{"id":134,"date":"2024-05-29T15:38:53","date_gmt":"2024-05-29T19:38:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/americangothic\/?post_type=chapter&p=134"},"modified":"2025-01-05T15:13:36","modified_gmt":"2025-01-05T20:13:36","slug":"the-jolly-corner-1908","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/americangothic\/chapter\/the-jolly-corner-1908\/","title":{"raw":"The Jolly Corner [1908]","rendered":"The Jolly Corner [1908]"},"content":{"raw":"

I<\/h3>\r\n\"Every<\/span> one asks me what I 'think' of everything,\" said Spencer Brydon; \"and I make answer as I can\u2014begging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn't matter to any of them really,\" he went on, \"for, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my 'thoughts' would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only myself.\" He was talking to Miss Staverton, with whom for a couple of months now he had availed himself of every possible occasion to talk; this disposition and this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in fact presented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in the considerable array of rather unattenuated surprises attending his so strangely belated return to America. Everything was somehow a surprise; and that might be natural when one had so long and so consistently neglected everything, taken pains to give surprises so much margin for play. He had given them more than thirty years\u2014thirty-three, to be exact; and they now seemed to him to have organised their performance quite on the scale of that licence. He had been twenty-three on leaving New York\u2014he was fifty-six to-day: unless indeed he were to reckon as he had sometimes, since his [pb_glossary id=\"1665\"]repatriation[\/pb_glossary], found himself feeling; in which case he would have lived longer <\/span><\/span>than is often allotted to man. It would have taken a century, he repeatedly said to himself, and said also to Alice Staverton, it would have taken a longer absence and a more averted mind than those even of which he had been guilty, to pile up the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the bignesses, for the better or the worse, that at present assaulted his vision wherever he looked.\r\n\r\n[h5p id=\"22\"]\r\n\r\nThe great fact all the while however had been the incalculability; since he\u00a0had<\/i>\u00a0supposed himself, from decade to decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change. He actually saw that he had allowed for nothing; he missed what he would have been sure of finding, he found what he would never have imagined. Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected, the ugly things of his far-away youth, when he had too promptly waked up to a sense of the ugly\u2014these uncanny phenomena placed him rather, as it happened, under the charm; whereas the \"swagger\" things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous inquirers every year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay. They were as so many set traps for displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring. It was interesting, doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been too disconcerting hadn't a certain finer truth saved the situation. He had distinctly not, in this steadier light, come over\u00a0all<\/i>\u00a0for the monstrosities; he had come, not only in the last analysis but quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with which they had nothing to do. He had come\u2014putting the thing pompously\u2014to look at his \"property,\" which he had thus for a third of a century not been within four thousand miles of; or, expressing it less [pb_glossary id=\"535\"]sordidly[\/pb_glossary],\u00a0<\/span><\/span>he had yielded to the humour of seeing again his house on the jolly corner, as he usually, and quite fondly, described it\u2014the one in which he had first seen the light, in which various members of his family had lived and had died, in which the holidays of his overschooled boyhood had been passed and the few social flowers of his chilled adolescence gathered, and which, alienated then for so long a period, had, through the successive deaths of his two brothers and the termination of old arrangements, come wholly into his hands. He was the owner of another, not quite so \"good\"\u2014the jolly corner having been, from far back, superlatively extended and consecrated; and the value of the pair represented his main capital, with an income consisting, in these later years, of their respective rents which (thanks precisely to their original excellent type) had never been depressingly low. He could live in \"Europe,\" as he had been in the habit of living, on the product of these flourishing New York leases, and all the better since, that of the second structure, the mere number in its long row, having within a twelvemonth fallen in, renovation at a high advance had proved beautifully possible.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1681\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"358\"]\"Three \"Three ironworkers on girder with steam and rooftops in background, New York City,\" 1904, by Thornton Oakley.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThese were items of property indeed, but he had found himself since his arrival distinguishing more than ever between them. The house within the street, two bristling blocks westward, was already in course of reconstruction as a tall mass of flats; he had acceded, some time before, to overtures for this conversion\u2014in which, now that it was going forward, it had been not the least of his astonishments to find himself able, on the spot, and though without a previous ounce of such experience, to participate with a certain intelligence, almost with a certain authority. He had lived his life with his back so turned to such concerns and his face addressed to those of so different an order that he scarce knew what to make of this <\/span><\/span>lively stir, in a compartment of his mind never yet penetrated, of a capacity for business and a sense for construction. These virtues, so common all round him now, had been dormant in his own organism\u2014where it might be said of them perhaps that they had slept the sleep of the just. At present, in the splendid autumn weather\u2014the autumn at least was a pure boon in the terrible place\u2014he loafed about his \"work\" undeterred, secretly agitated; not in the least \"minding\" that the whole proposition, as they said, was vulgar and sordid, and ready to climb ladders, to walk the plank, to handle materials and look wise about them, to ask questions, in fine, and challenge explanations and really \"go into\" figures.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1682\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"223\"]\"Impressionist \"Indian Summer in Madison Square,\" 1892, by Childe Hassam.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIt amused, it verily quite charmed him; and, by the same stroke, it amused, and even more, Alice Staverton, though perhaps charming her perceptibly less. She wasn't however going to be better-off for it, as\u00a0he<\/i>\u00a0was\u2014and so astonishingly much. Nothing was now likely, he knew, ever to make her better-off than she found herself, in the afternoon of life, as the delicately frugal possessor and tenant of the small house in Irving Place to which she had subtly managed to cling through her almost unbroken New York career. If he knew the way to it now better than to any other address among the dreadful multiplied numberings which seemed to him to reduce the whole place to some vast ledger-page, overgrown, fantastic, of ruled and criss-crossed lines and figures\u2014if he had formed, for his consolation, that habit, it was really not a little because of the charm of his having encountered and recognised, in the vast wilderness of the wholesale, breaking through the mere gross generalisation of wealth and force and success, a small still scene where items and shades, all delicate things, kept the sharpness of the notes of a high voice\u00a0<\/span><\/span>perfectly trained, and where economy hung about like the scent of a garden. His old friend lived with one maid and herself dusted her relics and trimmed her lamps and polished her silver; she stood off, in the awful modern crush, when she could, but she sallied forth and did battle when the challenge was really to \"spirit,\" the spirit she after all confessed to, proudly and a little shyly, as to that of the better time, that of\u00a0their<\/i>\u00a0common, their quite far-away and [pb_glossary id=\"1668\"]antediluvian[\/pb_glossary] social period and order. She made use of the [pb_glossary id=\"1669\"]streetcars[\/pb_glossary] when need be, the terrible things that people scrambled for as the panic-stricken at sea scramble for the boats; she affronted, inscrutably, under stress, all the public concussions and ordeals; and yet, with that slim mystifying grace of her appearance, which defied you to say if she were a fair young woman who looked older through trouble, or a fine smooth older one who looked young through successful indifference; with her precious reference, above all, to memories and histories into which he could enter, she was as exquisite for him as some pale pressed flower (a rarity to begin with), and, failing other sweetnesses, she was a sufficient reward of his effort. They had communities of knowledge, \"their\" knowledge (this discriminating possessive was always on her lips) of presences of the other age, presences all overlaid, in his case, by the experience of a man and the freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity, by passages of life that were strange and dim to her, just by \"Europe\" in short, but still unobscured, still exposed and cherished, under that pious visitation of the spirit from which she had never been diverted.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1683\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"689\"]\"Silver \"South-west corner of Irving Place and Sixteenth Street 1909,\" New-York Historical Society Library.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nShe had come with him one day to see how his \"apartment-house\" was rising; he had helped her over gaps and explained to her plans, and while they were there had happened to have, before her, a brief but lively discussion with the man in charge, the\u00a0<\/span><\/span>representative of the building-firm that had undertaken his work. He had found himself quite \"standing-up\" to this personage over a failure on the latter's part to observe some detail of one of their noted conditions, and had so lucidly argued his case that, besides ever so prettily flushing, at the time, for sympathy in his triumph, she had afterwards said to him (though to a slightly greater effect of irony) that he had clearly for too many years neglected a real gift. If he had but stayed at home he would have anticipated the inventor of the sky-scraper. If he had but stayed at home he would have discovered his genius in time really to start some new variety of awful architectural hare and run it till it burrowed in a gold-mine. He was to remember these words, while the weeks elapsed, for the small silver ring they had sounded over the queerest and deepest of his own lately most disguised and most muffled vibrations.\r\n\r\nIt had begun to be present to him after the first [pb_glossary id=\"1171\"]fortnight[\/pb_glossary], it had broken out with the oddest abruptness, this particular [pb_glossary id=\"1429\"]wanton[\/pb_glossary] wonderment: it met him there\u2014and this was the image under which he himself judged the matter, or at least, not a little, thrilled and flushed with it\u2014very much as he might have been met by some strange figure, some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house. The quaint analogy quite hauntingly remained with him, when he didn't indeed rather improve it by a still intenser form: that of his opening a door behind which he would have made sure of finding nothing, a door into a room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed start, on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk. After that visit to the house in construction he walked with his companion to see the other and always so much the better one, which in\u00a0<\/span><\/span>the eastward direction formed one of the comers, the \"jolly\" one precisely, of the street now so generally dishonoured and disfigured in its westward reaches, and of the comparatively conservative Avenue. The Avenue still had pretensions, as Miss Staverton said, to decency; the old people had mostly gone, the old names were unknown, and here and there an old association seemed to stray, all vaguely, like some very aged person, out too late, whom you might meet and feel the impilse to watch or follow, in kindness, for safe restoration to shelter.\r\n\r\nThey went in together, our friends; he admitted himself with his key, as he kept no one there, he explained, preferring, for his reasons, to leave the place empty, under a simple arrangement with a good woman living in the neighbourhood and who came for a daily hour to open windows and dust and sweep. Spencer Brydon had his reasons and was growingly aware of them; they seemed to him better each time he was there, though he didn't name them all to his companion, any more than he told her as yet how often, how quite absurdly often, he himself came. He only let her see for the present, while they walked through the great blank rooms, that absolute vacancy reigned and that, from top to bottom, there was nothing but Mrs. Muldoon's broomstick, in a corner, to tempt the burglar. Mrs. Muldoon was then on the premises, and she loquaciously attended the visitors, preceding them from room to room and pushing back shutters and throwing up sashes\u2014all to show them, as she remarked, how little there was to see. There was little indeed to see in the great gaunt shell where the main dispositions and the general apportionment of space, the style of an age of ampler allowances, had nevertheless for its master their honest pleading message, affecting him as some good old servant's, some lifelong retainer's appeal for a\u00a0<\/span><\/span>character, or even for a retiring-pension; yet it was also a remark of Mrs. Muldoon's that, glad as she was to oblige him by her noonday round, there was a request she greatly hoped he would never make of her. If he should wish her for any reason to come in after dark she would just tell him, if he \"plased,\" that he must ask it of somebody else.\r\n\r\nThe fact that there was nothing to see didn't [pb_glossary id=\"1671\"]militate[\/pb_glossary] for the worthy woman against what one\u00a0might<\/i>\u00a0see, and she put it frankly to Miss Staverton that no lady could be expected to like, could she? \"craping up to thim top storeys in the ayvil hours.\" The gas and the electric light were off the house, and she fairly evoked a gruesome vision of her march through the great grey rooms\u2014so many of them as there were too!\u2014with her glimmering [pb_glossary id=\"898\"]taper[\/pb_glossary]. Miss Staverton met her honest glare with a smile and the profession that she herself certainly would recoil from such an adventure. Spencer Brydon meanwhile held his peace\u2014for the moment; the question of the \"evil\" hours in his old home had already become too grave for him. He had begun some time since to \"crape,\" and he knew just why a packet of candles addressed to that pursuit had been stowed by his own hand, three weeks before, at the back of a drawer of the fine old [pb_glossary id=\"1685\"]sideboard[\/pb_glossary] that occupied, as a \"fixture,\" the deep recess in the dining-room. Just now he laughed at his companions\u2014quickly however changing the subject; for the reason that, in the first place, this laugh struck him even at that moment as starting the odd echo, the conscious human resonance (he scarce knew how to qualify it) that sounds made while he was there alone sent back to his ear or his fancy; and that, in the second, he imagined Alice Staverton for the instant on the point of asking him, with a divination, if he ever so prowled. There were divinations he was unprepared for, and he had at all events averted <\/span><\/span>inquiry by the time Mrs. Muldoon had left them, passing on to other parts.\r\n\r\nThere was happily enough to say, on so consecrated a spot, that could be said freely and fairly; so that a whole train of declarations was precipitated by his friend's having herself broken out, after a yearning look round: \"But I hope you don't mean they want you to pull\u00a0this<\/i>\u00a0to pieces!\" His answer came, promptly, with his reawakened wrath: it was of course exactly what they wanted, and what they were \"at\" him for, daily, with the iteration of people who couldn't for their life understand a man's liability to decent feelings. He had found the place, just as it stood and beyond what he could express, an interest and a joy. There were values other than the beastly rent-values, and in short, in short\u2014\u2014\u2014! But it was thus Miss Staverton took him up. \"In short you're to make so good a thing of your sky-scraper that, living in luxury on\u00a0those<\/i> ill-gotten gains, you can afford for a while to be sentimental here!\" Her smile had for him, with the words, the particular mild irony with which he found half her talk suffused; an irony without bitterness and that came, exactly, from her having so much imagination\u2014not, like the cheap sarcasms with which one heard most people, about the world of \"society,\" bid for the reputation of cleverness, from nobody's really having any. It was agreeable to him at this very moment to be sure that when he had answered, after a brief [pb_glossary id=\"1686\"]demur[\/pb_glossary], \"Well yes: so, precisely, you may put it!\" her imagination would still do him justice. He explained that even if never a dollar were to come to him from the other house he would nevertheless cherish this one; and he dwelt, further, while they lingered and wandered, on the fact of the stupefaction he was already exciting, the positive mystification he felt himself create.\r\n\r\nHe spoke of the value of all he read into it, into the\u00a0<\/span><\/span>mere sight of the walls, mere shapes of the rooms, mere sound of the floors, mere feel, in his hand, of the old silver-plated knobs of the several mahogany doors, which suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead; the seventy years of the past in fine that these things represented, the annals of nearly three generations, counting his grandfather's, the one that had ended there, and the impalpable ashes of his long-extinct youth, afloat in the very air like microscopic motes. She listened to everything; she was a woman who answered intimately but who utterly didn't chatter. She scattered abroad therefore no cloud of words; she could assent, she could agree, above all she could encourage, without doing that. Only at the last she went a little further than he had done himself. \"And then how do you know? You may still, after all, want to live here.\" It rather indeed pulled him up, for it wasn't what he had been thinking, at least in her sense of the words. \"You mean I may decide to stay on for the sake of it?\"\r\n\r\n\"Well,\u00a0with<\/i>\u00a0such a home\u2014\u2014\u2014!\" But, quite beautifully, she had too much tact to dot so monstrous an\u00a0i<\/i>, and it was precisely an illustration of the way she didn't rattle. How could any one\u2014of any wit\u2014insist on any one else's \"wanting\" to live in New York?\r\n\r\n[h5p id=\"23\"]\r\n\r\n\"Oh,\" he said, \"I might<\/i>\u00a0have lived here (since I had my opportunity early in life); I might have put in here all these years. Then everything would have been different enough\u2014and, I daresay, 'funny' enough. But that's another matter. And then the beauty of it\u2014I mean of my perversity, of my refusal to agree to a 'deal'\u2014is just in the total absence of a reason. Don't you see that if I had a reason about the matter at all it would\u00a0have<\/i>\u00a0to be the other way, and would then be inevitably a reason of dollars? There are no reasons here\u00a0but<\/i>\u00a0of dollars. Let us therefore have none whatever\u2014not the ghost of one.\"\r\n\r\n<\/span><\/span>They were back in the hall then for departure, but from where they stood the vista was large, through an open door, into the great square main saloon, with its almost antique felicity of brave spaces between windows. Her eyes came back from that reach and met his own a moment. \"Are you very sure the 'ghost' of one doesn't, much rather, serve\u2014\u2014\u2014?\"\r\n\r\nHe had a positive sense of turning pale. But it was as near as they were then to come. For he made answer, he believed, between a glare and a grin: \"Oh ghosts\u2014of course the place must swarm with them! I should be ashamed of it if it didn't. Poor Mrs. Muldoon's right, and it's why I haven't asked her to do more than look in.\"\r\n\r\nMiss Staverton's gaze again lost itself, and things, she didn't utter, it was clear, came and went in her mind. She might even for the minute, off there in the fine room, have imagined some element dimly gathering. Simplified like the [pb_glossary id=\"1687\"]death-mask[\/pb_glossary] of a handsome face, it perhaps produced for her just then an effect akin to the stir of an expression in the \"set\" commemorative plaster. Yet whatever her impression may have been she produced instead a vague platitude. \"Well, if it were only furnished and lived in\u2014\u2014\u2014!\"\r\n\r\nShe appeared to imply that in case of its being still furnished he might have been a little less opposed to the idea of a return. But she passed straight into the vestibule, as if to leave her words behind her, and the next moment he had opened the house-door and was standing with her on the steps. He closed the door and, while he re-pocketed his key, looking up and down, they took in the comparatively harsh actuality of the Avenue, which reminded him of the assault of the outer light of the Desert on the traveller emerging from an Egyptian tomb. But he risked before they stepped into the street his gathered answer to her\u00a0<\/span><\/span>speech. \"For me it\u00a0is<\/i>\u00a0lived in. For me it\u00a0is<\/i>\u00a0furnished.\" At which it was easy for her to sigh \"Ah yes\u2014\u2014\u2014!\" all vaguely and discreetly: since his parents and his favourite sister, to say nothing of other kin, in numbers, had run their course and met their end there. That represented, within the walls, [pb_glossary id=\"1688\"]ineffaceable[\/pb_glossary] life.\r\n\r\nIt was a few days after this that, during an hour passed with her again, he had expressed his impatience of the too flattering curiosity\u2014among the people he met\u2014about his appreciation of New York. He had arrived at none at all that was socially producible, and as for that matter of his \"thinking\" (thinking the better or the worse of anything there) he has wholly taken up with one subject of thought. It was mere vain egoism, and it was moreover, if she liked, morbid obsession. He found all things come back to the question of what he personally might have been, how he might have led his life and \"turned out,\" if he had not so, at the outset, given it up. And confessing for the first time to the intensity within him of his absurd speculation\u2014which but proved also, no doubt, the habit of too selfishly thinking\u2014he affirmed the impotence there of any other source of interest, any other native appeal. \"What would it have made of me, what would it have made of me? I keep for ever wondering, all idiotically; as if I could possibly know! I see what it has made of dozens of others, those I meet, and it positively aches within me, to the point of exasperation, that it would have made something of me as well. Only I can't make out what, and the worry of it, the small rage of curiosity never to be satisfied, brings back what I remember to have felt, once or twice, after judging best, for reasons, to burn some important letter unopened. I've been sorry, I've hated it\u2014I've never known what was in the letter. You may of course say it's a trifle\u2014\u2014\u2014!\"\r\n\r\n<\/span><\/span>\"I don't say it's a trifle,\" Miss Staverton gravely interrupted.\r\n\r\nShe was seated by her fire, and before her, on his feet and restless, he turned to and fro between this intensity of his idea and a fitful and unseeing inspection, through his single eye-glass, of the dear little old objects on her chimney-piece. Her interruption made him for an instant look at her harder. \"I shouldn't care if you did!\" he laughed, however; \"and it's only a figure, at any rate, for the way I now feel.\u00a0Not<\/i>\u00a0to have followed my perverse young course\u2014and almost in the teeth of my father's curse, as I may say; not to have kept it up, so, 'over there,' from that day to this, without a doubt or a pang; not, above all, to have liked it, to have loved it, so much, loved it, no doubt, with such an abysmal conceit of my own preference: some variation from\u00a0that<\/i>, I say, must have produced some different effect for my life and for my 'form.' I should have stuck here\u2014if it had been possible; and I was too young, at twenty-three, to judge, [pb_glossary id=\"1689\"]pour deux sous[\/pb_glossary]<\/i>, whether it\u00a0were<\/i>\u00a0possible. If I had waited I might have seen it was, and then I might have been, by staying here, something nearer to one of these types who have been hammered so hard and made so keen by their conditions. It isn't that I admire them so much\u2014the question of any charm in them, or of any charm, beyond that of the rank money-passion, exerted by their conditions\u00a0for<\/i>\u00a0them, has nothing to do with the matter: it's only a question of what fantastic, yet perfectly possible, development of my own nature I mayn't have missed. It comes over me that I had then a strange\u00a0alter ego<\/i>\u00a0deep down somewhere within me, as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud, and that I just took the course, I just transferred him to the climate, that blighted him for once and for ever.\"\r\n\r\n\"And you wonder about the flower,\" Miss Staverton\u00a0<\/span><\/span>said. \" So do I, if you want to know; and so I've been wondering these several weeks. I believe in the flower,\" she continued, \"I feel it would have been quite splendid, quite huge and monstrous.\"\r\n\r\n\"Monstrous above all!\" her visitor echoed; \"and I imagine, by the same stroke, quite hideous and offensive.\"\r\n\r\n\"You don't believe that,\" she returned; \"if you did you wouldn't wonder. You'd know, and that would be enough for you. What you feel\u2014and what I feel\u00a0for<\/i>\u00a0you\u2014is that you'd have had power.\"\r\n\r\n\"You'd have liked me that way?\" he asked.\r\n\r\nShe barely [pb_glossary id=\"1717\"]hung fire[\/pb_glossary]. \"How should I not have liked you?\"\r\n\r\n\"I see. You'd have liked me, have preferred me, a billionaire!\"\r\n\r\n\"How should I not have liked you?\" she simply again asked.\r\n\r\nHe stood before her still\u2014her question kept him motionless. He took it in, so much there was of it; and indeed his not otherwise meeting it testified to that. \"I know at least what I am,\" he simply went on; \"the [pb_glossary id=\"1691\"]other side of the medal's[\/pb_glossary] clear enough. I've not been [pb_glossary id=\"1692\"]edifying[\/pb_glossary]\u2014I believe I'm thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent. I've followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods; it must have come to you again and again\u2014in fact you've admitted to me as much\u2014that I was leading, at any time these thirty years, a selfish frivolous scandalous life. And you see what it has made of me.\"\r\n\r\nShe just waited, smiling at him. \"You see what it has made of\u00a0me<\/i>.\"\r\n\r\n\"Oh you're a person whom nothing can have altered. You were born to be what you are, anywhere, anyway: you've the perfection nothing else could have blighted. And don't you see how, without my exile, I\u00a0<\/span><\/span>shouldn't have been waiting till now\u2014\u2014\u2014?\" But he pulled up for the strange pang.\r\n\r\n\"The great thing to see,\" she presently said, \"seems to me to be that it has spoiled nothing. It hasn't spoiled your being here at last. It hasn't spoiled this. It hasn't spoiled your speaking\u2014\u2014\u2014\" She also however faltered.\r\n\r\nHe wondered at everything her controlled emotion might mean. \"Do you believe then\u2014too dreadfully!\u2014that I\u00a0am<\/i>\u00a0as good as I might ever have been?\"\r\n\r\n\"Oh no! Far from it!\" With which she got up from her chair and was nearer to him. \"But I don't care,\" she smiled.\r\n\r\n\"You mean I'm good enough?\"\r\n\r\nShe considered a little. \"Will you believe it if I say so? I mean will you let that settle your question for you?\" And then as if making out in his face that he drew back from this, that he had some idea which, however absurd, he couldn't yet bargain away: \"Oh you don't care either\u2014but very differently: you don't care for anything but yourself.\"\r\n\r\nSpencer Brydon recognised it\u2014it was in fact what he had absolutely professed. Yet he importantly qualified.\u2014\"He<\/i>\u00a0isn't myself. He's the just so totally other person. But I do want to see him,\" he added. \"And I can. And I shall.\"\r\n\r\nTheir eyes met for a minute while he guessed from something in hers that she divined his strange sense. But neither of them otherwise expressed it, and her apparent understanding, with no protesting shock, no easy derision, touched him more deeply than anything yet, constituting for his stifled perversity, on the spot, an element that was like breatheable air. What she said however was unexpected. \" Well,\u00a0I've<\/i>\u00a0seen him.\"\r\n\r\n\"You\u2014\u2014\u2014?\"\r\n\r\n\"I've seen him in a dream.\"\r\n\r\n<\/span><\/span>\"Oh a 'dream'\u2014\u2014\u2014!\" It let him down.\r\n\r\n\"But twice over,\" she continued. \"I saw him as I see you now.\"\r\n\r\n\"You've dreamed the same dream\u2014\u2014\u2014?\"\r\n\r\n\"Twice over,\" she repeated. \"The very same.\"\r\n\r\nThis did somehow a little speak to him, as it also gratified him. \"You dream about me at that rate?\"\r\n\r\n\"Ah about\u00a0him<\/i>!\" she smiled.\r\n\r\nHis eyes again sounded her. \"Then you know all about him.\" And as she said nothing more: \"What's the wretch like?\"\r\n\r\nShe hesitated, and it was as if he were pressing her so hard that, resisting for reasons of her own, she had to turn away. \"I'll tell you some other time!\"\r\n\r\n
\r\n\r\n

