BOOK THIRD
—I—
The two ladies who, in advance of the Swiss
season, had been warned that their design was unconsidered, that
the passes wouldn’t be clear, nor the air mild, nor the inns
open—the two ladies who, characteristically, had braved a good deal
of possibly interested remonstrance were finding themselves, as
their adventure turned out, wonderfully sustained. It was the
judgement of the head-waiters and other functionaries on the
Italian lakes that approved itself now as interested; they
themselves had been conscious of impatiences, of bolder dreams—at
least the younger had; so that one of the things they made out
together—making out as they did in endless variety—was that in
those operatic palaces of the Villa d’Este, of Cadenabbia, of
Pallanza and Stresa, lone women, however re-enforced by a
travelling-library of instructive volumes, were apt to be beguiled
and undone. Their flights of fancy moreover had been modest; they
had for instance risked nothing vital in hoping to make their way
by the Brünig. They were making it in fact happily enough as we
meet them, and were only wishing that, for the wondrous beauty of
the early high-climbing spring, it might have been longer and the
places to pause and rest more numerous.
Such at least had been the intimated attitude of
Mrs. Stringham, the elder of the companions, who had her own view
of the impatiences of the younger, to which, however, she offered
an opposition but of the most circuitous. She moved, the admirable
Mrs. Stringham, in a fine cloud of observation and suspicion; she
was in the position, as she believed, of knowing much more about
Milly Theale than Milly herself knew, and yet of having to darken
her knowledge as well as make it active. The woman in the world
least formed by nature, as she was quite aware, for duplicities and
labyrinths, she found herself dedicated to personal subtlety by a
new set of circumstances, above all by a new personal relation; had
now in fact to recognise that an education in the occult—she could
scarce say what to call it—had begun for her the day she left New
York with Mildred. She had come on from Boston for that purpose;
had seen little of the girl—or rather had seen her but briefly, for
Mrs. Stringham, when she saw anything at all, saw much, saw
everything—before accepting her proposal; and had accordingly
placed herself, by her act, in a boat that she more and more
estimated as, humanly speaking, of the biggest, though likewise, no
doubt, in many ways, by reason of its size, of the safest. In
Boston, the winter before, the young lady in whom we are interested
had, on the spot, deeply, yet almost tacitly, appealed to her,
dropped into her mind the shy conceit of some assistance, some
devotion to render. Mrs. Stringham’s little life had often been
visited by shy conceits—secret dreams that had fluttered their hour
between its narrow walls without, for any great part, so much as
mustering courage to look out of its rather dim windows. But this
imagination—the fancy of a possible link with the remarkable young
thing from New York—had mustered courage: had perched, on
the instant, at the clearest lookout it could find, and might be
said to have remained there till, only a few months later, itl had
caught, in surprise and joy, the unmistakeable flash of a
signal.
Milly Theale had Boston friends, such as they were,
and of recent making; and it was understood that her visit to
them—a visit that was not to be meagre—had been undertaken, after a
series of bereavements, in the interest of the particular peace
that New York couldn’t give. It was recognised, liberally enough,
that there were many things—perhaps even too many—New York
could give; but this was felt to make no difference in the
important truth that what you had most to do, under the discipline
of life, or of death, was really to feel your situation as grave.
Boston could help you to that as nothing else could, and it had
extended to Milly, by every presumption, some such measure of
assistance. Mrs. Stringham was never to forget—for the moment had
not faded, nor the infinitely fine vibration it set up in any
degree ceased—her own first sight of the striking apparition, then
unheralded and unexplained: the slim, constantly pale, delicately
haggard, anomalously, agreeably angular young person, of not more
than two-and-twenty summers, in spite of her marks, whose hair was
somehow exceptionally red even for the real thing, which it
innocently confessed to being, and whose clothes were remarkably
black even for robes of mourning, which was the meaning they
expressed. It was New York mourning, it was New York hair, it was a
New York history, confused as yet, but multitudinous, of the loss
of parents, brothers, sisters, almost every human appendage, all on
a scale and with a sweep that had required the greater stage; it
was a New York legend of affecting, of romantic isolation, and,
beyond everything, it was by most accounts, in respect to the mass
of money so piled on the girl’s back, a set of New York
possibilities. She was alone, she was stricken, she was rich, and
in particular was strange—a combination in itself of a nature to
engage Mrs. Stringham’s attention. But it was the strangeness that
most determined our good lady’s sympathy, convinced as she had to
be that it was greater than any one else—any one but the sole Susan
Stringham—supposed. Susan privately settled it that Boston was not
in the least seeing her, was only occupied with her seeing Boston,
and that any assumed affinity between the two characters was
delusive and vain. She was seeing her, and she had quite the finest
moment of her life in now obeying the instinct to conceal the
vision. She couldn’t explain it—no one would understand. They would
say clever Boston things—Mrs. Stringham was from Burlington
Vermont, which, she boldly upheld as the real heart of New England,
Boston being “too far south”—but they would only darken
counsel.
There could be no better proof (than this quick
intellectual split) of the impression made on our friend, who shone
herself, she was well aware, with but the reflected light of the
admirable city. She too had had her discipline, but it had not made
her striking; it had been prosaically usual, though doubtless a
decent dose; and had only made her usual to match it—usual, that
is, as Boston went. She had lost first her husband and then her
mother, with whom, on her husband’s death, she had lived again; so
that now, childless, she was but more sharply single than before.
