The Ivory Tower (London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917)/The Ivory Tower/Book 2/Chapter 2
II
Whether or no by its so different appearance from that of Mr. Gaw, the figure propped on pillows in the vast cool room and lighted in such a way that the clear deepening west seemed to flush toward it, through a wide high window, in the interest of its full effect, impressed our young man as massive and expansive, as of a beautiful bland dignity indeed—though emulating Rosanna's relative, he was at first to gather, by a perfect readiness to stare rather than speak. Miss Goodenough had hovered a little, for full assurance, but then had thrown off with a timbre of voice never yet used for Gray's own ear in any sick room, "Well, I guess you won't come to blows!" and had left them face to face—besides leaving the air quickened by the freedom of her humour. They were face to face for the time across an interval which, to do her justice, she had not taken upon herself to deal with directly; this in spite of Gray's apprehension at the end of a minute that she might, by the touch of her hand or the pitch of her spirit, push him further forward than he had immediately judged decent to advance. He had stopped at a certain distance from the great grave bed, stopped really for consideration and deference, or through the instinct of submitting himself first of all to approval, or at least to encouragement; the space, not great enough for reluctance and not small enough for presumption, showed him ready to obey any sign his uncle should make. Mr. Betterman struck him, in this high quietude of contemplation, much less as formidable than as mildly and touchingly august; he had not supposed him, he became suddenly aware, so great a person—a presence like that of some weary veteran of affairs, one of the admittedly eminent whose last words would be expected to figure in history. The large fair face, rather square than heavy, was neither clouded nor ravaged, but finely serene; the silver-coloured hair seemed to bind the broad high brow as with a band of splendid silk, while the eyes rested on Gray with an air of acceptance beyond attestation by the mere play of cheer or the comparative gloom of relief.
"Ah le beau type, le beau type!" was during these instants the visitor's inward comment breaking into one of the strange tongues that experience had appointed him privately to use, in many a case, for the appropriation of aspects and appearances. It was not till afterwards that he happened to learn how his uncle had been capable, two or three hours before seeing him, of offering cheek and chin to the deft ministration of a barber, a fact highly illuminating, though by that time the gathered lights were thick. What the patient owed on the spot to the sacrifice, he easily made out, was that look as of the last refinement of preparation, that positive splendour of the immaculate, which was really, on one's taking it all in, but part of an earnest recognition of his guest's own dignity. The grave beauty of the personal presence, the vague anticipation as of something that might go on to be commemorated for its example, the great pure fragrant room, bathed in the tempered glow of the afternoon's end, the general lucidity and tranquillity and security of the whole presented case, begot in fine, on our young friend's part, an extraordinary sense that as he himself was important enough to be on show, so these peculiar perfections that met him were but so many virtual honours rendered and signs of the high level to which he had mounted. On show, yes—that was it, and more wonderfully than could be said: Gray was sure after a little of how right he was to stand off as yet in any interest of his own significance that might be involved. There was clearly something his uncle so wanted him to be that he should run no possible danger of being it to excess, and that if he might only there and then grasp it he would ask but to proceed, for decency's sake, according to his lights: just as so short a time before a like force of suggestion had played upon him from Mr. Gaw—each of these appeals clothing him in its own way with such an oddity of pertinence, such a bristling set of attributes. This wait of the parties to the present one for articulate expression, on either side, of whatever it was that might most concern them together, promised also to last as the tension had lasted down on the verandah, and would perhaps indeed have drawn itself further out if Gray hadn't broken where he stood into a cry of admiration—since it could scarcely be called less—that blew to the winds every fear of overstepping.
"It's really worth one's coming so far, uncle, if you don't mind my saying so—it's really worth a great pilgrimage to see anything so splendid."
The old man heard, clearly, as by some process that was still deeply active; and then after a pause that represented, Gray was sure, no failure at all of perception, but only the wide embrace of a possibility of pleasure, sounded bravely back: "Does it come up to what you've seen?"
It was Gray rather who was for a moment mystified though only to further spontaneity when he had caught the sense of the question. "Oh, you come up to everything—by which I mean, if I may, that nothing comes up to you! I mean, if I may," he smiled, "that you yourself, uncle, affect me as the biggest and most native American impression that I can possibly be exposed to."
