Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 23
XXIII
He had a very friendly memory of a little mountain inn, accessible with moderate trouble from Lucerne, where he had once spent ten idle unadventurous days. He had at that time been trudging, knapsack on back, over half Switzerland, and, having had a sturdy conscience about covering ground, it was no shame to him to confess that he was mortally tired. The inn of which I speak appeared to have but recently exchanged the care of the stalled ox for that of the hungry tourist; but Rowland at least had felt himself only a feebler ruminant. It stood in a high shallow valley, with flower-strewn Alpine meadows sloping down to it from the base of certain rugged rocks whose outlines were grim against the late sky. Our friend had seen grander places that pleased him less, and whenever afterwards he wished to think of Alpine opportunities at their best he recalled this grassy concave among the steeper ridges and the August days passed in resting at his length in the lee of a sun-warmed boulder, with the light cool air astir about his temples, the wafted odours of the pines in his nostrils, the tinkle of the cattle-bells in his ears, the vast procession of the mountain-hours before his eyes and a volume of Wordsworth in his pocket. His face, on the Swiss hillsides, had been scorched to a brilliant hue, and his bed was a pallet in a loft, which he shared with a German botanist of colossal stature— every inch of whom quaked at an open window. These had been drawbacks to selfish ease, but Rowland hardly cared whether or how he was lodged, for his place of preference and of main abode was under the sky, on the crest of a slope that looked at the Jungfrau. He remembered all this on leaving Florence with his friends, and he reflected that, as the midseason was over, accommodations would be more ample and charges more modest. He communicated with his old friend the landlord, and while September was yet young his companions established themselves under his guidance in this hollow of the hills.
He had crossed the Saint-Gotthard Pass with them in the same vehicle. During the journey from Florence, and especially during this portion of it, the cloud that hung over the little party had almost cleared, and they had looked at each other, in the close intimacy of train and vettura, without either the retributive or the argumentative glare. It was impossible not to hang upon the perpetual rich picture of Apennine and Alp, and there was a tacit agreement among the travellers to sink every other consciousness. The effect of this discretion was of the best; it made of them shipwrecked swimmers who had clambered upon a raft. Roderick sat with a fascinated far-reaching stare and a perfect docility of attitude. He concerned himself not a particle about the itinerary or the wayside arrangements; but if he took no trouble he also gave quite touchingly little. His friend tacitly compared him to some noble young émigré of the French Terror, seized before reaching the frontier and showing, while brought back, a white face, indescribable, that anticipated the guillotine. He assented to everything that was proposed, and was perched apparently on heights of contemplation inaccessible to the others. His mother rarely removed her eyes from him; and, if a while before this would greatly have irritated him, he now seemed wholly unconscious of her observation and deeply indifferent to anything that might befall him. They spent a couple of days on the Lake of Como, at an hotel with white porticoes smothered in oleander and myrtle and terrace-steps leading down to little boats under striped awnings. They agreed it was the earthly paradise, and they passed the mornings in strolls through the cedarn alleys of classic villas and the evenings afloat beneath the stars, in a circle of outlined mountains, to the music of silver-trickling oars. One afternoon the two young men wandered away together as they had wandered of old. They followed the winding foot path that led toward Como, close to the lakeside, past the gates of villas and the walls of vineyards, through little hamlets propped on a dozen arches and bathing their feet and their pendent tatters in the grey-green ripple; past frescoed walls and crumbling campanili and grassy village piazzettas and the mouth of soft ravines that wound upward, through belts of swinging vine and vaporous olive and wide-armed chequering chestnut, to high ledges where white chapels gleamed amid the paler boskage and bare cliff-surfaces, with their blistered lips, drank in the liquid light. It all was consummately romantic; it was the Italy we know from the steel-engravings in old keepsakes and annuals, from the vignettes on music-sheets and the drop-curtains at theatres; an Italy we can never confess ourselves—in spite of our own changes and of all the local perversions and the lost causes, as well the gained—to have ceased to need and to believe in. The companions turned aside from the little paved footway that clambered and dipped and wound and doubled beside the lake, and stretched themselves idly beneath a fig-tree on a grassy headland. Rowland had never known anything so divinely soothing as the dreamy softness of these early autumn hours. The iridescent mountains shut him in; the small waves beneath him fretted the white pebbles at the laziest intervals; the festooned vines above him swayed just visibly in the all but motionless air.
