The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/The Great Condition/Chapter 7

by Henry James

VII

He came back punctually enough, and one of the results of it was a talk that, a few weeks later, he had one Sunday afternoon with Mrs. Chilver, whom, till this occasion—though it was not his first visit to the house—he had not yet seen alone. It took him then but ten minutes—ten minutes of a marked but subsiding want of ease—to break out with a strong appeal to her on the question of the danger of the possible arrival of somebody else. 'Would you mind—of course I know it's an immense deal for me to ask—having it just said at the door that you're not at home? I do so want really to get at you.'

'Oh, you needn't be afraid of an interruption.' Mrs. Chilver seemed only amused. 'No one comes to us. You see what our life is. Whom have you yet met here?'

He appeared struck with this. 'Yes. Of course your living at Hammersmith———'

'We have to live where we can live for tenpence a year.' He was silent at this touch, with a silence that, like an exclamation, betrayed a kind of helplessness, and she went on explaining as if positively to assist him. 'Besides, we haven't the want. And so few people know us. We're our own com pany.'

'Yes—that's just it. I never saw such a pair. It's as if you did it on purpose. But it was to show you how I feel at last the luxury of seeing you without Chilver.'

'Ah, but I can't forbid him the door!' she laughed.

He kept his eyes for a minute on that of the room. 'Do you mean he will come in?'

'Oh, if he does it won't be to hurt you. He's not jealous.'

'Well, I am,' said the visitor, frankly, 'and I verily believe it's his not being—and showing it so—that partly has to do with that. If he cared I believe I shouldn't. Besides, what does it matter———?' He threshed about in his place uncomfortably.

She sat there—with all her effaced anxieties—patient and pretty. 'What does what matter?'

'Why, how it happens—since it does happen—that he's always here.'

'But you see he isn't!'

He made an eager movement. 'Do you mean then we can talk?'

She just visibly hesitated. 'He and I only want to be kind to you.'

'That's just what's awful!' He fell back again. 'It's the way he has kept me on and on. I mean without———' But he had another drop.

'Without what?'

Poor Braddle at last sprang up. 'Do you mind my being in a horrible fidget and floundering about the room?'

She demurred, but without gravity. 'Not if you don't again knock over the lamp. Do you remember the day you did that at Brighton?'

With his ambiguous frown at her he stopped short. 'Yes, and how even that didn't move you.'

'Well, don't presume on it again!' she laughed.

'You mean it might move you this time?' he went on.

'No; I mean that as I've now got better lamps———!'

He roamed there among her decent frugalities and, as regarded other matters as well as lamps, noted once more—as he had done on other occasions—the extreme moderation of the improvement. He had rather imagined on Chilver's part more margin. Then at last suddenly, with an effect of irrelevance: 'Why don't people, as you say, come to you?'

'That's the kind of thing,' she smiled, 'you used to ask so much.'

'Oh, too much, of course, and it's absurd my still wanting to know. It's none of my business; but, you know, nothing is if you come to that. It's your extraordinary kindness—the way you give me my head—that puts me up to things. Only you're trying the impossible—you can't keep me on. I mean without—well, what I spoke of just now. Do you mind my bringing it bang out like a brute?' he continued, stopping before her again. 'Isn't it a question of either really taking me in or quite leaving me out?' As she had nothing, however, at first, for this inquiry but silence, and as her face made her silence charming, his appeal suddenly changed. 'Do you mind my going on like this?'

'I don't mind anything. You want, I judge, some help. What help can I give you?'

He dropped, at this, straight into his chair again. 'There you are! You pitied me even from the first—regularly beforehand. You're so confoundedly superior'—he almost sufficiently joked. 'Of course I know all our relations are most extraordinary, but I think yours and mine is the strangest—unless it be yours and Chilver's.'

'Let us say it's his and yours, and have done with it,' she smiled.

'Do you know what I came back then for?—I mean the second time, this time?'

'Why, to see me, I've all these days supposed.'

