XXIV
“I can give you your friend’s name—in a single guess. He’s Diedrich Hoffendahl!” They had been strolling more and more slowly the next morning, and as she made this announcement the Princess stopped altogether, standing there under a great beech with her eyes on Hyacinth’s and her hands full of primroses. He had breakfasted at noon with his hostess and Madame Grandoni, but the old lady had fortunately not joined them when the Princess afterwards proposed he should accompany her on her walk in the park. She told him how her venerable friend had, while the day was still very young, pronounced it in the worst possible taste that she shouldn’t let their companion yet depart in peace; to which she had replied that about tastes there was no disputing and that they had disagreed on such matters before without any one’s being the worse. Hyacinth expressed the hope that they wouldn’t dispute about him—of all thankless subjects in the world; and the Princess assured him that she never disputed about anything. She held that there were other ways than this of arranging one’s relations with people; and he guessed how thoroughly she meant that when a difference became sharp she broke off altogether. On her side then there was as little possibility as on his that they should ever quarrel: their acquaintance would be a grand friendship or would be nothing at all. The Princess gave it from hour to hour more of this quality, and it may be figured how safe her guest felt by the time he began to tell her that something had happened to him in London three months before, one night, or rather in the small hours of the morning, that had altered his life altogether—had indeed as he might say changed the terms on which he held it. He was aware that he didn’t know exactly what he meant by this last phrase; but it expressed sufficiently well the new feeling that had come over him since that interminable, tantalising cab-drive in the rain.
The Princess had led to this almost as soon as they left the house; making up for her avoidance of such topics the day before by saying suddenly: “Now tell me what’s going on among your friends. I don’t mean your worldly acquaintances, but your colleagues, your brothers. Où en êtes-vous at the present time? Is there anything new, is anything going to be done? I’m afraid you’re always simply dawdling and muddling.” Hyacinth felt as if of late he had by no means either dawdled or muddled; but before he had committed himself so far as to refute the imputation she broke out with a different effect: “How annoying it is that I can’t ask you anything without giving you the right to say to yourself, ‘After all what do I know? Mayn’t she be in the pay of the police—?’”
“Oh that doesn’t occur to me,” Hyacinth gallantly protested.
“It might at all events; by which I mean it may at any moment. Indeed I think it ought.”
“If you were in the pay of the police you wouldn’t trouble your head about me.”
“I should make you think that certainly! That would be my first care. However, if you’ve no tiresome suspicions so much the better,” said the Princess; and she pressed him again for some news from behind the scenes.
In spite of his absence of doubt on the subject of her honesty—he was sure he should never again entertain any such trumpery idea as that she might be an agent on the wrong side—he didn’t open himself immediately; but at the end of half an hour he let her know that the most important event of his life had taken place, scarcely more than the other day, in the most unexpected manner. And to explain in what it had consisted he said: “I pledged myself by everything that’s sacred.”
“To what did you pledge yourself?”
“I took a vow—a tremendous solemn vow—in the presence of four witnesses,” Hyacinth went on.
“And what was it about, your vow?”
“I gave my life away,” he consciously smiled.
She looked at him askance as if to see how he would indeed carry off such a statement as that; but she betrayed no levity of criticism—her face was politely grave. They moved together a moment, exchanging a glance in silence, and then she said: “Ah well then I’m all the more glad you stayed!”
“That was one of the reasons.”
“I wish you had waited—till after you had been here,” it occurred to her, however, to remark.
“Why till after I had been here?”
“Perhaps then you wouldn’t have given away your life. You might have seen reasons for keeping it.” With which, like Hyacinth, she sacrificed to the brighter bravery. He replied that he had not the least doubt that on the whole her influence was relaxing; but without heeding this she went on: “Be so good as to tell me what you’re talking about.”
“I’m not afraid of you, but I’ll give you no names,” said Hyacinth; and he related what had happened at the place known to him in Bloomsbury and during that night of which I have given some account. The Princess listened intently while they strolled under the budding trees with a more interrupted step. Never had the old oaks and beeches, renewing themselves in the sunshine as they did to-day or naked in some grey November, witnessed such an extraordinary series of confidences since the first pair that sought isolation wandered over the grassy slopes and ferny dells beneath them. Among other things our young man mentioned that he didn’t go to the “Sun and Moon” any more; he now perceived, what he ought to have perceived long before, that this particular temple of their faith, with everything that pretended to get hatched there, was a hopeless sham. He had been a rare muff from the first to take it seriously. He had done so mainly because a friend of his in whom he had confidence appeared to set him the example; but now it turned out that this friend (it was Paul Muniment again by the way) had always thought the men who went there a pack of shufflers and was trying them only to try everything. There was nobody you could begin to call a first-rate man, putting aside another friend of his, a Frenchman named Poupin—and Poupin was magnificent but wasn’t first-rate. Hyacinth had a standard now that he had seen a man who was the very incarnation of a strong plan. You felt him a big chap the very moment you came into his presence.
