The Sense of the Past

by Henry James

To divine these things, however, was also, while one was about it, to divine the presence, lurking among them, of the question of calculable profit, the power, elementary enough, to compare inconveniences and choose the least—the greatest being of course the one that would most interfere with such a gentleman's material ease. It was solid, it had always been, to be a Midmore of Drydown—that pressed heavier upon Ralph each instant; but the virtue of the solid was exactly that you couldn't see through it, as you might, or as unmannerly people at least, looking hard at it, might, should financial inanition begin to make it at all thin. Horrid for the great—since, strangely enough, the young man, staring, lowering, vainly dissimulating, or at least ineffectually pretending, did in his way represent greatness—to have to feel less at home in the world, or certainly in Mansfield Square, let alone at Drydown itself, by the want of anything their quality had learned from such a good way back to take for granted. Our friend vibrated to the sense of still another tenth of a second during which the measure of the want he himself was to supply made him blink as by its intense flash, directly after which he knew that his gallantry of welcome to Perry, his smile of intelligence—he might fairly have damned the intelligence he couldn't keep down!—was practically a suggestion that his cousin should advance and receive his promise to pay. His cousin did advance, at the worst, more rapidly than any effective alarm of Ralph's on this score could supervene; and then the latter scarce knew what brave distance had been covered by the exchange between them of a fine old fraternal embrace over which Mrs. Midmore's authority, dominant really, after all, through everything, had somehow presided with elegance and yet without ceremony.

Was it the fact of the embrace, was it the common stout palpability, the very human homely odour, of his relative, that had at the end of a minute dispelled all difficulties and renewed the wonderful rush, as it could only be felt, of the current? Certain it was that if Perry was going to be curious, and this most perhaps by the repudiation in him of the very rudiments of curiosity, so at the same time he had become as a creature to play with—from the moment at least of one's having something to his advantage to dangle before him. His human simplicity would surely mark itself as unlike, as quite beyond, anything of the sort that had ever confronted Ralph with pretensions or assumptions; and how should that alone not prove tempting to one's taste for a game, exasperated as this taste might become by such particular stupidities of confidence and comfort as would inevitably await it? It might be indeed that one had never seen the straight force of stupidity so attested—that straight force being, when applied, nothing very much other than brutality; which, clearly, lurked here with supports and accessories and surrounding graces, the fair and delicate house, the full-voiced mannerly women, the ordered consideration of twenty kinds, that it was so far from being able to draw upon in a country where it was mainly known but by its going naked and unashamed. Ralph easily knew that the attempt to preserve itself there in whatever approach to the conditions now before him would have had overmuch to reckon with distraction and diversion. All of which wondrous interpretation, on his part, of the few trifles light as air that achieved in as few seconds such a brushing of his sense, left him momentarily with a tight hold of Perry's hand and an ear still reached by his hard breathing—this too though the return to their orbits of his silly scared eyes was more assured.

Ralph further knew a desire to mark the distinction between being satisfied of him and amused at him, and was aware above all of something sharper for the instant than aught else, the fixed and extreme attention of the others, the look of the two ladies at their son and brother as if under stress of what they might gain or lose by the sentiment he should provoke; their major care for that, in the connection, rather than for their visitor's own immediate action, enriching again in our young man the savour of success. It was as Molly's husband to be, who had just arrived from America to claim her hand, and who had in fact just claimed it and felt it brightly conferred, along with a fond mother's blessing, by the grand girl herself—it was under instruction to greet him in this character that he knew Perry to have been pushed into his arms; and what with the lapse of the next minute had come to hang in the balance was whether or no that youth, the head of the family but also the fool of it, and with some rude art of his own the will of it, would stand out for his right not to have been passed over by the offhand transaction. He was a gentleman to stand out for his rights up to any point at which he shouldn't get bewildered about them; for he was also a gentleman to get bewildered, that is easily to be determined in such a sense, on any ground not absolutely to be felt by the shuffle of his feet. In saying to him with fine gaiety "I want to commend myself all round, and quite understand that I must before the last word is said—so that you must give me time for it a bit, please:" in saying, in risking, he verily felt, as much as this he would have been conscious of more felicity had he not seen the very next instant that gaiety might well be too fine to please in the difficult relation; to which it would thus appear that his kinsman could only contribute in highest measure a mistrust of any semblance of manner, or at least of such manner as a glib adventurer from overseas might have brought with him. He was probably formed not to "like" manner, or to understand it, whether kept up or kept down, damn him; for if Ralph, with his own splendid sense for rising again to the surface after deep submersions, could take the quickest conceivable note of this, so there hung in his eye at the same time the lively truth, which fairly jerked out arms and legs like those of a toy harlequin worked by a string, that manner was essentially and by an extraordinary law to be his constant resort and weapon and of consistent application to every aspect of his case. It wouldn't of course always be the same, nor would he wish it to, since that would represent the really mad grimace; but the vision of it was precious in proportion as he felt how, so remarkably, in fact so unaccountably, he should need always to work from behind something—something that, look as it would, he must object to Perry's staring at in return as if it were a counterfeit coin or a card from up his sleeve.