"Well," said Mr. Betterman, and again as with a fond deliberation, "what I'm going to like, I see, is to listen to the way you talk. That," he added with his soft distinctness, a singleness of note somehow for the many things meant, "that, I guess, is about what I most wanted you to come for. Unless it be to look at you too. I like to look right at you."
"Well," Gray harmoniously laughed again, "if even that can give you pleasure———!" He stood as for inspection, easily awkward, pleasantly loose, holding up his head as to make the most of no great stature. "I've never been so sorry that there isn't more of me."
The fine old eyes on the pillow kept steadily taking him in; he could quite see that he happened to be, as he might have called it, right; and though he had never felt himself, within his years, extraordinarily or excitingly wrong, so that this felicity might have turned rather flat for him, there was still matter for emotion, for the immediate throb and thrill, in finding success so crown him. He had been spared, thank goodness, any positive shame, but had never known his brow brushed or so much as tickled by the laurel or the bay. "Does it mean," he might have murmured to himself, "the strangest shift of standards?"—but his uncle had meanwhile spoken. "Well, there's all of you I'm going to want. And there must be more of you than I see. Because you are different," Mr. Betterman considered.
"But different from what?" Truly was Gray interested to know.
It took Mr. Betterman a moment to say, but he seemed to convey that it might have been guessed. "From what you'd have been if you had come."
The young man was indeed drawn in. "If I had come years ago? Well, perhaps," he so far happily agreed—"for I've often thought of that myself. Only, you see," he laughed, "I'm different from that too. I mean from what I was when I didn't come."
Mr. Betterman looked at it quietly. "You're different in the sense that you're older—and you seem to me rather older than I supposed. All the better, all the better," he continued to make out. "You're the same person I didn't tempt, the same person I couldn't—that time when I tried. I see you are, I see what you are."
"You see terribly much, sir, for the few minutes!" smiled Gray.
"Oh when I want to see———!" the old man comfortably enough sighed. "I take you in, I take you in; though I grant that I don't quite see how you can understand. Still," he pursued, "there are things for you to tell me. You're different from anything, and if we had time for particulars I should like to know a little how you've kept so. I was afraid you wouldn't turn out perhaps so thoroughly the sort of thing I liked to think—for I hadn't much more to go upon than what she said, you know. However," Mr. Betterman wound up as with due comfort, "it's by what she says that I've gone—and I want her to know that I don't feel fooled."
If Gray's wonderment could have been said to rest anywhere, hour after hour, long enough to be detected in the act, the detaining question would have been more than any other perhaps that of whether Miss Gaw would "come up." Now that she did so however, in this quiet way, it had no strangeness that his being at once glad couldn't make but a mouthful of; and the recent interest of what she had lately written to him was as nothing to the interest of her becoming personally his uncle's theme. With which, at the same time, it was pleasanter to him than anything else to speak of her himself. "If you allude to Rosanna Gaw you'll no doubt understand how tremendously I want to see her."
The sick man waited a little—but not, it quite seemed, from lack of understanding. "She wants tremendously to see you, Graham. You might know that of course from her going to work so." Then again he gathered his thoughts and again after a little went on. "She had a good idea, and I love her for it; but I'm afraid my own hasn't been so very much to give her the satisfaction. I've wanted it myself, and—well, here I am getting it from you. Yes," he kept up, his eyes never moving from his nephew, "you couldn't give me more if you had tried, from so far back, on purpose. But I can't tell you half!" He exhaled a long breath—he was a little spent. "You tell me. You tell me."
"I'm tiring you, sir," Gray said.
"Not by letting me see—you'd only tire me if you didn't." Then for the first time his eyes glanced about. "Haven't they put a place for you to sit? Perhaps they knew," he suggested, while Gray reached out for a chair, "perhaps they knew just how I'd want to see you. There seems nothing they don't know," he contentedly threw off again.
Gray had his chair before him, his hands on the back tilting it a little. "They're extraordinary. I've never seen anything like them. They help me tremendously," he cheerfully confessed.
Mr. Bettennan, at this, seemed to wonder. "Why, have you difficulties?"
