Part 21

Well then, there he is with the question of the marriage ended--as to which, let me catch myself up to remember, I shall have to give _her_ a motive, a presentable ground, since it's ended by her act, which won't make it too anomalous on his part that relations with the house are kept up. I must have him, by the way, not "stay" with them--I see advantages and naturalnesses, facilitations of several sorts, in his not doing that, but, much rather, putting up at one of the inns of the day, or better still in a lodging in one of the old Westend streets. Why not let the young woman make it quite frank and outspoken--happy thought!--and say in so many words that she can't marry him because, heaven help her, she's afraid of him; just that, simply afraid of him, even if he (with his own malaise at this note) can't get out of her any _why_, when he challenges her, as in dignity and decency he must, for a reason. This much affects and impresses him--for there isn't in it, mind, the smallest hint or implication of its being through any jealousy of her sister, whom she doesn't so much as honour with a suspicion. (The sort of Cinderella quality, so to call it, of the younger one, to be shown as more or less felt by him.) The position thus taken with practical suddenness by his prospective bride is the first definite note, at all really sharp one, that he has to reckon with on the subject of the queerness that hangs, that may so well hang, about him; and it sets up thereby the beginnings of the great feeling that I want to impute to him. He thinks all the same, at first, he expects and apprehends, not with pleasure, however, that this attitude of hers won't be supported by her mother and her brother: the thing having taken place between themselves only, and quite abruptly; she striking him as acting by her own sudden impulse alone, and in a manner not at all to suit the others. They will overbear her, he imagines; her mother in particular will bring her round again and into line. He positively fears this even--so that his surprise is great, and his malaise even greater, when the mother, with a full opportunity, by this time, doesn't so much as speak to him on the subject. There must be a passage between them, him and the Mother, in which he wonderingly and observantly, watching now all symptoms and portents, as it were, waits for Mrs. So-and-So to speak, to broach the matter herself, to show him her knowledge of what her daughter has done. He must know, or must believe, that she has now the knowledge--this point having been treated between him and the daughter, as it were, in the scene of the rupture. He _has_ of course to ask her if she throws him over with her mother's privity and approval, to which she replies that she doesn't, up to then, that she has broken down but then and there, but that now at once of course she will report herself, so to speak, to her mother. I see it must be the case that she is plain and honest, not at all tortuous or perfidious, and so far as calculating, why calculating quite boldly and confessedly, as to the material advantages accruing; and thereby the more eloquent as to the inward feeling she can't surmount when she renounces these advantages so flatly. Well, the point is, from all this, that our young man is waiting for the mother to express to him that he mustn't on his side take advantage of the girl's backing out, but insistently claim his right not to be so trifled with (the attitude of the family being that they are, for all their straitened means, great people themselves, greater truly than he, and with a greatness for him in the connection,) and is going on as if nothing has happened. He has expected from her, as in character, the information that she has dealt herself, and with the high maternal rigour that then prevailed, _with_ the ridiculous child, whom she has thus reduced again to reason and docility. But nothing of that sort comes--the lady of Drydown not only doesn't break ground to him herself in that sense, but betrays to his now considerably excited imagination a fear that he will: which will be, truly, awkward, embarrassing and even "scaring" to her; so that what I seem to see happening is verily that when he thus watches her not speak, notes her as forbearing to for reasons of her own, he doesn't take her up on it, decides in fact not to, decides that the question is really had out between them without either of them so speaking, and only by his looking her very hard in the eye, and her so looking at him, and his keeping it up on this and her keeping it up on that. It simply drops thus, by its own force, the question of the marriage, and the fact that he doesn't have it out, and that she allows him, as by taking care, no opportunity to, constitutes another silver nail, likewise, of as good a salience as I could desire. There it is then, so far as that goes; and after I have dealt for an instant now with the question of what the brother's attitude also is in the connection, I see I shall have got what I was reaching out for considerably above, _the particular thing taking, or having taken, place_ which must serve for me as the determinant of the phenomenon, the factor, I have settled to tackle. The "other fellow appears" to Ralph, and