 10. It was at all events the good ladies' disappearance that more markedly cleared the decks. Steered them for that long, slow, sustained action with which I make out that nothing was afterwards to interfere. She had sat there under her stiff old father's portrait, with which her own, on the other side of the chimney, mildly balanced. But these presences acted from that time but with cautious reserves. A brave, finished, clear-eyed image of such properties as the last named in particular, our already mentioned Alexander Robertson, a faint and diminished replica of whose picture, the really fine original, as I remember it, having been long since perverted from our view, I lately renewed acquaintance with, in a pious institution of his founding, where, after more than one push northward and some easy accommodations, he lives on into a world that knows him not, and of some of the high improvements of which he can little enough have dreamed. Of the world he had personally known, there was a feature or two still extant. The legend of his acres and his local concerns, as well as of his solid presence among them, was considerably cherished by us, though for ourselves, personally, the relics of his worth were a lean feast to sit at. They were by some invidious turn of fate all to help to constitute the heritage of our young kinsmen, the orphaned and administered feast to Fami, whose father, Alexander Wykof, son of our great aunt, and one of the two brothers of Cousin Helen, just discernibly flushes for me through the ominous haze that preceded the worst visitation of cholera New York was to know. Alexander, whom, early widowed and a victim of that visitation, I evoke as with something of a premature baldness, of a blackness of short whisker, of an expanse of light waistcoat, and of a harmless pomp of manner, appeared to have quite predominantly come in for the values in question which he promptly transmitted to his small motherless son, and which were dusted so greatly to increase. There are clues I have only lost, not making out in the least today why the sons of Vant Wykof should have been so happily distinguished. Our great uncle of the name isn't even a dim ghost to me. He had passed away beyond recall before I began to take notice, but I hold, rightly I feel, that it was not to his person these advantages were attached. They could have descended to our grandmother but in a minor degree. We should otherwise have been more closely aware of them. It comes to me that so far as we had at all been aware, it had mostly gone off in smoke. I have still in my ears some rueful allusion to lands, apparently in the general country of the beaver kill, which had come to my mother and her sister as their share of their grandfather Robertson's amplitude, among the further apportioned shares of their four brothers, only to be sacrificed later on at some scant appraisement. It is in the nature of lands at a distance and in regions imperfectly reclaimed to be spoken of always as immense, and I at any rate entertained the sense that we should have been great proprietors in the far wilderness if we had only taken more interest. Our interests were peculiarly urban, though not indeed that this had helped us much. Something of the mystery of the vanished acres hung for me about my maternal uncle, John Walsh, the only one who appeared to have been in respect to the dim possessions much on the spot, but I too crudely failed my chance of learning from him what had become of them. Not that they had seen him, poor gentleman, very much further, or that I had any strong sense of opportunity. I catch at but two or three projections of him, and only at one of his standing much at his ease. I see him before the fire in the Fourteenth Street library, sturdy with straight black hair and as if the beaver kill had rather stamped him, but clean shaven in a stock and a black frock coat. I hear him perhaps still more than I see him deliver himself on the then great subject of Jenny Lind, whom he seemed to have emerged from the wilderness to listen to, and as to whom I remember thinking it, strange small critic that I must have begun to be, of a note of the wilderness in him that he spoke of her as Miss Lind, albeit I scarce know and must even less have known then what other form he could have used. The rest of my sense of him is tinged with the ancient pity, that of our so exercised response in those years to the general sad case of uncles, aunts, and cousins obscurely afflicted, the uncles in particular, and untimely gathered. Up to me the memory of a call, one dusky wintry Sunday afternoon in Clinton Place, at the house of my uncle Robertson Walsh, then the head of my mother's family, where the hapless younger brother lay dying, whom I was taken to the top of the house to see, and of the sinister twilight grimness of whose lot, stretched there amid odours of tobacco and of drugs, or of some special strong drug, in one of the chambers of what I remember as a remote and unfriended arching attic, probably in fact the best place of prescribed quiet, I was to carry away a fast impression. All the uncles of whichever kindred were to come to seem sooner or later to be dying more or less before our eyes of melancholy matters, and yet their general story so far as one could read it appeared the story of life. I conceived at any rate that John Walsh, celibate, lonely, and good-naturedly black browed, had been sacrificed to the far off Robertson Acres, which on their side had been sacrificed to I never knew what. The point of my divigation, however, is that the barma side banquet of another tract of the same provenance was always spread for us opposite the other house, from which point it stretched on the north side of the street to 6th Avenue, though here we were soon to see it diminished at the corner by a structure afterwards known to us as our prosious New York School. This edifice devoted today to other uses, but of the same ample insignificance, still left for exploitation at that time an uncovered town territory, the transmitted tale of which was that our great-grandfather, living down near the battery, had had his country villa, or more strictly speaking his farm there, with free expenses round about. Shrunken though the tract a part of it remained, in particular a space that I remember, though with last faintness, to have seen appeal to the public as a tea garden or open-air cafe, a haunt of dance and song and other forms of rather ineffective gaiety. The subsequent conversion of the site into the premises of the French theatre I was to be able to note more distinctly, resorting there in the winter of 1874-5, though not without some wand detachment to a series of more or less exotic performances, and admiring in a special the high and hard virtuosity of Madame Restory, the unfailing instinct for the wrong emphasis of the then acclaimed Mrs. Ruseby, I still hear the assured, great woman, great woman, of a knowing friend, Matt, as I went out, and the stout fidelity to a losing game, as well as to a truth not quite measurable among us, of the late, the but legubriously comic, the blighted John Tool. These are glimmering ghosts, though that drama of the scene hard by it at which I have glanced gives me back its agents with a finer intensity. For the long action set in, as I have hinted, with the death of Aunt Wyckoff, and if rather taking its time at first to develop, maintained to the end, which was in its full finality but a few years since, the finest consistency and unity. With cousin Helen in rich prominence for the heroine, with the pale adventurous Albert for the hero or young protagonist, little indeed in the sense of a small New York arrestees ridden by furies, with a pair of confidants in the form first of the heroine's highly respectable but quite negligible husband, and second of her close friend and quasi sister, our own admirable aunt, with Alexander's younger brother, above all, the odd, the eccentric, the attaching Henry for the steak as it were of the game. So for the spectator did the figures distribute themselves. The three principal on the large stage, it became a field of such spreading interests, well in front, and the accessory pair, all sympathy and zeal, prompt comment and rich resonance hovering in the background, responsive to any call, and on the spot at a sign. The most particularly true indeed of our anything but detached aunt, much less a passive recipient, than a vessel constantly brimming, and destined herself to become the outstanding agent almost the dea ex machina in the last act of the story. Her colleague of the earlier periods, though to that title she would scarce have granted his right, I designate rather as our earnest cousin's husband, than as our kinsman, even by courtesy, since he was mister to his own wife, for whom the dread of liberties taken in general included even those that might have been allowed to herself. He had not in the least, like the others in his case, married into the cousinship with us, and this apparently rather by his defect than by ours. His Christian name, if certainly not for use, was scarce even for ornament, which consorted with the felt limits round about him of aids to mention, and with the fact that no man could on his journey through life well have been less eagerly designated or apostrophized. If there are persons as to whom the mister never comes up at all, so there are those as to whom it never subsides, but some of them all keep it by the greatness and others, oddly enough, by the smallness of their importance. The subject of my present reference, as I think of him, nevertheless, by which I mean in spite of his place in the latter group, greatly helps my documentation. He must have been of so excellent and consistent a shade of nullity. To that value, if value it be, there almost always attaches some question of the degree and the position. With adjuncts, with a relation, the zero may figure as a numeral, and the neglected zero is mostly, for