The Author of Beltraffio

“Children are terrible critics,” I prosaically answered.  “I’m really glad I haven’t any.”

“Do you also write, then?  And in the same style as my brother?  And do you like that style?  And do people appreciate it in America?  I don’t write, but I think I feel.”  To these and various other inquiries and observations my young lady treated me till we heard her brother’s step in the hall again and Mark Ambient reappeared.  He was so flushed and grave that I supposed he had seen something symptomatic in the condition of his child.  His sister apparently had another idea; she gazed at him from afar—as if he had been a burning ship on the horizon—and simply murmured “Poor old Mark!”

“I hope you’re not anxious,” I as promptly pronounced.

“No, but I’m disappointed.  She won’t let me in.  She has locked the door, and I’m afraid to make a noise.”  I daresay there might have been a touch of the ridiculous in such a confession, but I liked my new friend so much that it took nothing for me from his dignity.  “She tells me—from behind the door—that she’ll let me know if he’s worse.”

“It’s very good of her,” said Miss Ambient with a hollow sound.

I had exchanged a glance with Mark in which it’s possible he read that my pity for him was untinged with contempt, though I scarce know why he should have cared; and as his sister soon afterward got up and took her bedroom candlestick he proposed we should go back to his study.  We sat there till after midnight; he put himself into his slippers and an old velvet jacket, he lighted an ancient pipe, but he talked considerably less than before.  There were longish pauses in our communion, but they only made me feel we had advanced in intimacy.  They helped me further to understand my friend’s personal situation and to imagine it by no means the happiest possible.  When his face was quiet it was vaguely troubled, showing, to my increase of interest—if that was all that was wanted!—that for him too life was the same struggle it had been for so many another man of genius.  At last I prepared to leave him, and then, to my ineffable joy, he gave me some of the sheets of his forthcoming book—which, though unfinished, he had indulged in the luxury, so dear to writers of deliberation, of having “set up,” from chapter to chapter, as he advanced.  These early pages, the prémices, in the language of letters, of that new fruit of his imagination, I should take to my room and look over at my leisure.  I was in the act of leaving him when the door of the study noiselessly opened and Mrs. Ambient stood before us.  She observed us a moment, her candle in her hand, and then said to her husband that as she supposed he hadn’t gone to bed she had come down to let him know Dolcino was more quiet and would probably be better in the morning.  Mark Ambient made no reply; he simply slipped past her in the doorway, as if for fear she might seize him in his passage, and bounded upstairs to judge for himself of his child’s condition.  She looked so frankly discomfited that I for a moment believed her about to give him chase.  But she resigned herself with a sigh and her eyes turned, ruefully and without a ray, to the lamplit room where various books at which I had been looking were pulled out of their places on the shelves and the fumes of tobacco hung in mid-air.  I bade her good-night and then, without intention, by a kind of fatality, a perversity that had already made me address her overmuch on that question of her husband’s powers, I alluded to the precious proof-sheets with which Ambient had entrusted me and which I nursed there under my arm.  “They’re the opening chapters of his new book,” I said.  “Fancy my satisfaction at being allowed to carry them to my room!”

She turned away, leaving me to take my candlestick from the table in the hall; but before we separated, thinking it apparently a good occasion to let me know once for all since I was beginning, it would seem, to be quite “thick” with my host—that there was no fitness in my appealing to her for sympathy in such a case; before we separated, I say, she remarked to me with her quick fine well-bred inveterate curtness: “I daresay you attribute to me ideas I haven’t got.  I don’t take that sort of interest in my husband’s proof-sheets.  I consider his writings most objectionable!”

III

I had an odd colloquy the next morning with Miss Ambient, whom I found strolling in the garden before breakfast.  The whole place looked as fresh and trim, amid the twitter of the birds, as if, an hour before, the housemaids had been turned into it with their dust-pans and feather-brushes.  I almost hesitated to light a cigarette and was doubly startled when, in the act of doing so, I suddenly saw the sister of my host, who had, at the best, something of the weirdness of an apparition, stand before me.  She might have been posing for her photograph.  Her sad-coloured robe arranged itself in serpentine folds at her feet; her hands locked themselves listlessly together in front; her chin rested on a cinque-cento ruff.  The first thing I did after bidding her good-morning was to ask her for news of her little nephew—to express the hope she had heard he was better.  She was able to gratify this trust—she spoke as if we might expect to see him during the day.  We walked through the shrubberies together and she gave me further light on her brother’s household, which offered me an opportunity to repeat to her what his wife had so startled and distressed me with the night before.  Was it the sorry truth that she thought his productions objectionable?

