Roderick Hudson

H >> Henry James >> Roderick Hudson


Rowland said that he supposed that this sort of thing was the lot of
every artist and that the only remedy was plenty of courage and faith.
And he reminded him of Gloriani's having forewarned him against these
sterile moods the year before.

"Gloriani 's an ass!" said Roderick, almost fiercely. He hired a horse
and began to ride with Rowland on the Campagna. This delicious amusement
restored him in a measure to cheerfulness, but seemed to Rowland on the
whole not to stimulate his industry. Their rides were always very
long, and Roderick insisted on making them longer by dismounting in
picturesque spots and stretching himself in the sun among a heap of
overtangled stones. He let the scorching Roman luminary beat down upon
him with an equanimity which Rowland found it hard to emulate. But in
this situation Roderick talked so much amusing nonsense that, for the
sake of his company, Rowland consented to be uncomfortable, and often
forgot that, though in these diversions the days passed quickly, they
brought forth neither high art nor low. And yet it was perhaps by their
help, after all, that Roderick secured several mornings of ardent work
on his new figure, and brought it to rapid completion. One afternoon,
when it was finished, Rowland went to look at it, and Roderick asked him
for his opinion.

"What do you think yourself?" Rowland demanded, not from pusillanimity,
but from real uncertainty.

"I think it is curiously bad," Roderick answered. "It was bad from the
first; it has fundamental vices. I have shuffled them in a measure out
of sight, but I have not corrected them. I can't--I can't--I can't!" he
cried passionately. "They stare me in the face--they are all I see!"

Rowland offered several criticisms of detail, and suggested certain
practicable changes. But Roderick differed with him on each of these
points; the thing had faults enough, but they were not those faults.
Rowland, unruffled, concluded by saying that whatever its faults might
be, he had an idea people in general would like it.

"I wish to heaven some person in particular would buy it, and take it
off my hands and out of my sight!" Roderick cried. "What am I to do
now?" he went on. "I have n't an idea. I think of subjects, but they
remain mere lifeless names. They are mere words--they are not images.
What am I to do?"

Rowland was a trifle annoyed. "Be a man," he was on the point of saying,
"and don't, for heaven's sake, talk in that confoundedly querulous
voice." But before he had uttered the words, there rang through the
studio a loud, peremptory ring at the outer door.

Roderick broke into a laugh. "Talk of the devil," he said, "and you see
his horns! If that 's not a customer, it ought to be."

The door of the studio was promptly flung open, and a lady advanced to
the threshold--an imposing, voluminous person, who quite filled up the
doorway. Rowland immediately felt that he had seen her before, but he
recognized her only when she moved forward and disclosed an attendant in
the person of a little bright-eyed, elderly gentleman, with a bristling
white moustache. Then he remembered that just a year before he and his
companion had seen in the Ludovisi gardens a wonderfully beautiful girl,
strolling in the train of this conspicuous couple. He looked for her
now, and in a moment she appeared, following her companions with the
same nonchalant step as before, and leading her great snow-white poodle,
decorated with motley ribbons. The elder lady offered the two young
men a sufficiently gracious salute; the little old gentleman bowed and
smiled with extreme alertness. The young girl, without casting a glance
either at Roderick or at Rowland, looked about for a chair, and, on
perceiving one, sank into it listlessly, pulled her poodle towards her,
and began to rearrange his top-knot. Rowland saw that, even with her
eyes dropped, her beauty was still dazzling.

"I trust we are at liberty to enter," said the elder lady, with majesty.
"We were told that Mr. Hudson had no fixed day, and that we might come
at any time. Let us not disturb you."

Roderick, as one of the lesser lights of the Roman art-world, had not
hitherto been subject to incursions from inquisitive tourists, and,
having no regular reception day, was not versed in the usual formulas of
welcome. He said nothing, and Rowland, looking at him, saw that he was
looking amazedly at the young girl and was apparently unconscious of
everything else. "By Jove!" he cried precipitately, "it 's that goddess
of the Villa Ludovisi!" Rowland in some confusion, did the honors as he
could, but the little old gentleman begged him with the most obsequious
of smiles to give himself no trouble. "I have been in many a studio!" he
said, with his finger on his nose and a strong Italian accent.

"We are going about everywhere," said his companion. "I am passionately
fond of art!"