that matter, endowed with a consciousness and subject to irritation. For this dim little gentleman, so perfectly a gentleman, no appeal and no redress from the beginning to the end of his career were made or entertained or projected. No question of how to treat him, of how he might see it or feel it, could ever possibly rise. He was blank from whatever view, remaining so under application of whatever acid or exposure to whatever heat. The one identity he could have was to be part of the consensus. Such a case is rare, that of being no case at all, that of not having even the interest of the grievance of not being one. We, as a rule, catch glimpses in the downtrodden of such resentments. They have at least sometimes the importance of feeling the weight of our tread. The phenomenon was here quite other, that of a natural platitude that had never risen to the level of sensibility. When you've been wronged, you can be righted. When you have suffered, you can be soothed. If you have that amount of grasp of the scene, however humble, the drama of your life to some extent enacts itself, with the logical consequence of your being proportionally its hero, and having to be taken for such. Let me not dream of attempting to say for what cousin Helen took her spectral spouse, though I think it the most marked touch in her portrait that she kept us from ever knowing. She was a person about whom you knew everything else, but there she was genially inscrutable, and above all claimed no damages on the score of slights offered him. She knew nothing whatever of these, yet could herself be much wounded or hurt. Which latter word she sounded in the wondrous old New York manner, so irreducible to notation. She covered the whole case with the mantle which was, yet much more probably, that of her real simplicity than of a feigned unconsciousness. I doubt whether she knew that men could be amiable in a different manner from that which she had to serve her for supposing her husband amiable. When the mold and the men cast in it were very different, she failed, or at least she feared, to conclude to amiability. Though some women, as different themselves as such stranger men, might take it for that, directly interrogated she might, such was the innocence of these long extinct manners, have approved of male society in stronger doses or more vivid hues, save where consanguinity or indeed relationship by marriage, to which she greatly deferred, had honestly imposed it. The singular thing for the drama to which I return was that there it was just consanguinity that had made the burden difficult and strange, and of a nature to call on great decisions and patient plans, even though the most ominous possibilities were not involved. I reconstruct and reconstruct of course, but the elements had to my childish vision at least nothing at all portentous. If any light of the lure had played in for me just a little, it was but under much later information. What my childish vision was really most possessed of, I think, was the figure of the spectral spouse, the dim little gentleman, as I have called him, pacing the whole length of the two big parlours in prolonged repetition, much as if they had been the deck of one of those ships anciently haunted by him, as supercargo or whatever, in strange far seas. According to the only legend connected with him, save that of his early presumption in having approached, such as he was, so fine a young woman, and his remarkable luck in having approached her successfully. A luck surprisingly renewed for him, since it was also part of the legend that he had previously married and lost a bride beyond his desserts. END OF CHAPTER X I am strictly speaking at this point on a visit to Albert, who at times sociably condescended to my fewer years. I still appreciate the man of the world ease of it. But my host seems for the minute to have left me, and I am attached but to the rich perspective in which Uncle, for Albert too he was only all namelessly Uncle, comes and goes, out of the comparative high brownness of the back room, commanding brave extensions as I thought then, a covered piazza over which, in season, Isabella grapes excessively clustered and beyond which stretched, further, a yard that was an ample garden compared to ours at home. I keep in view his little rounded back, at the base of which his arms are interlocked behind him, and I know how his bald head, yet with the hair bristling up almost in short horned fashion at the sides, is thrust inquiringly, not to say appealingly, forward. I assist at his emergence, where the fine old mahogany doors of separation are rolled back on what used to seem to me silver wheels, into the brighter yet colder half of the scene, and attend him while he at last looks out a while into 14th street, for news of whatever may be remarkably, objectionably, or mercifully taking place there, and then I await his regular return, preparatory to a renewed advance, far from indifferent as I innocently am to his discoveries or his comments. It is cousin Helen, however, who preferentially takes them up, attaching to them the right importance, which is for the moment the very greatest that could possibly be attached to anything in the world. I, for my part, occupied with those marks of character in our pacing companion, his long, slightly equine countenance, his eyebrows ever elevated as in the curiosity of alarm, and the so limited play from side to side of his extremely per trusive head, as if somehow through tightness of the wash neckcloth that he habitually wore, and that, wound and rewound in their successive stages, made his neck very long, without making it in the least thick, and reached their climax in a proportionately very small knot, tied with the neatest art. I scarce can have known at the time that this was as complete a little old world figure, as any that might have then been noted there, far or near. Yet, if I didn't somehow subtly feel it, why am I now so convinced that I must have had familiarly before me a masterpiece of the great Domier, say, or Henri Monnier, or any other then contemporary projector of Monsieur Prudin, the Timorous Philistine in a World of Dangers, with whom I was later on to make acquaintance? I put myself the question of scant importance though it may seem, but there is a reflection perhaps more timely that may answer to it. I catch myself in the act of seeing poor, anonymous dear, as Cousin Helen can find herself, her life long to calling him, in the light of an image arrested by the French genius, and this in truth opens up vistas. I scarce know what it doesn't suggest, for the fact of sharpness, of intensity of type, which fact in turn leads my imagination almost any dance, making me ask myself quite most of all, whether a person so marked by it, must it really have been a highly finished figure? That degree of finish was surely rare among us. Rare at a time when the charm so much of the Cousinship, and the Uncle Ship, the kinship generally, had to be found in their so engagingly dispensing with any finish at all. They happened to be amiable, to be delightful, but I think I have already put the question, what would have become of us all if they hadn't been? A question the shudder of which could never have been suggested by the presence I am considering. He was too gentle and bland as it happened, and I indeed see it all as a world quite unfavorable to arrogance or insolence, or any hard and high assumption. But the more I think of him, even at the risk of thinking too much, the more I make out in him a tone and a manner that deprecated crude ease. Plenty of this was already in the air, but if he hadn't so spoken of an order in which forms still counted, it might scarce have occurred to one that there had ever been any. It comes over me therefore that he testified, and perhaps quite beautifully, I remember his voice and his speech which were not those of that New York at all. And with the echo, faint as it is, arrives the wonder of where he could possibly have picked such things up. They were, as forms, adjusted and settled things. From what finer civilization therefore had they come down to him? To brood on this, the least little bit is verily, as I have said, to open up vistas. Out of the depths of one of which fairly glimmers the queerest of questions. Mant we accordingly have been, the rest of us all wrong, and the dim little gentleman, the only one among us who was right. May not his truth to type have been a matter that, as mostly typeless ourselves, we neither perceived nor appreciated. So that if, as is conceivable, he felt and measured the situation, and simply chose to be bland and quiet, and keep his sense to himself, he was a hero without the laurel, as well as a martyr without the crown. The light of which possibility is, however, too fierce. I turn it off, I tear myself from the view, noting further but the one fact in his history that, by my glimpse of it, quite escapes ambiguity. The youthful Albert, I have mentioned, was to resist successfully through those years that solicitation of Europe, our own response to which, both as a general and a particular solution, kept breaking out in coral whales. But the other house nonetheless nourished projects so earnest that they could invoke the dignity of comparative silence and patience. The other house didn't aspire to the tongues, but it aspired to the grand tour of which ours was on many grounds incapable. Only after years and when endless things had happened, Albert having long before, in his special, quite taken up his stake and ostensibly dropped out of the game, did the great adventure itself get enacted, with the effect of one of the liveliest illustrations of the irony of fate. What had most of all flashed through the dream of it during years was the legend, at last quite antediluvian, of the dim little gentleman's early Vanderyara, that experience of distant lands and seas which would find an application nonetheless lively for having had long to