The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II)
H >> Henry James >> The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II)Afterwards, when his cousin had come back and they had gone down to
dinner together, where he sat facing her at a little table decorated in
the middle with flowers, a position from which he had another view,
through a window where the curtain remained undrawn by her direction
(she called his attention to this--it was for his benefit), of the
dusky, empty river, spotted with points of light--at this period, I say,
it was very easy for him to remark to himself that nothing would induce
him to make love to such a type as that. Several months later, in New
York, in conversation with Mrs. Luna, of whom he was destined to see a
good deal, he alluded by chance to this repast, to the way her sister
had placed him at table, and to the remark with which she had pointed
out the advantage of his seat.
"That's what they call in Boston being very 'thoughtful,'" Mrs. Luna
said, "giving you the Back Bay (don't you hate the name?) to look at,
and then taking credit for it."
This, however, was in the future; what Basil Ransom actually perceived
was that Miss Chancellor was a signal old maid. That was her quality,
her destiny; nothing could be more distinctly written. There are women
who are unmarried by accident, and others who are unmarried by option;
but Olive Chancellor was unmarried by every implication of her being.
She was a spinster as Shelley was a lyric poet, or as the month of
August is sultry. She was so essentially a celibate that Ransom found
himself thinking of her as old, though when he came to look at her (as
he said to himself) it was apparent that her years were fewer than his
own. He did not dislike her, she had been so friendly; but, little by
little, she gave him an uneasy feeling--the sense that you could never
be safe with a person who took things so hard. It came over him that it
was because she took things hard she had sought his acquaintance; it had
been because she was strenuous, not because she was genial; she had had
in her eye--and what an extraordinary eye it was!--not a pleasure, but a
duty. She would expect him to be strenuous in return; but he
couldn't--in private life, he couldn't; privacy for Basil Ransom
consisted entirely in what he called "laying off." She was not so plain
on further acquaintance as she had seemed to him at first; even the
young Mississippian had culture enough to see that she was refined. Her
white skin had a singular look of being drawn tightly across her face;
but her features, though sharp and irregular, were delicate in a fashion
that suggested good breeding. Their line was perverse, but it was not
poor. The curious tint of her eyes was a living colour; when she turned
it upon you, you thought vaguely of the glitter of green ice. She had
absolutely no figure, and presented a certain appearance of feeling
cold. With all this, there was something very modern and highly
developed in her aspect; she had the advantages as well as the drawbacks
of a nervous organisation. She smiled constantly at her guest, but from
the beginning to the end of dinner, though he made several remarks that
he thought might prove amusing, she never once laughed. Later, he saw
that she was a woman without laughter; exhilaration, if it ever visited
her, was dumb. Once only, in the course of his subsequent acquaintance
with her, did it find a voice; and then the sound remained in Ransom's
ear as one of the strangest he had heard.
She asked him a great many questions, and made no comment on his
answers, which only served to suggest to her fresh inquiries. Her
shyness had quite left her, it did not come back; she had confidence
enough to wish him to see that she took a great interest in him. Why
should she? he wondered, He couldn't believe he was one of _her_ kind;
he was conscious of much Bohemianism--he drank beer, in New York, in
cellars, knew no ladies, and was familiar with a "variety" actress.
Certainly, as she knew him better, she would disapprove of him, though,
of course, he would never mention the actress, nor even, if necessary,
the beer. Ransom's conception of vice was purely as a series of special
cases, of explicable accidents. Not that he cared; if it were a part of
the Boston character to be inquiring, he would be to the last a
courteous Mississippian. He would tell her about Mississippi as much as
she liked; he didn't care how much he told her that the old ideas in the
South were played out. She would not understand him any the better for
that; she would not know how little his own views could be gathered from
such a limited admission. What her sister imparted to him about her
mania for "reform" had left in his mouth a kind of unpleasant
aftertaste; he felt, at any rate, that if she had the religion of
humanity--Basil Ransom had read Comte, he had read everything--she would
never understand him. He, too, had a private vision of reform, but the
first principle of it was to reform the reformers. As they drew to the
close of a meal which, in spite of all latent incompatibilities, had
gone off brilliantly, she said to him that she should have to leave him
after dinner, unless perhaps he should be inclined to accompany her. She
was going to a small gathering at the house of a friend who had asked a
few people, "interested in new ideas," to meet Mrs. Farrinder.
"Oh, thank you," said Basil Ransom. "Is it a party? I haven't been to a
party since Mississippi seceded."