Roderick lay observing it all with his arms thrown back and his hands under his head. "This suits me," he said at last; "I could be happy here and forget everything. Why not stay here for ever?" He kept his position a long time and seemed lost in his thoughts. Rowland spoke to him, but he made vague answers; finally he closed his eyes. It seemed to Rowland also a place of irresistible persuasion, with the very taste of the lotus in the air. Suddenly Roderick turned over on his face and buried it in his arms. The movement had been a nervous spasm, but our friend nevertheless winced, on his jerking himself round again and sitting up, at the sight of his suffused eyes. Roderick turned to him, stretching out both hands to the lake and mountains and shaking them as from a heart too full for utterance.
"Pity me, my friend; pity me!" he presently cried. "Look at this lovely world and think what it must be to be dead to it!"
"Dead?" poor Rowland temporised.
"Dead, dead; dead and buried! Buried in an open grave where you lie staring up at the sailing clouds, smelling the waving flowers and hearing all nature live and grow above you. That 's the way I feel."
"I 'm very glad to hear it. Death of that sort 's very near to resurrection."
"It's too horrible," Roderick went on; "it has all come over me here. If I were not ashamed I could shed a bushel of tears. For one hour of what I have been I 'd give up—everything I 'm not."
"Never mind what you 'have' been; be something better!"
"I shall never be anything again; it's no use talking! But I don't know what secret spring has been touched since I 've lain here. Something in my heart seems suddenly to open and let in a flood of beauty and desire. I know what I 've lost and I think it horrible. Mind you, I know it, I feel it. Remember that hereafter. Don't say that he was stupefied and senseless, that his perception was dulled or his aspiration dead. Say he trembled in every nerve with a sense of the beauty and sweetness of life; say he rebelled and protested and struggled; say he was buried alive, with his eyes open and his heart beating to madness; say he clung to every blade of grass and every wayside thorn as he passed; say it was the most pathetic thing you ever beheld. Say," he wound up, "that it was a sacrifice and a scandal."
Rowland fairly turned pale as their eyes met. "I think that if you 're not mad you 'll at least soon make me so."
"Oh, I can trust you, old chap, and I assure you I can be trusted. I 've never been saner. I don't want to be bad company, and in this beautiful spot, at this delightful hour, it seems an outrage to break the charm. But I 'm bidding farewell to Italy, to beauty, to honour, to life. I only want to assure you that I know what I lose. I know it in every pulse, in every inch of me. Here where these things are all loveliest I take leave of them. Good-bye, adoreable world!"
During their slow ascent into Switzerland he absented himself much of the time from the carriage and rambled, far in advance, along the zigzags of the road and in constant deviation from them. He showed a tireless activity; his light weight and long legs carried him everywhere, and his friends saw him skirt the edge of plunging chasms, loosen the stones on vast steep slopes and lift himself against the sky from the top of rocky pinnacles. Mary Garland took scarcely less to her feet, but she remained near the carriage to be with Mrs. Hudson, while Rowland remained near it to be with Mrs. Hudson's companion. He measured the great road by her side and found himself sorry the Alps were so low and that their walk was not to last a week. She was exhilarated; she rejoiced in their adventure; in the way of mountains, until within the last few weeks, she had seen, for a near view, nothing greater than Mounts Holyoke and Tom and the mild Alban hills, so that she recognised in the Alps the just ground of their glory. Rowland had noted her own vision of natural objects, but he was struck afresh with her quick eye for them and with her knowledge of plants and rocks and "formations." At that season many of the wild flowers had gone, but others lingered, and Mary never failed to "spot" them in their outlying corners. She gave herself up to them, interested when they were old friends and charmed when they were new. Her foot was light in quest of them and she had soon covered the front seat of the carriage with a tangle of strange vegetation. Rowland had always supposed himself to dislike the race of weed-gathering, vase-dressing women, disposers, over the domestic scene, of bristling, tickling greenery; but he was none the less alert in her service and gathered for her several fine specimens which had at first seemed inaccessible. One of these indeed had appeared an easier prize than it was likely to prove, and he had paused a moment at the base of the little peak on which it grew, measuring the risk of further pursuit. Suddenly, as he stood there, he remembered Roderick's defiance of danger and of Christina Light during that sharp moment at the Coliseum, and he was seized with a strong desire to test the quality of his own companion. She had just scrambled up a grassy slope near him and had seen that the flower was out of reach. As he prepared to approach it she called to him eagerly to stop and yield to the impossibility. Poor Rowland, whose interest in her had so much more nourished itself on plain fare than snatched at any golden apple of reward, enjoyed immensely the sense of her caring for three minutes what should become of him. He was the least brutal of men, but for a moment he was perfectly indifferent to her nerves.
