The Beldonald Holbein

H >> Henry James >> The Beldonald Holbein


The famous "irony of fate" takes many forms, but I had never yet seen it
take quite this one. She had been "had over" on an understanding, and
she wasn't playing fair. She had broken the law of her ugliness and had
turned beautiful on the hands of her employer. More interesting even
perhaps than a view of the conscious triumph that this might prepare for
her, and of which, had I doubted of my own judgement, I could still take
Outreau's fine start as the full guarantee--more interesting was the
question of the process by which such a history could get itself enacted.
The curious thing was that all the while the reasons of her having passed
for plain--the reasons for Lady Beldonald's fond calculation, which they
quite justified--were written large in her face, so large that it was
easy to understand them as the only ones she herself had ever read. What
was it then that actually made the old stale sentence mean something so
different?--into what new combinations, what extraordinary language,
unknown but understood at a glance, had time and life translated it? The
only thing to be said was that time and life were artists who beat us
all, working with recipes and secrets we could never find out. I really
ought to have, like a lecturer or a showman, a chart or a blackboard to
present properly the relation, in the wonderful old tender battered
blanched face, between the original elements and the exquisite final
"style." I could do it with chalks, but I can scarcely do it with words.
However, the thing was, for any artist who respected himself, to _feel_
it--which I abundantly did; and then not to conceal from _her_ I felt
it--which I neglected as little. But she was really, to do her complete
justice, the last to understand; and I'm not sure that, to the end--for
there was an end--she quite made it all out or knew where she was. When
you've been brought up for fifty years on black it must be hard to adjust
your organism at a day's notice to gold-colour. Her whole nature had
been pitched in the key of her supposed plainness. She had known how to
be ugly--it was the only thing she had learnt save, if possible, how not
to mind it. Being beautiful took in any case a new set of muscles. It
was on the prior conviction, literally, that she had developed her
admirable dress, instinctively felicitous, always either black or white
and a matter of rather severe squareness and studied line. She was
magnificently neat; everything she showed had a way of looking both old
and fresh; and there was on every occasion the same picture in her draped
head--draped in low-falling black--and the fine white plaits (of a
painter's white, somehow) disposed on her chest. What had happened was
that these arrangements, determined by certain considerations, lent
themselves in effect much better to certain others. Adopted in mere shy
silence they had really only deepened her accent. It was singular,
moreover, that, so constituted, there was nothing in her aspect of the
ascetic or the nun. She was a good hard sixteenth-century figure, not
withered with innocence, bleached rather by life in the open. She was in
short just what we had made of her, a Holbein for a great Museum; and our
position, Mrs. Munden's and mine, rapidly became that of persons having
such a treasure to dispose of. The world--I speak of course mainly of
the art-world--flocked to see it.




CHAPTER IV


"But has she any idea herself, poor thing?" was the way I had put it to
Mrs. Munden on our next meeting after the incident at my studio; with the
effect, however, only of leaving my friend at first to take me as
alluding to Mrs. Brash's possible prevision of the chatter she might
create. I had my own sense of that--this provision had been nil; the
question was of her consciousness of the office for which Lady Beldonald
had counted on her and for which we were so promptly proceeding to spoil
her altogether.

"Oh I think she arrived with a goodish notion," Mrs. Munden had replied
when I had explained; "for she's clever too, you know, as well as good-
looking, and I don't see how, if she ever really _knew_ Nina, she could
have supposed for a moment that she wasn't wanted for whatever she might
have left to give up. Hasn't she moreover always been made to feel that
she's ugly enough for anything?" It was even at this point already
wonderful how my friend had mastered the case and what lights, alike for
its past and its future, she was prepared to throw on it. "If she has
seen herself as ugly enough for anything she has seen herself--and that
was the only way--as ugly enough for Nina; and she has had her own manner
of showing that she understands without making Nina commit herself to
anything vulgar. Women are never without ways for doing such things--both
for communicating and receiving knowledge--that I can't explain to you,
and that you wouldn't understand if I could, since you must be a woman
even to do that. I daresay they've expressed it all to each other simply
in the language of kisses. But doesn't it at any rate make something
rather beautiful of the relation between them as affected by our
discovery--?"

