The Ivory Tower

by Henry James

"Then it's done, then it's done—as I knew it would be if he could but see you." Flushed, but with her large fan held up so that scarce more than her eyes, their lids drawn together in the same nearsighted way he remembered, presented themselves over it, she fairly hunched her high shoulders higher for emphasis of her success. The more it might have embarrassed her to consider him without reserve the more she had this relief, as he took it, of her natural, her helpful blinking; so that what it came to really for her general advantage was that the fine closing of the eyes, the fine thing in her big face, but expressed effective scrutiny. Below her in stature—as various other men, for that matter, couldn't but be—he hardly came higher than her ear; and he for the shade of an instant struck himself as a small boy, literally not of man's estate, reporting, under some research, just to the amplest of mothers. He had reported to Mr. Betterman, so far as intent candour in him hadn't found itself distraught, and for the half hour had somehow affronted the immeasurable; but that didn't at all prevent his now quick sense of his never in his life having been so watched and waited upon by the uncharted infinite, or so subject to its operation—since infinities, at the rate he was sinking in, could apparently operate, and do it too without growing smaller for the purpose. He cast about, not at all upright on the small pink satin sofa to which he had unconsciously dropped; it was for him clearly to grow bigger, as everything about expressively smiled, smiled absolutely through the shadow cast by doctors and nurses again, in suggestion of; which, naturally, was what one would always want to do—but which any failure of, he after certain moments perfectly felt, wouldn't convert to the least difference for this friend. How could that have been more established than by her neglect of his having presently said, out of his particular need, that he would do anything in reason that was asked of him, but that he fairly ached with the desire to understand——? She blinked upon his ache to her own sufficiency, no doubt; but no further balm dropped upon it for the moment than by her appearing to brood with still deeper assurance, in her place and her posture, on the beauty of the accomplished fact, the fact of her performed purpose and her freedom now but to take care—yes, herself take care—for what would come of it. She might understand that he didn't—all the way as yet; but nothing could be more in the line of the mild and mighty mother than her treating that as a trifle. It attenuated a little perhaps, it just let light into the dark warmth of her spreading possession of what she had done, that when he had said, as a thing already ten times on his lips and now quite having to come out, "I feel some big mistake about me somehow at work, and want to stop it in time!" she met this with the almost rude decision of "There's nothing you can stop now, Graham, for your fate, or our situation, has the gained momentum of a rush that began ever so far away and that has been growing and growing. It would be too late even if we wanted to—and you can judge for yourself how little that's my wish. So here we are, you see, to make the best of it."

"When you talk of my 'fate,'" he allowed himself almost the amusement of answering, "you freeze the current of my blood; but when you say 'our situation,' and that we're in it together, that's a little better, and I assure you that I shall not for a moment stay in anything, whatever it may be, in which you're not close beside me. So there you are at any rate—and I matter at least as much as this, whatever the mistake: that I have hold of you as tight as ever you've been held in your life, and that, whatever and whatever the mistake, you've got to see me through."

"Well, I took my responsibility years ago, and things came of it"—so she made reply; "and the other day I took this other, and now this has come of it, and that was what I wanted, and wasn't afraid of, and am not afraid of now—like the fears that came to me after the Dresden time." No more direct than that was her answer to his protest, and what she subjoined still took as little account of it. "I rather lost them, those old fears—little by little; but one of the things I most wanted the other day was to see whether before you here they wouldn't wholly die down. They're over, they're over," she repeated; "I knew three minutes of you would do it—and not a ghost of them remains."

"I can't be anything but glad that you shouldn't have fears—and it's horrid to me to learn, I assure you," he said, "that I've ever been the occasion of any. But the extent to which," he then frankly laughed, "'three minutes' of me seems to be enough for people——!"

He left it there, just throwing up his arms, passive again as he had accepted his having to be in the other place; but conscious more and more of the anomaly of her showing so markedly at such an hour a preoccupation, and of the very intensest, that should not have her father for its subject. Nothing could have more represented this than her abruptly saying to him, without recognition of his point just made, so far as it might have been a point: "If your impression of your uncle, and of his looking so fine and being so able to talk to you, makes you think he has any power really to pick up or to last, I want you to know that you're wholly mistaken. It has kept him up," she went on, "and the effect may continue a day or two more—it will, in fact, till certain things are done. But then the flicker will have dropped—for he won't want it not to. He'll feel all right. The extraordinary inspiration, the borrowed force, will have spent itself—it will die down and go out, but with no pain. There has been at no time much of that," she said, "and now I'm positively assured there's none. It can't come back—nothing can but the weakness. It's too lovely," she remarkably added—"so there indeed and indeed we are."

To take in these words was to be, after a fashion he couldn't have expressed, on a basis of reality with her the very rarest and queerest; so that, bristling as it did with penetrative points, her speech left him scarce knowing for the instant which penetrated furthest. That she made no more of anything he himself said than if she had just sniffed it as a pale pink rose and then tossed it into the heap of his other sweet futilities, such another heap as had seemed to grow up for him in his uncle's room, this might have pressed sharpest hadn't something else, not wholly overscored by what followed, perhaps pricked his consciousness most. "'It,' you say, has kept him up? May I ask you what 'it' then may so wonderfully have been?"

She had no more objection to say than she apparently had difficulty. "Why, his having let me get at him. That was to make the whole difference."

It was somehow as much in the note of their reality as anything could well be; which was perhaps why he could but respond with "Oh I see!" and remain lolling a little with a sense of flatness—a flatness moreover exclusively his own.

So without flatness of her own she didn't even mind his; something in her brushed quite above it while she observed next, as if it were the most important thing that now occurred to her: "That of course was my poor father's mistake." And then as Gray but stared: "I mean the idea that he can pick up."

"It's your father's mistake that he can——?"