wait. It had to wait in truth half a century, yet its confidence had apparently not been impaired when New York, on the happy day, began to recede from view. Europe had surprises, nonetheless, and who knows to what extent it may after half a century have had shocks. The coming true of the old dream produced at any rate a snap of the tense chord, and the ancient worthy my imagination has, in the tenderest of intentions, thus played with, disembarked in England only to indulge in the last of his startled stares, only to look about him in vague depression and give it all up. He just landed and died, but the grand tour was nonetheless preceded with. Cousin Helen herself, aided by resources personal, social, and financial that left nothing to desire, triumphantly performed it, though as with a feeling of delicacy about it firmly overcome. But it has taken me quite out of the other house so that I patch up again at a stroke that early scene of her double guardianship at which my small wonder assisted. It even then glimmered on me, I think, that if Albert was also romantically in charge of his aunt, which was a perfectly nondescript relation, so his uncle Henry, her odd brother, was her more or less legal ward, despite his being so very much Albert's senior. In these facts, and in the character of each of the three persons involved, resided the drama, which must more or less have begun, as I have hinted, when simple-minded Henry, at a date I seem to have seized, definitely emerged from rustication. The beaver kill had, but for a certain term, protected or promoted his simplicity, and began on his side to pace the well-worn field between the 14th Street windows and the piazza of the Isabella grapes. I see him there less vividly than his fellow pedestrian, only because he was afterwards to loom so much larger, whereas his companion, even while still present, was weakly to shrink and fade. At this late day only do I devise for that companion a possible history. The simple-minded Henry's annals, on the other hand, grew in interest as soon as they became interesting at all. This happened as soon as one took in the ground, and some of the features of his tutelage. The basis of it all was that, harmless as he appeared, he was not to be trusted. I remember how portentous that truth soon looked, both in the light of his intense amiability and of Sister Helen's intense certitude. He wasn't to be trusted. It was the sole, very definite fact about him, except the fact that he had so kindly come down from the far-off beaver kill to regale us, with the perfect demonstration, dutifully, resignedly, setting himself among us to point the whole moral himself. He appeared from the moment we really took it in to be doing, in the manner, no more than he ought. He exposed himself to our invidious gaze on this ground with the humility, the quiet courtesy, and an instinctive dignity that came back to me as simply heroic. He had himself accepted, under strenuous suggestion, the dreadful view. And I see him today in the light of the grand Danumald, deferred for long years, but fairly dazzling when it came as fairly sublime in his decision not to put anyone in the wrong about him a day sooner than he could possibly help. The whole circle of us would in that event be so dreadfully sold as to our wisdom and justice, he proving only noble and exquisite. It didn't so immensely matter to him as that the establishment of his true character didn't. So he went on as if for all the years, and they really piled themselves up. His passing for a dangerous idiot, or at least for a slave of his passions from the moment he was allowed the werewithal in the least to indulge them, was a less evil for him than seeing us rudely corrected. It was in truth an extraordinary situation, and would have offered a splendid subject, as we used to say, to the painter of character, the novelist or the dramatist, with the hand to treat it. After I had read David Copperfield, an analogy glimmered. It struck me even in the early time. Cousin Henry was more or less another Mr. Dick, just as Cousin Helen was in her relation to him more or less another Miss Trotwood. There were disparities indeed. Mr. Dick was the harmless lunatic on that lady's premises, but she admired him and appealed to him. Lunatics, in her generous view, might be oracles, and there is no evidence, if I correctly remember, that she kept him low. Our Mr. Dick was suffered to indulge his passions, but on ten cents a day, while his fortune, under conscientious, under admirable care, Cousin Helen being no less the wise and keen woman of business than the devoted sister. Rolled up and became large. Likewise, Miss Trotwood's inmate hadn't at all the perplexed, brooding brow, with the troubled fold in it that represented poor Henry's, only form of criticism of adverse fate. They had alike the large, smooth, open countenance of those for whom life has been simplified, and if Mr. Dick had had a fortune, he would have remained all these days as modestly vague about the figure of it, as our relative consented to remain. The latter's interests were agricultural, while his predecessors, as we remember, were mainly historical. Each, at any rate, had in a general way his Miss Trotwood, not to say his sister Helen. The good Henry's Miss Trotwood lived and died without an instant's visitation of doubt as to the due exercise of her authority, as to what would happen if it faltered. Her victim, waiting in the handsomest manner till she had passed away to show us all, all who remained after so long to do him justice, that nothing but what was charming and touching could possibly happen. This was, in part at least, the dazzling deignement I have spoken of. He became, as soon as fortunate dispositions could take effect, the care of our admirable aunt, between whom and his sister, and himself close cousinship, from far back, had practically amounted to the sisterhood. By which time the other house had long been another house altogether, its ancient site relinquished, its contents planted afresh far northward, with new traditions invoked, though with that of its great friendliness to all of us, for our mother's sake, still confirmed. Here, with brief brightness clouded at the very last, the solution emerged. We became aware, not without embarrassment, that poor Henry, at large, and supplied with funds, was exactly as harmless and blameless as poor Henry stinted and captive. As to which, if anything had been wanting through our confusion, or to his own dignity, it would have been his supreme abstinence, his suppression of the least, didn't I tell you? He didn't even pretend to have told us, when he so abundantly might, and nothing could exceed the grace with which he appeared to have noticed nothing. He handled dollars as decently, and just as profusely, as he had handled dimes. The only light shade on the scene, except, of course, for its being so belated, which did make it pathetically dim, was the question of how nearly he at all measured his resources. Not his heart, but his imagination in the long years had been starved, and though he was now all discreetly and wisely encouraged to feel rich, it was rather sadly visible that, thanks to almost half a century of over-discipline, he failed quite to rise to his estate. He did feel rich, just as he felt generous. The misfortune was only in his weak sense for meanings. That, with the whole situation, made delicacy of the first importance. As indeed, what was perhaps most striking in the entire connection, was the part played by delicacy from the first. It had all been a drama of the delicate, the consummately scrupulous and successful administration of his resources for the benefit of his virtue, so that they could be handed over in the event without the leakage of a fraction. What was that but a triumph of delicacy? So delicacy conspired, delicacy surrounded him. The case having been from the early time that, could he only be regarded as sufficiently responsible, could the sources of his bounty be judged fairly open to light pressure? There was question of none but the lightest. That bounty might blessedly flow. This had been Miss Trotwood's own enlightened view, on behalf of one of the oddest and most appealing collections of wistful, wandering, single gentlewoman, that a single calculating benevolence perhaps ever found arrayed before it. Ornaments, these all, of the second and third cousinship and interested spectators of the most inexpressible facts. I should have liked completely to express them in spite of the difficulty, if not indeed just by reason of that. The difficulty of their consisting so much more of character than of incident. Heaven save the artless opposition. Though this last element figured bravely enough too, thanks to some of the forms taken by our young Albert's wild willfulness. He was so weak after the most approved fashion of distressing young men of means, that his successive exhibitions of it had a fine, high positive effect such as would have served beautifully act after act for the descent of the curtain. The issue however, differing in this from the common theatrical trick, depended less on who should die than on who should live. The younger of Cousin Helen's pair of wards, putting them even only as vessels of her attempted earnestness, had violently broken away. But a remedy to this grief, for reasons too many to tell, dwelt in the possible duration, could it only not be arrested of two other lives, one of these her own, the second, the guileless Henry's. The single gentlewoman, to a remarkable number whom she regarded and treated as nieces, though they were only daughters of cousins, were such objects of her tender solicitude, that she and Henry and Albert being alike, childless, the delightful thing to think of was, on certain contingencies, the nieces' prospective wealth. There were contingencies, of course, and they exactly produced the pity and terror. Her estate would go at her death to her nearest of