Glasses
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Henry James >> Glasses
Glasses
by Henry James
CHAPTER I
Yes indeed, I say to myself, pen in hand, I can keep hold of the
thread and let it lead me back to the first impression. The little
story is all there, I can touch it from point to point; for the
thread, as I call it, is a row of coloured beads on a string. None
of the beads are missing--at least I think they're not: that's
exactly what I shall amuse myself with finding out.
I had been all summer working hard in town and then had gone down
to Folkestone for a blow. Art was long, I felt, and my holiday
short; my mother was settled at Folkestone, and I paid her a visit
when I could. I remember how on this occasion, after weeks in my
stuffy studio with my nose on my palette, I sniffed up the clean
salt air and cooled my eyes with the purple sea. The place was
full of lodgings, and the lodgings were at that season full of
people, people who had nothing to do but to stare at one another on
the great flat down. There were thousands of little chairs and
almost as many little Jews; and there was music in an open rotunda,
over which the little Jews wagged their big noses. We all strolled
to and fro and took pennyworths of rest; the long, level cliff-top,
edged in places with its iron rail, might have been the deck of a
huge crowded ship. There were old folks in Bath chairs, and there
was one dear chair, creeping to its last full stop, by the side of
which I always walked. There was in fine weather the coast of
France to look at, and there were the usual things to say about it;
there was also in every state of the atmosphere our friend Mrs.
Meldrum, a subject of remark not less inveterate. The widow of an
officer in the Engineers, she had settled, like many members of the
martial miscellany, well within sight of the hereditary enemy, who
however had left her leisure to form in spite of the difference of
their years a close alliance with my mother. She was the
heartiest, the keenest, the ugliest of women, the least apologetic,
the least morbid in her misfortune. She carried it high aloft with
loud sounds and free gestures, made it flutter in the breeze as if
it had been the flag of her country. It consisted mainly of a big
red face, indescribably out of drawing, from which she glared at
you through gold-rimmed aids to vision, optic circles of such
diameter and so frequently displaced that some one had vividly
spoken of her as flattering her nose against the glass of her
spectacles. She was extraordinarily near-sighted, and whatever
they did to other objects they magnified immensely the kind eyes
behind them. Blest conveniences they were, in their hideous,
honest strength--they showed the good lady everything in the world
but her own queerness. This element was enhanced by wild braveries
of dress, reckless charges of colour and stubborn resistances of
cut, wondrous encounters in which the art of the toilet seemed to
lay down its life. She had the tread of a grenadier and the voice
of an angel.
In the course of a walk with her the day after my arrival I found
myself grabbing her arm with sudden and undue familiarity. I had
been struck by the beauty of a face that approached us and I was
still more affected when I saw the face, at the sight of my
companion, open like a window thrown wide. A smile fluttered out
of it an brightly as a drapery dropped from a sill--a drapery
shaken there in the sun by a young lady flanked by two young men, a
wonderful young lady who, as we drew nearer, rushed up to Mrs.
Meldrum with arms flourished for an embrace. My immediate
impression of her had been that she was dressed in mourning, but
during the few moments she stood talking with our friend I made
more discoveries. The figure from the neck down was meagre, the
stature insignificant, but the desire to please towered high, as
well as the air of infallibly knowing how and of never, never
missing it. This was a little person whom I would have made a high
bid for a good chance to paint. The head, the features, the
colour, the whole facial oval and radiance had a wonderful purity;
the deep grey eyes--the most agreeable, I thought, that I had ever
seen--brushed with a kind of winglike grace every object they
encountered. Their possessor was just back from Boulogne, where
she had spent a week with dear Mrs. Floyd-Taylor: this accounted
for the effusiveness of her reunion with dear Mrs. Meldrum. Her
black garments were of the freshest and daintiest; she suggested a
pink-and-white wreath at a showy funeral. She confounded us for
three minutes with her presence; she was a beauty of the great
conscious public responsible order. The young men, her companions,
gazed at her and grinned: I could see there were very few moments
of the day at which young men, these or others, would not be so
occupied. The people who approached took leave of their manners;
every one seemed to linger and gape. When she brought her face
close to Mrs. Meldrum's--and she appeared to be always bringing it
close to somebody's--it was a marvel that objects so dissimilar
should express the same general identity, the unmistakable
character of the English gentlewoman. Mrs. Meldrum sustained the
comparison with her usual courage, but I wondered why she didn't
introduce me: I should have had no objection to the bringing of
such a face close to mine. However, by the time the young lady
moved on with her escort she herself bequeathed me a sense that
some such RAPPROCHEMENT might still occur. Was this by reason of
the general frequency of encounters at Folkestone, or by reason of
a subtle acknowledgment that she contrived to make of the rights,
on the part of others, that such beauty as hers created? I was in
a position to answer that question after Mrs. Meldrum had answered
a few of mine.