Yet she sat rather coldly light, having, as she called it, enough
to live on—so far, that is, as she lived by bread alone: how little
indeed she was regularly content with that diet appeared from the
name she had made—Susan Shepherd Stringham—as a contributor to the
best magazines. She wrote short stories, and she fondly believed
she had her “note,” the art of showing New England without showing
it wholly in the kitchen. She had not herself been brought up in
the kitchen; she knew others who had not; and to speak for them had
thus become with her a literary mission. To be in truth literary
had ever been her dearest thought, the thought that kept her bright
little nippersm
perpetually in position. There were masters, models, celebrities,
mainly foreign, whom she finally accounted so and in whose light
she ingeniously laboured; there were others whom, however chattered
about, she ranked with the inane, for she bristled with
discriminations; but all categories failed her—they ceased at least
to signify—as soon as she found herself in presence of the real
thing, the romantic life itself. That was what she saw in
Mildred—what positively made her hand a while tremble too much for
the pen. She had had, it seemed to her, a revelation—such as even
New England refined and grammatical couldn’t give; and, all made up
as she was of small neat memories and ingenuities, little
industries and ambitions, mixed with something moral, personal,
that was still more intensely responsive, she felt her new friend
would have done her an ill turn if their friendship shouldn’t
develop, and yet that nothing would be left of anything else if it
should. It was for the surrender of everything else that she was,
however, quite prepared, and while she went about her usual Boston
business with her usual Boston probity she was really all the while
holding herself. She wore her “handsome” felt hat, so Tyrolese, yet
somehow, though feathered from the eagle’s wing, so truly domestic,
with the same straightness and security; she attached her fur boa
with the same honest precautions; she preserved her balance on the
ice-slopes with the same practised skill; she opened, each evening,
her Transcriptn with
the same interfusionof suspense and resignation; she attended her
almost daily concert with the same expenditure of patience and the
same economy of passion; she flitted in and out of the Public
Library with the air of conscientiously returning or bravely
carrying off in her pocket the key of knowledge itself; and
finally—it was what she most did—she watched the thin trickle of a
fictive “love-interest” through that somewhat serpentine channel,
in the magazines, which she mainly managed to keep clear for it.
But the real thing all the while was elsewhere; the real thing had
gone back to New York, leaving behind it the two unsolved
questions, quite distinct, of why it was real, and whether
she should ever be so near it again.
For the figure to which these questions attached
themselves she had found a convenient description—she thought of it
for herself always as that of a girl with a background. The great
reality was in the fact that, very soon, after but two or three
meetings, the girl with the background, the girl with the crown of
old gold and the mourning that was not as the mourning of Boston,
but at once more rebellious in its gloom and more frivolous in its
frills, had told her she had never seen any one like her. They had
met thus as opposed curiosities, and that simple remark of
Milly’s—if simple it was—became the most important thing that had
ever happened to her; it deprived the love-interest, for the time,
of actuality and even of pertinence; it moved her first, in short,
in a high degree, to gratitude, and then to no small compassion.
Yet in respect to this relation at least it was what did prove the
key of knowledge; it lighted up as nothing else could do the poor
young woman’s history. That the potential heiress of all the ages
should never have seen any one like a mere typical subscriber,
after all, to the Transcript was a truth that—in especial as
announced with modesty, with humility, with regret—described a
situation. It laid upon the elder woman, as to the void to be
filled, a weight of responsibility; but in particular it led her to
ask whom poor Mildred had then seen, and what range of
contacts it had taken to produce such queer surprises. That was
really the enquiry that had ended by clearing the air: the key of
knowledge was felt to click in the lock from the moment it flashed
upon Mrs. Stringham that her friend had been starved for culture.
Culture was what she herself represented for her, and it was living
up to that principle that would surely prove the great business.
She knew, the clever lady, what the principle itself represented,
and the limits of her own store; and a certain alarm would have
grown upon her if something else hadn’t grown faster. This was,
fortunately for her—and we give it in her own words—the sense of a
harrowing pathos. That, primarily, was what appealed to her, what
seemed to open the door of romance for her still wider than any,
than a still more reckless, connexion with the “picture-papers.”
For such was essentially the point: it was rich, romantic, abysmal,
to have, as was evident, thousands and thousands a year, to have
youth and intelligence and, if not beauty, at least in equal
measure a high dim charming ambiguous oddity, which was even
better, and then on top of all to enjoy boundless freedom, the
freedom of the wind in the desert—it was unspeakably touching to be
so equipped and yet to have been reduced by fortune to little
humble-minded mistakes.
It brought our friend’s imagination back again to
New York, where aberrations were so possible in the intellectual
sphere, and it in fact caused a visit she presently paid there to
overflow with interest. As Milly had beautifully invited her, so
she would hold out if she could against the strain of so much
confidence in her mind; and the remarkable thing was that even at
the end of three weeks she had held out. But by this time
her mind had grown comparatively bold and free; it was dealing with
new quantities, a different proportion altogether—and that had made
for refreshment: she had accordingly gone home in convenient
possession of her subject. New York was vast, New York was
startling, with strange histories, with wild cosmopolite backward
generations that accounted for anything; and to have got nearer the
luxuriant tribe of which the rare creature was the final flower,
the immense extravagant unregulated cluster, with free-living
ancestors, handsome dead cousins, lurid uncles, beautiful vanished
aunts, persons all busts and curls, preserved, though so exposed,
in the marble of famous French chisels—all this, to say nothing of
the effect of closer growths of the stem, was to have had one’s
small world-space both crowded and enlarged. Our couple had at all
events effected an exchange; the elder friend had been as
consciously intellectual as possible, and the younger, abounding in
personal revelation, had been as distinguished. This was poetry—it
was also history— Mrs. Stringham thought, to a finer tune even than
Maeterlinck and Pater, than Marbot and Gregorovius.o She
appointed occasions for the reading of these authors with her
hostess, rather perhaps than actually achieved great spans; but
what they managed and what they missed speedily sank for her into
the dim depths of the merely relative, so quickly, so strongly had
she clutched her central clue. All her scruples and hesitations,
all her anxious enthusiasms, had reduced themselves to a single
alarm—the fear that she really might act on her companion clumsily
and coarsely. She was positively afraid of what she might do to
her, and to avoid that, to avoid it with piety and passion, to do,
rather, nothing at all, to leave her untouched because no touch one
could apply, however light, however just, however earnest and
anxious, would be half good enough, would be anything but an ugly
smutch upon perfection—this now imposed itself as a consistent, an
inspiring thought.
Less than a month after the event that had so
determined Mrs. Stringham’s attitude—close upon the heels, that is,
of her return from New York—she was reached by a proposal that
brought up for her the kind of question her delicacy might have to
contend with. Would she start for Europe with her young friend at
the earliest possible date, and should she be willing to do so
without making conditions? The enquiry was launched by wire;
explanations, in sufficiency, were promised; extreme urgency was
suggested and a general surrender invited. It was to the honour of
her sincerity that she made the surrender on the spot, though it
was not perhaps altogether to that of her logic. She had wanted,
very consciously, from the first, to give something up for her new
acquaintance, but she had now no doubt that she was practically
giving up all. What settled this was the fulness of a particular
impression, the impression that had throughout more and more
supported her and which she would have uttered so far as she might
by saying that the charm of the creature was positively in the
creature’s greatness.