“Into whose presence, Mr. Robinson?” the Princess demanded.
“I don’t know that I ought to tell you, much as I believe in you! I’m speaking of the extraordinary man with whom I entered into that engagement.”
“To give away your life?”
“To do something that in a certain contingency he’ll require of me. He’ll require my poor little carcass.”
“Those ‘strong’ plans have a way of failing—unfortunately,” the Princess murmured, adding the last word more quickly.
“Is that a consolation or a regret?” Hyacinth asked. “This one shan’t fail—so far as depends on me. They wanted an obliging young man. Well, the place was vacant and I stepped in.”
“I’ve no doubt you’re right. We must pay for all we do.” She noted this hard law calmly and coldly and then said: “I think I know the person in whose power you’ve placed yourself.”
“Possibly, but I doubt it.”
“You can’t believe I’ve already gone so far? Why not? I’ve given you a certain amount of proof that I don’t hang back.”
“Well, if you know my friend you’ve gone very far indeed.”
The Princess appeared on the point of pronouncing a name; but she checked herself and said instead, suddenly eager: “Don’t they also want by chance an obliging young woman?”
“I happen to know he doesn’t think much of women, my first-rate man. He doesn’t trust them.”
“Is that why you call him first-rate? You’ve very nearly betrayed him to me.”
“Do you imagine there’s only one of that opinion?” Hyacinth returned.
“Only one who, having it, still remains a superior man. That’s a very difficult opinion to reconcile with others it’s important to have.”
“Schopenhauer did so, successfully,” said Hyacinth.
“How delightful you should know old Schopenhauer!” the Princess exclaimed. “The gentleman I have in my eye is also German.” Hyacinth let this pass, not challenging her, because he wished not to be challenged in return, and she went on: “Of course such an engagement as you speak of must make a tremendous difference in everything.”
“It has made this difference, that I’ve now a far other sense from any I had before of the reality, the solidity, of what’s being prepared. I was hanging about outside, on the steps of the temple, among the loafers and the gossips, but now I’ve been in the innermost sanctuary. Yes, I’ve seen the holy of holies.”
“And it’s very dazzling?”
“Ah Princess!” the young man strangely sighed.
“Then it is real, it is solid?” she pursued. “That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to make up my mind about so long.”
“It’s beyond anything I can say. Nothing of it appears above the surface; but there’s an immense underworld peopled with a thousand forms of revolutionary passion and devotion. The manner in which it’s organised is what astonished me. I knew that, or thought I knew it, in a general way, but the reality was a revelation. And on top of it all society lives. People go and come, and buy and sell, and drink and dance, and make money and make love, and seem to know nothing and suspect nothing and think of nothing; and iniquities flourish, and the misery of half the world is prated about as a ‘necessary evil,’ and generations rot away and starve in the midst of it, and day follows day, and everything is for the best in the best of possible worlds. All that’s one half of it; the other half is that everything’s doomed! In silence, in darkness, but under the feet of each one of us, the revolution lives and works. It’s a wonderful, immeasurable trap, on the lid of which society performs its antics. When once the machinery is complete there will be a great rehearsal. That rehearsal is what they want me for. The invisible, impalpable wires are everywhere, passing through everything, attaching themselves to objects in which one would never think of looking for them. What could be more strange and incredible for instance than that they should exist just here?”
“You make me believe it,” said the Princess thoughtfully.
“It matters little whether one believes it or not!”
“You’ve had a vision,” she continued.
“Pardieu, I’ve had a vision! So would you, if you had been there.”
“I wish I had!” she declared in a tone charged with such ambiguous implications that Hyacinth, catching them a moment after she had spoken, rejoined with a quick, incongruous laugh—
“No, you’d have spoiled everything. He made me see, he made me feel, he made me do, everything he wanted.”
“And why should he have wanted you in particular?”
