The Finer Grain
“You’re so in love with her and want to marry her!”—she said it all sympathetically and yearningly, poor crapy Cornelia; as if it were to be quite taken for granted that she knew all about it. And then when he had asked how she knew—why she took so informed a tone about it; all on the wonder of her seeming so much more “in” it just at that hour than he himself quite felt he could figure for: “Ah, how but from the dear lovely thing herself? Don’t you suppose she knows it?”
“Oh, she absolutely ‘knows’ it, does she?”—he fairly heard himself ask that; and with the oddest sense at once of sharply wanting the certitude and yet of seeing the question, of hearing himself say the words, through several thicknesses of some wrong medium. He came back to it from a distance; as he would have had to come back (this was again vivid to him) should he have got round again to his ripe intention three days before—after his now present but then absent friend, that is, had left him planted before his now absent but then present one for the purpose. “Do you mean she—at all confidently!—expects?” he went on, not much minding if it couldn’t but sound foolish; the time being given it for him meanwhile by the sigh, the wondering gasp, all charged with the unutterable, that the tone of his appeal set in motion. He saw his companion look at him, but it might have been with the eyes of thirty years ago; when—very likely.—he had put her some such question about some girl long since dead. Dimly at first, then more distinctly, didn’t it surge back on him for the very strangeness that there had been some such passage as this between them—yes, about Mary Cardew!—in the autumn of ‘68?
“Why, don’t you realise your situation?” Miss Rasch struck him as quite beautifully wailing—above all to such an effect of deep interest, that is, on her own part and in him.
“My situation?”—he echoed, he considered; but reminded afresh, by the note of the detached, the far-projected in it, of what he had last remembered of his sentient state on his once taking ether at the dentist’s.
“Yours and hers—the situation of her adoring you. I suppose you at least know it,” Cornelia smiled.
Yes, it was like the other time and yet it wasn’t. She was like—poor Cornelia was—everything that used to be; that somehow was most definite to him. Still he could quite reply “Do you call it—her adoring me—my situation?”
“Well, it’s a part of yours, surely—if you’re in love with her.”
“Am I, ridiculous old person! in love with her?” White-Mason asked.
“I may be a ridiculous old person,” Cornelia returned—“and, for that matter, of course I am! But she’s young and lovely and rich and clever: so what could be more natural?”
“Oh, I was applying that opprobrious epithet—!” He didn’t finish, though he meant he had applied it to himself. He had got up from his seat; he turned about and, taking in, as his eyes also roamed, several objects in the room, serene and sturdy, not a bit cheap-looking, little old New York objects of ‘68, he made, with an inner art, as if to recognise them—made so, that is, for himself; had quite the sense for the moment of asking them, of imploring them, to recognise him, to be for him things of his own past. Which they truly were, he could have the next instant cried out; for it meant that if three or four of them, small sallow carte-de-visite photographs, faithfully framed but spectrally faded, hadn’t in every particular, frames and balloon skirts and false “property” balustrades of unimaginable terraces and all, the tone of time, the secret for warding and easing off the perpetual imminent ache of one’s protective scowl, one would verily but have to let the scowl stiffen, or to take up seriously the question of blue goggles, during what might remain of life.
V
What he actually took up from a little old Twelfth-Street table that piously preserved the plain mahogany circle, with never a curl nor a crook nor a hint of a brazen flourish, what he paused there a moment for commerce with, his back presented to crapy Cornelia, who sat taking that view of him, during this opportunity, very protrusively and frankly and fondly, was one of the wasted mementos just mentioned, over which he both uttered and suppressed a small comprehensive cry. He stood there another minute to look at it, and when he turned about still kept it in his hand, only holding it now a litde behind him. “You must have come back to stay—with all your beautiful things. What else does it mean?”
“‘Beautiful’?” his old friend commented with her brow all wrinkled and her lips thrust out in expressive dispraise. They might at that rate have been scarce more beautiful than she herself. “Oh, don’t talk so—after Mrs. Worthingham’s! They’re wonderful, if you will: such things, such things! But one’s own poor relics and odds and ends are one’s own at least; and one has—yes—come back to them. They’re all I have in the world to come back to. They were stored, and what I was paying—!” Miss Rasch wofully added.
