Part 19

[1] The Ambassador _does_ of course think him a curious and interesting case of dementia, feels a kind of superior responsibility about him accordingly, is really in a manner "fascinated" and mystified too; and in short quite naturally and inevitably stretches a point to see him, as it were, safely home. This he has it on his mind and his nerves, on his sense of responsibility, effectively to do. But, as naturally, he mustn't acknowledge his conviction, even though Ralph invites him to; and I get I think what I want by making him come down to the street in the cab as from curiosity to test his visitor's extraordinary statement, and then plausibly propose or insist on getting in with him and tracking him, as it were, to his lair: so as to be able to have first-hand evidence of his material situation in the event of whatever further occupation. It's in the street and at the cab door that he makes the point of "seeing home", as if then and there merely extemporised; and with the advantage that I thus seem to get what I remember originally groping for, _having_ groped for, when I broke this off just here so many years ago. I gave up taking time to excogitate my missing link, my jump or transition from this last appearance of my young man's in the modern world, so to speak, and his coming up again, where we next find him, after the dive, in the "old". I think I now have quite sufficiently got that transition--I have it perfectly before me. It passes between them; Ralph himself, on their way, in the cab, or probably better still, outside, on the pavement in Mansfield Square and before the house, expresses all I want; puts it, that is, to his benevolent friend, that he _knows_ now perfectly that on opening the door of the house with his latchkey he lets himself into the Past. He disappears into the Past, and what he has wanted is that his companion shall know he is there; shall be able to give that account of him if he is missed or wanted; shall also perhaps be able to take in all, whatever it is to be, that may yet happen, and believe in his experience if he ever rises to the surface again with it. This of course but clinches the Ambassador's sense of the refined beauty of his mania; though at the same time the very law of my procedure here is to show what is passing in his excellency's mind only through Ralph's detection and interpretation, Ralph's own expression of it--so leaving my own exhibition of it to stand over for my final chapter, my supreme dénoûment, when Aurora What's-her-name, under a tremendous "psychic" anxiety and distress of her own, which has been growing and growing within her commensurately with Ralph's own culmination of distress and anguish in _his_ drama, which we so centrally and interestingly assist at, comes out to London for relief and throws herself upon the Ambassador with the strange story of her condition, matching and balancing so remarkably poor Ralph's own story of the number of months before. An essential point is that the time of duration of Ralph's plunge or dive is exactly the real time that has elapsed for those on the surface--some six months being about what I provisionally see. The horrid little old conceit of the dream that has only taken half an hour, or whatever, any analogy with that, I mean, to be utterly avoided. The duration is in short the real duration, and I know what I mean when I say that everything altogether corresponds. Then it is, in the final situation, that we get, by a backward reference or action, the real logic and process of the Ambassador's view of how it has seemed best to take the thing, and what it has seemed best to "do" in connection with his strange visitor's exhibition. He gives, he states, what has then determined and guided him; and I see that he states it to Aurora all sufficiently and vividly, so that we don't have any clumsiness of his going back to it, I mean to his account of his own procedure, with Ralph himself when we have Ralph at last restored and, as what all that has gone on in the interval makes it, saved: saved from all the horror of the growing fear of _not_ being saved, of being lost, of being _in_ the past to stay, heart-breakingly to stay and never know his own original precious Present again; that horror which his conception of his adventure had never reckoned with, and his manner of _getting_ saved from which, saved by the sacrifice, the self-sacrifice of the creature to whom he confesses, in his anguish of fear, the secret of who and what and how etc. he _is_, constitutes the clou and crisis and climax of my action as I see it. It will take more working out, which will come but too abundantly, I seem to apprehend, as I go; but I have the substance of it, I have that still, as I had it of old, in my vision, even if a trifle rough, of the two sisters, the mother, Mrs. So-and-so of Drydown, the brother of that period, and whoever or whatever else I may subordinately need--even to the point very possibly of a second young man, the third, that is, in all, who is a wooer or suitor of the younger sister and, for my full kind of quasi-Turn-of-Screw effect, is of a type, a type of the period, entirely opposed to that of the brother. I see him, I have him and his affair, too thoroughly to have to waste words on him here. The more I get into my drama itself the more magnificent, upon my word, I seem to see it and feel it; with such a tremendous lot of possibilities in it that I positively quake in dread of the muchness with which they threaten me. The slow growth on the part of the others of their fear of Ralph, even in the midst of their making much of him, as abnormal, as uncanny, as not _like_ those they know of their own kind etc., etc.; and his fear just _of_ theirs, with his double consciousness, alas, his being almost as right as possible for the "period", and yet so intimately and secretly wrong; with his desire to