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

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СКАЧАТЬ there’s no doubt you’re awfully bad,” Mr. Longstraw broke out, with joyous eagerness.  Naturally he couldn’t know that what she had principally in mind was an exchange of opinions that had taken place between her sister and herself just before she came to stay with Mrs. Lemon.  This incident, of which he himself was the occasion, might indeed have been called a discussion, for it had carried them quite into the cold air of the abstract.  Lady Barb had said she didn’t see how Agatha could look at such a creature as that—an odious familiar vulgar being who had not about him the rudiments of a gentleman.  Lady Agatha had replied that Mr. Longstraw was familiar and rough and that he had a twang and thought it amusing to talk to her as “the Princess”; but that he was a gentleman for all that and was tremendous fun whatever one called him—it didn’t seem to matter what one called any one or anything there.  Her sister had returned to this that if he was rough and familiar he couldn’t be a gentleman, inasmuch as that was just what a gentleman meant—a man who was civil and well-bred and well-born.  Lady Agatha had argued that such a point was just where she differed; that a man might perfectly be a gentleman and yet be rough, and even ignorant, so long as he was really nice.  The only thing was that he should be really nice, which was the case with Mr. Longstraw, who, moreover, was quite extraordinarily civil—as civil as a man could be.  And then Lady Agatha herself made the strongest point she had ever made in her life (she had never been so inspired) in saying that Mr. Longstraw was rough perhaps, but not rude—a distinction altogether wasted on her sister, who declared that she hadn’t come to America, of all places, to learn what a gentleman was.  The discussion in short had been a trifle grim.  I know not whether it was the tonic effect on them too, alien organisms as they were, of the fine winter weather, or that of Lady Barb’s being bored and having nothing else to do; but Lord Canterville’s daughters went into the question with the moral earnestness of a pair of approved Bostonians.  It was part of Lady Agatha’s view of her admirer that he after all much resembled other tall people with smiling eyes and tawny moustaches who had ridden a good deal in rough countries and whom she had seen in other places.  If he was more familiar he was also more alert; still, the difference was not in himself, but in the way she saw him—the way she saw everybody in America.  If she should see the others in the same way no doubt they’d be quite the same; and Lady Agatha sighed a little over the possibilities of life; for this peculiar way, especially regarded in connexion with gentlemen, had become very pleasant to her.

      She had betrayed her sister more than she thought, even though Jackson didn’t particularly show it in the tone in which he commented: “Of course she knows she’s going to see your mother in the summer.”  His tone was rather that of irritation at so much harping on the very obvious.

      “Oh it isn’t only mamma,” the girl said.

      “I know she likes a cool house,” Mrs. Lemon contributed.

      “When she goes you had better bid her good-bye,” Lady Agatha went on.

      “Of course I shall bid her good-bye,” said Mrs. Lemon, to whom apparently this remark was addressed.

      “I’ll never bid you good-bye, Princess,” Herman Longstraw interposed.  “You can bet your life on that.”

      “Oh it doesn’t matter about me, for of course I shall come back; but if Barb once gets to England she never will.”

      “Oh my dear child!” Mrs. Lemon wailed, addressing her young visitor, but looking at her son, who on his side looked at the ceiling, at the floor, looked above all very conscious.

      “I hope you don’t mind my saying that, Jackson dear,” Lady Agatha said to him, for she was very fond of her brother-in-law.

      “Ah well then, she shan’t go there,” he threw off in a moment with a small strange dry laugh that attached his mother’s eyes in shy penetration to his face.

      “But you promised mamma, you know,” said the girl with the confidence of her affection.

      Jackson’s countenance expressed to her none even of his very moderate hilarity.  “Your mother, then, must bring her back.”

      “Get some of your navy people to supply an ironclad!” cried Mr. Longstraw.

      “It would be very pleasant if the Marchioness could come over,” said Mrs. Lemon.

      “Oh she’d hate it more than poor Barb,” Lady Agatha quickly replied.  It didn’t at all suit her to find a marchioness inserted into her field of vision.

      “Doesn’t she feel interested from what you’ve told her?” Lady Agatha’s admirer inquired.  But Jackson didn’t heed his sister-in-law’s answer—he was thinking of something else.  He said nothing more, however, about the subject of his thought, and before ten minutes were over took his departure, having meanwhile neglected also to revert to the question of Lady Agatha’s bringing her visit to his mother to a close.  It wasn’t to speak to him of this—for, as we know, she wished to keep the girl and somehow couldn’t bring herself to be afraid of Herman Longstraw—that when her son took leave she went with him to the door of the house, detaining him a little while she stood on the steps, as people had always done in New York in her time, though it was another of the new fashions she didn’t like, the stiffness of not coming out of the parlour.  She placed her hand on his arm to keep him on the “stoop” and looked up and down into the lucid afternoon and the beautiful city—its chocolate-coloured houses so extraordinarily smooth—in which it seemed to her that even the most fastidious people ought to be glad to live.  It was useless to attempt to conceal it: his marriage had made a difference and a worry, had put a barrier that she was yet under the painful obligation of trying to seem not to notice.  It had brought with it a problem much more difficult than his old problem of how to make his mother feel herself still, as she had been in his childhood, the dispenser of his rewards.  The old problem had been easily solved, the new was a great tax.  Mrs. Lemon was sure her daughter-in-law didn’t take her seriously, and that was a part of the barrier.  Even if Barbarina liked her better than any one else this was mostly because she liked every one else so little.  Mrs. Lemon had in her nature no grain of resentment, and it wasn’t to feed a sense of wrong that she permitted herself to criticise her son’s wife.  She couldn’t help feeling that his marriage wasn’t altogether fortunate if his wife didn’t take his mother seriously.  She knew she wasn’t otherwise remarkable than as being his mother; but that position, which was no merit of hers—the merit was all Jackson’s in being her son—affected her as one which, familiar as Lady Barb appeared to have been in England with positions of various kinds, would naturally strike the girl as very high and to be accepted as freely as a fine morning.  If she didn’t think of his mother as an indivisible part of him perhaps she didn’t think of other things either; and Mrs. Lemon vaguely felt that, remarkable as Jackson was, he was made up of parts, and that it would never do that these should be rated lower one by one, since there was no knowing what that might end in.  She feared that things were rather cold for him at home when he had to explain so much to his wife—explain to her, for instance, all the sources of happiness that were to be found in New York.  This struck her as a new kind of problem altogether for a husband.  She had never thought of matrimony without a community of feeling in regard to religion and country; one took those great conditions for granted just as one assumed that one’s food was to be cooked; and if Jackson should have to discuss them with his wife he might, in spite of his great abilities, be carried into regions where he would get entangled and embroiled—from which even possibly he wouldn’t come back at all.  Mrs. Lemon had a horror of losing him in some way, and this fear was in her eyes as she stood by the doorway of her house and, after she had glanced up and down the street, eyed him a moment in silence.  He simply kissed her again and said she would take cold.

      “I’m not afraid of that—I’ve a shawl!”  Mrs. Lemon, who was very small and very fair, with pointed features and an elaborate cap, passed СКАЧАТЬ