The Author of Beltraffio

“Don’t defy me!” I could but honourably make answer.

She looked as if she hadn’t heard me, which was the best thing she could do; and we sat some time without further speech.  Mrs. Ambient had evidently the enviable English quality of being able to be mute without unrest.  But at last she spoke—she asked me if there seemed many people in town.  I gave her what satisfaction I could on this point, and we talked a little of London and of some of its characteristics at that time of the year.  At the end of this I came back irrepressibly to Mark.

“Doesn’t he like to be there now?  I suppose he doesn’t find the proper quiet for his work.  I should think his things had been written for the most part in a very still place.  They suggest a great stillness following on a kind of tumult.  Don’t you think so?” I laboured on.  “I suppose London’s a tremendous place to collect impressions, but a refuge like this, in the country, must be better for working them up.  Does he get many of his impressions in London, should you say?”  I proceeded from point to point in this malign inquiry simply because my hostess, who probably thought me an odious chattering person, gave me time; for when I paused—I’ve not represented my pauses—she simply continued to let her eyes wander while her long fair fingers played with the medallion on her neck.  When I stopped altogether, however, she was obliged to say something, and what she said was that she hadn’t the least idea where her husband got his impressions.  This made me think her, for a moment, positively disagreeable; delicate and proper and rather aristocratically fine as she sat there.  But I must either have lost that view a moment later or been goaded by it to further aggression, for I remember asking her if our great man were in a good vein of work and when we might look for the appearance of the book on which he was engaged.  I’ve every reason now to know that she found me insufferable.

She gave a strange small laugh as she said: “I’m afraid you think I know much more about my husband’s work than I do.  I haven’t the least idea what he’s doing,” she then added in a slightly different, that is a more explanatory, tone and as if from a glimpse of the enormity of her confession.  “I don’t read what he writes.”

She didn’t succeed, and wouldn’t even had she tried much harder, in making this seem to me anything less than monstrous.  I stared at her and I think I blushed.  “Don’t you admire his genius?  Don’t you admire ‘Beltraffio’?”

She waited, and I wondered what she could possibly say.  She didn’t speak, I could see, the first words that rose to her lips; she repeated what she had said a few minutes before.  “Oh of course he’s very clever!”  And with this she got up; our two absentees had reappeared.

II

Mrs. Ambient left me and went to meet them; she stopped and had a few words with her husband that I didn’t hear and that ended in her taking the child by the hand and returning with him to the house.  Her husband joined me in a moment, looking, I thought, the least bit conscious and constrained, and said that if I would come in with him he would show me my room.  In looking back upon these first moments of my visit I find it important to avoid the error of appearing to have at all fully measured his situation from the first or made out the signs of things mastered only afterwards.  This later knowledge throws a backward light and makes me forget that, at least on the occasion of my present reference—I mean that first afternoon—Mark Ambient struck me as only enviable.  Allowing for this he must yet have failed of much expression as we walked back to the house, though I remember well the answer he made to a remark of mine on his small son.

“That’s an extraordinary little boy of yours.  I’ve never seen such a child.”

“Why,” he asked while we went, “do you call him extraordinary?”

“He’s so beautiful, so fascinating.  He’s like some perfect little work of art.”

He turned quickly in the passage, grasping my arm.  “Oh don’t call him that, or you’ll—you’ll—!”

But in his hesitation he broke off suddenly, laughing at my surprise.  Immediately afterwards, however, he added: “You’ll make his little future very difficult.”

I declared that I wouldn’t for the world take any liberties with his little future—it seemed to me to hang by threads of such delicacy.  I should only be highly interested in watching it.

“You Americans are very keen,” he commented on this.  “You notice more things than we do.”

“Ah if you want visitors who aren’t struck with you,” I cried, “you shouldn’t have asked me down here!”

He showed me my room, a little bower of chintz, with open windows where the light was green, and before he left me said irrelevantly: “As for my small son, you know, we shall probably kill him between us before we’ve done with him!”  And he made this assertion as if he really believed it, without any appearance of jest, his fine near-sighted expressive eyes looking straight into mine.

“Do you mean by spoiling him?”

“No, by fighting for him!”

“You had better give him to me to keep for you,” I said.  “Let me remove the apple of discord!”

It was my extravagance of course, but he had the air of being perfectly serious.  “It would be quite the best thing we could do.  I should be all ready to do it.”

“I’m greatly obliged to you for your confidence.”

