Part 20

As to Cissy Foy meanwhile, the case seems to me to clear up and clear up to the last perfection; or to be destined and committed so to do, at any rate, as one presses it with the right pressure. How shall I put it for the moment, _her_ case, in the very simplest and most rudimentary terms? She sees the improvement in Horton's situation, she assists at it, it gives her pleasure, it even to a certain extent causes her wonder, but a wonder which the pleasure only perches on, so to speak, and converts to its use; so does the vision appeal to her and hold her of the exercise on his part, the more vivid exercise than any she has yet been able to enjoy an exhibition of, of the ability and force, the _doing_ and man-of-action quality, as to the show of which he has up to now been so hampered. She likes his success at last, plainly, and he has it from her that she likes it; she likes to let him know that she likes it, and we have her for the time in contemplation, as it were, of these two beautiful cases of possession and acquisition, out of which indeed poor little impecunious she gets as yet no direct advantage, but which are somehow together there _for_ her with a kind of glimmering looming option well before her as to how they shall _come_ yet to concern her. Awfully interesting and attractive, as one says, to mark the point (such a Joint _this!_) at which the case begins to glimmer for Gray about her, as it has begun to glimmer for him about Horton. I make out here, so far as I catch the tip of the tail of it, such an interesting connection and dependence, for what I may roughly call Gray's state of mind, as to what is taking place within Cissy, so to speak. Since I speak of the most primitive statement of it possible he catches the moment at which she begins to say to herself "But if Horton, if _he_, is going to be rich----?" as a positive arrest, say significant warning or omen, in his own nearer approach to her; which takes on thereby a portentous, a kind of ominous and yet enjoyable air of evidence as to his own likelihood, at this rate, of getting poor. He catches her not asking herself withal, at least _then_, "_How_ is Horton going to be rich, _how_, at such a rate, has it come on, and what does it mean?"--it is only the "_If_ Horton, oh _if_----?" that he comes up against; it's as if he comes up against, as well, some wondrous implication in it of "If, if, _if_ Mr. Gray is, 'in such a funny way,' going to be poor----?" He sees her _there_, seeing at the same time that it's as near as she yet gets; as near perhaps even--for this splendid apprehension sort of begins to take place in him--as she's going to allow herself to get; and after the first chill of it, shock of it, pain of it (because I want him to be at the point at which he has _that_) fades a little away for him, he emerging or shaking himself out of it, the beautiful way in which it falls into the general ironic apprehension, imagination, appropriation, of the Whole, becomes for him _the_ fact about it. She has them, each on his side, there in her balance--and this is between them, between him and her; I must have prepared everything right for its being oh such a fine moment. What I want to do of course is to get out of _this_ particular situation all it can give; what it most gives being, to the last point, the dramatic quality, intensity, force, current or whatever, of Gray's apprehension of it, once this is determined, and of course wondering interest in it--as a light, so to speak, on both of the persons concerned. What I see is that she gives him the measure, as it were, of Horton's successful proceeding--and does so, in a sort, without positively having it herself, or truly wanting to have it beyond the fact that it is success, is promise and prospect of acquisition on a big scale. What it comes to is that he finds her believing in Horton just at the time and in proportion as he has found himself ceasing to believe, so far as the latter's disinterestedness is concerned. No better, no more vivid illustration of the force of the money-power and money-prestige rises there before him, innumerably as other examples assault him from all round. The effect on her is there for him to "study," even, if he will; and in fact he does study it, studies it in a way that (as he also sees) makes her think that this closer consideration of her, approach to her, as it were, is the expression of an increased sympathy, faith and good will, increased desire, in fine, to make her like him. All the while it is, for Gray himself, something other; yet something at the same time wellnigh as absorbing as if it were what she takes it for. The fascination of seeing what will come of it--that is of the situation, the state of vigilance, the wavering equilibrium, at work, or at play, in the young woman--this "fascination" very "amusing" to show, with everything that clusters about it. He really enjoys getting so detached from it as to be able to have it before him for observation and wonder as he does, and I must make the point very much of how this fairly soothes and relieves him, begins to glimmer upon him exactly _through_ that consciousness as something like the sort of issue he has been worrying about and longing for. Just so something that he makes out as distinguishable there in Horton, a confidence more or less dissimulated but also, deeply within, more or less