"Well," said Gray, still with his chair, "you say I'm different—if you mean it for my being alien from what I feel surrounding me. But if you knew how funny all that seems to me," he laughed, "you'd understand that I clutch at protection."
"'Funny'?"—his host was clearly interested, without offence, in the term.
"Well then terrific, sir!"
"So terrific that you need protection?"
"Well," Gray explained, gently shaking his chair-back, "when one simply sees that nothing of one's former experience serves, and that one doesn't know anything about anything———!"
More than ever at this his uncle's look might have covered him. "Anything round here—no! That's it, that's it," the old man blandly repeated. That's just the way—I mean the way I hoped. She knows you don't know—and doesn't want you to either. But put down your chair," he said; and then after, when Gray, instantly and delicately complying, had placed the precious article with every precaution back where it had stood: "Sit down here on the bed. There's margin."
"Yes," smiled Gray, doing with all consideration as he was told, "you don't seem anywhere very much à l'étroit."
"I presume," his uncle returned, "you know French thoroughly."
Gray confessed to the complication. "Of course when one has heard it almost from the cradle———!"
"And the other tongues too?"
He seemed to wonder if, for his advantage, he mightn't deny them. "Oh a couple of others. In the countries there they come easy."
"Well, they wouldn't have come easy here—and I guess nothing else would; I mean of the things we principally grow. And I won't have you tell me," Mr. Betterman said, "that if you had taken that old chance they might have done so. We don't know anything about it, and at any rate it would have spoiled you. I mean for what you are."
"Oh," returned Gray, on the bed, but pressing lightly, "oh what I 'am'———!"
"My point isn't so much for what you are as for what you're not. So I won't have anything else; I mean I won't have you but as I want you," his host explained. "I want you just this way."
With which, while the young man kept his arms folded and his hands tucked away as for compression of his personal extent and weight, they exchanged, at their close range, the most lingering look yet. Extraordinary to him, in the gravity of this relation, his deeper impression of something beautiful and spreadingly clear—very much as if the wide window and the quiet clean sea and the finer sunset light had all had, for assistance and benediction, their word to say to it. They seemed to combine most to remark together "What an exquisite person is your uncle!" This is what he had for the minute the sense of taking from them, and the expression of his assent to it was in the tone of his next rejoinder. "If I could only know what it is you'd most like———!"
"Never mind what I most like—only tell me, only tell me," his companion again said: "You can't say anything that won't absolutely suit me; in fact I defy you to, though you mayn't at all see why that's the case. I've got you—without a flaw. So!" Mr. Betterman triumphantly breathed. Gray's sense was by this time of his being examined and appraised as never in his life before—very much as in the exposed state of an important "piece," an object of value picked, for finer estimation, from under containing glass. There was nothing then but to face it, unless perhaps also to take a certain comfort in his being, as he might feel, practically clean and in condition. That such an hour had its meaning, and that the meaning might be great for him, this of course surged softly in, more and more, from every point of the circle that held him; but with the consciousness making also more at each moment for an uplifting, a fantastic freedom, a sort of sublime simplification, in which nothing seemed to depend on him or to have at any time so depended. He was really face to face thus with bright immensities, and the handsome old presence from which, after a further moment, a hand had reached forth a little to take his own, guaranteed by the quietest of gestures at once their truth and the irrelevance, as he could only feel it, of their scale. Cool and not weak, to his responsive grasp, this retaining force, to which strength was added by what next came. "It's not for myself, it's not for myself—I mean your being as I say. What do I matter now except to have recognised it? No, Graham—it's in another connection." Was the connection then with Rosanna? Graham had time to wonder, and even to think what a big thing this might make of it, before his uncle brought out: "It's for the world."
"The world?"—Gray's vagueness again reigned.
"Well, our great public."
"Oh your great public———!"
The exclamation, the cry of alarm, even if also of amusement in face of such a connection as that, quickened for an instant the good touch of the cool hand. "That's the way I like you to sound. It's the way she told me you would—I mean that would be natural to you. And it's precisely why—being the awful great public it is—we require the difference that you'll make. So you see you're for our people."
Poor Graham's eyes widened. "I shall make a difference for your people———?"