But he lingered with his hands in his pockets.  I felt as if within a few moments I had, morally speaking, taken several steps nearer to him.  He looked weary, just as he faced me then, looked preoccupied and as if there were something one might do for him.  I was terribly conscious of the limits of my young ability, but I wondered what such a service might be, feeling at bottom nevertheless that the only thing I could do for him was to like him.  I suppose he guessed this and was grateful for what was in my mind, since he went on presently: “I haven’t the advantage of being an American, but I also notice a little, and I’ve an idea that”—here he smiled and laid his hand on my shoulder—“even counting out your nationality you’re not destitute of intelligence.  I’ve only known you half an hour, but—!”  For which again he pulled up.  “You’re very young, after all.”

“But you may treat me as if I could understand you!” I said; and before he left me to dress for dinner he had virtually given me a promise that he would.

When I went down into the drawing-room—I was very punctual—I found that neither my hostess nor my host had appeared.  A lady rose from a sofa, however, and inclined her head as I rather surprisedly gazed at her.  “I daresay you don’t know me,” she said with the modern laugh.  “I’m Mark Ambient’s sister.”  Whereupon I shook hands with her, saluting her very low.  Her laugh was modern—by which I mean that it consisted of the vocal agitation serving between people who meet in drawing-rooms as the solvent of social disparities, the medium of transitions; but her appearance was—what shall I call it?—medieval.  She was pale and angular, her long thin face was inhabited by sad dark eyes and her black hair intertwined with golden fillets and curious clasps.  She wore a faded velvet robe which clung to her when she moved and was “cut,” as to the neck and sleeves, like the garments of old Italians.  She suggested a symbolic picture, something akin even to Dürer’s Melancholia, and was so perfect an image of a type which I, in my ignorance, supposed to be extinct, that while she rose before me I was almost as much startled as if I had seen a ghost.  I afterwards concluded that Miss Ambient wasn’t incapable of deriving pleasure from this weird effect, and I now believe that reflexion concerned in her having sunk again to her seat with her long lean but not ungraceful arms locked together in an archaic manner on her knees and her mournful eyes addressing me a message of intentness which foreshadowed what I was subsequently to suffer.  She was a singular fatuous artificial creature, and I was never more than half to penetrate her motives and mysteries.  Of one thing I’m sure at least: that they were considerably less insuperable than her appearance announced.  Miss Ambient was a restless romantic disappointed spinster, consumed with the love of Michael-Angelesque attitudes and mystical robes; but I’m now convinced she hadn’t in her nature those depths of unutterable thought which, when you first knew her, seemed to look out from her eyes and to prompt her complicated gestures.  Those features in especial had a misleading eloquence; they lingered on you with a far-off dimness, an air of obstructed sympathy, which was certainly not always a key to the spirit of their owner; so that, of a truth, a young lady could scarce have been so dejected and disillusioned without having committed a crime for which she was consumed with remorse, or having parted with a hope that she couldn’t sanely have entertained.  She had, I believe, the usual allowance of rather vain motives: she wished to be looked at, she wished to be married, she wished to be thought original.

It costs me a pang to speak in this irreverent manner of one of Ambient’s name, but I shall have still less gracious things to say before I’ve finished my anecdote, and moreover—I confess it—I owe the young lady a bit of a grudge.  Putting aside the curious cast of her face she had no natural aptitude for an artistic development, had little real intelligence.  But her affectations rubbed off on her brother’s renown, and as there were plenty of people who darkly disapproved of him they could easily point to his sister as a person formed by his influence.  It was quite possible to regard her as a warning, and she had almost compromised him with the world at large.  He was the original and she the inevitable imitation.  I suppose him scarce aware of the impression she mainly produced, beyond having a general idea that she made up very well as a Rossetti; he was used to her and was sorry for her, wishing she would marry and observing how she didn’t.  Doubtless I take her too seriously, for she did me no harm, though I’m bound to allow that I can only half-account for her.  She wasn’t so mystical as she looked, but was a strange indirect uncomfortable embarrassing woman.  My story gives the reader at best so very small a knot to untie that I needn’t hope to excite his curiosity by delaying to remark that Mrs. Ambient hated her sister-in-law.  This I learned but later on, when other matters came to my knowledge.  I mention it, however, at once, for I shall perhaps not seem to count too much on having beguiled him if I say he must promptly have guessed it.  Mrs. Ambient, a person of conscience, put the best face on her kinswoman, who spent a month with her twice a year; but it took no great insight to recognise the very different personal paste of the two ladies, and that the usual feminine hypocrisies would cost them on either side much more than the usual effort.  Mrs. Ambient, smooth-haired, thin-lipped, perpetually fresh, must have regarded her crumpled and dishevelled visitor as an equivocal joke; she herself so the opposite of a Rossetti, she herself a Reynolds or a Lawrence, with no more far-fetched note in her composition than a cold ladylike candour and a well-starched muslin dress.

