Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 7
VII
Rowland passed the summer in England, staying with several old friends and two or three new. On his arrival he had it on his conscience to write to Mrs. Hudson and inform her that her son had relieved him of his tutelage. He felt that she thought of him as an incorruptible Mentor, following Roderick like a shadow, and he wished to let her know the truth. But he made the truth very comfortable and gave a detailed account of the young man's brilliant beginnings. He owed it to himself, he said, to remind her that he had not reasoned amiss, and that Roderick's present achievements were more profitable than his inglorious drudgery at Messrs. Striker and Spooner's. He was now taking a well-earned holiday and proposing to see a little of the world. He would work none the worse for this; every artist needed to take chances and seek impressions for himself. They had parted company for a couple of months, as Roderick was now a great man and beyond the need of going about with a keeper. But they were to meet again in Rome in the autumn, and then he should be able to send her more good news. Meanwhile he was very happy in what Roderick had already done — especially happy in the happiness it must have brought his mother. He ventured to ask to be kindly commended to Miss Garland.
His letter was promptly answered — to his surprise in the hand of the latter lady. The same post brought also an epistle from Cecilia. The document was voluminous, and we must content ourselves with giving an extract.
"Your letter was filled with an echo of that brilliant Roman world which made me almost ill with envy. For a week after I got it I thought Northampton quite too abysmally flat. But I am drifting back again to my old deeps of resignation, and I rush to the window when any one passes with all my old gratitude for small favours. So Roderick Hudson is already a great man, and you turn out to be a great prophet? My compliments to both of you; I never saw a trick so prettily played! And he takes it all very quietly and does n't lose his balance nor let it turn his head? You judged him then in a day better than I had done in six months, for I really never expected he would behave so properly. I believed he would do fine things, but I was sure he would intersperse them with a good many follies, and that his beautiful statues would spring up out of the midst of a dense plantation of wild oats. But from what you tell me Mr. Striker may now go hang himself. . . . There is one thing, however, to tell you as a friend and in the way of warning. That candid soul can keep a secret, and he may have private designs on your peace of mind. What do you think of his being engaged to marry Mary Garland? The two ladies had given no hint of it all winter, but a fortnight ago, when those big photographs of his statues arrived, they first pinned them up on the wall and then trotted out into the town and made a dozen calls, announcing the great news. Mrs. Hudson did, at least; the young woman herself, I suppose, sat at home writing letters. To me, I confess, the thing was a brutal surprise. I had not a suspicion that all the while he was coming so regularly to make himself agreeable on my verandah he was quietly preferring his queer cousin to all of us. Not indeed that he was ever at particular pains to suggest he preferred me! I suppose he has picked up a few graces in your wonderful Rome. He must not pick up too many; if he's too possible when he comes back the young woman will count him as one of the lost. She will be a very good wife for a man of genius, and such a one as they are often shrewd enough to take. She will darn his stockings and keep his accounts, she will sit at home and trim the lamp and keep up the fire, while he studies the Beautiful in pretty neighbours at dinner-parties. The two ladies are evidently very happy and, to do them justice, very humbly grateful to you. Mrs. Hudson never speaks of you without tears in her eyes, and I 'm sure she regards you as our leading philanthropist. Verily, it 's a good thing for a woman to be in love; Mary Garland has grown distinctly less plain. I met her the other night at a tea-party; she had a white rose in her hair and sang a sentimental ballad in a fine contralto voice."
Mary Garland's letter was so much shorter that we may give it entire.
My dear Sir,—Mrs. Hudson, as I suppose you know, has been for some time unable to use her eyes. She requests me therefore to answer your beautiful letter of the 22d of June. She thanks you extremely for writing and wishes me to say that she finds herself under great obligations to you. Your account of her son's progress and of the high esteem in which he is held has made her very happy, and she earnestly prays that all may go on well. He sent us a short time ago several large photographs of his two statues, taken from different points of view. We know little about such things, but they seem to us wonderfully beautiful. We sent them to Boston to be handsomely framed, and the man, on returning them, wrote us that he had exhibited them for a week in his gallery and that they had attracted great attention. The frames are magnificent, and the pictures now hang in a row on the parlour wall. Our only quarrel with them is that they make the old papering and the engravings look dreadfully shabby. Mr. Striker stood and looked at them the other day full five minutes; after which he said that if Roderick's head had been running on such things as those it was no wonder he couldn't learn to draw a deed. We lead here so quiet and monotonous a life that I am afraid I can tell you nothing that will interest you. Mrs. Hudson requests me to say that the little that might happen to us more or less is of small importance, as we live in our thoughts, which are fixed on her dear son. She thanks heaven he has so good a friend. Mrs. Hudson says that this is too short a letter, but I can say nothing more.