He had possession of the small old picture; he hovered there; he put his eyes again to it intently; then again held it a little behind him as if it might have been snatched away or the very feel of it, pressed against him, was good to his palm. “Mrs. Worthingham’s things? You think them beautiful?”
Cornelia did now, if ever, show an odd face. “Why certainly prodigious, or whatever. Isn’t that conceded?”
“No doubt every horror, at the pass we’ve come to, is conceded. That’s just what I complain of.”
“Do you complain?”—she drew it out as for surprise: she couldn’t have imagined such a thing.
“To me her things are awful. They’re the newest of the new.”
“Ah, but the old forms!”
“Those are the most blatant. I mean the swaggering reproductions.”
“Oh but,” she pleaded, “we can’t all be really old.”
“No, we can’t, Cornelia. But you can—!” said White-Mason with the frankest appreciation.
She looked up at him from where she sat as he could imagine her looking up at the curate at Bognor. “Thank you, sir! If that’s all you want–!”
“It is” he said, “all I want—or almost.”
“Then no wonder such a creature as that,” she lightly moralised, “won’t suit you!”
He bent upon her, for all the weight of his question, his smoothest stare. “You hold she certainly won’t suit me?”
“Why, what can I tell about it? Haven’t you by this time found out?”
“No, but I think I’m finding.” With which he began again to explore.
Miss Rasch immensely wondered. “You mean you don’t expect to come to an understanding with her?” And then as even to this straight challenge he made at first no answer: “Do you mean you give it up?”
He waited some instants more, but not meeting her eyes—only looking again about the room. “What do you think of my chance?”
“Oh,” his companion cried, “what has what I think to do with it? How can I think anything but that she must like you?”
“Yes—of course. But how much?”
“Then don’t you really know?” Cornelia asked.
He kept up his walk, oddly preoccupied and still not looking at her. “Do you, my dear?”
She waited a little. “If you haven’t really put it to her I don’t suppose she knows.”
This at last arrested him again. “My dear Cornelia, she doesn’t know–!”
He had paused as for the desperate tone, or at least the large emphasis of it, so that she took him up. “The more reason then to help her to find it out.”
“I mean,” he explained, “that she doesn’t know anything.”
“Anything?”
“Anything else, I mean—even if she does know that.”
Cornelia considered of it. “But what else need she—in particular—know? Isn’t that the principal thing?”
“Well”—and he resumed his circuit—“she doesn’t know anything that we know. But nothing,” he re-emphasised—“nothing whatever!”
“Well, can’t she do without that?”
“Evidently she can—and evidently she does, beautifully. But the question is whether I can!”
He had paused once more with his point—but she glared, poor Cornelia, with her wonder. “Surely if you know for yourself–!”
“Ah, it doesn’t seem enough for me to know for myself! One wants a woman,” he argued—but still, in his prolonged tour, quite without his scowl—“to know for one, to know with one. That’s what you do now,” he candidly put to her.
It made her again gape. “Do you mean you want to marry me?”
He was so full of what he did mean, however, that he failed even to notice it. “She doesn’t in the least know, for instance, how old I am.”
“That’s because you’re so young!”
“Ah, there you are!”—and he turned off afresh and as if almost in disgust. It left her visibly perplexed—though even the perplexed Cornelia was still the exceedingly pointed; but he had come to her aid after another turn. “Remember, please, that I’m pretty well as old as you.”
She had all her point at least, while she bridled and blinked, for this. “You’re exactly a year and ten months older.”
It checked him there for delight. “You remember my birthday?”
She twinkled indeed like some far-off light of home. “I remember every one’s. It’s a little way I’ve always had—and that I’ve never lost.”
He looked at her accomplishment, across the room, as at some striking, some charming phenomenon. “Well, that’s the sort of thing I want!” All the ripe candour of his eyes confirmed it.
What could she do therefore, she seemed to ask him, but repeat her question of a moment before?—which indeed presently she made up her mind to. “Do you want to marry me?”
It had this time better success—if the term may be felt in any degree to apply. All his candour, or more of it at least, was in his slow, mild, kind, considering head-shake. “No, Cornelia—not to marry you.”
His discrimination was a wonder; but since she was clearly treating him now as if everything about him was, so she could as exquisitely meet it. “Not at least,” she convulsively smiled, “until you’ve honourably tried Mrs. Worthingham. Don’t you really mean to?” she gallantly insisted.
