Roderick Hudson

H >> Henry James >> Roderick Hudson


"Change for the better!" cried Rowland.

"How can one tell? As one stands, one knows the worst. It seems to me
very frightful to develop," she added, with her complete smile.

"One is in for it in one way or another, and one might as well do it
with a good grace as with a bad! Since one can't escape life, it is
better to take it by the hand."

"Is this what you call life?" she asked.

"What do you mean by 'this'?"

"Saint Peter's--all this splendor, all Rome--pictures, ruins, statues,
beggars, monks."

"It is not all of it, but it is a large part of it. All these things
are impregnated with life; they are the fruits of an old and complex
civilization."

"An old and complex civilization: I am afraid I don't like that."

"Don't conclude on that point just yet. Wait till you have tested
it. While you wait, you will see an immense number of very beautiful
things--things that you are made to understand. They won't leave you as
they found you; then you can judge. Don't tell me I know nothing about
your understanding. I have a right to assume it."

Miss Garland gazed awhile aloft in the dome. "I am not sure I understand
that," she said.

"I hope, at least, that at a cursory glance it pleases you," said
Rowland. "You need n't be afraid to tell the truth. What strikes some
people is that it is so remarkably small."

"Oh, it's large enough; it's very wonderful. There are things in Rome,
then," she added in a moment, turning and looking at him, "that are
very, very beautiful?"

"Lots of them."

"Some of the most beautiful things in the world?"

"Unquestionably."

"What are they? which things have most beauty?"

"That is according to taste. I should say the statues."

"How long will it take to see them all? to know, at least, something
about them?"

"You can see them all, as far as mere seeing goes, in a fortnight. But
to know them is a thing for one's leisure. The more time you spend among
them, the more you care for them." After a moment's hesitation he went
on: "Why should you grudge time? It 's all in your way, since you are to
be an artist's wife."

"I have thought of that," she said. "It may be that I shall always live
here, among the most beautiful things in the world!"

"Very possibly! I should like to see you ten years hence."

"I dare say I shall seem greatly altered. But I am sure of one thing."

"Of what?"

"That for the most part I shall be quite the same. I ask nothing better
than to believe the fine things you say about my understanding, but even
if they are true, it won't matter. I shall be what I was made, what I am
now--a young woman from the country! The fruit of a civilization not old
and complex, but new and simple."

"I am delighted to hear it: that 's an excellent foundation."

"Perhaps, if you show me anything more, you will not always think so
kindly of it. Therefore I warn you."

"I am not frightened. I should like vastly to say something to you: Be
what you are, be what you choose; but do, sometimes, as I tell you."

If Rowland was not frightened, neither, perhaps, was Miss Garland; but
she seemed at least slightly disturbed. She proposed that they should
join their companions.

Mrs. Hudson spoke under her breath; she could not be accused of the want
of reverence sometimes attributed to Protestants in the great Catholic
temples. "Mary, dear," she whispered, "suppose we had to kiss that
dreadful brass toe. If I could only have kept our door-knocker, at
Northampton, as bright as that! I think it's so heathenish; but Roderick
says he thinks it 's sublime."

Roderick had evidently grown a trifle perverse. "It 's sublimer than
anything that your religion asks you to do!" he exclaimed.

"Surely our religion sometimes gives us very difficult duties," said
Miss Garland.

"The duty of sitting in a whitewashed meeting-house and listening to a
nasal Puritan! I admit that 's difficult. But it 's not sublime. I am
speaking of ceremonies, of forms. It is in my line, you know, to make
much of forms. I think this is a very beautiful one. Could n't you do
it?" he demanded, looking at his cousin.

She looked back at him intently and then shook her head. "I think not!"

"Why not?"

"I don't know; I could n't!"

During this little discussion our four friends were standing near the
venerable image of Saint Peter, and a squalid, savage-looking peasant,
a tattered ruffian of the most orthodox Italian aspect, had been
performing his devotions before it. He turned away, crossing himself,
and Mrs. Hudson gave a little shudder of horror.

"After that," she murmured, "I suppose he thinks he is as good as any
one! And here is another. Oh, what a beautiful person!"