She would have been content so to leave it; unless
indeed she had said, more familiarly, that Mildred was the biggest
impression of her life. That was at all events the biggest account
of her, and none but a big clearly would do. Her situation, as such
things were called, was on the grand scale; but it still was not
that. It was her nature, once for all—a nature that reminded Mrs.
Stringham of the term always used in the newspapers about the great
new steamers, the inordinate number of “feet of water” they drew;
so that if, in your little boat, you had chosen to hover and
approach, you had but yourself to thank, when once motion was
started, for the way the draught pulled you. Milly drew the feet of
water, and odd though it might seem that a lonely girl, who was not
robust and who hated sound and show, should stir the stream like a
leviathan, her companion floated off with the sense of rocking
violently at her side. More than prepared, however, for that
excitement, Mrs. Stringham mainly failed of ease in respect to her
own consistency. To attach herself for an indefinite time seemed a
roundabout way of holding her hands off. If she wished to be sure
of neither touching nor smutching, the straighter plan would
doubtless have been not to keep her friend within reach. This in
fact she fully recognised, and with it the degree to which she
desired that the girl should lead her life, a life certain to be so
much finer than that of anybody else. The difficulty, however, by
good fortune, cleared away as soon as she had further recognised,
as she was speedily able to do, that she Susan Shepherd—the name
with which Milly for the most part amused herself—was not
anybody else. She had renounced that character; she had now no life
to lead; and she honestly believed that she was thus supremely
equipped for leading Milly’s own. No other person whatever, she was
sure, had to an equal degree this qualification, and it was really
to assert it that she fondly embarked.
Many things, though not in many weeks, had come and
gone since then, and one of the best of them doubtless had been the
voyage itself, by the happy southern course, to the succession of
Mediterranean ports, with the dazzled wind-up at Naples. Two or
three others had preceded this; incidents, indeed rather lively
marks, of their last fortnight at home, and one of which had
determined on Mrs. Stringham’s part a rush to New York, forty-eight
breathless hours there, previous to her final rally. But the great
sustained sea-light had drunk up the rest of the picture, so that
for many days other questions and other possibilities sounded with
as little effect as a trio of penny whistles might sound in a
Wagner overture. It was the Wagner overture that practically
prevailed, up through Italy, where Milly had already been, still
further up and across the Alps, which were also partly known to
Mrs. Stringham; only perhaps “taken” to a time not wholly
congruous, hurried in fact on account of the girl’s high
restlessness. She had been expected, she had frankly promised, to
be restless—that was partly why she was “great”—or was a
consequence, at any rate, if not a cause; yet she had not perhaps
altogether announced herself as straining so hard at the cord. It
was familiar, it was beautiful to Mrs. Stringham that she had
arrears to make up, the chances that had lapsed for her through the
wanton ways of forefathers fond of Paris, but not of its higher
sides, and fond almost of nothing else; but the vagueness, the
openness, the eagerness without point and the interest without
pause—all a part of the charm of her oddity as at first
presented—had become more striking in proportion as they triumphed
over movement and change. She had arts and idiosyncrasies of which
no great account could have been given, but which were a daily
grace if you lived with them; such as the art of being almost
tragically impatient and yet making it as light as air; of being
inexplicably sad and yet making it as clear as noon; of being
unmistakeably gay and yet making it as soft as dusk. Mrs. Stringham
by this time understood everything, was more than ever confirmed in
wonder and admiration, in her view that it was life enough simply
to feel her companion’s feelings; but there were special keys she
had not yet added to her bunch, impressions that of a sudden were
apt to affect her as new.
This particular day on the great Swiss road had
been, for some reason, full of them, and they referred themselves,
provisionally, to some deeper depth than she had touched—though
into two or three such depths, it must be added, she had peeped
long enough to find herself suddenly draw back. It was not Milly’s
unpacified state, in short, that now troubled her—though certainly,
as Europe was the great American sedative, the failure was to some
extent to be noted: it was the suspected presence of something
behind the state—which, however, could scarcely have taken its
place there since their departure. What a fresh motive of unrest
could suddenly have sprung from was in short not to be divined. It
was but half an explanation to say that excitement, for each of
them, had naturally dropped, and that what they had left behind, or
tried to—the great serious facts of life, as Mrs. Stringham liked
to call them—was once more coming into sight as objects loom
through smoke when smoke begins to clear; for these were general
appearances from which the girl’s own aspect, her really larger
vagueness, seemed rather to disconnect itself. The nearest approach
to a personal anxiety indulged in as yet by the elder lady was on
her taking occasion to wonder if what she had more than anything
else got hold of mightn’t be one of the finer, one of the finest,
one of the rarest—as she called it so that she might call it
nothing worse—cases of American intensity. She had just had a
moment of alarm—asked herself if her young friend were merely going
to treat her to some complicated drama of nerves. At the end of a
week, however, with their further progress, her young friend had
effectively answered the question and given her the impression,
indistinct indeed as yet, of something that had a reality compared
with which the nervous explanation would have been coarse. Mrs.
Stringham found herself from that hour, in other words, in presence
of an explanation that remained a muffled and intangible form, but
that assuredly, should it take on sharpness, would explain
everything and more than everything, would become instantly the
light in which Milly was to be read.