I had a laugh for her plural possessive. "The point is of course that if
there was a conscious bargain, and our action on Mrs. Brash is to deprive
her of the sense of keeping her side of it, various things may happen
that won't be good either for her or for ourselves. She may
conscientiously throw up the position."

"Yes," my companion mused--"for she is conscientious. Or Nina, without
waiting for that, may cast her forth."

I faced it all. "Then we should have to keep her."

"As a regular model?" Mrs. Munden was ready for anything. "Oh that would
be lovely!"

But I further worked it out. "The difficulty is that she's not a model,
hang it--that she's too good for one, that she's the very thing herself.
When Outreau and I have each had our go, that will be all; there'll be
nothing left for any one else. Therefore it behoves us quite to
understand that our attitude's a responsibility. If we can't do for her
positively more than Nina does--"

"We must let her alone?" My companion continued to muse. "I see!"

"Yet don't," I returned, "see too much. We _can_ do more."

"Than Nina?" She was again on the spot. "It wouldn't after all be
difficult. We only want the directly opposite thing--and which is the
only one the poor dear can give. Unless indeed," she suggested, "we
simply retract--we back out."

I turned it over. "It's too late for that. Whether Mrs. Brash's peace
is gone I can't say. But Nina's is."

"Yes, and there's no way to bring it back that won't sacrifice her
friend. We can't turn round and say Mrs. Brash is ugly, can we? But
fancy Nina's not having _seen_!" Mrs. Munden exclaimed.

"She doesn't see now," I answered. "She can't, I'm certain, make out
what we mean. The woman, for _her_ still, is just what she always was.
But she has nevertheless had her stroke, and her blindness, while she
wavers and gropes in the dark, only adds to her discomfort. Her blow was
to see the attention of the world deviate."

"All the same I don't think, you know," my interlocutress said, "that
Nina will have made her a scene or that, whatever we do, she'll ever make
her one. That isn't the way it will happen, for she's exactly as
conscientious as Mrs. Brash."

"Then what is the way?" I asked.

"It will just happen in silence."

"And what will 'it,' as you call it, be?"

"Isn't that what we want really to see?"

"Well," I replied after a turn or two about, "whether we want it or not
it's exactly what we _shall_ see; which is a reason the more for
fancying, between the pair there--in the quiet exquisite house, and full
of superiorities and suppressions as they both are--the extraordinary
situation. If I said just now that it's too late to do anything but
assent it's because I've taken the full measure of what happened at my
studio. It took but a few moments--but she tasted of the tree."

My companion wondered. "Nina?"

"Mrs. Brash." And to have to put it so ministered, while I took yet
another turn, to a sort of agitation. Our attitude was a responsibility.

But I had suggested something else to my friend, who appeared for a
moment detached. "Should you say she'll hate her worse if she _doesn't_
see?"

"Lady Beldonald? Doesn't see what we see, you mean, than if she does? Ah
I give _that_ up!" I laughed. "But what I can tell you is why I hold
that, as I said just now, we can do most. We can do this: we can give to
a harmless and sensitive creature hitherto practically disinherited--and
give with an unexpectedness that will immensely add to its price--the
pure joy of a deep draught of the very pride of life, of an acclaimed
personal triumph in our superior sophisticated world."

Mrs. Munden had a glow of response for my sudden eloquence. Oh it will
be beautiful!




