The Jolly Corner

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THE JOLLY CORNER
by Henry James


CHAPTER I


"Every one asks me what I 'think' of everything," said Spencer Brydon;
"and I make answer as I can--begging or dodging the question, putting
them off with any nonsense. It wouldn't matter to any of them really,"
he went on, "for, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver
way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my 'thoughts' would still be
almost altogether about something that concerns only myself." He was
talking to Miss Staverton, with whom for a couple of months now he had
availed himself of every possible occasion to talk; this disposition and
this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in fact
presented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in the
considerable array of rather unattenuated surprises attending his so
strangely belated return to America. Everything was somehow a surprise;
and that might be natural when one had so long and so consistently
neglected everything, taken pains to give surprises so much margin for
play. He had given them more than thirty years--thirty-three, to be
exact; and they now seemed to him to have organised their performance
quite on the scale of that licence. He had been twenty-three on leaving
New York--he was fifty-six to-day; unless indeed he were to reckon as he
had sometimes, since his repatriation, found himself feeling; in which
case he would have lived longer than is often allotted to man. It would
have taken a century, he repeatedly said to himself, and said also to
Alice Staverton, it would have taken a longer absence and a more averted
mind than those even of which he had been guilty, to pile up the
differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the bignesses, for
the better or the worse, that at present assaulted his vision wherever he
looked.

The great fact all the while, however, had been the incalculability;
since he _had_ supposed himself, from decade to decade, to be allowing,
and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change.
He actually saw that he had allowed for nothing; he missed what he would
have been sure of finding, he found what he would never have imagined.
Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected,
the ugly things of his far-away youth, when he had too promptly waked up
to a sense of the ugly--these uncanny phenomena placed him rather, as it
happened, under the charm; whereas the "swagger" things, the modern, the
monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly, like
thousands of ingenuous enquirers every year, come over to see, were
exactly his sources of dismay. They were as so many set traps for
displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless tread was
constantly pressing the spring. It was interesting, doubtless, the whole
show, but it would have been too disconcerting hadn't a certain finer
truth saved the situation. He had distinctly not, in this steadier
light, come over _all_ for the monstrosities; he had come, not only in
the last analysis but quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with
which they had nothing to do. He had come--putting the thing
pompously--to look at his "property," which he had thus for a third of a
century not been within four thousand miles of; or, expressing it less
sordidly, he had yielded to the humour of seeing again his house on the
jolly corner, as he usually, and quite fondly, described it--the one in
which he had first seen the light, in which various members of his family
had lived and had died, in which the holidays of his overschooled boyhood
had been passed and the few social flowers of his chilled adolescence
gathered, and which, alienated then for so long a period, had, through
the successive deaths of his two brothers and the termination of old
arrangements, come wholly into his hands. He was the owner of another,
not quite so "good"--the jolly corner having been, from far back,
superlatively extended and consecrated; and the value of the pair
represented his main capital, with an income consisting, in these later
years, of their respective rents which (thanks precisely to their
original excellent type) had never been depressingly low. He could live
in "Europe," as he had been in the habit of living, on the product of
these flourishing New York leases, and all the better since, that of the
second structure, the mere number in its long row, having within a
twelvemonth fallen in, renovation at a high advance had proved
beautifully possible.

These were items of property indeed, but he had found himself since his
arrival distinguishing more than ever between them. The house within the
street, two bristling blocks westward, was already in course of
reconstruction as a tall mass of flats; he had acceded, some time before,
to overtures for this conversion--in which, now that it was going
forward, it had been not the least of his astonishments to find himself
able, on the spot, and though without a previous ounce of such
experience, to participate with a certain intelligence, almost with a
certain authority. He had lived his life with his back so turned to such
concerns and his face addressed to those of so different an order that he
scarce knew what to make of this lively stir, in a compartment of his
mind never yet penetrated, of a capacity for business and a sense for
construction. These virtues, so common all round him now, had been
dormant in his own organism--where it might be said of them perhaps that
they had slept the sleep of the just. At present, in the splendid autumn
weather--the autumn at least was a pure boon in the terrible place--he
loafed about his "work" undeterred, secretly agitated; not in the least
"minding" that the whole proposition, as they said, was vulgar and
sordid, and ready to climb ladders, to walk the plank, to handle
materials and look wise about them, to ask questions, in fine, and
challenge explanations and really "go into" figures.