Such a matter as this may at all events speak of
the style in which our young woman could affect those who were near
her, may testify to the sort of interest she could inspire. She
worked—and seemingly quite without design—upon the sympathy, the
curiosity, the fancy of her associates, and we shall really
ourselves scarce otherwise come closer to her than by feeling their
impression and sharing, if need be, their confusion.8 She
reduced them, Mrs. Stringham would have said, to a consenting
bewilderment; which was precisely, for that good lady, on a last
analysis, what was most in harmony with her greatness. She
exceeded, escaped measure, was surprising only because they
were so far from great. Thus it was that on this wondrous day by
the Brünig the spell of watching her had grown more than ever
irresistible; a proof of what—or of a part of what—Mrs. Stringham
had, with all the rest, been reduced to. She had almost the sense
of tracking her young friend as if at a given moment to pounce. She
knew she shouldn’t pounce, she hadn’t come out to pounce; yet she
felt her attention secretive, all the same, and her observation
scientific. She struck herself as hovering like a spy, applying
tests, laying traps, concealing signs. This would last, however,
only till she should fairly know what was the matter; and to watch
was after all, meanwhile, a way of clinging to the girl, not less
than an occupation, a satisfaction in itself. The pleasure of
watching moreover, if a reason were needed, came from a sense of
her beauty. Her beauty hadn’t at all originally seemed a part of
the situation, and Mrs. Stringham had even in the first flush of
friendship not named it grossly to any one; having seen early that
for stupid people—and who, she sometimes secretly asked herself,
wasn’t stupid?—it would take a great deal of explaining. She had
learned not to mention it till it was mentioned first—which
occasionally happened, but not too often; and then she was there in
force. Then she both warmed to the perception that met her own
perception, and disputed it, suspiciously, as to special items;
while, in general, she had learned to refine even to the point of
herself employing the word that most people employed. She employed
it to pretend she was also stupid and so have done with the matter;
spoke of her friend as plain, as ugly even, in a case of especially
dense insistence; but as, in appearance, so “awfully full of
things.” This was her own way of describing a face that, thanks
doubtless to rather too much forehead, too much nose and too much
mouth, together with too little mere conventional colour and
conventional line, was expressive, irregular, exquisite, both for
speech and for silence. When Milly smiled it was a public
event—when she didn’t it was a chapter of history. They had stopped
on the Brünig for luncheon, and there had come up for them under
the charm of the place the question of a longer stay.
Mrs. Stringham was now on the ground of thrilled
recognitions, small sharp echoes of a past which she kept in a
well-thumbed case, but which, on pressure of a spring and exposure
to the air, still showed itself ticking as hard as an honest old
watch. The embalmed “Europe” of her younger time had partly stood
for three years of Switzerland, a term of continuous school at
Vevey, with rewards of merit in the form of silver medals tied by
blue ribbons and mild mountain-passes attacked with alpenstocks. It
was the good girls who, in the holidays, were taken highest, and
our friend could now judge, from what she supposed her familiarity
with the minor peaks, that she had been one of the best. These
reminiscences, sacred to-day because prepared in the hushed
chambers of the past, had been part of the general train laid for
the pair of sisters, daughters early fatherless, by their brave
Vermont mother, who struck her at present as having apparently,
almost like Columbus, worked out, all unassisted, a conception of
the other side of the globe. She had focussed Vevey, by the light
of nature and with extraordinary completeness, at Burlington; after
which she had embarked, sailed, landed, explored and, above all,
made good her presence. She had given her daughters the five years
in Switzerland and Germany that were to leave them ever afterwards
a standard of comparison for all cycles of Cathay,p and to
stamp the younger in especial—Susan was the younger—with a
character, that, as Mrs. Stringham had often had occasion, through
life, to say to herself, made all the difference. It made all the
difference for Mrs. Stringham, over and over again and in the most
remote connexions, that, thanks to her parent’s lonely thrifty
hardy faith, she was a woman of the world. There were plenty of
women who were all sorts of things that she wasn’t, but who, on the
other hand, were not that, and who didn’t know she was
(which she liked—it relegated them still further) and didn’t know
either how it enabled her to judge them. She had never seen herself
so much in this light as during the actual phase of her associated,
if slightly undirected, pilgrimage; and the consciousness gave
perhaps to her plea for a pause more intensity than she knew. The
irrecoverable days had come back to her from far off; they were
part of the sense of the cool upper air and of everything else that
hung like an indestructible scent to the torn garment of youth—the
taste of honey and the luxury of milk, the sound of cattle-bells
and the rush of streams, the fragrance of trodden balms and the
dizziness of deep gorges.
Milly clearly felt these things too, but they
affected her companion at moments—that was quite the way Mrs.
Stringham would have expressed it—as the princess in a conventional
tragedy might have affected the confidant if a personal emotion had
ever been permitted to the latter. That a princess could only be a
princess was a truth with which, essentially, a confidant, however
responsive, had to live. Mrs. Stringham was a woman of the world,
but Milly Theale was a princess, the only one she had yet had to
deal with, and this, in its way too, made all the difference. It
was a perfectly definite doom for the wearer—it was for every one
else an office nobly filled. It might have represented possibly,
with its involved loneliness and other mysteries, the weight under
which she fancied her companion’s admirable head occasionally, and
ever so submissively, bowed. Milly had quite assented at luncheon
to their staying over, and had left her to look at rooms, settle
questions, arrange about their keeping on their carriage and
horses; cares that had now moreover fallen to Mrs. Stringham as a
matter of course and that yet for some reason, on this occasion
particularly, brought home to her—all agreeably, richly, almost
grandly—what it was to live with the great. Her young friend had in
a sublime degree a sense closed to the general question of
difficulty, which she got rid of furthermore not in the least as
one had seen many charming persons do, by merely passing it on to
others. She kept it completely at a distance: it never entered the
circle; the most plaintive confidant couldn’t have dragged it in;
and to tread the path of a confidant was accordingly to live
exempt. Service was in other words so easy to render that the whole
thing was like court life without the hardships. It came back of
course to the question of money, and our observant lady had by this
time repeatedly reflected that if one were talking of the
“difference,” it was just this, this incomparably and nothing else,
that when all was said and done most made it. A less vulgarly, a
less obviously purchasing or parading person she couldn’t have
imagined; but it prevailed even as the truth of truths that the
girl couldn’t get away from her wealth. She might leave her
conscientious companion as freely alone with it as possible and
never ask a question, scarce even tolerate a reference; but it was
in the fine folds of the helplessly expensive little black frock
that she drew over the grass as she now strolled vaguely off; it
was in the curious and splendid coils of hair, “done” with no eye
whatever to the mode du jour,q that
peeped from under the corresponding indifference of her hat, the
merely personal tradition that suggested a sort of noble
inelegance; it lurked between the leaves of the uncut but
antiquated Tauchnitzr volume
of which, before going out, she had mechanically possessed herself.