He waited again a little; then he brought out: “I’ll tell you presently.” He came back, and as by still another mere glance over the room, to what seemed to him so much nearer. “That table was old Twelfth-Street?”
“Everything here was.”
“Oh, the pure blessings! With you, ah, with you, I haven’t to wear a green shade.” And he had retained meanwhile his small photograph, which he again showed himself. “Didn’t we talk of Mary Cardew?”
“Why, do you remember it?” She marvelled to extravagance.
“You make me. You connect me with it. You connect it with we.” He liked to display to her this excellent use she thus had, the service she rendered. “There are so many connections—there will be so many. I feel how, with you, they must all come up again for me: in fact you’re bringing them out already, just while I look at you, as fast as ever you can. The fact that you knew every one—!” he went on; yet as if there were more in that too than he could quite trust himself about.
“Yes, I knew every one,” said Cornelia Rasch; but this time with perfect simplicity. “I knew, I imagine, more than you do—or more than you did.”
It kept him there, it made him wonder with his eyes on her. “Things about them—our people?”
“Our people. Ours only now.”
Ah, such an interest as he felt in this—taking from her while, so far from scowling, he almost gaped, all it might mean! “Ours indeed—and it’s awfully good they are; or that we’re still here for them! Nobody else is—nobody but you: not a cat!”
“Well, I am a cat!” Cornelia grinned.
“Do you mean you can tell me things—?” It was too beautiful to believe.
“About what really was?” she artfully considered, holding him immensely now. “Well, unless they’ve come to you with time; unless you’ve learned—or found out.”
“Oh,” he reassuringly cried—reassuringly, it most seemed, for himself—“nothing has come to me with time, everything has gone from me. How can I find out now! What creature has an idea–?”
She threw up her hands with the shrug of old days—the sharp little shrug his sisters used to imitate and that she hadn’t had to go to Europe for. The only thing was that he blessed her for bringing it back.
“Ah, the ideas of people now–!”
“Yes, their ideas are certainly not about us” But he ruefully faced it. “We’ve none the less, however, to live with them.”
“With their ideas—?” Cornelia questioned.
“With them—these modern wonders; such as they are!” Then he went on: “It must have been to help me you’ve come back.”
She said nothing for an instant about that, only nodding instead at his photograph. “What has become of yours? I mean of her.”
This time it made him turn pale. “You remember I have one?”
She kept her eyes on him. “In a ‘pork-pie’ hat, with her hair in a long net. That was so ‘smart’ then; especially with one’s skirt looped up, over one’s hooped magenta petticoat, in little festoons, and a row of very big onyx beads over one’s braided velveteen sack—braided quite plain and very broad, don’t you know?”
He smiled for her extraordinary possession of these things—she was as prompt as if she had had them before her. “Oh, rather—‘don’t I know?’ You wore brown velveteen, and, on those remarkably small hands, funny gauntlets—like mine.”
“Oh, do you remember? But like yours?” she wondered.
“I mean like hers in my photograph.” But he came back to the present picture. “This is better, however, for really showing her lovely head.”
“Mary’s head was a perfection!” Cornelia testified.
“Yes—it was better than her heart.”
“Ah, don’t say that!” she pleaded. “You weren’t fair.”
“Don’t you think I was fair?” It interested him immensely—and the more that he indeed mightn’t have been; which he seemed somehow almost to hope.
“She didn’t think so—to the very end.”
“She didn’t?”—ah the right things Cornelia said to him! But before she could answer he was studying again closely the small faded face. “No, she doesn’t, she doesn’t. Oh, her charming sad eyes and the way they say that, across the years, straight into mine! But I don’t know, I don’t know!” White-Mason quite comfortably sighed.
His companion appeared to appreciate this effect. “That’s just the way you used to flirt with her, poor thing. Wouldn’t you like to have it?” she asked.
“This—for my very own?” He looked up delighted. “I really may?”
“Well, if you’ll give me yours. We’ll exchange.”
“That’s a charming idea. We’ll exchange. But you must come and get it at my rooms—where you’ll see my things.”
For a little she made no answer—as if for some feeling. Then she said: “You asked me just now why I’ve come back.”
He stared as for the connection; after which with a smile: “Not to do that——?”
She waited briefly again, but with a queer little look. “I can do those things now; and—yes!—that’s in a manner why. I came,” she then said, “because I knew of a sudden one day—knew as never before—that I was old.”