But his uncle serenely went on. "Don't think you know them yet, or what it's like over here at all. You may think so and feel you're prepared. But you don't know till you've had the whole thing up against you."
"May I ask, sir," Gray smiled, "what you're talking about?"
His host met his eyes on it, but let it drop. "You'll see soon enough for yourself. Don't mind what I say. That isn't the thing for you now—it's all done. Only be true," said Mr. Betterman. "You are and, as I've said, can't help yourself." With which he relapsed again to one of his good conclusions. "And after all don't mind the public either."
"Oh," returned Gray, "all great publics are awful."
"Ah no no—I won't have that. Perhaps they may be, but the trouble we're concerned with is about ours—and about some other things too." Gray felt in the hand's tenure a small emphasizing lift of the arm, while the head moved a little as off toward the world they spoke of—which amounted for our young man, however, but to a glance at all the outside harmony and prosperity, bathed as these now seemed in the colour of the flushed sky. Absurd altogether that he should be in any way enlisted against such things. His entertainer, all the same, continued to see the reference and to point it. "The enormous preponderance of money. Money is their life."
"But surely even here it isn't everyone who has it. Also," he freely laughed, "isn't it a good thing to have?"
"A very good thing indeed." Then his uncle waited as in the longest inspection yet. "But you don't know anything about it."
"Not about large sums," Gray cheerfully admitted.
"I mean it has never been near you. That sticks out of you—the way it hasn't. I knew it couldn't have been—and then she told me she knew. I see you're a blank—and nobody here's a blank, not a creature I've ever touched. That's what I've wanted," the old man went on—"a perfect clean blank. I don't mean there aren't heaps of them that are damned fools, just as there are heaps of others, bigger heaps probably, that are damned knaves; except that mostly the knave is the biggest fool. But those are not blanks; they're full of the poison—without a blest other idea. Now you're the blank I want, if you follow—and yet you're not the blatant ass."
"I'm not sure I quite follow," Gray laughed, "but I'm very much obliged."
"Have you ever done three cents' worth of business?" Mr. Betterman judicially asked.
It helped our young man to some ease of delay. "Well, I'm afraid I can't claim to have had much business to do. Also you're wrong, sir," he added, "about my not being a blatant ass. Oh please understand that I am a blatant ass. Let there be no mistake about that," Gray touchingly pleaded.
"Yes—but not on the subject of anything but business."
"Well—no doubt on the subject of business more than on any other."
Still the good eyes rested. "Tell me one thing, other than that, for which you haven't at least some intelligence."
"Oh sir, there are no end of things, and it's odd one should have to prove that—though it would take me long. But I allow there's nothing I understand so little and like so little as the mystery of the 'market' and the hustle of any sort."
"You utterly loathe and abhor the hustle! That's what I blissfully want of you," said Mr. Betterman.
"You ask of me the declaration———?" Gray considered. "But how can I know, don't you see?—when I am such a blank, when I've never had three cents' worth of business, as you say, to transact?"
"The people who don't loathe it are always finding it somehow to do, even if preposterously for the most part, and dishonestly. Your case," Mr. Betterman reasoned, "is that you haven't a grain of the imagination of any such interest. If you had had," he wound up, "it would have stirred in you that first time."
Gray followed, as his kinsman called it, enough to be able to turn his memory a moment on this. "Yes, I think my imagination, small scrap of a thing as it was, did work then somehow against you."
"Which was exactly against business"—the old man easily made the point. "I was business. I've been business and nothing else in the world. I'm business at this moment still—because I can't be anything else. I mean I've such a head for it. So don't think you can put it on me that I haven't thought out what I'm doing to good purpose. I do what I do but too abominably well." With which he weakened for the first time to a faint smile. "It's none of your affair."