She couldn’t dress it away, nor walk it away, nor read it away, nor
think it away; she could neither smile it away in any dreamy
absence nor blow it away in any softened sigh. She couldn’t have
lost it if she had tried—that was what it was to be really rich. It
had to be the thing you were. When at the end of an hour she
hadn’t returned to the house Mrs. Stringham, though the bright
afternoon was yet young, took, with precautions, the same
direction, went to join her in case of her caring for a walk. But
the purpose of joining her was in truth less distinct than that of
a due regard for a possibly preferred detachment: so that, once
more, the good lady proceeded with a quietness that made her
slightly “underhand” even in her own eyes. She couldn’t help that,
however, and she didn’t care, sure as she was that what she really
wanted wasn’t to overstep but to stop in time. It was to be able to
stop in time that she went softly, but she had on this occasion
further to go than ever yet, for she followed in vain, and at last
with some anxiety, the footpath she believed Milly to have taken.
It wound up a hillside and into the higher Alpine meadows in which,
all these last days, they had so often wanted, as they passed above
or below, to stray; and then it obscured itself in a wood, but
always going up, up, and with a small cluster of brown old
high-perched chalets evidently for its goal. Mrs. Stringham reached
in due course the chalets, and there received from a bewildered old
woman, a very fearful person to behold, an indication that
sufficiently guided her. The young lady had been seen not long
before passing further on, over a crest and to a place where the
way would drop again, as our unappeased enquirer found it in fact,
a quarter of an hour later, markedly and almost alarmingly to do.
It led somewhere, yet apparently quite into space, for the great
side of the mountain appeared, from where she pulled up, to fall
away altogether, though probably but to some issue below and out of
sight. Her uncertainty moreover was brief, for she next became
aware of the presence on a fragment of rock, twenty yards off, of
the Tauchnitz volume the girl had brought out and that therefore
pointed to her shortly previous passage. She had rid herself of the
book, which was an encumbrance, and meant of course to pick it up
on her return; but as she hadn’t yet picked it up what on earth had
become of her? Mrs. Stringham, I hasten to add,9 was
within a few moments to see; but it was quite an accident that she
hadn’t, before they were over, betrayed by her deeper agitation the
fact of her own nearness.
The whole place, with the descent of the path and
as a sequel to a sharp turn that was masked by rocks and shrubs,
appeared to fall precipitously and to become a “view” pure and
simple, a view of great extent and beauty, but thrown forward and
vertiginous. Milly, with the promise of it from just above, had
gone straight down to it, not stopping till it was all before her;
and here, on what struck her friend as the dizzy edge of it, she
was seated at her ease. The path somehow took care of itself and
its final business, but the girl’s seat was a slab of rock at the
end of a short promontory or excrescence that merely pointed off to
the right at gulfs of air and that was so placed by good fortune,
if not by the worst, as to be at last completely visible. For Mrs.
Stringham stifled a cry on taking in what she believed to be the
danger of such a perch for a mere maiden; her liability to slip, to
slide, to leap, to be precipitated by a single false movement, by a
turn of the head—how could one tell?—into whatever was beneath. A
thousand thoughts, for the minute, roared in the poor lady’s ears,
but without reaching, as happened, Milly’s. It was a commotion that
left our observer intensely still and holding her breath. What had
first been offered her was the possibility of a latent
intention—however wild the idea—in such a posture; of some betrayed
accordance of Milly’s caprice with a horrible hidden obsession. But
since Mrs. Stringham stood as motionless as if a sound, a syllable,
must have produced the start that would be fatal, so even the lapse
of a few seconds had partly a reassuring effect. It gave her time
to receive the impression which, when she some minutes later softly
retraced her steps, was to be the sharpest she carried away. This
was the impression that if the girl was deeply and recklessly
meditating there she wasn’t meditating a jump; she was on the
contrary, as she sat, much more in a state of uplifted and
unlimited possession that had nothing to gain from violence. She
was looking down on the kingdoms of the earth, and though indeed
that of itself might well go to the brain, it wouldn’t be with a
view of renouncing them. Was she choosing among them or did she
want them all? This question, before Mrs. Stringham had decided
what to do, made others vain; in accordance with which she saw, or
believed she did, that if it might be dangerous to call out, to
sound in any way a surprise, it would probably be safe enough to
withdraw as she had come. She watched a while longer, she held her
breath, and she never knew afterwards what time had elapsed.
Not many minutes probably, yet they hadn’t seemed
few, and they had given her so much to think of, not only while
creeping home, but while waiting afterwards at the inn, that she
was still busy with them when, late in the afternoon, Milly
reappeared. She had stopped at the point of the path where the
Tauchnitz lay, had taken it up and, with the pencil attached to her
watch-guard, had scrawled a word—à bientôt!s—across
the cover; after which, even under the girl’s continued delay, she
had measured time without a return of alarm. For she now saw that
the great thing she had brought away was precisely a conviction
that the future wasn’t to exist for her princess in the form of any
sharp or simple release from the human predicament. It wouldn’t be
for her a question of a flying leap and thereby of a quick escape.
It would be a question of taking full in the face the whole assault
of life, to the general muster of which indeed her face might have
been directly presented as she sat there on her rock. Mrs.
Stringham was thus able to say to herself during still another wait
of some length that if her young friend still continued absent it
wouldn’t be because—what-everthe opportunity—she had cut short the
thread. She wouldn’t have committed suicide; she knew herself
unmistakeably reserved for some more complicated passage; this was
the very vision in which she had, with no little awe, been
discovered. The image that thus remained with the elder lady kept
the character of a revelation. During the breathless minutes of her
watch she had seen her companion afresh; the latter’s type, aspect,
marks, her history, her state, her beauty, her mystery, all
unconsciously betrayed themselves to the Alpine air, and all had
been gathered in again to feed Mrs. Stringham’s flame. They are
things that will more distinctly appear for us, and they are
meanwhile briefly represented by the enthusiasm that was stronger
on our friend’s part than any doubt. It was a consciousness she was
scarce yet used to carrying, but she had as beneath her feet a mine
of something precious. She seemed to herself to stand near the
mouth, not yet quite cleared. The mine but needed working and would
certainly yield a treasure. She wasn’t thinking, either, of Milly’s
gold.
—II—
The girl said nothing, when they met, about the
words scrawled on the Tauchnitz, and Mrs. Stringham then noticed
that she hadn’t the book with her. She had left it lying and
probably would never remember it at all. Her comrade’s decision was
therefore quickly made not to speak of having followed her; and
within five minutes of her return, wonderfully enough, the
preoccupation denoted by her forgetfulness further declared itself.