It was in a garment and with an expression of this kind that she made her entrance after I had exchanged a few words with Miss Ambient.  Her husband presently followed her and, there being no other company, we went to dinner.  The impressions I received at that repast are present to me still.  The elements of oddity in the air hovered, as it were, without descending—to any immediate check of my delight.  This came mainly, of course, from Ambient’s talk, the easiest and richest I had ever heard.  I mayn’t say to-day whether he laid himself out to dazzle a rather juvenile pilgrim from over the sea; but that matters little—it seemed so natural to him to shine.  His spoken wit or wisdom, or whatever, had thus a charm almost beyond his written; that is if the high finish of his printed prose be really, as some people have maintained, a fault.  There was such a kindness in him, however, that I’ve no doubt it gave him ideas for me, or about me, to see me sit as open-mouthed as I now figure myself.  Not so the two ladies, who not only were very nearly dumb from beginning to end of the meal, but who hadn’t even the air of being struck with such an exhibition of fancy and taste.  Mrs. Ambient, detached, and inscrutable, met neither my eye nor her husband’s; she attended to her dinner, watched her servants, arranged the puckers in her dress, exchanged at wide intervals a remark with her sister-in-law and, while she slowly rubbed her lean white hands between the courses, looked out of the window at the first signs of evening—the long June day allowing us to dine without candles.  Miss Ambient appeared to give little direct heed to anything said by her brother; but on the other hand she was much engaged in watching its effect upon me.  Her “die-away” pupils continued to attach themselves to my countenance, and it was only her air of belonging to another century that kept them from being importunate.  She seemed to look at me across the ages, and the interval of time diminished for me the inconvenience.  It was as if she knew in a general way that he must be talking very well, but she herself was so at home among such allusions that she had no need to pick them up and was at liberty to see what would become of the exposure of a candid young American to a high æsthetic temperature.

The temperature was æsthetic certainly, but it was less so than I could have desired, for I failed of any great success in making our friend abound about himself.  I tried to put him on the ground of his own genius, but he slipped through my fingers every time and shifted the saddle to one or other of his contemporaries.  He talked about Balzac and Browning, about what was being done in foreign countries, about his recent tour in the East and the extraordinary forms of life to be observed in that part of the world.  I felt he had reasons for holding off from a direct profession of literary faith, a full consistency or sincerity, and therefore dealt instead with certain social topics, treating them with extraordinary humour and with a due play of that power of ironic evocation in which his books abound.  He had a deal to say about London as London appears to the observer who has the courage of some of his conclusions during the high-pressure time—from April to July—of its gregarious life.  He flashed his faculty of playing with the caught image and liberating the wistful idea over the whole scheme of manners or conception of intercourse of his compatriots, among whom there were evidently not a few types for which he had little love.  London in short was grotesque to him, and he made capital sport of it; his only allusion that I can remember to his own work was his saying that he meant some day to do an immense and general, a kind of epic, social satire.  Miss Ambient’s perpetual gaze seemed to put to me: “Do you perceive how artistic, how very strange and interesting, we are?  Frankly now is it possible to be more artistic, more strange and interesting, than this?  You surely won’t deny that we’re remarkable.”  I was irritated by her use of the plural pronoun, for she had no right to pair herself with her brother; and moreover, of course, I couldn’t see my way to—at all genially—include Mrs. Ambient.  Yet there was no doubt they were, taken together, unprecedented enough, and, with all allowances, I had never been left, or condemned, to draw so many rich inferences.