II<\/h3>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1711\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"391\"]\"Print \"Rogers' house, no. 7 State Street,\" 1908, by Charles Frederick William Mielatz.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIt was after this that there was most of a virtue for him, most of a cultivated charm, most of a preposterous secret thrill, in the particular form of surrender to his obsession and of address to what he more and more believed to be his privilege. It was what in these weeks he was living for\u2014since he really felt life to begin but after Mrs. Muldoon had retired from the scene and, visiting the ample house from attic to cellar, making sure he was alone, he knew himself in safe possession and, as he tacitly expressed it, let himself go. He sometimes came twice in the twenty-four hours; the moments he liked best were those of gathering dusk, of the short autumn twilight; this was the time of which, again and again, he found himself hoping most. Then he could, as seemed to him, most intimately wander and wait, linger and listen, feel his fine attention, never in his life before so fine, on the pulse of the great vague place: he preferred the lampless hour and only wished he might have prolonged each day the deep [pb_glossary id=\"1693\"]crepuscular[\/pb_glossary] spell. Later\u2014rarely much before midnight, but then for a considerable vigil\u2014he watched with his glimmering light; moving slowly, holding it high, playing it far, rejoicing above all, as much as he might, in open [pb_glossary id=\"1694\"]vistas[\/pb_glossary], reaches of communication between rooms and by passages; the long straight chance or show, as he would have called it, for the revelation he pretended to invite. It was\u00a0<\/span><\/span>a practice he found he could perfectly \"work\" without exciting remark; no one was in the least the wiser for it; even Alice Staverton, who was moreover a well of discretion, didn't quite fully imagine.\r\n\r\nHe let himself in and let himself out with the assurance of calm proprietorship; and accident so far favoured him that, if a fat Avenue \"officer\" had happened on occasion to see him entering at eleven-thirty, he had never yet, to the best of his belief, been noticed as emerging at two. He walked there on the crisp November nights, arrived regularly at the evening's end; it was as easy to do this after dining out as to take his way to a [pb_glossary id=\"1718\"]club[\/pb_glossary] or to his hotel. When he left his club, if he hadn't been dining out, it was ostensibly to go to his hotel; and when he left his hotel, if he had spent a part of the evening there, it was ostensibly to go to his club. Everything was easy in fine; everything conspired and promoted: there was truly even in the strain of his experience something that glossed over, something that salved and simplified, all the rest of consciousness. He circulated, talked, renewed, loosely and pleasantly, old relations\u2014met indeed, so far as he could, new expectations and seemed to make out on the whole that in spite of the career, of such different contacts, which he had spoken of to Miss Staverton as ministering so little, for those who might have watched it, to [pb_glossary id=\"1692\"]edification[\/pb_glossary], he was positively rather liked than not. He was a dim secondary social success\u2014and all with people who had truly not an idea of him. It was all mere surface sound, this murmur of their welcome, this popping of their corks\u2014just as his gestures of response were the extravagant shadows, emphatic in proportion as they meant little, of some game of\u00a0[pb_glossary id=\"1695\"]ombres chinoises[\/pb_glossary]<\/i>. He projected himself all day, in thought, straight over the bristling line of hard unconscious heads and into the other, the real, the waiting life; the life\u00a0<\/span><\/span>that, as soon as he had heard behind him the click of his great house-door, began for him, on the jolly corner, as beguilingly as the slow opening bars of some rich music follows the tap of the conductor's wand.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1708\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"560\"]\"Impressionist Fifth Avenue Nocturne,\" 1895, by Childe Hassam.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nHe always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick on the old marble of the hall pavement, large black-and-white squares that he remembered as the admiration of his childhood and that had then made in him, as he now saw, for the growth of an early conception of style. This effect was the dim reverberating tinkle as of some far-off bell hung who should say where?\u2014in the depths of the house, of the past, of that mystical other world that might have flourished for him had he not, for [pb_glossary id=\"1696\"]weal[\/pb_glossary] or woe, abandoned it. On this impression he did ever the same thing; he put his stick noiselessly away in a corner\u2014feeling the place once more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round its edge. The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical other world, and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear, of all the old baffled forsworn possibilities. What he did therefore by this appeal of his hushed presence was to wake them into such measure of ghostly life as they might still enjoy. They were shy, all but unappeasably shy, but they weren't really sinister; at least they weren't as he had [pb_glossary id=\"523\"]hitherto[\/pb_glossary] felt them\u2014before they had taken the Form he so yearned to make them take, the Form he at moments saw himself in the light of fairly hunting on tiptoe, the points of his evening-shoes, from room to room and from storey to storey.\r\n\r\nThat was the essence of his vision\u2014which was all rank folly, if one would, while he was out of the house and otherwise occupied, but which took on the last\u00a0<\/span><\/span>[pb_glossary id=\"1697\"]verisimilitude[\/pb_glossary] as soon as he was placed and posted. He knew what he meant and what he wanted; it was as clear as the figure on a cheque presented in demand for cash. His\u00a0alter<\/i>\u00a0ego \"walked\"\u2014that was the note of his image of him, while his image of his motive for his own odd pastime was the desire to waylay him and meet him. He roamed, slowly, warily, but all restlessly, he himself did\u2014Mrs. Muldoon had been right, absolutely, with her figure of their \"craping\"; and the presence he watched for would roam restlessly too. But it would be as cautious and as shifty; the conviction of its probable, in fact its already quite sensible, quite audible evasion of pursuit grew for him from night to night, laying on him finally a rigour to which nothing in his life had been comparable. It had been the theory of many superficially-judging persons, he knew, that he was wasting that life in a surrender to sensations, but he had tasted of no pleasure so fine as his actual tension, had been introduced to no sport that demanded at once the patience and the nerve of this stalking of a creature more subtle, yet at bay perhaps more formidable, than any beast of the forest. The terms, the comparisons, the very practices of the chase positively came again into play; there were even moments when passages of his occasional experience as a sportsman, stirred memories, from his younger time, of moor and mountain and desert, revived for him\u2014and to the increase of his keenness\u2014by the tremendous force of analogy. He found himself at moments\u2014once he had placed his single light on some mantel-shelf or in some recess\u2014stepping back into shelter or shade, effacing himself behind a door or in an [pb_glossary id=\"1698\"]embrasure[\/pb_glossary], as he had sought of old the vantage of rock and tree; he found himself holding his breath and living in the joy of the instant, the supreme suspense created by big game alone.\r\n\r\nHe wasn't afraid (though putting himself the\u00a0<\/span><\/span>question as he believed gentlemen on Bengal tigershoots or in close quarters with the great bear of the Rockies had been known to confess to having put it); and this indeed\u2014since here at least he might be frank!\u2014because of the impression, so intimate and so strange, that he himself produced as yet a dread, produced certainly a strain, beyond the liveliest he was likely to feel. They fell for him into categories, they fairly became familiar, the signs, for his own perception, of the alarm his presence and his vigilance created; though leaving him always to remark, [pb_glossary id=\"324\"]portentously[\/pb_glossary], on his probably having formed a relation, his probably enjoying a consciousness, unique in the experience of man. People enough, first and last, had been in terror of apparitions, but who had ever before so turned the tables and become himself, in the apparitional world, an incalculable terror? He might have found this sublime had he quite dared to think of it; but he didn't too much insist, truly, on that side of his privilege. With habit and repetition he gained to an extraordinary degree the power to penetrate the dusk of distances and the darkness of corners, to resolve back into their innocence the treacheries of uncertain light, the evil-looking forms taken in the gloom by mere shadows, by accidents of the air, by shifting effects of perspective; putting down his dim luminary he could still wander on without it, pass into other rooms and, only knowing it was there behind him in case of need, see his way about, visually project for his purpose a comparative clearness. It made him feel, this acquired faculty, like some monstrous stealthy cat; he wondered if he would have glared at these moments with large shining yellow eyes, and what it mightn't [pb_glossary id=\"1410\"]verily[\/pb_glossary] be, for the poor hard-pressed alter ego<\/i>, to be confronted with such a type.\r\n\r\nHe liked however the open shutters; he opened everywhere those Mrs. Muldoon had closed, closing\u00a0<\/span><\/span>them as carefully afterwards, so that she shouldn't notice: he liked\u2014oh this he did like, and above all in the upper rooms!\u2014the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars through the window-panes, and scarcely less the flare of the street-lamps below, the white electric lustre which it would have taken curtains to keep out. This was human actual social; this was of the world he had lived in, and he was more at his ease certainly for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal, that all the while and in spite of his detachment it seemed to give him. He had support of course mostly in the rooms at the wide front and the prolonged side; it failed him considerably in the central shades and the parts at the back. But if he sometimes, on his rounds, was glad of his optical reach, so none the less often the rear of the house affected him as the very jungle of his prey. The place was there more subdivided; a large \"extension\" in particular, where small rooms for servants had been multiplied, abounded in nooks and corners, in closets and passages, in the ramifications especially of an ample back staircase over which he leaned, many a time, to look far down\u2014not deterred from his gravity even while aware that he might, for a spectator, have figured some solemn [pb_glossary id=\"1700\"]simpleton[\/pb_glossary] playing at hide-and-seek. Outside in fact he might himself make that ironic\u00a0[pb_glossary id=\"1699\"]rapprochement[\/pb_glossary]<\/i>; but within the walls, and in spite of the clear windows, his consistency was proof against the cynical light of New York.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1724\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]\"Hall Hall and stairway, Mt. Vernon Mansion, 1883, photo by Luke C. Dillon.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIt had belonged to that idea of the exasperated consciousness of his victim to become a real test for him; since he had quite put it to himself from the first that, oh distinctly! he could \"cultivate\" his whole perception. He had felt it as above all open to cultivation\u2014which indeed was but another name for his manner of spending his time. He was bringing it on, bringing it to perfection, by practice; in <\/span><\/span>consequence of which it had grown so fine that he was now aware of impressions, attestations of his general [pb_glossary id=\"1701\"]postulate[\/pb_glossary], that couldn't have broken upon him at once. This was the case more specifically with a phenomenon at last quite frequent for him in the upper rooms, the recognition\u2014absolutely unmistakable, and by a turn dating from a particular hour, his resumption of his campaign after a diplomatic drop, a calculated absence of three nights\u2014of his being definitely followed, tracked at a distance carefully taken and to the express end that he should the less confidently, less arrogantly, appear to himself merely to pursue. It worried, it finally broke him up, for it proved, of all the conceivable impressions, the one least suited to his book. He was kept in sight while remaining himself\u2014as regards the essence of his position\u2014sightless, and his only recourse then was in abrupt turns, rapid recoveries of ground. He wheeled about, retracing his steps, as if he might so catch in his face at least the stirred air of some other quick revolution. It was indeed true that his fully dislocalised thought of these man\u0153uvres recalled to him Pantaloon<\/a>, at the Christmas farce, buffeted and tricked from behind by ubiquitous Harlequin; but it left intact the influence of the conditions themselves each time he was re-exposed to them, so that in fact this association, had he suffered it to become constant, would on a certain side have but ministered to his intenser gravity. He had made, as I have said, to create on the premises the baseless sense of a reprieve, his three absences; and the result of the third was to confirm the after-effect of the second.\r\n\r\nOn his return, that night\u2014the night succeeding his last intermission\u2014he stood in the hall and looked up the staircase with a certainty more intimate than any he had yet known. \"He's\u00a0there<\/i>, at the top, and waiting\u2014not, as in general, falling back for\u00a0<\/span><\/span>disappearance. He's holding his ground, and it's the first time\u2014which is a proof, isn't it? that something has happened for him.\" So Brydon argued with his hand on the banister and his foot on the lowest stair; in which position he felt as never before the air chilled by his logic. He himself turned cold in it, for he seemed of a sudden to know what now was involved. \"Harder pressed?\u2014yes, he takes it in, with its thus making clear to him that I've come, as they say, 'to stay.' He finally doesn't like and can't bear it, in the sense, I mean, that his wrath, his menaced interest, now balances with his dread. I've hunted him till he has 'turned': that, up there, is what has happened\u2014he's the fanged or the antlered animal brought at last to [pb_glossary id=\"1703\"]bay[\/pb_glossary].\" There came to him, as I say\u2014but determined by an influence beyond my notation!\u2014the acuteness of this certainty; under which, however, the next moment he had broken into a sweat that he would as little have consented to attribute to fear as he would have dared immediately to act upon it for enterprise. It marked none the less a prodigious thrill, a thrill that represented sudden dismay, no doubt, but also represented, and with the selfsame throb, the strangest, the most joyous, possibly the next minute almost the proudest, duplication of consciousness.\r\n\r\n\"He has been dodging, retreating, hiding, but now, worked up to anger, he'll fight!\"\u2014this intense impression made a single mouthful, as it were, of terror and applause. But what was wondrous was that the applause, for the felt fact, was so eager, since, if it was his other self he was running to earth, this ineffable identity was thus in the last resort not unworthy of him. It bristled there\u2014somewhere near at hand, however unseen still\u2014as the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm of the [pb_glossary id=\"1704\"]adage[\/pb_glossary]\u00a0must<\/i>\u00a0at last bristle; and Brydon at this instant tasted probably of a\u00a0<\/span><\/span>sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity. It was as if it would have shamed him that a character so associated with his own should triumphantly succeed in just skulking, should to the end not risk the open; so that the drop of this danger was, on the spot, a great lift of the whole situation. Yet with another rare shift of the same subtlety he was already trying to measure by how much more he himself might now be in peril of fear; so rejoicing that he could, in another form, actively inspire that fear, and simultaneously quaking for the form in which he might passively know it.\r\n\r\nThe apprehension of knowing it must after a little have grown in him, and the strangest moment of his adventure perhaps, the most memorable or really most interesting, afterwards, of his crisis, was the lapse of certain instants of concentrated conscious\u00a0combat<\/i>, the sense of a need to hold on to something, even after the manner of a man slipping and slipping on some awful incline; the vivid impulse, above all, to move, to act, to charge, somehow and upon something\u2014to show himself, in a word, that he wasn't afraid. The state of \"holding-on\" was thus the state to which he was momentarily reduced; if there had been anything, in the great vacancy, to seize, he would presently have been aware of having clutched it as he might under a shock at home have clutched the nearest chair-back. He had been surprised at any rate\u2014of this he\u00a0was<\/i>\u00a0aware\u2014into something unprecedented since his original appropriation of the place; he had closed his eyes, held them tight, for a long minute, as with that instinct of dismay and that terror of vision. When he opened them the room, the other [pb_glossary id=\"1705\"]contiguous[\/pb_glossary] rooms, extraordinarily, seemed lighter\u2014so light, almost, that at first he took the change for day. He stood firm, however that might be, just where he had paused; his resistance had\u00a0<\/span><\/span>helped him\u2014it was as if there were something he had tided over. He knew after a little what this was\u2014it had been in the imminent danger of flight. He had stiffened his will against going; without this he would have made for the stairs, and it seemed to him that, still with his eyes closed, he would have descended them, would have known how, straight and swiftly, to the bottom.\r\n\r\nWell, as he had held out, here he was\u2014still at the top, among the more intricate upper rooms and with the gauntlet of the others, of all the rest of the house, still to run when it should be his time to go. He would go at his time\u2014only at his time: didn't he go every night very much at the same hour? He took out his watch\u2014there was light for that: it was scarcely a quarter past one, and he had never withdrawn so soon. He reached his lodgings for the most part at two\u2014with his walk of a quarter of an hour. He would wait for the last quarter\u2014he wouldn't stir till then; and he kept his watch there with his eyes on it, reflecting while he held it that this deliberate wait, a wait with an effort, which he recognised, would serve perfectly for the attestation he desired to make. It would prove his courage\u2014unless indeed the latter might most be proved by his budging at last from his place. What he mainly felt now was that, since he hadn't originally scuttled, he had his dignities\u2014which had never in his life seemed so many\u2014all to preserve and to carry aloft. This was before him in truth as a physical image, an image almost worthy of an age of greater romance. That remark indeed glimmered for him only to glow the next instant with a finer light; since what age of romance, after all, could have matched either the state of his mind or, \"objectively,\" as they said, the wonder of his situation? The only difference would have been that, brandishing his dignities over his head as in a parchment scroll, he might then\u2014\u00a0<\/span><\/span>that is in the heroic time\u2014have proceeded downstairs with a drawn sword in his other grasp.\r\n\r\nAt present, really, the light he had set down on the mantel of the next room would have to figure his sword; which utensil, in the course of a minute, he had taken the requisite number of steps to possess himself of. The door between the rooms was open, and from the second another door opened to a third. These rooms, as he remembered, gave all three upon a common corridor as well, but there was a fourth, beyond them, without issue save through the preceding. To have moved, to have heard his step again, was appreciably a help; though even in recognising this he lingered once more a little by the chimneypiece on which his light had rested. When he next moved, just hesitating where to turn, he found himself considering a circumstance that, after his first and comparatively vague apprehension of it, produced in him the start that often attends some pang of recollection, the violent shock of having ceased happily to forget. He had come into sight of the door in which the brief chain of communication ended and which he now surveyed from the nearer threshold, the one not directly facing it. Placed at some distance to the left of this point, it would have admitted him to the last room of the four, the room without other approach or [pb_glossary id=\"1706\"]egress[\/pb_glossary], had it not, to his intimate conviction, been closed\u00a0since<\/i>\u00a0his former visitation, the matter probably of a quarter of an hour before. He stared with all his eyes at the wonder of the fact, arrested again where he stood and again holding his breath while he sounded its sense. Surely it had been subsequently closed\u2014that is it had been on his previous passage indubitably open!