“She doesn’t usually come out with that so soon!” Miss Ambient returned in answer to my breathlessness.

“Poor lady,” I pleaded, “she saw I’m a fanatic.”

“Yes, she won’t like you for that.  But you mustn’t mind, if the rest of us like you!  Beatrice thinks a work of art ought to have a ‘purpose.’  But she’s a charming woman—don’t you think her charming?  I find in her quite the grand air.”

“She’s very beautiful,” I produced with an effort; while I reflected that though it was apparently true that Mark Ambient was mismated it was also perceptible that his sister was perfidious.  She assured me her brother and his wife had no other difference but this—one that she thought his writings immoral and his influence pernicious.  It was a fixed idea; she was afraid of these things for the child.  I answered that it was in all conscience enough, the trifle of a woman’s regarding her husband’s mind as a well of corruption, and she seemed much struck with the novelty of my remark.  “But there hasn’t been any of the sort of trouble that there so often is among married people,” she said.  “I suppose you can judge for yourself that Beatrice isn’t at all—well, whatever they call it when a woman kicks over!  And poor Mark doesn’t make love to other people either.  You might think he would, but I assure you he doesn’t.  All the same of course, from her point of view, you know, she has a dread of my brother’s influence on the child on the formation of his character, his ‘ideals,’ poor little brat, his principles.  It’s as if it were a subtle poison or a contagion—something that would rub off on his tender sensibility when his father kisses him or holds him on his knee.  If she could she’d prevent Mark from even so much as touching him.  Every one knows it—visitors see it for themselves; so there’s no harm in my telling you.  Isn’t it excessively odd?  It comes from Beatrice’s being so religious and so tremendously moral—so à cheval on fifty thousand riguardi.  And then of course we mustn’t forget,” my companion added, a little unexpectedly, to this polyglot proposition, “that some of Mark’s ideas are—well, really—rather impossible, don’t you know?”

I reflected as we went into the house, where we found Ambient unfolding The Observer at the breakfast-table, that none of them were probably quite so “impossible, don’t you know?” as his sister.  Mrs. Ambient, a little “the worse,” as was mentioned, for her ministrations, during the night, to Dolcino, didn’t appear at breakfast.  Her husband described her, however, as hoping to go to church.  I afterwards learnt that she did go, but nothing naturally was less on the cards than that we should accompany her.  It was while the church-bell droned near at hand that the author of “Beltraffio” led me forth for the ramble he had spoken of in his note.  I shall attempt here no record of where we went or of what we saw.  We kept to the fields and copses and commons, and breathed the same sweet air as the nibbling donkeys and the browsing sheep, whose woolliness seemed to me, in those early days of acquaintance with English objects, but part of the general texture of the small dense landscape, which looked as if the harvest were gathered by the shears and with all nature bleating and braying for the violence.  Everything was full of expression for Mark Ambient’s visitor—from the big bandy-legged geese whose whiteness was a “note” amid all the tones of green as they wandered beside a neat little oval pool, the foreground of a thatched and whitewashed inn, with a grassy approach and a pictorial sign—from these humble wayside animals to the crests of high woods which let a gable or a pinnacle peep here and there and looked even at a distance like trees of good company, conscious of an individual profile.  I admired the hedge-rows, I plucked the faint-hued heather, and I was for ever stopping to say how charming I thought the thread-like footpaths across the fields, which wandered in a diagonal of finer grain from one smooth stile to another.  Mark Ambient was abundantly good-natured and was as much struck, dear man, with some of my observations as I was with the literary allusions of the landscape.  We sat and smoked on stiles, broaching paradoxes in the decent English air; we took short cuts across a park or two where the bracken was deep and my companion nodded to the old woman at the gate; we skirted rank coverts which rustled here and there as we passed, and we stretched ourselves at last on a heathery hillside where if the sun wasn’t too hot neither was the earth too cold, and where the country lay beneath us in a rich blue mist.  Of course I had already told him what I thought of his new novel, having the previous night read every word of the opening chapters before I went to bed.