"Isn't it a little my affair," Gray as genially objected, "to be more touched than I can express by your attention to me—as well (if you'll let me say so) as rather astonished at it?" And then while his host took this without response, only engaged as to more entire repletion in the steady measure of him, he added further, even though aware in sounding it of the complacency or fatuity, of the particular absurdity, his question might have seemed to embody: "What in the world can I want but to meet you in every way?" His perception at last was full, the great strange sense of everything smote his eyes; so that without the force of his effort at the most general amenity possible his lids and his young lips might have convulsively closed. Even for his own ear "What indeed?" was thus the ironic implication—which he felt himself quite grimace to show he should have understood somebody else's temptation to make. Here, however, where his uncle's smile might pertinently have broadened, the graver blandness settled again, leaving him in face of it but the more awkwardly assured. He felt as if he couldn't say enough to abate the ugliness of that—and perhaps it even did come out to the fact of beauty that no profession of the decent could appear not to coincide with the very candour of the greedy. "I'm prepared for any thing, yes—in the way of a huge inheritance": he didn't care if it might sound like that when he next went on, since what could he do but just melt to the whole benignity? "If I only understood what it is I can best do for you."
"Do? The question isn't of your doing, but simply of your being."
Gray cast about. "But don't they come to the same thing?"
"Well, I guess that for you they'll have to."
"Yes, sir," Gray answered—"but suppose I should say 'Don't keep insisting so on me'?" Then he had a romantic flight which was at the same time, for that moment at least, a sincere one. "I don't know that I came out so very much for myself."
"Well, if you didn't it only shows the more what you are"—Mr. Betterman made the point promptly. "It shows you've got the kind of imagination that has nothing to do with the kind I so perfectly see you haven't. And if you don't do things for yourself," he went on, "you'll be doing them the more for just what I say." With which too, as Graham but pleadingly gaped: "You'll be doing them for everyone else—that is finding it impossible to do what they do. From the moment they notice that—well, it will be what I want. We know, we know," he remarked further and as if this quite settled it.
Any ambiguity in his "we" after an instant cleared up; he was to have alluded but ever so sparely, through all this scene, to Rosanna Gaw, but he alluded now, and again it had for Gray an amount of reference that was like a great sum of items in a bill imperfectly scanned. None the less it left him desiring still more clearness. His whole soul centred at this point in the need not to have contributed by some confused accommodation to a strange theory of his future. Strange he could but feel this one to be, however simply, that is on however large and vague an assumption, it might suit others, amid their fathomless resources and their luxuries or perversities of waste, to see it. He wouldn't be smothered in the vague, whatever happened, and had now the gasp and upward shake of the head of a man in too deep water. "What I want to insist on," he broke out with it, "is that I mustn't consent to any exaggeration in the interest of your, or of any other, sublime view of me, view of my capacity of any sort. There's no sublime view of me to be taken that consorts in the least with any truth; and I should be a very poor creature if I didn't here and now assure you that no proof in the world exists, or has for a moment existed, of my being capable of anything whatever."
He might have supposed himself for a little to have produced something of the effect that would naturally attach to a due vividness in this truth—for didn't his uncle now look at him just a shade harder, before the fixed eyes closed, indeed, as under a pressure to which they had at last really to yield? They closed, and the old white face was for the couple of minutes so thoroughly still without them that a slight uneasiness quickened him, and it would have taken but another moment to make a slight sound, which he had to turn his head for the explanation of, reach him as the response to an appeal. The door of the room, opening gently, had closed again behind Miss Goodenough, who came forward softly, but with more gravity, Gray thought, than he had previously seen her show. Still in his place and conscious of the undiminished freshness of her invalid's manual emphasis, he looked at her for some opinion as to the latter's appearance, or to the move on his own part next indicated; during which time her judgment itself, considering Mr. Betterman, a trifle heavily waited. Gray's doubt, before the stillness which had followed so great even if so undiscourageable an effort, moved him to some play of disengagement; whereupon he knew himself again checked, and there, once more, the fine old eyes rested on him. "I'm afraid I've tired him out," he could but say to the nurse, who made the motion to feel her patient's pulse without the effect of his releasing his visitor. Gray's hand was retained still, but his kinsman's eyes and next words were directed to Miss Goodenough.
"It's all right—even more so than I told you it was going to be."
"Why of course it's all right—you look too sweet together!" she pronounced.
"But I mean I've got him; I mean I make him squirm"—which words had somehow the richest gravity of any yet; "but all it does for his resistance is that he squirms right to me."
"Oh we won't have any resistance!" Miss Goodenough freely declared. "Though for all the fight you've got in you still———!" she in fine altogether backed Mr. Betterman.