\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1712\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"381\"]\"Image \"Ghostly sighting?,\" 1899, The National Archives UK.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nHe took it full in the face that something had happened between\u2014that he couldn't not have noticed before (by which he meant on his original tour of all\u00a0<\/span><\/span>the rooms that evening) that such a barrier had exceptionally presented itself. He had indeed since that moment undergone an agitation so extraordinary that it might have muddled for him any earlier view; and he tried to convince himself that he might perhaps then have gone into the room and, inadvertently, automatically, on coming out, have drawn the door after him. The difficulty was that this exactly was what he never did; it was against his whole policy, as he might have said, the essence of which was to keep vistas clear. He had them from the first, as he was well aware, quite on the brain: the strange apparition, at the far end of one of them, of his baffled \"prey\" (which had become by so sharp an irony so little the term now to apply!) was the form of success his imagination had most cherished, projecting into it always a refinement of beauty. He had known fifty times the start of perception that had afterwards dropped; had fifty times gasped to himself \"There!\" under some fond brief hallucination. The house, as the case stood, admirably lent itself; he might wonder at the taste, the native architecture of the particular time, which could rejoice so in the multiplication of doors\u2014the opposite extreme to the modern, the actual almost complete [pb_glossary id=\"1707\"]proscription[\/pb_glossary] of them; but it had fairly contributed to provoke this obsession of the presence encountered telescopically, as he might say, focussed and studied in diminishing perspective and as by a rest for the elbow.\r\n\r\nIt was with these considerations that his present attention was charged\u2014they perfectly availed to make what he saw portentous. He\u00a0couldn't<\/i>, by any lapse, have blocked that aperture; and if he hadn't, if it was unthinkable, why what else was clear but that there had been another agent? Another agent?\u2014he had been catching, as he felt, a moment back, the very breath of him; but when he had been so close as in\u00a0<\/span><\/span>this simple, this logical, this completely personal act? It was so logical, that is, that one might have\u00a0taken<\/i>\u00a0it for personal; yet for what did Brydon take it, he asked himself, while, softly panting, he felt his eyes almost leave their sockets. Ah this time at last they\u00a0were<\/i>, the two, the opposed projections of him, in presence; and this time, as much as one would, the question of danger loomed. With it rose, as not before, the question of courage\u2014for what he knew the blank face of the door to say to him was \"Show us how much you have!\" It stared, it glared back at him with that challenge; it put to him the two alternatives: should he just push it open or not? Oh to have this consciousness was to\u00a0think<\/i>\u2014and to think, Brydon knew, as he stood there, was, with the lapsing moments, not to have acted! Not to have acted\u2014that was the misery and the pang\u2014was even still not to act; was in fact\u00a0all<\/i>\u00a0to feel the thing in another, in a new and terrible way. How long did he pause and how long did he debate? There was presently nothing to measure it; for his vibration had already changed\u2014as just by the effect of its intensity. Shut up there, at bay, defiant, and with the prodigy of the thing palpably, provably\u00a0done<\/i>, thus giving notice like some stark signboard\u2014under that accession of accent the situation itself had turned; and Brydon at last remarkably made up his mind on what it had turned to.\r\n\r\nIt had turned altogether to a different admonition; to a supreme hint, for him, of the value of Discretion! This slowly dawned, no doubt\u2014for it could take its time; so perfectly, on his threshold, had he been stayed, so little as yet had he either advanced or retreated. It was the strangest of all things that now when, by his taking ten steps and applying his hand to a latch, or even his shoulder and his knee, if necessary, to a panel, all the hunger of his prime need might have been met, his high curiosity crowned, his unrest\u00a0<\/span><\/span>assuaged\u2014it was amazing, but it was also exquisite and rare, that insistence should have, at a touch, quite dropped from him. Discretion\u2014he jumped at that; and yet not, verily, at such a pitch, because it saved his nerves or his skin, but because, much more valuably, it saved the situation. When I say he \"jumped\" at it I feel the consonance of this term with the fact that\u2014at the end indeed of I know not how long\u2014he did move again, he crossed straight to the door. He wouldn't touch it\u2014it seemed now that he might\u00a0if<\/i>\u00a0he would: he would only just wait there a little, to show, to prove, that he wouldn't. He had thus another station, close to the thin partition by which revelation was denied him; but with his eyes bent and his hands held off in a mere intensity of stillness. He listened as if there had been something to hear, but this attitude, while it lasted, was his own communication. \"If you won't then\u2014good: I spare you and I give up. You affect me as by the appeal positively for pity: you convince me that for reasons rigid and sublime\u2014what do I know?\u2014we both of us should have suffered. I respect them then, and, though moved and privileged as, I believe, it has never been given to man, I retire, I renounce\u2014never, on my honour, to try again. So rest for ever\u2014and let\u00a0me<\/i>!'\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1720\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"506\"]\"Times Times Square at night, New York, between 1900 and 1915, by Detroit Publishing Co.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThat, for Brydon was the deep sense of this last demonstration\u2014solemn, measured, directed, as he felt it to be. He brought it to a close, he turned away; and now verily he knew how deeply he had been stirred. He retraced his steps, taking up his candle, burnt, he observed, well-[pb_glossary id=\"703\"]nigh[\/pb_glossary] to the socket, and marking again, lighten it as he would, the distinctness of his footfall; after which, in a moment, he knew himself at the other side of the house. He did here what he had not yet done at these hours\u2014he opened half a [pb_glossary id=\"1673\"]casement[\/pb_glossary], one of those in the front, and let in the air of the night; a thing he would have taken at any time\u00a0<\/span><\/span>previous for a sharp rupture of his spell. His spell was broken now, and it didn't matter\u2014broken by his concession and his surrender, which made it [pb_glossary id=\"1674\"]idle[\/pb_glossary] henceforth that he should ever come back. The empty street\u2014its other life so marked even by the great lamplit vacancy\u2014was within call, within touch; he stayed there as to be in it again, high above it though he was still perched; he watched as for some comforting common fact, some vulgar human note, the passage of a scavenger or a thief, some night-bird however base. He would have blessed that sign of life; he would have welcomed positively the slow approach of his friend the policeman, whom he had hitherto only sought to avoid, and was not sure that if the patrol had come into sight he mightn't have felt the impulse to get into relation with it, to hail it, on some pretext, from his fourth floor.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1719\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"506\"]\"Broadway Broadway at night from Times Square, New York, between 1900 and 1915, by Detroit Publishing Co.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe pretext that wouldn't have been too silly or too compromising, the explanation that would have saved his dignity and kept his name, in such a case, out of the papers, was not definite to him: he was so occupied with the thought of recording his Discretion\u2014as an effect of the vow he had just uttered to his intimate adversary\u2014that the importance of this loomed large and something had overtaken all ironically his sense of proportion. If there had been a ladder applied to the front of the house, even one of the vertiginous perpendiculars employed by painters and roofers and sometimes left standing overnight, he would have managed somehow, astride of the window-sill, to compass by outstretched leg and arm that mode of descent. If there had been some such uncanny thing as he had found in his room at hotels, a workable fire-escape in the form of notched cable or a canvas shoot, he would have availed himself of it as a proof\u2014well, of his present delicacy. He nursed that sentiment, as the question stood, a little in vain, and even\u2014at the\u00a0<\/span><\/span>end of he scarce knew, once more, how long\u2014found it, as by the action on his mind of the failure of response of the outer world, sinking back to vague anguish. It seemed to him he had waited an age for some stir of the great grim hush; the life of the town was itself under a spell\u2014so unnaturally, up and down the whole prospect of known and rather ugly objects, the blankness and the silence lasted. Had they ever, he asked himself, the hard-faced houses, which had begun to look livid in the dim dawn, had they ever spoken so little to any need of his spirit? Great builded voids, great crowded stillnesses put on, often, in the heart of cities, for the small hours, a sort of sinister mask, and it was of this large collective negation that Brydon presently became conscious\u2014all the more that the break of day was, almost incredibly, now at hand, proving to him what a night he had made of it.\r\n\r\nHe looked again at his watch, saw what had become of his time-values (he had taken hours for minutes\u2014not, as in other tense situations, minutes for hours) and the strange air of the streets was but the weak, the sullen flush of a dawn in which everything was still locked up. His choked appeal from his own open window had been the sole note of life, and he could but break off at last as for a worse despair. Yet while so deeply demoralised he was capable again of an impulse denoting\u2014at least by his present measure\u2014extraordinary resolution; of retracing his steps to the spot where he had turned cold with the extinction of his last pulse of doubt as to there being in the place another presence than his own. This required an effort strong enough to sicken him; but he had his reason, which overmastered for the moment everything else. There was the whole of the rest of the house to traverse, and how should he screw himself to that if the door he had seen closed were at present\u00a0<\/span><\/span>open? He could hold to the idea that the closing had practically been for him an act of mercy, a chance offered him to descend, depart, get off the ground and never again profane it. This conception held together, it worked; but what it meant for him depended now clearly on the amount of forbearance his recent action, or rather his recent inaction, had engendered. The image of the \"presence,\" whatever it was, waiting there for him to go\u2014this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short\u2014he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.\r\n\r\nHe knew\u2014yes, as he had never known anything\u2014that,\u00a0should<\/i>\u00a0he see the door open, it would all too abjectly be the end of him. It would mean that the agent of his shame\u2014for his shame was the deep abjection\u2014was once more at large and in general possession; and what glared him thus in the face was the act that this would determine for him. It would send him straight about to the window he had left open, and by that window, be long ladder and dangling rope as absent as they would, he saw himself uncontrollably insanely fatally take his way to the street. The hideous chance of this he at least could avert; but he could only avert it by recoiling in time from assurance. He had the whole house to deal with, this fact was still there; only he now knew that uncertainty alone could start him. He stole back from where he had checked himself\u2014merely to do so was suddenly like safety\u2014and, making blindly for the greater staircase, left gaping rooms and sounding passages behind. Here was the top of the stairs, with a fine large dim descent and three spacious landings to mark\u00a0<\/span><\/span>off. His instinct was all for mildness, but his feet were harsh on the floors, and, strangely, when he had in a couple of minutes become aware of this, it counted somehow for help. He couldn't have spoken, the tone of his voice would have scared him, and the common conceit or resource of \"[pb_glossary id=\"1675\"]whistling in the dark[\/pb_glossary]\" (whether literally or figuratively) have appeared basely vulgar; yet he liked none the less to hear himself go, and when he had reached his first landing\u2014taking it all with no rush, but quite steadily\u2014that stage of success drew from him a gasp of relief.\r\n\r\nThe house, withal, seemed immense, the scale of space again inordinate; the open rooms, to no one of which his eyes deflected, gloomed in their shuttered state like mouths of caverns; only the high skylight that formed the crown of the deep well created for him a medium in which he could advance, but which might have been, for queerness of colour, some watery under-world. He tried to think of something noble, as that his property was really grand, a splendid possession; but this nobleness took the form too of the clear delight with which he was finally to sacrifice it. They might come in now, the builders, the destroyers\u2014they might come as soon as they would. At the end of two flights he had dropped to another zone, and from the middle of the third, with only one more left, he recognised the influence of the lower windows, of half-drawn blinds, of the occasional gleam of streetlamps, of the glazed spaces of the vestibule. This was the bottom of the sea, which showed an illumination of its own and which he even saw paved\u2014when at a given moment he drew up to sink a long look over the banisters\u2014with the marble squares of his childhood. By that time indubitably he felt, as he might have said in a commoner cause, better; it had allowed him to stop and draw breath, and the ease increased with the sight of the old black-and-white slabs. But what\u00a0<\/span><\/span>he most felt was that now surely, with the element of impunity pulling him as by hard firm hands, the case was settled for what he might have seen above had he dared that last look. The closed door, blessedly remote now, was still closed\u2014and he had only in short to reach that of the house.\r\n\r\nHe came down further, he crossed the passage forming the access to the last flight; and if here again he stopped an instant it was almost for the sharpness of the thrill of assured escape. It made him shut his eyes\u2014which opened again to the straight slope of the remainder of the stairs. Here was impunity still, but impunity almost excessive; inasmuch as the sidelights and the high [pb_glossary id=\"1676\"]fan-tracery[\/pb_glossary] of the entrance were glimmering straight into the hall; an appearance produced, he the next instant saw, by the fact that the vestibule gaped wide, that the hinged halves of the inner door had been thrown far back. Out of that again the question<\/i>\u00a0sprang at him, making his eyes, as he felt, half-start from his head, as they had done, at the top of the house, before the sign of the other door. If he had left that one open, hadn't he left this one closed, and wasn't he now in\u00a0most<\/i>\u00a0immediate presence of some inconceivable occult activity? It was as sharp, the question, as a knife in his side, but the answer hung fire still and seemed to lose itself in the vague darkness to which the thin admitted dawn, glimmering archwise over the whole outer door, made a semicircular margin, a cold silvery nimbus that seemed to play a little as he looked\u2014to shift and expand and contract.\r\n\r\nIt was as if there had been something within it, protected by indistinctness and corresponding in extent with the opaque surface behind, the painted panels of the last barrier to his escape, of which the key was in his pocket. The indistinctness mocked him even while he stared, affected him as somehow\u00a0<\/span><\/span>shrouding or challenging certitude, so that after faltering an instant on his step he let himself go with the sense that here was at last something to meet, to touch, to take, to know\u2014something all unnatural and dreadful, but to advance upon which was the condition for him either of liberation or of supreme defeat. The [pb_glossary id=\"1677\"]penumbra[\/pb_glossary], dense and dark, was the virtual screen of a figure which stood in it as still as some image erect in a niche or as some black-vizored sentinel guarding a treasure. Brydon was to know afterwards, was to recall and make out, the particular thing he had believed during the rest of his descent. He saw, in its great grey glimmering margin, the central vagueness diminish, and he felt it to be taking the very form toward which, for so many days, the passion of his curiosity had yearned. It gloomed, it loomed, it was something, it was somebody, the prodigy of a personal presence.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1714\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"391\"]\"John Spirit Photography (John K. Hallowell and fifteen other faces), 1901, photo by S.W. Fallis.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nRigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance and stature waited there to measure himself with his power to dismay. This only could it be\u2014this only till he recognised, with his advance, that what made the face dim was the pair of raised hands that covered it and in which, so far from being offered in defiance, it was buried as for dark deprecation. So Brydon, before him, took him in; with every fact of him now, in the higher light, hard and acute\u2014his planted stillness, his vivid truth, his grizzled bent head and white masking hands, his queer actuality of evening-dress, of dangling double eye-glass, of gleaming silk [pb_glossary id=\"1713\"]lappet[\/pb_glossary] and white linen, of pearl button and gold watch-guard and polished shoe. No portrait by a great modern master could have presented him with more intensity, thrust him out of his frame with more art, as if there had been \"treatment,\" of the consummate sort, in his every shade and [pb_glossary id=\"1709\"]salience[\/pb_glossary]. The revulsion, for our friend, had become,\u00a0<\/span><\/span>before he knew it, immense\u2014this drop, in the act of apprehension, to the sense of his adversary's inscrutable man\u0153uvre. That meaning at least, while he gaped, it offered him; for he could but gape at his other self in this other anguish, gape as a proof that\u00a0he<\/i>, standing there for the achieved, the enjoyed, the triumphant life, couldn't be faced in his triumph. Wasn't the proof in the splendid covering hands, strong and completely spread?\u2014so spread and so intentional that, in spite of a special verity that surpassed every other, the fact that one of these hands had lost two fingers, which were reduced to stumps, as if accidentally shot away, the face was effectually guarded and saved.\r\n\r\n\"Saved,\" though,\u00a0would<\/i> it be?\u2014Brydon breathed his wonder till the very impunity of his attitude and the very insistence of his eyes produced, as he felt, a sudden stir which showed the next instant as a deeper [pb_glossary id=\"716\"]portent[\/pb_glossary], while the head raised itself, the betrayal of a braver purpose. The hands, as he looked, began to move, to open; then, as if deciding in a flash, dropped from the face and left it uncovered and presented. Horror, with the sight, had leaped into Brydon's throat, gasping there in a sound he couldn't utter; for the bared identity was too hideous as his<\/i>, and his glare was the passion of his protest. The face,\u00a0that<\/i>\u00a0face, Spencer Brydon's?\u2014he searched it still, but looking away from it in dismay and denial, falling straight from his height of sublimity. It was unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility\u2014\u2014\u2014! He had been \"sold,\" he inwardly moaned, stalking such game as this: the presence before him was a presence, the horror within him a horror, but the waste of his nights had been only grotesque and the success of his adventure an irony. Such an identity fitted his at\u00a0no<\/i>\u00a0point, made its alternative monstrous. A thousand times yes, as it came upon\u00a0<\/span><\/span>him nearer now\u2014the face was the face of a stranger. It came upon him nearer now, quite as one of those expanding fantastic images projected by the magic lantern of childhood; for the stranger, whoever he might be, evil, odious, blatant, vulgar, had advanced as for aggression, and he knew himself give ground. Then harder pressed still, sick with the force of his shock, and falling back as under the hot breath and the roused passion of a life larger than his own, a rage of personality before which his own collapsed, he felt the whole vision turn to darkness and his very feet give way. His head went round; he was going; he had gone.\r\n\r\n
\r\n\r\n