makes him ask himself why, contrary to all consistency or logic, the laws of the game, this extraordinary occurrence should take place. He feels it as portentous--feels it, I see, in a way altogether different from the way in which he felt it on the first great occasion; when it only uplifted and thrilled him, making him conscious of all his force--whereas it now disquiets and alarms him, makes him sound it for its logic and its reason; which he clearly enough interprets to himself. A difficult and intricate thread of exhibition here, but as fine and sharp as I require it if I only keep it so. It comes back to him, it comes over him, that he has freedom, and that his acting in independence, or at least acting with inevitability, has laid this trap for him--that he has deviated, and of necessity, from what would have happened in the other fellow's place and time. What would have happened is that _he wouldn't_ have feared his prospective bride, he being the other fellow; and that thus he, Ralph, has done the other fellow a violence, has wronged the personality of the other fellow _in him_, in himself, Ralph, by depriving him of the indicated, the consonant union with the fine handsome desirable girl whom the 1820 man would perfectly and successfully have been in love with, and whom he would have kept all unalarmedly and unsuspiciously in love with him. Deviation, violation, practical treachery, in fact--that is what Ralph's production and his effect on the two women (the mother sharing so in the "off"-ness of her daughter) amounts to and represents for him, aggravated moreover by the interest taken in, the community of feeling enjoyed with, the younger girl--for whom, putting it in rough summary fashion, the other fellow wouldn't have cared a jot. I cling thus to, I work thus admirably, what I have called Ralph's insuperable and ineffaceable margin of independence, clinging taint of modernity--it being by his fine modern sense that the exquisite, the delicate, the worthy-herself-to-be-modern younger girl has affected him, in utter defiance of any capacity on the other fellow's part to appreciate or conceive any such value in her. Off in his inscrutable fact of being and of action the other fellow then has had too _his_ insuperable margin of antiquity, as opposed to modernity, his independent sensibility, though of a simpler and ruder, a harsher and heavier sort; and it is as a hovering messenger of this that my young man has, so to put it, drawn him down upon him. There it is--I get so my cause of my effect; I get my fact that the other party to the agreed--to experience turns up, all unexpectedly, all "alarmingly" to _my_ party after a fashion to show that violence, that injury, as above formulated, has been done him, and as a protest against its being done further. I mustn't have this fact, I see, as repetitive, mustn't cheapen it with recurrence; must only have it, I seem to grasp, take place three times, each time with its own weight of meaning for that time, and then not take place again. It becomes thus each time a clou d'argent of the very sharpest salience. I see the first time as what one may call a warning. I see the second--taking place after Ralph has told the younger girl of what has happened, and what must take place between them on it _has_ taken place--I see that as a retribution, or in other words as a thumping, a tremendous aggravator of malaise; and I see the third as something which I will state in a minute after having said a word more about the second. The second constitutes--by which I mean the occasion of it does----a reflection of the intimacy, or at least the beautifully good understanding, with the younger girl, determined for Ralph by his opening himself to her after the sensation, just above formulated, proceeding from the rupture and the way the two other women have acted about it. It's only at this moment, and from this moment, that she becomes his _confidante_, all the difference being made by that; and don't I see it as an enormous little fact that whereas he goes on in silence, as it were, with the others (putting the two men out of the question, which is a point to be treated separately,) he finds her in no ignorance, either real or pretended, but welling up, virtually, with readiness to let him see that she knows. She _knows_--and I think he doesn't even quite understand why or how she knows; her possession of what she does know striking him as a matter beyond, in its "quality", any communication of it that the others may have been capable of making her. The passage between them representing all this becomes then the determinant of what I have called the retributive, as distinguished from the merely warning, reappearance of the other party. I just want to tuck in here provisionally, and before breaking off for the day, that I hold tight the "motive", the dramatic value, of the third reappearance; which resides in my heroine's relation to it--that is not, definitely not, in her having it at all herself, that is not at all directly, but in her becoming aware of _his_ having it and, as it were, catching him in the act of the same. Work this out, express this better, or at least entirely, in my next go: I perfectly see it--it only wants clear statement.