After the ladies had retired my host took me into his study to smoke, where I appealingly brought him round, or so tried, to some disclosure of fond ideals.  I was bent on proving I was worthy to listen to him, on repaying him for what he had said to me before dinner, by showing him how perfectly I understood.  He liked to talk; he liked to defend his convictions and his honour (not that I attacked them); he liked a little perhaps—it was a pardonable weakness—to bewilder the youthful mind even while wishing to win it over.  My ingenuous sympathy received at any rate a shock from three or four of his professions—he made me occasionally gasp and stare.  He couldn’t help forgetting, or rather couldn’t know, how little, in another and drier clime, I had ever sat in the school in which he was master; and he promoted me as at a jump to a sense of its penetralia.  My trepidations, however, were delightful; they were just what I had hoped for, and their only fault was that they passed away too quickly; since I found that for the main points I was essentially, I was quite constitutionally, on Mark Ambient’s “side.”  This was the taken stand of the artist to whom every manifestation of human energy was a thrilling spectacle and who felt for ever the desire to resolve his experience of life into a literary form.  On that high head of the passion for form the attempt at perfection, the quest for which was to his mind the real search for the holy grail—he said the most interesting, the most inspiring things.  He mixed with them a thousand illustrations from his own life, from other lives he had known, from history and fiction, and above all from the annals of the time that was dear to him beyond all periods, the Italian cinque-cento.  It came to me thus that in his books he had uttered but half his thought, and that what he had kept back from motives I deplored when I made them out later—was the finer and braver part.  It was his fate to make a great many still more “prepared” people than me not inconsiderably wince; but there was no grain of bravado in his ripest things (I’ve always maintained it, though often contradicted), and at bottom the poor fellow, disinterested to his finger-tips and regarding imperfection not only as an æsthetic but quite also as a social crime, had an extreme dread of scandal.  There are critics who regret that having gone so far he didn’t go further; but I regret nothing—putting aside two or three of the motives I just mentioned—since he arrived at a noble rarity and I don’t see how you can go beyond that.  The hours I spent in his study—this first one and the few that followed it; they were not, after all, so numerous—seem to glow, as I look back on them, with a tone that is partly that of the brown old room, rich, under the shaded candle-light where we sat and smoked, with the dusky delicate bindings of valuable books; partly that of his voice, of which I still catch the echo, charged with the fancies and figures that came at his command.  When we went back to the drawing-room we found Miss Ambient alone in possession and prompt to mention that her sister-in-law had a quarter of an hour before been called by the nurse to see the child, who appeared rather unwell—a little feverish.

“Feverish! how in the world comes he to be feverish?” Ambient asked.  “He was perfectly right this afternoon.”

“Beatrice says you walked him about too much—you almost killed him.”

“Beatrice must be very happy—she has an opportunity to triumph!” said my friend with a bright bitterness which was all I could have wished it.

“Surely not if the child’s ill,” I ventured to remark by way of pleading for Mrs. Ambient.

“My dear fellow, you aren’t married—you don’t know the nature of wives!” my host returned with spirit.

I tried to match it.  “Possibly not; but I know the nature of mothers.”

“Beatrice is perfect as a mother,” sighed Miss Ambient quite tremendously and with her fingers interlaced on her embroidered knees.

“I shall go up and see my boy,” her brother went on.  “Do you suppose he’s asleep?”

“Beatrice won’t let you see him, dear”—as to which our young lady looked at me, though addressing our companion.

“Do you call that being perfect as a mother?” Ambient asked.

“Yes, from her point of view.”

“Damn her point of view!” cried the author of “Beltraffio.”  And he left the room; after which we heard him ascend the stairs.

I sat there for some ten minutes with Miss Ambient, and we naturally had some exchange of remarks, which began, I think, by my asking her what the point of view of her sister-in-law could be.

“Oh it’s so very odd.  But we’re so very odd altogether.  Don’t you find us awfully unlike others of our class?—which indeed mostly, in England, is awful.  We’ve lived so much abroad.  I adore ‘abroad.’  Have you people like us in America?”

“You’re not all alike, you interesting three—or, counting Dolcino, four—surely, surely; so that I don’t think I understand your question.  We’ve no one like your brother—I may go so far as that.”

“You’ve probably more persons like his wife,” Miss Ambient desolately smiled.

“I can tell you that better when you’ve told me about her point of view.”

“Oh yes—oh yes.  Well,” said my entertainer, “she doesn’t like his ideas.  She doesn’t like them for the child.  She thinks them undesirable.”

Being quite fresh from the contemplation of some of Mark Ambient’s arcana I was particularly in a position to appreciate this announcement.  But the effect of it was to make me, after staring a moment, burst into laughter which I instantly checked when I remembered the indisposed child above and the possibility of parents nervously or fussily anxious.

“What has that infant to do with ideas?” I asked.  “Surely he can’t tell one from another.  Has he read his father’s novels?”

“He’s very precocious and very sensitive, and his mother thinks she can’t begin to guard him too early.”  Miss Ambient’s head drooped a little to one side and her eyes fixed themselves on futurity.  Then of a sudden came a strange alteration; her face lighted to an effect more joyless than any gloom, to that indeed of a conscious insincere grimace, and she added “When one has children what one writes becomes a great responsibility.”