III<\/h3>\r\nWhat<\/span>\u00a0had next brought him back, clearly\u2014though after how long?\u2014was Mrs. Muldoon's voice, coming to him from quite near, from so near that he seemed presently to see her as kneeling on the ground before him while he lay looking up at her; himself not wholly on the ground, but half-raised and upheld\u2014conscious, yes, of tenderness of support and, more particularly, of a head pillowed in extraordinary softness and [pb_glossary id=\"1303\"]fainly[\/pb_glossary] refreshing fragrance. He considered, he wondered, his wit but half at his service; then another face intervened, bending more directly over him, and he finally knew that Alice Staverton had made her lap an ample and perfect cushion to him, and that she had to this end seated herself on the lowest degree of the staircase, the rest of his long person remaining stretched on his old black-and-white slabs. They were cold, these marble squares of his youth; but\u00a0he<\/i>\u00a0somehow was not, in this rich return of consciousness\u2014the most wonderful hour, little by little, that he had ever known, leaving him, as it did, so gratefully, so abysmally passive, and yet as with a treasure of intelligence waiting all round him for quiet appropriation; dissolved, he might call it, in the air of the place and producing the golden glow of a late autumn afternoon. He had come back, yes\u2014come back from further away than any man but himself had ever travelled; but it was strange how with\u00a0<\/span><\/span>this sense what he had come back\u00a0to<\/i>\u00a0seemed really the great thing, and as if his prodigious journey had been all for the sake of it. Slowly but surely his consciousness grew, his vision of his state thus completing itself: he had been miraculously\u00a0carried<\/i>\u00a0back\u2014lifted and carefully borne as from where he had been picked up, the uttermost end of an interminable grey passage. Even with this he was suffered to rest, and what had now brought him to knowledge was the break in the long mild motion.\r\n\r\nIt had brought him to knowledge, to knowledge\u2014yes, this was the beauty of his state; which came to resemble more and more that of a man who has gone to sleep on some news of a great inheritance, and then, after dreaming it away, after profaning it with matters strange to it, has waked up again to serenity of certitude and has only to lie and watch it grow. This was the drift of his patience\u2014that he had only to let it shine on him. He must moreover, with intermissions, still have been lifted and borne; since why and how else should he have known himself, later on, with the afternoon glow intenser, no longer at the foot of his stairs\u2014situated as these now seemed at that dark other end of his tunnel\u2014but on a deep window-bench of his high saloon, over which had been spread, couch-fashion, a mantle of soft stuff lined with grey fur that was familiar to his eyes and that one of his hands kept fondly feeling as for its pledge of truth. Mrs. Muldoon's face had gone, but the other, the second he had recognised, hung over him in a way that showed how he was still propped and pillowed. He took it all in, and the more he took it the more it seemed to suffice: he was as much at peace as if he had had food and drink. It was the two women who had found him, on Mrs. Muldoon's having plied, at her usual hour, her latch-key\u2014and on her having above all arrived while Miss Staverton still lingered\u00a0<\/span><\/span>near the house. She had been turning away, all anxiety, from worrying the vain bell-handle\u2014her calculation having been of the hour of the good woman's visit; but the latter, blessedly, had come up while she was still there, and they had entered together. He had then lain, beyond the [pb_glossary id=\"524\"]vestibule[\/pb_glossary], very much as he was lying now\u2014quite, that is, as he appeared to have fallen, but all so wondrously without bruise or gash; only in a depth of stupor. What he most took in, however, at present, with the steadier clearance, was that Alice Staverton had for a long unspeakable moment not doubted he was dead.\r\n\r\n\"It must have been that I\u00a0was<\/i>.\" He made it out as she held him. \"Yes\u2014I can only have died. You brought me literally to life. Only,\" he wondered, his eyes rising to her, \"only, in the name of all the benedictions, how?\"\r\n\r\nIt took her but an instant to bend her face and kiss him, and something in the manner of it, and in the way her hands clasped and locked his head while he felt the cool charity and virtue of her lips, something in all this beatitude somehow answered everything. \"And now I keep you,\" she said.\r\n\r\n\"Oh keep me, keep me!\" he pleaded while her face still hung over him: in response to which it dropped again and stayed close, clingingly close. It was the seal of their situation\u2014of which he tasted the impress for a long blissful moment in silence. But he came back. \"Yet how did you know?\"\r\n\r\n\"I was uneasy. You were to have come, you remember\u2014and you had sent no word.\"\r\n\r\n\"Yes, I remember\u2014I was to have gone to you at one to-day.\" It caught on to their \"old\" life and relation\u2014which were so near and so far. \"I was still out there in my strange darkness\u2014where was it, what was it? I must have stayed there so long.\"\u00a0<\/span><\/span>He could but wonder at the depth and the duration of his swoon.\r\n\r\n\"Since last night?\" she asked with a shade of fear for her possible indiscretion.\r\n\r\n\"Since this morning\u2014it must have been: the cold dim dawn of to-day. Where have I been,\" he vaguely wailed, \"where have I been? \"He felt her hold him close, and it was as if this helped him now to make in all security his mild moan. \"What a long dark day!\"\r\n\r\nAll in her tenderness she had waited a moment. \"In the cold dim dawn?\" she quavered.\r\n\r\nBut he had already gone on piecing together the parts of the whole prodigy. \"As I didn't turn up you came straight\u2014\u2014\u2014?\"\r\n\r\nShe barely cast about. \"I went first to your hotel\u2014where they told me of your absence. You had dined out last evening and hadn't been back since. But they appeared to know you had been at your club.\"\r\n\r\n\"So you had the idea of\u00a0this<\/i>\u2014\u2014\u2014?\"\r\n\r\n\"Of what?\" she asked in a moment.\r\n\r\n\"Well\u2014of what has happened.\"\r\n\r\n\" I believed at least you'd have been here. I've known, all along,\" she said, \"that you've been coming.\"\r\n\r\n\"'Known' it?\"\r\n\r\n\"Well, I've believed it. I said nothing to you after that talk we had a month ago\u2014but I felt sure. I knew you\u00a0would<\/i>,\" she declared.\r\n\r\n\"That I'd persist, you mean?\"\r\n\r\n\"That you'd see him.\"\r\n\r\n\"Ah but I didn't!\" cried Brydon with his long wail. \"There's somebody\u2014an awful beast; whom I brought, too horribly, to bay. But it's not me.\"\r\n\r\nAt this she bent over him again, and her eyes were in his eyes. \"No\u2014it's not you.\" And it was as if, while her face hovered, he might have made out in it,\u00a0<\/span><\/span>hadn't it been so near, some particular meaning blurred by a smile. \"No, thank heaven,\" she repeated\u2014\"it's not you! Of course it wasn't to have been.\"\r\n\r\n\" Ah but it\u00a0was<\/i>,\" he gently insisted. And he stared before him now as he had been staring for so many weeks. \"I was to have known myself.\"\r\n\r\n\"You couldn't!\" she returned consolingly. And then reverting, and as if to account further for what she had herself done, \"But it wasn't only\u00a0that<\/i>, that you hadn't been at home,\" she went on. \"I waited till the hour at which we had found Mrs. Muldoon that day of my going with you; and she arrived, as I've told you, while, failing to bring any one to the door, I lingered in my despair on the steps. After a little, if she hadn't come, by such a mercy, I should have found means to hunt her up. But it wasn't,\" said Alice Staverton, as if once more with her fine intention\u2014\"it wasn't only that.\"\r\n\r\nHis eyes, as he lay, turned back to her. \"What more then?\"\r\n\r\nShe met it, the wonder she had stirred. \"In the cold dim dawn, you say? Well, in the cold dim dawn of this morning I too saw you.\"\r\n\r\n\"Saw\u00a0me<\/i>\u2014\u2014\u2014?\"\r\n\r\n\"Saw\u00a0him<\/i>,\" said Alice Staverton. \"It must have been at the same moment.\"\r\n\r\nHe lay an instant taking it in\u2014as if he wished to be quite reasonable. \"At the same moment?\"\r\n\r\n\"Yes\u2014in my dream again, the same one I've named to you. He came back to me. Then I knew it for a sign. He had come to you.\"\r\n\r\nAt this Brydon raised himself; he had to see her better. She helped him when she understood his movement, and he sat up, steadying himself beside her there on the window-bench and with his right hand grasping her left. \"He<\/i>\u00a0didn't come to me.\"\r\n\r\n<\/span><\/span>\"You came to yourself,\" she beautifully smiled.\r\n\r\n\"Ah I've come to myself now\u2014thanks to you, dearest. But this brute, with his awful face\u2014this brute's a black stranger. He's none of\u00a0me<\/i>, even as I\u00a0might<\/i>\u00a0have been,\" Brydon sturdily declared.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1722\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"351\"]\"Richard Richard Mansfield from a production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, circa 1887-1900, photo by Henry Van der Weyde.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nBut she kept the clearness that was like the breath of infallibility. \"Isn't the whole point that you'd have been different?\"\r\n\r\nHe almost scowled for it. \"As different as\u00a0that<\/i>\u2014\u2014\u2014?\"\r\n\r\nHer look again was more beautiful to him than the things of this world. \"Haven't you exactly wanted to know\u00a0how<\/i>\u00a0different? So this morning,\" she said, \"you appeared to me.\"\r\n\r\n\"Like\u00a0him<\/i>?\"\r\n\r\n\"A black stranger!\"\r\n\r\n\"Then how did you know it was I?\"\r\n\r\n\"Because, as I told you weeks ago, my mind, my imagination, had worked so over what you might, what you mightn't have been\u2014to show you, you see, how I've thought of you. In the midst of that you came to me\u2014that my wonder might be answered. So I knew,\" she went on; \"and believed that, since the question held you too so fast, as you told me that day, you too would see for yourself. And when this morning I again saw I knew it would be because you had\u2014and also then, from the first moment, because you somehow wanted me.\u00a0He<\/i>\u00a0seemed to tell me of that. So why,\" she strangely smiled, \"shouldn't I like him?\"\r\n\r\nIt brought Spencer Brydon to his feet. \"You 'like' that horror?\"\r\n\r\n\"I\u00a0could<\/i>\u00a0have liked him. And to me,\" she said, \"he was no horror. I had accepted him.\"\r\n\r\n\"'Accepted'\u2014\u2014\u2014?\" Brydon oddly sounded.\r\n\r\n\"Before, for the interest of his difference\u2014yes. And as\u00a0I<\/i>\u00a0didn't disown him, as\u00a0I<\/i>\u00a0knew him\u2014which\u00a0<\/span><\/span>you at last, confronted with him in his difference, so cruelly didn't, my dear\u2014well, he must have been, you see, less dreadful to me. And it may have pleased him that I pitied him.\"\r\n\r\nShe was beside him on her feet, but still holding his hand\u2014still with her arm supporting him. But though it all brought for him thus a dim light, \"You 'pitied' him? \" he grudgingly, resentfully asked.\r\n\r\n\"He has been unhappy, he has been ravaged,\" she said.\r\n\r\n\"And haven't I been unhappy? Am not I\u2014you've only to look at me!\u2014ravaged?\"\r\n\r\n\"Ah I don't say I like him\u00a0better<\/i>,\" she granted after a thought. \"But he's grim, he's worn\u2014and things have happened to him. He doesn't make shift, for sight, with your charming monocle.\"\r\n\r\n\"No\"\u2014it struck Brydon: \"I couldn't have sported mine 'downtown.' They'd have [pb_glossary id=\"1678\"]guyed[\/pb_glossary] me there.\"\r\n\r\n\"His great convex [pb_glossary id=\"1679\"]pince-nez[\/pb_glossary]\u2014I saw it, I recognised the kind\u2014is for his poor ruined sight. And his poor right hand\u2014\u2014\u2014!\"\r\n\r\n\"Ah!\" Brydon winced\u2014whether for his proved identity or for his lost fingers. Then, \"He has a million a year,\" he lucidly added. \"But he hasn't you.\"\r\n\r\n\"And he isn't\u2014no, he isn't\u2014you<\/i>!\" she murmured as he drew her to his breast.\r\n\r\n \r\n
\r\n\r\nSource:\r\n

