Now can you imagine a man being like that? But if you ever breathe a word to a living soul—!
HENRIETTA STACKPOLE REDIVIVA
Thanks to Henry James—on whom be peace—I am a man without a trade. One by one he used to appropriate my most precious models until I came to await each new book with a curiosity which no disinterested reader could imagine. A surprising number of his so-called creations—how little did he create them only he and I could tell!—I knew long before knowing him. Roderick Hudson, for instance, I met at a villa in the Euganean Hills, and regarded as my peculiar prey, in days before the precipice. And, indeed, he has not gone over it yet; but it is only a question of time. The Princess Casamassima, too, is an old friend of mine who oscillates between Paris and Constantinople. She is shortly to be married, I hear, and that is a turn unkinder than any Mr. James has done me. Then there is Osmond. Often as I have seen him, though, he would probably tell you that he dared say but didn’t really recollect. They will never admit that they are fathomable, those people. As for Madame Merle, I believe I have met her once only. Christopher Newman, however, and the Baroness Münster, and Gordon Wright, and poor little Maisie—But I might go on indefinitely, picking out persons of my acquaintance whom Mr. James in some unaccountable way discovered first.
Still, in spite of this purely accidental disadvantage under which I suffer, it must be said that the printed fortunes of these friends of mine afford me, in many cases, a pleasure superior to that of actual intercourse. I have to confess, too, that Mr. James has not seldom lent me the key to mysteries of character which would have remained inscrutable but for his elucidation. It has even happened, furthermore, that an introduction from him has been so complete that when later I came to meet the person in real life it was like being at a play which one has seen before. I knew in advance exactly what to expect.
A cognate case was my encounter with Henrietta Stackpole, the spirited journalist in “The Portrait of a Lady.” As I did not recognise her at first sight, it is quite possible that the reader may fail to do so. Indeed, some to whom I tell the story roundly declare they do not believe a word of it. I can only insist that it happened years and years ago, at a far less sophisticated period of our history; that the name on the card was unmistakable; and that Henrietta was a caprice, if you will, but a perfectly credible one, of a rapid and uneven civilisation.
My second introduction to her came about in this wise. I was staying at the time in Venice—a city in which it has been my good fortune to spend much of my life and in which I would count it perfect happiness to spend the whole. A prevalence of rainy scirocco had for two or three days diminished the enchantments of the summer lagoon. It was therefore natural, on the morning in question, that I should have gone unconsciously to that place which is always aglow when the world is grey, which is always warm when the wind is cold, which is always cool when the sun is hot—the miraculous church of St. Mark’s. There I established myself at the base of my favourite pier and proceeded to the familiar enjoyment of sensations which this is not the place to describe.
Presently there crossed my line of vision a lady. This was not in itself a phenomenon so extraordinary. St. Mark’s, like other churches, usually contains more women than men; in the course of a year I doubt not that more Americans enter it than Italians; and of American travellers, young women—to use the phrase in its most generous sense—vastly outnumber persons of other descriptions. Indeed, it is a tradition implanted in the European mind only more ineradicably by the doughboys of 1918 that ours is a land of Amazons, whence the few indispensable males are seldom allowed to escape. There crossed my line of vision, then, a damsel of my own nationality. A certain peculiarity attached to her from the fact that she carried no Baedeker. Nor did she appear to have ties with any person or group of persons provided with a copy of that useful work. What particularly attracted my attention to her, however, was a large silver ornament which she bore on a revers of her tailor-made costume. It represented—so far as I could make out—a human head and bust, supported in heraldic and highly decorative manner by fluttering streamers and extended wings. In those distant days there was no cavalry of the clouds, to suggest a winged admirer in the Air Service. So, knowing that my countrywomen are insatiable collectors of the curious and the antique, I wondered if this young lady had picked up in the Spadaria some quaint bit of chasing and had adopted this means of transporting it to her hotel.
As if to satisfy my curiosity, the young person obligingly proceeded to seat herself near me on the bench at the foot of the pier. I was thus enabled to devote, at closer range, a covert examination to her treasure. The human representation I accordingly discovered to be that of Col. William Jennings Bryan, as set forth by a legend on the fluttering streamers, which contained further expressions with regard to free silver and crosses of gold. I could not easily decipher them without appearing to transcend the bounds of delicacy.
The completeness of my disillusionment, and the fact that a young and measurably attractive woman should prefer ornaments of free silver to crosses of gold—for which latter I have an especial fancy—led me to consider my companion with more attention than it might perhaps be decorous for a stranger to betray. Her attire was that of a well-to-do person, and she might have passed for one of good taste but for the ornament to which I have referred. That she was of alert mind was evident from the incisive way in which she looked about and then used her pencil upon a small pad, as one making a sketch. I must confess that I had some curiosity to see how St. Mark’s would look to a virgin of political mind, and I was so rude as to let my eye rest for a moment upon her paper. To my surprise I discovered that she was not sketching at all—or that, if she did so, it was with words, and in some dialect to me perfectly unintelligible. The characters with which she rapidly covered her pad resembled those of the Arabic more nearly than anything else with which I was acquainted, unless they had about them something of Scandinavian runes. Altogether I was completely mystified. For whatever traits may distinguish the American girl upon her travels, linguistic facility is not one of them.
As we sat thus in uncommunicative companionship, there approached us that familiar genius of St. Mark’s, the blue and ancient sacristan who rattles the collection box. Me he knew of old as a wanton gentleman much given to passing half hours in the golden church at the side of young and otherwise unprotected ladies. At least I am sure he can have attributed to me no motive other than that which was likely to bring so many whispering couples of his own nationality. Accordingly he approached us with a smile of recognition and held out toward the person at my side one of those cards with which he is so inexhaustibly provided, representing the Nicopeian Madonna. The admirer of Colonel Bryan looked dubiously upon this offering. Finally, however, she was won over by the old man’s irresistible smile and accepted the papistical emblem. No sooner had she done so than the sacristan, as is his wont, produced the collection box, which from force of habit he had kept behind him. At this the young woman tried to hand back the card. But the old man was occupied in passing the box to me, as in such cases was also his wont. And from force of habit I dropped in a coin. At which the cheerful ancient bent his efforts in other directions.