determined, operates in its way as a measure for him of Horton's intimate sense of how things will go for him; the confidence referring, I mustn't omit, to his possibility of Cissy, after all, whom his sentiment for makes his most disinterested interest, so to call it: all this in a manner corresponding to that apprehension in Gray of _her_ confidence, which I have just been sketchily noting. The one disinterested thing in Horton, that is, consists of his being so attached to her that he really cares for her freedom, cares for her doing what on the whole she most wants to, if it will but come as she wants it, by the operation, the evolution, so to say, of her clear preference. He has somehow within him a sense that anyway, whatever happens, they shall not fail of being "friends" after all. I see myself wanting to have Gray come up against some conclusive sign of how things _are_ at last between them--though I say "at last" as if he has had _much_ other light as to how such things _have_ been, precedently. I don't want him to _have_ had much other light, though he needs of course to have had _some_; there being people enough to tell him, he being so in the circle of talk, reference, gossip; but with his own estimate of the truth of ever so much of the chatter in general, and of that chatter in particular, taking its course. What I seem to see just in this connection is that he has "believed" so far as to take it that she _has_ "cared" for his friend in the previous time, but that Horton hasn't really at all cared for her, keeping himself in reserve as it is of his essence to do, and in particular (this absolutely _known_ to Gray) never having wholly given up his views on Rosanna. Gray believes that he hasn't, at any rate, and this helps him not to fit the fact of the younger girl's renounced, quenched, outlived, passion, or whatever one may call it, to any game of patience or calculation, rooted in a like state of feeling, on Horton's part. I want the full effect of what I can only call for convenience Gray's Discovery, his full discovery of them "together", in some situation, and its illuminating and signifying, its in a high degree, to repeat again my cherished word, determinant character. This effect requires exactly what I have been roughly marking--the line of argument in which appearances, as interpreted for himself, have been supporting Gray. "She has been in love with him, yes--but nothing has come of it--nothing could come of it; because, though he has been aware, and has been nice and kind to her, he isn't affected in the same way--is, in these matters, too cool and calculating a bird. He likes women, yes; and has had lots to do with them; but in the way of what a real relation with _her_ would have meant--not! She has given him up, she has given it up--whereby one is free not to worry, not to have scruples, not to fear to cut across the possibility of one's friend." That's a little compendium of what I see. But it comes to me that I also want something more--for the full effect and the exact particular and most pointed bearing of what I dub Gray's discovery. He must have put it to Horton, as their relations have permitted at some suggested hour, or in some relevant connection: "Do you mind telling me if it's true--what I've heard a good deal affirmed--that there has been a question of an engagement between you and Miss Foy?--or that you are so interested in her that to see somebody else making up to her would be to you as a pang, an affront, a ground of contention or challenge or whatever?" I seem to see that, very much indeed; and by the same token to see Horton's straight denegation. I see Horton say emphatically No--and this for reasons quite conceivable in him, once one apprehends their connection with his wishing above all, beyond anything else that he at this moment wishes, to keep well with Gray. His denegation is plausible; Gray believes it and accepts it--all the more that at the moment in question he _wants_ to, in the interest of his own freedom of action. Accordingly the point I make is that when he in particular conditions finds them all unexpectedly and unmistakably "together", the discovery becomes for him _doubly_ illuminating. I might even better say trebly; showing him in the very first place that Horton has lied to him, and thereby that Horton _can_ lie. This very interesting and important--but also, in a strange way, "fascinating" to him. It shows in the second way how much Cissy is "thinking" of Horton, as well as he of her; and it shows in the last place, which makes it triple, how well Horton must think of the way his affairs are getting on that he can now consider the possibility of a marriage--that he can feel, I mean, he can _afford_ to marry; not having need of one of the Rosanna's to make up for his own destitution. This clinches enormously, as by a flash of vision, Gray's perception of what he is about; and is thus very intensely a Joint of the first water! What I want to be carried on to is the point at which all that he sees and feels and puts together in this connection eventuates in a decision or attitude, in a clearing-up of all the troubled questions, obscurities and difficulties that have hung for him about what I call his Solution, about what he shall be most at ease, most clear and consistent for himself, in making up his mind to. The process here and the position on his part, with