Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 1
RODERICK HUDSON
I
Rowland Mallet had made his arrangements to sail for Europe on the 5th of September, and having in the interval a fortnight to spare, he determined to spend it with his cousin Cecilia, the widow of a nephew of his father. He was urged by the reflexion that an affectionate farewell might help to exonerate him from the charge of neglect frequently preferred by this lady. It was not that the young man disliked her; he regarded her, on the contrary, with a tender admiration and had not forgotten how when his cousin brought her home on her marriage he seemed to feel the upward sweep of the empty bough from which the golden fruit had been plucked. He then and there, for himself, accepted the prospect of bachelorhood. The truth was that, as it will be part of the entertainment of this narrative to exhibit, Rowland Mallet had an uncomfortably sensitive conscience, and that, in spite of the seeming paradox, his visits to Cecilia were rare because she and her misfortunes were often uppermost in it. Her misfortunes were three in number: first, she had lost her husband; second, she had lost her money, or the greater part of it; and third, she lived at Northampton, Massachusetts. Mallet's compassion was really wasted, because Cecilia was a very clever woman and a skilful counter-plotter to adversity. She had made herself a charming home, her economies were not obtrusive, and there was always a cheerful flutter in the folds of her crape. It was the consciousness of all this that puzzled Mallet whenever he felt tempted to put in his oar. He had money and he had time, but he never could decide just how to place these gifts gracefully at Cecilia's service. He was no longer at all in the humour to marry her; that fancy had in these eight years died a very natural death. And yet her extreme cleverness seemed somehow to make charity difficult and patronage impossible. He would rather have chopped off his hand than offer her a cheque, a piece of useful furniture or a black silk dress; and yet there was pity for him in seeing such a bright proud woman live in such a small dull way. Cecilia had moreover a turn for sarcasm, and her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a lurking scratch in it. Rowland remembered that for him she was all smiles, and suspected awkwardly that he ministered not a little to her sense of the irony of things. And in truth, with his means, his leisure and his opportunities, what had he done? He had a lively suspicion of his uselessness. Cecilia meanwhile cut out her own dresses, and was personally giving her little girl the education of a princess. This time, however, he presented himself bravely enough; for in the way of activity it was something definite at least to be going to Europe and to be meaning to spend the winter in Rome. Cecilia met him in the early dusk at the gate of her little garden, amid a studied combination of horticultural odours. A rosy widow of twenty-eight, half-cousin, half-hostess, doing the honours of a fragrant cottage on a midsummer evening, was a phenomenon to which all the young man's senses were able to rise. Cecilia was always gracious, but this evening she was positively in spirits. She was in a happy mood, and Mallet imagined there was a private reason for it—a reason quite distinct from her pleasure in receiving her honoured kinsman. The next day he flattered himself he was on the way to discover it.
For the present, after tea, as they sat on the rose-framed porch, while Rowland held his younger cousin between his knees, and she, enjoying her situation, listened timorously for the stroke of bedtime, Cecilia insisted on talking more about her visitor than about herself. "What is it you mean to do in Europe?" she asked lightly, giving a turn to the frill of her sleeve—just such a turn as seemed to Mallet to bring out all the latent difficulties of the question.
"Why, very much what I do here," he answered. "No great harm!"
"Is it true," Cecilia asked, "that here you do no great harm? Is n't a man like you doing a certain harm when he is n't doing some positive good?"
"Is n't that compliment rather ambiguous?" he inquired in return.
"No," she answered, "you know what I think of you. You have a turn for doing nice things and behaving yourself properly. You have it, in the first place, in your character. You mean, if you will pardon my putting it so, thoroughly well. Ask Bessie if you don't hold her more gently and comfortably than any of her other admirers."
"He holds me more comfortably than Mr. Hudson," Bessie declared roundly.
Rowland, not knowing Mr. Hudson, could but half appreciate the eulogy, and Cecilia went on to develop her idea. "Your circumstances, in the second place, suggest the idea of some sort of social usefulness. You 're intelligent and are well informed, and your benevolence, if one may call it benevolence, would be discriminating. You 're rich and unoccupied, so that it might be abundant. Therefore I say you 're a man to do something on a large scale. Bestir yourself, dear Rowland, or we may be taught to think that Virtue herself is setting a bad example."