Rowland smiled sympathetically, and let them turn to Roderick's statue.
He glanced again at the young sculptor, to invite him to bestir himself,
but Roderick was still gazing wide-eyed at the beautiful young mistress
of the poodle, who by this time had looked up and was gazing straight at
him. There was nothing bold in her look; it expressed a kind of languid,
imperturbable indifference. Her beauty was extraordinary; it grew and
grew as the young man observed her. In such a face the maidenly custom
of averted eyes and ready blushes would have seemed an anomaly; nature
had produced it for man's delight and meant that it should surrender
itself freely and coldly to admiration. It was not immediately apparent,
however, that the young lady found an answering entertainment in the
physiognomy of her host; she turned her head after a moment and looked
idly round the room, and at last let her eyes rest on the statue of the
woman seated. It being left to Rowland to stimulate conversation, he
began by complimenting her on the beauty of her dog.

"Yes, he 's very handsome," she murmured. "He 's a Florentine. The dogs
in Florence are handsomer than the people." And on Rowland's caressing
him: "His name is Stenterello," she added. "Stenterello, give your hand
to the gentleman." This order was given in Italian. "Say buon giorno a
lei."

Stenterello thrust out his paw and gave four short, shrill barks; upon
which the elder lady turned round and raised her forefinger.

"My dear, my dear, remember where you are! Excuse my foolish child," she
added, turning to Roderick with an agreeable smile. "She can think of
nothing but her poodle."

"I am teaching him to talk for me," the young girl went on, without
heeding her mother; "to say little things in society. It will save me
a great deal of trouble. Stenterello, love, give a pretty smile and say
tanti complimenti!" The poodle wagged his white pate--it looked like
one of those little pads in swan's-down, for applying powder to the
face--and repeated the barking process.

"He is a wonderful beast," said Rowland.

"He is not a beast," said the young girl. "A beast is something black
and dirty--something you can't touch."

"He is a very valuable dog," the elder lady explained. "He was presented
to my daughter by a Florentine nobleman."

"It is not for that I care about him. It is for himself. He is better
than the prince."

"My dear, my dear!" repeated the mother in deprecating accents, but with
a significant glance at Rowland which seemed to bespeak his attention to
the glory of possessing a daughter who could deal in that fashion with
the aristocracy.

Rowland remembered that when their unknown visitors had passed before
them, a year previous, in the Villa Ludovisi, Roderick and he had
exchanged conjectures as to their nationality and social quality.
Roderick had declared that they were old-world people; but Rowland
now needed no telling to feel that he might claim the elder lady as a
fellow-countrywoman. She was a person of what is called a great deal
of presence, with the faded traces, artfully revived here and there, of
once brilliant beauty. Her daughter had come lawfully by her loveliness,
but Rowland mentally made the distinction that the mother was silly and
that the daughter was not. The mother had a very silly mouth--a mouth,
Rowland suspected, capable of expressing an inordinate degree of
unreason. The young girl, in spite of her childish satisfaction in her
poodle, was not a person of feeble understanding. Rowland received an
impression that, for reasons of her own, she was playing a part. What
was the part and what were her reasons? She was interesting; Rowland
wondered what were her domestic secrets. If her mother was a daughter
of the great Republic, it was to be supposed that the young girl was a
flower of the American soil; but her beauty had a robustness and tone
uncommon in the somewhat facile loveliness of our western maidenhood.
She spoke with a vague foreign accent, as if she had spent her life in
strange countries. The little Italian apparently divined Rowland's mute
imaginings, for he presently stepped forward, with a bow like a master
of ceremonies. "I have not done my duty," he said, "in not announcing
these ladies. Mrs. Light, Miss Light!"

Rowland was not materially the wiser for this information, but Roderick
was aroused by it to the exercise of some slight hospitality. He altered
the light, pulled forward two or three figures, and made an apology
for not having more to show. "I don't pretend to have anything of an
exhibition--I am only a novice."

"Indeed?--a novice! For a novice this is very well," Mrs. Light
declared. "Cavaliere, we have seen nothing better than this."

The Cavaliere smiled rapturously. "It is stupendous!" he murmured. "And
we have been to all the studios."