kin, represented by her brother and nephew. It would be only of her savings, fortunately with her kind eye on the gentlewoman, zealous and long-continued, that she might dispose by will, and it was but a troubled comfort that, should he be living at the time of her death, the susceptible Henry would profit no less than the wanton Albert. Henry was at any cost to be kept in life that he might profit. The woeful question, the question of delicacy for a woman devoutly conscientious, was how could anyone else, above all, could fifteen other persons be made to profit by his profiting? She had been as earnest a steward of her brother's fortune, as if directness of pressure on him, in a sense favorable to her interests, that is to her sympathies which were her only interests, had been a matter of course with her, whereas in fact she would have held it a crime given his simplicity, to attempt in the least to guide his hand. If he didn't outlive his nephew, and he was older though, as it would appear so much more virtuous, his inherited property, she being dead, would accrue to that unedifying person. There was the pity, and as for the question of the disposition of Henry's savings, without the initiative of Henry's intelligence, in that, alas, was the terror. Henry's savings, there had been no terror for her naturally, and beautifully husbandning his resources for him, dangled naturally with no small vividness before the wistful gentlewoman, to whom, if he had but had the initiative, he might have made the most princely presence. Such was the oddity, not to say the rather tragic drollery of the situation, that Henry's idea of a present was ten cents worth of popcorn, or some similar homely trifle, and that when one had created for him a world of these proportions, there was no honest way of inspiring him to write checks for hundreds. All Congress though these would be with the generosity of his nature as shown by the exuberance of his popcorn. The ideal solution would be his flashing to intelligence just long enough to apprehend the case, and, of his own magnanimous movement, sign away everything. But that was a fairytale stroke, and the fairies here somehow stood off. Thus, between the wealth of her earnestness and the poverty of her courage, her dread, that is, of exposing herself to a legal process for undue influence, our good lady was not at peace, or, to be exact, was only at peace as came to her by the free bestowal of her own accumulations during her lifetime and after her death. She pre-deceased her brother, and had the pang of feeling that if half her residuum would be deplorably diverted, the other half would be, by the same stroke, imperfectly applied. The artless Henry remained at once so well provided and so dimly inspired. Here was suspense indeed for a last curtain but one, and my fancy glows all expertly for the disclosure of the final scene, then which nothing could well have been happier on all the premises, save for a single flaw. The installation in 44th street of our admirable aunt, often through the later years domiciled there, but now settled the community of life with the touching charge and representing near him his extinguished, their extinguished sister. The two few years that followed were the good man's Indian summer and a very wonderful time. So charmingly it shone forth for all concerned that he was a person fitted to adorn, as the phrase is, almost any position. Our admirable aunt, not less devoted and less disinterested than his former protectress, had yet much more imagination. She had enough in a word for perfect confidence, and under confidence what remained of poor Henry's life bloomed like a garden freshly watered. Sad, alas, the fact that so scant a patch was now left. It sufficed, however, and he rose just in time to every conception. It was, as I have noted, as if he had all the while known, as if he had really been a conscious victim to the superstition of his blackness. His final companion recognized as it were his powers, and it may be imagined whether, when he absolutely himself proposed to benefit the gentle woman, she passed him or not the blessed pen. He had taken a year or two to publish by his behavior the perfection of his civility, and so, on that safe ground, made use of the pen. His competence was afterwards attacked, and it emerged triumphant exactly as his perfect charity and humility and amenity, and his long inward loneliness of half a century did. He had bowed his head and sometimes softly scratched it during that immense period. He had occasionally, after roaming downstairs with the troubled fold in his brow, and the difficult, the smothered statement on his lips. His vocabulary was scant and stiff. The vocabulary of pleading explanation often found too complicated by the witty. Retired once more to his room, sometimes indeed for hours, to think it all over again, but had never failed of sobriety or propriety or punctuality or regularity. Never failed of one of the virtues, his imputed indifference to which had been the ground of his discipline. It was very extraordinary, and of all the stories I know, as I think the most beautiful. So far at least as he was concerned. The flaw I have mentioned, the one break in the final harmony, was the death of our admirable aunt so soon, shortly before his own, and while taken with illness at the same time, he lay there deprived of her attention. He had that of the gentle woman, however, two or three of the wisest and tenderest, being deputed by the others. And if his original estate reverted at law, they presently nonetheless had occasion to bless his name. End of Chapter 11. Chapter 12 of A Small Boy and Others This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by M.B. A Small Boy and Others by Henry James. Chapter 12 I turn round again to where I last left myself gaping at the old rickety billboard in Fifth Avenue, and am almost as sharply aware as ever of the main source of its spell, the fact that it most often blazed with the rich repeal of Mr. Barnum, whose lecture room, attached to the Great American Museum, overflowed into posters of all the theatrical bravery disavowed by its title. It was my rueful theory of those days, though tasteful I may call it, too, as well as rueful, that on all the holidays on which we weren't dragged to the dentists, we attended as a matter of course at Barnum's, that is, when we were so happy as to be able to, which, to my own particular consciousness, wasn't every time the case. The case was too often to my melancholy view that W.J., quite regularly, on the non-dental Saturdays, repaired to this seat of joy with the easy Albert, he at home there and master of the scene to a degree at which, somehow, neither of us could at the best arrive. He quite molded truly in those years of plasticity, as to the aesthetic bent, and the determination of curiosity I seem to make out, by the General Barnum Association and Revelation. It was not, I hasten to add, that I, too, didn't, to the extent of my minor chance, drink at the spring, for how else should I have come by the whole undimmed sense of the connection? The weary waiting in the dusty halls of Humbug amid bottled mermaids, bearded ladies, and chilled dioramas, for the lecture room, the true centre of the seat of joy to open. Vivid, in a special to me, is my almost sick wondering of whether I might not be wrapped away before it did open. The impression appears to have been mixed, the drinking deep and the holding out, holding out in particular against failure of food and of stage fairs, provision for transport to and fro, being questions equally intense. The appeal of the lecture room, in its essence a heavy extra, so exhausted our resources, that even the sustaining doughnut of the refreshment counter would mock our desire and the long homeward crawl, the length of Broadway and further, seem to defy repetition. Those desperate days, nonetheless, affect me now as having flashed with the very complexion of romance. Their aches and inanitions were part of the adventure. The homeward straggle, interminable as it appeared, flowered at moments into rapt contemplations. That, for instance, of the painted portrait, large as life, of the celebrity of the hour, then dancing at the Broadway theatre, Lola Montez, Countess of Landsfeld, of a dazzling and unreal beauty, and in a riding habit lavishly open at the throat. It was thus quite in order that I should pour longest, there at my fondest corner, over the Barnum announcements. My present inability to be superficial about which has given, in fact, the measure of my contemporary care. These announcements must have been, in their way, marvels of attractive composition, the placard bristling from top to toe with its analytic synopsis of scenery and events, the synoptical view cast its net of fine meshes and the very words savoured of incantation. It is odd, at the same time, that when I question memory as to the living hours themselves, those of the stuffed and dim little hall of the audience, smelling of peppermint and orange peel, where the curtain rose on our gasping but rewarded patience. Two performances only stand out for me, though these in the highest relief. Love, or the Countess and the Surf, by J. Sheridan Knowles, I see that still as the blazonry of one of them, just as I see Ms. Emily Mustayer, large red in face, coiffed in his tangle of small fine damp looking short curls, and clad in a light blue garment edged with swans down, shout at the top of her lungs that a perverse of gold would be the fair gerdon of the minion who should start on the spot to do her bidding at some desperate crisis that I forget. I forget Uan the Surf, whom I yet recall immensely admiring for his nobleness. I forget everyone but Ms. Mustayer, who gave form to my conception of the tragic actress at her highest. She had a hooked nose, a great play of nostril, a vast protuberance of bosom, and always the crop of close moist ringlets. I say always, for I was to see her often