A young lady had approached the sacred effigy, after having wandered
away from a group of companions. She kissed the brazen toe, touched it
with her forehead, and turned round, facing our friends. Rowland then
recognized Christina Light. He was stupefied: had she suddenly embraced
the Catholic faith? It was but a few weeks before that she had treated
him to a passionate profession of indifference. Had she entered the
church to put herself en regle with what was expected of a Princess
Casamassima? While Rowland was mentally asking these questions she was
approaching him and his friends, on her way to the great altar. At first
she did not perceive them.

Mary Garland had been gazing at her. "You told me," she said gently, to
Rowland, "that Rome contained some of the most beautiful things in the
world. This surely is one of them!"

At this moment Christina's eye met Rowland's and before giving him
any sign of recognition she glanced rapidly at his companions. She saw
Roderick, but she gave him no bow; she looked at Mrs. Hudson, she looked
at Mary Garland. At Mary Garland she looked fixedly, piercingly, from
head to foot, as the slow pace at which she was advancing made possible.
Then suddenly, as if she had perceived Roderick for the first time,
she gave him a charming nod, a radiant smile. In a moment he was at her
side. She stopped, and he stood talking to her; she continued to look at
Miss Garland.

"Why, Roderick knows her!" cried Mrs. Hudson, in an awe-struck whisper.
"I supposed she was some great princess."

"She is--almost!" said Rowland. "She is the most beautiful girl in
Europe, and Roderick has made her bust."

"Her bust? Dear, dear!" murmured Mrs. Hudson, vaguely shocked. "What a
strange bonnet!"

"She has very strange eyes," said Mary, and turned away.

The two ladies, with Rowland, began to descend toward the door of the
church. On their way they passed Mrs. Light, the Cavaliere, and the
poodle, and Rowland informed his companions of the relation in which
these personages stood to Roderick's young lady.

"Think of it, Mary!" said Mrs. Hudson. "What splendid people he must
know! No wonder he found Northampton dull!"

"I like the poor little old gentleman," said Mary.

"Why do you call him poor?" Rowland asked, struck with the observation.

"He seems so!" she answered simply.

As they were reaching the door they were overtaken by Roderick, whose
interview with Miss Light had perceptibly brightened his eye. "So you
are acquainted with princesses!" said his mother softly, as they passed
into the portico.

"Miss Light is not a princess!" said Roderick, curtly.

"But Mr. Mallet says so," urged Mrs. Hudson, rather disappointed.

"I meant that she was going to be!" said Rowland.

"It 's by no means certain that she is even going to be!" Roderick
answered.

"Ah," said Rowland, "I give it up!"

