The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/John Delavoy/Chapter 3

by Henry James

III

I mentioned my paper and my disappointment, but I think it was only in the light of subsequent events that I could fix an impression of his having, at the moment, looked a trifle embarrassed. He smote his brow and took out his tablets; he deplored the accident of which I complained, and promised to look straight into it. An accident it could only have been, the result of a particular pressure, a congestion of work. Of course he had had my letter and had fully supposed it had been answered and acted on. My spirits revived at this, and I almost thought the incident happy when I heard Miss Delavoy herself put a clear question.

'It won't be for April, then, which was what I had hoped?' It was what I had hoped, goodness knew, but if I had had no anxiety I should not have caught the low, sweet ring of her own. It made Mr. Beston's eyes fix her a moment, and, though the thing has as I write it a fatuous air, I remember thinking that he must at this instant have seen in her face almost all his contributor saw. If he did he couldn't wholly have enjoyed it; yet he replied genially enough: 'I'll put it into June.'

'Oh, June!' our companion murmured in a manner that I took as plaintive—even as exquisite.

Mr. Beston had got up. I had not promised myself to sit him out, much less to drive him away; and at this sign of his retirement I had a sense still dim, but much deeper, of being literally lifted by my check. Even before it was set up my article was somehow operative, so that I could look from one of my companions to the other and quite magnanimously smile. 'June will do very well.'

'Oh, if you say so———!' Miss Delavoy sighed and turned away.

'We must have time for the portrait; it will require great care,' Mr. Beston said.

'Oh, please be sure it has the greatest!' I eagerly returned.

But Miss Delavoy took this up, speaking straight to Mr. Beston. 'I attach no importance to the portrait. My impatience is all for the article.'

'The article's very neat. It's very neat,' Mr. Beston repeated. 'But your drawing's our great prize.'

'Your great prize,' our young lady replied, 'can only be the thing that tells most about my brother.'

'Well, that's the case with your picture,' Mr. Beston protested.

'How can you say that? My picture tells nothing in the world but that he never sat for another.'

'Which is precisely the enormous and final fact!' I laughingly exclaimed.

Mr. Beston looked at me as if in uncertainty and just the least bit in disapproval; then he found his tone. 'It's the big fact for The Cynosure. I shall leave you in no doubt of that!' he added, to Miss Delavoy, as he went away.

I was surprised at his going, but I inferred that, from the pressure at the office, he had no choice; and I was at least not too much surprised to guess the meaning of his last remark to have been that our hostess must expect a handsome draft. This allusion had so odd a grace on a lover's lips that, even after the door had closed, it seemed still to hang there between Miss Delavoy and her second visitor. Naturally, however, we let it gradually drop; she only said with a kind of conscious quickness: 'I'm really very sorry for the delay,' I thought her beautiful as she spoke, and I felt that I had taken with her a longer step than the visible facts explained. 'Yes, it's a great bore. But to an editor—one doesn't show it.'

She seemed amused. 'Are they such queer fish?'

I considered. 'You know the great type.'

'Oh, I don't know Mr. Beston as an editor.'

'As what, then?'

'Well, as what you call, I suppose, a man of the world. A very kind, clever one.'

'Of course I see him mainly in the saddle and in the charge—at the head of his hundreds of thousands. But I mustn't undermine him,' I added, smiling, 'when he's doing so much for me.'

She appeared to wonder about it. 'Is it really a great deal?'

'To publish a thing like that? Yes—as editors go. They're all tarred with the same brush.'

'Ah, but he has immense ideas. He goes in for the best in all departments. That's his own phrase. He has often assured me that he'll never stoop.'

'He wants none but "first-class stuff." That's the way he has expressed it to me; but it comes to the same thing. It's our great comfort. He's charming.'

'He's charming,' my friend replied; and I thought for the moment we had done with Mr. Beston. A rich reference to him, none the less, struck me as flashing from her very next words—words that she uttered without appearing to have noticed any I had pronounced in the interval. 'Does no one, then, really care for my brother?'

I was startled by the length of her flight. 'Really care?'

'No one but you? Every month your study doesn't appear is at this time a kind of slight.'

'I see what you mean. But of course we're serious.'

'Whom do you mean by "we"?'

'Well, you and me.'

She seemed to look us all over and not to be struck with our mass. 'And no one else? No one else is serious?'

'What I should say is that no one feels the whole thing, don't you know? as much.'

Miss Delavoy hesitated. 'Not even so much as Mr. Beston?' And her eyes, as she named him, waited, to my surprise, for my answer.

I couldn't quite see why she returned to him, so that my answer was rather lame. 'Don't ask me too many things; else there are some I shall have to ask.'

She continued to look at me; after which she turned away. 'Then I won't—for I don't understand him.' She turned away, I say, but the next moment had faced about with a fresh, inconsequent question. 'Then why in the world has he cooled off?'

'About my paper? Has he cooled? Has he shown you that otherwise?' I asked.

'Than by his delay? Yes, by silence—and by worse.'

'What do you call worse?'

'Well, to say of it—and twice over—what he said just now.'

'That it's very "neat"? You don't think it is?' I laughed.

'I don't say it;' and with that she smiled. 'My brother might hear!'

Her tone was such that, while it lingered in the air, it deepened, prolonging the interval, whatever point there was in this; unspoken things therefore had passed between us by the time I at last brought out: 'He hasn't read me! It doesn't matter,' I quickly went on; 'his relation to what I may do or not do is, for his own purposes, quite complete enough without that.'

She seemed struck with this. 'Yes, his relation to almost anything is extraordinary.'

'His relation to everything!' It rose visibly before us and, as we felt, filled the room with its innumerable, indistinguishable objects. 'Oh, it's the making of him!'

She evidently recognised all this, but after a minute she again broke out: 'You say he hasn't read you and that it doesn't matter. But has he read my brother? Doesn't that matter?'

I waved away the thought. 'For what do you take him, and why in the world should it? He knows perfectly what he wants to do, and his postponement is quite in your interest. The reproduction of the drawing———'

She took me up. 'I hate the drawing!'

'So do I,' I laughed, 'and I rejoice in there being something on which we can feel so together!'