Читать книгу The Sense of the Past - Henry James - Страница 7

It was not till he reached the street that he took in all she meant—as in particular by those last words. Without sense or sight, on leaving the house, he turned mechanically to the left and went blankly before him. This was not his way home, but he had no thought for ways. He moved simply because if he didn't there was nothing for him but to sit down on the first other doorstep. He felt mainly a great weakness—felt almost nothing else; yet it was a weakness that, oddly, sustained him for a long stretch, carried him up to the Park, determined his passing in, and then made him proceed unheedingly from the nearer to the further end. It was only on reaching the distant limit that he so much as noted a bench. The one he noted, however, he quickly sank upon; and little by little, thereafter, he gained a second consciousness. This was a perception of the beauty of the day, the mildest mood of March. The windless air, charged with spring, was like a brimming cup held still. The weather was divine, but the person supposed by him an hour before as dear to him as life had since then turned him out into the world. Well, the world was there to take him. Yes, he increasingly felt, he was there and his bench, placed near the top of the spread of a great alley, seemed to give him a general view of it. The object indeed after a while most distinct in this view was Ralph Pendrel himself, who rose there conspicuous and held our young friend's eyes. What marked him most was that he was a man humiliated. Arrange it as he would—or as she would—he had not been good enough. What it really came to—she might say what she liked—was that he was not of the type. Who was then?—he could but put himself the question. He even presently reflected that it might serve her right to find after a while there was nobody. Thus it was that Ralph Pendrel, with the world taking him, was yet thrown back on that gentleman. If he was not good enough for her he would be so for this alternative friend; and he gathered about him in thought for an hour all the merits he could muster. One of them precisely was that he had another and quite a different passion. He kept repeating to himself that just this, for his hard mistress, was his defect. He had wondered much before he got up whether he had it with such intensity as to constitute a vice—an inhuman side, that is, which she might pardonably distrust. The only thing for him doubtless now therefore would be to attest the intensity. He at last quitted the place with the step of a man proposing to test it on the spot. All this while, however, the anxiety truly deepest in him was about another affair. What in the world had happened to her in Europe?

It was when he reached the quiet scene which the recent lapse of his mother's soft pervasion had made so inconsequently, though now the abode of a more single state, not wider but narrower, that the next great thing befel him. He found on his table a letter from a firm of London solicitors, a communication on the face of it most harmoniously timed. It appeared that under the will of his late kinsman, Mr. Philip Augustus Pendrel, he inherited property—a fact enriched by the further mention, on the part of his informants, that should he find it convenient to come to England without undue delay his being on the spot would contribute to their action in his interest. It may immediately be said that the light wind of this stroke had even at the moment a happy effect on the heat of his wound. The event would certainly appeal with no great directness to the author of that injury, but its connection with the object of his other passion, as we have termed this source of inspiration, became at once of the liveliest. He made as rapidly as possible his arrangements for a journey to London, but he had time, before winding up the situation in New York, to hear from his cousin's representatives of matters still further concerning him and to receive from them in especial a letter addressed in that gentleman's hand and not at first found among his effects. It contained the only words that had, so far as he knew, come to any member of the American kinship, for two generations, from any member of the English. The English, he was perfectly aware, had been held by the American to be offish and haughty, and the American had stiffened itself to show that, since the question was of turning an unconscious back, the game was playable wherever backs were broad enough to show—which they made bold to feel themselves in the new country too. It was familiar to Ralph Pendrel that his father and his grandfather had fairly studied, and had practised with consistency, the art of the cold shoulder. They had each been more than once to England, but had "looked up" nobody and nothing—had clearly not acquainted themselves either by inquiry or closer visitation with those thin possibilities of something some day to their advantage, or to that of their posterity, that might have been dreamed of at the best. The property mainly accruing to Ralph loomed large now as a house—it was described as commodious—in a fine quarter of the town; this remained at first the limit of his charmed apprehension. No light, of the dimmest, had previously reached him as to the English view of what he had always heard called at home "the American attitude." He had in growing older not much believed there could be an English view; but it would seem after all that over this ground his fancy had too shyly hovered.

