Collected Stories

  Jackson Lemon was making some researches, just now, which took up a great deal of his time; and, for the rest, he passed his hours abundantly with his wife. For the last three months, therefore, he had seen his mother scarcely more than once a week. In spite of researches, in spite of medical societies, where Jackson, to her knowledge, read papers, Lady Barb had more of her husband’s company than she had counted upon at the time she married. She had never known a married pair to be so much together as she and Jackson; he appeared to expect her to sit with him in the library in the morning. He had none of the occupations of gentlemen and noblemen in England, for the element of politics appeared to be as absent as the hunting. There were politics in Washington, she had been told, and even at Albany, and Jackson had proposed to introduce her to these cities; but the proposal, made to her once at dinner before several people, had excited such cries of horror that it fell dead on the spot. ‘We don’t want you to see anything of that kind,’ one of the ladies had said, and Jackson had appeared to be discouraged – that is if, in regard to Jackson, one could really tell.

  ‘Pray, what is it you want me to see?’ Lady Barb had asked on this occasion.

  ‘Well, New York; and Boston, if you want to very much – but not otherwise; and Niagara; and, more than anything, Newport.’

  Lady Barb was tired of their eternal Newport; she had heard of it a thousand times, and felt already as if she had lived there half her life; she was sure, moreover, that she should hate it. This is perhaps as near as she came to having a lively conviction on any American subject. She asked herself whether she was then to spend her life in the Fifth Avenue, with alternations of a city of villas (she detested villas), and wondered whether that was all the great American country had to offer her. There were times when she thought that she should like the backwoods, and that the Far West might be a resource; for she had analysed her feelings just deep enough to discover that when she had – hesitating a good deal – turned over the question of marrying Jackson Lemon, it was not in the least of American barbarism that she was afraid; her dread was of American civilisation. She believed the little lady I have just quoted was a goose; but that did not make New York any more interesting. It would be reckless to say that she suffered from an overdose of Jackson’s company, because she had a view of the fact that he was much her most important social resource. She could talk to him about England; about her own England, and he understood more or less what she wished to say, when she wished to say anything, which was not frequent. There were plenty of other people who talked about England; but with them the range of allusion was always the hotels, of which she knew nothing, and the shops, and the opera, and the photographs: they had a mania for photographs. There were other people who were always wanting her to tell them about Pasterns, and the manner of life there, and the parties; but if there was one thing Lady Barb disliked more than another, it was describing Pasterns. She had always lived with people who knew, of themselves, what such a place would be, without demanding these pictorial efforts, proper only, as she vaguely felt, to persons belonging to the classes whose trade was the arts of expression. Lady Barb, of course, had never gone into it; but she knew that in her own class the business was not to express, but to enjoy; not to represent, but to be represented – though, indeed, this latter liability might convey offence; for it may be noted that even for an aristocrat Jackson Lemon’s wife was aristocratic.

  Lady Agatha and her visitor came back from the library in course of time, and Jackson Lemon felt it his duty to be rather cold to Herman Longstraw. It was not clear to him what sort of a husband his sister-in-law would do well to look for in America – if there were to be any question of husbands; but as to this he was not bound to be definite, provided he should rule out Mr Longstraw. This gentleman, however, was not given to perceive shades of manner; he had little observation, but very great confidence.

  ‘I think you had better come home with me,’ Jackson said to Lady Agatha; ‘I guess you have stayed here long enough.’

  ‘Don’t let him say that, Mrs Lemon!’ the girl cried. ‘I like being with you so very much.’

  ‘I try to make it pleasant,’ said Mrs Lemon. ‘I should really miss you now; but perhaps it’s your mother’s wish.’ If it was a question of defending her guest from ineligible suitors, Mrs Lemon felt, of course, that her son was more competent than she; though she had a lurking kindness for Herman Longstraw, and a vague idea that he was a gallant, genial specimen of young America.

  ‘Oh, mamma wouldn’t see any difference!’ Lady Agatha exclaimed, looking at Jackson with pleading blue eyes. ‘Mamma wants me to see every one; you know she does. That’s what she sent me to America for; she knew it was not like England. She wouldn’t like it if I didn’t sometimes stay with people; she always wanted us to stay at other houses. And she knows all about you, Mrs Lemon, and she likes you immensely. She sent you a message the other day, and I am afraid I forgot to give it you – to thank you for being so kind to me and taking such a lot of trouble. Really she did, but I forgot it. If she wants me to see as much as possible of America, it’s much better I should be here than always with Barb – it’s much less like one’s own country. I mean it’s much nicer – for a girl,’ said Lady Agatha, affectionately, to Mrs Lemon, who began also to look at Jackson with a kind of tender argumentativeness.

  ‘If you want the genuine thing, you ought to come out on the plains,’ Mr Longstraw interposed, with smiling sincerity. ‘I guess that was your mother’s idea. Why don’t you all come out?’ He had been looking intently at Lady Agatha while the remarks I have just repeated succeeded each other on her lips – looking at her with a kind of fascinated approbation, for all the world as if he had been a slightly slow-witted English gentleman and the girl had been a flower of the West – a flower that knew how to talk. He made no secret of the fact that Lady Agatha’s voice was music to him, his ear being much more susceptible than his own inflections would have indicated. To Lady Agatha those inflections were not displeasing, partly because, like Mr Herman himself, in general, she had not a perception of shades; and partly because it never occurred to her to compare them with any other tones. He seemed to her to speak a foreign language altogether – a romantic dialect, through which the most comical meanings gleamed here and there.