mitigate so far as he can the malaise that he feels himself, do what he will, more and more produce. There must be an importance for him, I mean about him, in the view of the others; and this must be definite and consist of some two or three very strong and vivid facts--vivid that is to the imagination of people of 1820. Rather beautiful does it seem to me to have two or three of his actual modern facts stick to him and operate in this sense that I try to project: notably his "refinement", though he tries to conceal it, to dissimulate it; notably his being in 1820 as "rich" as he is, or was, in 1910--which counts for an immense well-offness at the earlier period. And then his whole true modern attribute and quality, with a distinguished appearance to match it, and certain things dont il ne peut pas se défaire, that are of the modern pitch of material civilisation, like his perfect and soignées teeth, for example, which that undentisted age can't have known the like of, and which constitute a part of his troubled consciousness of complication. He dissimulates, he succeeds, he fits in above all because he pleases, pleases at the same time that he creates malaise, by not being _like_ them all; which it is that gives me what I just above threw out this question for, his "importance". Without the importance I don't see the situation for him at all as I want it, and yet I must bring it in on lines of sufficient verisimilitude--even though while I say this the element so visualised fills me with the effect to be got out of it: I mean the charm and interest and fineness of that. In short once I have the importance, as I say, I have everything: the rest all clusters round it. Yes, the more I think of the little man (he must be little) who circles about the younger sister, and of whom she has an intimate horror--_he_ rich, by the way, too, and thereby desired by the mother, and with a small sort of raffiné (of that time) Horace Walpole atmosphere about him--but in short I needn't talk of him thus; I possess him too entirely. I keep missing, at the same time, all the while, my fact of putting the essence of what I see straight enough thus--the postulate of the young man from America arriving, coming upon the scene, somehow designated or arranged for in advance as to one or other of the sisters (I leave it rough and a little in the air, so to speak, for the moment. The just how and just why I can dispose of in a page when in closer quarters.) The point is that the wrong sister, abetted by the mother, pounces on him, as it were--it's the elder one I see doing this; and it so befalls that he is booked, as we say, to marry her, before, with all the precautions he has to keep, he can, as we also say, turn round. So it is that after a little, after the flush of the amusement of his extraordinary consciousness having begun a bit to abate in the light of the brutalities etc., what I call to myself most conveniently his dawning anguish glimmers and glimmers; what it means to see himself married to the elder sister and locked up with her there in that form of the Past. He conceals, he successfully does so, his growing malaise, all the effort and unrest of which, by the by, makes him, he sees, appear to them "clever" beyond anything they have ever dreamed of (they, also, by the way, must pass for clever, as 1820 understood it;) and I catch also, parenthetically, at my need for their not being, with all their pride of gentility, at all as conveniently well-off as they would like, or must require, this fact helping greatly the importance for them that he is possessed of means that seem to them quite blessedly large. The note of their thrift, a certain hardness of meanness, the nature of their economies, the brutality (I keep coming back to that) of their various expedients--this and that and the other Ralph has to take in. Meanwhile he is committed to the elder sister--and we have the effect on her of his importance, his means, his cleverness, mixed up with that in him which is mystifying to all of them, but which the elder sister at first at least sets down to the action and the play of a cleverness, a strange cleverness from over the sea, such as she has never before conceived. She holds on and on to him even after the malaise, and his sense of it in them, with his still greater sense of it in himself, has quite begun, as it were, to rage; with which: oh I see somehow such beautiful things that I can hardly keep step with myself to expatiate and adumbrate coherently enough. Let me just nail 2 or 3 things, by 2 or 3 of the roughest simplest strokes, in order to catch and hold them fast before I go on. All the while, all the while, the younger sister, who is ever so touching, charming, really appealing for him--all the while, all the while. I know what I mean by this sufficiently just to see and note here that the elder does after a while break off under the action of the malaise, which Ralph is in the extraordinary position of having in a way to work against and being also, as a means of release to him, grateful to. I can't take time to catch at this moment, but keep it till the next chance, my notation of how and where the younger sister, the one who really would have been meant for him, the one for the sake of whom he would almost really swing off backward--my notation, I say (after a break of dictation) of the origin and growth of the special relation between Ralph and herself; she being of course the nearest approach--and in fact it's very much of an approach--that I have in the whole thing to a Heroine. I seem to myself now to have intended somehow, in my original view, an accident, a complication, a catastrophic perversity or fatality, as it were, through which Ralph has addressed himself from the first to the elder, the wrong, sister instead of the younger, the right--and when I try to recover what I so long ago had in my head about