Roderick almost immediately demanded that his mother should sit to him,
at his studio, for her portrait, and Rowland ventured to add another
word of urgency. If Roderick's idea really held him, it was an immense
pity that his inspiration should be wasted; inspiration, in these days,
had become too precious a commodity. It was arranged therefore that, for
the present, during the mornings, Mrs. Hudson should place herself at
her son's service. This involved but little sacrifice, for the good
lady's appetite for antiquities was diminutive and bird-like, the
usual round of galleries and churches fatigued her, and she was glad
to purchase immunity from sight-seeing by a regular afternoon drive. It
became natural in this way that, Miss Garland having her mornings
free, Rowland should propose to be the younger lady's guide in whatever
explorations she might be disposed to make. She said she knew nothing
about it, but she had a great curiosity, and would be glad to see
anything that he would show her. Rowland could not find it in his heart
to accuse Roderick of neglect of the young girl; for it was natural that
the inspirations of a capricious man of genius, when they came, should
be imperious; but of course he wondered how Miss Garland felt, as the
young man's promised wife, on being thus expeditiously handed over to
another man to be entertained. However she felt, he was certain he would
know little about it. There had been, between them, none but indirect
allusions to her engagement, and Rowland had no desire to discuss it
more largely; for he had no quarrel with matters as they stood. They
wore the same delightful aspect through the lovely month of May, and the
ineffable charm of Rome at that period seemed but the radiant sympathy
of nature with his happy opportunity. The weather was divine; each
particular morning, as he walked from his lodging to Mrs. Hudson's
modest inn, seemed to have a blessing upon it. The elder lady had
usually gone off to the studio, and he found Miss Garland sitting alone
at the open window, turning the leaves of some book of artistic or
antiquarian reference that he had given her. She always had a smile, she
was always eager, alert, responsive. She might be grave by nature, she
might be sad by circumstance, she might have secret doubts and pangs,
but she was essentially young and strong and fresh and able to enjoy.
Her enjoyment was not especially demonstrative, but it was curiously
diligent. Rowland felt that it was not amusement and sensation that she
coveted, but knowledge--facts that she might noiselessly lay away, piece
by piece, in the perfumed darkness of her serious mind, so that, under
this head at least, she should not be a perfectly portionless bride. She
never merely pretended to understand; she let things go, in her modest
fashion, at the moment, but she watched them on their way, over the
crest of the hill, and when her fancy seemed not likely to be missed it
went hurrying after them and ran breathless at their side, as it were,
and begged them for the secret. Rowland took an immense satisfaction in
observing that she never mistook the second-best for the best, and
that when she was in the presence of a masterpiece, she recognized the
occasion as a mighty one. She said many things which he thought very
profound--that is, if they really had the fine intention he suspected.
This point he usually tried to ascertain; but he was obliged to proceed
cautiously, for in her mistrustful shyness it seemed to her that
cross-examination must necessarily be ironical. She wished to know just
where she was going--what she would gain or lose. This was partly on
account of a native intellectual purity, a temper of mind that had
not lived with its door ajar, as one might say, upon the high-road of
thought, for passing ideas to drop in and out at their pleasure; but had
made much of a few long visits from guests cherished and honored--guests
whose presence was a solemnity. But it was even more because she was
conscious of a sort of growing self-respect, a sense of devoting her
life not to her own ends, but to those of another, whose life would be
large and brilliant. She had been brought up to think a great deal of
"nature" and nature's innocent laws; but now Rowland had spoken to her
ardently of culture; her strenuous fancy had responded, and she was
pursuing culture into retreats where the need for some intellectual
effort gave a noble severity to her purpose. She wished to be very sure,
to take only the best, knowing it to be the best. There was something
exquisite in this labor of pious self-adornment, and Rowland helped it,
though its fruits were not for him. In spite of her lurking rigidity
and angularity, it was very evident that a nervous, impulsive sense
of beauty was constantly at play in her soul, and that her actual
experience of beautiful things moved her in some very deep places. For
all that she was not demonstrative, that her manner was simple, and her
small-talk of no very ample flow; for all that, as she had said, she was
a young woman from the country, and the country was West Nazareth, and
West Nazareth was in its way a stubborn little fact, she was feeling
the direct influence of the great amenities of the world, and they were
shaping her with a divinely intelligent touch. "Oh exquisite virtue of
circumstance!" cried Rowland to himself, "that takes us by the hand
and leads us forth out of corners where, perforce, our attitudes are a
trifle contracted, and beguiles us into testing mistrusted faculties!"
When he said to Mary Garland that he wished he might see her ten years
hence, he was paying mentally an equal compliment to circumstance and
to the girl herself. Capacity was there, it could be freely trusted;
observation would have but to sow its generous seed. "A superior
woman"--the idea had harsh associations, but he watched it imaging
itself in the vagueness of the future with a kind of hopeless
confidence.

They went a great deal to Saint Peter's, for which Rowland had an
exceeding affection, a large measure of which he succeeded in infusing
into his companion. She confessed very speedily that to climb the long,
low, yellow steps, beneath the huge florid facade, and then to push
the ponderous leathern apron of the door, to find one's self confronted
with that builded, luminous sublimity, was a sensation of which the
keenness renewed itself with surprising generosity. In those days the
hospitality of the Vatican had not been curtailed, and it was an easy
and delightful matter to pass from the gorgeous church to the solemn
company of the antique marbles. Here Rowland had with his companion a
great deal of talk, and found himself expounding aesthetics a perte de
vue. He discovered that she made notes of her likes and dislikes in a
new-looking little memorandum book, and he wondered to what extent she
reported his own discourse. These were charming hours. The galleries had
been so cold all winter that Rowland had been an exile from them; but
now that the sun was already scorching in the great square between the
colonnades, where the twin fountains flashed almost fiercely, the marble
coolness of the long, image-bordered vistas made them a delightful
refuge. The great herd of tourists had almost departed, and our two
friends often found themselves, for half an hour at a time, in sole and
tranquil possession of the beautiful Braccio Nuovo. Here and there was
an open window, where they lingered and leaned, looking out into the
warm, dead air, over the towers of the city, at the soft-hued, historic
hills, at the stately shabby gardens of the palace, or at some sunny,
empty, grass-grown court, lost in the heart of the labyrinthine pile.
They went sometimes into the chambers painted by Raphael, and of course
paid their respects to the Sistine Chapel; but Mary's evident preference
was to linger among the statues. Once, when they were standing before
that noblest of sculptured portraits, the so-called Demosthenes, in the
Braccio Nuovo, she made the only spontaneous allusion to her projected
marriage, direct or indirect, that had yet fallen from her lips. "I am
so glad," she said, "that Roderick is a sculptor and not a painter."