\"The Jolly Corner,\"<\/a> 1922, by Henry James. Pubic Domain, via Wikisource.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n ","rendered":"

I<\/h3>\n

“Every<\/span> one asks me what I ‘think’ of everything,” said Spencer Brydon; “and I make answer as I can\u2014begging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn’t matter to any of them really,” he went on, “for, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my ‘thoughts’ would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only myself.” He was talking to Miss Staverton, with whom for a couple of months now he had availed himself of every possible occasion to talk; this disposition and this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in fact presented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in the considerable array of rather unattenuated surprises attending his so strangely belated return to America. Everything was somehow a surprise; and that might be natural when one had so long and so consistently neglected everything, taken pains to give surprises so much margin for play. He had given them more than thirty years\u2014thirty-three, to be exact; and they now seemed to him to have organised their performance quite on the scale of that licence. He had been twenty-three on leaving New York\u2014he was fifty-six to-day: unless indeed he were to reckon as he had sometimes, since his repatriation<\/a>, found himself feeling; in which case he would have lived longer <\/span><\/span>than is often allotted to man. It would have taken a century, he repeatedly said to himself, and said also to Alice Staverton, it would have taken a longer absence and a more averted mind than those even of which he had been guilty, to pile up the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the bignesses, for the better or the worse, that at present assaulted his vision wherever he looked.<\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The great fact all the while however had been the incalculability; since he\u00a0had<\/i>\u00a0supposed himself, from decade to decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change. He actually saw that he had allowed for nothing; he missed what he would have been sure of finding, he found what he would never have imagined. Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected, the ugly things of his far-away youth, when he had too promptly waked up to a sense of the ugly\u2014these uncanny phenomena placed him rather, as it happened, under the charm; whereas the “swagger” things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous inquirers every year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay. They were as so many set traps for displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring. It was interesting, doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been too disconcerting hadn’t a certain finer truth saved the situation. He had distinctly not, in this steadier light, come over\u00a0all<\/i>\u00a0for the monstrosities; he had come, not only in the last analysis but quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with which they had nothing to do. He had come\u2014putting the thing pompously\u2014to look at his “property,” which he had thus for a third of a century not been within four thousand miles of; or, expressing it less sordidly<\/a>,\u00a0<\/span><\/span>he had yielded to the humour of seeing again his house on the jolly corner, as he usually, and quite fondly, described it\u2014the one in which he had first seen the light, in which various members of his family had lived and had died, in which the holidays of his overschooled boyhood had been passed and the few social flowers of his chilled adolescence gathered, and which, alienated then for so long a period, had, through the successive deaths of his two brothers and the termination of old arrangements, come wholly into his hands. He was the owner of another, not quite so “good”\u2014the jolly corner having been, from far back, superlatively extended and consecrated; and the value of the pair represented his main capital, with an income consisting, in these later years, of their respective rents which (thanks precisely to their original excellent type) had never been depressingly low. He could live in “Europe,” as he had been in the habit of living, on the product of these flourishing New York leases, and all the better since, that of the second structure, the mere number in its long row, having within a twelvemonth fallen in, renovation at a high advance had proved beautifully possible.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Three
“Three ironworkers on girder with steam and rooftops in background, New York City,” 1904, by Thornton Oakley.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

These were items of property indeed, but he had found himself since his arrival distinguishing more than ever between them. The house within the street, two bristling blocks westward, was already in course of reconstruction as a tall mass of flats; he had acceded, some time before, to overtures for this conversion\u2014in which, now that it was going forward, it had been not the least of his astonishments to find himself able, on the spot, and though without a previous ounce of such experience, to participate with a certain intelligence, almost with a certain authority. He had lived his life with his back so turned to such concerns and his face addressed to those of so different an order that he scarce knew what to make of this <\/span><\/span>lively stir, in a compartment of his mind never yet penetrated, of a capacity for business and a sense for construction. These virtues, so common all round him now, had been dormant in his own organism\u2014where it might be said of them perhaps that they had slept the sleep of the just. At present, in the splendid autumn weather\u2014the autumn at least was a pure boon in the terrible place\u2014he loafed about his “work” undeterred, secretly agitated; not in the least “minding” that the whole proposition, as they said, was vulgar and sordid, and ready to climb ladders, to walk the plank, to handle materials and look wise about them, to ask questions, in fine, and challenge explanations and really “go into” figures.<\/p>\n

\"Impressionist
“Indian Summer in Madison Square,” 1892, by Childe Hassam.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It amused, it verily quite charmed him; and, by the same stroke, it amused, and even more, Alice Staverton, though perhaps charming her perceptibly less. She wasn’t however going to be better-off for it, as\u00a0he<\/i>\u00a0was\u2014and so astonishingly much. Nothing was now likely, he knew, ever to make her better-off than she found herself, in the afternoon of life, as the delicately frugal possessor and tenant of the small house in Irving Place to which she had subtly managed to cling through her almost unbroken New York career. If he knew the way to it now better than to any other address among the dreadful multiplied numberings which seemed to him to reduce the whole place to some vast ledger-page, overgrown, fantastic, of ruled and criss-crossed lines and figures\u2014if he had formed, for his consolation, that habit, it was really not a little because of the charm of his having encountered and recognised, in the vast wilderness of the wholesale, breaking through the mere gross generalisation of wealth and force and success, a small still scene where items and shades, all delicate things, kept the sharpness of the notes of a high voice\u00a0<\/span><\/span>perfectly trained, and where economy hung about like the scent of a garden. His old friend lived with one maid and herself dusted her relics and trimmed her lamps and polished her silver; she stood off, in the awful modern crush, when she could, but she sallied forth and did battle when the challenge was really to “spirit,” the spirit she after all confessed to, proudly and a little shyly, as to that of the better time, that of\u00a0their<\/i>\u00a0common, their quite far-away and antediluvian<\/a> social period and order. She made use of the streetcars<\/a> when need be, the terrible things that people scrambled for as the panic-stricken at sea scramble for the boats; she affronted, inscrutably, under stress, all the public concussions and ordeals; and yet, with that slim mystifying grace of her appearance, which defied you to say if she were a fair young woman who looked older through trouble, or a fine smooth older one who looked young through successful indifference; with her precious reference, above all, to memories and histories into which he could enter, she was as exquisite for him as some pale pressed flower (a rarity to begin with), and, failing other sweetnesses, she was a sufficient reward of his effort. They had communities of knowledge, “their” knowledge (this discriminating possessive was always on her lips) of presences of the other age, presences all overlaid, in his case, by the experience of a man and the freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity, by passages of life that were strange and dim to her, just by “Europe” in short, but still unobscured, still exposed and cherished, under that pious visitation of the spirit from which she had never been diverted.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Silver
“South-west corner of Irving Place and Sixteenth Street 1909,” New-York Historical Society Library.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

She had come with him one day to see how his “apartment-house” was rising; he had helped her over gaps and explained to her plans, and while they were there had happened to have, before her, a brief but lively discussion with the man in charge, the\u00a0<\/span><\/span>representative of the building-firm that had undertaken his work. He had found himself quite “standing-up” to this personage over a failure on the latter’s part to observe some detail of one of their noted conditions, and had so lucidly argued his case that, besides ever so prettily flushing, at the time, for sympathy in his triumph, she had afterwards said to him (though to a slightly greater effect of irony) that he had clearly for too many years neglected a real gift. If he had but stayed at home he would have anticipated the inventor of the sky-scraper. If he had but stayed at home he would have discovered his genius in time really to start some new variety of awful architectural hare and run it till it burrowed in a gold-mine. He was to remember these words, while the weeks elapsed, for the small silver ring they had sounded over the queerest and deepest of his own lately most disguised and most muffled vibrations.<\/p>\n

It had begun to be present to him after the first fortnight<\/a>, it had broken out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton<\/a> wonderment: it met him there\u2014and this was the image under which he himself judged the matter, or at least, not a little, thrilled and flushed with it\u2014very much as he might have been met by some strange figure, some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house. The quaint analogy quite hauntingly remained with him, when he didn’t indeed rather improve it by a still intenser form: that of his opening a door behind which he would have made sure of finding nothing, a door into a room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed start, on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk. After that visit to the house in construction he walked with his companion to see the other and always so much the better one, which in\u00a0<\/span><\/span>the eastward direction formed one of the comers, the “jolly” one precisely, of the street now so generally dishonoured and disfigured in its westward reaches, and of the comparatively conservative Avenue. The Avenue still had pretensions, as Miss Staverton said, to decency; the old people had mostly gone, the old names were unknown, and here and there an old association seemed to stray, all vaguely, like some very aged person, out too late, whom you might meet and feel the impilse to watch or follow, in kindness, for safe restoration to shelter.<\/p>\n

They went in together, our friends; he admitted himself with his key, as he kept no one there, he explained, preferring, for his reasons, to leave the place empty, under a simple arrangement with a good woman living in the neighbourhood and who came for a daily hour to open windows and dust and sweep. Spencer Brydon had his reasons and was growingly aware of them; they seemed to him better each time he was there, though he didn’t name them all to his companion, any more than he told her as yet how often, how quite absurdly often, he himself came. He only let her see for the present, while they walked through the great blank rooms, that absolute vacancy reigned and that, from top to bottom, there was nothing but Mrs. Muldoon’s broomstick, in a corner, to tempt the burglar. Mrs. Muldoon was then on the premises, and she loquaciously attended the visitors, preceding them from room to room and pushing back shutters and throwing up sashes\u2014all to show them, as she remarked, how little there was to see. There was little indeed to see in the great gaunt shell where the main dispositions and the general apportionment of space, the style of an age of ampler allowances, had nevertheless for its master their honest pleading message, affecting him as some good old servant’s, some lifelong retainer’s appeal for a\u00a0<\/span><\/span>character, or even for a retiring-pension; yet it was also a remark of Mrs. Muldoon’s that, glad as she was to oblige him by her noonday round, there was a request she greatly hoped he would never make of her. If he should wish her for any reason to come in after dark she would just tell him, if he “plased,” that he must ask it of somebody else.<\/p>\n

The fact that there was nothing to see didn’t militate<\/a> for the worthy woman against what one\u00a0might<\/i>\u00a0see, and she put it frankly to Miss Staverton that no lady could be expected to like, could she? “craping up to thim top storeys in the ayvil hours.” The gas and the electric light were off the house, and she fairly evoked a gruesome vision of her march through the great grey rooms\u2014so many of them as there were too!\u2014with her glimmering taper<\/a>. Miss Staverton met her honest glare with a smile and the profession that she herself certainly would recoil from such an adventure. Spencer Brydon meanwhile held his peace\u2014for the moment; the question of the “evil” hours in his old home had already become too grave for him. He had begun some time since to “crape,” and he knew just why a packet of candles addressed to that pursuit had been stowed by his own hand, three weeks before, at the back of a drawer of the fine old sideboard<\/a> that occupied, as a “fixture,” the deep recess in the dining-room. Just now he laughed at his companions\u2014quickly however changing the subject; for the reason that, in the first place, this laugh struck him even at that moment as starting the odd echo, the conscious human resonance (he scarce knew how to qualify it) that sounds made while he was there alone sent back to his ear or his fancy; and that, in the second, he imagined Alice Staverton for the instant on the point of asking him, with a divination, if he ever so prowled. There were divinations he was unprepared for, and he had at all events averted <\/span><\/span>inquiry by the time Mrs. Muldoon had left them, passing on to other parts.<\/p>\n

There was happily enough to say, on so consecrated a spot, that could be said freely and fairly; so that a whole train of declarations was precipitated by his friend’s having herself broken out, after a yearning look round: “But I hope you don’t mean they want you to pull\u00a0this<\/i>\u00a0to pieces!” His answer came, promptly, with his reawakened wrath: it was of course exactly what they wanted, and what they were “at” him for, daily, with the iteration of people who couldn’t for their life understand a man’s liability to decent feelings. He had found the place, just as it stood and beyond what he could express, an interest and a joy. There were values other than the beastly rent-values, and in short, in short\u2014\u2014\u2014! But it was thus Miss Staverton took him up. “In short you’re to make so good a thing of your sky-scraper that, living in luxury on\u00a0those<\/i> ill-gotten gains, you can afford for a while to be sentimental here!” Her smile had for him, with the words, the particular mild irony with which he found half her talk suffused; an irony without bitterness and that came, exactly, from her having so much imagination\u2014not, like the cheap sarcasms with which one heard most people, about the world of “society,” bid for the reputation of cleverness, from nobody’s really having any. It was agreeable to him at this very moment to be sure that when he had answered, after a brief demur<\/a>, “Well yes: so, precisely, you may put it!” her imagination would still do him justice. He explained that even if never a dollar were to come to him from the other house he would nevertheless cherish this one; and he dwelt, further, while they lingered and wandered, on the fact of the stupefaction he was already exciting, the positive mystification he felt himself create.<\/p>\n

He spoke of the value of all he read into it, into the\u00a0<\/span><\/span>mere sight of the walls, mere shapes of the rooms, mere sound of the floors, mere feel, in his hand, of the old silver-plated knobs of the several mahogany doors, which suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead; the seventy years of the past in fine that these things represented, the annals of nearly three generations, counting his grandfather’s, the one that had ended there, and the impalpable ashes of his long-extinct youth, afloat in the very air like microscopic motes. She listened to everything; she was a woman who answered intimately but who utterly didn’t chatter. She scattered abroad therefore no cloud of words; she could assent, she could agree, above all she could encourage, without doing that. Only at the last she went a little further than he had done himself. “And then how do you know? You may still, after all, want to live here.” It rather indeed pulled him up, for it wasn’t what he had been thinking, at least in her sense of the words. “You mean I may decide to stay on for the sake of it?”<\/p>\n

“Well,\u00a0with<\/i>\u00a0such a home\u2014\u2014\u2014!” But, quite beautifully, she had too much tact to dot so monstrous an\u00a0i<\/i>, and it was precisely an illustration of the way she didn’t rattle. How could any one\u2014of any wit\u2014insist on any one else’s “wanting” to live in New York?<\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

“Oh,” he said, “I might<\/i>\u00a0have lived here (since I had my opportunity early in life); I might have put in here all these years. Then everything would have been different enough\u2014and, I daresay, ‘funny’ enough. But that’s another matter. And then the beauty of it\u2014I mean of my perversity, of my refusal to agree to a ‘deal’\u2014is just in the total absence of a reason. Don’t you see that if I had a reason about the matter at all it would\u00a0have<\/i>\u00a0to be the other way, and would then be inevitably a reason of dollars? There are no reasons here\u00a0but<\/i>\u00a0of dollars. Let us therefore have none whatever\u2014not the ghost of one.”<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span>They were back in the hall then for departure, but from where they stood the vista was large, through an open door, into the great square main saloon, with its almost antique felicity of brave spaces between windows. Her eyes came back from that reach and met his own a moment. “Are you very sure the ‘ghost’ of one doesn’t, much rather, serve\u2014\u2014\u2014?”<\/p>\n

He had a positive sense of turning pale. But it was as near as they were then to come. For he made answer, he believed, between a glare and a grin: “Oh ghosts\u2014of course the place must swarm with them! I should be ashamed of it if it didn’t. Poor Mrs. Muldoon’s right, and it’s why I haven’t asked her to do more than look in.”<\/p>\n

Miss Staverton’s gaze again lost itself, and things, she didn’t utter, it was clear, came and went in her mind. She might even for the minute, off there in the fine room, have imagined some element dimly gathering. Simplified like the death-mask<\/a> of a handsome face, it perhaps produced for her just then an effect akin to the stir of an expression in the “set” commemorative plaster. Yet whatever her impression may have been she produced instead a vague platitude. “Well, if it were only furnished and lived in\u2014\u2014\u2014!”<\/p>\n