this there glimmers out, there floats shyly back to me from afar, the sense of something like this, a bit difficult to put, though entirely expressible with patience, and that as I catch hold of the tip of the tail of it yet again strikes me as adding to my action but another admirable twist. Of course I am afraid of twists, I mean of their multiplying on my hands to the effect of too much lengthening and enlarging and sprawling; but the bit that I speak of now is surely of the very essence of the situation. It connects itself with something so interesting and effective, so strong and fine, to express--from the moment one successfully tackles it. "This" then, what I mentioned above, is that Ralph has "taken over" from the other party to his extraordinary arrangement certain indications that have been needed for starting the thing, and which I think of him as having, under the operation of the whole prodigy, very considerably, very enormously, assimilated. Enormous, however, as the assimilation may be, it is not absolutely perfect, and don't I exactly get out of this wavering margin, this occurrence of spots and moments, so to speak, where it falls short, just one of those effects of underlying distress, of sense of danger, as I comprehensively call it, which are of the very finest essence of one's general intention? He knows his way so much and so far, knows it wonderfully, finds his identity, the one he wears for the occasion, extraordinarily easy considering the miracle of it all; but the very beauty of the subject is in the fact of his at the same time watching himself, watching his success, criticising his failure, being both the other man and not the other man, being just sufficiently the other, his prior, his own, self, not to be able to help living in that a bit too. Isn't it a part of what I call the beauty that this concomitant, this watchful and critical, living in his "own" self inevitably grows and grows from a certain moment on?--and isn't it for instance quite magnificent that one sees this growth of it as inevitably promoted more and more by his sense of what I have noted as the malaise on the part of the others? Don't I see his divination and perception of that so affect and act upon him that little by little he begins to live more, to live most, and most uneasily, in what I refer to as his own, his prior self, and less, uneasily less, in his borrowed, his adventurous, that of his tremendous speculation, so to speak--rather than the other way round as has been the case at first. When his own, his original, conquers so much of the ground of that, then it is that what I have called his anguish gets fuller possession of it--it being so one thing to "live in the Past" _with_ the whole spirit, the whole candour of confidence and confidence of candour, that he would then have naturally had--and a totally different thing to find himself living in it without those helps to possibility, those determinations of relation, those preponderant right instincts and, say, saving divinations. Don't I put it at first that he is excited and amused and exhilarated by the presence of these latter, by the freedom with which he lives and enjoys and sees and knows: the exhilaration proceeding during the "at first" time, as I put it, by the sense, the fairly intoxicating and spell-casting consciousness of how the inordinate business is going. His sense of success, which there is just enough of his critical margin or edge to appreciate, to estimate, and thus relate to his former consciousness and his whole starting-point, this _creates_ for him a part of the success, the success with the others, by the very spirit and glamour (to them) that it gives him and that keeps up till the change I visualise, the inevitable difference, to phrase it roughly, begins--begins by something that _happens_, something that springs out of the very situation itself for portent, for determination, and which I must work out, or work into, exactly the right dramatic identity for. This I guarantee; but meanwhile I am ahead of my argument, and must hark back for a few minutes to what I left standing and waiting above--that "this" which I was there about to follow up. At once, withal, I see it in images, which I must put as they come, and which make for me thus, don't I seem to feel? one of the first, if not _the_ very first passages of my action. An action, an action, an action must it thus insuperably be--as it has moreover so well started with being--from the first pulse to the last. Ralph, taking leave of the Ambassador, the depositary of his extraordinary truth and the (as he hopes) secured connection with the world he cuts himself loose from, dropping as from a balloon thousands of feet up in the air, and not really knowing what smash or what magically _soft_ concussion awaits him--Ralph, I say, in entering the house then walks at a step straight into 1820 and, closing the door behind him, shuts out everything to which he has hitherto belonged. He is from that minute, to his own eyes and all his own faculties, the young man in the portrait, the young man we have seen advance to him that night of his vigil in the drawing-room. This bridge or effective transition from the visit at the Embassy to the central drama is thus _found_ and is as good as another for my purpose--swift and straight and simple and direct; as I have on a foregoing page, however, sufficiently stated. Well then, I want to make it, _within_, his arrival, practically, from America to the London family: as to which, however, on consideration don't I see myself catch a bright betterment by not at all making him use a latch-key?