“I’m not without hope of being able to make it decent enough,” he said as I went back to the subject while we turned up our heels to the sky.  “At least the people who dislike my stuff—and there are plenty of them, I believe—will dislike this thing (if it does turn out well) most.”  This was the first time I had heard him allude to the people who couldn’t read him—a class so generally conceived to sit heavy on the consciousness of the man of letters.  A being organised for literature as Mark Ambient was must certainly have had the normal proportion of sensitiveness, of irritability; the artistic ego, capable in some cases of such monstrous development, must have been in his composition sufficiently erect and active.  I won’t therefore go so far as to say that he never thought of his detractors or that he had any illusions with regard to the number of his admirers—he could never so far have deceived himself as to believe he was popular, but I at least then judged (and had occasion to be sure later on) that stupidity ruffled him visibly but little, that he had an air of thinking it quite natural he should leave many simple folk, tasting of him, as simple as ever he found them, and that he very seldom talked about the newspapers, which, by the way, were always even abnormally vulgar about him.  Of course he may have thought them over—the newspapers—night and day; the only point I make is that he didn’t show it while at the same time he didn’t strike one as a man actively on his guard.  I may add that, touching his hope of making the work on which he was then engaged the best of his books, it was only partly carried out.  That place belongs incontestably to “Beltraffio,” in spite of the beauty of certain parts of its successor.  I quite believe, however, that he had at the moment of which I speak no sense of having declined; he was in love with his idea, which was indeed magnificent, and though for him, as I suppose for every sane artist, the act of execution had in it as much torment as joy, he saw his result grow like the crescent of the young moon and promise to fill the disk.  “I want to be truer than I’ve ever been,” he said, settling himself on his back with his hands clasped behind his head; “I want to give the impression of life itself.  No, you may say what you will, I’ve always arranged things too much, always smoothed them down and rounded them off and tucked them in—done everything to them that life doesn’t do.  I’ve been a slave to the old superstitions.”

“You a slave, my dear Mark Ambient?  You’ve the freest imagination of our day!”

“All the more shame to me to have done some of the things I have!  The reconciliation of the two women in ‘Natalina,’ for instance, which could never really have taken place.  That sort of thing’s ignoble—I blush when I think of it!  This new affair must be a golden vessel, filled with the purest distillation of the actual; and oh how it worries me, the shaping of the vase, the hammering of the metal!  I have to hammer it so fine, so smooth; I don’t do more than an inch or two a day.  And all the while I have to be so careful not to let a drop of the liquor escape!  When I see the kind of things Life herself, the brazen hussy, does, I despair of ever catching her peculiar trick.  She has an impudence, Life!  If one risked a fiftieth part of the effects she risks!  It takes ever so long to believe it.  You don’t know yet, my dear youth.  It isn’t till one has been watching her some forty years that one finds out half of what she’s up to!  Therefore one’s earlier things must inevitably contain a mass of rot.  And with what one sees, on one side, with its tongue in its cheek, defying one to be real enough, and on the other the bonnes gens rolling up their eyes at one’s cynicism, the situation has elements of the ludicrous which the poor reproducer himself is doubtless in a position to appreciate better than any one else.  Of course one mustn’t worry about the bonnes gens,” Mark Ambient went on while my thoughts reverted to his ladylike wife as interpreted by his remarkable sister.

“To sink your shaft deep and polish the plate through which people look into it—that’s what your work consists of,” I remember ingeniously observing.

“Ah polishing one’s plate—that’s the torment of execution!” he exclaimed, jerking himself up and sitting forward.  “The effort to arrive at a surface, if you think anything of that decent sort necessary—some people don’t, happily for them!  My dear fellow, if you could see the surface I dream of as compared with the one with which I’ve to content myself.  Life’s really too short for art—one hasn’t time to make one’s shell ideally hard.  Firm and bright, firm and bright is very well to say—the devilish thing has a way sometimes of being bright, and even of being hard, as mere tough frozen pudding is hard, without being firm.  When I rap it with my knuckles it doesn’t give the right sound.  There are horrible sandy stretches where I’ve taken the wrong turn because I couldn’t for the life of me find the right.  If you knew what a dunce I am sometimes!  Such things figure to me now base pimples and ulcers on the brow of beauty!”