all the implications and consequences of the same in which it results, is difficult and delicate to formulate, but I see with the last intensity the sense of it, and feel how it will all come and come as I get nearer to it. What is a big and beautiful challenge to a whole fine handling of these connections in particular is the making conceivable and clear, or in other words credible, consistent, vivid and interesting, the particular extraordinary relation thus constituted between the two men. That one may make it these things for Gray is more or less calculable, and, as I seem to make out, workable; but the greatest beauty of the difficulty is in getting it and keeping it in the right note and at the right pitch for Horton. Horton's "acceptance"--on what prodigious basis save the straight and practical view of Gray's exalted queerness and constitutional, or whatever, perversity, can _that_ be shown as resting? Two fine things--that is one of them strikes me as very fine--here come to me; one of these my seeing (_don't_ I see it?) how it will fall in, not to say fall out, as of the essence of the true workability, that the extent to which i's are not dotted between them, are left consciously undotted, to which, to the most extraordinary tune, and yet with the logic of it all straight, they stand off, or rather Gray does, the other all demonstrably thus taking his cue--the way, I say, in which the standing-off from sharp or supreme clearances is, and confirms itself as being, a note of my hero's action in the matter, throws upon one the most interesting work. Horton accepts it as exactly part of the prodigious queerness which he humours and humours in proportion as Gray will have it that he shall; the "fine thing", the second of the two, just spoken of, being that Horton never flinches from his perfectly splendid theory that he is "taking care", consummately, of his friend, and that he is arranging, by my exhibition of him, just as consummately to _show_ for so doing. No end, I think, to be got out of this wondrous fact of Gray's sparing Horton, or saving him, the putting of anything to a real and direct Test; such a Test as would reside in his asking straight for a large sum of money, a big amount, really consonant with his theoretically intact resources arid such as he with the highest propriety in the world might simply say that he has an immediate use for, or can make some important application of. No end, no end, as I say, to what I see as given me by this--this huge constituted and accepted eccentricity of Gray's holdings-off. I have the image of the relation between them made by it in my vision thus of the way, or the ways, they look at each other even while talking together to a tune which would logically or consistently make these ways _other_; the sort of education of the look that it breeds in Horton on the whole ground of "how far he may go." The things that pass between them after this fashion quite beautiful to do if kept from an overdoing; with Horton's formula of his "looking after" Gray completely interwoven with his whole ostensibility. It is with this formula that Horton meets the world all the while--the world that at a given moment can only find itself so full of wonderment and comment. It is with it above all that he meets Cissy, who takes it from him in a way that absolutely helps him to keep it up; and it _would_ be with it that he should meet Rosanna if, after a given day or season, he might find it in him to dare, as it were, to "meet" Rosanna at all. It is with Horton's formula, which I think I finally show him as quite publicly delighting in, that Gray himself meets Rosanna, whom he meets a great deal all this time; with such passages between them as are only matched in another sense, and with all the other values with which they swell, so to speak, by his passages with the consummate Horton. Charming, by which I mean such interesting, things resident in what I _there_ touch on; with the way _they_ look at each other, Rosanna and Gray, if one is talking about looks. Gray keeps it in comedy, so far as he can--making a tone, a spell, that Rosanna doesn't break into, as she breaks, anything to call _really_ breaks, into nothing as yet: I seem to see the final, from-far-back-prepared moment when she does, for the first and last time, break as of a big and beautiful value. _That_ will be a Joint of Joints; but meanwhile what is between them is the sombre confidence, tenderness, fascination, anxiety, a dozen admirable things, with which she waits on Gray's tone, not playing up to it at all (playings-up and suchlike not being verily in her) but taking it from him, accommodating herself to it with all her anxiety and her confidence somehow mixed together, as if to see how far it will carry her. Such a lot to be done with Gussie Bradham, portentous woman, even to the very cracking or bursting of the mould meanwhile--so functional do I see her, in spite of the crowding and pressing together of functions, as to the production of those (after all early-determined) reactions in Gray by the simple complete exhibition of her type and pressure and aggressive mass. She is really worth a book by herself, or would be should I look that way; and I just here squeeze what I most want about her into a sort of nutshell by saying that it marks for Gray just where and how his Solution, or at any rate some of its