It amused, it verily quite charmed him; and, by the same stroke, it
amused, and even more, Alice Staverton, though perhaps charming her
perceptibly less. She wasn't, however, going to be better-off for it, as
_he_ was--and so astonishingly much: nothing was now likely, he knew,
ever to make her better-off than she found herself, in the afternoon of
life, as the delicately frugal possessor and tenant of the small house in
Irving Place to which she had subtly managed to cling through her almost
unbroken New York career. If he knew the way to it now better than to
any other address among the dreadful multiplied numberings which seemed
to him to reduce the whole place to some vast ledger-page, overgrown,
fantastic, of ruled and criss-crossed lines and figures--if he had
formed, for his consolation, that habit, it was really not a little
because of the charm of his having encountered and recognised, in the
vast wilderness of the wholesale, breaking through the mere gross
generalisation of wealth and force and success, a small still scene where
items and shades, all delicate things, kept the sharpness of the notes of
a high voice perfectly trained, and where economy hung about like the
scent of a garden. His old friend lived with one maid and herself dusted
her relics and trimmed her lamps and polished her silver; she stood oft,
in the awful modern crush, when she could, but she sallied forth and did
battle when the challenge was really to "spirit," the spirit she after
all confessed to, proudly and a little shyly, as to that of the better
time, that of _their_ common, their quite far-away and antediluvian
social period and order. She made use of the street-cars when need be,
the terrible things that people scrambled for as the panic-stricken at
sea scramble for the boats; she affronted, inscrutably, under stress, all
the public concussions and ordeals; and yet, with that slim mystifying
grace of her appearance, which defied you to say if she were a fair young
woman who looked older through trouble, or a fine smooth older one who
looked young through successful indifference with her precious reference,
above all, to memories and histories into which he could enter, she was
as exquisite for him as some pale pressed flower (a rarity to begin
with), and, failing other sweetnesses, she was a sufficient reward of his
effort. They had communities of knowledge, "their" knowledge (this
discriminating possessive was always on her lips) of presences of the
other age, presences all overlaid, in his case, by the experience of a
man and the freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity,
by passages of life that were strange and dim to her, just by "Europe" in
short, but still unobscured, still exposed and cherished, under that
pious visitation of the spirit from which she had never been diverted.

She had come with him one day to see how his "apartment-house" was
rising; he had helped her over gaps and explained to her plans, and while
they were there had happened to have, before her, a brief but lively
discussion with the man in charge, the representative of the building
firm that had undertaken his work. He had found himself quite "standing
up" to this personage over a failure on the latter's part to observe some
detail of one of their noted conditions, and had so lucidly argued his
case that, besides ever so prettily flushing, at the time, for sympathy
in his triumph, she had afterwards said to him (though to a slightly
greater effect of irony) that he had clearly for too many years neglected
a real gift. If he had but stayed at home he would have anticipated the
inventor of the sky-scraper. If he had but stayed at home he would have
discovered his genius in time really to start some new variety of awful
architectural hare and run it till it burrowed in a gold mine. He was to
remember these words, while the weeks elapsed, for the small silver ring
they had sounded over the queerest and deepest of his own lately most
disguised and most muffled vibrations.