--to the fact of which an awkwardness and a difficulty would, I seem to make out, or _do_, rather, immediately attach. No, no--no latch-key--but a rat-tat-tat, on his own part, at the big brass knocker; having effected which he stands there a moment, I think, his head very triumphantly high and confident, looking from the steps down at the Ambassador on the pavement; this latter isolated now, by Ralph's having paid and discharged the cab, which has driven away, the moment they got out. What I glanced at as happening between them just thereafter takes place on the pavement, as I have noted, but with this difference, I see with a minute's further intensity of focussing, that he does--well, what I have just stated. Only I seem to want a dumb passage between the two men while the Ambassador just stands, just lingers, as if now at last verily spellbound. I mustn't forget, by the way, that I have spoken of the rain, or that Ralph has, at the Embassy, and that his Excellency can't be represented as standing there without a vehicle and under his umbrella. So it has been constate on their coming out of the Embassy that the rain has stopped during Ralph's visit, so that it's all the more quite over when they reach the square. The Ambassador has said, in reference to the cab, "Oh I won't keep it--I'll walk home; you've really made me need to shake myself!" Thereby I get him held there for the minute seeing the last of Ralph after the latter has knocked and before the door is opened. Ralph turns on its opening--it is held open wide for the moment, and as I seem to see this altogether in latish daylight of a spring, say of a March or April, season, it is no lighted interior that is for a moment exhibited, but just such a Bloomsbury entrance hall as may very well meet the eye to-day. Within then, Ralph arrives; and what for the moment I want summarily to mark is simply that the elder sister is the first person in the "drama" that he sees. She must be handsome, very--handsomer in an obvious way than the younger; not yet at all in sight--not in sight, I think, till after the three others have been, the mother and the two young men, who a little announce and prepare her. It even may be a little, I think, that she is for the time away from home and doesn't return till after the situation is otherwise started. Well then, here it is that what Ralph _knows_, what he is in possession of and has the general preparation for, is so far precarious and, so to speak, treacherous, that--well, all I want to say now is, before I break off, that he takes her, takes the elder one, for the right young woman. This seems easy--so right, in her way, does she appear to be. He knows, he has "had it", from the 1820 young man, what is expected of him in regard to one of the young women; how, in what manner and on what terms and by what understanding it has come to be expected, remaining questions that I shall adequately, not to say brilliantly, dispose of. What I seem to want is to get the relation between these two started on the spot, before any other relation whatever takes place for my young man; feeling as I do that once it is started I can abundantly take care of it. I even ask myself whether I mayn't have my hero's very first impression, the very first of all, of my second man, as I call him, the one other than the brother, who is there for the second sister and whom he should perhaps do well to find alone in the room when he is introduced, waiting there for the others, the objects of his call, and constituting Ralph's immediate impression. It is to _them_, say, that the first sister enters--so indefeasibly and luminously, as it were, do I see my procedure ruled by the drama, the quasi-scenic movement, or essential march and logic and consistency, at any rate. However, I am not pretending in these words, in this rough scenario, to go into any but the most provisional and general particulars. What I want is that my young man should inevitably and naturally _dazzle_, and become aware of it, by the very force of his feeling the distinction and privilege of the prodigious element that has launched him. The others don't in the least know what it is in him, but what I want to make ressortir from it is that he "does" the other fellow, his ancient prototype, the expected cousin from America, with no end of gentility etc. There must be at the same time, of course I see, enormous foreshortenings, great compression and presentation of picture: I want something of this sort to show before the second daughter turns up. Of course such questions as whether it was of the period that the elder one, bred as girls of that time were bred, would "come down" to a couple of "gentlemen visitors" alone, and as by a kind of anticipation of our current modernity--of course such a detail as that is a perfectly easy thing to handle and make right. At the same time withal, in respect to what I said just above about the scenic, let me keep before me how the very essence of all this is to stick as fast as possible to the precedent of the "Screw", in which foreshortening abounded and I didn't, and couldn't, at all hand my subject over to the scenic. The present is of course a much larger and more complicated affair, lending itself much more to the scenic, even in a manner insisting on it a little, or a good bit; but I must guard, guard and all the while intensely guard, myself, none the less--or I shall sprawl out over ever so much more ground than I shall want, or at all need, for my best effect, to cover. If I may but look it well in the face that the thing can only afford in a very minor degree, not in the least in a preponderant one, to express itself scenically, it takes very little further thinking to see how vital that is, and that the particular effect I want most to catch, that of the crescendo of the malaise, really demands and depends upon the non-scenic for its full triumph. I grasp this entirely; I see how "narrative representation" most permits, most effectively prepares and accompanies, my turning of my present screw, and what a part picture and image and evoked aspect and sense can play for me in that connection.