“I see. I see.” He quite understood—she had notes that so struck him. “And how did you like it?”
She hesitated—she decided. “Well, if I liked it, it was on the principle perhaps on which some people like high game!”
“High game—that’s good!” he laughed. “Ah, my dear, we’re ‘high’!”
She shook her head. “No, not you—yet. I at any rate didn’t want any more adventures,” Cornelia said.
He showed their small relic again with assurance. “You wanted us. Then here we are. Oh how we can talk!—with all those things you know! You are an invention. And you’ll see there are things J know. I shall turn up here—well, daily.”
She took it in, but only after a moment answered. “There was something you said just now you’d tell me. Don’t you mean to try–?”
“Mrs. Worthingham?” He drew from within his coat his pocket-book and carefully found a place in it for Mary Cardew’s carte-de-visite, folding it together with deliberation over which he put it back. Finally he spoke. “No—I’ve decided. I can’t—I don’t want to.”
Cornelia marvelled—or looked as if she did. “Not for all she has?”
“Yes—I know all she has. But I also know all she hasn’t. And, as I told you, she herself doesn’t—hasn’t a glimmer of a suspicion of it; and never will have.”
Cornelia magnanimously thought “No—but she knows other things.”
He shook his head as at the portentous heap of them. “Too many—too many. And other indeed—so other! Do you know,” he went on, “that it’s as if you—by turning up for me—had brought that home to me?”
“‘For you,’” she candidly considered. “But what—since you can’t marry me!—can you do with me?”
Well, he seemed to have it all. “Everything. I can live with you—just this way.” To illustrate which he dropped into the other chair by her fire; where, leaning back, he gazed at the flame. “I can’t give you up. It’s very curious. It has come over me as it did over you when you renounced Bognor. That’s it—I know it at last, and I see one can like it. I’m ‘high.’ You needn’t deny it. That’s my taste. I’m old.” And in spite of the considerable glow there of her little household altar he said it without the scowl.
THE BENCH OF DESOLATION
I
SHE had practically, he believed, conveyed the intimation, the horrid, brutal, vulgar menace, in the course of their last dreadful conversation, when, for whatever was left him of pluck or confidence—confidence in what he would fain have called a little more aggressively the strength of his position—he had judged best not to take it up. But this time there was no question of not understanding, or of pretending he didn’t; the ugly, the awful words, ruthlessly formed by her lips, were like the fingers of a hand that she might have thrust into her pocket for extraction of the monstrous object that would serve best for—what should he call it?—a gage of battle.
“If I haven’t a very different answer from you within the next three days I shall put the matter into the hands of my solicitor, whom it may interest you to know I’ve already seen. I shall bring an action for ‘breach’ against you, Herbert Dodd, as sure as my name’s Kate Cookham.”
There it was, straight and strong—yet he felt he could say for himself, when once it had come, or even, already, just as it was coming, that it turned on, as if she had moved an electric switch, the very brightest light of his own very reasons. There she was, in all the grossness of her native indelicacy, in all her essential excess of will and destitution of scruple; and it was the woman capable of that ignoble threat who, his sharper sense of her quality having become so quite deterrent, was now making for him a crime of it that he shouldn’t wish to tie himself to her for life. The vivid, lurid thing was the reality, all unmistakable, of her purpose; she had thought her case well out; had measured its odious, specious presentability; had taken, he might be sure, the very best advice obtainable at Properley, where there was always a first-rate promptitude of everything fourth-rate; it was disgustingly certain, in short, that she’d proceed. She was sharp and adroit, moreover—distinctly in certain ways a master-hand; how otherwise, with her so limited mere attractiveness, should she have entangled him? He couldn’t shut his eyes to the very probable truth that if she should try it she’d pull it off. She knew she would—precisely; and her assurance was thus the very proof of her cruelty. That she had pretended she loved him was comparatively nothing; other women had pretended it, and other women too had really done it; but that she had pretended he could possibly have been right and safe and blest in loving her, a creature of the kind who could sniff that squalor of the law-court, of claimed damages and brazen lies and published kisses, of love-letters read amid obscene guffaws, as a positive tonic to resentment, as a high incentive to her course—this was what put him so beautifully in the right It was what might signify in a woman all through, he said to himself, the mere imagination of such machinery. Truly what a devilish conception and what an appalling nature!