CHAPTER II
Flora Saunt, the only daughter of an old soldier, had lost both her
parents, her mother within a few months. Mrs. Meldrum had known
them, disapproved of them, considerably avoided them: she had
watched the girl, off and on, from her early childhood. Flora,
just twenty, was extraordinarily alone in the world--so alone that
she had no natural chaperon, no one to stay with but a mercenary
stranger, Mrs. Hammond Synge, the sister-in-law of one of the young
men I had just seen. She had lots of friends, but none of them
nice: she kept picking up impossible people. The Floyd-Taylors,
with whom she had been at Boulogne, were simply horrid. The
Hammond Synges were perhaps not so vulgar, but they had no
conscience in their dealings with her.
"She knows what I think of them," said Mrs. Meldrum, "and indeed
she knows what I think of most things."
"She shares that privilege with most of your friends!" I replied
laughing.
"No doubt; but possibly to some of my friends it makes a little
difference. That girl doesn't care a button. She knows best of
all what I think of Flora Saunt."
"And what may your opinion be?"
"Why, that she's not worth troubling about-- an idiot too abysmal."
"Doesn't she care for that?"
"Just enough, as you saw, to hug me till I cry out. She's too
pleased with herself for anything else to matter."
"Surely, my dear friend," I rejoined, "she has a good deal to be
pleased with!"
"So every one tells her, and so you would have told her if I had
given you the chance. However, that doesn't signify either, for
her vanity is beyond all making or mending. She believes in
herself, and she's welcome, after all, poor dear, having only
herself to look to. I've seldom met a young woman more completely
free to be silly. She has a clear course--she'll make a showy
finish."
"Well," I replied, "as she probably will reduce many persons to the
same degraded state, her partaking of it won't stand out so much."
"If you mean that the world's full of twaddlers I quite agree with
you!" cried Mrs. Meldrum, trumpeting her laugh half across the
Channel.
I had after this to consider a little what she would call my
mother's son, but I didn't let it prevent me from insisting on her
making me acquainted with Flora Saunt; indeed I took the bull by
the horns, urging that she had drawn the portrait of a nature which
common charity now demanded of her to put into relation with a
character really fine. Such a frail creature was just an object of
pity. This contention on my part had at first of course been
jocular; but strange to say it was quite the ground I found myself
taking with regard to our young lady after I had begun to know her.
I couldn't have said what I felt about her except that she was
undefended; from the first of my sitting with her there after
dinner, under the stars--that was a week at Folkestone of balmy
nights and muffled tides and crowded chairs--I became aware both
that protection was wholly absent from her life and that she was
wholly indifferent to its absence. The odd thing was that she was
not appealing: she was abjectly, divinely conceited, absurdly
fantastically pleased. Her beauty was as yet all the world to her,
a world she had plenty to do to live in. Mrs. Meldrum told me more
about her, and there was nothing that, as the centre of a group of
giggling, nudging spectators, Flora wasn't ready to tell about
herself. She held her little court in the crowd, upon the grass,
playing her light over Jews and Gentiles, completely at ease in all
promiscuities. It was an effect of these things that from the very
first, with every one listening, I could mention that my main
business with her would be just to have a go at her head and to
arrange in that view for an early sitting. It would have been as
impossible, I think, to be impertinent to her as it would have been
to throw a stone at a plate-glass window; so any talk that went
forward on the basis of her loveliness was the most natural thing
in the world and immediately became the most general and sociable.
It was when I saw all this that I judged how, though it was the
last thing she asked for, what one would ever most have at her
service was a curious compassion. That sentiment was coloured by
the vision of the dire exposure of a being whom vanity had put so
off her guard. Hers was the only vanity I have ever known that
made its possessor superlatively soft. Mrs. Meldrum's further
information contributed moreover to these indulgences--her account
of the girl's neglected childhood and queer continental
relegations, with straying squabbling Monte-Carlo-haunting parents;
the more invidious picture, above all, of her pecuniary
arrangement, still in force, with the Hammond Synges, who really,
though they never took her out--practically she went out alone--had
their hands half the time in her pocket. She had to pay for
everything, down to her share of the wine-bills and the horses'
fodder, down to Bertie Hammond Synge's fare in the "underground"
when he went to the City for her. She had been left with just
money enough to turn her head; and it hadn't even been put in
trust, nothing prudent or proper had been done with it. She could
spend her capital, and at the rate she was going, expensive,
extravagant and with a swarm of parasites to help, it certainly
wouldn't last very long.