The allusion resided chiefly in the extreme earnestness with which the
words were uttered. Rowland immediately asked her the reason of her
gladness.

"It 's not that painting is not fine," she said, "but that sculpture is
finer. It is more manly."

Rowland tried at times to make her talk about herself, but in this she
had little skill. She seemed to him so much older, so much more pliant
to social uses than when he had seen her at home, that he had a
desire to draw from her some categorical account of her occupation and
thoughts. He told her his desire and what suggested it. "It appears,
then," she said, "that, after all, one can grow at home!"

"Unquestionably, if one has a motive. Your growth, then, was
unconscious? You did not watch yourself and water your roots?"

She paid no heed to his question. "I am willing to grant," she said,
"that Europe is more delightful than I supposed; and I don't think that,
mentally, I had been stingy. But you must admit that America is better
than you have supposed."

"I have not a fault to find with the country which produced you!"
Rowland thought he might risk this, smiling.

"And yet you want me to change--to assimilate Europe, I suppose you
would call it."

"I have felt that desire only on general principles. Shall I tell you
what I feel now? America has made you thus far; let America finish you!
I should like to ship you back without delay and see what becomes
of you. That sounds unkind, and I admit there is a cold intellectual
curiosity in it."

She shook her head. "The charm is broken; the thread is snapped! I
prefer to remain here."

Invariably, when he was inclined to make of something they were talking
of a direct application to herself, she wholly failed to assist him; she
made no response. Whereupon, once, with a spark of ardent irritation, he
told her she was very "secretive." At this she colored a little, and
he said that in default of any larger confidence it would at least be
a satisfaction to make her confess to that charge. But even this
satisfaction she denied him, and his only revenge was in making, two
or three times afterward, a softly ironical allusion to her slyness. He
told her that she was what is called in French a sournoise. "Very good,"
she answered, almost indifferently, "and now please tell me again--I
have forgotten it--what you said an 'architrave' was."

It was on the occasion of her asking him a question of this kind that
he charged her, with a humorous emphasis in which, also, if she had
been curious in the matter, she might have detected a spark of restless
ardor, with having an insatiable avidity for facts. "You are always
snatching at information," he said; "you will never consent to have any
disinterested conversation."

She frowned a little, as she always did when he arrested their talk upon
something personal. But this time she assented, and said that she knew
she was eager for facts. "One must make hay while the sun shines," she
added. "I must lay up a store of learning against dark days. Somehow,
my imagination refuses to compass the idea that I may be in Rome
indefinitely."

He knew he had divined her real motives; but he felt that if he might
have said to her--what it seemed impossible to say--that fortune
possibly had in store for her a bitter disappointment, she would have
been capable of answering, immediately after the first sense of pain,
"Say then that I am laying up resources for solitude!"

But all the accusations were not his. He had been watching, once, during
some brief argument, to see whether she would take her forefinger out
of her Murray, into which she had inserted it to keep a certain page.
It would have been hard to say why this point interested him, for he had
not the slightest real apprehension that she was dry or pedantic. The
simple human truth was, the poor fellow was jealous of science.
In preaching science to her, he had over-estimated his powers of
self-effacement. Suddenly, sinking science for the moment, she looked at
him very frankly and began to frown. At the same time she let the Murray
slide down to the ground, and he was so charmed with this circumstance
that he made no movement to pick it up.

"You are singularly inconsistent, Mr. Mallet," she said.

"How?"

"That first day that we were in Saint Peter's you said things that
inspired me. You bade me plunge into all this. I was all ready; I only
wanted a little push; yours was a great one; here I am in mid-ocean! And
now, as a reward for my bravery, you have repeatedly snubbed me."