again, during a much later phase, the midmost years of that Boston Museum, which aimed at so vastly higher a distinction than the exploded lecture room had really done. Though in an age that snickered even abnormally low, it still lacked the courage to call itself a theatre. She must have been in comedy, which I believe she also usefully and fearlessly practiced, rather unimaginable. But there was no one like her in the Boston time for cursing queens and eagle-beaked mothers. The Shakespeare of the booths and other such would have been unproducible without her. She had a rusty, rasping, heaving and tossing authority, of which the bitterness is still in my ears. I am revisited by an outer glimpse of her in that after-age when she had come comparatively speaking into her own. The sight of her accidentally incurred one tremendously hot summer night, as she slowly moved from her lodgings or wherever in the High Baudouin Street region down to the not distant theatre from which even the temperature had given her no reprieve. And well remember how, the queer light of my young impression playing up again in her path, she struck me as the very image of mere, sore, histrionic habit and use. A worn and weary, a battered even though almost sordidly smoothed, thing of the theatre. Very much as an old, infinitely handled and greasy violin cello of the orchestra might have been, it was but an effect doubtless of the heat that she scarcely seemed clad at all. Slippard, shuffling, and though somehow hatted and vaguely veiled or streamered, wrapped in a gauzy sketch of a dressing gown, she pointed to my extravagant attention the moral of thankless personal service, of the reverse of the picture, of the cost of amusing the public in a case of amusing it as who should say every hour. And I had thrilled before her as the Countess in love such contrasted combinations. But she carried her head very high, as with the habit of crowns and trains and tirades, had in fact much the air of some deposed and reduced sovereign living on a scant allowance. So that, all invisibly and compassionately, I took off my hat to her, to which I must add the other of my two Barnamite scenic memories, my having anciently admired her as the Eliza of Uncle Tom's cabin, her swelling bust encased in a neat cotton gown, and her flight across the ice blocks of the Ohio, if I rightly remember the perilous stream, intrepidly and gracefully performed. We lived at that time, with great intensity, in Mrs. Stowe's novel, which, recalling my prompt and charmed acquaintance with it, I should perhaps substitute for the initials, earlier mentioned here, as my first experiment in grown-up fiction. There was, however, I think, for that triumphant work no classified condition. It was for no sort of reader, as distinct from any other sort, save indeed for northern as differing from southern. It knew the large felicity of gathering in alike, the small and the simple, and the big and the wise, and had, above all, the extraordinary fortune of finding itself, for an immense number of people, much less a book than a state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness, in which they didn't sit and read and appraise and pass the time, but walked and talked and laughed and cried, and, in a manner of which Mrs. Stowe was the irresistible cause, generally conducted themselves. Appreciation and judgment, the whole impression, were thus an effect for which there had been no process, any process so related, having in other cases had to be at some point or other critical. Nothing in the guise of a written book, therefore, a book printed, published, sold, bought and noticed, probably ever reached its mark, the mark of exciting interest, without having at least groped for that goal as a book, or by the exposure of some literary side. Letters, here, languished unconscious, and Uncle Tom, instead of making even one of the cheap shortcuts through the medium in which books breathe, even as fishes in the water, went gaily round about it altogether, as if a fish, a wonderful leaping fish, had simply flown through the air. This feat accomplished, the surprising creature could naturally fly anywhere, and one of the first things it did was thus to flutter down on every stage, literally without exception in America and Europe. If the amount of life represented in such a work is measurable by the ease with which representation is taken up, and carried further, carried even violently furthest, the fate of Mrs. Stowe's picture was conclusive. It simply sat down wherever it lighted, and made itself, so to speak, at home. Vither multitudes flocked afresh, and there, in each case, it rose to its height again, and went with all its vivacity and good faith, through all its motions. These latter were to leave me, however, with a fonder vision still than that of the comparatively Jejeune lecture-room version. For the first exhibition of them to spring to the front was the fine free rendering achieved at a playhouse, till then ignored by fashion and culture. The national theatre, deep down on the east side, whence echoes had come faintest two ears polite, but where a sincerity vivid, though rude, was now supposed to reward the curious. Our numerous attendance there under this spell was my first experience of the theatre party, as we have enjoyed it in our time. Each emotion and impression of which is as fresh to me as the most recent of the same family. Precious through all, indeed, perhaps is the sense, strange only to later sophistication, of my small encouraged state as a free playgoer. A state doubly wondrous, when I thus evoke the full contingent from Union Square, where, for that matter, I think, the wild evening must have been planned. I am lost again in all the good nature from which small boys on wild evenings could dangle so unchidden, since the state of unchiddenness is what comes back to me well nigh clearest. How, without that complacency of conscience, could every felt impression so live again? It is true that for my present sense of the matter, snubs and raps would still tingle, would count double. Just wherefore it is exactly, however, that I mirror myself in these depths of propriety. The social scheme, as we knew it, was in its careless charity worthy of the Golden Age. Though I can't sufficiently repeat that we knew it both at its easiest and its safest, the fruits dropped right upon the board to which we flocked, together, the least of us and the greatest, with differences of appetite and of reach doubtless, but not with differences of place and of proportionate share. My appetite and my reach in respect to the more full-bodied Uncle Tom might have brooked certainly any comparison. I must have partaken thoroughly of the feast to have left the various aftertastes so separate and so strong. It was a great thing to have a canon to judge by. It helped conscious criticism, which was to fit on wings, for use ever after, to the shoulders of appreciation. In the light of that advantage I could be sure my second Eliza was less dramatic than my first, and that my first Cassie, that of the great and blood-curdling Mrs. Bellamy of the lecture room, touched depths which made the Lady at the National prosaic and placid. I could already be down on a placid Cassie. Just as, on the other hand, the rocking of the ice-flows of the Ohio, with the desperate Eliza, infant in arms, balancing for a leap from one to the other, had here less of the audible creak of carpentry, emulated a little more to my perception the real water of Mr. Cromwell's pump. They can't, even at that age, have emulated it much, and one almost envies, quite making up one's mind not to denounce, the simple faith of an age beguiled by arts so rude. However, the point exactly was that we attended this spectacle just in order not to be beguiled, just in order to enjoy with ironic detachment, and at the very most, to be amused ourselves at our sensibility should it prove to have been trapped and caught. To have become thus aware of our collective attitude constituted for one small spectator at least a great initiation. He got his first glimpse of that possibility of a free play of mind over a subject which was to throw him with force at a later stage of culture, when subjects had considerably multiplied into the critical arms of Matthew Arnold. So he is himself at least interested in seeing the matter, as a progress in which the first step was taken before that crude scenic appeal, by his wondering among his companions, where the absurd, the absurd for them, ended, and the fun, the real fun, which was the gravity, the tragedy, the drullery, the beauty, the thing itself, briefly, might be legitimately and tastefully held to begin. Uncanny, though the remark perhaps, I am not sure I wasn't thus more interested in the pulse of our party, under my tiny recording thumb, then in the beat of the drama, and the shock of its opposed forces. Vivid and touching, as the contrast was then found, for instance, between the tragicomical Topsy, the slave girl clad in a pinafore of sackcloth and destined to become, for Anglo-Saxon millions, the type of the absolute in the artless, and her little mistress, the blonde Eva, a figure rather in the Kenwigs tradition of pantalettes and pigtails, whom I recall as perching quite suicidally, with her elbows out and a preliminary shriek, on that bulwark of the Mississippi steamboat, which was to facilitate her all but fatal emergent in the flood. Why should I have duly noted that no little game on her part could well less have resembled or simulated an accident, and yet have been no less moved by her reappearance, rescued from the river but perfectly dry, in the arms of faithful Tom, who had plunged in to save her, without either so much as wetting his shoes, than if I had been engaged with her in a reckless romp. I could count the white stitches on the loose patchwork, and yet could take it for a story rich and harmonious. I could know we had all intellectually condescended, and