"Couldn't YOU perhaps take her, independent, unencumbered as you
are?" I asked of Mrs. Meldrum. "You're probably, with one
exception, the sanest person she knows, and you at least wouldn't
scandalously fleece her."
"How do you know what I wouldn't do?" my humorous friend demanded.
"Of course I've thought how I can help her--it has kept me awake at
night. But doing it's impossible; she'll take nothing from me.
You know what she does--she hugs me and runs away. She has an
instinct about me and feels that I've one about her. And then she
dislikes me for another reason that I'm not quite clear about, but
that I'm well aware of and that I shall find out some day. So far
as her settling with me goes it would be impossible moreover here;
she wants naturally enough a much wider field. She must live in
London--her game is there. So she takes the line of adoring me, of
saying she can never forget that I was devoted to her mother--which
I wouldn't for the world have been--and of giving me a wide berth.
I think she positively dislikes to look at me. It's all right;
there's no obligation; though people in general can't take their
eyes off me."
"I see that at this moment," I replied. "But what does it matter
where or how, for the present, she lives? She'll marry infallibly,
marry early, and everything then will change."
"Whom will she marry?" my companion gloomily asked.
"Any one she likes. She's so abnormally pretty that she can do
anything. She'll fascinate some nabob or some prince."
"She'll fascinate him first and bore him afterwards. Moreover
she's not so pretty as you make her out; she hasn't a scrap of a
figure."
"No doubt, but one doesn't in the least miss it."
"Not now," said Mrs. Meldrum, "but one will when she's older and
when everything will have to count."
"When she's older she'll count as a princess, so it won't matter."
"She has other drawbacks," my companion went on. "Those wonderful
eyes are good for nothing but to roll about like sugar-balls--which
they greatly resemble--in a child's mouth. She can't use them."
"Use them? Why, she does nothing else."
"To make fools of young men, but not to read or write, not to do
any sort of work. She never opens a book, and her maid writes her
notes. You'll say that those who live in glass houses shouldn't
throw stones. Of course I know that if I didn't wear my goggles I
shouldn't be good for much."
"Do you mean that Miss Saunt ought to sport such things?" I
exclaimed with more horror than I meant to show.
"I don't prescribe for her; I don't know that they're what she
requires."
"What's the matter with her eyes?" I asked after a moment.
"I don't exactly know; but I heard from her mother years ago that
even as a child they had had for a while to put her into spectacles
and that though she hated them and had been in a fury of disgust,
she would always have to be extremely careful. I'm sure I hope she
is!"
I echoed the hope, but I remember well the impression this made
upon me--my immediate pang of resentment, a disgust almost equal to
Flora's own. I felt as if a great rare sapphire had split in my
hand.
CHAPTER III
This conversation occurred the night before I went back to town. I
settled on the morrow to take a late train, so that I had still my
morning to spend at Folkestone, where during the greater part of it
I was out with my mother. Every one in the place was as usual out
with some one else, and even had I been free to go and take leave
of her I should have been sure that Flora Saunt would not be at
home. Just where she was I presently discovered: she was at the
far end of the cliff, the point at which it overhangs the pretty
view of Sandgate and Hythe. Her back, however, was turned to this
attraction; it rested with the aid of her elbows, thrust slightly
behind her so that her scanty little shoulders were raised toward
her ears, on the high rail that inclosed the down. Two gentlemen
stood before her whose faces we couldn't see but who even as
observed from the rear were visibly absorbed in the charming
figure-piece submitted to them. I was freshly struck with the fact
that this meagre and defective little person, with the cock of her
hat and the flutter of her crape, with her eternal idleness, her
eternal happiness, her absence of moods and mysteries and the
pretty presentation of her feet, which especially now in the
supported slope of her posture occupied with their imperceptibility
so much of the foreground--I was reminded anew, I say, how our
young lady dazzled by some art that the enumeration of her merits
didn't explain and that the mention of her lapses didn't affect.
Where she was amiss nothing counted, and where she was right
everything did. I say she was wanting in mystery, but that after
all was her secret. This happened to be my first chance of
introducing her to my mother, who had not much left in life but the
quiet look from under the hood of her chair at the things which,
when she should have quitted those she loved, she could still trust
to make the world good for them. I wondered an instant how much
she might be moved to trust Flora Saunt, and then while the chair
stood still and she waited I went over and asked the girl to come
and speak to her. In this way I saw that if one of Flora's
attendants was the inevitable young Hammond Synge, master of
ceremonies of her regular court, always offering the use of a
telescope and accepting that of a cigar, the other was a personage
I had not yet encountered, a small pale youth in showy
knickerbockers, whose eyebrows and nose and the glued points of
whose little moustache were extraordinarily uplifted and sustained.