Mr. Pendrel's letter practically expressed the unsupposed quantity, and nothing surely could have been of more flattering effect. Written to be delivered after his death, it explained and enhanced, the delightful document—shaking the tree, as it were, for the golden fruit to fall. What it came to was that he had read as an old man his young relative's remarkable volume, "An Essay in Aid of the Reading of History," and, wishing somehow to testify to the admiration he felt for it, had come to consider that no symbol would be so solid as the old English house forming the sole item, in a long list of heavily hampered possessions, that he was free thus to dispose of. It was a mere town tenement, and none of the newest, but it was the best repayment of his debt he could make. He had nowhere seen the love of old things, of the scrutable, palpable past, nowhere felt an ear for stilled voices, as precious as they are faint, as seizable, truly, as they are fine, affirm a more remarkable power than in the pages that had moved him to gratitude. Unpretending though the title, the spare volume, but in which every word reached the mark, was a contribution to causes he had always had much at heart, a plea with which he rejoiced that the name of their family should have been associated. There were old things galore in Mansfield Square; the past, he considered, held its state there for those with the wit to make it out; and, should his young kinsman accept his bequest, he would find himself master of a scene in which a chapter of history—obscure, though not so remote as might perhaps have been wished—would perhaps by his intervention step more into the light. The generations at least had passed through it, clinging indeed as long as they might, and couldn't have failed to leave something of their mark, which it would doubtless interest Mr. Ralph to puzzle out. It was the testator's wish that he should do so at his ease. The letter in fine was, as Ralph said, a deucedly beautiful gentlemanly one, and the turn of the wheel of fortune. The material advantage might be uncertain; but it was blessedly not for the economic question, it was for the historic, the aesthetic, fairly in fact for the cryptic, that he cared. A big London house sounded in truth on the face of the matter less like an aid to research than like an exposure to rates and taxes, a legacy of the order vulgarly known as thumping. But verily too even London, for our rare young man, was within the pale of romance. His "other" passion in short had soon begun freshly to glow.

Within a month it had shaken him still harder, and all the more that, this time, his impatience had fallen and two or three of his illusions with it: his curiosity had sat down to its feast. He had encountered in London more business than he expected, but had not encountered what he most feared, the display of a swarm of litigants. This greatly eased his mind, since if injustice had been done it would have taken much from the savour of the feast. There was no nearer relative, it surprisingly seemed, no counter-claimant, no hint in the air of a satisfaction disputed. No unfortunate and expropriated person came, in a word, to light, and there was therefore neither a cause to defend nor a sacrifice to consider. The only thing really to consider in such a stroke of luck was its violation of the common law of prose. Life was at best good prose—when it wasn't bad; and Mr. Pendrel's succession was—all "town tenement" as it might be—poetry undefiled. It was none the less poetry that the value of the property was so easily ascertained to be high. Ralph reflected not even for a moment after he had been to see it that a fine country estate would have been more to his purpose. He had no purpose, he freely recognised, but to begin at once to cultivate whatever relation should seem most fruitful to his so suddenly acquired "stake" in an alien order. The circumstance of its being exactly what it was—of no greater extent, yet of no less dignity—ministered beyond anything else for the new master to a sense of close communication with the old. It was extraordinary how on this ground the young man felt himself understood; and he reflected endlessly as well as amazedly on the fact that it had all been done for him by his slim composition of five years before, so timid, so futile in the light of his subsequent growth. The affair would have been less of a fairytale—and had indeed thereby less of a charm—if Mr. Pendrel's impulse had been determined by such a book as he might now write. What a book, what books, moreover, should properly proceed, he said to himself, from a longer and nearer view of the silent secrets of the place! These were what had been bequeathed him, these were what the hand of death had placed before him, on the table, as in a locked brass-bound box the key of which he was to find. It would not be by any weakness of his, please God, that a single one of them should fail of its message.