that we had yet had the thrill of an aesthetic adventure, and this was a brave beginning for a consciousness that was to be nothing if not mixed, and a curiosity that was to be nothing if not restless. The principle of this prolonged arrest, which I insist on prolonging a little further, is doubtless in my instinct to grope for our earliest aesthetic seeds. Careless at once and generous the hands by which they were sown, but practically appointed nonetheless to cause that peculiarly flurried hair to run. Flurried because overground so little native to it, when so many others held back. Is it that air of romance that guilds for me then the Barnum background? Taking it as a symbol? That makes me to resist to this effect of a passionate adverse loyalty, any impulse to translate into harsh terms, any old sordidities and poverties. The great American Museum, the downtown scenery and aspects at large, and even the uptown improvements on them, as then flourishing? Why, they must have been for the most part of the last meanness. The Barnum picture above all ignoble and awful, its blatant face or frame stuck about with innumerable flags that waved, poor, vulgar sized ensigns, over spurious relics and catchpenny monsters in effigy, to say nothing of the promise within of the still more monstrous and abnormal living, from the total impression of which things we plucked somehow, the flower of the ideal. It grew, I must injustice proceed, much more sweetly and naturally at nibblos, which represented in our scheme the ideal evening, while Barnum figured the ideal day, so that I ask myself, with that sense of our resorting there under the rich cover of night, which was the supreme charm, how it comes that this larger memory hasn't swallowed up all the others. For here, absolutely, was the flower at its finest and grown as nowhere else, grown in the great garden of the Ravel family, and offered again and again to our deep inhalation. I see the Ravels, French acrobats, dancers and pantomimists, as representing for our culture pure grace and charm and civility, so that one doubts whether any candid community was ever so much in debt to a race of entertainers or had so happy and prolonged, so personal and grateful a relation with them. They must have been, with their offshoots of Martinetes and others, of three or four generations, besides being of a rich theatrical stock generally, and we had our particular friends and favorites among them. We seemed to follow them through every phase of their career, to assist at their tottering steps along the tightrope as very small children, kept in equilibrium by very big balancing poles, caretakers here walking under in case of falls, to greet them as Madame Excel, of robust maturity and in a Spanish costume, bounding on the same tense cord more heavily, but more assuredly, and finally to know the climax of the art with them in Raoul or the Night Owl and Jaco or the Brazilian Ape, and all this in the course of our own brief infancy. My impression of them bristles so with memories that we seem to have rallied to their different productions with much the same regularity with which we formed fresh educational connections, and there was so much our property and our pride that they supported us handsomely through all fluttered entertainment of the occasional Albany cousins. I remember how when one of these visitors wound up in honor of New York to the very fever of perception, broke out one evening while we waited for the curtain to rise. Oh, don't you hear the cries? They're beating them, I'm sure they are. Can't it be stopped? We resented the charge as a slur on our very honor. For what our romantic relative had heatedly imagined to reach us, in a hushed-up manner from behind, was the sounds attendant on the application of blows to some acrobatic infant who had funked his little job. Impossible such horrors in the world of pure poetry opened out to us at Nibblos, a temple of illusion of tragedy and comedy and pathos, that, though it's aboard a stony brown metropolitan hotel, on the wrong side must have been bleak and vulgar, flung its glamour forth into Broadway. What more pathetic the instance, so that we publicly wept than the fate of wondrous Martinetti Giacco, who after befriending a hapless French family wrecked on the coast of Brazil, and bringing back to life a small boy rescued from the waves. I see even now, with every detail this inanimate victim supine on the strand, met his death by some cruel bullet of which I have forgotten the determinant cause, only remembering the final agony as something we could scare his bear, and a strain of our sensibility to which our parents repeatedly questioned the wisdom of exposing us. These performers and these things were in all probability but of a middling skill and splendour. It was the pretropese age, and we were caught by mild marvels, even if a friendly good faith in them, something sweet and sympathetic, was after all a value, whether of their own humanity, their own special quality, or only of our innocence, never to be renewed. But I like this taper to the initiators, so to call them, whom I remembered when we had left them behind, as if they had given us a silver key to carry off, and so to refit after long years, to sweet names never thought of from then till now. Signor Leon Giavelli, in whom the French and the Italian charm appear to have met, who was he, and what did he brilliantly do, and why of a sudden do I thus recall and admire him? I am afraid he but danced the tightrope, the most domestic of our friends' resources, as it brought them out, by the far stretch of the rope into the bosom of the house and against our very hearts, where they leapt and bounded and wavered and recovered closely face to face with us. But I dare say he bounded, brave Signor Leon, to the greatest height of all. Let this vague agility, in any case, connect him with that revelation of the ballet, the sentimental pastoral of other years, which in the Four Lovers, for example, a pantomimic lesson as in words of one syllable, but all quick and gay and droll would have affected us as classic, I am sure, had we then had at our disposal that term of appreciation. When we read in English storybooks about the pantomimes in London, which somehow cropped up in them so often, those were the only things that didn't make us yearn. So much we felt we were masters of the type, and so almost sufficiently was that a stopgap for London constantly deferred. We hadn't the transformation scene, it was true, though what this really seemed to come to was clown and harlequin taking liberties with policemen. These last evidently a sharp note in a picturesqueness that we lacked, our own slouchy officers saying nothing to us of that sort. But we hadn't Nibblow's harlequin and Columbine, albeit of less pure a tradition. And we knew moreover all about clowns, for we went to circuses too, and so repeatedly that when I add them to our list of recreations, the good old orthodox circuses under tents set up in vacant lots, with which New York appears at that time to have wristled, time and place would seem to have shrunken for most other pursuits, and not least for that of serious learning. And the case is aggravated, as I remember Francones, which we more or less haunted and which, aiming at the grander style and the monumental effect, blazed with fresh paint, and rang with Roman chariot races up there among the deserts of 29th Street, whatever. Considerably south perhaps, but only a little east of the vaster desolations that gave scope to the Crystal Palace, second of its name since, following, not Pasibus Equus, alas, the London structure of 1851. This enterprise, forestalled by a year or two, the Paris Palais de Landucherie of 1855. Such as it was, I feel again its majesty on those occasions on which I dragged, if I must hear once more speak for myself only. After Albany cousins through its courts of edification, I remember being very tired and cold and hungry there, in a little light drab and very glossy or shiny, talma, breasted with rather troublesome buttonhole embroideries, though concomitantly conscious that I was somehow in Europe, since everything about me had been brought over, which ought to have been consoling, and seems in fact to have been so in some degree, in as much as both my own pain and the sense of the cousinly, the Albany, headaches, quite fade in that recovered presence of big European art embodied in Thorwaldzine's enormous Christ and the Disciples, a shining marble company ranged in a semi-circle of dark maroon walls. If this was Europe, then Europe was beautiful indeed, and we rose to it on the wings of wonder. Never were we afterwards to see great showy sculpture in whatever profuse exhibition, or of whatever period or school, without some renewal of that charmed Thorwaldzine hour, some taste again of the almost sugary or confectionary sweetness with which the great white images had affected us under their suppertable gaslight. The crystal palace was vast and various and dense, which was what Europe was going to be. It was a deep down jungle of impressions that were somehow challenges, even as we might, helplessly defied, find foreign words and practices, over which, formidably, towered kisses mounted Amazon, attacked by a leopard or whatever, a work judged at that day sublime and the glory of the place, so that I felt the journey back in the autumn dusk and the Sixth Avenue cars, established just in time, a relapse into soothing flatness, a return to the 14th Street horizon from a far journey and a hundred looming questions that would still, tremendous thought, come up for all the personal answers of which one cultivated the seed. CHAPTER XIII Let me hurry, however, to catch again that thread I left dangling from my glance at our small, vague spasms of school. My personal sense of them being as vague and small, I mean, in contrast with the fuller and stronger cup meted out all round to the Albany cousins, much more