"Heaven forbid," cried Rowland, "that I should set the examples of virtue! I 'm quite willing to follow them, however, and if I don't do something on the grand scale it is that my genius is altogether imitative and that I've not recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur. Pray, what shall I do? Found an orphan asylum or build a dormitory for Harvard College? I 'm not rich enough to do either in an ideally handsome way, and I confess that yet a while I feel too young to strike my grand coup. I 'm holding myself ready for inspiration. I 'm waiting till something takes my fancy irresistibly. If inspiration comes at forty it will be a hundred pities to have tied up my money-bag at thirty."
"Well, of course I give you decent time," said Cecilia. "It 's only a word to the wise—a notification that you 're expected not to run your course without having done something handsome for your fellow men."
Nine o'clock sounded, and Bessie with each stroke courted a closer embrace. But a single winged word from her mother overleaped her successive intrenchments. She turned and kissed her cousin, depositing an irrepressible tear on his moustache. Then she went and said her prayers to her mother; it was evident she was being admirably brought up. Rowland, with the permission of his hostess, lighted a cigar and puffed it a while in silence. Cecilia's interest in his career seemed very agreeable. That Mallet was without vanity I by no means intend to affirm; but there had been times when, seeing him accept with scarce less deference advice even more peremptory than this lady's, you might have asked yourself what had become of his proper pride. Now, in the sweet-smelling starlight, he felt gently wooed to egotism. There was a project connected with his going abroad which it was on his tongue's end to communicate. It had no relation to hospitals or dormitories, and yet it would have sounded very generous. But it was not because it would have sounded generous that poor Mallet at last puffed it away in the fumes of his cigar. Useful though it might be, it expressed too imperfectly the young man's own personal conception of usefulness. He was extremely fond of all the arts and had an almost passionate enjoyment of pictures. He had seen a great many and judged them sagaciously. It had occurred to him some time before that it would be the work of a good citizen to go abroad and with all expedition and secrecy purchase certain valuable specimens of the Dutch and Italian schools, as to which he had received private proposals, and then present his treasures out of hand to an American city, not unknown to æsthetic fame, in which at that time there prevailed a good deal of fruitless aspiration toward an art-museum. He had seen himself in imagination, more than once, in the mouldy old saloon of a Florentine palace, turning toward the deep embrasure of the window some scarcely-faded Ghirlandaio or Botticelli while a host in reduced circumstances pointed out the lovely drawing of a hand. But he imparted none of these visions to Cecilia, and he suddenly swept them away with the declaration that he was of course an idle useless creature and that he should probably be even more so in Europe than at home. "The only thing is," he said, "that there I shall seem to be doing some thing. I shall be better beguiled, and shall be therefore, I suppose, in a better humour with life. You may say that that 's just the humour a useless man should keep out of. He should cultivate humility and depression. I did a good many things when I was in Europe before, but I spent no winter in Rome. Every one assures me that this is a peculiar refinement of bliss; you must have noticed the almost priggish ecstasy with which those who have enjoyed it talk about it. It's evidently a sort of glorified loafing: a passive life there, thanks to the number and the quality of one's impressions, takes on a respectable likeness to an active pursuit. It's always lotus-eating, only you sit down at table and the lotuses are served up on rococo china. It 's all very well, but I have a distinct prevision of this—that if Roman life does n't do something substantial to make you happier it must contribute rather to unhinge or upset you. It seems to me a rash thing for a sensitive soul deliberately to cultivate its sensibilities by rambling too often among the ruins of the Palatine or riding too often in the shadow of the crumbling aqueducts. In such recreations the chords of feeling grow tense, and after-life, to spare your æsthetic nerves, must play upon them with a touch as dainty as the tread of Mignon when she danced her egg-dance."
"I should have said, my dear Rowland, with all recognition of your eloquence," Cecilia said with a laugh, "that your nerves were tough—that your eggs were hard!"