It is a question if the reader will know why, but this letter gave Rowland extraordinary pleasure. He liked its shortness, almost its dryness, and there seemed to him an exquisite modesty in its saying nothing from the girl herself. He delighted in the formal address and conclusion; they pleased him as he had been pleased by the angular gesture of some maiden-saint in a primitive painting. The whole thing quickened that impression of fine feeling combined with an almost rigid simplicity which Roderick's betrothed had personally given him. Its homely stiffness showed as the direct reflexion of a life concentrated, as the writer had borrowed warrant from her companion to say, in a single devoted idea. The monotonous days of the two women seemed to Rowland's fancy to follow each other like the tick-tick of a great time-piece marking off the hours which separated them from the supreme felicity of clasping the far-away son and lover to lips sealed with the intensity of joy.
He was left to vain conjectures, however, as to Roderick's own state of mind. He knew his absent friend had scant patience for the pen and would at any time, in his own phrase, rather design a tomb than answer a note. But when a month had passed without news he began to be half anxious and half angry, and addressed the young sculptor three lines, in care of a Continental banker, begging him at least to give some sign of life. A week afterwards came an answer—brief and dated Baden-Baden. "I know I've been a great brute," Roderick wrote, "not to have sent you a word before; but really I don't know what has got into me. I 've lately learned terribly well how to do nothing. I 'm afraid to think how long it is since I wrote to my mother or to Mary. Heaven help them poor patient trustful creatures! I don't know how to tell you what I am doing or not doing. It seems all amusing enough while it lasts, but it would make a poor show as an apology and a still poorer as a boast. I found Baxter in Switzerland, or rather he found me, and he grabbed me by the arm and brought me here. I was walking twenty miles a day in the Alps, drinking milk in lonely chalets, sleeping as you sleep, and thinking it was all very good fun; but Baxter told me it would never do, that the Alps were 'damned rot,' that Baden-Baden was 'the cheese,' and that if I knew what was good for me I would come along with him. It is a wonderful place certainly, though, thank the Lord, Baxter departed last week, blaspheming horribly at trente-et-quarante. But you know all about it, and what one does — what one is liable to do. I 've succumbed, in a measure, to the liabilities, and I wish I had some one here to give me a kicking. Not you — you would kick me with your boots off; you 're too generous ever to do me any real good. What do you think of that for thanks? I 've fits of horrible homesickness for my studio, and I shall be devoutly grateful when the summer is over and I can go back and potter about there. I feel as if nothing but the chisel and a sledgehammer would satisfy me; as if in fact I could tear a figure straight out of the block even as Michael of old. There are a lot of Roman people here, English and American; I live in the midst of them and talk nonsense from morning till night. There 's also some one else; and to her I don't talk sense, nor, thank goodness, mean what I say. I confess I need a month's work to take out of my mouth the taste of so many lies."
These lines brought Rowland a due perturbation; the more that what they seemed to point to surprised him. During the long stretch of their comradeship Roderick had shown so little impatience to see what was vulgarly called life that he had come to think of that possibility as a cancelled danger, and it greatly perplexed him to learn that his friend had apparently proved so pliant to opportunity. But Roderick's allusions were ambiguous, and it was possible they might simply mean that he was out of humour with idleness and mere personal success—he could so easily have so much of that—and was fretting wholesomely over his absent work. It was a very good thing certainly that tried debauchery should so particularly not lead him on. Nevertheless the letter needed to Rowland's mind a key: the key arrived a week later.