"Not to all--heaven forbid!" cried Mrs. Light. "But to a number that I
have had pointed out by artistic friends. I delight in studios: they are
the temples of the beautiful here below. And if you are a novice, Mr.
Hudson," she went on, "you have already great admirers. Half a dozen
people have told us that yours were among the things to see." This
gracious speech went unanswered; Roderick had already wandered across to
the other side of the studio and was revolving about Miss Light. "Ah, he
's gone to look at my beautiful daughter; he is not the first that
has had his head turned," Mrs. Light resumed, lowering her voice to
a confidential undertone; a favor which, considering the shortness of
their acquaintance, Rowland was bound to appreciate. "The artists are
all crazy about her. When she goes into a studio she is fatal to the
pictures. And when she goes into a ball-room what do the other women
say? Eh, Cavaliere?"

"She is very beautiful," Rowland said, gravely.

Mrs. Light, who through her long, gold-cased glass was looking a little
at everything, and at nothing as if she saw it, interrupted her random
murmurs and exclamations, and surveyed Rowland from head to foot. She
looked at him all over; apparently he had not been mentioned to her as
a feature of Roderick's establishment. It was the gaze, Rowland felt,
which the vigilant and ambitious mamma of a beautiful daughter has
always at her command for well-dressed young men of candid physiognomy.
Her inspection in this case seemed satisfactory. "Are you also an
artist?" she inquired with an almost caressing inflection. It was clear
that what she meant was something of this kind: "Be so good as to assure
me without delay that you are really the young man of substance and
amiability that you appear."

But Rowland answered simply the formal question--not the latent one.
"Dear me, no; I am only a friend of Mr. Hudson."

Mrs. Light, with a sigh, returned to the statues, and after mistaking
the Adam for a gladiator, and the Eve for a Pocahontas, declared that
she could not judge of such things unless she saw them in the marble.
Rowland hesitated a moment, and then speaking in the interest of
Roderick's renown, said that he was the happy possessor of several of
his friend's works and that she was welcome to come and see them at his
rooms. She bade the Cavaliere make a note of his address. "Ah, you 're
a patron of the arts," she said. "That 's what I should like to be if
I had a little money. I delight in beauty in every form. But all these
people ask such monstrous prices. One must be a millionaire, to think
of such things, eh? Twenty years ago my husband had my portrait painted,
here in Rome, by Papucci, who was the great man in those days. I was in
a ball dress, with all my jewels, my neck and arms, and all that. The
man got six hundred francs, and thought he was very well treated. Those
were the days when a family could live like princes in Italy for five
thousand scudi a year. The Cavaliere once upon a time was a great
dandy--don't blush, Cavaliere; any one can see that, just as any one can
see that I was once a pretty woman! Get him to tell you what he made a
figure upon. The railroads have brought in the vulgarians. That 's what
I call it now--the invasion of the vulgarians! What are poor we to do?"

Rowland had begun to murmur some remedial proposition, when he was
interrupted by the voice of Miss Light calling across the room, "Mamma!"

"My own love?"

"This gentleman wishes to model my bust. Please speak to him."

The Cavaliere gave a little chuckle. "Already?" he cried.

Rowland looked round, equally surprised at the promptitude of the
proposal. Roderick stood planted before the young girl with his arms
folded, looking at her as he would have done at the Medicean Venus. He
never paid compliments, and Rowland, though he had not heard him speak,
could imagine the startling distinctness with which he made his request.

"He saw me a year ago," the young girl went on, "and he has been
thinking of me ever since." Her tone, in speaking, was peculiar; it had
a kind of studied inexpressiveness, which was yet not the vulgar device
of a drawl.

"I must make your daughter's bust--that 's all, madame!" cried Roderick,
with warmth.

"I had rather you made the poodle's," said the young girl. "Is it very
tiresome? I have spent half my life sitting for my photograph, in every
conceivable attitude and with every conceivable coiffure. I think I have
posed enough."

"My dear child," said Mrs. Light, "it may be one's duty to pose. But as
to my daughter's sitting to you, sir--to a young sculptor whom we don't
know--it is a matter that needs reflection. It is not a favor that 's to
be had for the mere asking."

"If I don't make her from life," said Roderick, with energy, "I will
make her from memory, and if the thing 's to be done, you had better
have it done as well as possible."

"Mamma hesitates," said Miss Light, "because she does n't know whether
you mean she shall pay you for the bust. I can assure you that she will
not pay you a sou."

"My darling, you forget yourself," said Mrs. Light, with an attempt at
majestic severity. "Of course," she added, in a moment, with a change of
note, "the bust would be my own property."

"Of course!" cried Roderick, impatiently.

"Dearest mother," interposed the young girl, "how can you carry a
marble bust about the world with you? Is it not enough to drag the poor
original?"