"No; Miss Birdseye doesn't give parties. She's an ascetic."
"Oh, well, we have had our dinner," Ransom rejoined, laughing.
His hostess sat silent a moment, with her eyes on the ground; she looked
at such times as if she were hesitating greatly between several things
she might say, all so important that it was difficult to choose.
"I think it might interest you," she remarked presently. "You will hear
some discussion, if you are fond of that. Perhaps you wouldn't agree,"
she added, resting her strange eyes on him.
"Perhaps I shouldn't--I don't agree with everything," he said, smiling
and stroking his leg.
"Don't you care for human progress?" Miss Chancellor went on.
"I don't know--I never saw any. Are you going to show me some?"
"I can show you an earnest effort towards it. That's the most one can be
sure of. But I am not sure you are worthy."
"Is it something very Bostonian? I should like to see that," said Basil
Ransom.
"There are movements in other cities. Mrs. Farrinder goes everywhere;
she may speak to-night."
"Mrs. Farrinder, the celebrated----?"
"Yes, the celebrated; the great apostle of the emancipation of women.
She is a great friend of Miss Birdseye."
"And who is Miss Birdseye?"
"She is one of our celebrities. She is the woman in the world, I
suppose, who has laboured most for every wise reform. I think I ought to
tell you," Miss Chancellor went on in a moment, "she was one of the
earliest, one of the most passionate, of the old Abolitionists."
She had thought, indeed, she ought to tell him that, and it threw her
into a little tremor of excitement to do so. Yet, if she had been afraid
he would show some irritation at this news, she was disappointed at the
geniality with which he exclaimed:
"Why, poor old lady--she must be quite mature!"
It was therefore with some severity that she rejoined:
"She will never be old. She is the youngest spirit I know. But if you
are not in sympathy, perhaps you had better not come," she went on.
"In sympathy with what, dear madam?" Basil Ransom asked, failing still,
to her perception, to catch the tone of real seriousness. "If, as you
say, there is to be a discussion, there will be different sides, and of
course one can't sympathise with both."
"Yes, but every one will, in his way--or in her way--plead the cause of
the new truths. If you don't care for them, you won't go with us."
"I tell you I haven't the least idea what they are! I have never yet
encountered in the world any but old truths--as old as the sun and moon.
How can I know? But _do_ take me; it's such a chance to see Boston."
"It isn't Boston--it's humanity!" Miss Chancellor, as she made this
remark, rose from her chair, and her movement seemed to say that she
consented. But before she quitted her kinsman to get ready, she observed
to him that she was sure he knew what she meant; he was only pretending
he didn't.
"Well, perhaps, after all, I have a general idea," he confessed; "but
don't you see how this little reunion will give me a chance to fix it?"
She lingered an instant, with her anxious face. "Mrs. Farrinder will fix
it!" she said; and she went to prepare herself.
It was in this poor young lady's nature to be anxious, to have scruple
within scruple and to forecast the consequences of things. She returned
in ten minutes, in her bonnet, which she had apparently assumed in
recognition of Miss Birdseye's asceticism. As she stood there drawing on
her gloves--her visitor had fortified himself against Mrs. Farrinder by
another glass of wine--she declared to him that she quite repented of
having proposed to him to go; something told her that he would be an
unfavourable element.
"Why, is it going to be a spiritual _seance_?" Basil Ransom asked.
"Well, I have heard at Miss Birdseye's some inspirational speaking."
Olive Chancellor was determined to look him straight in the face as she
said this; her sense of the way it might strike him operated as a
cogent, not as a deterrent, reason.
"Why, Miss Olive, it's just got up on purpose for me!" cried the young
Mississippian, radiant, and clasping his hands. She thought him very
handsome as he said this, but reflected that unfortunately men didn't
care for the truth, especially the new kinds, in proportion as they were
good-looking. She had, however, a moral resource that she could always
fall back upon; it had already been a comfort to her, on occasions of
acute feeling, that she hated men, as a class, anyway. "And I want so
much to see an old Abolitionist; I have never laid eyes on one," Basil
Ransom added.
"Of course you couldn't see one in the South; you were too afraid of
them to let them come there!" She was now trying to think of something
she might say that would be sufficiently disagreeable to make him cease
to insist on accompanying her; for, strange to record--if anything, in a
person of that intense sensibility, be stranger than any other--her
second thought with regard to having asked him had deepened with the
elapsing moments into an unreasoned terror of the effect of his
presence. "Perhaps Miss Birdseye won't like you," she went on, as they
waited for the carriage.