"In common charity," Roderick wrote, "lend me a hundred pounds! I 've gambled away my last franc—I 've made a villainous heap of debts. Send me the money first; lecture me afterwards!" Rowland sent the money by return of post; then he proceeded, not to lecture, but to think. He hung his head—he was acutely disappointed. He had no right to be, he assured himself; but so it was. Roderick was young, impulsive, unpractised in stoicism; it was a hundred to one that he was to pay the usual vulgar tribute to folly. But his friend had regarded it as securely gained to his own belief in virtue that he was not as other foolish youths are, and that he would have been capable of looking Folly in the face, for all her bells, and passing on his way. Rowland for a while felt a sore sense of wrath. What right had a man who was engaged to that delightful girl in Northampton to behave as if his consciousness were a common blank, to be filled in with coarse sensations? Yes, distinctly, he had lost an illusion, an illusion that he had loved. He had accompanied his missive with an urgent recommendation that Baden-Baden should immediately be quitted, and with an offer to meet the young traveller at any point the latter might name. The answer came promptly; it ran as follows: "Send me another fifty pounds! I 'm a bigger donkey than ever. I will leave as soon as the money comes, and meet you at Geneva. There I will tell you everything."
There is an ancient terrace at Geneva, planted with trees and studded with benches, overlooked by stately houses and overlooking the distant Alps. A great many generations have made it a lounging place, a great many friends and lovers strolled there, a great many confidential talks and momentous interviews gone forward. Here one morning, sitting on one of the battered green benches, Roderick, as he had promised, told his friend everything. He had arrived the previous evening; he looked like the battered knight who yet sports a taller plume. He made no professions of penitence, but he practised an unmitigated frankness, and his remorse might be taken for granted. He conveyed in every phrase that he had done with the flesh and the devil and was counting the hours till he should re-enter the true temple of his faith. We shall not rehearse his confession in detail; its main outline serves our turn. He had fallen in with people who really knew how to be low—which he, poor wretch, did n't, only he had thought it, in their company, a trick to be learnt. What could he do? He never read books and he had no studio; in one way or an other he had to pass the time. He passed it in dangling about several very pretty women and reflecting that it was always something gained for a sculptor to sit under a tree looking at his leisure into a charming face and saying things that made it smile and play its muscles and part its lips and show its teeth. Attached to these ladies were gentlemen with wonderful names, polyglot ambrosial gentlemen who walked about in clouds of fragrance, called him mon cher, sat at roulette all night and supped the next morning. Roderick had found himself in the mood for thinking them types of a high, even if a somewhat spent, civilisation. He was surprised at his curiosity, but he let it take its course. It led him to the discovery that to live with ladies almost crudely on the lookout for mementos of friendship, even if in no more permanent form than that of expensive bouquets and of bushels of bonbons, and for rides in the Black Forest on shining hired horses, who expected a fellow, further, to arrange parties for the opera on nights when Patti sang and the prices were consequent, to propose light suppers at the Kursaal or drives by moonlight to the Castle, to be always arrayed and anointed and under arms for their service—that to move in such society, we say, though it might be a privilege, was a privilege with a penalty attached. But the tables made such things easy; half the Baden world lived by the tables. Roderick tried them, and found them at first a wonderful help. The help, however, was all fallacious, for he soon perceived that to seem to have money, and to have it in fact, exposed an eager and confident youth to peculiar liabilities. As his friend's narrative sailed closer Rowland was reminded of Madame de Cruchecassée in Thackeray's novel, but of a Madame de Cruchecassée mature and quasi-maternal, attached as with a horrible sincerity to her prey, and though he had listened in tranquil silence to the rest of it he found it hard not to say that all this had been, for a young man in his particular position, about as gratuitous a mistake as possible. Roderick admitted it with bitterness; and then told how much—measured simply in vulgar cash—the mistake had cost him. His luck had changed, the tables had ceased to back him, and he had found himself up to his knees in debt. Every penny had gone of the solid sum which had seemed a large equivalent of those shining statues in Rome. He had been an ass, but it was not irreparable; he could make another statue in a couple of months.