privileged, I felt, in every stroke of fortune, or at least more interesting, though it must be wicked to call them more happy, through those numberless bereavements that had so enriched their existence. I mentioned above in particular the enviable consciousness of our little red-headed kinsman Gus Barker, who, as by a sharp provision, snatched what gaiety he might from a life to be cut short in a cavalry dash by one of the Confederate bullets of 1863. He blew out with us on New York Sundays, as I have said, sharp puffs of the atmosphere of the institution charlie, strong to us, that is, the atmosphere of whose institutions was weak. But it was above all during a gregarious visit paid him in a livelier field still that I knew myself merely mothered and brothered. It had been his fate to be but scantily the latter and never at all the former. Our Aunt Janet had not survived his birth, but on this day of our collective pilgrimage to Sing Sing, where he was at military school, and clad in a fashion that represented to me the very panoply of war, he shone with a rare radiance of privation. Ingenuous and responsive of a social disposition, a candor of gaiety that matched his physical activity, the most beautifully made athletic little person, and in the highest degree appealing and engaging. He not only did us the honors of his dazzling academy, dazzling at least to me, but had all the air of showing us over the great state prison which even then flourished near at hand and to which he accompanied us. A party of a composition that comes back to me as wonderful, the New York and Albany cousinships appearing to have converged and met for that happy occasion, with the generations and sexes melting together and moving in a loose harmonious band. The party must have been less numerous than by the romantic tradition or confused notation of my youth, and what I mainly remember of it, beyond my sense of our being at once and attendant train to my aged and gentle and in general most unadventurous grandmother, and a chorus of curiosity and amusement round about the vivid gussie, is our collective impression that state prisons were on the whole delightful places, vast, bright and breezy with a gay, free circulation in corridors and on stairs, a pleasant prevalence of hot soup and fresh crusty rolls in tins of which visitors admiringly partook, and for the latter, in chance corners and on sunny landings, much interesting light rush of gentlemen remarkable but for gentlemanly crimes, that is defocations and malversations to striking and impressive amounts. I recall our coming on such a figure at the foot of a staircase and his having been announced to us by our conductor or friend in charge as likely to be there. And what a charm I found in his cool, loose uniform of shining white, as I was afterwards to figure it, as well as in his generally refined and distinguished appearance, and in the fact that he was engaged, while exposed to our attention, in the commendable act of pairing his nails with a smart pen knife and that he didn't allow us to interrupt him. One of my companions, I forget which, had advised me that in these contacts with illustrious misfortune I was to be careful not to stare, and present to me at this moment is the wonder of whether he would think it staring, to note that he quite stared, and also that his hands were fine and fair, and one of them adorned with a signet ring. I was to have later in life a glimpse of two or three dismal penitentiaries, places affecting me as sordid, as dark and dreadful, but if the revelation of Sing Sing had involved the idea of a timely warning to the young mind, my small sensibility at least was not reached by the lesson. I envied the bold-eyed celebrity in the array of a planter at his ease. We might have been his slaves, quite as much as I envied Gussie. In connection with which I may remark here that though in that early time I seemed to have been constantly eager to exchange my lot for that of somebody else on the assumed certainty of gaining by the bargain, I failed to remember feeling jealous of such happier persons, in the measure open to children of spirit. I had rather a positive lack of the passion, and thereby I suppose a lack of spirit, since if jealousy bears as I think on what one sees one's companions able to do, as against one's own falling short, envy, as I knew it at least, simply of what they were, or in other words of a certain sort of richer consciousness supposed, doubtless often too freely supposed, in them. They were so other, that was what I felt, and to be other, other almost anyhow seemed as good as the probable taste of the bright compound wistfully watched in the confectioner's window. Unattainable, impossible of course, but as to which just this impossibility and just that privation kept those active proceedings in which jealousy seeks relief quite out of the question. A platitude of acceptance of the poor, actual, the absence of all vision of how in any degree to change it, combined with the complacency, an acuity of perception of alternatives, though a view of them as only through the confectioner's hard glass, that is what I recover as the nearest approach to an apology in the soil of my nature for the springing seed of emulation. I never dreamed of competing, a business having in it at the best for my temper, if not for my total failure of temper, a displeasing ferocity. If competing was bad, snatching was therefore still worse, and jealousy was a sort of spiritual snatching, with which nonetheless all the while one might have been like so and so who had such horizons. A helpless little love of horizons I certainly cherished and could sometimes even care for my own. These always shrank, however, under almost any suggestion of a further range or finer shade in the purple rim offered to other eyes, and that is what I take for the restlessness of envy. It wasn't that I wished to change with everyone, with anyone at a venture, but that I saw gifts everywhere but as mine, and that I scarce knew whether to call the effect of this miserable or monstrous. It was the effect at least of self-abandonment. I mean two visions. There must have been on that occasion of the Sing Sing Day, which it deeply interests me to piece together some state of connection for some of us with the hospitalities of Rheinbeck, the place of abode of the eldest of the Albany uncles, that is of the three most in our view, for there were two others, the eldest of all, a half uncle only, who formed a class quite by himself, and the very youngest, who, with lively interests all his own, had still less attention for us than either of his three brothers. The house at Rheinbeck and all its accessories, which struck our young senses as innumerable, in especial the great bluff of the Hudson on which it stood, yields me images scarcely dimmed, though as the effect but of snatches of acquaintance. There at all events, the gently groaning, ever so gently and dryly, Albany grandmother, with the Albany cousins, as to whom I hear discriminate. Her two adopted daughters, maturist and mildest of the general tribe, must have paused for a stay, a feature of which would be perhaps her juncture with the New York contingent, somewhere sociably achieved for the befriending of juvenile Gussie. It shimmers here the whole circumstance, with I scarce know what large innocence of charity and ease. The Gussie pretext for reunion, all so thin and yet so important an appeal, the simplicity of the interests and the doings, the assumptions and the concessions, each today so touching, almost so edifying. We were surely all gentle and generous together, floating in such a clean, light social order, sweetly prove against on we, unless it be a bad note, as is conceivable, never, never to feel bored, and thankful for the smallest aesthetic or romantic mercies. My vision loses itself with all in vaster connections. Above all, in my general sense of the then grand newness of the Hudson River Railroad, so far at least as its completion to Albany was concerned, a modern blessing that even the youngest of us were in a position to appraise. The time had been when the steamboat had to content us, and I feel how amply it must have done so, as I recall the thrill of docking in dim early dawns, the whole hour of the Albany waterside, the night of huge, strange paddling and pattering and shrieking and creaking, once ended, and contrast with it all, certain long sessions in the train, at an age and in conditions, when neither train nor traveller had suffered chastening. Sessions of a high animation, as I recast them, but at the same time of moral intensities of lassitude. The elements here indeed are very much confused and mixed. I must have known that discipline of the hectic interest and the extravagant strain in relation to Rhinebeck only, and a tap doubtless on the way to New York for the Albany kinship, but the limit to our smaller patience of any northward land journey. And yet not the young fatigue, I repeat, but the state of easy wonder is what most comes back, the stops too repeated but perversely engaging, the heat and the glare too great, but the river, by the window, making reaches and glimpses, so that the great swing of picture and force of light and color were themselves a constant adventure. The uncles, above all, too preeminent, too recurrent to the creation of a positive soreness of sympathy, of curiosity, and yet constituting by the presence half the enlargement of the time. For the presence of uncles, incoherent Albany uncles, is somehow what most gives these hours their stamp for memory. I scarce know why, nor do I much I confess distinguish occasions, but I see what I see, the long, the rattling car of the old open native form, and the old harsh native exposure. The sense of arrival for ever postponed, qualified, however, also by that of having in my hands a volume of Monsieur Arsène Hussay, philosophicomédienne, remarkably submitted by one of my relatives to my