The Portrait of A Lady (89 page)

She turned on him as if he had struck her. ‘‘Are you mad?'' she cried.

‘‘I have never been so sane; I see the whole thing. Don't think it's necessary to defend him. But I won't say another word against him; I will speak only of you,'' Goodwood added, quickly. ‘‘How can you pretend you are not heartbroken? You don't know what to do—you don't know where to turn. It's too late to play a part; didn't you leave all that behind you in Rome? Touchett knew all about it—and I knew it too—what it would cost you to come here. It will cost you your life! When I know that, how can I keep myself from wishing to save you? What would you think of me if I should stand still and see you go back to your reward? ‘It's awful, what she'll have to pay for it!'—that's what Touchett said to me. I may tell you that, mayn't I? He was such a near relation!'' cried Goodwood, making his point again. ‘‘I would sooner have been shot than let another man say those things to me; but he was different; he seemed to me to have the right. It was after he got home—when he saw he was dying, and when I saw it too. I understand all about it; you are afraid to go back. You are perfectly alone; you don't know where to turn. Now it is that I want you to think of me.''

‘‘To think of you?'' Isabel said, standing before him in the dusk. The idea of which she had caught a glimpse a few moments before now loomed large. She threw back her head a little; she stared at it as if it had been a comet in the sky.

‘‘You don't know where to turn; turn to me! I want to persuade you to trust me,'' Goodwood repeated. And then he paused a moment, with his shining eyes. ‘‘Why should you go back—why should you go through that ghastly form?''

‘‘To get away from you!'' she answered. But this expressed only a little of what she felt. The rest was that she had never been loved before. It wrapped her about; it lifted her off her feet.

At first, in rejoinder to what she had said, it seemed to her that he would break out into greater violence. But after an instant he was perfectly quiet; he wished to prove that he was sane, that he had reasoned it all out. ‘‘I wish to prevent that, and I think I may, if you will only listen to me. It's too monstrous to think of sinking back into that misery. It's you that are out of your mind. Trust me as if I had the care of you. Why shouldn't we be happy—when it's here before us, when it's so easy? I am yours forever—forever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock. What have you to care about? You have no children; that perhaps would be an obstacle. As it is, you have nothing to consider. You must save what you can of your life; you mustn't lose it all simply because you have lost a part. It would be an insult to you to assume that you care for the look of the thing—for what people will say—for the bottomless idiocy of the world! We have nothing to do with all that; we are quite out of it; we look at things as they are. You took the great step in coming away; the next is nothing; it's the natural one. I swear, as I stand here, that a woman deliberately made to suffer is justified in anything in life—in going down into the streets, if that will help her! I know how you suffer, and that's why I am here. We can do absolutely as we please; to whom under the sun do we owe anything? What is it that holds us—what is it that has the smallest right to interfere in such a question as this? Such a question is between ourselves—and to say that is to settle it! Were we born to rot in our misery— were we born to be afraid? I never knew
you
afraid! If you only trust me, how little you will be disappointed! The world is all before us—and the world is very large. I know something about that.''

Isabel gave a long murmur, like a creature in pain; it was as if he were pressing something that hurt her. ‘‘The world is very small,'' she said, at random; she had an immense desire to appear to resist. She said it at random, to hear herself say something; but it was not what she meant. The world, in truth, had never seemed so large; it seemed to open out, all round her, to take the form of a mighty sea, where she floated in fathomless waters. She had wanted help, and here was help; it had come in a rushing torrent. I know not whether she believed everything that he said; but she believed that to let him take her in his arms would be the next best thing to dying. This belief, for a moment, was a kind of rapture, in which she felt herself sinking and sinking. In the movement she seemed to beat with her feet, in order to catch herself, to feel something to rest on.

‘‘Ah, be mine as I am yours!'' she heard her companion cry. He had suddenly given up argument, and his voice seemed to come through a confusion of sound.

This, however, of course, was but a subjective fact, as the metaphysicians say; the confusion, the noise of waters, and all the rest of it were in her own head. In an instant she became aware of this. ‘‘Do me the greatest kindness of all,'' she said. ‘‘I beseech you to go away!''

‘‘Ah, don't say that. Don't kill me!'' he cried.

She clasped her hands; her eyes were streaming with tears.

‘‘As you love me, as you pity me, leave me alone!''

He glared at her a moment through the dusk, and the next instant she felt his arms about her, and his lips on her own lips. His kiss was like a flash of lightning; when it was dark again she was free. She never looked about her; she only darted away from the spot. There were lights in the windows of the house; they shone far across the lawn. In an extraordinarily short time—for the distance was considerable—she had moved through the darkness (for she saw nothing) and reached the door. Here only she paused. She looked all about her; she listened a little; then she put her hand on the latch. She had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path.

Two days afterwards, Caspar Goodwood knocked at the door of the house in Wimpole Street in which Henrietta Stackpole occupied furnished lodgings. He had hardly removed his hand from the knocker when the door was opened, and Miss Stackpole herself stood before him. She had on her bonnet and jacket; she was on the point of going out.

‘‘Oh, good morning,'' he said, ‘‘I was in hope I should find Mrs. Osmond.''

Henrietta kept him waiting a moment for her reply; but there was a good deal of expression about Miss Stackpole even when she was silent.

‘‘Pray what led you to suppose she was here?''

‘‘I went down to Gardencourt this morning, and the servant told me she had come to London. He believed she was to come to you.''

Again Miss Stackpole held him—with an intention of perfect kindness—in suspense.

‘‘She came here yesterday, and spent the night. But this morning she started for Rome.''

Caspar Goodwood was not looking at her; his eyes were fastened on the doorstep.

‘‘Oh, she started—'' he stammered. And without finishing his phrase, or looking up, he turned away.