“Should you think me quite abominable if I were to say that after
all-?”
Mrs. Stringham had already thought, with the first
sound of the question, everything she was capable of thinking, and
had immediately made such a sign that Milly’s words gave place to
visible relief at her assent. “You don’t care for our stop
here—you’d rather go straight on? We’ll start then with the peep of
tomorrow’s dawn—or as early as you like; it’s only rather late now
to take the road again.” And she smiled to show how she meant it
for a joke that an instant onward rush was what the girl would have
wished. “I bullied you into stopping,” she added; “so it serves me
right.”
Milly made in general the most of her good friend’s
jokes; but she humoured this one a little absently. “Oh yes, you do
bully me.” And it was thus arranged between them, with no
discussion at all, that they would resume their journey in the
morning. The younger tourist’s interest in the detail of the
matter—in spite of a declaration from the elder that she would
consent to be dragged anywhere—appeared almost immediately
afterwards quite to lose itself; she promised, however, to think
till supper of where, with the world all before them, they might
go—supper having been ordered for such time as permitted of lighted
candles. It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at
wayside inns, in strange countries, amid mountain scenery, gave the
evening meal a peculiar poetry—such being the mild adventures, the
refinements of impression, that they, as they would have said, went
in for. It was now as if, before this repast, Milly had designed to
“lie down”; but at the end of three minutes more she wasn’t lying
down, she was saying instead, abruptly, with a transition that was
like a jump of four thousand miles: “What was it that, in New York,
on the ninth, when you saw him alone, Doctor Finch said to
you?”
It was not till later that Mrs. Stringham fully
knew why the question had startled her still more than its
suddenness explained; though the effect of it even at the moment
was almost to frighten her into a false answer. She had to think,
to remember the occasion, the “ninth,” in New York, the time she
had seen Doctor Finch alone, and to recall the words he had then
uttered; and when everything had come back it was quite, at first,
for a moment, as if he had said something that immensely mattered.
He hadn’t, however, in fact; it was only as if he might perhaps
after all have been going to. It was on the sixth—within ten days
of their sailing—that she had hurried from Boston under the alarm,
a small but a sufficient shock, of hearing that Mildred had
suddenly been taken ill, had had, from some obscure cause, such an
upset as threatened to stay their journey. The bearing of the
accident had happily soon presented itself as slight, and there had
been in the event but a few hours of anxiety; the journey had been
pronounced again not only possible, but, as representing “change,”
highly advisable; and if the zealous guest had had five minutes by
herself with the Doctor this was clearly no more at his insistence
than at her own. Almost nothing had passed between them but an easy
exchange of enthusiasms in respect to the remedial properties of
“Europe”; and due assurance, as the facts came back to her, she was
now able to give. “Nothing whatever, on my word of honour, that you
mayn’t know or mightn’t then have known. I’ve no secret with him
about you. What makes you suspect it? I don’t quite make out how
you know I did see him alone.”
“No—you never told me,” said Milly. “And I don’t
mean,” she went on, “during the twenty-four hours while I was bad,
when your putting your heads together was natural enough. I mean
after I was better—the last thing before you went home.”
Mrs. Stringham continued to wonder. “Who told you I
saw him then?”
“He didn’t himself—nor did you write me it
afterwards. We speak of it now for the first time. That’s exactly
why!” Milly declared—with something in her face and voice that, the
next moment, betrayed for her companion that she had really known
nothing, had only conjectured and, chancing her charge, made a hit.
Yet why had her mind been busy with the question? “But if you’re
not, as you now assure me, in his confidence,” she smiled, “it’s no
matter.”
“I’m not in his confidence—he had nothing to
confide. But are you feeling unwell?”
The elder woman was earnest for the truth, though
the possibility she named was not at all the one that seemed to
fit—witness the long climb Milly had just indulged in. The girl
showed her constant white face, but this her friends had all
learned to discount, and it was often brightest when superficially
not bravest. She continued for a little mysteriously to smile. “I
don’t know—haven’t really the least idea. But it might be well to
find out.”
Mrs. Stringham at this flared into sympathy. “Are
you in trouble—in pain?”
“Not the least little bit. But I sometimes
wonder—!”
“Yes”—she pressed: “wonder what?”
“Well, if I shall have much of it.”
Mrs. Stringham stared. “Much of what? Not of
pain?”
“Of everything. Of everything I have.”
Anxiously again, tenderly, our friend cast about.
“You ‘have’ everything; so that when you say ‘much’ of it—”
“I only mean,” the girl broke in, “shall I have it
for long? That is if I have got it.”
She had at present the effect, a little, of
confounding, or at least of perplexing her comrade, who was
touched, who was always touched, by something helpless in her grace
and abrupt in her turns, and yet actually half made out in her a
sort of mocking light. “If you’ve got an ailment?”
“If I’ve got everything,” Milly laughed.
“Ah that—like almost nobody else.”
“Then for how long?”
Mrs. Stringham’s eyes entreated her; she had gone
close to her, half-enclosed her with urgent arms. “Do you want to
see some one?” And then as the girl only met it with a slow
headshake, though looking perhaps a shade more conscious: “We’ll go
straight to the best near doctor.” This too, however, produced but
a gaze of qualified assent and a silence, sweet and vague, that
left everything open. Our friend decidedly lost herself. “Tell me,
for God’s sake, if you’re in distress.”
“I don’t think I’ve really everything,”
Milly said as if to explain—and as if also to put it
pleasantly.
“But what on earth can I do for you?”
The girl debated, then seemed on the point of being
able to say; but suddenly changed and expressed herself otherwise.
“Dear, dear thing—I’m only too happy!”
It brought them closer, but it rather confirmed
Mrs. Stringham’s doubt. “Then what’s the matter?”
“That’s the matter—that I can scarcely bear
it.”
“But what is it you think you haven’t got?”
Milly waited another moment; then she found it, and
found for it a dim show of joy. “The power to resist the bliss of
what I have!”
Mrs. Stringham took it in—her sense of being “put
off” with it, the possible, probable irony of it—and her tenderness
renewed itself in the positive grimness of a long murmur. “Whom
will you see?”—for it was as if they looked down from their height
at a continent of doctors. “Where will you first go?”