He liked to think, as he took possession, that his kinsman was watching, and therewith waiting, beyond the grave; though the way he had abstained from restrictive conditions—from all, that is, save a single one hereafter to be mentioned—was perhaps the deepest note in his good taste. The part played in the whole business by that happy principle was in truth at moments almost such as to make poor Ralph uneasy. There was a roundness in his fortune that might seem too much to beguile. Were blessings so unexpected ever, beyond a certain point, anything but traps? Should he begin to make his way into the secrets, as they hovered and hung there, wearing a sort of sensible consistency, who could say where he might come out, into what dark deeps of knowledge he might be drawn, or how he should "like," given what must perhaps at the best stick to him of insuperable modern prejudice, the face of some of his discoveries? He encountered however on this ground of a possible menace to his peace a reassurance that sprang, and with all eagerness, from the very nature of his mind. He lived, so far as a wit sharpened by friction with the real permitted him, in his imagination; but if life was for this faculty but a chain of open doors through which endless connections danced there was yet no knowledge in the world on which one should wish a door closed. There was none at any rate that in the glow of his first impression of his property he didn't desire much more to face than to shirk. If he was even in this early stage a little disconcerted it came only from the too narrow limits in which Mr. Pendrel's personal image, meeting his mind's eye at odd moments on the spot and constantly invoked by his gratitude, appeared to have arranged to reveal itself. He would have been particularly grateful for a portrait; but though there were in the house other framed physiognomies these were things—and not unluckily either!—of a different order of reference, an order in which the friendly photograph for instance, whether of the late tenant of the place or of any other subject, played no part. The friendly photograph had been with us for half a century, but there was nothing there to Ralph's vision so new as that. Number Nine Mansfield Square affected that vision, in short, to a degree presently to be explained, as with an inimitable reserve in respect to the modern world. It had crossed the threshold of the century, the nineteenth, it had even measured a few steps of the portentous prospect, but where it had stopped, pulled up very short and as with its head in the air—it had stopped, one might have surmised, with a kind of disgust. It had determined clearly, on the apprehension then interchanged, to have as little to say to the future as an animated home, of whatever period, might get off with. "And yet I am the future," Ralph Pendrel mused, "and I dream of making it speak."

Face to face with it then, when he felt that already and quite distinctly it was speaking—which happened the first time that ever, key in hand, he was able to enter it unaccompanied—there was an inconsequence to note, and one from which he drew a fine pleasure. He was thus moved more shrewdly to reflect that if he was so trusted there must have been something in him to inspire it. Was he to such a tune the future? Had not his taste for "research," which was more personally his passion for the past, worked rather, and despite his comparative youth, to transmute him? On the day he disembarked in England he felt himself as never before ranged in that interest, counted on that side of the line. It was to this he had been brought by his desire to remount the stream of time, really to bathe in its upper and more natural waters, to risk even, as he might say, drinking of them. No man, he well believed, could ever so much have wanted to look behind and still behind—to scale the high wall into which the successive years, each a squared block, pile themselves in our rear and look over as nearly as possible with the eye of sense into, unless it should rather be called out of, the vast prison yard. He was by the turn of his spirit oddly indifferent to the actual and the possible; his interest was all in the spent and the displaced, in what had been determined and composed roundabout him, what had been presented as a subject and a picture, by ceasing—so far as things ever cease—to bustle or even to be. It was when life was framed in death that the picture was really hung up. If his idea in fine was to recover the lost moment, to feel the stopped pulse, it was to do so as experience, in order to be again consciously the creature that had been, to breathe as he had breathed and feel the pressure that he had felt. The truth most involved for him, so intent, in the insistent ardour of the artist, was that art was capable of an energy to this end never yet to all appearance fully required of it. With an address less awkward, a wooing less shy, an embrace less weak, it would draw the foregone much closer to its breast. What he wanted himself was the very smell of that simpler mixture of things that had so long served; he wanted the very tick of the old stopped clocks. He wanted the hour of the day at which this and that had happened, and the temperature and the weather and the sound, and yet more the stillness, from the street, and the exact look-out, with the corresponding look-in, through the window and the slant on the walls of the light of afternoons that had been. He wanted the unimaginable accidents, the little notes of truth for which the common lens of history, however the scowling muse might bury her nose, was not sufficiently fine. He wanted evidence of a sort for which there had never been documents enough, or for which documents mainly, however multiplied, would never be enough. That was indeed in any case the artist's method—to try for an ell in order to get an inch. The difficult, as at best it is, becomes under such conditions so dire that to face it with any prospect one had to propose the impossible. Recovering the lost was at all events on this scale much like entering the enemy's lines to get back one's dead for burial; and to that extent was he not, by his deepening penetration, contemporaneous and present? "Present" was a word used by him in a sense of his own and meaning as regards most things about him markedly absent. It was for the old ghosts to take him for one of themselves.