But there was no doubt, luckily, either, that he could plant his feet the firmer for his now intensified sense of these things. He was to live, it appeared, abominably worried, he was to live consciously rueful, he was to live perhaps even what a scoffing world would call abjectly exposed; but at least he was to live saved. In spite of his clutch of which steadying truth, however, and in spite of his declaring to her, with many other angry protests and pleas, that the line of conduct she announced was worthy of a vindictive barmaid, a lurking fear in him, too deep to counsel mere defiance, made him appear to keep open a little, till he could somehow turn round again, the door of possible composition. He had scoffed at her claim, at her threat, at her thinking she could hustle and bully him—“Such a way, my eye, to call back to life a dead love!”—yet his instinct was ever, prudentially but helplessly, for gaining time, even if time only more wofully to quake, and he gained it now by not absolutely giving for his ultimatum that he wouldn’t think of coming round. He didn’t in the smallest degree mean to come round, but it was characteristic of him that he could for three or four days breathe a little easier by having left her under the impression that he perhaps might. At the same time he couldn’t not have said—what had conduced to bring out, in retort, her own last word, the word on which they had parted—“Do you mean to say you yourself would now be willing to marry and live with a man of whom you could feel, the thing done, that he’d be all the while thinking of you in the light of a hideous coercion?” “Never you mind about my willingness,” Kate had answered; “you’ve known what that has been for the last six months. Leave that to me, my willingness—I’ll take care of it all right; and just see what conclusion you can come to about your own.”
He was to remember afterward how he had wondered whether, turned upon her in silence while her odious lucidity reigned unchecked, his face had shown her anything like the quantity of hate he felt. Probably not at all; no man’s face could express that immense amount; especially the fair, refined, intellectual, gentlemanlike face which had had—and by her own more than once repeated avowal—so much to do with the enormous fancy she had originally taken to him. “Which—frankly now—would you personally rather I should do,” he had at any rate asked her with an intention of supreme irony: “just sordidly marry you on top of this, or leave you the pleasure of your lovely appearance in court and of your so assured (since that’s how you feel it) big haul of damages? Sha’n’t you be awfully disappointed, in fact, if I don’t let you get something better out of me than a poor plain ten-shilling gold ring and the rest of the blasphemous rubbish, as we should make it between us, pronounced at the altar? I take it of course,” he had swaggered on, “that your pretension wouldn’t be for a moment that I should—after the act of profanity—take up my life with you.”
“It’s just as much my dream as it ever was, Herbert Dodd, to take up mine with you! Remember for me that I can do with it, my dear, that my idea is for even as much as that of you!” she had cried; “remember that for me, Herbert Dodd; remember, remember!”
It was on this she had left him—left him frankly under a mortal chill. There might have been the last ring of an appeal or a show of persistent and perverse tenderness in it, however preposterous any such matter; but in point of fact her large, clean, plain, brown face—so much too big for her head, he now more than ever felt it to be, just as her head was so much too big for her body, and just as her hats had an irritating way of appearing to decline choice and conformity in respect to any of her dimensions—presented itself with about as much expression as his own shop-window when the broad, blank, sallow blind was down. He was fond of his shop-window with some good show on; he had a fancy for a good show and was master of twenty different schemes of taking arrangement for the old books and prints, “high-class rarities” his modest catalogue called them, in which he dealt and which his maternal uncle, David Geddes, had, as he liked to say, “handed down” to him. His widowed mother had screwed the whole thing, the stock and the connection and the rather bad little house in the rather bad little street, out of the ancient worthy, shortly before his death, in the name of the youngest and most interesting, the “delicate” one and the literary, of her five scattered and struggling children. He could enjoy his happiest collocations and contrasts and effects, his harmonies and varieties of toned and faded leather and cloth, his sought color-notes and the high clearnesses, here and there, of his white and beautifully figured price-labels, which pleased him enough in themselves almost to console him for not oftener having to break, on a customer’s insistence, into the balanced composition. But the dropped expanse of time-soiled canvas, the thing of Sundays and holidays, with just his name, “Herbert Dodd, Successor,” painted on below his uncle’s antique style, the feeble penlike flourishes already quite archaic—this ugly vacant mask, which might so easily be taken for the mask of failure, somehow always gave him a chill.