“Simply because I struck him as the right person. That’s his affair: I can’t tell you. When he meets the right person he chalks him. I sat on the bed. There were only two chairs in the dirty little room and by way of curtain his overcoat was hung up before the window. He himself didn’t sit; he leaned against the wall straight in front of me, his hands behind him. He told me certain things and his manner was extraordinarily quiet. So was mine, I think I may say; and indeed it was only poor Poupin who made a row. It was for my sake somehow: he didn’t think we were all conscious enough; he wanted to call attention to my sublimity. There was no sublimity about it—I simply couldn’t help myself. He and the other German had the two chairs and Muniment sat on a queer old, battered, hair-covered trunk, a most foreign-looking article.” Hyacinth had taken no notice of the little ejaculation with which his companion greeted in this last sentence the word “other.”
“And what did Mr. Muniment say?” she presently asked.
“Oh he said it was all right. Of course he thought so from the moment he determined to bring me. He knew what the other fellow was looking for.”
“I see.” Then the Princess added: “We’ve a curious way of being fond of you.”
“Whom do you mean by ‘we’?”
“Your friends. Mr. Muniment and I for instance.”
“I like it as well as any other. But you don’t feel alike. I’ve an idea you yourself are sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“That I’ve put my head into a noose.”
“Ah you’re rather snubby—I thought I concealed it so well!” the Princess cried. He recognised that his discrimination had been invidious, as there might have been for an instant a hint of tears in her voice. She looked away from him, and it was after this that, stopping short, she remarked as I have related: “Your man’s Diedrich Hoffendahl.”
Hyacinth took it with a stare and parted lips. “Well, you are in it—more than I supposed!”
“You know he doesn’t trust women,” his companion smiled.
“Why in the world should you have cared for any light I can throw if you’ve ever been in relation with him?”
She hesitated a little. “Oh you’re very different. I like you better,” she added.
“Ah if it’s for that!” murmured Hyacinth.
The Princess coloured as he had seen her colour before, and in this liability on her part there was even after repetition an unexpectedness, something all too touching. “Don’t try to fix my inconsistencies on me,” she said with a humility that matched her blush. “Of course there are plenty of them, but it will always be kinder of you to let them pass. Besides, in this case they’re not so serious as they seem. As a product of the ‘people’ and of that strange fermenting underworld (what you say of it’s so true!) you interest me more and have more to say to me even than Hoffendahl—wonderful creature as he assuredly is.”
“Would you object to telling me how and where you came to know him?” her visitor asked.
“Through a couple of friends of mine in Vienna, two of the affiliated, both passionate revolutionists and clever men. They’re Neapolitans, originally poveretti like yourself, who emigrated years ago to seek their fortune. One of them’s a teacher of singing, the wisest, most accomplished person in his line I’ve ever known. The other, if you please, is a confectioner! He makes the most delicious pâtisserie fine. It would take long to tell you how I made their acquaintance and how they put me into relation with the Maestro, as they called him, of whom they spoke with bated breath. It’s not from yesterday—though you don’t seem able to believe it—that I’ve had a care for these interests. I wrote to Hoffendahl and had several letters from him; the singing-master and the pastry-cook went bail for my sincerity. The next year I had an interview with him at Wiesbaden; but I can’t tell you the circumstances of our meeting in that place without implicating another person to whom just now at least I’ve no right to give you a clue. Of course Hoffendahl made an immense impression on me; he struck me as the Master indeed, the very genius of a new social order, and I fully understand the manner in which you were affected by him. When he was in London three months ago I knew it and knew where to write to him. I did so and asked him if he wouldn’t see me somewhere. I said I’d meet him anywhere, in any darkness, if it should have to be, that he might designate. He answered by a charming letter which I’ll show you—it has nothing in the least compromising—but declined my offer, pleading his short stay and a press of engagements. He’ll write to me but won’t trust me. However, he shall some day!”