"I can get the flower," he called to her. "Will you trust me?"
"I don't want it; I'd rather not have it!" she cried.
"Will you trust me?" he repeated, looking at her hard.
She looked at him in return and then at the flower; he wondered whether she would shriek and swoon as Christina had done. "I wish it were something better!" she said simply; and she stood watching him while he began to clamber. Rowland was not a trained acrobat, and his enterprise was difficult; but he kept his wits about him, made the most of narrow footholds and coigns of vantage and at last secured his prize. He managed to stick it into his button-hole, after which he worked his way down again. There was more than one chance for an ugly fall, but he had not lost his head or his hold. It was doubtless not gracefully done, but it was done, and that was all he had proposed to himself. He was red in the face when he offered Mary the flower, and she was visibly pale. She had kept her eyes on him without moving. All this had passed without the knowledge of Mrs. Hudson, who was dozing beneath the hood of the carriage. Mary's eyes did not perhaps quite display the ardent admiration anciently offered to the victor by the queen of beauty at a tournament; but they told him that his existence had for the time mattered to her. He liked having proof of this to put in his pocket, very much as a "handsome" subscriber to an important cause likes an acknowledgement of his cheque.
"Why did you do that?" she asked gravely. He hesitated, conscious of the deep desire to answer "Because I love you!" But he had not kept his head before to lose it now. He lowered his pitch and replied simply: "Because I wanted to do something for you."
"Suppose you had broken your neck."
"I believed I should n't. And you believed it, I think."
"I believed nothing. I simply trusted you, as you asked me."
"Quod erat demonstrandum!" cried Rowland. "I think you know Latin."
When our four friends were established in what I have called their hollow in the hills there was much scrambling over slopes both grassy and stony, a good deal of flower-plucking on narrow ledges, a great many long walks and, thanks to the tonic mountain air, not a little relief and oblivion. Mrs. Hudson was reduced to forgetting, above all, that the poison of Europe — as she knew Europe — might lurk in the breeze, and even to admitting that the eggs of Engelthal were almost as fresh and the cream almost as thick as those of the Connecticut Valley. She was certainly more in her element than she had been in Italy; having always lived in the country she had missed in Rome and Florence that social solitude mitigated by bushes and rocks, primarily dear to the true New England temperament. The little unpainted Oberland inn, with its plank partitions, its milk-pans standing in the sun, its "help," in the form of angular young women of the countryside, reminded her of places of summer sojourn in her native land; and the beautiful historic chambers of Villa Pandolfini passed from her conscience without a regret and without having in the least modified her conception of the house submissive to "keeping." If Roderick, on the other hand, had changed his sky, he had still not changed his mind; he was not sensibly nearer to having got back into the traces than he had shown himself during his declaration of despair by the Italian lakeside. He now kept this despair to himself and went decently enough about the ordinary business of life; but it was easy to see that he wasn't, in the new phrase, "there"—his meekness was so mechanical and his present motives somehow so inscrutable. In that sad half-hour on the Como promontory there had been a fierce truth under the impression of which Rowland found himself at last forswearing criticism and censure. He began to feel it quite idle to appeal to his comrade's will; there was no will left—its place was a mocking void. This view of the case indeed was occasionally contravened by certain indications on Roderick's part of the surviving faculty of resistance to disagreeable obligation: one might still have said, if one had been disposed to improve the occasion at any hazard, that there was a method in his madness, that his moral energy had its sleeping and its waking hours, and that in an attractive cause it would yet again be capable of rising with the dawn. This name, however, for a possible knock at his door, what was it, truly, but another word for an inspiration? Oh, for such a visitor, the appealing plastic idea, he would spring up and open wide his eyes and look out at the dawn; but where was the precious pebble to come from that might be cast with the right sharp tap at his window-pane? It was now impossible, at all events, not to be indulgent to a consciousness that had so ceased to be aggressive—not to forgive much apathy to a temper that had turned its rough side inward. Roderick said frankly that Switzerland made him less miserable than Italy, and that the Alps were less of a reproach to idle skilled hands than the Apennines. He went in for long rambles, generally alone, and was very fond of climbing into dizzy places where no sound could overtake him and there, stretched at his length on the never-trodden moss, of pulling his hat over his eyes and lounging away the hours in perfect immobility. Rowland was sometimes the associate of these walks, for if his friend never directly proposed it he yet as little visibly resented it; and the only way at present to treat him was as a graceful, an almost genial, a certainly harmless eccentric, with whom one assumed that all things were well and held one's tongue about the prosperity he had forfeited, or maintained to any questioner—much rejoicing, for the time, there were none—that such were the interlunar swoons of the true as distinguished from the false artist, and that the style of genius was as much in them as in the famous Homeric nod. His interest in Mary's relations with her cousin had lost meanwhile none of its point, though mystified as he was on all sides he found nothing penetrable here. After their arrival at Engelthal Roderick appeared to care more for her society than he had done hitherto, and this revival of appetite could n't fail to come home to their friend. They sat together and strolled together, and she often read aloud to him. One day, on their arrival at luncheon, after he had been lying half the morning at her feet in the shadow of a rock, Rowland asked him what she had been reading.