  ‘I should like it above all things,’ she said, in answer to his last observation.

  ‘The scenery’s superior to anything round here,’ Mr Longstraw went on.

  Mrs Lemon, as we know, was the softest of women; but, as an old New Yorker, she had no patience with some of the new fashions. Chief among these was the perpetual reference, which had become common only within a few years, to the outlying parts of the country, the States and Territories of which children, in her time, used to learn the names, in their order, at school, but which no one ever thought of going to or talking about. Such places, in Mrs Lemon’s opinion, belonged to the geography-books, or at most to the literature of newspapers, but not to society nor to conversation; and the change – which, so far as it lay in people’s talk, she thought at bottom a mere affectation – threatened to make her native land appear vulgar and vague. For this amiable daughter of Manhattan, the normal existence of man, and, still more, of woman, had been ‘located’, as she would have said, between Trinity Church and the beautiful Reservoir at the top of the Fifth Avenue – monuments of which she was personally proud; and if we could look into the deeper parts of her mind, I am afraid we should discover there an impression that both the countries of Europe and the remainder of her own continent were equally far from the centre and the light.

  ‘Well, scenery isn’t everything,’ she remarked, mildly, to Mr Longstraw; ‘and if Lady Agatha should wish to see anything of that kind, all she has got to do is to take the boat up the Hudson.’

  Mrs Lemon’s recognition of this river, I should say, was all that it need have been; she thought that it existed for the purpose of supplying New Yorkers with poetical feelings, helping them to face comfo
rtably occasions like the present, and, in general, meet foreigners with confidence – part of the oddity of foreigners being their conceit about their own places.

  ‘That’s a good idea, Lady Agatha; let’s take the boat,’ said Mr Longstraw. ‘I’ve had great times on the boats.’

  Lady Agatha looked at her cavalier a little with those singular, charming eyes of hers – eyes of which it was impossible to say, at any moment, whether they were the shyest or the frankest in the world; and she was not aware, while this contemplation lasted, that her brother-in-law was observing her. He was thinking of certain things while he did so, of things he had heard about the English; who still, in spite of his having married into a family of that nation, appeared to him very much through the medium of hearsay. They were more passionate than the Americans, and they did things that would never have been expected; though they seemed steadier and less excitable, there was much social evidence to show that they were more impulsive.

  ‘It’s so very kind of you to propose that,’ Lady Agatha said in a moment to Mrs Lemon. ‘I think I have never been in a ship – except, of course, coming from England. I am sure mamma would wish me to see the Hudson. We used to go in immensely for boating in England.’

  ‘Did you boat in a ship?’ Herman Longstraw asked, showing his teeth hilariously, and pulling his moustaches.

  ‘Lots of my mother’s people have been in the navy.’ Lady Agatha perceived vaguely and good-naturedly that she had said something which the odd Americans thought odd, and that she must justify herself. Her standard of oddity was getting dreadfully dislocated.

  ‘I really think you had better come back to us,’ said Jackson; ‘your sister is very lonely without you.’

  ‘She is much more lonely with me. We are perpetually having differences. Barb is dreadfully vexed because I like America, instead of – instead of—’ And Lady Agatha paused a moment; for it just occurred to her that this might be a betrayal.

  ‘Instead of what?’ Jackson Lemon inquired.

  ‘Instead of perpetually wanting to go to England, as she does,’ she went on, only giving her phrase a little softer turn; for she felt the next moment that her sister could have nothing to hide, and must, of course, have the courage of her opinions. ‘Of course England’s best, but I daresay I like to be bad,’ said Lady Agatha, artlessly.

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

  She had betrayed her sister more than she thought, even though Jackson Lemon did not particularly show it in the tone in which he said: ‘Of course she knows that she is going to see your mother in the summer.’ His tone, rather, was that of irritation at the repetition of a familiar idea.

  ‘Oh, it isn’t only mamma,’ replied Lady Agatha.

  ‘I know she likes a cool house,’ said Mrs Lemon, suggestively.

  ‘When she goes, you had better bid her good-bye,’ the girl went on.

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

  ‘I shall never bid you good-bye, Princess,’ Herman Longstraw interposed. ‘I can tell you that you never will see the last of me.’

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

  ‘Oh, my dear child,’ murmured Mrs Lemon, addressing Lady Agatha, but looking at her son.

  Jackson looked at the ceiling, at the floor; above all, he looked very conscious.

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

  ‘Ah, well, then, she shan’t go, then,’ he remarked, after a moment, with a dry little laugh.

  ‘But you promised mamma, you know,’ said the girl, with the confidence of her affection.

  Jackson looked at her with an eye which expressed none even of his very moderate hilarity. ‘Your mother, then, must bring her back.’

  ‘Get some of your navy people to supply an ironclad!’ cried Mr Longstraw.

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

  ‘Oh, she would hate it more than poor Barb,’ Lady Agatha quickly replied. It did not suit her mood at all to see a marchioness inserted into the field of her vision.

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