It had begun to be present to him after the first fortnight, it had
broken out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton wonderment:
it met him there--and this was the image under which he himself judged
the matter, or at least, not a little, thrilled and flushed with it--very
much as he might have been met by some strange figure, some unexpected
occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house. The
quaint analogy quite hauntingly remained with him, when he didn't indeed
rather improve it by a still intenser form: that of his opening a door
behind which he would have made sure of finding nothing, a door into a
room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed
start, on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted in the
middle of the place and facing him through the dusk. After that visit to
the house in construction he walked with his companion to see the other
and always so much the better one, which in the eastward direction formed
one of the corners,--the "jolly" one precisely, of the street now so
generally dishonoured and disfigured in its westward reaches, and of the
comparatively conservative Avenue. The Avenue still had pretensions, as
Miss Staverton said, to decency; the old people had mostly gone, the old
names were unknown, and here and there an old association seemed to
stray, all vaguely, like some very aged person, out too late, whom you
might meet and feel the impulse to watch or follow, in kindness, for safe
restoration to shelter.

They went in together, our friends; he admitted himself with his key, as
he kept no one there, he explained, preferring, for his reasons, to leave
the place empty, under a simple arrangement with a good woman living in
the neighbourhood and who came for a daily hour to open windows and dust
and sweep. Spencer Brydon had his reasons and was growingly aware of
them; they seemed to him better each time he was there, though he didn't
name them all to his companion, any more than he told her as yet how
often, how quite absurdly often, he himself came. He only let her see
for the present, while they walked through the great blank rooms, that
absolute vacancy reigned and that, from top to bottom, there was nothing
but Mrs. Muldoon's broomstick, in a corner, to tempt the burglar. Mrs.
Muldoon was then on the premises, and she loquaciously attended the
visitors, preceding them from room to room and pushing back shutters and
throwing up sashes--all to show them, as she remarked, how little there
was to see. There was little indeed to see in the great gaunt shell
where the main dispositions and the general apportionment of space, the
style of an age of ampler allowances, had nevertheless for its master
their honest pleading message, affecting him as some good old servant's,
some lifelong retainer's appeal for a character, or even for a retiring-
pension; yet it was also a remark of Mrs. Muldoon's that, glad as she was
to oblige him by her noonday round, there was a request she greatly hoped
he would never make of her. If he should wish her for any reason to come
in after dark she would just tell him, if he "plased," that he must ask
it of somebody else.

The fact that there was nothing to see didn't militate for the worthy
woman against what one _might_ see, and she put it frankly to Miss
Staverton that no lady could be expected to like, could she? "craping up
to thim top storeys in the ayvil hours." The gas and the electric light
were off the house, and she fairly evoked a gruesome vision of her march
through the great grey rooms--so many of them as there were too!--with
her glimmering taper. Miss Staverton met her honest glare with a smile
and the profession that she herself certainly would recoil from such an
adventure. Spencer Brydon meanwhile held his peace--for the moment; the
question of the "evil" hours in his old home had already become too grave
for him. He had begun some time since to "crape," and he knew just why a
packet of candles addressed to that pursuit had been stowed by his own
hand, three weeks before, at the back of a drawer of the fine old
sideboard that occupied, as a "fixture," the deep recess in the dining-
room. Just now he laughed at his companions--quickly however changing
the subject; for the reason that, in the first place, his laugh struck
him even at that moment as starting the odd echo, the conscious human
resonance (he scarce knew how to qualify it) that sounds made while he
was there alone sent back to his ear or his fancy; and that, in the
second, he imagined Alice Staverton for the instant on the point of
asking him, with a divination, if he ever so prowled. There were
divinations he was unprepared for, and he had at all events averted
enquiry by the time Mrs. Muldoon had left them, passing on to other
parts.

There was happily enough to say, on so consecrated a spot, that could be
said freely and fairly; so that a whole train of declarations was
precipitated by his friend's having herself broken out, after a yearning
look round: "But I hope you don't mean they want you to pull _this_ to
pieces!" His answer came, promptly, with his re-awakened wrath: it was
of course exactly what they wanted, and what they were "at" him for,
daily, with the iteration of people who couldn't for their life
understand a man's liability to decent feelings. He had found the place,
just as it stood and beyond what he could express, an interest and a joy.
There were values other than the beastly rent-values, and in short, in
short--! But it was thus Miss Staverton took him up. "In short you're
to make so good a thing of your sky-scraper that, living in luxury on
_those_ ill-gotten gains, you can afford for a while to be sentimental
here!" Her smile had for him, with the words, the particular mild irony
with which he found half her talk suffused; an irony without bitterness
and that came, exactly, from her having so much imagination--not, like
the cheap sarcasms with which one heard most people, about the world of
"society," bid for the reputation of cleverness, from nobody's really
having any. It was agreeable to him at this very moment to be sure that
when he had answered, after a brief demur, "Well, yes; so, precisely, you
may put it!" her imagination would still do him justice. He explained
that even if never a dollar were to come to him from the other house he
would nevertheless cherish this one; and he dwelt, further, while they
lingered and wandered, on the fact of the stupefaction he was already
exciting, the positive mystification he felt himself create.

