The Jolly Corner by Henry James


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Page 2

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.

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Thu 28th Mar 2024, 23:05