“They’re very bad, very bad,” I said as gravely as I could.

“Very bad?  They’re the highest social offence I know; it ought—it absolutely ought; I’m quite serious—to be capital.  If I knew I should be publicly thrashed else I’d manage to find the true word.  The people who can’t—some of them don’t so much as know it when they see it—would shut their inkstands, and we shouldn’t be deluged by this flood of rubbish!”

I shall not attempt to repeat everything that passed between us, nor to explain just how it was that, every moment I spent in his company, Mark Ambient revealed to me more and more the consistency of his creative spirit, the spirit in him that felt all life as plastic material.  I could but envy him the force of that passion, and it was at any rate through the receipt of this impression that by the time we returned I had gained the sense of intimacy with him that I have noted.  Before we got up for the homeward stretch he alluded to his wife’s having once—or perhaps more than once—asked him whether he should like Dolcino to read “Beltraffio.”  He must have been unaware at the moment of all that this conveyed to me—as well doubtless of my extreme curiosity to hear what he had replied.  He had said how much he hoped Dolcino would read all his works—when he was twenty; he should like him to know what his father had done.  Before twenty it would be useless; he wouldn’t understand them.

“And meanwhile do you propose to hide them—to lock them up in a drawer?” Mrs. Ambient had proceeded.

“Oh no—we must simply tell him they’re not intended for small boys.  If you bring him up properly after that he won’t touch them.”

To this Mrs. Ambient had made answer that it might be very awkward when he was about fifteen, say; and I asked her husband if it were his opinion in general, then, that young people shouldn’t read novels.

“Good ones—certainly not!” said my companion.  I suppose I had had other views, for I remember saying that for myself I wasn’t sure it was bad for them if the novels were “good” to the right intensity of goodness.  “Bad for them, I don’t say so much!” my companion returned.  “But very bad, I’m afraid, for the poor dear old novel itself.”  That oblique accidental allusion to his wife’s attitude was followed by a greater breadth of reference as we walked home.  “The difference between us is simply the opposition between two distinct ways of looking at the world, which have never succeeded in getting on together, or in making any kind of common household, since the beginning of time.  They’ve borne all sorts of names, and my wife would tell you it’s the difference between Christian and Pagan.  I may be a pagan, but I don’t like the name; it sounds sectarian.  She thinks me at any rate no better than an ancient Greek.  It’s the difference between making the most of life and making the least, so that you’ll get another better one in some other time and place.  Will it be a sin to make the most of that one, too, I wonder; and shall we have to be bribed off in the future state as well as in the present?  Perhaps I care too much for beauty—I don’t know, I doubt if a poor devil can; I delight in it, I adore it, I think of it continually, I try to produce it, to reproduce it.  My wife holds that we shouldn’t cultivate or enjoy it without extraordinary precautions and reserves.  She’s always afraid of it, always on her guard.  I don’t know what it can ever have done to her, what grudge it owes her or what resentment rides.  And she’s so pretty, too, herself!  Don’t you think she’s lovely?  She was at any rate when we married.  At that time I wasn’t aware of that difference I speak of—I thought it all came to the same thing: in the end, as they say.  Well, perhaps it will in the end.  I don’t know what the end will be.  Moreover, I care for seeing things as they are; that’s the way I try to show them in any professed picture.  But you mustn’t talk to Mrs. Ambient about things as they are.  She has a mortal dread of things as they are.”

“She’s afraid of them for Dolcino,” I said: surprised a moment afterwards at being in a position—thanks to Miss Ambient—to be so explanatory; and surprised even now that Mark shouldn’t have shown visibly that he wondered what the deuce I knew about it.  But he didn’t; he simply declared with a tenderness that touched me: “Ah nothing shall ever hurt him!”

