The Author of Beltraffio

“Yes, we always run,” I laughingly allowed.

She looked at me seriously, yet with an absence in her pretty eyes.  “I suppose your distances are so great.”

“Yes, but we break our marches!  I can’t tell you the pleasure to me of finding myself here,” I added.  “I’ve the greatest admiration for Mr. Ambient.”

“He’ll like that.  He likes being admired.”

“He must have a very happy life, then.  He has many worshippers.”

“Oh yes, I’ve seen some of them,” she dropped, looking away, very far from me, rather as if such a vision were before her at the moment.  It seemed to indicate, her tone, that the sight was scarcely edifying, and I guessed her quickly enough to be in no great intellectual sympathy with the author of “Beltraffio.”  I thought the fact strange, but somehow, in the glow of my own enthusiasm, didn’t think it important it only made me wish rather to emphasise that homage.

“For me, you know,” I returned—doubtless with a due suffisance—“he’s quite the greatest of living writers.”

“Of course I can’t judge.  Of course he’s very clever,” she said with a patient cheer.

“He’s nothing less than supreme, Mrs. Ambient!  There are pages in each of his books of a perfection classing them with the greatest things.  Accordingly for me to see him in this familiar way, in his habit as he lives, and apparently to find the man as delightful as the artist—well, I can’t tell you how much too good to be true it seems and how great a privilege I think it.”  I knew I was gushing, but I couldn’t help it, and what I said was a good deal less than what I felt.  I was by no means sure I should dare to say even so much as this to the master himself, and there was a kind of rapture in speaking it out to his wife which was not affected by the fact that, as a wife, she appeared peculiar.  She listened to me with her face grave again and her lips a little compressed, listened as if in no doubt, of course, that her husband was remarkable, but as if at the same time she had heard it frequently enough and couldn’t treat it as stirring news.  There was even in her manner a suggestion that I was so young as to expose myself to being called forward—an imputation and a word I had always loathed; as well as a hinted reminder that people usually got over their early extravagance.  “I assure you that for me this is a red-letter day,” I added.

She didn’t take this up, but after a pause, looking round her, said abruptly and a trifle dryly: “We’re very much afraid about the fruit this year.”

My eyes wandered to the mossy mottled garden-walls, where plum-trees and pears, flattened and fastened upon the rusty bricks, looked like crucified figures with many arms.  “Doesn’t it promise well?”

“No, the trees look very dull.  We had such late frosts.”

Then there was another pause.  She addressed her attention to the opposite end of the grounds, kept it for her husband’s return with the child.  “Is Mr. Ambient fond of gardening?” it occurred to me to ask, irresistibly impelled as I felt myself, moreover, to bring the conversation constantly back to him.

“He’s very fond of plums,” said his wife.

“Ah well, then, I hope your crop will be better than you fear.  It’s a lovely old place,” I continued.  “The whole impression’s that of certain places he has described.  Your house is like one of his pictures.”

She seemed a bit frigidly amused at my glow.  “It’s a pleasant little place.  There are hundreds like it.”

“Oh it has his tone,” I laughed, but sounding my epithet and insisting on my point the more sharply that my companion appeared to see in my appreciation of her simple establishment a mark of mean experience.

It was clear I insisted too much.  “His tone?” she repeated with a harder look at me and a slightly heightened colour.

“Surely he has a tone, Mrs. Ambient.”

“Oh yes, he has indeed!  But I don’t in the least consider that I’m living in one of his books at all.  I shouldn’t care for that in the least,” she went on with a smile that had in some degree the effect of converting her really sharp protest into an insincere joke.  “I’m afraid I’m not very literary.  And I’m not artistic,” she stated.

“I’m very sure you’re not ignorant, not stupid,” I ventured to reply, with the accompaniment of feeling immediately afterwards that I had been both familiar and patronising.  My only consolation was in the sense that she had begun it, had fairly dragged me into it.  She had thrust forward her limitations.

“Well, whatever I am I’m very different from my husband.  If you like him you won’t like me.  You needn’t say anything.  Your liking me isn’t in the least necessary!”

“Don’t defy me!” I could but honourably make answer.