She appeared to imply that in case of its being still furnished he might have been a little less opposed to the idea of a return. But she passed straight into the vestibule, as if to leave her words behind her, and the next moment he had opened the house-door and was standing with her on the steps. He closed the door and, while he re-pocketed his key, looking up and down, they took in the comparatively harsh actuality of the Avenue, which reminded him of the assault of the outer light of the Desert on the traveller emerging from an Egyptian tomb. But he risked before they stepped into the street his gathered answer to her\u00a0<\/span><\/span>speech. “For me it\u00a0is<\/i>\u00a0lived in. For me it\u00a0is<\/i>\u00a0furnished.” At which it was easy for her to sigh “Ah yes\u2014\u2014\u2014!” all vaguely and discreetly: since his parents and his favourite sister, to say nothing of other kin, in numbers, had run their course and met their end there. That represented, within the walls, ineffaceable<\/a> life.<\/p>\n

It was a few days after this that, during an hour passed with her again, he had expressed his impatience of the too flattering curiosity\u2014among the people he met\u2014about his appreciation of New York. He had arrived at none at all that was socially producible, and as for that matter of his “thinking” (thinking the better or the worse of anything there) he has wholly taken up with one subject of thought. It was mere vain egoism, and it was moreover, if she liked, morbid obsession. He found all things come back to the question of what he personally might have been, how he might have led his life and “turned out,” if he had not so, at the outset, given it up. And confessing for the first time to the intensity within him of his absurd speculation\u2014which but proved also, no doubt, the habit of too selfishly thinking\u2014he affirmed the impotence there of any other source of interest, any other native appeal. “What would it have made of me, what would it have made of me? I keep for ever wondering, all idiotically; as if I could possibly know! I see what it has made of dozens of others, those I meet, and it positively aches within me, to the point of exasperation, that it would have made something of me as well. Only I can’t make out what, and the worry of it, the small rage of curiosity never to be satisfied, brings back what I remember to have felt, once or twice, after judging best, for reasons, to burn some important letter unopened. I’ve been sorry, I’ve hated it\u2014I’ve never known what was in the letter. You may of course say it’s a trifle\u2014\u2014\u2014!”<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span>“I don’t say it’s a trifle,” Miss Staverton gravely interrupted.<\/p>\n

She was seated by her fire, and before her, on his feet and restless, he turned to and fro between this intensity of his idea and a fitful and unseeing inspection, through his single eye-glass, of the dear little old objects on her chimney-piece. Her interruption made him for an instant look at her harder. “I shouldn’t care if you did!” he laughed, however; “and it’s only a figure, at any rate, for the way I now feel.\u00a0Not<\/i>\u00a0to have followed my perverse young course\u2014and almost in the teeth of my father’s curse, as I may say; not to have kept it up, so, ‘over there,’ from that day to this, without a doubt or a pang; not, above all, to have liked it, to have loved it, so much, loved it, no doubt, with such an abysmal conceit of my own preference: some variation from\u00a0that<\/i>, I say, must have produced some different effect for my life and for my ‘form.’ I should have stuck here\u2014if it had been possible; and I was too young, at twenty-three, to judge, pour deux sous<\/a><\/i>, whether it\u00a0were<\/i>\u00a0possible. If I had waited I might have seen it was, and then I might have been, by staying here, something nearer to one of these types who have been hammered so hard and made so keen by their conditions. It isn’t that I admire them so much\u2014the question of any charm in them, or of any charm, beyond that of the rank money-passion, exerted by their conditions\u00a0for<\/i>\u00a0them, has nothing to do with the matter: it’s only a question of what fantastic, yet perfectly possible, development of my own nature I mayn’t have missed. It comes over me that I had then a strange\u00a0alter ego<\/i>\u00a0deep down somewhere within me, as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud, and that I just took the course, I just transferred him to the climate, that blighted him for once and for ever.”<\/p>\n

“And you wonder about the flower,” Miss Staverton\u00a0<\/span><\/span>said. ” So do I, if you want to know; and so I’ve been wondering these several weeks. I believe in the flower,” she continued, “I feel it would have been quite splendid, quite huge and monstrous.”<\/p>\n

“Monstrous above all!” her visitor echoed; “and I imagine, by the same stroke, quite hideous and offensive.”<\/p>\n

“You don’t believe that,” she returned; “if you did you wouldn’t wonder. You’d know, and that would be enough for you. What you feel\u2014and what I feel\u00a0for<\/i>\u00a0you\u2014is that you’d have had power.”<\/p>\n

“You’d have liked me that way?” he asked.<\/p>\n

She barely hung fire<\/a>. “How should I not have liked you?”<\/p>\n

“I see. You’d have liked me, have preferred me, a billionaire!”<\/p>\n

“How should I not have liked you?” she simply again asked.<\/p>\n

He stood before her still\u2014her question kept him motionless. He took it in, so much there was of it; and indeed his not otherwise meeting it testified to that. “I know at least what I am,” he simply went on; “the other side of the medal's<\/a> clear enough. I’ve not been edifying<\/a>\u2014I believe I’m thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent. I’ve followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods; it must have come to you again and again\u2014in fact you’ve admitted to me as much\u2014that I was leading, at any time these thirty years, a selfish frivolous scandalous life. And you see what it has made of me.”<\/p>\n

She just waited, smiling at him. “You see what it has made of\u00a0me<\/i>.”<\/p>\n

“Oh you’re a person whom nothing can have altered. You were born to be what you are, anywhere, anyway: you’ve the perfection nothing else could have blighted. And don’t you see how, without my exile, I\u00a0<\/span><\/span>shouldn’t have been waiting till now\u2014\u2014\u2014?” But he pulled up for the strange pang.<\/p>\n

“The great thing to see,” she presently said, “seems to me to be that it has spoiled nothing. It hasn’t spoiled your being here at last. It hasn’t spoiled this. It hasn’t spoiled your speaking\u2014\u2014\u2014” She also however faltered.<\/p>\n

He wondered at everything her controlled emotion might mean. “Do you believe then\u2014too dreadfully!\u2014that I\u00a0am<\/i>\u00a0as good as I might ever have been?”<\/p>\n

“Oh no! Far from it!” With which she got up from her chair and was nearer to him. “But I don’t care,” she smiled.<\/p>\n

“You mean I’m good enough?”<\/p>\n

She considered a little. “Will you believe it if I say so? I mean will you let that settle your question for you?” And then as if making out in his face that he drew back from this, that he had some idea which, however absurd, he couldn’t yet bargain away: “Oh you don’t care either\u2014but very differently: you don’t care for anything but yourself.”<\/p>\n

Spencer Brydon recognised it\u2014it was in fact what he had absolutely professed. Yet he importantly qualified.\u2014”He<\/i>\u00a0isn’t myself. He’s the just so totally other person. But I do want to see him,” he added. “And I can. And I shall.”<\/p>\n

Their eyes met for a minute while he guessed from something in hers that she divined his strange sense. But neither of them otherwise expressed it, and her apparent understanding, with no protesting shock, no easy derision, touched him more deeply than anything yet, constituting for his stifled perversity, on the spot, an element that was like breatheable air. What she said however was unexpected. ” Well,\u00a0I’ve<\/i>\u00a0seen him.”<\/p>\n

“You\u2014\u2014\u2014?”<\/p>\n

“I’ve seen him in a dream.”<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span>“Oh a ‘dream’\u2014\u2014\u2014!” It let him down.<\/p>\n

“But twice over,” she continued. “I saw him as I see you now.”<\/p>\n

“You’ve dreamed the same dream\u2014\u2014\u2014?”<\/p>\n

“Twice over,” she repeated. “The very same.”<\/p>\n

This did somehow a little speak to him, as it also gratified him. “You dream about me at that rate?”<\/p>\n

“Ah about\u00a0him<\/i>!” she smiled.<\/p>\n

His eyes again sounded her. “Then you know all about him.” And as she said nothing more: “What’s the wretch like?”<\/p>\n

She hesitated, and it was as if he were pressing her so hard that, resisting for reasons of her own, she had to turn away. “I’ll tell you some other time!”<\/p>\n

\n

II<\/h3>\n
\"Print
“Rogers’ house, no. 7 State Street,” 1908, by Charles Frederick William Mielatz.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It was after this that there was most of a virtue for him, most of a cultivated charm, most of a preposterous secret thrill, in the particular form of surrender to his obsession and of address to what he more and more believed to be his privilege. It was what in these weeks he was living for\u2014since he really felt life to begin but after Mrs. Muldoon had retired from the scene and, visiting the ample house from attic to cellar, making sure he was alone, he knew himself in safe possession and, as he tacitly expressed it, let himself go. He sometimes came twice in the twenty-four hours; the moments he liked best were those of gathering dusk, of the short autumn twilight; this was the time of which, again and again, he found himself hoping most. Then he could, as seemed to him, most intimately wander and wait, linger and listen, feel his fine attention, never in his life before so fine, on the pulse of the great vague place: he preferred the lampless hour and only wished he might have prolonged each day the deep crepuscular<\/a> spell. Later\u2014rarely much before midnight, but then for a considerable vigil\u2014he watched with his glimmering light; moving slowly, holding it high, playing it far, rejoicing above all, as much as he might, in open vistas<\/a>, reaches of communication between rooms and by passages; the long straight chance or show, as he would have called it, for the revelation he pretended to invite. It was\u00a0<\/span><\/span>a practice he found he could perfectly “work” without exciting remark; no one was in the least the wiser for it; even Alice Staverton, who was moreover a well of discretion, didn’t quite fully imagine.<\/p>\n

He let himself in and let himself out with the assurance of calm proprietorship; and accident so far favoured him that, if a fat Avenue “officer” had happened on occasion to see him entering at eleven-thirty, he had never yet, to the best of his belief, been noticed as emerging at two. He walked there on the crisp November nights, arrived regularly at the evening’s end; it was as easy to do this after dining out as to take his way to a club<\/a> or to his hotel. When he left his club, if he hadn’t been dining out, it was ostensibly to go to his hotel; and when he left his hotel, if he had spent a part of the evening there, it was ostensibly to go to his club. Everything was easy in fine; everything conspired and promoted: there was truly even in the strain of his experience something that glossed over, something that salved and simplified, all the rest of consciousness. He circulated, talked, renewed, loosely and pleasantly, old relations\u2014met indeed, so far as he could, new expectations and seemed to make out on the whole that in spite of the career, of such different contacts, which he had spoken of to Miss Staverton as ministering so little, for those who might have watched it, to edification<\/a>, he was positively rather liked than not. He was a dim secondary social success\u2014and all with people who had truly not an idea of him. It was all mere surface sound, this murmur of their welcome, this popping of their corks\u2014just as his gestures of response were the extravagant shadows, emphatic in proportion as they meant little, of some game of\u00a0ombres chinoises<\/a><\/i>. He projected himself all day, in thought, straight over the bristling line of hard unconscious heads and into the other, the real, the waiting life; the life\u00a0<\/span><\/span>that, as soon as he had heard behind him the click of his great house-door, began for him, on the jolly corner, as beguilingly as the slow opening bars of some rich music follows the tap of the conductor’s wand.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Impressionist
Fifth Avenue Nocturne,” 1895, by Childe Hassam.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick on the old marble of the hall pavement, large black-and-white squares that he remembered as the admiration of his childhood and that had then made in him, as he now saw, for the growth of an early conception of style. This effect was the dim reverberating tinkle as of some far-off bell hung who should say where?\u2014in the depths of the house, of the past, of that mystical other world that might have flourished for him had he not, for weal<\/a> or woe, abandoned it. On this impression he did ever the same thing; he put his stick noiselessly away in a corner\u2014feeling the place once more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round its edge. The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical other world, and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear, of all the old baffled forsworn possibilities. What he did therefore by this appeal of his hushed presence was to wake them into such measure of ghostly life as they might still enjoy. They were shy, all but unappeasably shy, but they weren’t really sinister; at least they weren’t as he had hitherto<\/a> felt them\u2014before they had taken the Form he so yearned to make them take, the Form he at moments saw himself in the light of fairly hunting on tiptoe, the points of his evening-shoes, from room to room and from storey to storey.<\/p>\n

That was the essence of his vision\u2014which was all rank folly, if one would, while he was out of the house and otherwise occupied, but which took on the last\u00a0<\/span><\/span>verisimilitude<\/a> as soon as he was placed and posted. He knew what he meant and what he wanted; it was as clear as the figure on a cheque presented in demand for cash. His\u00a0alter<\/i>\u00a0ego “walked”\u2014that was the note of his image of him, while his image of his motive for his own odd pastime was the desire to waylay him and meet him. He roamed, slowly, warily, but all restlessly, he himself did\u2014Mrs. Muldoon had been right, absolutely, with her figure of their “craping”; and the presence he watched for would roam restlessly too. But it would be as cautious and as shifty; the conviction of its probable, in fact its already quite sensible, quite audible evasion of pursuit grew for him from night to night, laying on him finally a rigour to which nothing in his life had been comparable. It had been the theory of many superficially-judging persons, he knew, that he was wasting that life in a surrender to sensations, but he had tasted of no pleasure so fine as his actual tension, had been introduced to no sport that demanded at once the patience and the nerve of this stalking of a creature more subtle, yet at bay perhaps more formidable, than any beast of the forest. The terms, the comparisons, the very practices of the chase positively came again into play; there were even moments when passages of his occasional experience as a sportsman, stirred memories, from his younger time, of moor and mountain and desert, revived for him\u2014and to the increase of his keenness\u2014by the tremendous force of analogy. He found himself at moments\u2014once he had placed his single light on some mantel-shelf or in some recess\u2014stepping back into shelter or shade, effacing himself behind a door or in an embrasure<\/a>, as he had sought of old the vantage of rock and tree; he found himself holding his breath and living in the joy of the instant, the supreme suspense created by big game alone.<\/p>\n

He wasn’t afraid (though putting himself the\u00a0<\/span><\/span>question as he believed gentlemen on Bengal tigershoots or in close quarters with the great bear of the Rockies had been known to confess to having put it); and this indeed\u2014since here at least he might be frank!\u2014because of the impression, so intimate and so strange, that he himself produced as yet a dread, produced certainly a strain, beyond the liveliest he was likely to feel. They fell for him into categories, they fairly became familiar, the signs, for his own perception, of the alarm his presence and his vigilance created; though leaving him always to remark, portentously<\/a>, on his probably having formed a relation, his probably enjoying a consciousness, unique in the experience of man. People enough, first and last, had been in terror of apparitions, but who had ever before so turned the tables and become himself, in the apparitional world, an incalculable terror? He might have found this sublime had he quite dared to think of it; but he didn’t too much insist, truly, on that side of his privilege. With habit and repetition he gained to an extraordinary degree the power to penetrate the dusk of distances and the darkness of corners, to resolve back into their innocence the treacheries of uncertain light, the evil-looking forms taken in the gloom by mere shadows, by accidents of the air, by shifting effects of perspective; putting down his dim luminary he could still wander on without it, pass into other rooms and, only knowing it was there behind him in case of need, see his way about, visually project for his purpose a comparative clearness. It made him feel, this acquired faculty, like some monstrous stealthy cat; he wondered if he would have glared at these moments with large shining yellow eyes, and what it mightn’t verily<\/a> be, for the poor hard-pressed alter ego<\/i>, to be confronted with such a type.<\/p>\n

He liked however the open shutters; he opened everywhere those Mrs. Muldoon had closed, closing\u00a0<\/span><\/span>them as carefully afterwards, so that she shouldn’t notice: he liked\u2014oh this he did like, and above all in the upper rooms!\u2014the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars through the window-panes, and scarcely less the flare of the street-lamps below, the white electric lustre which it would have taken curtains to keep out. This was human actual social; this was of the world he had lived in, and he was more at his ease certainly for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal, that all the while and in spite of his detachment it seemed to give him. He had support of course mostly in the rooms at the wide front and the prolonged side; it failed him considerably in the central shades and the parts at the back. But if he sometimes, on his rounds, was glad of his optical reach, so none the less often the rear of the house affected him as the very jungle of his prey. The place was there more subdivided; a large “extension” in particular, where small rooms for servants had been multiplied, abounded in nooks and corners, in closets and passages, in the ramifications especially of an ample back staircase over which he leaned, many a time, to look far down\u2014not deterred from his gravity even while aware that he might, for a spectator, have figured some solemn simpleton<\/a> playing at hide-and-seek. Outside in fact he might himself make that ironic\u00a0rapprochement<\/a><\/i>; but within the walls, and in spite of the clear windows, his consistency was proof against the cynical light of New York.<\/p>\n

\"Hall
Hall and stairway, Mt. Vernon Mansion, 1883, photo by Luke C. Dillon.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It had belonged to that idea of the exasperated consciousness of his victim to become a real test for him; since he had quite put it to himself from the first that, oh distinctly! he could “cultivate” his whole perception. He had felt it as above all open to cultivation\u2014which indeed was but another name for his manner of spending his time. He was bringing it on, bringing it to perfection, by practice; in <\/span><\/span>consequence of which it had grown so fine that he was now aware of impressions, attestations of his general postulate<\/a>, that couldn’t have broken upon him at once. This was the case more specifically with a phenomenon at last quite frequent for him in the upper rooms, the recognition\u2014absolutely unmistakable, and by a turn dating from a particular hour, his resumption of his campaign after a diplomatic drop, a calculated absence of three nights\u2014of his being definitely followed, tracked at a distance carefully taken and to the express end that he should the less confidently, less arrogantly, appear to himself merely to pursue. It worried, it finally broke him up, for it proved, of all the conceivable impressions, the one least suited to his book. He was kept in sight while remaining himself\u2014as regards the essence of his position\u2014sightless, and his only recourse then was in abrupt turns, rapid recoveries of ground. He wheeled about, retracing his steps, as if he might so catch in his face at least the stirred air of some other quick revolution. It was indeed true that his fully dislocalised thought of these man\u0153uvres recalled to him Pantaloon<\/a>, at the Christmas farce, buffeted and tricked from behind by ubiquitous Harlequin; but it left intact the influence of the conditions themselves each time he was re-exposed to them, so that in fact this association, had he suffered it to become constant, would on a certain side have but ministered to his intenser gravity. He had made, as I have said, to create on the premises the baseless sense of a reprieve, his three absences; and the result of the third was to confirm the after-effect of the second.<\/p>\n

