capable of the relaxed pace at which she expected to take her foreign tour. They were all in a state of tension; they went through life standing. She was a short, broad, high-coloured woman, with a loud voice and superabundant black hair, arranged in a way peculiar to herself, with so many combs and bands that it had the appearance of a national coiffure. There was an impression in New York, about 1845, that the style was Danish; some one had said something about having seen it in Schleswig-Holstein. Mrs. Portico had a bold, humorous, slightly flam-boyant look; people who saw her for the first time received an impression that her late husband had married the daughter of a bar-keeper or the proprietress of a menagerie. Her high, hoarse, good-natured voice seemed to connect her in some way with public life; it was not pretty enough to suggest that she might have been an actress. These ideas quickly passed away, however, even if you were not sufficiently initiated to knowas all the Gressies, for instance, knew so wellthat her origin, so far from being enveloped in mystery, was almost the sort of thing she might have boasted of. But, in spite of the

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