He spoke of the value of all he read into it, into the mere sight of the
walls, mere shapes of the rooms, mere sound of the floors, mere feel, in
his hand, of the old silver-plated knobs of the several mahogany doors,
which suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead the seventy years
of the past in fine that these things represented, the annals of nearly
three generations, counting his grandfather's, the one that had ended
there, and the impalpable ashes of his long-extinct youth, afloat in the
very air like microscopic motes. She listened to everything; she was a
woman who answered intimately but who utterly didn't chatter. She
scattered abroad therefore no cloud of words; she could assent, she could
agree, above all she could encourage, without doing that. Only at the
last she went a little further than he had done himself. "And then how
do you know? You may still, after all, want to live here." It rather
indeed pulled him up, for it wasn't what he had been thinking, at least
in her sense of the words, "You mean I may decide to stay on for the sake
of it?"

"Well, _with_ such a home--!" But, quite beautifully, she had too much
tact to dot so monstrous an _i_, and it was precisely an illustration of
the way she didn't rattle. How could any one--of any wit--insist on any
one else's "wanting" to live in New York?

"Oh," he said, "I _might_ have lived here (since I had my opportunity
early in life); I might have put in here all these years. Then
everything would have been different enough--and, I dare say, 'funny'
enough. But that's another matter. And then the beauty of it--I mean of
my perversity, of my refusal to agree to a 'deal'--is just in the total
absence of a reason. Don't you see that if I had a reason about the
matter at all it would _have_ to be the other way, and would then be
inevitably a reason of dollars? There are no reasons here _but_ of
dollars. Let us therefore have none whatever--not the ghost of one."

They were back in the hall then for departure, but from where they stood
the vista was large, through an open door, into the great square main
saloon, with its almost antique felicity of brave spaces between windows.
Her eyes came back from that reach and met his own a moment. "Are you
very sure the 'ghost' of one doesn't, much rather, serve--?"

He had a positive sense of turning pale. But it was as near as they were
then to come. For he made answer, he believed, between a glare and a
grin: "Oh ghosts--of course the place must swarm with them! I should be
ashamed of it if it didn't. Poor Mrs. Muldoon's right, and it's why I
haven't asked her to do more than look in."

Miss Staverton's gaze again lost itself, and things she didn't utter, it
was clear, came and went in her mind. She might even for the minute, off
there in the fine room, have imagined some element dimly gathering.
Simplified like the death-mask of a handsome face, it perhaps produced
for her just then an effect akin to the stir of an expression in the
"set" commemorative plaster. Yet whatever her impression may have been
she produced instead a vague platitude. "Well, if it were only furnished
and lived in--!"

She appeared to imply that in case of its being still furnished he might
have been a little less opposed to the idea of a return. But she passed
straight into the vestibule, as if to leave her words behind her, and the
next moment he had opened the house-door and was standing with her on the
steps. He closed the door and, while he re-pocketed his key, looking up
and down, they took in the comparatively harsh actuality of the Avenue,
which reminded him of the assault of the outer light of the Desert on the
traveller emerging from an Egyptian tomb. But he risked before they
stepped into the street his gathered answer to her speech. "For me it
_is_ lived in. For me it is furnished." At which it was easy for her to
sigh "Ah yes!" all vaguely and discreetly; since his parents and his
favourite sister, to say nothing of other kin, in numbers, had run their
course and met their end there. That represented, within the walls,
ineffaceable life.