He told me more about his wife before we arrived at the gate of home, and if he be judged to have aired overmuch his grievance I’m afraid I must admit that he had some of the foibles as well as the gifts of the artistic temperament; adding, however, instantly that hitherto, to the best of my belief, he had rarely let this particular cat out of the bag.  “She thinks me immoral—that’s the long and short of it,” he said as we paused outside a moment and his hand rested on one of the bars of his gate; while his conscious expressive perceptive eyes—the eyes of a foreigner, I had begun to account them, much more than of the usual Englishman—viewing me now evidently as quite a familiar friend, took part in the declaration.  “It’s very strange when one thinks it all over, and there’s a grand comicality in it that I should like to bring out.  She’s a very nice woman, extraordinarily well-behaved, upright and clever and with a tremendous lot of good sense about a good many matters.  Yet her conception of a novel—she has explained it to me once or twice, and she doesn’t do it badly as exposition—is a thing so false that it makes me blush.  It’s a thing so hollow, so dishonest, so lying, in which life is so blinked and blinded, so dodged and disfigured, that it makes my ears burn.  It’s two different ways of looking at the whole affair,” he repeated, pushing open the gate.  “And they’re irreconcilable!” he added with a sigh.  We went forward to the house, but on the walk, half-way to the door, he stopped and said to me: “If you’re going into this kind of thing there’s a fact you should know beforehand; it may save you some disappointment.  There’s a hatred of art, there’s a hatred of literature—I mean of the genuine kinds.  Oh the shams—those they’ll swallow by the bucket!”  I looked up at the charming house, with its genial colour and crookedness, and I answered with a smile that those evil passions might exist, but that I should never have expected to find them there.  “Ah it doesn’t matter after all,” he a bit nervously laughed; which I was glad to hear, for I was reproaching myself with having worked him up.

If I had it soon passed off, for at luncheon he was delightful; strangely delightful considering that the difference between himself and his wife was, as he had said, irreconcilable.  He had the art, by his manner, by his smile, by his natural amenity, of reducing the importance of it in the common concerns of life; and Mrs. Ambient, I must add, lent herself to this transaction with a very good grace.  I watched her at table for further illustrations of that fixed idea of which Miss Ambient had spoken to me; for in the light of the united revelations of her sister-in-law and her husband she had come to seem to me almost a sinister personage.  Yet the signs of a sombre fanaticism were not more immediately striking in her than before; it was only after a while that her air of incorruptible conformity, her tapering monosyllabic correctness, began to affect me as in themselves a cold thin flame.  Certainly, at first, she resembled a woman with as few passions as possible; but if she had a passion at all it would indeed be that of Philistinism.  She might have been (for there are guardian-spirits, I suppose, of all great principles) the very angel of the pink of propriety—putting the pink for a principle, though I’d rather put some dismal cold blue.  Mark Ambient, apparently, ten years before, had simply and quite inevitably taken her for an angel, without asking himself of what.  He had been right in calling my attention to her beauty.  In looking for some explanation of his original surrender to her I saw more than before that she was, physically speaking, a wonderfully cultivated human plant—that he might well have owed her a brief poetic inspiration.  It was impossible to be more propped and pencilled, more delicately tinted and petalled.

If I had had it in my heart to think my host a little of a hypocrite for appearing to forget at table everything he had said to me in our walk, I should instantly have cancelled such a judgement on reflecting that the good news his wife was able to give him about their little boy was ground enough for any optimistic reaction.  It may have come partly, too, from a certain compunction at having breathed to me at all harshly on the cool fair lady who sat there—a desire to prove himself not after all so mismated.  Dolcino continued to be much better, and it had been promised him he should come downstairs after his dinner.  As soon as we had risen from our own meal Mark slipped away, evidently for the purpose of going to his child; and no sooner had I observed this than I became aware his wife had simultaneously vanished.  It happened that Miss Ambient and I, both at the same moment, saw the tail of her dress whisk out of a doorway; an incident that led the young lady to smile at me as if I now knew all the secrets of the Ambients.  I passed with her into the garden and we sat down on a dear old bench that rested against the west wall of the house.  It was a perfect spot for the middle period of a Sunday in June, and its felicity seemed to come partly from an antique sun-dial which, rising in front of us and forming the centre of a small intricate parterre, measured the moments ever so slowly and made them safe for leisure and talk.  The garden bloomed in the suffused afternoon, the tall beeches stood still for an example, and, behind and above us, a rose tree of many seasons, clinging to the faded grain of the brick, expressed the whole character of the scene in a familiar exquisite smell.  It struck me as a place to offer genius every favour and sanction—not to bristle with challenges and checks.  Miss Ambient asked me if I had enjoyed my walk with her brother and whether we had talked of many things.