I remember taking him at first for a foreigner and for something of
a pretender: I scarce know why unless because of the motive I felt
in the stare he fixed on me when I asked Miss Saunt to come away.
He struck me a little as a young man practising the social art of
impertinence; but it didn't matter, for Flora came away with
alacrity, bringing all her prettiness and pleasure and gliding over
the grass in that rustle of delicate mourning which made the
endless variety of her garments, as a painter could take heed,
strike one always as the same obscure elegance. She seated herself
on the floor of my mother's chair, a little too much on her right
instep as I afterwards gathered, caressing her still hand, smiling
up into her cold face, commending and approving her without a
reserve and without a doubt. She told her immediately, as if it
were something for her to hold on by, that she was soon to sit to
me for a "likeness," and these words gave me a chance to enquire if
it would be the fate of the picture, should I finish it, to be
presented to the young man in the knickerbockers. Her lips, at
this, parted in a stare; her eyes darkened to the purple of one of
the shadow-patches on the sea. She showed for the passing instant
the face of some splendid tragic mask, and I remembered for the
inconsequence of it what Mrs. Meldrum had said about her sight. I
had derived from this lady a worrying impulse to catechise her, but
that didn't seem exactly kind; so I substituted another question,
inquiring who the pretty young man in knickerbockers might happen
to be.
"Oh a gentleman I met at Boulogne. He has come over to see me."
After a moment she added: "Lord Iffield."
I had never heard of Lord Iffield, but her mention of his having
been at Boulogne helped me to give him a niche. Mrs. Meldrum had
incidentally thrown a certain light on the manners of Mrs. Floyd-
Taylor, Flora's recent hostess in that charming town, a lady who,
it appeared, had a special vocation for helping rich young men to
find a use for their leisure. She had always one or other in hand
and had apparently on this occasion pointed her lesson at the rare
creature on the opposite coast. I had a vague idea that Boulogne
was not a resort of the world's envied; at the same time there
might very well have been a strong attraction there even for one of
the darlings of fortune. I could perfectly understand in any case
that such a darling should be drawn to Folkestone by Flora Saunt.
But it was not in truth of these things I was thinking; what was
uppermost in my mind was a matter which, though it had no sort of
keeping, insisted just then on coming out.
"Is it true, Miss Saunt," I suddenly demanded, "that you're so
unfortunate as to have had some warning about your beautiful eyes?"
I was startled by the effect of my words; the girl threw back her
head, changing colour from brow to chin. "True? Who in the world
says so?" I repented of my question in a flash; the way she met it
made it seem cruel, and I felt my mother look at me in some
surprise. I took care, in answer to Flora's challenge, not to
incriminate Mrs. Meldrum. I answered that the rumour had reached
me only in the vaguest form and that if I had been moved to put it
to the test my very real interest in her must be held responsible.
Her blush died away, but a pair of still prettier tears glistened
in its track. "If you ever hear such a thing said again you can
say it's a horrid lie!" I had brought on a commotion deeper than
any I was prepared for; but it was explained in some degree by the
next words she uttered: "I'm happy to say there's nothing the
matter with any part of me whatever, not the least little thing!"
She spoke with her habitual complacency, with triumphant assurance;
she smiled again, and I could see how she wished that she hadn't so
taken me up. She turned it off with a laugh. "I've good eyes,
good teeth, a good digestion and a good temper. I'm sound of wind
and limb!" Nothing could have been more characteristic than her
blush and her tears, nothing less acceptable to her than to be
thought not perfect in every particular. She couldn't submit to
the imputation of a flaw. I expressed my delight in what she told
me, assuring her I should always do battle for her; and as if to
rejoin her companions she got up from her place on my mother's
toes. The young men presented their backs to us; they were leaning
on the rail of the cliff. Our incident had produced a certain
awkwardness, and while I was thinking of what next to say she
exclaimed irrelevantly: "Don't you know? He'll be Lord
Considine." At that moment the youth marked for this high destiny
turned round, and she spoke to my mother. "I'll introduce him to
you--he's awfully nice." She beckoned and invited him with her
parasol; the movement struck me as taking everything for granted.
I had heard of Lord Considine and if I had not been able to place
Lord Iffield it was because I didn't know the name of his eldest
son. The young man took no notice of Miss Saunt's appeal; he only
stared a moment and then on her repeating it quietly turned his
back. She was an odd creature: she didn't blush at this; she only
said to my mother apologetically, but with the frankest sweetest
amusement, "You don't mind, do you? He's a monster of shyness!"
