CHAPTER NINE
NOTHING CAME TO HIM simply now. Nothing he saw and heard in this, his first journey out of England in five years, came as new and fresh experience to be wondered at and treasured. In Paris he met Rosina and Bay Emmet, the daughters of Ellen Temple, Minny’s sister. Both had been born after Minny’s death and had known her merely from the few photographs which had been taken and as a shadowy absence. The girls were not alike. Rosina was prettier and more outspoken; Bay was small and somewhat stocky, more quietly confiding and trusting than her sister. Her ambition as a painter was already clear from her keen observation of the work in the galleries and the life in the street, the latter seeming to both girls to rival the former for its artfulness and beauty.
Sometimes when they spoke he heard Minny Temple ’s voice. He envied them their lack of self-consciousness, their unawareness that their American voices, so filled with enthusiasm, were not as original as they imagined, nor as uncomplicated by history as they supposed.
He was old enough at fifty-six to be able to deplore things with full conviction, and Bay Emmet playfully insisted that he was imitating Dr Sloper from Washington Square on his tour of Europe with his unfortunate and ill-educated daughter. He deplored the girls’ accents and corrected them regularly as they moved from one museum to another. When Rosina, for example, admired the jewels in a Parisian shop window, Henry immediately corrected her.
‘Jew-el, not jool.’
And when she agreed that American girls did not nowadays speak out their vowels distinctly, he replied:
‘Vow-els, not vowls, Rosina.’
Soon, both sisters, obviously enjoying their cousin’s reprimands, began to find new outrages to commit against his fastidious ear. They reminded him now, more than at any other time, of the dead aunt who loved such an encounter and would relish the response a new remark could cause. The girls managed to stand their ground not by arguing with him, but by mocking him gently, dropping any consonant which came their way and using a modern idiom certain to irritate him. When Bay announced one morning that she needed to go upstairs to fix her hair, Henry asked her, ‘To fix it to what, or with what?’
Paris was more splendid than he had ever seen it, but he sensed something behind the splendour of which he disapproved. He was careful not to discuss this with the Emmet girls. He loved how innocently alert they were to colours and vistas and textures; he enjoyed how they pointed out details to him and to each other, and how happily they bathed in the city’s grandeur. A few times, when Bay Emmet grew silent and took no further part in jokes, and seemed to be absorbing the scene in a sort of reverie, and could grow easily irritated at any interruption, he felt the ghost of Constance Fenimore Woolson tugging at the air around them, serene and inward-looking, as sensitive to suggestion and shadow as Minny Temple had been to flourish and light.
His cousins thus brought ancient memories to life. Sometimes, so fascinated were they by their surroundings, they did not notice his darkening memories. He found their indifference to him charming, a relief, and he wondered if some of his old friends, who demanded his attention too much and monitored too closely what he said and did, might be encouraged to follow the example of the Emmet sisters.
He realized, as he travelled south, having left the girls to their European tour, that he could live easily without many of his friends. He would enjoy irregular correspondence, and, indeed, would treasure hearing of their lives and activities. But as he spent a night in Marseilles, knowing that the next day he would be in their grasp, he recognized that he could quite blissfully have passed by the abode of Paul and Minnie Bourget and not have seen his friends at all. The height of fame and wealth had given Bourget a twenty-five-acre estate on the Riviera on a terraced mountainside with a park of dense pine and cedar, complete with magnificent views. It had also given him an inordinate interest in his own opinions which, exacerbated by anti-Semitism, had become unpleasantly rigid and authoritarian.
There was another guest on the estate, a minor French novelist. Henry did everything he could, in the early days of his stay, not to discuss Zola or the Dreyfus case with Paul or Minnie Bourget or their guest, feeling that his own views on the matter would diverge from those of his hosts. His support for Zola and, indeed, for Dreyfus, was sufficiently strong not to wish to hear the Bourgets’ prejudices on the matter. He could sense that the Bourgets’ luxury and exquisite taste and the superior nature of their daily routine were connected with the hardness and hatreds of their illiberal politics. The English, he thought, were softer in their views, more ambiguous in the connections between their personal circumstances and their political convictions.
He knew Bourget, he felt, as though he had made him. He knew his nature and his culture, his race and his type, his vanity and his snobbery, his interest in ideas and his ambition. But these were small matters compared with the overall effect of the man, and the core of selfhood which he so easily revealed. This was richer and more likeable and more complicated than anyone supposed.
In return for all Henry’s attention, he knew, Bourget noticed nothing. His list of Henry’s attributes, were he to make one, would be simple and clear and inaccurate. He did not observe the concealed self, nor, Henry imagined, did the idea interest him. And this, as his stay with the Bourgets came to an end, pleased him. Remaining invisible, becoming skilled in the art of self-effacement, even to someone whom he had known so long, gave him satisfaction. He was ready to listen, always ready to do that, but not prepared to reveal the mind at work, the imagination, or the depth of feeling. At times, he knew, the blankness was much more than a mask. It made its way inwards as well as outwards, so that, having left the Bourgets’ estate, and travelling on towards Venice, the possibility of future meetings with his former hosts had quickly become a subject of indifference to him.
HE HAD NOT forgotten how much he loved Italy, but he feared that he had grown too old and stale to be captured once more by it, or that Italy, under pressure of time and tourism, had lost its golden charm. He sat still in the train carriage during the three-hour delay at Ventimiglia, watching the stuffy, scrambling, complaining crowd, led by a party of affluent Germans. He would have given a great deal to have stood up and walked sturdily over the border, his baggage coming behind him on a wheelbarrow pushed by Burgess Noakes. He felt an immense impatience to leave France behind him and be brushed now by the wings of Italy. The manners in Italy were open and fresh; all the refinement was hidden and taken for granted. When finally he found himself sitting in an armchair close to the window of his hotel in Genoa basking in the Italian air and the revival of Italian memories, he felt relieved and happy.
ONCE HE HAD arrived in Venice and night fell, he knew that neither tourism nor time had harmed the city’s mixture of sadness and splendour. He made his way from the railway station to the Palazzo Barbaro along side-canals by gondola, swerving and twisting through the dimly recognized waterways. These journeys had a gravity attached to them, as though the passenger were being led theatrically to his doom. But then, as the vessel was let float softly and slacken in pace, and gently bumped against a mooring post, the other side of Venice appeared – the raw sumptuousness, the shameless glitter, the spaces so out of scale with actual need.