I want the business just glanced at, in the four or five foregoing lines, to be as ideally right of course as it can possibly be made; want to squeeze all the effective virtue out of it, in the sense of my generally intended colour and tone, generally intended production of the "new" frisson, as artfully as can be managed. Focussing on it a bit I seem to catch the tip of the tail of the right possibility--though on further thought indeed I am pulled up a little, not being sure it can't be bettered. For I was thinking a moment that she _should_, after all, have herself the direct apprehension, perception or, speaking plainly, vision; have it in the sense that she exhibits herself to R. at a given moment as plunged in stupefaction or confusion by having apparently seen him in double, that is seen him, been sure of him, in a place where, in the conditions gone into or examined and discussed between them, he couldn't possibly have been. In other words she has it to tell him--that to her perception as well, by her experience of it the hour ago or whatever, he rose before her for certain moments in a reality with which everything proves in conflict. That, I say, was what a minute since glimmered upon me--Ralph's having it from _her_ as the form of what I call in this connection my third big determinant. But no, but no: what is immeasurably better than that he should have anything of the sort through herself is that she shall have it all absolutely through him. Pressing harder and more intelligently, I come back to the image, the so obviously finest, of her _catching_ him under the squeeze, under the dire apprehension, of this third occasion--which I seem to see I can make adequate and operative by her recognising him, just that, after the right fashion, as doing his damnedest _not_ to show her, not to betray to her, his intelligence of what he has to infer from, to read into, seeing it in an awful light, something that has just befallen him. It seems to me that I get it and give it, for my best interest, by our having it _all_ in the form in which her taxing him with being in a state, a state that she divines, yet but only half understands, determines his at last more or less abjectly confessing to. He breaks down under the beautiful pity of her divination, the wonder of her so feeling for him that she virtually knows, or knows enough; and the question is here of course, isn't it? whether for full lucidity of interest, full logic of movement, he doesn't let her know all or, in vulgar fictional parlance, reveal his secret. That's what it comes to, what it _has_ to come to, very much indeed it would seem; that's what the situation would seem to mean, would appear to have to give, as who should say, of finest: their being face to face over all the prodigious truth--which I think there ought to be a magnificent scène à faire in illustration of. The beauty, the pathos, the terror of it dwells thus in his throwing himself upon her for help--for help to "get out", literally, help which she can somehow give him. The logic, the exquisite, of this to be kept tight hold of, with one's finger on every successive link of the chain. But voyons un peu the logic; which, expressed in the plainest, the most mathematical terms possible, is that what this "retributive" admonition signifies for him is, he feels, that he is going to be _left_, handed over to the conditions of where and what and above all _when_ he is; never saved, never rescued, never restored again, by the termination of his adventure and his experience, to his native temporal conditions, which he yearns for with an unutterable yearning. He has come to have his actual ones, the benighted, the dreadful ones, in horror--and he just lets her know _how_ horrible everything that surrounds her, everything that she herself is surrounded with and makes part of, have become for him, and under what a weight of despair he sinks if what has just again for the third time happened to him means that his fate is sealed. He breaks down to her, has the one outward, the one communicated despair that I see for him in the course of the affair; his throwing himself upon her for what she can do to avert that doom, his beseeching her, all selfishly, to help him. I say _all selfishly_ for the dramatic, clumsily so to call it, value, working value, of this; connected, identical, as it is with his readiness, in fact his intense hope of being able to, profit by the idea of a liberation for him purchased on her part by some sacrifice--sacrifice, by no means sufficiently, of any hope of _him_, but of the very stuff of herself, and this up to the hilt. The more I look into this, the more I see in it; but with proportionately much therefore to be stated about it with a supreme lucidity. Reduced to its simplest expression the case stands that he has fallen in love with her--done so in absolute rebound from the distress that her sister's, her mother's, breach has brought to an end for him; leaving him _originally_ to throw himself so much on _her_ by reaction, by already acquired and assimilated sense that with her, too blessedly, almost _any_ ease for him, whether but comparatively or absolutely, is possible. Thus had he given way to his having, as who should say, fallen in love with her; and thus does that fact work, to his perception, both toward his prime relief and toward his understanding of what he has to fear. Here I come to something pretty intricate and difficult, yet full of life and force, say frankly of beauty, if I can get it straight; which is what I must proceed to. _Why_ has what passes, what has passed up to then, between this pair, _why_ does it bring on or draw down the third, the "retributive" recurrence? Well, let us see if we don't make out, and thereby but store up still more beauty and intensity. Put it simply for the moment that the Predecessor has been in love with the elder sister _while_, all unknowably (at the time,) the younger has been in love with him. That condition on her part, it appears to me, gives the link I want, the exact one, for what Ralph finds of prepared, as it were, of reciprocal, of ground laid, for his first understandings with her _when once he has begun to feel_ the interfering malaise of the others. I am here, I quite recognise, brought up against the question of why if the Predecessor has been so in love, then and there, in the old time, he should have had this impulse to swing off into conditions so remote from those of the object of this sentiment. I get partly in answer to this the fact that Ralph, shown as so much in love in the first Book, has all the same embraced his opportunity to swing off into where we now have him; but I want something more than this, and I don't get it by simply leaning strongly on the attachment inspired in the man of 1820; inasmuch as the more he has been attached the more explaining will the matter take, the matter flowering into that inordinate phenomenon of the original nocturnal meeting of the two men. If I give full value to the idea that the present Pendrel's pressure, his hovering, penetrating force has had much the most to do with what has taken place, that though the man of 1820 has drawn the man of 1910, exact, (though as to this I must make no modern date explicit of that) back into his own age, while the latter has drawn the former forward into _his_, though I do this, I take care, I soigner the effect that Ralph has begun it, has exerted the original force, has been the determinant for the other and thrust at him his opportunity. This in a general way clears up a little the particular aspect of the case that I am turning over; but don't I still nevertheless want something more than that? I want something that the predecessor may affect Ralph as definitely uttering to him and direfully reproaching him with; and perhaps as I dig into my material and insist on gouging what I want out of it I meet this ground of resentment and reprobation for the predecessor that he feels, or rather that Ralph feels him to feel--for it can all only be _imputation_ on R's part--that he isn't, as it were, playing the game; ceases quite to play it from the moment that he inspires the elder girl, whom one had hit it off so with dans le temps, with the alarm of distress and dislike that has operated for her rupture. I find something in that, I find I think enough in that--find it enough that Ralph recognises himself as under displeasure, under vindictive displeasure for not, as it were, playing the game. Let me make him put it for himself that the other man doesn't play the game either, from the moment that he thus "comes in", reappears, as it were, as with the conscious purpose so to "brouiller" things. Have it clear that Ralph has no theory at all of what his double's situation is off in _his_ sphere; put it that he is by way of having no sort of constructive or inferential or divinatory notion of that at all: which it would make an extraordinary complication to undertake to give him--by which I mean an impossible one, an unspeakable tangle, within the limits, altogether. Yes, yes; the more I think the more I seem to see this conception of Ralph's to be that the other fellow is endangered and incommoded in his sphere by what strikes him as R's practical perfidy and non-accomplishment. What makes this is that the two women, the two other men etc., and the object of his preference above all, are thereby handed over to their intensity of malaise--I give Ralph as seeing and feeling and understanding him as _rendered_ thereby vindictive, as convicting him accordingly of "perfidy", and of decreeing the punishment which shall consist of not coming to his help: as I must show it as having figured in their original entente that each shall come au besoin to the help of the other. Out of this little store of indications, at any rate, I shall be able surely to help myself to whatever in the connection, and in closer quarters, I find my best interest in.