"Distinctly, then," said Rowland, "I strike you as inconsistent?"

"That is the word."

"Then I have played my part very ill."

"Your part? What is your part supposed to have been?"

He hesitated a moment. "That of usefulness, pure and simple."

"I don't understand you!" she said; and picking up her Murray, she
fairly buried herself in it.

That evening he said something to her which necessarily increased her
perplexity, though it was not uttered with such an intention. "Do you
remember," he asked, "my begging you, the other day, to do occasionally
as I told you? It seemed to me you tacitly consented."

"Very tacitly."

"I have never yet really presumed on your consent. But now I would
like you to do this: whenever you catch me in the act of what you call
inconsistency, ask me the meaning of some architectural term. I will
know what you mean; a word to the wise!"

One morning they spent among the ruins of the Palatine, that sunny
desolation of crumbling, over-tangled fragments, half excavated and half
identified, known as the Palace of the Caesars. Nothing in Rome is more
interesting, and no locality has such a confusion of picturesque charms.
It is a vast, rambling garden, where you stumble at every step on the
disinterred bones of the past; where damp, frescoed corridors, relics,
possibly, of Nero's Golden House, serve as gigantic bowers, and where,
in the springtime, you may sit on a Latin inscription, in the shade of
a flowering almond-tree, and admire the composition of the Campagna.
The day left a deep impression on Rowland's mind, partly owing to its
intrinsic sweetness, and partly because his companion, on this occasion,
let her Murray lie unopened for an hour, and asked several questions
irrelevant to the Consuls and the Caesars. She had begun by saying
that it was coming over her, after all, that Rome was a ponderously sad
place. The sirocco was gently blowing, the air was heavy, she was tired,
she looked a little pale.

"Everything," she said, "seems to say that all things are vanity. If one
is doing something, I suppose one feels a certain strength within one to
contradict it. But if one is idle, surely it is depressing to live, year
after year, among the ashes of things that once were mighty. If I were
to remain here I should either become permanently 'low,' as they say, or
I would take refuge in some dogged daily work."

"What work?"

"I would open a school for those beautiful little beggars; though I am
sadly afraid I should never bring myself to scold them."

"I am idle," said Rowland, "and yet I have kept up a certain spirit."

"I don't call you idle," she answered with emphasis.

"It is very good of you. Do you remember our talking about that in
Northampton?"

"During that picnic? Perfectly. Has your coming abroad succeeded, for
yourself, as well as you hoped?"

"I think I may say that it has turned out as well as I expected."

"Are you happy?"

"Don't I look so?"

"So it seems to me. But"--and she hesitated a moment--"I imagine you
look happy whether you are so or not."

"I 'm like that ancient comic mask that we saw just now in yonder
excavated fresco: I am made to grin."

"Shall you come back here next winter?"

"Very probably."

"Are you settled here forever?"

"'Forever' is a long time. I live only from year to year."

"Shall you never marry?"

Rowland gave a laugh. "'Forever'--'never!' You handle large ideas. I
have not taken a vow of celibacy."

"Would n't you like to marry?"

"I should like it immensely."

To this she made no rejoinder: but presently she asked, "Why don't you
write a book?"

Rowland laughed, this time more freely. "A book! What book should I
write?"

"A history; something about art or antiquities."

"I have neither the learning nor the talent."

She made no attempt to contradict him; she simply said she had supposed
otherwise. "You ought, at any rate," she continued in a moment, "to do
something for yourself."

"For myself? I should have supposed that if ever a man seemed to live
for himself"--

"I don't know how it seems," she interrupted, "to careless observers.
But we know--we know that you have lived--a great deal--for us."

Her voice trembled slightly, and she brought out the last words with a
little jerk.

"She has had that speech on her conscience," thought Rowland; "she has
been thinking she owed it to me, and it seemed to her that now was her
time to make it and have done with it."

She went on in a way which confirmed these reflections, speaking with
due solemnity. "You ought to be made to know very well what we all feel.
Mrs. Hudson tells me that she has told you what she feels. Of course
Roderick has expressed himself. I have been wanting to thank you too; I
do, from my heart."

Rowland made no answer; his face at this moment resembled the tragic
mask much more than the comic. But Miss Garland was not looking at him;
she had taken up her Murray again.