The spirit of gossip governed but little, he had promptly seen, the commerce of his friends the London solicitors with their clients; they were persons of a hard professional and facial surface and of settled dull complexion, giving back, on a rap of the knuckle, the special sharp answer, but not thereby corrupted to any human resonance. They betrayed to him in consequence few of Mr. Pendrel's secrets, and he shrank on his side from giving the measure of his ignorance of the source of so large a bounty. This was perhaps the weakness of a slightly lame pride; he had not been too proud to accept, but he felt that in asking many questions he should show himself indebted to a stranger. He accordingly made out little more than that his kinsman had read books, possibly even pursued studies and entertained ideals, had had another habitation, the estate of Driffle, in the country, much more frequented, and had never, since forming, on the occasion of an inheritance in the maternal line, the connection with Mansfield Square, been disposed to pass in London—it was even a little odd—more than two or three weeks together. Odder still, though to our young man's but half informed view, was it that his visits to town appeared to have been almost always of the autumn and the winter, had indeed often taken place at Christmas and at Easter, the periods, by the rigid London law, of gregarious intermission. He had been a person, it was clear, of few commonplace conformities, a person with a fine sense for his own taste and his own freedom, one in whose life the accents, as who should say, were not placed where people in general place them. There were moreover in the history points of indistinctness which would doubtless clear up under pressure; as the fact for instance that though he had entered into possession in middle life he had yet affirmed this possession so thoroughly that confusion and a grey vagueness had already settled on the memory of whatever predecessors, who seemed to lurk indistinguishable behind him. At the same time that he had loved and guarded the place, he had none the less, as might have been remarked and as was somehow to be divined, not admitted it to the last familiarity. This went so far as to suggest that in keeping it clear and inviolate he had had in view betimes the convenience of some other considerable person.

That beneficiary, in the form of his American cousin, so rejoiced in such an inference that, during the first few days, he hung about under cover of night, and with mingled diffidence and pride, before the inexpressive front. The pride was for all he was already aware of within, while the diffidence was for the caretaker and her husband, a mature and obese but irreproachably formal policeman—persons of high respectability both, placed in charge by Mr. Pendrel's executors, to whom he feared to show as frivolous in knocking yet again. Was he not for that matter frivolous actually and sufficiently, he more than once asked himself, carried off his intellectual feet to such a point by an accident that would have had for most people a mere relation to their income? He was conscious enough that what had thus caught him up to flights of fancy was an object of a class more definable than almost any other as of the reverse of extraordinary, a London house of the elder, larger, finer type, of an age long anterior to the age of jerry-building, but still after all a mere grey square section of a street, passed and repassed by cabs and costermongers, called at by the milkman, numbered by the vestryman, and marked by the solicitude of this last functionary to the extent exactly of an unimpressive street-lamp placed straight, or rather in fact placed considerably crooked, before the door. The street-lamp was a disfavour to the dark backward into which Ralph loved to look, and yet he was perhaps a little glad of its presence on the two or three occasions just mentioned—occasions of his patrolling the opposite side in covert contemplation. The dusky front at these times showed its eyes—admirable many-paned windows, at once markedly numerous and markedly interspaced—in a manner more responsive to his own. He had moments of stopping when the coast was clear for a longer stare and then of going on in pronounced detachment at the approach of observation. There was still a want of ease in his ecstasy, if it were not rather that the very essence of the ecstasy was a certain depth of apprehension.