The Wings of the Dove - Henry James (classic literature books TXT) 📗

result of making him feel that the picture closed him in. What part was there for him, with his attitude that lacked the highest style, in a composition in which everything else would have it? “They won’t, however, be at dinner, the few people she expects⁠—they come round afterwards from their respective hotels; and Sir Luke Strett and his niece, the principal ones, will have arrived from London but an hour or two ago. It’s for him she has wanted to do something⁠—to let it begin at once. We shall see more of him, because she likes him; and I’m so glad⁠—she’ll be glad too⁠—that you’re to see him.” The good lady, in connection with it, was urgent, was almost unnaturally bright. “So I greatly hope⁠—!” But her hope fairly lost itself in the wide light of her cheer.

He considered a little this appearance, while she let him, he thought, into still more knowledge than she uttered. “What is it you hope?”

“Well, that you’ll stay on.”

“Do you mean after dinner?” She meant, he seemed to feel, so much that he could scarce tell where it ended or began.

“Oh that, of course. Why we’re to have music⁠—beautiful instruments and songs; and not Tasso declaimed as in the guidebooks either. She has arranged it⁠—or at least I have. That is Eugenio has. Besides, you’re in the picture.”

“Oh⁠—I!” said Densher almost with the gravity of a real protest.

“You’ll be the grand young man who surpasses the others and holds up his head and the wine-cup. What we hope,” Mrs. Stringham pursued, “is that you’ll be faithful to us⁠—that you’ve not come for a mere foolish few days.”

Densher’s more private and particular shabby realities turned, without comfort, he was conscious, at this touch, in the artificial repose he had in his anxiety about them but half-managed to induce. The way smooth ladies, travelling for their pleasure and housed in Veronese pictures, talked to plain embarrassed workingmen, engaged in an unprecedented sacrifice of time and of the opportunity for modest acquisition! The things they took for granted and the general misery of explaining! He couldn’t tell them how he had tried to work, how it was partly what he had moved into rooms for, only to find himself, almost for the first time in his life, stricken and sterile; because that would give them a false view of the source of his restlessness, if not of the degree of it. It would operate, indirectly perhaps, but infallibly, to add to that weight as of expected performance which these very moments with Mrs. Stringham caused more and more to settle on his heart. He had incurred it, the expectation of performance; the thing was done, and there was no use talking; again, again the cold breath of it was in the air. So there he was. And at best he floundered. “I’m afraid you won’t understand when I say I’ve very tiresome things to consider. Botherations, necessities at home. The pinch, the pressure in London.”

But she understood in perfection; she rose to the pinch and the pressure and showed how they had been her own very element. “Oh the daily task and the daily wage, the golden guerdon or reward? No one knows better than I how they haunt one in the flight of the precious deceiving days. Aren’t they just what I myself have given up? I’ve given up all to follow her. I wish you could feel as I do. And can’t you,” she asked, “write about Venice?”

He very nearly wished, for the minute, that he could feel as she did; and he smiled for her kindly. “Do you write about Venice?”

“No; but I would⁠—oh wouldn’t I?⁠—if I hadn’t so completely given up. She’s, you know, my princess, and to one’s princess⁠—”

“One makes the whole sacrifice?”

“Precisely. There you are!”

It pressed on him with this that never had a man been in so many places at once. “I quite understand that she’s yours. Only you see she’s not mine.” He felt he could somehow, for honesty, risk that, as he had the moral certainty she wouldn’t repeat it and least of all to Mrs. Lowder, who would find in it a disturbing implication. This was part of what he liked in the good lady, that she didn’t repeat, and also that she gave him a delicate sense of her shyly wishing him to know it. That was in itself a hint of possibilities between them, of a relation, beneficent and elastic for him, which wouldn’t engage him further than he could see. Yet even as he afresh made this out he felt how strange it all was. She wanted, Susan Shepherd then, as appeared, the same thing Kate wanted, only wanted it, as still further appeared, in so different a way and from a motive so different, even though scarce less deep. Then Mrs. Lowder wanted, by so odd an evolution of her exuberance, exactly what each of the others did; and he was between them all, he was in the midst. Such perceptions made occasions⁠—well, occasions for fairly wondering if it mightn’t be best just to consent, luxuriously, to be the ass the whole thing involved. Trying not to be and yet keeping in it was of the two things the more asinine. He was glad there was no male witness; it was a circle of petticoats; he shouldn’t have liked a man to see him. He only had for a moment a sharp thought of Sir Luke Strett, the great master of the knife whom Kate in London had spoken of Milly as in commerce with, and whose renewed intervention at such a distance, just announced to him, required some accounting for. He had a vision of great London surgeons⁠—if this one was a surgeon⁠—as incisive all round; so that he should perhaps after all not wholly escape the ironic attention of his own sex. The most he might be able to do was not to care; while he was trying not to he could take that