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THE TRAGIC MUSE
have had something to do with Dormer. That could pass for an explanation with many of Mrs. Dallow’s friends, who as a general thing
were not morbidly analytic; especially with those who met Nick as
a matter of course at dinner. His fi guring at this lady’s entertainments, being in her house whenever a candle was lighted, was taken
as a sign that there was something rather particular between them.
Nick had said to her more than once that people would wonder why
they didn’t marry; but he was wrong in this, inasmuch as there were
many of their friends to whom it wouldn’t have occurred that his
position could be improved. That they were cousins was a fact not so
evident to others as to themselves, in consequence of which they appeared remarkably intimate. The person seeing clearest in the matter was Mrs. Gresham, who lived so much in the world that being
left now and then to one’s own company had become her idea of
true sociability. She knew very well that if she had been privately
engaged to a young man as amiable as Nick Dormer she would have
managed that publicity shouldn’t play such a part in their intercourse; and she had her secret scorn for the stupidity of people whose
conception of Nick’s relation to Julia rested on the fact that he was
always included in her parties. “If he never was there they might
talk,” she said to herself. But Mrs. Gresham was supersubtle. To her
it would have appeared natural that her friend should celebrate
the parliamentary recess by going down to Harsh and securing the
young man’s presence there for a fortnight; she recognised Mrs. Dallow’s actual plan as a comparatively poor substitute the project of
spending the holidays in other people’s houses, to which Nick had
also promised to come. Mrs. Gresham was romantic; she wondered
what was the good of mere snippets and snatches, the chances that
any one might have, when large, still days a deux were open to you
chances of which half the sanctity was in what they excluded. However, there were more unsettled matters between Mrs. Dallow and
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HENRY JAMES
her queer kinsman than even Mrs. Gresham’s fi ne insight could embrace. She was not on the Sunday evening before Easter among the
guests in Great Stanhope Street; but if she had been Julia’s singular
indifference to observation would have stopped short of encouraging her to remain in the drawing-room, along with Nick, after the
others had gone. I may add that Mrs. Gresham’s extreme curiosity
would have emboldened her as little to do so. She would have taken
for granted that the pair wished to be alone together, though she
would have regarded this only as a snippet. The company had at all
events stayed late, and it was nearly twelve o’clock when the last of
them, standing before the fi re in the room they had quitted, broke
out to his companion:
“See here, Julia, how long do you really expect me to endure this
kind of thing?” Julia made him no answer; she only leaned back in
her chair with her eyes upon his. He met her gaze a moment; then
he turned round to the fi re and for another moment looked into it.
After this he faced his hostess again with the exclamation: “It’s so
foolish it’s so damnably foolish!”
She still said nothing, but at the end of a minute she spoke without answering him. “I shall expect you on Tuesday, and I hope you’ll
come by a decent train.”
“What do you mean by a decent train?”
“I mean I hope you’ll not leave it till the last thing before dinner,
so that we can have a little walk or something.”
“What’s a little walk or something? Why, if you make such
a point of my coming to Griffi n, do you want me to come at all?”
She hesitated an instant; then she returned; “I knew you hated it!”
“You provoke me so,” said Nick. “You try to, I think.”
“And Severals is still worse. You’ll get out of that if you can,”
Mrs. Dallow went on.
“If I can? What’s to prevent me?”
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THE TRAGIC MUSE
“You promised Lady Whiteroy. But of course that’s nothing.”
“I don’t care a straw for Lady Whiteroy.”
“And you promised me. But that’s less still.”
“It is foolish it’s quite idiotic,” said Nick with his hands in his
pockets and his eyes on the ceiling.
There was another silence, at the end of which Julia remarked:
“You might have answered Mr. Macgeorge when he spoke to you.”
“Mr. Macgeorge what has he to do with it?”
“He has to do with your getting on a little. If you think that’s
the way !”
Nick broke into a laugh. “I like lessons in getting on in other
words I suppose you mean in urbanity from you, Julia!”
“Why not from me?”
“Because you can do nothing base. You’re incapable of putting
on a fl attering manner to get something by it: therefore why should
you expect me to? You’re unfl attering that is, you’re austere in proportion as there may be something to be got.”
She sprang from her chair, coming toward him. “There’s only
one thing I want in the world you know very well.”
“Yes, you want it so much that you won’t even take it when it’s
pressed on you. How long do you seriously expect me to bear it?”
Nick repeated.
“I never asked you to do anything base,” she said as she stood in
front of him. “If I’m not clever about throwing myself into things it’s
all the more reason you should be.”
“If you’re not clever, my dear Julia ?” Nick, close to her, placed his
hands on her shoulders and shook her with a mixture of tenderness
and passion. “You’re clever enough to make me furious, sometimes!”
She opened and closed her fan looking down at it while she submitted to his mild violence. “All I want is that when a man like Mr.
Macgeorge talks to you you shouldn’t appear bored to death. You
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HENRY JAMES
used to be so charming under those infl ictions. Now you appear to
take no interest in anything. At dinner to-night you scarcely opened
your lips; you treated them all as if you only wished they’d go.”