Rowland looked, at this, conscientiously blank. "For God's sake," he said, "don't play such dangerous games with your facility. If you've got facility, respect it, nurse it, adore it, save it up in an old stocking—don't speculate on it." And he wondered what his companion, up to his knees in debt, would have done if there had been no good-natured Rowland Mallet to lend a helping hand. But he did n't express his curiosity in words, and the contingency seemed not to have presented itself to Roderick's imagination. The young sculptor reverted to his late adventures again in the evening, and this time talked of them more objectively, as the phrase is; with a detachment that flowered little by little into free anecdote quite as if they had been the adventures of some other, some different, ass. He related half a dozen droll things that had happened to him, and, as if his responsibility had been disengaged by all this ventilation, wondered, with laughter, that such absurdities could have been. Rowland sat perfectly grave—he kept it up on principle. Then Roderick began to talk of half a dozen plastic ideas that he had in his head, and set them forth with his old inimitable touch. Suddenly, as it was relevant, he declared that his Baden doings had not been altogether fruitless, for the lady who had reminded Rowland of Madame de Cruchecassée had, poor dear, in her make-up, some wonderful, beautiful lines. Rowland at last said that such experiments might pass if one felt one was really the wiser for them. "By the wiser," he sententiously added, "I mean the stronger in reconsidered and confirmed purpose, in acquired will-power."
"Oh, don't talk about such dreadful things!" Roderick answered, throwing back his head and looking at the stars. This conversation also took place in the open air, on the little island in the rushing Rhone where Jean-Jacques, himself so far from remarkable for the control of his course, is enthroned in bronze as the genius of the spot.
"The will, it seems to me, is an abyss of abysses and a riddle of riddles. Who can answer for his properly having one? who can say beforehand that it 's going in a given case to be worth anything at all? There are all kinds of uncanny underhand currents moving to and fro between one's will and the rest of one one's imagination in particular. People talk as if the two things were essentially distinct; on different sides of one's organism, like the heart and the liver. Mine, I know—that is my imagination and my conscience—are much nearer together. It all depends upon circumstances. I believe there 's a certain group of circumstances possible for every man, in which his power to choose is destined to snap like a dry twig."
"My dear man," said Rowland, "don't talk about any part of you that has a grain of character in it being 'destined.' The power to choose is destiny. That 's the way to look at it."
"Look at it, my good Rowland," Roderick answered, "as you find most comfortable. One conviction I 've gathered from my summer's experience," he went on—"it 's as well to look it frankly in the face — is that I 'm damnably susceptible, by nature, to the grace and the beauty and the mystery of women, to their power to turn themselves 'on' as creatures of subtlety and perversity. So there you have me."
Rowland, so "having" him, stared, and then strolled away, softly whistling to himself. He was unwilling to admit even tacitly that this speech had really the ominous meaning it seemed to have. In a few days the two young men made their way back to Italy and lingered a while in Florence before going on to Rome. In Florence Roderick appeared to have recovered his old innocence and his preference for the pleasures of study. Rowland began to think of the Baden episode as a bad dream, or at the worst one of the plunges, really touching bottom, that the plunger with the brine of the deep sea in his mouth doesn't need, or never has wind again, to repeat. They passed a fortnight looking at pictures and exploring for out-of-the-way remnants of fresco and carving, and Roderick exhibited all his earlier energy of appreciation and criticism. In Rome he went almost pompously to work, finishing in a month two or three small things he had left standing on his departure. He talked the most joyous nonsense about finding himself back in his old quarters. On the first Sunday following their return, at their going together in the afternoon to Saint Peter's, he delivered himself of a mystic greeting to the great church, and to the city in general, in a manner so uplifted that his voice rang quite publicly through the nave and arrested a procession of ecclesiastics on their march to the choir. He began to model a new image — a female figure of which he had said nothing to Rowland. It represented a woman leaning lazily back in her chair, with her head inclined in apparent attention, a vague smile on her lips and a pair of remarkably beautiful arms folded in her lap. With something less of its emphasised grace it would have recalled the noble statue of Agrippina in the Capitol. Rowland looked at it and was not sure he liked it. It differed singularly from anything his friend had yet done. "Who is it? what does it mean?" he asked.
"Anything you please!" said Roderick with a certain petulance. "A 'Lady conversing affably with a Gentleman.'"
