Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/125

HENRY JAMES 99 perspective in which "Uncle" comes and goes. I keep in view his little rounded back, at the base of which his arms are inter- locked behind him, and I know how his bald head, yet with the hair bristling up almost in short-horn fashion at the sides, is thrust inquiringly, not to say appealingly, forward ; I assist at his emergence, where the fine old mahogany doors of separation are rolled back on what used to seem to me silver wheels, into the brighter yet colder half of the scene, and attend him while he at last looks out awhile into Fourteenth Street for news of whatever may be remarkably, objectionably, or mercifully taking place there ; and then I await his regular return, preparatory to a renewed advance, far from indifferent as I innocently am to his discoveries or comments. It is Cousin Helen, however, who preferentially takes them up, attaching to them the right im- portance, which is for the moment the very greatest that could be possibly attached to anything in the world ; I for my part occupied with those marks of character in our pacing companion — his long, slightly equine countenance, his eyebrows ever elevated as in the curiosity of alarm, and the so limited play from side to side of his extremely protrusive head, as if through tightness of the " wash" neckcloths that he habitually wore, and that, wound and rewound in their successive stages, made his neck very long without making it in the least thick, and reached the climax in a proportionately very small knot tied with the neatest art. . . . So it glimmers up and " sets," with a steady increase of clarity, as the focusing gets more and more exact — and already the original throb has been doubled by the addition of the joy of tracking down. And now comes the next " extra," layer number three. Softly and subtly, with every precaution, so as not to disturb its attitude, Mr. James now slips out of his seven-year-old body, draws back far enough to get it, as well as " Uncle," into the field of his vision — and suddenly discovers, with a cry, things unsus- pected before, mute watchers and wonders that the small boy never recked of, raising omens positively too awful to be borne : — I scarcely can have known at the time that this was as complete a little old-world figure as any that might then have been noted