“I did wish they’d go. Haven’t I told you a hundred times what
I think of your salon?”
“How then do you want me to live?” she asked. “Am I not to have
a creature in the house?”
“As many creatures as you like. Your freedom’s complete and, as
far as I’m concerned, always will be. Only when you challenge me
and overhaul me not justly, I think I must confess the simple truth,
that there are many of your friends I don’t delight in.”
“Oh your idea of pleasant people!” Julia lamented. “I should like
once for all to know what it really is.”
“I can tell you what it really isn’t: it isn’t Mr. Macgeorge.
He’s a being almost grotesquely limited.”
“He’ll be where you’ll never be unless you change.”
“To be where Mr. Macgeorge is not would be very much my desire. Therefore why should I change?” Nick demanded. “However,
I hadn’t the least intention of being rude to him, and I don’t think
I was,” he went on. “To the best of my ability I assume a virtue if
I haven’t it; but apparently I’m not enough of a comedian.”
“If you haven’t it?” she echoed. “It’s when you say things like that
that you’re so dreadfully tiresome. As if there were anything that
you haven’t or mightn’t have!”
Nick turned away from her; he took a few impatient steps in the
room, looking at the carpet, his hands always in his pockets. Then
he came back to the fi re with the observation: “It’s rather hard to be
found so wanting when one has tried to play one’s part so beautifully.” He paused with his eyes on her own and then went on with
a vibration in his voice: “I’ve imperilled my immortal soul, or at
least bemuddled my intelligence, by all the things I don’t care for
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THE TRAGIC MUSE
that I’ve tried to do, and all the things I detest that I’ve tried to be,
and all the things I never can be that I’ve tried to look as if I were
all the appearances and imitations, the pretences and hypocrisies
in which I’ve steeped myself to the eyes; and at the end of it (it
serves me right!) my reward is simply to learn that I’m still not half
humbug enough!”
Julia looked away from him as soon as he had spoken these
words; she attached her eyes to the clock behind him and observed
irrelevantly: “I’m very sorry, but I think you had better go. I don’t
like you to stay after midnight.”
“Ah what you like and what you don’t like, and where one begins and the other ends all that’s an impenetrable mystery!” the
young man declared. But he took no further notice of her allusion
to his departure, adding in a different tone: “‘A man like Mr. Macgeorge’! When you say a thing of that sort in a certain, particular way
I should rather like to suffer you to perish.”
Mrs. Dallow stared; it might have seemed for an instant that she
was trying to look stupid. “How can I help it if a few years hence he’s
certain to be at the head of any Liberal Government?”
“We can’t help it of course, but we can help talking about it,”
Nick smiled. “If we don’t mention it it mayn’t be noticed.”
“You’re trying to make me angry. You’re in one of your vicious
moods,” she returned, blowing out on the chimney-piece a guttering candle.
“That I’m exasperated I’ve already had the honour very positively to inform you. All the same I maintain that I was irreproachable
at dinner. I don’t want you to think I shall always be as good as that.”
“You looked so out of it; you were as gloomy as if every earthly
hope had left you, and you didn’t make a single contribution to any
discussion that took place. Don’t you think I observe you?” she asked
with an irony tempered by a tenderness unsuccessfully concealed.
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HENRY JAMES
“Ah my darling, what you observe !” Nick cried with a certain
bitterness of amusement. But he added the next moment more seriously, as if his tone had been disrespectful: “You probe me to the
bottom, no doubt.”
“You needn’t come either to Griffi n or to Severals if you don’t
want to.”
“Give them up yourself; stay here with me!”
She coloured quickly as he said this, and broke out: “Lord, how
you hate political houses!”
“How can you say that when from February to August I spend
every blessed night in one?”
“Yes, and hate that worst of all.”
“So do half the people who are in it. You, my dear, must have
so many things, so many people, so much mise-en-scene and such
a perpetual spectacle to live,” Nick went on. “Perpetual motion,
perpetual visits, perpetual crowds! If you go into the country you’ll
see forty people every day and be mixed up with them all day.
The idea of a quiet fortnight in town, when by a happy if idiotic
superstition everybody goes out of it, disconcerts and frightens you.
It’s the very time, it’s the very place, to do a little work and possess
one’s soul.”
This vehement allocution found her evidently somewhat unprepared; but she was sagacious enough, instead of attempting for
the moment a general rejoinder, to seize on a single phrase and
say: “Work? What work can you do in London at such a moment
as this?”
Nick considered. “I might tell you I want to get up a lot of subjects, to sit at home and read blue-books; but that wouldn’t be quite
what I mean.”
“Do you mean you want to paint?”
“Yes, that’s it, since you gouge it out of me.”
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THE TRAGIC MUSE
“Why do you make such a mystery about it? You’re at perfect
liberty,” Julia said.
She put out her hand to rest it on the mantel-shelf, but her companion took it on the way and held it in both his own. “You’re delightful, Julia, when you speak in that tone then I know why it is
I love you. But I can’t do anything if I go to Griffi n, if I go to Severals.”
“I see I see,” she answered thoughtfully and kindly.