'Well,' said Braddle with a slight hesitation, 'it was, to that extent, to show my confidence.'

But she also hesitated. 'Your confidence in what?'

He had still another impatience, with the force of which he again changed his place. 'Am I giving him away? How much do you know?'

In the air of his deep unrest her soft stillness—lending itself, but only by growing softer—had little by little taken on a beauty. 'I'm trying to follow you—to understand. I know of your meeting with Henry last year at a club.'

'Ah then, if he gave me away———!'

'I gathered rather, I seem to remember, from what he men tioned to me, that he must rather have given me too. But I don't in the least mind.'

'Well, what passed between us then,' said Braddle, 'is why I came back. He made me, if I should wait, a sort of promise———'

'Oh'—she took him up—'I don't think he was conscious of anything like a promise. He said at least nothing to me of that.' With which, as Braddle's face had exceedingly fallen, 'But I know what you then wanted and what you still want to know,' she added.

On this, for a time, they sat there with a long look. 'I would rather have had it from him,' he said at last.

'It would certainly have been more natural,' she intelligently returned. 'But he has given you no chance to press him again?'

'None—and with an evident intention: seeing me only with you.'

'Well, at the present moment he doesn't see you at all. Nor me either!' Mrs. Chilver added, as if to cover something in the accent of her former phrase. 'But if he has avoided close quarters with you, it has been not to disappoint you.'

'He won't, after all, tell me?'

'He can't. He has nothing to tell.'

Poor Braddle showed at this what his disappointment could be. 'He has not even yet asked you?'

'Not even yet—after fifteen months. But don't be hard on him,' she pleaded. 'You wouldn't.'

'For all this time?' Braddle spoke almost with indignation at the charge. 'My dear lady—rather!'

'No, no,' she gently insisted, 'not even to tell him.'

'He told you then,' Braddle demanded, 'that I thought he ought, if on no other grounds, to ask just in order to tell me?'

'Oh dear, no. He only told me he had met you, and where you had been. We don't speak of his "asking," she explained.

'Don't you?' Her visitor stared.

'Never.'

'Then how have you known———?'

'What you want so much? Why, by having seen it in you before—and just how much—and seeing it now. I've been feeling all along,' she said, 'how you must have argued.'

'Oh, we didn't argue!'

'I think you did.'

He had slowly got up—now less actively but not less intensely nervous—and stood there heedless of this and rather differently looking at her. 'He never talks with you of his asking?'

'Never,' she repeated.

'And you still stick to it that I wouldn't?'

She hesitated. 'Have talked of it?'

'Have asked.'

She was beautiful as she smiled up at him. 'It would have been a little different. You would have talked.'

He remained there a little in silence; what he might have done seemed so both to separate them and to hold them together. 'And Chilver, you feel, will now never ask?'

'Never now.'

He seemed to linger for conviction. 'If he was going to, you mean, he would have done it———'

'Yes'—she was prompt—'the moment his time was up.'

'I see'—and, turning away, he moved slowly about. 'So you're safe?'

'Safe.'

'And I'm just where I was!' he oddly threw off.

'I'm amazed again,' Mrs. Chilver said, 'at your so clinging to it that you would have had the benefit of his information.'

It was a remark that pulled him up as if something like a finer embarrassment had now come to him. 'I've only in mind his information as to the fact that he had made you speak.'

'And what good would that have done you?'

'Without the details?'—he was indeed thinking.

'I like your expressions!' said Mrs. Chilver.

'Yes—aren't they hideous?' He had jerked out his glass and, with a returning flush, appeared to affect to smile over it. But the drop of his glass showed something in each of his eyes that, though it might have come from the rage, came evidently—to his companion's vision at least—from the more pardonable pain, of his uncertainty. 'But there we are!'

The manner in which these last words reached her had clearly to do with her finally leaving her place, watching him meanwhile as he wiped his glass. 'Yes—there we are. He did tell me,' she went on, 'that you had told him where you had been and that you could pick up nothing———'

'Against you?' he broke in. 'Not a beggarly word.'