On his return, that night\u2014the night succeeding his last intermission\u2014he stood in the hall and looked up the staircase with a certainty more intimate than any he had yet known. “He’s\u00a0there<\/i>, at the top, and waiting\u2014not, as in general, falling back for\u00a0<\/span><\/span>disappearance. He’s holding his ground, and it’s the first time\u2014which is a proof, isn’t it? that something has happened for him.” So Brydon argued with his hand on the banister and his foot on the lowest stair; in which position he felt as never before the air chilled by his logic. He himself turned cold in it, for he seemed of a sudden to know what now was involved. “Harder pressed?\u2014yes, he takes it in, with its thus making clear to him that I’ve come, as they say, ‘to stay.’ He finally doesn’t like and can’t bear it, in the sense, I mean, that his wrath, his menaced interest, now balances with his dread. I’ve hunted him till he has ‘turned’: that, up there, is what has happened\u2014he’s the fanged or the antlered animal brought at last to bay<\/a>.” There came to him, as I say\u2014but determined by an influence beyond my notation!\u2014the acuteness of this certainty; under which, however, the next moment he had broken into a sweat that he would as little have consented to attribute to fear as he would have dared immediately to act upon it for enterprise. It marked none the less a prodigious thrill, a thrill that represented sudden dismay, no doubt, but also represented, and with the selfsame throb, the strangest, the most joyous, possibly the next minute almost the proudest, duplication of consciousness.<\/p>\n

“He has been dodging, retreating, hiding, but now, worked up to anger, he’ll fight!”\u2014this intense impression made a single mouthful, as it were, of terror and applause. But what was wondrous was that the applause, for the felt fact, was so eager, since, if it was his other self he was running to earth, this ineffable identity was thus in the last resort not unworthy of him. It bristled there\u2014somewhere near at hand, however unseen still\u2014as the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm of the adage<\/a>\u00a0must<\/i>\u00a0at last bristle; and Brydon at this instant tasted probably of a\u00a0<\/span><\/span>sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity. It was as if it would have shamed him that a character so associated with his own should triumphantly succeed in just skulking, should to the end not risk the open; so that the drop of this danger was, on the spot, a great lift of the whole situation. Yet with another rare shift of the same subtlety he was already trying to measure by how much more he himself might now be in peril of fear; so rejoicing that he could, in another form, actively inspire that fear, and simultaneously quaking for the form in which he might passively know it.<\/p>\n

The apprehension of knowing it must after a little have grown in him, and the strangest moment of his adventure perhaps, the most memorable or really most interesting, afterwards, of his crisis, was the lapse of certain instants of concentrated conscious\u00a0combat<\/i>, the sense of a need to hold on to something, even after the manner of a man slipping and slipping on some awful incline; the vivid impulse, above all, to move, to act, to charge, somehow and upon something\u2014to show himself, in a word, that he wasn’t afraid. The state of “holding-on” was thus the state to which he was momentarily reduced; if there had been anything, in the great vacancy, to seize, he would presently have been aware of having clutched it as he might under a shock at home have clutched the nearest chair-back. He had been surprised at any rate\u2014of this he\u00a0was<\/i>\u00a0aware\u2014into something unprecedented since his original appropriation of the place; he had closed his eyes, held them tight, for a long minute, as with that instinct of dismay and that terror of vision. When he opened them the room, the other contiguous<\/a> rooms, extraordinarily, seemed lighter\u2014so light, almost, that at first he took the change for day. He stood firm, however that might be, just where he had paused; his resistance had\u00a0<\/span><\/span>helped him\u2014it was as if there were something he had tided over. He knew after a little what this was\u2014it had been in the imminent danger of flight. He had stiffened his will against going; without this he would have made for the stairs, and it seemed to him that, still with his eyes closed, he would have descended them, would have known how, straight and swiftly, to the bottom.<\/p>\n

Well, as he had held out, here he was\u2014still at the top, among the more intricate upper rooms and with the gauntlet of the others, of all the rest of the house, still to run when it should be his time to go. He would go at his time\u2014only at his time: didn’t he go every night very much at the same hour? He took out his watch\u2014there was light for that: it was scarcely a quarter past one, and he had never withdrawn so soon. He reached his lodgings for the most part at two\u2014with his walk of a quarter of an hour. He would wait for the last quarter\u2014he wouldn’t stir till then; and he kept his watch there with his eyes on it, reflecting while he held it that this deliberate wait, a wait with an effort, which he recognised, would serve perfectly for the attestation he desired to make. It would prove his courage\u2014unless indeed the latter might most be proved by his budging at last from his place. What he mainly felt now was that, since he hadn’t originally scuttled, he had his dignities\u2014which had never in his life seemed so many\u2014all to preserve and to carry aloft. This was before him in truth as a physical image, an image almost worthy of an age of greater romance. That remark indeed glimmered for him only to glow the next instant with a finer light; since what age of romance, after all, could have matched either the state of his mind or, “objectively,” as they said, the wonder of his situation? The only difference would have been that, brandishing his dignities over his head as in a parchment scroll, he might then\u2014\u00a0<\/span><\/span>that is in the heroic time\u2014have proceeded downstairs with a drawn sword in his other grasp.<\/p>\n

At present, really, the light he had set down on the mantel of the next room would have to figure his sword; which utensil, in the course of a minute, he had taken the requisite number of steps to possess himself of. The door between the rooms was open, and from the second another door opened to a third. These rooms, as he remembered, gave all three upon a common corridor as well, but there was a fourth, beyond them, without issue save through the preceding. To have moved, to have heard his step again, was appreciably a help; though even in recognising this he lingered once more a little by the chimneypiece on which his light had rested. When he next moved, just hesitating where to turn, he found himself considering a circumstance that, after his first and comparatively vague apprehension of it, produced in him the start that often attends some pang of recollection, the violent shock of having ceased happily to forget. He had come into sight of the door in which the brief chain of communication ended and which he now surveyed from the nearer threshold, the one not directly facing it. Placed at some distance to the left of this point, it would have admitted him to the last room of the four, the room without other approach or egress<\/a>, had it not, to his intimate conviction, been closed\u00a0since<\/i>\u00a0his former visitation, the matter probably of a quarter of an hour before. He stared with all his eyes at the wonder of the fact, arrested again where he stood and again holding his breath while he sounded its sense. Surely it had been subsequently closed\u2014that is it had been on his previous passage indubitably open!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Image
“Ghostly sighting?,” 1899, The National Archives UK.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

He took it full in the face that something had happened between\u2014that he couldn’t not have noticed before (by which he meant on his original tour of all\u00a0<\/span><\/span>the rooms that evening) that such a barrier had exceptionally presented itself. He had indeed since that moment undergone an agitation so extraordinary that it might have muddled for him any earlier view; and he tried to convince himself that he might perhaps then have gone into the room and, inadvertently, automatically, on coming out, have drawn the door after him. The difficulty was that this exactly was what he never did; it was against his whole policy, as he might have said, the essence of which was to keep vistas clear. He had them from the first, as he was well aware, quite on the brain: the strange apparition, at the far end of one of them, of his baffled “prey” (which had become by so sharp an irony so little the term now to apply!) was the form of success his imagination had most cherished, projecting into it always a refinement of beauty. He had known fifty times the start of perception that had afterwards dropped; had fifty times gasped to himself “There!” under some fond brief hallucination. The house, as the case stood, admirably lent itself; he might wonder at the taste, the native architecture of the particular time, which could rejoice so in the multiplication of doors\u2014the opposite extreme to the modern, the actual almost complete proscription<\/a> of them; but it had fairly contributed to provoke this obsession of the presence encountered telescopically, as he might say, focussed and studied in diminishing perspective and as by a rest for the elbow.<\/p>\n

It was with these considerations that his present attention was charged\u2014they perfectly availed to make what he saw portentous. He\u00a0couldn’t<\/i>, by any lapse, have blocked that aperture; and if he hadn’t, if it was unthinkable, why what else was clear but that there had been another agent? Another agent?\u2014he had been catching, as he felt, a moment back, the very breath of him; but when he had been so close as in\u00a0<\/span><\/span>this simple, this logical, this completely personal act? It was so logical, that is, that one might have\u00a0taken<\/i>\u00a0it for personal; yet for what did Brydon take it, he asked himself, while, softly panting, he felt his eyes almost leave their sockets. Ah this time at last they\u00a0were<\/i>, the two, the opposed projections of him, in presence; and this time, as much as one would, the question of danger loomed. With it rose, as not before, the question of courage\u2014for what he knew the blank face of the door to say to him was “Show us how much you have!” It stared, it glared back at him with that challenge; it put to him the two alternatives: should he just push it open or not? Oh to have this consciousness was to\u00a0think<\/i>\u2014and to think, Brydon knew, as he stood there, was, with the lapsing moments, not to have acted! Not to have acted\u2014that was the misery and the pang\u2014was even still not to act; was in fact\u00a0all<\/i>\u00a0to feel the thing in another, in a new and terrible way. How long did he pause and how long did he debate? There was presently nothing to measure it; for his vibration had already changed\u2014as just by the effect of its intensity. Shut up there, at bay, defiant, and with the prodigy of the thing palpably, provably\u00a0done<\/i>, thus giving notice like some stark signboard\u2014under that accession of accent the situation itself had turned; and Brydon at last remarkably made up his mind on what it had turned to.<\/p>\n

It had turned altogether to a different admonition; to a supreme hint, for him, of the value of Discretion! This slowly dawned, no doubt\u2014for it could take its time; so perfectly, on his threshold, had he been stayed, so little as yet had he either advanced or retreated. It was the strangest of all things that now when, by his taking ten steps and applying his hand to a latch, or even his shoulder and his knee, if necessary, to a panel, all the hunger of his prime need might have been met, his high curiosity crowned, his unrest\u00a0<\/span><\/span>assuaged\u2014it was amazing, but it was also exquisite and rare, that insistence should have, at a touch, quite dropped from him. Discretion\u2014he jumped at that; and yet not, verily, at such a pitch, because it saved his nerves or his skin, but because, much more valuably, it saved the situation. When I say he “jumped” at it I feel the consonance of this term with the fact that\u2014at the end indeed of I know not how long\u2014he did move again, he crossed straight to the door. He wouldn’t touch it\u2014it seemed now that he might\u00a0if<\/i>\u00a0he would: he would only just wait there a little, to show, to prove, that he wouldn’t. He had thus another station, close to the thin partition by which revelation was denied him; but with his eyes bent and his hands held off in a mere intensity of stillness. He listened as if there had been something to hear, but this attitude, while it lasted, was his own communication. “If you won’t then\u2014good: I spare you and I give up. You affect me as by the appeal positively for pity: you convince me that for reasons rigid and sublime\u2014what do I know?\u2014we both of us should have suffered. I respect them then, and, though moved and privileged as, I believe, it has never been given to man, I retire, I renounce\u2014never, on my honour, to try again. So rest for ever\u2014and let\u00a0me<\/i>!’<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Times
Times Square at night, New York, between 1900 and 1915, by Detroit Publishing Co.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That, for Brydon was the deep sense of this last demonstration\u2014solemn, measured, directed, as he felt it to be. He brought it to a close, he turned away; and now verily he knew how deeply he had been stirred. He retraced his steps, taking up his candle, burnt, he observed, well-nigh<\/a> to the socket, and marking again, lighten it as he would, the distinctness of his footfall; after which, in a moment, he knew himself at the other side of the house. He did here what he had not yet done at these hours\u2014he opened half a casement<\/a>, one of those in the front, and let in the air of the night; a thing he would have taken at any time\u00a0<\/span><\/span>previous for a sharp rupture of his spell. His spell was broken now, and it didn’t matter\u2014broken by his concession and his surrender, which made it idle<\/a> henceforth that he should ever come back. The empty street\u2014its other life so marked even by the great lamplit vacancy\u2014was within call, within touch; he stayed there as to be in it again, high above it though he was still perched; he watched as for some comforting common fact, some vulgar human note, the passage of a scavenger or a thief, some night-bird however base. He would have blessed that sign of life; he would have welcomed positively the slow approach of his friend the policeman, whom he had hitherto only sought to avoid, and was not sure that if the patrol had come into sight he mightn’t have felt the impulse to get into relation with it, to hail it, on some pretext, from his fourth floor.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Broadway
Broadway at night from Times Square, New York, between 1900 and 1915, by Detroit Publishing Co.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The pretext that wouldn’t have been too silly or too compromising, the explanation that would have saved his dignity and kept his name, in such a case, out of the papers, was not definite to him: he was so occupied with the thought of recording his Discretion\u2014as an effect of the vow he had just uttered to his intimate adversary\u2014that the importance of this loomed large and something had overtaken all ironically his sense of proportion. If there had been a ladder applied to the front of the house, even one of the vertiginous perpendiculars employed by painters and roofers and sometimes left standing overnight, he would have managed somehow, astride of the window-sill, to compass by outstretched leg and arm that mode of descent. If there had been some such uncanny thing as he had found in his room at hotels, a workable fire-escape in the form of notched cable or a canvas shoot, he would have availed himself of it as a proof\u2014well, of his present delicacy. He nursed that sentiment, as the question stood, a little in vain, and even\u2014at the\u00a0<\/span><\/span>end of he scarce knew, once more, how long\u2014found it, as by the action on his mind of the failure of response of the outer world, sinking back to vague anguish. It seemed to him he had waited an age for some stir of the great grim hush; the life of the town was itself under a spell\u2014so unnaturally, up and down the whole prospect of known and rather ugly objects, the blankness and the silence lasted. Had they ever, he asked himself, the hard-faced houses, which had begun to look livid in the dim dawn, had they ever spoken so little to any need of his spirit? Great builded voids, great crowded stillnesses put on, often, in the heart of cities, for the small hours, a sort of sinister mask, and it was of this large collective negation that Brydon presently became conscious\u2014all the more that the break of day was, almost incredibly, now at hand, proving to him what a night he had made of it.<\/p>\n

He looked again at his watch, saw what had become of his time-values (he had taken hours for minutes\u2014not, as in other tense situations, minutes for hours) and the strange air of the streets was but the weak, the sullen flush of a dawn in which everything was still locked up. His choked appeal from his own open window had been the sole note of life, and he could but break off at last as for a worse despair. Yet while so deeply demoralised he was capable again of an impulse denoting\u2014at least by his present measure\u2014extraordinary resolution; of retracing his steps to the spot where he had turned cold with the extinction of his last pulse of doubt as to there being in the place another presence than his own. This required an effort strong enough to sicken him; but he had his reason, which overmastered for the moment everything else. There was the whole of the rest of the house to traverse, and how should he screw himself to that if the door he had seen closed were at present\u00a0<\/span><\/span>open? He could hold to the idea that the closing had practically been for him an act of mercy, a chance offered him to descend, depart, get off the ground and never again profane it. This conception held together, it worked; but what it meant for him depended now clearly on the amount of forbearance his recent action, or rather his recent inaction, had engendered. The image of the “presence,” whatever it was, waiting there for him to go\u2014this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short\u2014he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.<\/p>\n

He knew\u2014yes, as he had never known anything\u2014that,\u00a0should<\/i>\u00a0he see the door open, it would all too abjectly be the end of him. It would mean that the agent of his shame\u2014for his shame was the deep abjection\u2014was once more at large and in general possession; and what glared him thus in the face was the act that this would determine for him. It would send him straight about to the window he had left open, and by that window, be long ladder and dangling rope as absent as they would, he saw himself uncontrollably insanely fatally take his way to the street. The hideous chance of this he at least could avert; but he could only avert it by recoiling in time from assurance. He had the whole house to deal with, this fact was still there; only he now knew that uncertainty alone could start him. He stole back from where he had checked himself\u2014merely to do so was suddenly like safety\u2014and, making blindly for the greater staircase, left gaping rooms and sounding passages behind. Here was the top of the stairs, with a fine large dim descent and three spacious landings to mark\u00a0<\/span><\/span>off. His instinct was all for mildness, but his feet were harsh on the floors, and, strangely, when he had in a couple of minutes become aware of this, it counted somehow for help. He couldn’t have spoken, the tone of his voice would have scared him, and the common conceit or resource of “whistling in the dark<\/a>” (whether literally or figuratively) have appeared basely vulgar; yet he liked none the less to hear himself go, and when he had reached his first landing\u2014taking it all with no rush, but quite steadily\u2014that stage of success drew from him a gasp of relief.<\/p>\n