He covered his nephew again as for a final or crushing appraisement, then going on for Miss Goodenough's benefit: "He tried something a minute ago to settle me, but I wish you could just have heard how he expressed himself."
"It is a pleasure to hear him—when he's good!" She laughed with a shade of impatience.
"He's never so good as when he wants to be bad. So there you are, sir!" the old man said. "You're like the princess in the fairy-tale; you've only to open your mouth———"
"And the pearls and diamonds pop out!"—Miss Goodenough, for her patient's relief, completed his meaning. "So don't try for toads and snakes!" she promptly went on to Gray. To which she added with still more point: "And now you must go."
"Not one little minute more?" His uncle still held him.
"Not one, sir!" Miss Goodenough decided.
"It isn't to talk," the old man explained. "I like just to look at him."
"So do I," said Miss Goodenough; "but we can't always do everything we like."
"No then, Graham—remember that. You'd like to have persuaded me that I don't know what I mean. But you must understand you haven't."
His hand had loosened, and Gray got up, turning a face now flushed and a little disordered from one of them to the other. "I don't pretend to understand anything!"
It turned his uncle to their companion. "Isn't he fine?"
"Of course he's fine," said Miss Goodenough; "but you've quite worn him out."
"Have I quite worn you out?" Mr. Betterman calmly inquired.
As if indeed finished, each thumb now in a pocket of his trousers, the young man dimly smiled. "I think you must have—quite."
"Well, let Miss Mumby look after you. He'll find her there?" his uncle asked of her colleague. And then as the latter showed at this her first indecision, "Isn't she somewhere round?" he demanded.
Miss Goodenough had wavered, but as if it really mattered for the friend there present she responsibly concluded. "Well, no—just for a while." And she appealed to Gray's indulgence. "She's had to go to Mr. Gaw."
"Why, is Mr. Gaw sick?" Mr. Betterman asked with detachment.
"That's what we shall know when she comes back. She'll come back all right," she continued for Gray's encouragement.
He met it with proper interest. "I'm sure I hope so!"
"Well, don't be too sure!" his uncle judiciously said.
"Oh he has only borrowed her." Miss Goodenough smoothed it down even as she smoothed Mr. Betterman's sheet, while with the same movement of her head she wafted Gray to the door.
"Mr. Gaw," her patient returned, "has borrowed from me before. Mr. Gaw, Graham———!"
"Yes sir?" said Gray with the door ajar and his hand on the knob.
The fine old presence on the pillow had faltered before expression; then it appeared rather sighingly and finally to give the question up. "Well, Mr. Gaw's an abyss."
Gray found himself suddenly responsive. "Isn't he, the strange man?"
"The strange man—that's it." This summary description sufficed now to Mr. Betterman's achieved indifference. "But you've seen him?"
"Just for an instant."
"And that was enough?"
"Well, I don't know." Gray himself gave it up. "You're all so fiercely interesting!"
"I think Rosanna's lovely!" Miss Goodenough contributed, to all appearance as an attenuation, while she tucked their companion in.
"Oh Miss Gaw's quite another matter," our young man still paused long enough to reply.
"Well, I don't mean but what she's interesting in her way too," Miss Goodenough's conscience prompted.
"Oh he knows all about her. That's all right," Mr. Betterman remarked for his nurse's benefit.
"Why of course I know it," this lady candidly answered. "Miss Mumby and I have had to feel that. I guess he'll want to send her his love," she continued across to Gray.
"To Miss Mumby?" asked Gray, his general bewilderment having moments of aggravation.
"Why no—she's sure of his affection. To Miss Gaw. Don't you want," she inquired of her patient, "to send your love to that poor anxious girl?"
"Is she anxious?" Gray returned in advance of his uncle.
Miss Goodenough hung fire but a moment. "Well, I guess I'd be in her place. But you'll see."
"Then," said Gray to his host, "if Rosanna's in trouble I'll go to her at once."
The old man, at this, once more delivered himself. "She won't be in trouble—any more than I am. But tell her—tell her———!"
"Yes, sir"—Gray had again to wait.
But Miss Goodenough now would have no more of it. "Tell her that we're about as fresh as we can live!"—the wave of her hand accompanying which Gray could take at last for his dismissal.