“I’ve scarcely been inside of my studio for months, and I feel
quite homesick for it. The idea of putting in a few quiet days there
has taken hold of me: I rather cling to it.”
“It seems so odd your having a studio!” Julia dropped, speaking
so quickly that the words were almost incomprehensible.
“Doesn’t it sound absurd, for all the good it does me, or I do in it?
Of course one can produce nothing but rubbish on such terms
without continuity or persistence, with just a few days here and
there. I ought to be ashamed of myself, no doubt; but even my rubbish interests me. ‘Guenille sI l’on veut, ma guenille m’est chère.’ But
I’ll go down to Harsh with you in a moment, Julia,” Nick pursued:
“that would do as well if we could be quiet there, without people,
without a creature; and I should really be perfectly content. You’d
beautifully sit for me; it would be the occasion we’ve so often wanted
and never found.”
She shook her head slowly and with a smile that had a meaning
for him. “Thank you, my dear; nothing would induce me to go to
Harsh with you.”
He looked at her hard. “What’s the matter whenever it’s a question of anything of that sort? Are you afraid of me?” She pulled her
hand from him quickly, turning away; but he went on: “Stay with
me here then, when everything’s so right for it. We shall do beautifully have the whole place, have the whole day, to ourselves. Hang
your engagements! Telegraph you won’t come. We’ll live at the stu-
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HENRY JAMES
dio you’ll sit to me every day. Now or never’s our chance when shall
we have so good a one? Think how charming it will be! I’ll make you
wish awfully that I may do something.”
“I can’t get out of Griffi n it’s impossible,” Julia said, moving further away and with her back presented to him.
“Then you are afraid of me simply!”
She turned straight round, very pale. “Of course I am. You’re
welcome to know it.”
He went toward her, and for a moment she seemed to make another slight movement of retreat. This, however, was scarcely perceptible, and there was nothing to alarm in the tone of reasonable
entreaty in which he spoke as he stood there. “Put an end, Julia, to
our absurd situation it really can’t go on. You’ve no right to expect
a man to be happy or comfortable in so false a position. We’re spoken of odiously of that we may be sure; and yet what good have we
of it?”
“Spoken of? Do I care for that?”
“Do you mean you’re indifferent because there are no grounds?
That’s just why I hate it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” she returned with
sharp disdain.
“Be my wife to-morrow be my wife next week. Let us have done
with this fantastic probation and be happy.”
“Leave me now come back to-morrow. I’ll write to you.” She had
the air of pleading with him at present, pleading as he pleaded.
“You can’t resign yourself to the idea of one’s looking ’out of it’!”
Nick laughed.
“Come to-morrow, before lunch,” she went on.
“To be told I must wait six months more and then be sent about
my business? Ah, Julia, Julia!” the young man groaned.
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THE TRAGIC MUSE
Something in this simple lament it sounded natural and perfectly unstudied seemed straightway to make a great impression on
her. “You shall wait no longer,” she said after a short silence.
“What do you mean by no longer?”
“Give me about fi ve weeks say till the Whitsuntide recess.”
“Five weeks are a great deal,” smiled Nick.
“There are things to be done you ought to understand.”
“I only understand how I love you.”
She let herself go “Dearest Nick!” and he caught her and kept
her in his arms.
“I’ve your promise then for fi ve weeks hence to a day?” he demanded as she at last released herself.
“We’ll settle that the exact day; there are things to consider and
to arrange. Come to luncheon to-morrow.”
“I’ll come early I’ll come at one,” he said; and for a moment they
stood all deeply and intimately taking each other in.
“Do you think I want to wait, any more than you?” she asked in
congruity with this.
“I don’t feel so much out of it now!” he declared by way of answer. “You’ll stay of course now you’ll give up your visits?”
She had hold of the lappet of his coat; she had kept it in her
hand even while she detached herself from his embrace. There was
a white fl ower in his buttonhole that she looked at and played with
a moment before she said; “I’ve a better idea you needn’t come to
Griffi n. Stay in your studio do as you like paint dozens of pictures.”
“Dozens? Barbarian!” Nick wailed.
The epithet apparently had an endearing suggestion for her; it
at any rate led her to let him possess himself of her head and, so
holding it, kiss her led her to say: “What on earth do I want but that
you should do absolutely as you please and be as happy as you can?”
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HENRY JAMES
He kissed her in another place at this; but he put it to her;
“What dreadful proposition is coming now?”
“I’ll go off and do up my visits and come back.”
“And leave me alone?”
“Don’t be affected! You know you’ll work much better without
me. You’ll live in your studio I shall be well out of the way.”
“That’s not what one wants of a sitter. How can I paint you?”
“You can paint me all the rest of your life. I shall be a perpetual
sitter.”
“I believe I could paint you without looking at you” and his
lighted face shone down on her. “You do excuse me then from those
dreary places?”
“How can I insist after what you said about the pleasure of keeping these days?” she admirably it was so all sincerely asked.
“You’re the best woman on earth though it does seem odd you
should rush away as soon as our little business is settled.”
“We shall make it up. I know what I’m about. And now go!”
She ended by almost pushing him out of the room.
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