She looked as if she hadn’t heard me, which was the best thing she could do; and we sat some time without further speech.  Mrs. Ambient had evidently the enviable English quality of being able to be mute without unrest.  But at last she spoke—she asked me if there seemed many people in town.  I gave her what satisfaction I could on this point, and we talked a little of London and of some of its characteristics at that time of the year.  At the end of this I came back irrepressibly to Mark.

“Doesn’t he like to be there now?  I suppose he doesn’t find the proper quiet for his work.  I should think his things had been written for the most part in a very still place.  They suggest a great stillness following on a kind of tumult.  Don’t you think so?” I laboured on.  “I suppose London’s a tremendous place to collect impressions, but a refuge like this, in the country, must be better for working them up.  Does he get many of his impressions in London, should you say?”  I proceeded from point to point in this malign inquiry simply because my hostess, who probably thought me an odious chattering person, gave me time; for when I paused—I’ve not represented my pauses—she simply continued to let her eyes wander while her long fair fingers played with the medallion on her neck.  When I stopped altogether, however, she was obliged to say something, and what she said was that she hadn’t the least idea where her husband got his impressions.  This made me think her, for a moment, positively disagreeable; delicate and proper and rather aristocratically fine as she sat there.  But I must either have lost that view a moment later or been goaded by it to further aggression, for I remember asking her if our great man were in a good vein of work and when we might look for the appearance of the book on which he was engaged.  I’ve every reason now to know that she found me insufferable.

She gave a strange small laugh as she said: “I’m afraid you think I know much more about my husband’s work than I do.  I haven’t the least idea what he’s doing,” she then added in a slightly different, that is a more explanatory, tone and as if from a glimpse of the enormity of her confession.  “I don’t read what he writes.”

She didn’t succeed, and wouldn’t even had she tried much harder, in making this seem to me anything less than monstrous.  I stared at her and I think I blushed.  “Don’t you admire his genius?  Don’t you admire ‘Beltraffio’?”

She waited, and I wondered what she could possibly say.  She didn’t speak, I could see, the first words that rose to her lips; she repeated what she had said a few minutes before.  “Oh of course he’s very clever!”  And with this she got up; our two absentees had reappeared.

II

Mrs. Ambient left me and went to meet them; she stopped and had a few words with her husband that I didn’t hear and that ended in her taking the child by the hand and returning with him to the house.  Her husband joined me in a moment, looking, I thought, the least bit conscious and constrained, and said that if I would come in with him he would show me my room.  In looking back upon these first moments of my visit I find it important to avoid the error of appearing to have at all fully measured his situation from the first or made out the signs of things mastered only afterwards.  This later knowledge throws a backward light and makes me forget that, at least on the occasion of my present reference—I mean that first afternoon—Mark Ambient struck me as only enviable.  Allowing for this he must yet have failed of much expression as we walked back to the house, though I remember well the answer he made to a remark of mine on his small son.

“That’s an extraordinary little boy of yours.  I’ve never seen such a child.”

“Why,” he asked while we went, “do you call him extraordinary?”

“He’s so beautiful, so fascinating.  He’s like some perfect little work of art.”

He turned quickly in the passage, grasping my arm.  “Oh don’t call him that, or you’ll—you’ll—!”

But in his hesitation he broke off suddenly, laughing at my surprise.  Immediately afterwards, however, he added: “You’ll make his little future very difficult.”

I declared that I wouldn’t for the world take any liberties with his little future—it seemed to me to hang by threads of such delicacy.  I should only be highly interested in watching it.

“You Americans are very keen,” he commented on this.  “You notice more things than we do.”

“Ah if you want visitors who aren’t struck with you,” I cried, “you shouldn’t have asked me down here!”

He showed me my room, a little bower of chintz, with open windows where the light was green, and before he left me said irrelevantly: “As for my small son, you know, we shall probably kill him between us before we’ve done with him!”  And he made this assertion as if he really believed it, without any appearance of jest, his fine near-sighted expressive eyes looking straight into mine.

“Do you mean by spoiling him?”

“No, by fighting for him!”

“You had better give him to me to keep for you,” I said.  “Let me remove the apple of discord!”

It was my extravagance of course, but he had the air of being perfectly serious.  “It would be quite the best thing we could do.  I should be all ready to do it.”