significant and attendant aspects, swims into his ken, with the very first scene she makes him about the meanness then of his conception of his opportunity. Then it is he feels he must be getting a bit into the truth of things--if that's the way he strikes her. His very measure of taste and delicacy and the sympathetic and the nice and the what he wants, becomes after a fashion what she will want most to make him a scene about. I have it at first that he lends himself, that her great driving tone and pressure, her would-be act of possession of him, Cissy and the question of Cissy being the link, have amounted to a sort of trouble-saving thing which he has let himself "go to", which he has suffered as his convenient push or handy determinant, for the hour (sceptical even then as to its lasting)--but which has inordinately overdosed him, overhustled him, almost, as he feels in his old habit of financial contraction, overspent and overruined him. He does the things, the social things, for the moment, that she prescribes, that she foists upon him as the least ones he can decently do; does them even with a certain bewildered amusement--while Rosanna, brooding apart, so to speak, out of the circle and on her own ground, but ever so attentive, draws his eye to the effect of what one might almost call the intelligent, the patience-inviting, wink! Oh for the pity of scant space for specific illustration of Mrs. Bradham; where-with indeed of course I reflect on the degree to which my planned compactness, absolutely precious and not to be compromised with, must restrict altogether the larger illustrational play. Intensities of foreshortening, with alternate vividnesses of extension: that is the rough label of the process. I keep it before me how mixed Cissy is with certain of the consequences of this hustlement of Mrs. Bradham, and how bullyingly, so to call it almost, she has put the whole matter of what he ought to "do for them all," on the ground in particular of what it is so open to him, so indicated for him, to do for that poor dear exquisite thing in especial. Illustrational, illustrational, yes; but oh how every inch of it will have to count. I seem to want her to have made him do some one rather gross big thing above all, as against his own sense of fineness in these matters; and to have this thing count somehow very much in the matter of his relation with Cissy. I seem to want something like his having consented to be "put up" by her to the idea of offering Cissy something very handsome by way of a "kind" tribute to her mingled poverty and charm--jolly, jolly, I think Eve exactly got it! I keep in mind that Mrs. Bradham wants him to marry her--this amount of "disinterestedness" giving the measure of Mrs. B. at her most exalted "best". Wherewith, to consolidate this, her delicacy being capable--well, of what we shall see, she works of course to exaggeration the idea of his "recognising" how nice Cissy was, over there in the other time, to his poor sick stepfather, who himself so recognised it, who wrote to her so charmingly a couple of times "about it", after her return to America and quite shortly before his death. Gray "knows about this", and of course will quite see what she means. Therefore wouldn't it be nice for Gray to give her, Cissy, something really beautiful and valuable and socially helpful to her--as of course he can't give her money, which is what would be most helpful. Under this hustlement, in fine, and with a sense, born of his goodnature, his imagination, and his own delicacy, such a very different affair, of what Gussie Bradham has done for him, by her showing, he finds himself in for having bought a very rare single row of pearls, such as a girl, in New York at least, may happily wear, and presenting it to our young person as the token of recognition that Mrs. Bradham has imagined for them. The beauty in which, I see, is that it may be illustrational in more ways than one--illustrational of the hustle, of the length Gray has "appreciatively" let himself go, and, above all, of Cissy's really interesting intelligence and "subtlety". She refuses the gift, very gently and pleadingly, but as it seems to him really pretty well finally--refuses it as not relevant or proportionate or congruous to any relation in which they yet stand to each other, and as oh ever so much over-expressing any niceness she may have shown in Europe. She does, in doing this, exactly what he has felt at the back of his head that she would really do, and what he likes her for doing--the effect of which is that she has furthered her interest with him decidedly more (as she of course says to herself) than if she had taken it. He is left with it for the moment on his hands, and what I want is that he shall the next thing find himself, in revulsion, in reaction, there being for him no question of selling it again etc., finds himself, I say, offering it to Mrs. Bradham herself, who swallows it without winking. Yet, in a way, this little history of the pearls, of her not having had them, and of his after a fashion owing her a certain compensation for that, owing her something she _can_ accept, is there _between_ him and my young person. They figure again between them, humorously, freely, ironically--the girl being of an irony!--in their appearances on Mrs. Bradham's person, to whose huge possession of ornament they none the less conspicuously add.