Milly had for the third time her air of
consideration; but she came back with it to her plea of some
minutes before. “I’ll tell you at supper—good-bye till then.” And
she left the room with a lightness that testified for her companion
to something that again particularly pleased her in the renewed
promise of motion. The odd passage just concluded, Mrs. Stringham
mused as she once more sat alone with a hooked needle and a ball of
silk, the “fine” work with which she was always provided—this
mystifying mood had simply been precipitated, no doubt, by their
prolonged halt, with which the girl hadn’t really been in sympathy.
One had only to admit that her complaint was in fact but the excess
of the joy of life, and everything did then fit. She
couldn’t stop for the joy, but she could go on for it, and with the
pulse of her going on she floated again, was restored to her great
spaces. There was no evasion of any truth—so at least Susan
Shepherd hoped—in one’s sitting there while the twilight deepened
and feeling still more finely that the position of this young lady
was magnificent. The evening at that height had naturally turned to
cold, and the travellers had bespoken a fire with their meal; the
great Alpine road asserted its brave presence through the small
panes of the low clean windows, with incidents at the inn-door, the
yellow diligence,t the
great waggons, the hurrying hooded private conveyances, reminders,
for our fanciful friend, of old stories, old pictures, historic
flights, escapes, pursuits, things that had happened, things indeed
that by a sort of strange congruity helped her to read the meanings
of the greatest interest into the relation in which she was now so
deeply involved. It was natural that this record of the
magnificence of her companion’s position should strike her as after
all the best meaning she could extract; for she herself was seated
in the magnificence as in a court-carriage—she came back to that,
and such a method of progression, such a view from crimson
cushions, would evidently have a great deal more to give. By the
time the candles were lighted for supper and the short white
curtains drawn Milly had reappeared, and the little scenic room had
then all its romance. That charm moreover was far from broken by
the words in which she, without further loss of time, satisfied her
patient mate. “I want to go straight to London.”
It was unexpected, corresponding with no view
positively taken at their departure; when England had appeared, on
the contrary, rather relegated and postponed—seen for the moment,
as who should say, at the end of an avenue of preparations and
introductions. London, in short, might have been supposed to be the
crown, and to be achieved, like a siege, by gradual approaches.
Milly’s actual fine stride was therefore the more exciting, as any
simplification almost always was to Mrs. Stringham; who, besides,
was afterwards to recall as a piece of that very “exposition” dear
to the dramatist the terms in which, between their smoky candles,
the girl had put her preference and in which still other things had
come up, come while the clank of waggon-chains in the sharp air
reached their ears, with the stamp of hoofs, the rattle of buckets
and the foreign questions, foreign answers, that were all alike a
part of the cheery converse of the road. The girl brought it out in
truth as she might have brought a huge confession, something she
admitted herself shy about and that would seem to show her as
frivolous; it had rolled over her that what she wanted of Europe
was “people,” so far as they were to be had, and that, if her
friend really wished to know, the vision of this same equivocal
quantity was what had haunted her during their previous days, in
museums and churches, and what was again spoiling for her the pure
taste of scenery. She was all for scenery—yes; but she wanted it
human and personal, and all she could say was that there would be
in London—wouldn’t there?—more of that kind than anywhere else. She
came back to her idea that if it wasn’t for long—if nothing should
happen to be so for her—why the particular thing she spoke
of would probably have most to give her in the time, would probably
be less than anything else a waste of her remainder. She produced
this last consideration indeed with such gaiety that Mrs. Stringham
was not again disconcerted by it, was in fact quite ready—if talk
of early dying was in order—to match it from her own future. Good,
then; they would eat and drink because of what might happen
to-morrow; and they would direct their course from that moment with
a view to such eating and drinking. They ate and drank that night,
in truth, as in the spirit of this decision; whereby the air,
before they separated, felt itself the clearer.
It had cleared perhaps to a view only too
extensive—extensive, that is, in proportion to the signs of life
presented. The idea of “people” was not so entertained on Milly’s
part as to connect itself with particular persons, and the fact
remained for each of the ladies that they would, completely
unknown, disembark at Dover amid the completely unknowing. They had
no relation already formed; this plea Mrs. Stringham put forward to
see what it would produce. It produced nothing at first but the
observation on the girl’s side that what she had in mind was no
thought of society nor of scraping acquaintance; nothing was
further from her than to desire the opportunities represented for
the compatriot in general by a trunkful of “letters.” It wasn’t a
question, in short, of the people the compatriot was after; it was
the human, the English picture itself, as they might see it in
their own way—the concrete world inferred so fondly, from what one
had read and dreamed. Mrs. Stringham did every justice to this
concrete world, but when later on an occasion chanced to present
itself she made a point of not omitting to remark that it might be
a comfort to know in advance one or two of the human particles of
its concretion. This still, however, failed, in vulgar parlance, to
“fetch” Milly, so that she had presently to go all the way.
“Haven’t I understood from you, for that matter, that you gave Mr.
Densher something of a promise?”
There was a moment, on this, when Milly’s look had
to be taken as representing one of two things—either that she was
completely vague about the promise or that Mr. Densher’s name
itself started no train. But she really couldn’t be so vague about
the promise, the partner of these hours quickly saw, without
attaching it to something; it had to be a promise to somebody in
particular to be so repudiated. In the event, accordingly, she
acknowledged Mr. Merton Densher, the so unusually “bright” young
Englishman who had made his appearance in New York on some special
literary business—wasn’t it?—shortly before their departure, and
who had been three or four times in her house during the brief
period between her visit to Boston and her companion’s subsequent
stay with her; but she required much reminding before it came back
to her that she had mentioned to this companion just afterwards the
confidence expressed by the personage in question in her never
doing so dire a thing as to come to London without, as the phrase
was, looking a fellow up. She had left him the enjoyment of his
confidence, the form of which might have appeared a trifle
free—this she now reasserted; she had done nothing either to impair
or to enhance it; but she had also left Mrs. Stringham, in the
connexion and at the time, rather sorry to have missed Mr. Densher.