Hyacinth was thrown quite off his balance by this representation of the ground the Princess had already traversed, and the explanation was still but half restorative when, on his asking her why she hadn’t exhibited her titles before, she replied: “Well, I thought my being quiet was the better way to draw you out.” There was but little difficulty in drawing him out now, and before their walk was over he had told her more definitely what Hoffendahl demanded. This was simply that he should hold himself ready for the next five years to do at a given moment an act which would in all probability cost him his life. The act was as yet indefinite, but one might get an idea of it from the penalty involved, which would certainly be capital. The only thing settled was that it was to be done instantly and absolutely, without a question, a condition or a scruple, in the manner that should be prescribed at the moment from headquarters. Very likely it would be to shoot some one—some blatant humbug in a high place; but whether the individual should deserve it or shouldn’t deserve it was not to be one’s affair. If he recognised generally Hoffendahl’s wisdom—and the other night it had seemed to shine like a great cold, splendid, northern aurora—it was not in order that he might challenge it in the particular case. He had taken a vow of blind obedience, the vow as of the Jesuit fathers to the head of their order. It was because the Jesuits had carried out their vows (having in the first place great administrators) that their organisation had been mighty, and this sort of mightiness was what people who felt as Hyacinth and the Princess felt should go in for. It was not certain sure he should be bagged after his coup any more than it was certain sure he should bring down his man; but it was much to be looked for and was what he counted on and indeed preferred. He should probably take little trouble to save his skin, and he should never enjoy the idea of dodging or hiding or disavowing. If it were a question of really placing his bullet he himself should naturally deserve what would come to him. If one did that sort of thing there was an indelicacy in not being ready to pay for it, and he at least was perfectly willing. He shouldn’t judge, he should simply execute. He didn’t pretend to say what good his little job might do or what portée it might have; he hadn’t the data for appreciating it and simply took upon himself to believe that at headquarters they knew what they were about. The thing was to be part of a very large plan, of which he couldn’t measure the scope—something that was to be done simultaneously in a dozen different countries. The impression was to be very much in this immense coincidence. It was to be hoped it wouldn’t be spoiled by any muffing. At all events he wouldn’t hang fire, whatever the other fellows might do. He didn’t say it because Hoffendahl had done him the honour of giving him the business to do, but he believed the Master knew how to pick out his men. To be sure they had known nothing about him in advance; he had only been suggested from one day to the other by those who were always looking out. The fact remained, however, that when Hyacinth stood before him he recognised him as the sort of little chap he had in his eye—one who could pass through a very small opening. Humanity, in his scheme, was classified and subdivided with a truly German thoroughness and altogether of course from the point of view of the revolution—as it might forward or obstruct that cause. Hyacinth’s little job was a very small part of what Hoffendahl had come to England for; he had in his hand innumerable other threads. Hyacinth knew nothing of these and didn’t much want to know, except for the portentous wonder of the way Hoffendahl kept them apart. He had exactly the same mastery of them that a great musician—that the Princess herself—had of the keyboard of the piano; he treated all things, persons, institutions, ideas, as so many notes in his great symphonic massacre. The day would come when—far down in the treble—one would feel one’s self touched by the little finger of the composer, would grow generally audible (with a small sharp crack) for a second.
It was impossible that our young man shouldn’t become aware at the end of ten minutes that he had charmed the Princess into the deepest, most genuine attention: she was listening to him as she had never listened before. He enjoyed that high effect on her, and his sense of the tenuity of the thread by which his future hung, renewed by his hearing himself talk about it, made him reflect that at present anything in the line of enjoyment, any scrap filched from the feast of life, was so much gained for eager young experience. The reader may judge if he had held his breath and felt his heart-beats after placing himself on his new footing of utility in the world; but that emotion had finally spent itself, through a hundred forms of restlessness, of vain conjecture—through an exaltation which alternated with despair and which, equally with the despair, he concealed more successfully than he supposed. He would have detested the idea that his companion might have heard his voice tremble while he told his story; but though to-day he had really grown used to his danger and resigned, as it were, to his consecration, and though it couldn’t fail to be agreeable to him to perceive that, like some famous novel, he was thrilling, he still couldn’t guess how very remarkable, in such a connexion, the Princess thought his composure, his lucidity, his good humour. It is true she tried to hide her wonder, for she owed it to her self-respect to let it still appear that even such a one as she was prepared for a personal sacrifice as complete. She had the air—or she endeavoured to have it—of accepting for him everything that he accepted for himself; nevertheless there was something rather forced in the smile (lovely as it might be) with which she covered him while she said after a little: “It’s very serious—it’s very serious indeed, isn’t it?” He replied that the serious part was to come—there was no particular grimness for him (comparatively) in strolling in that fine park and gossiping with her about the matter; and it occurred to her presently to suggest to him that perhaps Hoffendahl would never give him any sign at all, so that he might wait, all the while sur les dents, in a false suspense. He admitted that this would be a sell, but declared that either way he should be sold, though differently; and that at any rate he would have conformed to the great religious rule—to live each hour as if it were to be one’s last.
“In holiness, you mean—in great recueillement?” the Princess asked.