“I’m greatly obliged to you for your confidence.”

But he lingered with his hands in his pockets.  I felt as if within a few moments I had, morally speaking, taken several steps nearer to him.  He looked weary, just as he faced me then, looked preoccupied and as if there were something one might do for him.  I was terribly conscious of the limits of my young ability, but I wondered what such a service might be, feeling at bottom nevertheless that the only thing I could do for him was to like him.  I suppose he guessed this and was grateful for what was in my mind, since he went on presently: “I haven’t the advantage of being an American, but I also notice a little, and I’ve an idea that”—here he smiled and laid his hand on my shoulder—“even counting out your nationality you’re not destitute of intelligence.  I’ve only known you half an hour, but—!”  For which again he pulled up.  “You’re very young, after all.”

“But you may treat me as if I could understand you!” I said; and before he left me to dress for dinner he had virtually given me a promise that he would.

When I went down into the drawing-room—I was very punctual—I found that neither my hostess nor my host had appeared.  A lady rose from a sofa, however, and inclined her head as I rather surprisedly gazed at her.  “I daresay you don’t know me,” she said with the modern laugh.  “I’m Mark Ambient’s sister.”  Whereupon I shook hands with her, saluting her very low.  Her laugh was modern—by which I mean that it consisted of the vocal agitation serving between people who meet in drawing-rooms as the solvent of social disparities, the medium of transitions; but her appearance was—what shall I call it?—medieval.  She was pale and angular, her long thin face was inhabited by sad dark eyes and her black hair intertwined with golden fillets and curious clasps.  She wore a faded velvet robe which clung to her when she moved and was “cut,” as to the neck and sleeves, like the garments of old Italians.  She suggested a symbolic picture, something akin even to Dürer’s Melancholia, and was so perfect an image of a type which I, in my ignorance, supposed to be extinct, that while she rose before me I was almost as much startled as if I had seen a ghost.  I afterwards concluded that Miss Ambient wasn’t incapable of deriving pleasure from this weird effect, and I now believe that reflexion concerned in her having sunk again to her seat with her long lean but not ungraceful arms locked together in an archaic manner on her knees and her mournful eyes addressing me a message of intentness which foreshadowed what I was subsequently to suffer.  She was a singular fatuous artificial creature, and I was never more than half to penetrate her motives and mysteries.  Of one thing I’m sure at least: that they were considerably less insuperable than her appearance announced.  Miss Ambient was a restless romantic disappointed spinster, consumed with the love of Michael-Angelesque attitudes and mystical robes; but I’m now convinced she hadn’t in her nature those depths of unutterable thought which, when you first knew her, seemed to look out from her eyes and to prompt her complicated gestures.  Those features in especial had a misleading eloquence; they lingered on you with a far-off dimness, an air of obstructed sympathy, which was certainly not always a key to the spirit of their owner; so that, of a truth, a young lady could scarce have been so dejected and disillusioned without having committed a crime for which she was consumed with remorse, or having parted with a hope that she couldn’t sanely have entertained.  She had, I believe, the usual allowance of rather vain motives: she wished to be looked at, she wished to be married, she wished to be thought original.

It costs me a pang to speak in this irreverent manner of one of Ambient’s name, but I shall have still less gracious things to say before I’ve finished my anecdote, and moreover—I confess it—I owe the young lady a bit of a grudge.  Putting aside the curious cast of her face she had no natural aptitude for an artistic development, had little real intelligence.  But her affectations rubbed off on her brother’s renown, and as there were plenty of people who darkly disapproved of him they could easily point to his sister as a person formed by his influence.  It was quite possible to regard her as a warning, and she had almost compromised him with the world at large.  He was the original and she the inevitable imitation.  I suppose him scarce aware of the impression she mainly produced, beyond having a general idea that she made up very well as a Rossetti; he was used to her and was sorry for her, wishing she would marry and observing how she didn’t.  Doubtless I take her too seriously, for she did me no harm, though I’m bound to allow that I can only half-account for her.  She wasn’t so mystical as she looked, but was a strange indirect uncomfortable embarrassing woman.  My story gives the reader at best so very small a knot to untie that I needn’t hope to excite his curiosity by delaying to remark that Mrs. Ambient hated her sister-in-law.  This I learned but later on, when other matters came to my knowledge.  I mention it, however, at once, for I shall perhaps not seem to count too much on having beguiled him if I say he must promptly have guessed it.  Mrs. Ambient, a person of conscience, put the best face on her kinswoman, who spent a month with her twice a year; but it took no great insight to recognise the very different personal paste of the two ladies, and that the usual feminine hypocrisies would cost them on either side much more than the usual effort.  Mrs. Ambient, smooth-haired, thin-lipped, perpetually fresh, must have regarded her crumpled and dishevelled visitor as an equivocal joke; she herself so the opposite of a Rossetti, she herself a Reynolds or a Lawrence, with no more far-fetched note in her composition than a cold ladylike candour and a well-starched muslin dress.