Henrietta had come out, closing the door behind her, and now she put out her hand and grasped his arm.

‘‘Look here, Mr. Goodwood,'' she said; ‘‘just you wait!''

On which he looked up at her.

Afterword

A specter haunted Henry James; it was the specter of George Eliot. He visited her first in 1869, when he was twenty-six, and wrote to his father: ‘‘I was immensely impressed, interested and pleased. To begin with, she is magnificently ugly—deliciously hideous . . . Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a few minutes, steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her. Yes behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced blue-stocking.'' Three years later, when
Middlemarch
appeared, James wrote from Rome to his friend Grace Norton: ‘‘A marvelous mind throbs in every page of ‘Middlemarch.' It raises the standard of what is to be expected of women—(by your leave!). . . . We all know about the female heart; but apparently there is a female brain too. . . . To produce some little exemplary works of art is my narrow and lowly dream. They are to have less ‘brain' than ‘Middlemarch' but (I boldly proclaim it) they are to have more form.''

James reviewed many of George Eliot's books at length, using a most serious tone, including
Felix Holt
in 1866 and
The Spanish Gypsy
in 1868. In March 1873, his review of
Middlemarch
began: ‘‘ ‘Middlemarch' is at once one of the strongest and one of the weakest of English novels,'' reflecting the view of his brother William, who had written to him a month earlier, ‘‘What a blasted artistic failure ‘Middlemarch' is but what a well of wisdom.'' Henry James's review includes the sentence: ‘‘It is not compact, doubtless; but when was a panorama compact?'' And it is clear from his own subsequent prefaces to his books and from his letters that he did not wish to follow George Eliot in writing ‘‘panorama,'' but that he did wish to follow her example in attempting to enter into the spirit of a single character, ‘‘to render the expression of a soul,'' as he says of Eliot's Dorothea Brooke. ‘‘We believe in her,'' he wrote, ‘‘as in a woman we might providentially meet some fine day. . . . By what unerring mechanism this effect is produced—whether by fine strokes or broad ones, by description or narration, we can hardly say; it is certainly the great achievement of the book.''

As the 1870s went on, then, James began to imagine a creation of his own, a woman whom he might render in full, but in a novel that would be formally more pure than anything that George Eliot was capable of, a novel that would blend architectural perfection with unerring characterization. In 1878, he published
Daisy Miller
, a tale of a spirited young American woman in Italy who is punished for breaking the rules, and also a tale called ‘‘An International Episode,'' in which another spirited young American woman is, to the surprise of her English friends, not in search of a rich husband, or any husband at all; she seeks something more interesting from life than the mere prospect of money and rank.

The Portrait of a Lady
was begun in Florence in spring 1879 and serialized in
The Atlantic Monthly
(like
Roderick Hudson
and
The American
before it) as well as in London in
Macmillan's Magazine
. He continued working on the book the following year in Venice. When he came to write his Preface to the book a quarter of a century later, he insisted that it did not come to him as plot, ‘‘but altogether in the sense of a single character, the character and aspect of a particular engaging young woman.'' He was alert to the idea that making a young woman the central subject of a work of art had to be defended, or at least explained. He appealed to the example of George Eliot, to her placing female characters such as Hetty Sorrel, Maggie Tulliver, Rosamond Vincy and Gwendolen Harleth at the very center of her novels, remarking how difficult the task was, so difficult indeed that ‘‘Dickens and Walter Scott, as for instance even, in the main, so subtle a hand as R. L. Stevenson, has preferred to leave the task unattempted.''

His decision, he wrote, was to ‘‘place the center of the subject in the young woman's consciousness. . . . Stick to that—for the center. . . . Press least hard, in short, on the consciousness of your heroine's satellites, especially the male; make it an interest contributive only to the greater one.'' In attempting to explain what he had in mind, he used imagery associated with architecture throughout: ‘‘On one thing I was determined; that, though I should clearly have to pile brick upon brick for the creation of an interest, I would leave no pretext for saying that anything is out of line, scale or perspective.'' This meant, of course, that he would have to justify the undue amount of floor space given in the early part of the book to Henrietta Stackpole, which he did very gracefully and disarmingly in his Preface by acknowledging that he had ‘‘suffered Henrietta (of whom we have indubitably too much) so officiously, so strangely, so almost inexplicably, to pervade. . . . She exemplifies, I fear, in her superabundance, not an element of my plan, but only an excess of my zeal.''

In creating Isabel, rather than trying to please his readers with the broad strokes—what he calls ‘‘the cultivation of the lively''—in which Henrietta was drawn, James was concerned with consciousness, then, rather than plot. Nonetheless, he understood that a novel must have a body as well as a soul. Thus he asked in his Preface: ‘‘What will she do?'' And his answer was: ‘‘Why, the first thing she'll do will be to come to Europe.'' And, he wrote, he ‘‘waked up one morning'' in possession of those she would meet. ‘‘I recognized them, I knew them, they were the numbered pieces of my puzzle, the concrete terms of my ‘plot.' '' Within the noise of this plot, he would place the power of silence, the slow and careful dramatization of an interior life, the silent registering of knowledge and experience, which, he wrote, can throw ‘‘the action further forward than twenty ‘incidents' might have done.'' In particular he mentioned the scene in which Isabel is alone by the dying fire. ‘‘It all goes on without her being approached by another person and without her leaving her chair. It is obviously the best thing in the book.''

James's language in his fiction was both mask and pure revelation; he played with the drama between circumlocution and bald statement. So, too, his Prefaces were written both to reveal and to hide. While he was generous in describing his systems in creating form, he had a large interest in concealing where Isabel might have come from in his own complex past and how the people she would meet might have been there all along at the sharp edges of his memory, waiting patiently and firmly to enter his imagination unbeckoned.