The house, withal, seemed immense, the scale of space again inordinate; the open rooms, to no one of which his eyes deflected, gloomed in their shuttered state like mouths of caverns; only the high skylight that formed the crown of the deep well created for him a medium in which he could advance, but which might have been, for queerness of colour, some watery under-world. He tried to think of something noble, as that his property was really grand, a splendid possession; but this nobleness took the form too of the clear delight with which he was finally to sacrifice it. They might come in now, the builders, the destroyers\u2014they might come as soon as they would. At the end of two flights he had dropped to another zone, and from the middle of the third, with only one more left, he recognised the influence of the lower windows, of half-drawn blinds, of the occasional gleam of streetlamps, of the glazed spaces of the vestibule. This was the bottom of the sea, which showed an illumination of its own and which he even saw paved\u2014when at a given moment he drew up to sink a long look over the banisters\u2014with the marble squares of his childhood. By that time indubitably he felt, as he might have said in a commoner cause, better; it had allowed him to stop and draw breath, and the ease increased with the sight of the old black-and-white slabs. But what\u00a0<\/span><\/span>he most felt was that now surely, with the element of impunity pulling him as by hard firm hands, the case was settled for what he might have seen above had he dared that last look. The closed door, blessedly remote now, was still closed\u2014and he had only in short to reach that of the house.<\/p>\n

He came down further, he crossed the passage forming the access to the last flight; and if here again he stopped an instant it was almost for the sharpness of the thrill of assured escape. It made him shut his eyes\u2014which opened again to the straight slope of the remainder of the stairs. Here was impunity still, but impunity almost excessive; inasmuch as the sidelights and the high fan-tracery<\/a> of the entrance were glimmering straight into the hall; an appearance produced, he the next instant saw, by the fact that the vestibule gaped wide, that the hinged halves of the inner door had been thrown far back. Out of that again the question<\/i>\u00a0sprang at him, making his eyes, as he felt, half-start from his head, as they had done, at the top of the house, before the sign of the other door. If he had left that one open, hadn’t he left this one closed, and wasn’t he now in\u00a0most<\/i>\u00a0immediate presence of some inconceivable occult activity? It was as sharp, the question, as a knife in his side, but the answer hung fire still and seemed to lose itself in the vague darkness to which the thin admitted dawn, glimmering archwise over the whole outer door, made a semicircular margin, a cold silvery nimbus that seemed to play a little as he looked\u2014to shift and expand and contract.<\/p>\n

It was as if there had been something within it, protected by indistinctness and corresponding in extent with the opaque surface behind, the painted panels of the last barrier to his escape, of which the key was in his pocket. The indistinctness mocked him even while he stared, affected him as somehow\u00a0<\/span><\/span>shrouding or challenging certitude, so that after faltering an instant on his step he let himself go with the sense that here was at last something to meet, to touch, to take, to know\u2014something all unnatural and dreadful, but to advance upon which was the condition for him either of liberation or of supreme defeat. The penumbra<\/a>, dense and dark, was the virtual screen of a figure which stood in it as still as some image erect in a niche or as some black-vizored sentinel guarding a treasure. Brydon was to know afterwards, was to recall and make out, the particular thing he had believed during the rest of his descent. He saw, in its great grey glimmering margin, the central vagueness diminish, and he felt it to be taking the very form toward which, for so many days, the passion of his curiosity had yearned. It gloomed, it loomed, it was something, it was somebody, the prodigy of a personal presence.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"John
Spirit Photography (John K. Hallowell and fifteen other faces), 1901, photo by S.W. Fallis.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance and stature waited there to measure himself with his power to dismay. This only could it be\u2014this only till he recognised, with his advance, that what made the face dim was the pair of raised hands that covered it and in which, so far from being offered in defiance, it was buried as for dark deprecation. So Brydon, before him, took him in; with every fact of him now, in the higher light, hard and acute\u2014his planted stillness, his vivid truth, his grizzled bent head and white masking hands, his queer actuality of evening-dress, of dangling double eye-glass, of gleaming silk lappet<\/a> and white linen, of pearl button and gold watch-guard and polished shoe. No portrait by a great modern master could have presented him with more intensity, thrust him out of his frame with more art, as if there had been “treatment,” of the consummate sort, in his every shade and salience<\/a>. The revulsion, for our friend, had become,\u00a0<\/span><\/span>before he knew it, immense\u2014this drop, in the act of apprehension, to the sense of his adversary’s inscrutable man\u0153uvre. That meaning at least, while he gaped, it offered him; for he could but gape at his other self in this other anguish, gape as a proof that\u00a0he<\/i>, standing there for the achieved, the enjoyed, the triumphant life, couldn’t be faced in his triumph. Wasn’t the proof in the splendid covering hands, strong and completely spread?\u2014so spread and so intentional that, in spite of a special verity that surpassed every other, the fact that one of these hands had lost two fingers, which were reduced to stumps, as if accidentally shot away, the face was effectually guarded and saved.<\/p>\n

“Saved,” though,\u00a0would<\/i> it be?\u2014Brydon breathed his wonder till the very impunity of his attitude and the very insistence of his eyes produced, as he felt, a sudden stir which showed the next instant as a deeper portent<\/a>, while the head raised itself, the betrayal of a braver purpose. The hands, as he looked, began to move, to open; then, as if deciding in a flash, dropped from the face and left it uncovered and presented. Horror, with the sight, had leaped into Brydon’s throat, gasping there in a sound he couldn’t utter; for the bared identity was too hideous as his<\/i>, and his glare was the passion of his protest. The face,\u00a0that<\/i>\u00a0face, Spencer Brydon’s?\u2014he searched it still, but looking away from it in dismay and denial, falling straight from his height of sublimity. It was unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility\u2014\u2014\u2014! He had been “sold,” he inwardly moaned, stalking such game as this: the presence before him was a presence, the horror within him a horror, but the waste of his nights had been only grotesque and the success of his adventure an irony. Such an identity fitted his at\u00a0no<\/i>\u00a0point, made its alternative monstrous. A thousand times yes, as it came upon\u00a0<\/span><\/span>him nearer now\u2014the face was the face of a stranger. It came upon him nearer now, quite as one of those expanding fantastic images projected by the magic lantern of childhood; for the stranger, whoever he might be, evil, odious, blatant, vulgar, had advanced as for aggression, and he knew himself give ground. Then harder pressed still, sick with the force of his shock, and falling back as under the hot breath and the roused passion of a life larger than his own, a rage of personality before which his own collapsed, he felt the whole vision turn to darkness and his very feet give way. His head went round; he was going; he had gone.<\/p>\n

\n

III<\/h3>\n

What<\/span>\u00a0had next brought him back, clearly\u2014though after how long?\u2014was Mrs. Muldoon’s voice, coming to him from quite near, from so near that he seemed presently to see her as kneeling on the ground before him while he lay looking up at her; himself not wholly on the ground, but half-raised and upheld\u2014conscious, yes, of tenderness of support and, more particularly, of a head pillowed in extraordinary softness and fainly<\/a> refreshing fragrance. He considered, he wondered, his wit but half at his service; then another face intervened, bending more directly over him, and he finally knew that Alice Staverton had made her lap an ample and perfect cushion to him, and that she had to this end seated herself on the lowest degree of the staircase, the rest of his long person remaining stretched on his old black-and-white slabs. They were cold, these marble squares of his youth; but\u00a0he<\/i>\u00a0somehow was not, in this rich return of consciousness\u2014the most wonderful hour, little by little, that he had ever known, leaving him, as it did, so gratefully, so abysmally passive, and yet as with a treasure of intelligence waiting all round him for quiet appropriation; dissolved, he might call it, in the air of the place and producing the golden glow of a late autumn afternoon. He had come back, yes\u2014come back from further away than any man but himself had ever travelled; but it was strange how with\u00a0<\/span><\/span>this sense what he had come back\u00a0to<\/i>\u00a0seemed really the great thing, and as if his prodigious journey had been all for the sake of it. Slowly but surely his consciousness grew, his vision of his state thus completing itself: he had been miraculously\u00a0carried<\/i>\u00a0back\u2014lifted and carefully borne as from where he had been picked up, the uttermost end of an interminable grey passage. Even with this he was suffered to rest, and what had now brought him to knowledge was the break in the long mild motion.<\/p>\n

It had brought him to knowledge, to knowledge\u2014yes, this was the beauty of his state; which came to resemble more and more that of a man who has gone to sleep on some news of a great inheritance, and then, after dreaming it away, after profaning it with matters strange to it, has waked up again to serenity of certitude and has only to lie and watch it grow. This was the drift of his patience\u2014that he had only to let it shine on him. He must moreover, with intermissions, still have been lifted and borne; since why and how else should he have known himself, later on, with the afternoon glow intenser, no longer at the foot of his stairs\u2014situated as these now seemed at that dark other end of his tunnel\u2014but on a deep window-bench of his high saloon, over which had been spread, couch-fashion, a mantle of soft stuff lined with grey fur that was familiar to his eyes and that one of his hands kept fondly feeling as for its pledge of truth. Mrs. Muldoon’s face had gone, but the other, the second he had recognised, hung over him in a way that showed how he was still propped and pillowed. He took it all in, and the more he took it the more it seemed to suffice: he was as much at peace as if he had had food and drink. It was the two women who had found him, on Mrs. Muldoon’s having plied, at her usual hour, her latch-key\u2014and on her having above all arrived while Miss Staverton still lingered\u00a0<\/span><\/span>near the house. She had been turning away, all anxiety, from worrying the vain bell-handle\u2014her calculation having been of the hour of the good woman’s visit; but the latter, blessedly, had come up while she was still there, and they had entered together. He had then lain, beyond the vestibule<\/a>, very much as he was lying now\u2014quite, that is, as he appeared to have fallen, but all so wondrously without bruise or gash; only in a depth of stupor. What he most took in, however, at present, with the steadier clearance, was that Alice Staverton had for a long unspeakable moment not doubted he was dead.<\/p>\n

“It must have been that I\u00a0was<\/i>.” He made it out as she held him. “Yes\u2014I can only have died. You brought me literally to life. Only,” he wondered, his eyes rising to her, “only, in the name of all the benedictions, how?”<\/p>\n

It took her but an instant to bend her face and kiss him, and something in the manner of it, and in the way her hands clasped and locked his head while he felt the cool charity and virtue of her lips, something in all this beatitude somehow answered everything. “And now I keep you,” she said.<\/p>\n

“Oh keep me, keep me!” he pleaded while her face still hung over him: in response to which it dropped again and stayed close, clingingly close. It was the seal of their situation\u2014of which he tasted the impress for a long blissful moment in silence. But he came back. “Yet how did you know?”<\/p>\n

“I was uneasy. You were to have come, you remember\u2014and you had sent no word.”<\/p>\n

“Yes, I remember\u2014I was to have gone to you at one to-day.” It caught on to their “old” life and relation\u2014which were so near and so far. “I was still out there in my strange darkness\u2014where was it, what was it? I must have stayed there so long.”\u00a0<\/span><\/span>He could but wonder at the depth and the duration of his swoon.<\/p>\n

“Since last night?” she asked with a shade of fear for her possible indiscretion.<\/p>\n

“Since this morning\u2014it must have been: the cold dim dawn of to-day. Where have I been,” he vaguely wailed, “where have I been? “He felt her hold him close, and it was as if this helped him now to make in all security his mild moan. “What a long dark day!”<\/p>\n

All in her tenderness she had waited a moment. “In the cold dim dawn?” she quavered.<\/p>\n

But he had already gone on piecing together the parts of the whole prodigy. “As I didn’t turn up you came straight\u2014\u2014\u2014?”<\/p>\n

She barely cast about. “I went first to your hotel\u2014where they told me of your absence. You had dined out last evening and hadn’t been back since. But they appeared to know you had been at your club.”<\/p>\n

“So you had the idea of\u00a0this<\/i>\u2014\u2014\u2014?”<\/p>\n

“Of what?” she asked in a moment.<\/p>\n

“Well\u2014of what has happened.”<\/p>\n

” I believed at least you’d have been here. I’ve known, all along,” she said, “that you’ve been coming.”<\/p>\n

“‘Known’ it?”<\/p>\n

“Well, I’ve believed it. I said nothing to you after that talk we had a month ago\u2014but I felt sure. I knew you\u00a0would<\/i>,” she declared.<\/p>\n

“That I’d persist, you mean?”<\/p>\n

“That you’d see him.”<\/p>\n

“Ah but I didn’t!” cried Brydon with his long wail. “There’s somebody\u2014an awful beast; whom I brought, too horribly, to bay. But it’s not me.”<\/p>\n

At this she bent over him again, and her eyes were in his eyes. “No\u2014it’s not you.” And it was as if, while her face hovered, he might have made out in it,\u00a0<\/span><\/span>hadn’t it been so near, some particular meaning blurred by a smile. “No, thank heaven,” she repeated\u2014”it’s not you! Of course it wasn’t to have been.”<\/p>\n

” Ah but it\u00a0was<\/i>,” he gently insisted. And he stared before him now as he had been staring for so many weeks. “I was to have known myself.”<\/p>\n

“You couldn’t!” she returned consolingly. And then reverting, and as if to account further for what she had herself done, “But it wasn’t only\u00a0that<\/i>, that you hadn’t been at home,” she went on. “I waited till the hour at which we had found Mrs. Muldoon that day of my going with you; and she arrived, as I’ve told you, while, failing to bring any one to the door, I lingered in my despair on the steps. After a little, if she hadn’t come, by such a mercy, I should have found means to hunt her up. But it wasn’t,” said Alice Staverton, as if once more with her fine intention\u2014”it wasn’t only that.”<\/p>\n

His eyes, as he lay, turned back to her. “What more then?”<\/p>\n

She met it, the wonder she had stirred. “In the cold dim dawn, you say? Well, in the cold dim dawn of this morning I too saw you.”<\/p>\n

“Saw\u00a0me<\/i>\u2014\u2014\u2014?”<\/p>\n

“Saw\u00a0him<\/i>,” said Alice Staverton. “It must have been at the same moment.”<\/p>\n

He lay an instant taking it in\u2014as if he wished to be quite reasonable. “At the same moment?”<\/p>\n

“Yes\u2014in my dream again, the same one I’ve named to you. He came back to me. Then I knew it for a sign. He had come to you.”<\/p>\n

At this Brydon raised himself; he had to see her better. She helped him when she understood his movement, and he sat up, steadying himself beside her there on the window-bench and with his right hand grasping her left. “He<\/i>\u00a0didn’t come to me.”<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span>“You came to yourself,” she beautifully smiled.<\/p>\n

“Ah I’ve come to myself now\u2014thanks to you, dearest. But this brute, with his awful face\u2014this brute’s a black stranger. He’s none of\u00a0me<\/i>, even as I\u00a0might<\/i>\u00a0have been,” Brydon sturdily declared.<\/p>\n

\"Richard
Richard Mansfield from a production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, circa 1887-1900, photo by Henry Van der Weyde.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But she kept the clearness that was like the breath of infallibility. “Isn’t the whole point that you’d have been different?”<\/p>\n

He almost scowled for it. “As different as\u00a0that<\/i>\u2014\u2014\u2014?”<\/p>\n

Her look again was more beautiful to him than the things of this world. “Haven’t you exactly wanted to know\u00a0how<\/i>\u00a0different? So this morning,” she said, “you appeared to me.”<\/p>\n

“Like\u00a0him<\/i>?”<\/p>\n

“A black stranger!”<\/p>\n

“Then how did you know it was I?”<\/p>\n

“Because, as I told you weeks ago, my mind, my imagination, had worked so over what you might, what you mightn’t have been\u2014to show you, you see, how I’ve thought of you. In the midst of that you came to me\u2014that my wonder might be answered. So I knew,” she went on; “and believed that, since the question held you too so fast, as you told me that day, you too would see for yourself. And when this morning I again saw I knew it would be because you had\u2014and also then, from the first moment, because you somehow wanted me.\u00a0He<\/i>\u00a0seemed to tell me of that. So why,” she strangely smiled, “shouldn’t I like him?”<\/p>\n

It brought Spencer Brydon to his feet. “You ‘like’ that horror?”<\/p>\n

“I\u00a0could<\/i>\u00a0have liked him. And to me,” she said, “he was no horror. I had accepted him.”<\/p>\n

“‘Accepted’\u2014\u2014\u2014?” Brydon oddly sounded.<\/p>\n

“Before, for the interest of his difference\u2014yes. And as\u00a0I<\/i>\u00a0didn’t disown him, as\u00a0I<\/i>\u00a0knew him\u2014which\u00a0<\/span><\/span>you at last, confronted with him in his difference, so cruelly didn’t, my dear\u2014well, he must have been, you see, less dreadful to me. And it may have pleased him that I pitied him.”<\/p>\n

She was beside him on her feet, but still holding his hand\u2014still with her arm supporting him. But though it all brought for him thus a dim light, “You ‘pitied’ him? ” he grudgingly, resentfully asked.<\/p>\n

“He has been unhappy, he has been ravaged,” she said.<\/p>\n

“And haven’t I been unhappy? Am not I\u2014you’ve only to look at me!\u2014ravaged?”<\/p>\n

“Ah I don’t say I like him\u00a0better<\/i>,” she granted after a thought. “But he’s grim, he’s worn\u2014and things have happened to him. He doesn’t make shift, for sight, with your charming monocle.”<\/p>\n

“No”\u2014it struck Brydon: “I couldn’t have sported mine ‘downtown.’ They’d have guyed<\/a> me there.”<\/p>\n

“His great convex pince-nez<\/a>\u2014I saw it, I recognised the kind\u2014is for his poor ruined sight. And his poor right hand\u2014\u2014\u2014!”<\/p>\n

“Ah!” Brydon winced\u2014whether for his proved identity or for his lost fingers. Then, “He has a million a year,” he lucidly added. “But he hasn’t you.”<\/p>\n

“And he isn’t\u2014no, he isn’t\u2014you<\/i>!” she murmured as he drew her to his breast.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Source:<\/p>\n

“The Jolly Corner,”<\/a> 1922, by Henry James. Pubic Domain, via Wikisource.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

definition<\/span>