'And you tried hard?'

'I worked like a nigger. It was no use.'

'But say you had succeeded—what,' she asked, 'was your idea?'

'Why, not to have had the thing any longer between us.'

He brought this out with such simplicity that she stared. 'But if it had been———?'

'Yes?'—the way she hung fire made him eager.

'Well—something you would have loathed.'

'Is it?'—he almost sprang at her. 'For pity's sake, what is it?' he broke out in a key that now filled the room supremely with the strange soreness of his yearning for his justification.

She kept him waiting, after she had taken this in, but another instant. 'You would rather, you say, have had it from him———'

'But I must take it as I can get it? Oh, anyhow!' he fairly panted.

'Then with a condition.'

It threw him back into a wail that was positively droll. 'Another?'

'This one,' she dimly smiled, 'is comparatively easy. You must promise me with the last solemnity———'

'Yes!'

'On the sacred honour of a gentleman———'

'Yes!'

'To repeat to no one whatever what you now have from me.'

Thus completely expressed, the condition checked him but a moment. 'Very well!'

'You promise?'

'On the sacred honour of a gentleman.'

'Then I invite you to make the inference most directly suggested by the vanity of your researches.'

He looked about him. 'The inference?'

'As to what a fault may have been that it's impossible to find out.'

He got hold as he could. 'It may have been hidden.'

'Then anything hidden, from so much labour, so well———'

'May not have existed?' he stammered after she had given him time to take something from her deep eyes. He glared round and round with it—seemed to have it on his hands before the world. 'Then what did you mean———?'

'Ah, sir, what did you? You invented my past.'

'Do you mean you hadn't one?' cried Bertram Braddle.

'None I would have mentioned to you. It was you who brought it up.'

He appealed, in his stupefaction, to the immensity of the vacancy itself. 'There's nothing?'

She made no answer for a moment, only looking, while he dropped hard on her sofa, so far away that her eyes might have been fixed on the blue Pacific. 'There's the upshot of your inquiry.'

He followed her, while she moved before him, from his place. 'What did you then so intensely keep back?'

'What did you,' she asked as she paused, 'so intensely put forward? I kept back what you have from me now.'

'This,' he gasped from the depths of his collapse, 'is what you would have told me?'

'If, as my loyal husband, you had brought it up again. But you wouldn't!' she once more declared.

'And I should have gone on thinking———'

'Yes,' she interrupted—'that you were, for not bringing it up, the most delicate and most generous of men.'

It seemed all to roll over him and sweep him down, but he gave, in his swift passage, a last clutch. 'You consent to let him think you———?'

'He thinks me what he finds me!' said Mrs. Chilver.

Braddle got up from the sofa, looking about for his hat and stick; but by the time he had reached the door with them he rose again to the surface. 'I, too, then, am to leave him his idea———?'

'Well, of what?' she demanded as he faltered.

'Of your—whatever you called it.'

'I called it nothing. You relieved me of the question of the name.'

He gloomily shook his head. 'You see to what end! Chilver, at any rate,' he said, 'has his view, and to that extent has a name for it.'

'Only to the extent of having the one you gave him.'

'Well, what I gave him he took!' Braddle, with returning spirit, declared. 'What I suggested—God forgive me!—he believed.'

'Yes—that he might make his sacrifice. You speak,' said Mrs. Chilver, 'of his idea. His sacrifice is his idea. And his idea,' she added, 'is his happiness.'

'His sacrifice of your reputation?'

'Well—to whom?'

'To me,' said Bertram Braddle. 'Do you expect me now to permit that?'

Mrs. Chilver serenely enough considered. 'I shall protect his happiness, which is above all his vision of his own attitude, and I don't see how you can prevent this save by breaking your oath.'

'Oh, my oath!' And he prolonged the groan of his resentment.

It evidently—what he felt—made her sorry for him, and she spoke in all kindness. 'It's only your punishment!' she sighed after him as he departed.