She had thought of him again after that, the elder woman; she had
likewise gone so far as to notice that Milly appeared not to have
done so—which the girl might easily have betrayed; and, interested
as she was in everything that concerned her, she had made out for
herself, for herself only and rather idly, that, but for
interruptions, the young Englishman might have become a better
acquaintance. His being an acquaintance at all was one of the signs
that in the first days had helped to place Milly, as a young person
with the world before her, for sympathy and wonder. Isolated,
unmothered, unguarded, but with her other strong marks, her big
house, her big fortune, her big freedom, she had lately begun to
“receive,” for all her few years, as an older woman might have
done—as was done, precisely, by princesses who had public
considerations to observe and who came of age very early. If it was
thus distinct to Mrs. Stringham then that Mr. Densher had gone off
somewhere else in connexion with his errand before her visit to New
York, it had been also not undiscoverable that he had come back for
a day or two later on, that is after her own second excursion—that
he had in fine reappeared on a single occasion on his way to the
West: his way from Washington as she believed, though he was out of
sight at the time of her joining her friend for their departure. It
hadn’t occurred to her before to exaggerate—it had not occurred to
her that she could; but she seemed to become aware to-night that
there had been just enough in this relation to meet, to provoke,
the free conception of a little more.
She presently put it that, at any rate, promise or
no promise, Milly would at a pinch be able, in London, to act on
his permission to make him a sign; to which Milly replied with
readiness that her ability, though evident, would be none the less
quite wasted, inasmuch as the gentleman would to a certainty be
still in America. He had a great deal to do there—which he would
scarce have begun; and in fact she might very well not have thought
of London at all if she hadn’t been sure he wasn’t yet near coming
back. It was perceptible to her companion that the moment our young
woman had so far committed herself she had a sense of having
overstepped; which was not quite patched up by her saying the next
minute, possibly with a certain failure of presence of mind, that
the last thing she desired was the air of running after him. Mrs.
Stringham wondered privately what question there could be of any
such appearance—the danger of which thus suddenly came up; but she
said for the time nothing of it—she only said other things: one of
which was, for instance, that if Mr. Densher was away he was away,
and this the end of it: also that of course they must be discreet
at any price. But what was the measure of discretion, and how was
one to be sure? So it was that, as they sat there, she produced her
own case: she had a possible tie with London, which she
desired as little to disown as she might wish to risk presuming on
it. She treated her companion, in short, for their evening’s end,
to the story of Maud Manningham, the odd but interesting English
girl who had formed her special affinity in the old days at the
Vevey school; whom she had written to, after their separation, with
a regularity that had at first faltered and then altogether failed,
yet that had been for the time quite a fine case of crude
constancy; so that it had in fact flickered up again of itself on
the occasion of the marriage of each. They had then once more
fondly, scrupulously written—Mrs. Lowder first; and even another
letter or two had afterwards passed. This, however, had been the
end—though with no rupture, only a gentle drop: Maud Manningham had
made, she believed, a great marriage, while she herself had made a
small; on top of which, moreover, distance, difference, diminished
community and impossible reunion had done the rest of the work. It
was but after all these years that reunion had begun to show as
possible—if the other party to it, that is, should be still in
existence. That was exactly what it now appeared to our friend
interesting to ascertain, as, with one aid and another, she
believed she might. It was an experiment she would at all events
now make if Milly didn’t object.
Milly in general objected to nothing, and though
she asked a question or two she raised no present plea. Her
questions—or at least her own answers to them—kindled on Mrs.
Stringham’s part a backward train: she hadn’t known till to-night
how much she remembered, or how fine it might be to see what had
become of large high-coloured Maud, florid, alien, exotic—which had
been just the spell—even to the perceptions of youth. There was the
danger—she frankly touched it—that such a temperament mightn’t have
matured, with the years, all in the sense of fineness: it was the
sort of danger that, in renewing relations after long breaks, one
had always to look in the face. To gather in strayed threads was to
take a risk—for which, however, she was prepared if Milly was. The
possible “fun,” she confessed, was by itself rather tempting; and
she fairly sounded, with this—wound up a little as she was—the note
of fun as the harmless final right of fifty years of mere New
England virtue. Among the things she was afterwards to recall was
the indescribable look dropped on her, at that, by her companion;
she was still seated there between the candles and before the
finished supper, while Milly moved about, and the look was long to
figure for her as an inscrutable comment on her notion of freedom.
Challenged, at any rate, as for the last wise word, Milly showed
perhaps, musingly, charmingly, that, though her attention had been
mainly soundless, her friend’s story—produced as a resource
unsuspected, a card from up the sleeve—half-surprised,
half-beguiled her. Since the matter, such as it was, depended on
that, she brought out before she went to bed an easy, a light “Risk
everything!”
This quality in it seemed possibly a little to deny
weight to Maud Lowder’s evoked presence—as Susan Stringham, still
sitting up, became, in excited reflexion, a trifle more conscious.
Something determinant, when the girl had left her, took place in
her—nameless but, as soon as she had given way, coercive. It was as
if she knew again, in this fulness of time, that she had been,
after Maud’s marriage, just sensibly outlived or, as people
nowadays said, shunted. Mrs. Lowder had left her behind, and on the
occasion, subsequently, of the corresponding date in her own
life—not the second, the sad one, with its dignity of sadness, but
the first, with the meagreness of its supposed felicity—she had
been, in the same spirit, almost patronisingly pitied. If that
suspicion, even when it had ceased to matter, had never quite died
out for her, there was doubtless some oddity in its now offering
itself as a link, rather than as another break, in the chain; and
indeed there might well have been for her a mood in which the
notion of the development of patronage in her quondamu
schoolmate would have settled her question in another sense. It was
actually settled—if the case be worth our analysis—by the happy
consummation, the poetic justice, the generous revenge, of her
having at last something to show. Maud, on their parting company,
had appeared to have so much, and would now—for wasn’t it also in
general quite the rich law of English life?—have, with accretions,
promotions, expansions, ever so much more. Very good; such things
might be; she rose to the sense of being ready for them. Whatever
Mrs. Lowder might have to show—and one hoped one did the
presumptions all justice—she would have nothing like Milly Theale,
who constituted the trophy producible by poor Susan. Poor Susan
lingered late—till the candles were low, and as soon as the table
was cleared she opened her neat portfolio. She hadn’t lost the old
clue; there were connexions she remembered, addresses she could
try; so the thing was to begin. She wrote on the spot.