"I don't know," Roderick said; "I don't heed the sense." Mary heard this and Rowland looked at her, but it only made her look hard at Roderick. "I listen to Mary," he continued, "for the sake of her voice. It 's soothing and stupefying—it 's really demoralising." At this the girl coloured and turned away.
Rowland, as we know, had speculated much, in the interest of his ultimate chance, had asked himself if her constancy had been proof; and that demand, on her lips, which had brought about his own departure for Switzerland had seemed almost equivalent to a confession that she needed his help to keep her faith. He had, in his high modesty, not risked the supposition that Mary could contrast him with Roderick to the advantage of his personal charm; but his consciousness of duty done had a hand to hold out for any such stray grain of enthusiasm as might have crumbled away from her estimate of his companion. If some day she had declared in a sudden burst of bitterness that she was completely disillusioned and that she gave up her recreant lover our friend's expectation would have gone half-way to meet her. And certainly, if her troubled spirit had taken this course, no generous critic, he reasoned, would have pronounced her vain. She had been offered an extent of cold shoulder on which few girls could have schooled themselves to rest their eyes so long. There were girls indeed the beauty of whose nature, like that of Burd Helen in the ballad, lay in clinging to the man of their love through bush and brier and in bowing their head to all hard usage. That behaviour had of course a grace of its own, but Rowland was far from seeing it as proper to Mary Garland. She asked something for what she gave, and he was yet to make out what had been given her. She believed in the conquests of ambition, and would surely never long persuade herself that it was as interesting to see them missed—even helplessly and pathetically—as to see them strenuously reached. Rowland passed, before he had done, an angry day; for he had not been able to stifle a sense that she had in a manner—how did he like to put it?—"transferred her esteem" to him. And yet here she was throwing herself back into Roderick's arms at his slightest overture—so that a fatuous man (which, thank goodness, he was n't) might almost have called her a coquette, or at least have asked her what she "meant." He stated to himself that his position was abject and that all the philosophy he could bring to bear upon it would make it neither honourable nor comfortable. He would go away and cut it short. He did n't go away; he simply took a long walk, made an absence of hours, and on his return found Mary sitting out in the moonlight with their friend.
Communing with himself during the restless ramble in question, he had determined that he would at last cease to observe, to heed or to care for what these two young persons might do or might not do together. Nevertheless some three days afterwards, the opportunity presenting itself, he deliberately broached the subject with Roderick. He felt it inconsistent and faint-hearted; it was an allowance to fingers that itched to handle forbidden fruit. But he said to himself that it was really more logical to return to the question than to drop it, for they had formerly discussed these mysteries sharply enough. Was n't it perfectly reasonable that he should wish to know the sequel to the situation Roderick had then delineated? Roderick had made him promises, and it was to be expected that he should wish to ascertain how the promises had been kept. So he took occasion to break ground on the morrow of the day just mentioned. "I imagine you're not sorry at present to have allowed yourself to be dissuaded from putting an end to your affair with your cousin." He liked somehow calling their engagement an affair.
Roderick eyed him with the vague and absent look lately habitual to his face. "Dissuaded?"