It was as if she were sorry for every one--for Lord Iffield, the
victim of a complaint so painful, and for my mother, the subject of
a certain slight. "I'm sure I don't want him!" said my mother, but
Flora added some promise of how she would handle him for his
rudeness. She would clearly never explain anything by any failure
of her own appeal. There rolled over me while she took leave of us
and floated back to her friends a wave of superstitious dread. I
seemed somehow to see her go forth to her fate, and yet what should
fill out this orb of a high destiny if not such beauty and such
joy? I had a dim idea that Lord Considine was a great proprietor,
and though there mingled with it a faint impression that I
shouldn't like his son the result of the two images was a whimsical
prayer that the girl mightn't miss her possible fortune.
CHAPTER IV
One day in the course of the following June there was ushered into
my studio a gentleman whom I had not yet seen but with whom I had
been very briefly in correspondence. A letter from him had
expressed to me some days before his regret on learning that my
"splendid portrait" of Miss Flora Louisa Saunt, whose full name
figured by her own wish in the catalogue of the exhibition of the
Academy, had found a purchaser before the close of the private
view. He took the liberty of inquiring whether I might have at his
service some other memorial of the same lovely head, some
preliminary sketch, some study for the picture. I had replied that
I had indeed painted Miss Saunt more than once and that if he were
interested in my work I should be happy to show him what I had
done. Mr. Geoffrey Dawling, the person thus introduced to me,
stumbled into my room with awkward movements and equivocal sounds--
a long, lean, confused, confusing young man, with a bad complexion
and large protrusive teeth. He bore in its most indelible pressure
the postmark, as it were, of Oxford, and as soon as he opened his
mouth I perceived, in addition to a remarkable revelation of gums,
that the text of the queer communication matched the registered
envelope. He was full of refinements and angles, of dreary and
distinguished knowledge. Of his unconscious drollery his dress
freely partook; it seemed, from the gold ring into which his red
necktie was passed to the square toe-caps of his boots, to conform
with a high sense of modernness to the fashion before the last.
There were moments when his overdone urbanity, all suggestive
stammers and interrogative quavers, made him scarcely intelligible;
but I felt him to be a gentleman and I liked the honesty of his
errand and the expression of his good green eyes.
As a worshipper at the shrine of beauty, however, he needed
explaining, especially when I found he had no acquaintance with my
brilliant model; had on the mere evidence of my picture taken, as
he said, a tremendous fancy to her looks. I ought doubtless to
have been humiliated by the simplicity of his judgment of them, a
judgment for which the rendering was lost in the subject, quite
leaving out the element of art. He was like the innocent reader
for whom the story is "really true" and the author a negligible
quantity. He had come to me only because he wanted to purchase,
and I remember being so amused at his attitude, which I had never
seen equally marked in a person of education, that I asked him why,
for the sort of enjoyment he desired, it wouldn't be more to the
point to deal directly with the lady. He stared and blushed at
this; the idea clearly alarmed him. He was an extraordinary case--
personally so modest that I could see it had never occurred to him.
He had fallen in love with a painted sign and seemed content just
to dream of what it stood for. He was the young prince in the
legend or the comedy who loses his heart to the miniature of the
princess beyond seas. Until I knew him better this puzzled me
much--the link was so missing between his sensibility and his type.
He was of course bewildered by my sketches, which implied in the
beholder some sense of intention and quality; but for one of them,
a comparative failure, he ended by conceiving a preference so
arbitrary and so lively that, taking no second look at the others,
he expressed his wish to possess it and fell into the extremity of
confusion over the question of price. I helped him over that
stile, and he went off without having asked me a direct question
about Miss Saunt, yet with his acquisition under his arm. His
delicacy was such that he evidently considered his rights to be
limited; he had acquired none at all in regard to the original of
the picture. There were others--for I was curious about him--that
I wanted him to feel I conceded: I should have been glad of his
carrying away a sense of ground acquired for coming back. To
ensure this I had probably only to invite him, and I perfectly
recall the impulse that made me forbear. It operated suddenly from
within while he hung about the door and in spite of the diffident
appeal that blinked in his gentle grin. If he was smitten with
Flora's ghost what mightn't be the direct force of the luminary
that could cast such a shadow? This source of radiance, flooding
my poor place, might very well happen to be present the next time
he should turn up. The idea was sharp within me that there were
relations and complications it was no mission of mine to bring
about. If they were to develop they should develop in their very
own sense.