It was in a garment and with an expression of this kind that she made her entrance after I had exchanged a few words with Miss Ambient.  Her husband presently followed her and, there being no other company, we went to dinner.  The impressions I received at that repast are present to me still.  The elements of oddity in the air hovered, as it were, without descending—to any immediate check of my delight.  This came mainly, of course, from Ambient’s talk, the easiest and richest I had ever heard.  I mayn’t say to-day whether he laid himself out to dazzle a rather juvenile pilgrim from over the sea; but that matters little—it seemed so natural to him to shine.  His spoken wit or wisdom, or whatever, had thus a charm almost beyond his written; that is if the high finish of his printed prose be really, as some people have maintained, a fault.  There was such a kindness in him, however, that I’ve no doubt it gave him ideas for me, or about me, to see me sit as open-mouthed as I now figure myself.  Not so the two ladies, who not only were very nearly dumb from beginning to end of the meal, but who hadn’t even the air of being struck with such an exhibition of fancy and taste.  Mrs. Ambient, detached, and inscrutable, met neither my eye nor her husband’s; she attended to her dinner, watched her servants, arranged the puckers in her dress, exchanged at wide intervals a remark with her sister-in-law and, while she slowly rubbed her lean white hands between the courses, looked out of the window at the first signs of evening—the long June day allowing us to dine without candles.  Miss Ambient appeared to give little direct heed to anything said by her brother; but on the other hand she was much engaged in watching its effect upon me.  Her “die-away” pupils continued to attach themselves to my countenance, and it was only her air of belonging to another century that kept them from being importunate.  She seemed to look at me across the ages, and the interval of time diminished for me the inconvenience.  It was as if she knew in a general way that he must be talking very well, but she herself was so at home among such allusions that she had no need to pick them up and was at liberty to see what would become of the exposure of a candid young American to a high æsthetic temperature.

The temperature was æsthetic certainly, but it was less so than I could have desired, for I failed of any great success in making our friend abound about himself.  I tried to put him on the ground of his own genius, but he slipped through my fingers every time and shifted the saddle to one or other of his contemporaries.  He talked about Balzac and Browning, about what was being done in foreign countries, about his recent tour in the East and the extraordinary forms of life to be observed in that part of the world.  I felt he had reasons for holding off from a direct profession of literary faith, a full consistency or sincerity, and therefore dealt instead with certain social topics, treating them with extraordinary humour and with a due play of that power of ironic evocation in which his books abound.  He had a deal to say about London as London appears to the observer who has the courage of some of his conclusions during the high-pressure time—from April to July—of its gregarious life.  He flashed his faculty of playing with the caught image and liberating the wistful idea over the whole scheme of manners or conception of intercourse of his compatriots, among whom there were evidently not a few types for which he had little love.  London in short was grotesque to him, and he made capital sport of it; his only allusion that I can remember to his own work was his saying that he meant some day to do an immense and general, a kind of epic, social satire.  Miss Ambient’s perpetual gaze seemed to put to me: “Do you perceive how artistic, how very strange and interesting, we are?  Frankly now is it possible to be more artistic, more strange and interesting, than this?  You surely won’t deny that we’re remarkable.”  I was irritated by her use of the plural pronoun, for she had no right to pair herself with her brother; and moreover, of course, I couldn’t see my way to—at all genially—include Mrs. Ambient.  Yet there was no doubt they were, taken together, unprecedented enough, and, with all allowances, I had never been left, or condemned, to draw so many rich inferences.