Lady Barbarina, The Siege of London, An International Episode, and Other Tales. Генри Джеймс

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СКАЧАТЬ see Lady Barb.  It was vivid to him, as he occasionally paused with fevered eyes on the card in the chimney-glass, that he had come pretty far; and he had come so far because he was under the spell—yes, he was under the spell, or whatever it was, of Lady Barb.  There was no doubt whatever of this; he had a faculty for diagnosis and he knew perfectly what was the matter with him.  He wasted no time in musing on the mystery of his state; in wondering if he mightn’t have escaped such a seizure by a little vigilance at first, or if it would abate should he go away.  He accepted it frankly for the sake of the pleasure it gave him—the girl was the delight of most of his senses—and confined himself to considering how it would square with his general situation to marry her.  The squaring wouldn’t at all necessarily follow from the fact that he was in love; too many other things would come in between.  The most important of these was the change not only of the geographical but of the social standpoint for his wife, and a certain readjustment that it would involve in his own relation to things.  He wasn’t inclined to readjustments, and there was no reason why he should be: his own position was in most respects so advantageous.  But the girl tempted him almost irresistibly, satisfying his imagination both as a lover and as a student of the human organism; she was so blooming, so complete, of a type so rarely encountered in that degree of perfection.  Jackson Lemon was no Anglomaniac, but he took peculiar pleasure in certain physical facts of the English—their complexion, their temperament, their tissue; and Lady Barb had affected him from the first as in flexible virginal form a wonderful compendium of these elements.  There was something simple and robust in her beauty; it had the quietness of an old Greek statue, without the vulgarity of the modern simper or of contemporary prettiness.  Her head was antique, and though her conversation was quite of the present period Jackson told himself that some primitive sincerity of soul couldn’t but match with the cast of her brow, of her bosom, of the back of her neck, and with the high carriage of her head, which was at once so noble and so easy.  He saw her as she might be in the future, the beautiful mother of beautiful children in whom the appearance of “race” should be conspicuous.  He should like his children to have the appearance of race as well as other signs of good stuff, and wasn’t unaware that he must take his precautions accordingly.  A great many people in England had these indications, and it was a pleasure to him to see them, especially as no one had them so unmistakably as the second daughter of the Cantervilles.  It would be a great luxury to call a creature so constituted one’s own; nothing could be more evident than that, because it made no difference that she wasn’t strikingly clever.  Striking cleverness wasn’t one of the signs, nor a mark of the English complexion in general; it was associated with the modern simper, which was a result of modern nerves.  If Jackson had wanted a wife all fiddlestrings of course he could have found her at home; but this tall fair girl, whose character, like her figure, appeared mainly to have been formed by riding across country, was differently put together.  All the same would it suit his book, as they said in London, to marry her and transport her to New York?  He came back to this question; came back to it with a persistency which, had she been admitted to a view of it, would have tried the patience of Lady Beauchemin.  She had been irritated more than once at his appearing to attach himself so exclusively to that horn of the dilemma—as if it could possibly fail to be a good thing for a little American doctor to marry the daughter of an English peer.  It would have been more becoming in her ladyship’s eyes that he should take this for granted a little more and take the consent of her ladyship’s—of their ladyships’—family a little less.  They looked at the matter so differently!  Jackson Lemon was conscious that if he should propose for the young woman who so strongly appealed to him it would be because it suited him, and not because it suited his possible sisters-in-law.  He believed himself to act in all things by his own faculty of choice and volition, a feature of his outfit in which he had the highest confidence.

      It would have seemed, indeed, that just now this part of his inward machine was not working very regularly, since, though he had come home to go to bed, the stroke of half-past twelve saw him jump not into his sheets but into a hansom which the whistle of the porter had summoned to the door of his hotel and in which he rattled off to Portland Place.  Here he found—in a very large house—an assembly of five hundred persons and a band of music concealed in a bower of azaleas.  Lady Canterville had not arrived; he wandered through the rooms and assured himself of that.  He also discovered a very good conservatory, where there were banks and pyramids of azaleas.  He watched the top of the staircase, but it was a long time before he saw what he was looking for, and his impatience grew at last extreme.  The reward, however, when it came, was all he could have desired.  It consisted of a clear smile from Lady Barb, who stood behind her mother while the latter extended vague finger-tips to the hostess.  The entrance of this charming woman and her beautiful daughters—always a noticeable incident—was effected with a certain spread of commotion, and just now it was agreeable to Jackson to feel this produced impression concern him probably more than any one else in the house.  Tall, dazzling, indifferent, looking about her as if she saw very little, Lady Barb was certainly a figure round which a young man’s fancy might revolve.  Very rare, yet very quiet and very simple, she had little manner and little movement; but her detachment was not a vulgar art.  She appeared to efface herself, to wait till, in the natural course, she should be attended to; and in this there was evidently no exaggeration, for she was too proud not to have perfect confidence.  Her sister, quite another affair, with a little surprised smile which seemed to say that in her extreme innocence she was still prepared for anything, having heard, indirectly, such extraordinary things about society, was much more impatient and more expressive, and had always projected across a threshold the pretty radiance of her eyes and teeth before her mother’s name was announced.  Lady Canterville was by many persons more admired and more championed than her daughters; she had kept even more beauty than she had given them, and it was a beauty which had been called intellectual.  She had extraordinary sweetness, without any definite professions; her manner was mild almost to tenderness; there was even in it a degree of thoughtful pity, of human comprehension.  Moreover her features were perfect, and nothing could be more gently gracious than a way she had of speaking, or rather of listening, to people with her head inclined a little to one side.  Jackson liked her without trepidation, and she had certainly been “awfully nice” to him.  He approached Lady Barb as soon as he could do so without an appearance of rushing up; he remarked to her that he hoped very much she wouldn’t dance.  He was a master of the art which flourishes in New York above every other, and had guided her through a dozen waltzes with a skill which, as she felt, left absolutely nothing to be desired.  But dancing was not his business to-night.  She smiled without scorn at the expression of his hope.

      “That’s what mamma has brought us here for,” she said; “she doesn’t like it if we don’t dance.”

      “How does she know whether she likes it or not?  You always have danced.”

      “Oh, once there was a place where I didn’t,” said Lady Barb.

      He told her he would at any rate settle it with her mother, and persuaded her to wander with him into the conservatory, where coloured lights were suspended among the plants and a vault of verdure arched above.  In comparison with the other rooms this retreat was far and strange.  But they were not alone; half a-dozen other couples appeared to have had reasons as good as theirs.  The gloom, none the less, was rosy with the slopes of azalea and suffused with mitigated music, which made it possible to talk without consideration of one’s neighbours.  In spite of this, though it was only in looking back on the scene later that Lady Barb noted the fact, these dispersed couples were talking very softly.  She didn’t look at them; she seemed to take it that virtually she was alone with the young American.  She said something about the flowers, about the fragrance of the air; for all answer to which he asked her, as he stood there before her, a question that might have startled her by its suddenness.

      “How do people who marry in England ever know each other before marriage?  They have no chance.”

      “I’m sure I don’t know,” she returned.  “I never was married.”

      “It’s very different in my country.  There a man may see much of a girl; he may freely СКАЧАТЬ