"I don't know; I reckon she will," said Basil Ransom good-humouredly. He
evidently had no intention of giving up his opportunity.
From the window of the dining-room, at that moment, they heard the
carriage drive up. Miss Birdseye lived at the South End; the distance
was considerable, and Miss Chancellor had ordered a hackney-coach, it
being one of the advantages of living in Charles Street that stables
were near. The logic of her conduct was none of the clearest; for if she
had been alone she would have proceeded to her destination by the aid of
the street-car; not from economy (for she had the good fortune not to be
obliged to consult it to that degree), and not from any love of
wandering about Boston at night (a kind of exposure she greatly
disliked), but by reason of a theory she devotedly nursed, a theory
which bade her put off invidious differences and mingle in the common
life. She would have gone on foot to Boylston Street, and there she
would have taken the public conveyance (in her heart she loathed it) to
the South End. Boston was full of poor girls who had to walk about at
night and to squeeze into horse-cars in which every sense was
displeased; and why should she hold herself superior to these? Olive
Chancellor regulated her conduct on lofty principles, and this is why,
having to-night the advantage of a gentleman's protection, she sent for
a carriage to obliterate that patronage. If they had gone together in
the common way she would have seemed to owe it to him that she should be
so daring, and he belonged to a sex to which she wished to be under no
obligations. Months before, when she wrote to him, it had been with the
sense, rather, of putting _him_ in debt. As they rolled toward the South
End, side by side, in a good deal of silence, bouncing and bumping over
the railway-tracks very little less, after all, than if their wheels had
been fitted to them, and looking out on either side at rows of red
houses, dusky in the lamp-light, with protuberant fronts, approached by
ladders of stone; as they proceeded, with these contemplative
undulations, Miss Chancellor said to her companion, with a concentrated
desire to defy him, as a punishment for having thrown her (she couldn't
tell why) into such a tremor:
"Don't you believe, then, in the coming of a better day--in its being
possible to do something for the human race?"
Poor Ransom perceived the defiance, and he felt rather bewildered; he
wondered what type, after all, he _had_ got hold of, and what game was
being played with him. Why had she made advances, if she wanted to pinch
him this way? However, he was good for any game--that one as well as
another--and he saw that he was "in" for something of which he had long
desired to have a nearer view. "Well, Miss Olive," he answered, putting
on again his big hat, which he had been holding in his lap, "what
strikes me most is that the human race has got to bear its troubles."
"That's what men say to women, to make them patient in the position they
have made for them."
"Oh, the position of women!" Basil Ransom exclaimed. "The position of
women is to make fools of men. I would change my position for yours any
day," he went on. "That's what I said to myself as I sat there in your
elegant home."
He could not see, in the dimness of the carriage, that she had flushed
quickly, and he did not know that she disliked to be reminded of certain
things which, for her, were mitigations of the hard feminine lot. But
the passionate quaver with which, a moment later, she answered him
sufficiently assured him that he had touched her at a tender point.
"Do you make it a reproach to me that I happen to have a little money?
The dearest wish of my heart is to do something with it for others--for
the miserable."
Basil Ransom might have greeted this last declaration with the sympathy
it deserved, might have commended the noble aspirations of his
kinswoman. But what struck him, rather, was the oddity of so sudden a
sharpness of pitch in an intercourse which, an hour or two before, had
begun in perfect amity, and he burst once more into an irrepressible
laugh. This made his companion feel, with intensity, how little she was
joking. "I don't know why I should care what you think," she said.
"Don't care--don't care. What does it matter? It is not of the slightest
importance."
He might say that, but it was not true; she felt that there were reasons
why she should care. She had brought him into her life, and she should
have to pay for it. But she wished to know the worst at once. "Are you
against our emancipation?" she asked, turning a white face on him in the
momentary radiance of a street-lamp.
"Do you mean your voting and preaching and all that sort of thing?" He
made this inquiry, but seeing how seriously she would take his answer,
he was almost frightened, and hung fire. "I will tell you when I have
heard Mrs. Farrinder."
They had arrived at the address given by Miss Chancellor to the
coachman, and their vehicle stopped with a lurch. Basil Ransom got out;
he stood at the door with an extended hand, to assist the young lady.
But she seemed to hesitate; she sat there with her spectral face. "You
hate it!" she exclaimed, in a low tone.
