Part 21

But my point here is above all that Gray exactly _doesn't_ put the question of what is becoming of his funds under Horty's care of them to the test by any cultivation of that courage for large drafts and big hauls, that nerve for believing in the fairy-tale of his sudden fact of possession, which was briefly and in a manner amusingly possible to him at the first go off of his situation. He forbears, abstains, stands off, and finds himself, or in particular is found by others, to the extent of their observing, wondering and presently challenging him, to be living, to be drawing on his supposed income, with what might pass for the most extraordinarily timorous and limited imagination. He _likes_ this arrest, enjoys it and feels a sort of wondrous refreshing decency, at any rate above all a refreshing interest and curiosity about it, or, rather, for it; but what his position involves is his explaining it to others, his making up his mind, his having to, for a line to take about it, without his thereby giving Horton away. He isn't to give Horton away the least scrap from this point on; but at the same time he is to have to deal with the world, with society, with the entourage consisting for him, in its most pressing form, of, say, three representative persons--he has to deal with this challenge, as I have called it, in some way that will sort of meet it _without_ givings-away. These three persons are in especial Rosanna and the two Bradhams; and it is before me definitely, I think, that I want to express, and in the very vividest way, his sense of his situation here, of what it means, and of what _he_ means, _in_ it, through what takes place for him about it with Rosanna and with the Bradhams. It is by what he "says" to the Bradhams and to Rosanna (in the way, that is largely, of _not_ saying) that I seem to see my values here as best got, and the presentation of their different states most vivified and dramatised. These are scenes, and the function of them to serve up for us exactly, and ever so lucidly, what I desire them to represent. If the greatest interest of them, of sorts, belongs to them in so far as they are "with" Rosanna, there are yet particular values that belong to the relation with Davey, and the three relations, at any rate, work the thing for me. They are perfectly different, on this lively ground, though the "point" involved is the same in each; and the having each of them to do it with should enable me to do it beautifully; I mean to squeeze _all_ the dramatic sense from it. The great beauty is of course for the aspects with Rosanna, between whom and him everything passes--and there is so much basis already in what has been between them--without his "explaining", as I have called it, anything. Even without explanations--or all the more by reason of their very absence--there is so much of it all; of the question and the dramatic illumination. With Gussie Bradham--_that_ aspect I needn't linger or insist on, here, so much as a scrap. I have that, see it all, it's _there._ But with Davey I want something very good, that is in other words very functional; and I think I even wonder if I don't want to see Davey as attempting to borrow money of him. This--if I do see it--will take much putting on the right basis; and it seems to kind of glimmer upon me richly what the right basis is. My idea has been from the first that the Bradham money is all Gussie's; I have seen Davey, by the very type and aspect, by all his detached irony and humour and indiscretion and general value as the unmonied young man who has married the heiress, as Horton would have been had he been able to marry Rosanna. But no interfering analogy need trouble me here; Horton's not having done that, and the essential difference between the men, eases off any such question. Only don't I seem to want it that Gussie's fortune, besides not having been even remotely comparable to Rosanna's, is, though with a fair outward face, a dilapidated and undermined quantity, much ravaged by Gussie's violent strain upon it, and representing thus, through her general enormous habit and attitude, an association and connection with the money world, but all the more characteristically so, for Gray as he begins to see, that almost everything but the pitch of Gussie's wants and arrangements and ideals has been chucked, as it were, out of its windows and doors. Don't I really see the Bradhams thus as _predatory?_ Predatory on the very rich, that is; with Gussie's insistence that Gray shall _be_ and shall proceed as quite one of the _very_, oh the very, very, exactly in order that she _may_ so prey? Yes and so it is that Gray learns--so it is that a part of Davey's abysses of New York financial history, is his own, their own, but his in particular, abyss of inconvenience, abyss of inability to keep it up combined with all the social impossibility of not doing so. I somehow want such values of the supporting and functional and illustrative sort in Davey that I really think I kind of want him to be the person, _the_ person, to whom Gray gives--as a kind of recognition of the remarkable part, the precious part, don't I feel it as being? that Davey plays for him. He likes so the illuminating Davey, whom I'm quite sure I want to show in no malignant or vicious light, but just as a regular rag or sponge of saturation in the surrounding medium. He is beyond, he is outside of, all moral judgments, all scandalised states; he is amused at what he himself does, at his general and particular effect and effects on Gray, who is his luxury of a relation, as it were, and whom I somehow seem to want to show him feel as the only person in the whole medium appreciating his genius; in other words his detached play of mind and the deep "American humour" of it. Don't I seem to want him even as asking for something rather big?--a kind of a lump of a sum which Gray, always with amusement, answers that he will have to see about. Gray's seeing about anything of this sort means, all notedly, absolutely _all_, as I think I have it, asking Horton whether he can, whether he may, whether Horton will give it to him, whether in short the thing will suit Horton; even without any disposition of the sum, any account of what he wants to do, indicated or reported or confessed to Horton? Don't I see something like this?--that Gray, having put it to Horton, has precisely determined, for his vision, on Horton's part, just that first important plea of "Really you can't, you know, at this rate"--even after Gray has been for some time so "ascetic"--"It won't be convenient for you just now; and I must ask you really, you know, to take my word for it that you'd much better not distract from what I am in the act of doing for you such a sum"--by which I mean, for I am probably using here not the terms Horton _would_ use--"much better not make such a call (call is the word) when I am exactly doing for you etc." What I seem to see is that Davey does have money from him, but has it only on a scale that falls short, considerably, of his appeal or proposal or whatever; in other words that Gray accommodates him to the third, or some other fraction, of the whole extent; and that this involves for him practically the need of his saying that Horton won't let him have more. I want that, I see it as a value; I see Davey's aspect on it as a value, I see what is determined thus between them as a value; and I seem to see most this _covering_ by Gray of Horton in answer to the insinuations, not indignant but amused, in answer to the humorously fantastic picture, on Davey's lips, of the rate at which Horton is cleaning him out or whatever, this taking of the line of so doing and of piling up plausibilities of defence, excuse etc., so far as poor Gray can be plausible in these difficult "technical" connections, as the vivid image, the vividest, I am most concerned to give of what I show him as doing. The covering of Horton, the covering of Horton--this is much more than not giving him away; this active and positive protection of him seems to me really what my subject logically asks. Well then if that is it, is what it most of all, for the dramatic value, asks, how can this be consistently less than Gray's act of going all the way indeed? I don't know why--as it has been hovering before me--I don't want the complete vivid sense of it to take the form of an awful, a horrible or hideous, crisis on Horton's part which, under the stress of it, he "suddenly" discloses to Gray, throwing himself upon him in the most fevered, the most desperate appeal for relief. What then constitutes the nature of the crisis, what _then_ can, or constitute the urgency of the relief, unless the fact of his having something altogether dreadful to confess; so dreadful that it can only involve the very essence of his reputation, honour and decency, his safety in short before the law? He has been guilty of some huge irregularity, say--but which yet is a different thing from whatever irregularities he has been guilty of in respect to Gray himself; and which up to now, at the worst, have left a certain substantial part of Gray's funds intact. Say that, say that; turn it over, that is, to see if it's really wanted. I think of it as wanted because I feel the need of the effect of some _acute_ determination play up as I consider all this--and yet also see objections; which probably will multiply as I look a little closer. I throw this off, at all events, for the moment, as I go, to be looked at straighter, to return to presently--after I've got away from it a bit, I mean from this special aspect a little, in order to come back to it fresher; picking up meanwhile two or three different matters.