judgment. I see them always the relatives in slow circulation, restless and nervous and casual, their note, not less than strikingly genial, but with vaguenesses, lapses, eclipses, that deprived their society of attackless weight. They cheered us on, in their way. Born optimists, clearly, if not logically determined ones, they were always reassuring and sustaining, though with a bright brevity that must have taken immensities, I think, for granted. They wore their hats slightly toward the nose, they strolled, they hung about, they reported of progress and of the company. They dropped suggestions, new magazines, packets of the edible deprecated for the immature. They figured, in fine, to a small nephew as the principal man of their time, so far as the two younger and more familiar were concerned, the most splendid as to aspect and apparel. It was, nonetheless, to the least shining, though not essentially the least comforting of this social trio, that, if I remember rightly, I owed my introduction to the chronic galant of the eighteenth century. Their tags itself, at any rate, to the impression of flutter as of some faint, some recaptured grimace, for another of his kindly offices, which I associate somehow with the deck of esteemboat. His production for our vague benefit of a literary classic, the confessions, as he called our attention to them, of the celebrated Rousseau. I catch again the echo of the mirth excited to my surprise by this communication, and recover as well my responsive advance toward a work that seemed so to promise. But especially have I, it before me, that some play of light criticism mostly attended, on the part of any circle, this speaker's most ambitious remarks. For all that, and in spite of oddities of appearance and type, it was Augustus James, who spread widest, in default of towering highest, to my wistful view of the larger life, and who covered definite and accessible ground. This ground, the house and precincts of Linwood, at Rhinebeck, harbored our tender years, I surmise, but at few and brief moments. But it hasn't taken many of these to make it the image of an hospitality liberal, as I suppose, great social situations were liberal. Suppositions on this score, having in childhood, or at least they had in mind, as little as possible to do with dry data. Didn't Linwood bristle with great views and other glories, with gardens and grape-eries and black ponies, to say nothing of gardeners and grooms who were notoriously and quotedly droll, to say nothing in particular of our Aunt Elizabeth, who had been Miss Bay of Albany, who was the mother of the fair and free young waltzing women in New York, and who floats back to me through the Rhinebeck picture, aquiline but easy, with an effect of handsome, high-browed, high-nosed looseness, of dressing gowns or streaming shawls, the dowdy, the delightful shawl of the period, and of claws of bright benevolent steel that kept nipping for our charmed advantage. Roses and grapes and peaches and current clusters, together with turns of frays and scraps of remark that fell as by quite a like flash of shears. These are mere scrapings of gold dust, but my mind owes her a vibration that, however tiny, was to insist all these years on marking. On figuring in a whole complex of picture and drama, the clearest note of which was that of worry and woe, a crisis prolonged in deep-roofed outer galleries through hot August evenings and amid the dim flare of open windows to the hum of domesticated insects. All but inexpressible the part played in the young mind naturally even though perversely, even though inordinately arranged as a stage for the procession and exhibition of appearances by matters all of a usual cast, contacts and impressions not arriving at the dignity of shocks, but happening to be to the taste, as one may say, of the little intelligence happening to be such as the fond fancy could assimilate. One's record becomes under memories of this order, and that is the only trouble, a tale of assimilation's small and fine, out of which refuse, directly interesting to the subject victim only, the most branching vegetations may be conceived as having sprung. Such are the absurdities of the poor dear inward life, when translated that is and perhaps ineffectually translated into terms of the outward and trying at all to flourish on the lines of the outward, a reflection that might stay here weren't it that I somehow feel morally affiliated, tied as by knotted fibers to the elements involved. One of these was assuredly that my father had again, characteristically, suffered me to dangle. He having been called to Linwood by the dire trouble of his sister, Mrs. Temple, and brought me with him from Staten Island. I make the matter out as of the summer of 54. We had come up, he and I, to New York, but our doings there, with the journey following, are a blank to me. I recover but my sense on our arrival of being for the first time in the presence of tragedy, which the shining scene round about made more sinister, sharpened even to the point of my feeling abashed and irrelevant, wondering why I had come. My aunt, under her brother's roof, had left her husband wasted with consumption near death at Albany. Gravely ill herself, she had taken the disease from him as it was taken in those days, and was in the event very scantily to survive him. She had been ordered away in her own interest, for which she cared no scrap, and my father, the person in all his family most justly appealed and most anxiously listened to, had been urged to come and support her in a separation that she passionately rejected. Vivid to me still, as floating across verandas into the hot afternoon stillness, is the wail of her protest and her grief. I remember being scared and hushed by it, and stealing away beyond its reach. I remember not less what resources of high control the whole case imputed, for my imagination to my father, and how, creeping off to the edge of the eminence above the Hudson, I somehow felt the great bright harmonies of air and space, becoming one with my rather proud assurance and confidence, that of my own connection, for life, for interest, with such sources of light. The great impression, however, the one that has brought me so far, was another matter. Only that of the close, lamp-tempered, outer evening aforesaid, with my parent again, somewhere deep within, yet not too far to make us hold our breath for it, tenderly opposing his sister's purpose of flight, and the presence at my side of my young cousin Marie, youngest daughter of the house, exactly of my own age, and named in honor of her having been born in Paris, to the influence of which fact, her shining black eyes, her small quickness and brownness, marking sharply her difference from her sister's, so oddly, so almost extravagantly testified. It had come home to me by some voice of the air that she was spoiled, and it made her in the highest degree interesting. We ourselves had been so associated at home without being in the least spoiled. I think we even rather missed it, so that I knew about these subjects of invidious reflection only by literature, mainly, no doubt, that of the nursery, in which they formed, quite by themselves, a romantic class, and the fond fancy always predominant, I prized, even while a little dreading, the chance to see the condition at work. This chance was given to me, it was clear, though I risk in my record of it a final anti-climax. By a remark from my uncle Augustus to his daughter, seated duskily in our group, which included two or three dim-dependent forms, he expressed the strong opinion that Marie should go to bed, expressed it, that is, with the casual cursory humor that was to strike me as the main, expressional resource of outstanding members of the family, and that would perhaps have had, under analysis, the defect of making judgment very personal without quite making authority so. Authority they hadn't of a truth, these also human outstanding ones. They made shift but with light appreciation, sudden suggestion, a peculiar variety of happy remark in the air. It had been remarked, but in the air, I feel sure that Marie should seek her couch, a truth by the dark wing of which I roofily felt myself brushed, and the words seemed therefore to fall with a certain ironic weight. What I have retained of their effect at any rate is the vague fact of some objection raised by my cousin, and some sharper point to his sentence supplied by her father, promptly merged in a visible commotion, a flutter of my young companion across the gallery as for refuge in the maternal arms, a protest and an appeal in short, which drew from my aunt the simple phrase that was from that moment so preposterously to count for me. Come now, my dear, don't make a scene. I insist on your not making a scene. That was all the witchcraft the occasion used, but the note was nonetheless epoch-making. The expression, so vivid, so portentous, was one I had never heard. It had never been addressed to us at home. And who should say now what a world one mightn't at least read into it? It seemed freighted to sail so far. It told me so much about life. Life at these intensities clearly became scenes. But the great thing, the immense illumination, was that we could make them or not as we chose. It was a long time, of course, before I began to distinguish between those within our compass more particularly as spoiled, and those producible on a different basis, and which should involve detachment, involve presence of mind. Just the qualities in which Marie's possible output was apparently deficient. It didn't in the least matter accordingly whether or no a scene was then preceded to. And I have lost all count of what immediately happened. The mark had been made on me, and the door flung open. The passage, gathering up all the elements of the troubled time, had been itself a scene, quite enough of one, and I had become aware with it of a rich a session of possibilities. End of Chapter Thirteenth