"Miss Birdseye will convert me," said Ransom, with intention; for he had
grown very curious, and he was afraid that now, at the last, Miss
Chancellor would prevent his entering the house. She alighted without
his help, and behind her he ascended the high steps of Miss Birdseye's
residence. He had grown very curious, and among the things he wanted to
know was why in the world this ticklish spinster had written to him.
IV
She had told him before they started that they should be early; she
wished to see Miss Birdseye alone, before the arrival of any one else.
This was just for the pleasure of seeing her--it was an opportunity; she
was always so taken up with others. She received Miss Chancellor in the
hall of the mansion, which had a salient front, an enormous and very
high number--756--painted in gilt on the glass light above the door, a
tin sign bearing the name of a doctress (Mary J. Prance) suspended from
one of the windows of the basement, and a peculiar look of being both
new and faded--a kind of modern fatigue--like certain articles of
commerce which are sold at a reduction as shop-worn. The hall was very
narrow; a considerable part of it was occupied by a large hat-tree, from
which several coats and shawls already depended; the rest offered space
for certain lateral demonstrations on Miss Birdseye's part. She sidled
about her visitors, and at last went round to open for them a door of
further admission, which happened to be locked inside. She was a little
old lady, with an enormous head; that was the first thing Ransom
noticed--the vast, fair, protuberant, candid, ungarnished brow,
surmounting a pair of weak, kind, tired-looking eyes, and ineffectually
balanced in the rear by a cap which had the air of falling backward, and
which Miss Birdseye suddenly felt for while she talked, with
unsuccessful irrelevant movements. She had a sad, soft, pale face, which
(and it was the effect of her whole head) looked as if it had been
soaked, blurred, and made vague by exposure to some slow dissolvent. The
long practice of philanthropy had not given accent to her features; it
had rubbed out their transitions, their meanings. The waves of sympathy,
of enthusiasm, had wrought upon them in the same way in which the waves
of time finally modify the surface of old marble busts, gradually
washing away their sharpness, their details. In her large countenance
her dim little smile scarcely showed. It was a mere sketch of a smile, a
kind of instalment, or payment on account; it seemed to say that she
would smile more if she had time, but that you could see, without this,
that she was gentle and easy to beguile.
She always dressed in the same way: she wore a loose black jacket, with
deep pockets, which were stuffed with papers, memoranda of a voluminous
correspondence; and from beneath her jacket depended a short stuff
dress. The brevity of this simple garment was the one device by which
Miss Birdseye managed to suggest that she was a woman of business, that
she wished to be free for action. She belonged to the Short-Skirts
League, as a matter of course; for she belonged to any and every league
that had been founded for almost any purpose whatever. This did not
prevent her being a confused, entangled, inconsequent, discursive old
woman, whose charity began at home and ended nowhere, whose credulity
kept pace with it, and who knew less about her fellow-creatures, if
possible, after fifty years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she had
gone into the field to testify against the iniquity of most
arrangements. Basil Ransom knew very little about such a life as hers,
but she seemed to him a revelation of a class, and a multitude of
socialistic figures, of names and episodes that he had heard of, grouped
themselves behind her. She looked as if she had spent her life on
platforms, in audiences, in conventions, in phalansteries, in _seances_;
in her faded face there was a kind of reflexion of ugly lecture-lamps;
with its habit of an upward angle, it seemed turned toward a public
speaker, with an effort of respiration in the thick air in which social
reforms are usually discussed. She talked continually, in a voice of
which the spring seemed broken, like that of an over-worked bell-wire;
and when Miss Chancellor explained that she had brought Mr. Ransom
because he was so anxious to meet Mrs. Farrinder, she gave the young man
a delicate, dirty, democratic little hand, looking at him kindly, as she
could not help doing, but without the smallest discrimination as against
others who might not have the good fortune (which involved, possibly, an
injustice) to be present on such an interesting occasion. She struck him
as very poor, but it was only afterward that he learned she had never
had a penny in her life. No one had an idea how she lived; whenever
money was given her she gave it away to a negro or a refugee. No woman
could be less invidious, but on the whole she preferred these two
classes of the human race. Since the Civil War much of her occupation
was gone; for before that her best hours had been spent in fancying that
she was helping some Southern slave to escape. It would have been a nice
question whether, in her heart of hearts, for the sake of this
excitement, she did not sometimes wish the blacks back in bondage. She
had suffered in the same way by the relaxation of many European
despotisms, for in former years much of the romance of her life had been
in smoothing the pillow of exile for banished conspirators. Her refugees
had been very precious to her; she was always trying to raise money for
some cadaverous Pole, to obtain lessons for some shirtless Italian.