CHAPTER V


Well, that's what, on the whole and in spite of everything, it really
was. It has dropped into my memory a rich little gallery of pictures, a
regular panorama of those occasions that were to minister to the view
from which I had so for a moment extracted a lyric inspiration. I see
Mrs. Brash on each of these occasions practically enthroned and
surrounded and more or less mobbed; see the hurrying and the nudging and
the pressing and the staring; see the people "making up" and introduced,
and catch the word when they have had their turn; hear it above all, the
great one--"Ah yes, the famous Holbein!"--passed about with that
perfection of promptitude that makes the motions of the London mind so
happy a mixture of those of the parrot and the sheep. Nothing would be
easier of course than to tell the whole little tale with an eye only for
that silly side of it. Great was the silliness, but great also as to this
case of poor Mrs. Brash, I will say for it, the good nature. Of course,
furthermore, it took in particular "our set," with its positive child-
terror of the _banal_, to be either so foolish or so wise; though indeed
I've never quite known where our set begins and ends, and have had to
content myself on this score with the indication once given me by a lady
next whom I was placed at dinner: "Oh it's bounded on the north by Ibsen
and on the south by Sargent!" Mrs. Brash never sat to me; she absolutely
declined; and when she declared that it was quite enough for her that I
had with that fine precipitation invited her, I quite took this as she
meant it; before we had gone very far our understanding, hers and mine,
was complete. Her attitude was as happy as her success was prodigious.
The sacrifice of the portrait was a sacrifice to the true inwardness of
Lady Beldonald, and did much, for the time, I divined, toward muffling
their domestic tension. All it was thus in her power to say--and I heard
of a few cases of her having said it--was that she was sure I would have
painted her beautifully if she hadn't prevented me. She couldn't even
tell the truth, which was that I certainly would have done so if Lady
Beldonald hadn't; and she never could mention the subject at all before
that personage. I can only describe the affair, naturally, from the
outside, and heaven forbid indeed that I should try too closely to,
reconstruct the possible strange intercourse of these good friends at
home.

My anecdote, however, would lose half the point it may have to show were
I to omit all mention of the consummate turn her ladyship appeared
gradually to have found herself able to give her deportment. She had
made it impossible I should myself bring up our old, our original
question, but there was real distinction in her manner of now accepting
certain other possibilities. Let me do her that justice; her effort at
magnanimity must have been immense. There couldn't fail of course to be
ways in which poor Mrs. Brash paid for it. How much she had to pay we
were in fact soon enough to see; and it's my intimate conviction that, as
a climax, her life at last was the price. But while she lived at
least--and it was with an intensity, for those wondrous weeks, of which
she had never dreamed--Lady Beldonald herself faced the music. This is
what I mean by the possibilities, by the sharp actualities indeed, that
she accepted. She took our friend out, she showed her at home, never
attempted to hide or to betray her, played her no trick whatever so long
as the ordeal lasted. She drank deep, on her side too, of the cup--the
cup that for her own lips could only be bitterness. There was, I think,
scarce a special success of her companion's at which she wasn't
personally present. Mrs. Munden's theory of the silence in which all
this would be muffled for them was none the less, and in abundance,
confirmed by our observations. The whole thing was to be the death of
one or the other of them, but they never spoke of it at tea. I remember
even that Nina went so far as to say to me once, looking me full in the
eyes, quite sublimely, "I've made out what you mean--she _is_ a picture."
The beauty of this moreover was that, as I'm persuaded, she hadn't really
made it out at all--the words were the mere hypocrisy of her reflective
endeavour for virtue. She couldn't possibly have made it out; her friend
was as much as ever "dreadfully plain" to her; she must have wondered to
the last what on earth possessed us. Wouldn't it in fact have been after
all just this failure of vision, this supreme stupidity in short, that
kept the catastrophe so long at bay? There was a certain sense of
greatness for her in seeing so many of us so absurdly mistaken; and I
recall that on various occasions, and in particular when she uttered the
words just quoted, this high serenity, as a sign of the relief of her
soreness, if not of the effort of her conscience, did something quite
visible to my eyes, and also quite unprecedented, for the beauty of her
face. She got a real lift from it--such a momentary discernible
sublimity that I recollect coming out on the spot with a queer crude
amused "Do you know I believe I could paint you _now_?"