"My dear, you 're nonsensical!" cried Mrs. Light, almost angrily.

"You can always sell it," said the young girl, with the same artful
artlessness.

Mrs. Light turned to Rowland, who pitied her, flushed and irritated.
"She is very wicked to-day!"

The Cavaliere grinned in silence and walked away on tiptoe, with his hat
to his lips, as if to leave the field clear for action. Rowland, on the
contrary, wished to avert the coming storm. "You had better not refuse,"
he said to Miss Light, "until you have seen Mr. Hudson's things in the
marble. Your mother is to come and look at some that I possess."

"Thank you; I have no doubt you will see us. I dare say Mr. Hudson is
very clever; but I don't care for modern sculpture. I can't look at it!"

"You shall care for my bust, I promise you!" cried Roderick, with a
laugh.

"To satisfy Miss Light," said the Cavaliere, "one of the old Greeks
ought to come to life."

"It would be worth his while," said Roderick, paying, to Rowland's
knowledge, his first compliment.

"I might sit to Phidias, if he would promise to be very amusing and make
me laugh. What do you say, Stenterello? would you sit to Phidias?"

"We must talk of this some other time," said Mrs. Light. "We are in
Rome for the winter. Many thanks. Cavaliere, call the carriage." The
Cavaliere led the way out, backing like a silver-stick, and Miss Light,
following her mother, nodded, without looking at them, to each of the
young men.

"Immortal powers, what a head!" cried Roderick, when they had gone.
"There 's my fortune!"

"She is certainly very beautiful," said Rowland. "But I 'm sorry you
have undertaken her bust."

"And why, pray?"

"I suspect it will bring trouble with it."

"What kind of trouble?"

"I hardly know. They are queer people. The mamma, I suspect, is the
least bit of an adventuress. Heaven knows what the daughter is."

"She 's a goddess!" cried Roderick.

"Just so. She is all the more dangerous."

"Dangerous? What will she do to me? She does n't bite, I imagine."

"It remains to be seen. There are two kinds of women--you ought to
know it by this time--the safe and the unsafe. Miss Light, if I am not
mistaken, is one of the unsafe. A word to the wise!"

"Much obliged!" said Roderick, and he began to whistle a triumphant air,
in honor, apparently, of the advent of his beautiful model.

In calling this young lady and her mamma "queer people," Rowland but
roughly expressed his sentiment. They were so marked a variation from
the monotonous troop of his fellow-country people that he felt much
curiosity as to the sources of the change, especially since he doubted
greatly whether, on the whole, it elevated the type. For a week he
saw the two ladies driving daily in a well-appointed landau, with the
Cavaliere and the poodle in the front seat. From Mrs. Light he received
a gracious salute, tempered by her native majesty; but the young girl,
looking straight before her, seemed profoundly indifferent to observers.
Her extraordinary beauty, however, had already made observers numerous
and given the habitues of the Pincian plenty to talk about. The echoes
of their commentary reached Rowland's ears; but he had little taste
for random gossip, and desired a distinctly veracious informant. He had
found one in the person of Madame Grandoni, for whom Mrs. Light and her
beautiful daughter were a pair of old friends.