“Oh dear no; simply in extreme thankfulness for every good minute that’s added.”
“Ah well, there will probably be a great many good minutes,” she returned.
“The more the better—if they’re as good as this one.”
“That won’t be the case with many of them in Lomax Place.”
“I assure you that since that night Lomax Place has improved.” Hyacinth stood there smiling, his hands in his pockets and his hat pushed back.
The Princess appeared to consider this quaint truth, as well as the charming facts of his appearance and attitude, with an extreme intellectual curiosity. “If after all then you’re not called you’ll have been positively happy.”
“I shall have had some fine moments. Perhaps Hoffendahl’s plot is simply for that: Muniment may have put him up to it!”
“Who knows? However, with me you must go on as if nothing were changed.”
“Changed from what?”
“From the time of our first meeting at the theatre.”
“I’ll go on in any way you like,” said Hyacinth. “Only the real difference will be there, you know.”
“The real difference?”
“That I shall have ceased to care for what you care for.”
“I don’t understand,” she confessed with all the candour of her beauty.
“Isn’t it enough now to give my life to the beastly cause,” the young man broke out, “without giving my sympathy?”
“The beastly cause?” the Princess murmured, opening her deep eyes.
“Of course it’s really just as holy as ever; only the people I find myself pitying now are the rich, the happy.”
“I see. You’re very remarkable. You’re splendid. Perhaps you pity my husband,” she added in a moment.
“Do you call him one of the happy?” Hyacinth inquired as they walked on again.
But she only repeated: “You’re very remarkable. Yes, you’re splendid.”
To which he made answer: “Well, it’s what I want to be!”
I have related the whole of this conversation because it supplies a highly important chapter of Hyacinth’s history, but we may not take time to trace all the stages and reproduce all the passages through which the friendship of the Princess Casamassima with the young man she had constituted her bookbinder was confirmed. By the end of a week the standard of fitness she had set up in the place of exploded proprieties appeared the model of justice and convenience; and during this period, a season of strange revelations for our young man, many other things happened. One of them was that he drove over to Broome with his hostess and called on Lady Marchant and her daughters; an episode that appeared to minister in the Princess to a thorough ironic glee. When they came away he asked her why she hadn’t told the ladies who he was. Otherwise where was the point? And she replied: “Simply because they wouldn’t have believed me. That’s your fault!” This was the same note she had struck when the third day of his stay (the weather had changed for the worse and a rainy afternoon kept them indoors) she remarked to him irrelevantly and abruptly: “It is most extraordinary, your knowing poor dear old ‘Schop’!” He answered that she really seemed quite unable to accustom herself to his little talents; and this led to a long talk, longer than the one I have already narrated, in which he took her still further into his confidence. Never had the pleasure of conversation, the greatest he knew, been so largely opened to him. The Princess admitted frankly that he would to her sense take a great deal of accounting for; she observed that he was, no doubt, pretty well used to himself, but must give stupider persons time. “I’ve watched you constantly since you came—in every detail of your behaviour—and I’m more and more intriguée. You haven’t a vulgar intonation, you haven’t a common gesture, you never make a mistake, you do and say everything exactly in the right way. You come out of the poor cramped hole you’ve described to me, and yet you might have stayed in country-houses all your life. You’re much better than if you had! Jugez donc, from the way I talk to you! I’ve to make no allowances—not one little allowance. I’ve seen Italians with that sort of natural tact and ease, but I didn’t know it was ever to be found in any Anglo-Saxon in whom it hadn’t been cultivated at a vast expense; unless perhaps in certain horribly ‘refined’ little American women.”
“Do you mean I’m a gentleman?” asked Hyacinth in a peculiar tone while he looked out into the wet garden.
She faltered and then said: “It’s I who make the mistakes!” Five minutes later she broke into an exclamation which touched him almost more than anything she had ever done, giving him the highest opinion of her delicacy and sympathy, putting him before himself as vividly as if the words were a little portrait. “Fancy the strange, the bitter fate: to be constituted as you’re constituted, to be conscious of the capacity you must feel, and yet to look at the good things of life only through the glass of the pastry-cook’s window!”
“Every class has its pleasures,” he made answer with perverse sententiousness in spite of his emotion; but the remark didn’t darken their mutual intelligence, which was to expand to still greater wonders, and before they separated that evening he told her the things that had never yet passed his lips—the things to which he had awaked when he made Pinnie explain to him the visit to the prison. He told her in short what he was.