"Don't you remember that in Rome you wished to break off, and that I urged you to hold fast, on the contrary — thin as your link appeared to have become? I wanted you to see what would come, for you, of your taking no first step. If I 'm not mistaken you 're now reconciled to your having let things alone."
"Oh yes," said Roderick, "I remember what you said; you made it a kind of personal favour to yourself that I should not clear anything up. I consented, but afterwards, when I thought of it, your attitude struck me as having its oddity. Had it ever been seen before?—a man asking another man to gratify him, in such a case—I mean the case of such an attractive girl—by still blocking the way."
"Well, my view was about as selfish as another," said Rowland. "One man puts his selfishness into this thing, and one into that. It would n't at all have suited me to see your cousin in low spirits."
"But you liked her—you admired her, eh? So you intimated."
"I admire her extremely."
"It was your originality then—to do you justice you 've a great deal of a certain sort—to wish her happiness secured in just that fashion. Many a man would have liked better himself to make the woman he admired happy, and would have welcomed her low spirits as an opening for sympathy. You were very quaint and unexpected—though I 'm bound to say very reasonable and even very charming—about it."
"So be it!" said Rowland. "The question is Are n't you glad I was all those interesting things? Are n't you finding much of your old feeling for your cousin now come back to you?"
"I don't pretend to say. When she arrived in Rome I discovered I had ceased to care for her, and I honestly proposed that we should have no humbug about it. If you, on the contrary, thought there was something to be gained by having a little humbug I was willing to try it! I don't see that the situ ation is really changed. Mary is all she ever was—all the cardinal virtues, and if possible more than all. But she does n't, poor dear, in the least interest me—so what 's a fellow to do? Nothing does interest me—not really—of course, and how can I pretend she 's a brilliant exception? The only difference is that I don't care now whether she interests me or not. Of course marrying such a useless lout as I am is out of the question for any woman, and I should pay Mary a poor compliment to assume that she 's in a hurry to celebrate our nuptials."
"Oh, you'll do—you're in love!" Rowland not very logically answered. It must be confessed that this assertion was made for the sole purpose of hearing his companion deny it.
But it quite failed of its aim. Roderick gave a liberal shrug of his shoulders and an irresponsible toss of his head. "Call it what you please! I 'm past caring for the names of things."
Rowland had not only failed of logic, he had also failed of candour. He believed not the least little mite that Roderick was in love; he had only argued the false to learn the true. The "true" was then that this troubled youth was again, despite everything, in some degree under a charm, and that one could n't be so ministered to without either liking it or hating it. Roderick might say what he would, he did n't hate it. So it came round to her having, behind everything, an insidious art. Rowland liked, for his part, to think of her insidious art. Since she had asked him as a favour to herself, at any rate, to come with them to Switzerland, he thought she might by this time have let him know if he seemed to have done her a service. The days passed without her doing so, and at last he walked away to an isolated eminence some five miles from the inn and murmured to the silent rocks that she was ungrateful. Listening nature appeared not to contradict him, so that on the morrow he asked the girl with a touch of melancholy malice whether it struck her that his deflexion from his other plan had been attended with brilliant results.
"Why, we're delighted you're with us!" she simply answered.
He was anything but satisfied with this; it seemed to imply that she had forgotten how she had put it to him that he would particularly oblige her. He reminded her of her request and recalled the place and time. "That evening on the terrace, late, after Mrs. Hudson had gone to bed, and Roderick being absent."
She perfectly remembered, but the memory seemed to trouble her. "I 'm afraid your kindness has been a great charge upon you then. You wanted very much to do something else."
"I wanted above all things to do what you would like, and I made no sacrifice. But if I had made an immense one it would be more than made up to me by any assurance that I 've helped Roderick to better conditions."
She was silent a while, and then, "Why do you ask me?" she said. "You 're able to judge quite as well as I."
Rowland cast about him; he desired to justify himself in the most veracious manner. "The truth is I 'm afraid I care only in the second place for Roderick's holding up his head. What I care for in the first place is your tranquillity and security."
"I don't know why that should be," she returned: "I 've certainly done nothing to make you so much my friend. If you were to tell me you intend to leave us to-morrow I 'm afraid that I should n't venture to ask you to stay. But whether you go or stay, let us not talk of Roderick."
"Then that," said Rowland, "doesn't answer my question. Is he better?"
"No!" she brought out, and turned away.
He was careful not to tell her he intended to leave them.