“Well, of most things,” I freely allowed, though I remembered we hadn’t talked of Miss Ambient.

“And don’t you think some of his theories are very peculiar?”

“Oh I guess I agree with them all.”  I was very particular, for Miss Ambient’s entertainment, to guess.

“Do you think art’s everything?” she put to me in a moment.

“In art, of course I do!”

“And do you think beauty’s everything?”

“Everything’s a big word, which I think we should use as little as possible.  But how can we not want beauty?”

“Ah there you are!” she sighed, though I didn’t quite know what she meant by it.  “Of course it’s difficult for a woman to judge how far to go,” she went on.  “I adore everything that gives a charm to life.  I’m intensely sensitive to form.  But sometimes I draw back—don’t you see what I mean?—I don’t quite see where I shall be landed.  I only want to be quiet, after all,” Miss Ambient continued as if she had long been baffled of this modest desire.  “And one must be good, at any rate, must not one?” she pursued with a dubious quaver—an intimation apparently that what I might say one way or the other would settle it for her.  It was difficult for me to be very original in reply, and I’m afraid I repaid her confidence with an unblushing platitude.  I remember, moreover, attaching to it an inquiry, equally destitute of freshness and still more wanting perhaps in tact, as to whether she didn’t mean to go to church, since that was an obvious way of being good.  She made answer that she had performed this duty in the morning, and that for her, of Sunday afternoons, supreme virtue consisted in answering the week’s letters.  Then suddenly and without transition she brought out: “It’s quite a mistake about Dolcino’s being better.  I’ve seen him and he’s not at all right.”

I wondered, and somehow I think I scarcely believed.  “Surely his mother would know, wouldn’t she?”

She appeared for a moment to be counting the leaves on one of the great beeches.  “As regards most matters one can easily say what, in a given situation, my sister-in-law will, or would, do.  But in the present case there are strange elements at work.”

“Strange elements?  Do you mean in the constitution of the child?”

“No, I mean in my sister-in-law’s feelings.”

“Elements of affection of course; elements of anxiety,” I concurred.  “But why do you call them strange?”

She repeated my words.  “Elements of affection, elements of anxiety.  She’s very anxious.”

Miss Ambient put me indescribably ill at ease; she almost scared me, and I wished she would go and write her letters.  “His father will have seen him now,” I said, “and if he’s not satisfied he will send for the doctor.”

“The doctor ought to have been here this morning,” she promptly returned.  “He lives only two miles away.”

I reflected that all this was very possibly but a part of the general tragedy of Miss Ambient’s view of things; yet I asked her why she hadn’t urged that view on her sister-in-law.  She answered me with a smile of extraordinary significance and observed that I must have very little idea of her “peculiar” relations with Beatrice; but I must do her the justice that she re-enforced this a little by the plea that any distinguishable alarm of Mark’s was ground enough for a difference of his wife’s.  He was always nervous about the child, and as they were predestined by nature to take opposite views, the only thing for the mother was to cultivate a false optimism.  In Mark’s absence and that of his betrayed fear she would have been less easy.  I remembered what he had said to me about their dealings with their son—that between them they’d probably put an end to him; but I didn’t repeat this to Miss Ambient: the less so that just then her brother emerged from the house, carrying the boy in his arms.  Close behind him moved his wife, grave and pale; the little sick face was turned over Ambient’s shoulder and toward the mother.  We rose to receive the group, and as they came near us Dolcino twisted himself about.  His enchanting eyes showed me a smile of recognition, in which, for the moment, I should have taken a due degree of comfort.  Miss Ambient, however, received another impression, and I make haste to say that her quick sensibility, which visibly went out to the child, argues that in spite of her affectations she might have been of some human use.  “It won’t do at all—it won’t do at all,” she said to me under her breath.  “I shall speak to Mark about the Doctor.”

Her small nephew was rather white, but the main difference I saw in him was that he was even more beautiful than the day before.  He had been dressed in his festal garments—a velvet suit and a crimson sash—and he looked like a little invalid prince too young to know condescension and smiling familiarly on his subjects.

“Put him down, Mark, he’s not a bit at his ease,” Mrs. Ambient said.

“Should you like to stand on your feet, my boy?” his father asked.