"I have known the mamma for twenty years," said this judicious critic,
"and if you ask any of the people who have been living here as long
as I, you will find they remember her well. I have held the beautiful
Christina on my knee when she was a little wizened baby with a very red
face and no promise of beauty but those magnificent eyes. Ten years ago
Mrs. Light disappeared, and has not since been seen in Rome, except for
a few days last winter, when she passed through on her way to Naples.
Then it was you met the trio in the Ludovisi gardens. When I first
knew her she was the unmarried but very marriageable daughter of an old
American painter of very bad landscapes, which people used to buy from
charity and use for fire-boards. His name was Savage; it used to make
every one laugh, he was such a mild, melancholy, pitiful old gentleman.
He had married a horrible wife, an Englishwoman who had been on the
stage. It was said she used to beat poor Savage with his mahl-stick and
when the domestic finances were low to lock him up in his studio and
tell him he should n't come out until he had painted half a dozen of
his daubs. She had a good deal of showy beauty. She would then go
forth, and, her beauty helping, she would make certain people take the
pictures. It helped her at last to make an English lord run away with
her. At the time I speak of she had quite disappeared. Mrs. Light
was then a very handsome girl, though by no means so handsome as
her daughter has now become. Mr. Light was an American consul, newly
appointed at one of the Adriatic ports. He was a mild, fair-whiskered
young man, with some little property, and my impression is that he had
got into bad company at home, and that his family procured him his place
to keep him out of harm's way. He came up to Rome on a holiday, fell
in love with Miss Savage, and married her on the spot. He had not been
married three years when he was drowned in the Adriatic, no one ever
knew how. The young widow came back to Rome, to her father, and here
shortly afterwards, in the shadow of Saint Peter's, her little girl was
born. It might have been supposed that Mrs. Light would marry again,
and I know she had opportunities. But she overreached herself. She
would take nothing less than a title and a fortune, and they were not
forthcoming. She was admired and very fond of admiration; very vain,
very worldly, very silly. She remained a pretty widow, with a surprising
variety of bonnets and a dozen men always in her train. Giacosa dates
from this period. He calls himself a Roman, but I have an impression he
came up from Ancona with her. He was l'ami de la maison. He used to hold
her bouquets, clean her gloves (I was told), run her errands, get her
opera-boxes, and fight her battles with the shopkeepers. For this he
needed courage, for she was smothered in debt. She at last left Rome
to escape her creditors. Many of them must remember her still, but she
seems now to have money to satisfy them. She left her poor old father
here alone--helpless, infirm and unable to work. A subscription was
shortly afterwards taken up among the foreigners, and he was sent
back to America, where, as I afterwards heard, he died in some sort of
asylum. From time to time, for several years, I heard vaguely of Mrs.
Light as a wandering beauty at French and German watering-places. Once
came a rumor that she was going to make a grand marriage in England;
then we heard that the gentleman had thought better of it and left
her to keep afloat as she could. She was a terribly scatter-brained
creature. She pretends to be a great lady, but I consider that
old Filomena, my washer-woman, is in essentials a greater one. But
certainly, after all, she has been fortunate. She embarked at last on
a lawsuit about some property, with her husband's family, and went to
America to attend to it. She came back triumphant, with a long purse.
She reappeared in Italy, and established herself for a while in Venice.
Then she came to Florence, where she spent a couple of years and where
I saw her. Last year she passed down to Naples, which I should have said
was just the place for her, and this winter she has laid siege to Rome.
She seems very prosperous. She has taken a floor in the Palazzo F----,
she keeps her carriage, and Christina and she, between them, must have
a pretty milliner's bill. Giacosa has turned up again, looking as if he
had been kept on ice at Ancona, for her return."

"What sort of education," Rowland asked, "do you imagine the mother's
adventures to have been for the daughter?"

"A strange school! But Mrs. Light told me, in Florence, that she had
given her child the education of a princess. In other words, I suppose,
she speaks three or four languages, and has read several hundred French
novels. Christina, I suspect, is very clever. When I saw her, I was
amazed at her beauty, and, certainly, if there is any truth in faces,
she ought to have the soul of an angel. Perhaps she has. I don't judge
her; she 's an extraordinary young person. She has been told twenty
times a day by her mother, since she was five years old, that she is a
beauty of beauties, that her face is her fortune, and that, if she plays
her cards, she may marry a duke. If she has not been fatally corrupted,
she is a very superior girl. My own impression is that she is a mixture
of good and bad, of ambition and indifference. Mrs. Light, having failed
to make her own fortune in matrimony, has transferred her hopes to her
daughter, and nursed them till they have become a kind of monomania. She
has a hobby, which she rides in secret; but some day she will let you
see it. I 'm sure that if you go in some evening unannounced, you will
find her scanning the tea-leaves in her cup, or telling her daughter's
fortune with a greasy pack of cards, preserved for the purpose. She
promises her a prince--a reigning prince. But if Mrs. Light is silly,
she is shrewd, too, and, lest considerations of state should deny
her prince the luxury of a love-match, she keeps on hand a few common
mortals. At the worst she would take a duke, an English lord, or even a
young American with a proper number of millions. The poor woman must be
rather uncomfortable. She is always building castles and knocking them
down again--always casting her nets and pulling them in. If her
daughter were less of a beauty, her transparent ambition would be very
ridiculous; but there is something in the girl, as one looks at her,
that seems to make it very possible she is marked out for one of those
wonderful romantic fortunes that history now and then relates. 'Who,
after all, was the Empress of the French?' Mrs. Light is forever saying.
'And beside Christina the Empress is a dowdy!'"