Rowland then remembered that one of the Baden-Baden conversers had had wonderful "lines," and here perhaps they were. But he asked no more questions. This, after all, was a way of profiting by experience. A few days later he took his first ride of the season on the Campagna, and as he on his homeward canter was passing across the long shadow of a ruined tower he perceived a small figure at a short distance bent over a sketch-book. As he drew near he recognised Sam Singleton. The honest little painter's face was scorched to flame-colour by the light of southern suns, and borrowed an even deeper crimson from his gleeful greeting of his most appreciative patron. He was making a careful and charming sketch. On Rowland's asking him how he had spent his summer he gave an account of his wanderings which made our poor friend sigh with a sense of more contrasts than one. He had not been out of Italy, but had delved deep into the historic heart of the lovely land and gathered a wonderful store of subjects. He had rambled about among the unvisited villages of the Apennines, pencil in hand and knapsack on back, sleeping on straw and eating black bread and beans, but feasting on local colour, making violent love to opportunity and laying up a treasure of reminiscences. He took a devout satisfaction in his hard-earned results and his successful economy. Rowland went the next day by appointment to look at his sketches, and spent a whole morning turning them over. Singleton talked more than he had ever done before, explained them all, and told some honest anecdote, mainly comical and at the expense of his knowledge of "life," about the production of each.
"Dear me, how I've chattered!" he finally sighed. "I 'm afraid you would rather have looked at the things in peace and quiet. I did n't know I could talk so much. But somehow I feel very happy; I feel as if I had taken a kind of stride."
"That you have," said Rowland. "I doubt whether any patient worker ever took a longer in the time. You must feel much more sure of yourself."
Singleton looked for some moments with great interest at a knot in the floor. "Yes," he ventured at last to acknowledge, "I feel much more sure of myself. I know better what I 'm about." And his voice dropped as if he were communicating a secret which it took some courage to impart. "I hardly like to say it, for fear I should after all be mistaken. But since it strikes you, perhaps it 's true. It 's a great happiness; I would n't exchange it for a great deal of money."
"Yes, I suppose it 's a great happiness," said Rowland. "I shall really think of you as living here in a state of scandalous bliss. I don't feel it 's quite decent for an artist to know so well what he 's about."
Singleton stared a moment, as if he supposed his visitor in earnest; then with a vision of the kindly jest he walked about the room agitating his head and shyly laughing. "And Mr. Hudson?" he said as Rowland was going; "I hope he 's as great as ever."
"He 's very well—for him. He 's back at work again."
"Ah, there 's a man," cried Singleton, "who has taken his start once for all and does n't need to stop and ask himself in fear and trembling every month or two whether he 's going on. When he stops it 's to rest! And where did he spend the summer?"
"The greater part of it at Baden-Baden."
"Ah, that 's in the Black Forest," cried Singleton with profound simplicity. "They say you can make ripping studies of trees there."
"No doubt," said Rowland with a smile, laying an almost paternal hand on the little artist's stooping shoulders. "Unhappily trees are not Roderick's line. Nevertheless he tells me that at Baden he made some studies and I gather that they were, in a manner, ripping. Come when you can, by the way," he added after a moment, "to his studio, and tell me what you think of something he has lately begun."
Singleton declared that he would come delightedly, and Rowland left him at his work.
He met a number of his last winter's friends and found that Madame Grandoni, Miss Blanchard and Gloriani had again taken up the golden thread of Roman life. The ladies gave an excellent account of themselves: Madame Grandoni had been taking seabaths at Rimini and Miss Blanchard painting wild flowers in the Tyrol. Her complexion was somewhat browned, which was very becoming, and her flowers tossed their heads and rolled their eyes like so many little poetesses looking for rhymes. Gloriani had been in Paris and had come away in high good-humour, finding no one there in the artist-world with as long a head as his own. He came in a few days to Roderick's studio, one afternoon when Rowland was present. He examined the new figure with great deference, pronounced it tremendously trouvé, and abstained considerably from irritating prophecies. But Rowland fancied he observed certain signs of inward jubilation on the subtle sculptor's part, and walked away with him to learn his private opinion.