She was a fool not to have closed with me then and there; for what has
happened since has altered everything--what was to happen a little later
was so much more than I could swallow. This was the disappearance of the
famous Holbein from one day to the other--producing a consternation among
us all as great as if the Venus of Milo had suddenly vanished from the
Louvre. "She has simply shipped her straight back"--the explanation was
given in that form by Mrs. Munden, who added that any cord pulled tight
enough would end at last by snapping. At the snap, in any case, we
mightily jumped, for the masterpiece we had for three or four months been
living with had made us feel its presence as a luminous lesson and a
daily need. We recognised more than ever that it had been, for high
finish, the gem of our collection--we found what a blank it left on the
wall. Lady Beldonald might fill up the blank, but we couldn't. That she
did soon fill it up--and, heaven help us, _how_ was put before me after
an interval of no great length, but during which I hadn't seen her. I
dined on the Christmas of last year at Mrs. Munden's, and Nina, with a
"scratch lot," as our hostess said, was there, so that, the preliminary
wait being longish, she could approach me very sweetly. "I'll come to
you tomorrow if you like," she said; and the effect of it, after a first
stare at her, was to make me look all round. I took in, by these two
motions, two things; one of which was that, though now again so satisfied
herself of her high state, she could give me nothing comparable to what I
should have got had she taken me up at the moment of my meeting her on
her distinguished concession; the other that she was "suited" afresh and
that Mrs. Brash's successor was fully installed. Mrs. Brash's successor,
was at the other side of the room, and I became conscious that Mrs.
Munden was waiting to see my eyes seek her. I guessed the meaning of the
wait; what was one, this time, to say? Oh first and foremost assuredly
that it was immensely droll, for this time at least there was no mistake.
The lady I looked upon, and as to whom my friend, again quite at sea,
appealed to me for a formula, was as little a Holbein, or a specimen of
any other school, as she was, like Lady Beldonald herself, a Titian. The
formula was easy to give, for the amusement was that her prettiness--yes,
literally, prodigiously, her prettiness--was distinct. Lady Beldonald
had been magnificent--had been almost intelligent. Miss What's-her-name
continues pretty, continues even young, and doesn't matter a straw! She
matters so ideally little that Lady Beldonald is practically safer, I
judge, than she has ever been. There hasn't been a symptom of chatter
about this person, and I believe her protectress is much surprised that
we're not more struck.

It was at any rate strictly impossible to me to make an appointment for
the day as to which I have just recorded Nina's proposal; and the turn of
events since then has not quickened my eagerness. Mrs. Munden remained
in correspondence with Mrs. Brash--to the extent, that is, of three
letters, each of which she showed me. They so told to our imagination
her terrible little story that we were quite prepared--or thought we
were--for her going out like a snuffed candle. She resisted, on her
return to her original conditions, less than a year; the taste of the
tree, as I had called it, had been fatal to her; what she had contentedly
enough lived without before for half a century she couldn't now live
without for a day. I know nothing of her original conditions--some minor
American city--save that for her to have gone back to them was clearly to
have stepped out of her frame. We performed, Mrs. Munden and I, a small
funeral service for her by talking it all over and making it all out. It
wasn't--the minor American city--a market for Holbeins, and what had
occurred was that the poor old picture, banished from its museum and
refreshed by the rise of no new movement to hang it, was capable of the
miracle of a silent revolution; of itself turning, in its dire dishonour,
its face to the wall. So it stood, without the intervention of the ghost
of a critic, till they happened to pull it round again and find it mere
dead paint. Well, it had had, if that's anything, its season of fame,
its name on a thousand tongues and printed in capitals in the catalogue.
We hadn't been at fault. I haven't, all the same, the least note of
her--not a scratch. And I did her so in intention! Mrs. Munden
continues to remind me, however, that this is not the sort of rendering
with which, on the other side, after all, Lady Beldonald proposes to
content herself. She has come back to the question of her own portrait.
Let me settle it then at last. Since she _will_ have the real
thing--well, hang it, she shall!