There was a legend that an Hungarian had once possessed himself of her
affections, and had disappeared after robbing her of everything she
possessed. This, however, was very apocryphal, for she had never
possessed anything, and it was open to grave doubt that she could have
entertained a sentiment so personal. She was in love, even in those
days, only with causes, and she languished only for emancipations. But
they had been the happiest days, for when causes were embodied in
foreigners (what else were the Africans?), they were certainly more
appealing.
She had just come down to see Doctor Prance--to see whether she wouldn't
like to come up. But she wasn't in her room, and Miss Birdseye guessed
she had gone out to her supper; she got her supper at a boarding-table
about two blocks off. Miss Birdseye expressed the hope that Miss
Chancellor had had hers; she would have had plenty of time to take it,
for no one had come in yet; she didn't know what made them all so late.
Ransom perceived that the garments suspended to the hat-rack were not a
sign that Miss Birdseye's friends had assembled; if he had gone a little
further still he would have recognised the house as one of those in
which mysterious articles of clothing are always hooked to something in
the hall. Miss Birdseye's visitors, those of Doctor Prance, and of other
tenants--for Number 756 was the common residence of several persons,
among whom there prevailed much vagueness of boundary--used to leave
things to be called for; many of them went about with satchels and
reticules, for which they were always looking for places of deposit.
What completed the character of this interior was Miss Birdseye's own
apartment, into which her guests presently made their way, and where
they were joined by various other members of the good lady's circle.
Indeed, it completed Miss Birdseye herself, if anything could be said to
render that office to this essentially formless old woman, who had no
more outline than a bundle of hay. But the bareness of her long, loose,
empty parlour (it was shaped exactly like Miss Chancellor's) told that
she had never had any needs but moral needs, and that all her history
had been that of her sympathies. The place was lighted by a small hot
glare of gas, which made it look white and featureless. It struck even
Basil Ransom with its flatness, and he said to himself that his cousin
must have a very big bee in her bonnet to make her like such a house. He
did not know then, and he never knew, that she mortally disliked it, and
that in a career in which she was constantly exposing herself to offence
and laceration, her most poignant suffering came from the injury of her
taste. She had tried to kill that nerve, to persuade herself that taste
was only frivolity in the disguise of knowledge; but her susceptibility
was constantly blooming afresh and making her wonder whether an absence
of nice arrangements were a necessary part of the enthusiasm of
humanity. Miss Birdseye was always trying to obtain employment, lessons
in drawing, orders for portraits, for poor foreign artists, as to the
greatness of whose talent she pledged herself without reserve; but in
point of fact she had not the faintest sense of the scenic or plastic
side of life.
Toward nine o'clock the light of her hissing burners smote the majestic
person of Mrs. Farrinder, who might have contributed to answer that
question of Miss Chancellor's in the negative. She was a copious,
handsome woman, in whom angularity had been corrected by the air of
success; she had a rustling dress (it was evident what _she_ thought
about taste), abundant hair of a glossy blackness, a pair of folded
arms, the expression of which seemed to say that rest, in such a career
as hers, was as sweet as it was brief, and a terrible regularity of
feature. I apply that adjective to her fine placid mask because she
seemed to face you with a question of which the answer was preordained,
to ask you how a countenance could fail to be noble of which the
measurements were so correct. You could contest neither the measurements
nor the nobleness, and had to feel that Mrs. Farrinder imposed herself.
There was a lithographic smoothness about her, and a mixture of the
American matron and the public character. There was something public in
her eye, which was large, cold, and quiet; it had acquired a sort of
exposed reticence from the habit of looking down from a lecture-desk,
over a sea of heads, while its distinguished owner was eulogised by a
leading citizen. Mrs. Farrinder, at almost any time, had the air of
being introduced by a few remarks. She talked with great slowness and
distinctness, and evidently a high sense of responsibility; she
pronounced every syllable of every word and insisted on being explicit.
If, in conversation with her, you attempted to take anything for
granted, or to jump two or three steps at a time, she paused, looking at
you with a cold patience, as if she knew that trick, and then went on at
her own measured pace. She lectured on temperance and the rights of
women; the ends she laboured for were to give the ballot to every woman
in the country and to take the flowing bowl from every man. She was held
to have a very fine manner, and to embody the domestic virtues and the
graces of the drawing-room; to be a shining proof, in short, that the
forum, for ladies, is not necessarily hostile to the fireside. She had a
husband, and his name was Amariah.