Let us frankly plead, for that matter, that he found himself affected before this passage lapsed as by the suddenest vision of a possibility of his having to appeal from the imputation, as who should say, of cheating, cheating in that sense which his above-mentioned love of the game, exactly, might expose him to suspicion of; this for all the world as if he were seated with the house of Midmore, not to speak of other company too, at a green table and between tall brave candlesticks which would at a given moment somehow perversely light the exchange of queer glances from partner to partner at his expense. So odd an apprehension could cast of course but the briefest shade: breath after breath and hint after hint—though whence directed who should say?—so spending themselves upon the surface of his sensibility that impressions, as we have already seen, were successively effaced and nothing persisted but the force of derived motion. As soon as he had heard his affianced bride, for instance, take up with infinite spirit the words of accommodation just addressed by him to her brother he seemed to see a shining clearance and to measure the span by which the three of them together, he and she and her mother, would be cleverer than any home criticism. "What puts it into your head, please, that if I'm quite content, and bold enough into the bargain to say as much to whomever it may concern, what puts it into your head that he may have a case against you that need give you the least trouble?" She spoke that out like her mother's daughter, whether like her brother's sister or no, blooming with still greater beauty and so attracting and holding Perry's eyes in consequence that when he turned them back again they reflected something of her pride.

"There's not a gentleman too grand for her anywhere," her brother observed to Ralph; "but I suppose you think yourself quite one of ourselves; which I don't say you're not," he added with due caution, "if you really please her and please my mother, to say nothing——"

"To say nothing of my pleasing you, of course"—Ralph took him up with the address that, however it might turn, he would so assuredly have to make the best of. "Yes, that's of course, but I won't pretend I don't draw a great confidence from their favour: I've felt them on the spot just as wise as they are kind. Just as kind as they are handsome too," he went on, looking at his kinsman ever so much harder and harder—which he somehow found that, though it wasn't at all what he wanted, he couldn't in the least help. It made him drive his address home, and this was, in the oddest way, as if he had his host by the body in a sort of intimate combat and were trying him and squeezing him for a fall. Perry would have to take him, and to show that he had taken him—this was the tug; only the more he conveyed that, even if he wreathed it, so to say, in flowers and the more he thereby insisted on a relation, if not on the one, the more he seemed to give his man an opportunity the other aspect of which was that it was for himself a form of exposure. Why he should be exposed, and what, above all, exposed to, was more than he could have said—wondering as he did at this even while a passion urged and an instinct warned him. There it was, in any case: he couldn't help sounding Perry, even in the presence of the women; which was what brought upon him, through concentration of the visual sense, the challenge he seemed positively to advance into the enemy's county in order to invite. It was the rate at which he drew intelligence out of the dull that made him uneasy when it ought to have made him, by every presumption, feel it as wind in his sails. Violating nature, as might fairly seem, in the face before him, what was such a glimmer intelligence of?—this he asked himself while he watched it grow and while, into the bargain, he might have marvelled at the oddity of one's wanting to be impressive without wanting to be understood. To be understood simply as impressive—it was this that would best consort; but what the devil wouldn't requiring such a creature to be more penetrable perhaps represent in the way of teaching it tricks it might use against one? In the act of impressing, Ralph felt, he encouraged familiarity—which was what people had been known to do at their cost and to the provocation of bad accident by putting primitive natures in a false position. False indeed would be the position when Perry should begin, say, to know more about Ralph Pendrel than this lover of life knew about himself. It may be added that if these considerations did lurk in the expression of countenance bent by Ralph upon his host with general ingenious intent, even a Midmore stuffed with a single prejudice might well have picked from the bunch some hint of a sinister menace to that monotony.

"You don't mean to say you're struck with my appearance—I know it's not my strong point!" Perry said goodhumouredly enough, after all, and with a laugh which put that quantity at once in a better light. "But I like, as much as you please, to be praised for what I am" he added—"if you'll give me time to show that; for I suppose you've already noticed that in this country we take time for our affairs, and perhaps no people among us all more than we of this family; which has gone on for ever so long, yon know, at its own pace and never allowed itself to be driven. We probably don't look to you, however, as if you could lash us up—out of breath even as you may perhaps be with your errand; and that's all the appearance I pretend to make to anyone. What I leave to my mother I do leave to her," the young man further declared—more and more articulate, clearly, on finding himself so well listened to; "and of course she and Miss Midmore are as clever as they're handsome, if that's what you want." After achieving, with some unexpectedness for Ralph, this effort of propriety, he looked as in recovered self-possession from Mrs. Midmore to Molly, and then again very hard at his sister and back at his mother, so that it shouldn't be his fault, obviously, if they didn't trust his tact. He showed himself in short the man of sense and of consequence, though while speaking he had stared straight before him, not resting his eyes on Ralph, who, none the less, at once and cordially welcomed his remarks.

"I hear you with the greatest interest, but even if we don't always take time enough in America for what we do, I'm not going to grant you that I haven't thoroughly thought of what I'm about in coming to you. And if you care to know it," Ralph continued, "it has taken but four days of old England to convince me that you're the happiest people in the most convenient country. I've been since I landed more pleased and amused than I can tell you." With which our young man again smiled and smiled.

"Oh you've seen nothing as yet compared to what you will," Mrs. Midmore impatiently broke in—"and I know," she said, "that what Perry would like to say to you is that you'll have no idea of anything till you've seen and admired Drydown. That you shall do in good time—it's a place I shall make it my care that you shall get to love, for that's where we're at home, where we're what we are, if you understand; and where, as I see Perry desires to assure you, you shall have a horse of your own to ride, and the best home-grown victual that you'll anywhere find to eat, and a capital neighbourhood to receive civility from, to say nothing of one of the very finest views in England spread out before you."

"You shall have any horse that you can ride," Perry concurred, his clue to amiability now quite grasped, with this fine example of it given; "though it isn't when they're most to my taste, I grant, that they're apt to be most to other men's. That's what I say to my friends"—and he improved his theme, not to speak of his himself improving with it: "I tell 'em they're welcome to any mount that suits 'em, and I don't think I find it in general a freedom from which my animals suffer. Unless it be," he pursued, appealing again with his flushed but comparatively directed deliberation to his sister, "unless it be that I provide better still for Molly's liking—since I must make him understand, you know," he kept on, "how straight he has to follow if he's so bold as to allow you a lead."