It was a few days after this that, during an hour passed with her again,
he had expressed his impatience of the too flattering curiosity--among
the people he met--about his appreciation of New York. He had arrived at
none at all that was socially producible, and as for that matter of his
"thinking" (thinking the better or the worse of anything there) he was
wholly taken up with one subject of thought. It was mere vain egoism,
and it was moreover, if she liked, a morbid obsession. He found all
things come back to the question of what he personally might have been,
how he might have led his life and "turned out," if he had not so, at the
outset, given it up. And confessing for the first time to the intensity
within him of this absurd speculation--which but proved also, no doubt,
the habit of too selfishly thinking--he affirmed the impotence there of
any other source of interest, any other native appeal. "What would it
have made of me, what would it have made of me? I keep for ever
wondering, all idiotically; as if I could possibly know! I see what it
has made of dozens of others, those I meet, and it positively aches
within me, to the point of exasperation, that it would have made
something of me as well. Only I can't make out what, and the worry of
it, the small rage of curiosity never to be satisfied, brings back what I
remember to have felt, once or twice, after judging best, for reasons, to
burn some important letter unopened. I've been sorry, I've hated it--I've
never known what was in the letter. You may, of course, say it's a
trifle--!"

"I don't say it's a trifle," Miss Staverton gravely interrupted.

She was seated by her fire, and before her, on his feet and restless, he
turned to and fro between this intensity of his idea and a fitful and
unseeing inspection, through his single eye-glass, of the dear little old
objects on her chimney-piece. Her interruption made him for an instant
look at her harder. "I shouldn't care if you did!" he laughed, however;
"and it's only a figure, at any rate, for the way I now feel. _Not_ to
have followed my perverse young course--and almost in the teeth of my
father's curse, as I may say; not to have kept it up, so, 'over there,'
from that day to this, without a doubt or a pang; not, above all, to have
liked it, to have loved it, so much, loved it, no doubt, with such an
abysmal conceit of my own preference; some variation from _that_, I say,
must have produced some different effect for my life and for my 'form.' I
should have stuck here--if it had been possible; and I was too young, at
twenty-three, to judge, _pour deux sous_, whether it _were_ possible. If
I had waited I might have seen it was, and then I might have been, by
staying here, something nearer to one of these types who have been
hammered so hard and made so keen by their conditions. It isn't that I
admire them so much--the question of any charm in them, or of any charm,
beyond that of the rank money-passion, exerted by their conditions _for_
them, has nothing to do with the matter: it's only a question of what
fantastic, yet perfectly possible, development of my own nature I mayn't
have missed. It comes over me that I had then a strange _alter ego_ deep
down somewhere within me, as the full-blown flower is in the small tight
bud, and that I just took the course, I just transferred him to the
climate, that blighted him for once and for ever."

"And you wonder about the flower," Miss Staverton said. "So do I, if you
want to know; and so I've been wondering these several weeks. I believe
in the flower," she continued, "I feel it would have been quite splendid,
quite huge and monstrous."

"Monstrous above all!" her visitor echoed; "and I imagine, by the same
stroke, quite hideous and offensive."

"You don't believe that," she returned; "if you did you wouldn't wonder.
You'd know, and that would be enough for you. What you feel--and what I
feel _for_ you--is that you'd have had power."

"You'd have liked me that way?" he asked.

She barely hung fire. "How should I not have liked you?"

"I see. You'd have liked me, have preferred me, a billionaire!"

"How should I not have liked you?" she simply again asked.

He stood before her still--her question kept him motionless. He took it
in, so much there was of it; and indeed his not otherwise meeting it
testified to that. "I know at least what I am," he simply went on; "the
other side of the medal's clear enough. I've not been edifying--I
believe I'm thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent.
I've followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods; it must have
come to you again and again--in fact you've admitted to me as much--that
I was leading, at any time these thirty years, a selfish frivolous
scandalous life. And you see what it has made of me."