"Certainly; I liked it as well as I said," Gloriani declared in answer to Rowland's anxious query; "or rather I liked it a great deal better. I did n't say how much, for fear of making your friend angry. But one can leave him alone now, for he 's coming round. I told you he could n't keep up that flapping of his wings in the blue, and he has already come down to earth. Don't you see what I mean?"
"I don't particularly like the thing, you know," Rowland confessed.
"That's because you yourself try to sit like an angel on a cloud. This present idea of Hudson's is full of possibilities, and he 'll pull some of them off; but it is n't the sancta simplicitas of a few months ago. He has taken his turn sooner than I supposed. What has happened to him? Has he been disappointed in love? But that 's none of my business. I congratulate him on having found his feet or at least found such a smart pair of shoes."
Roderick, however, was less to be congratulated than Gloriani had taken it into his head to believe. He was discontented with his work, he applied himself to it by fits and starts, he declared that he did n't know what was in store for him; he was turning into a man of moods. "Is this of necessity what a fellow must come to?" he asked of Rowland with a peremptory flash in his eye, a look seeming to imply that his companion had undertaken to insure him against perplexities and was not fulfilling his contract — "this damnable uncertainty when one goes to bed at night as to whether one is going to wake up in an ecstasy or in a tantrum? Have we only a season, over before we know it, in which to call our faculties our own? Six months ago I could stand up to my work like a man, day after day, and never dream of asking myself how I felt. But now, some mornings, it 's the very devil to get going. My experiment looks so base when I come into the studio that I 've twenty minds to smash it on the spot, and I lose three or four hours in sitting there moping and getting used to it."
Rowland said that he supposed that these changes of intellectual weather, these occasional obscurations of the mere staring sun were the lot of every poet and what was the sculptor but the poet of the corporeal? So that the only remedy was plenty of courage and faith. And he reminded him, with a rare failure of tact perhaps, of Gloriani's having forewarned him the year before against the apparent lapse of the mere "inspired" state.
"Gloriani's a murderous mountebank!" Roderick fiercely replied. "He has got a bag of tricks and he comes with it to his studio as a conjurer comes for twenty francs to a children's party. Faugh!" He hired a horse, and began to ride with Rowland on the Campagna. This admirable exercise restored him in a measure to the appearance of felicity, but it seemed to Rowland on the whole not to stimulate his diligence. Their rides were always drawn out, and Roderick insisted on making them longer by dismounting in picturesque spots and stretching himself, in the golden air, on some mild mass of over-tangled stones. He let the Roman sky smile upon him with an intensity that his companion found more embarrassing. But in this situation he talked so much amusing nonsense that, for the sake of his company, Rowland consented to risk sunstroke and often forgot that, though in these diversions the days passed quickly, they produced neither the art of the market nor that of the temple. And yet it was perhaps by their help, after all, that Roderick secured several mornings of ardent work on his new figure and brought it forward in three or four bold jumps. One afternoon when it was practically finished Rowland went to look at it, and Roderick asked for his opinion.
"What do you think yourself?" Rowland demanded not from pusillanimity, but from real uncertainty.
"I think it curiously, almost interestingly bad," Roderick answered. "It was false from the first; it has fundamental vices. I 've shuffled them out of sight by a hocus-pocus for which I blush, but I haven't corrected them. I can't—I can't—I can't!" he cried passionately. "They stare me in the face—they 're all I see!"
Rowland offered several criticisms of detail and suggested certain practicable changes. But Roderick differed with him on each of these points; the thing had faults enough, but they were not those faults. Rowland, unruffled, concluded by saying that whatever its faults might be, he had an idea people in general would admire it.
"I wish to heaven some person in particular—but not you again, confound you!" Roderick cried—"would buy it and take it off my hands and out of my sight! What am I to do now?" he almost imperiously went on. "I haven't a blamed idea. I think of subjects, but they remain mere idiotic names. They 're mere words—they 're not images. What am I to do?"
Rowland was a trifle annoyed. "Be a man," he was on the point of saying, "and don't, for heaven's sake, talk in that confoundedly querulous voice!" But before he had uttered the words there rang through the studio a loud peremptory ring at the outer door. Roderick broke into a laugh. "Talk of the devil and you see his horns! If that 's not a customer, for poetic justice, it ought to be."