"That being stupid, you mean, I might be happy? Upon my word, I'm not so happy as that! I'm clever enough to want more than I've got. I'm tired of myself, my own thoughts, my own affairs, my own eternal company. True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out—you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand. Unfortunately I have no errand, and nobody will trust me with one. I want to care for something or for somebody. And I want to care, don't you see? with a certain intensity; even, if you can believe it, with a certain passion. I can't just now be intense and passionate about a hospital or a dormitory. Do you know I sometimes think that I 'm a man of genius half-finished? The genius has been left out, the faculty of expression is wanting; but the need for expression remains, and I spend my days groping for the latch of a closed door."
"What an immense number of words," said Cecilia after a pause, "to say you want to fall in love! I've no doubt you've as good a genius for that as any one if you would only trust it a little more."
"Of course I 've thought of that, and I assure you I hold myself ready. But evidently I 'm not inflammable. Is there in Northampton by chance some perfect epitome of the graces?"
"Of the graces?" said Cecilia, raising her eyebrows and suppressing too distinct a consciousness of being herself a finished embodiment of several.
"The household virtues, in all their rigour, are better represented. There are some excellent young women, and there are two or three very pretty girls. I'll have them all here to tea, one by one, if you like."
"I should particularly like it; especially as I should give you a chance to see by the profundity of my attention that if I'm not happy it 's not for want of taking pains."
Cecilia was silent a little; and then, "On the whole," she resumed, "I don't think there are any worth putting you in possible suspense about. You've seen as good samples as we can show you."
"Are you very, very sure?" asked the young man, rising and throwing away his cigar-end.
"Upon my word." cried Cecilia, "one would suppose I wished to keep you for myself! Of course I 'm very, very sure. But, as the penalty of your insinuations, I shall invite the plainest and prosiest damsel who can be found—of them we have our assortment!—and leave you alone with her."
Rowland smiled. "Even against her," he said, "I should be sorry to conclude until I had given her my respectful attention."
This little profession of ideal chivalry (which closed the conversation) was not quite so fanciful on his lips as it would have been on those of many another man; as a rapid glance at his antecedents may help to make the reader perceive. His life had held side by side many hard things and many soft. He had sprung from a stiff Puritan stock and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of our earthly pilgrimage than of its privileges and pleasures. His progenitors had submitted in the matter of dogmatic theology to the relaxing influences of recent years; but if Rowland's youthful consciousness was not chilled by the menace of long punishment for brief transgression, he had at least been made to feel that there ran through all things a strain of right and of wrong as different, after all, in their complexion, as the texture, to the spiritual sense, of Sundays and week-days. His father, a chip of the primal Puritan block, had been a man of an icy smile and a stony frown. He had always bestowed on his son, on principle, more frowns than smiles, and if the lad had not been turned to stone himself it was because nature had blessed him inwardly with a well of vivifying waters. Mrs. Mallet had been a Miss Rowland, the daughter of a retired sea-captain once famous on the ships that sailed from Salem and Newburyport. He had brought to port many a cargo which crowned the edifice of fortunes already almost colossal, but he had also done a little sagacious trading on his own account, and he was able to retire, prematurely for so seaworthy a maritime organism, upon a pension of his own providing. He was to be seen for a year on the Salem wharves, smoking the best tobacco and contemplating the seaward horizon with an inveteracy which superficial minds interpreted as a sign of repentance. At last, one evening, he disappeared beneath it, as he had often done before; this time, however, not as a commissioned navigator, but simply as an amateur of a critical turn likely to prove oppressive to the officer in command of the vessel. Five months later his place at home knew him again, and made the acquaintance also of a handsome, light-coloured young woman, of redundant contour, speaking a foreign tongue. The foreign tongue proved after much conflicting research to be the idiom of Amsterdam, and the young woman, which was stranger still, to be Captain Rowland's wife. Why he had gone forth so suddenly across the seas to marry her, what had happened between them before, and whether—though it was of questionable propriety for a good citizen to espouse a young person of mysterious origin who did her hair in fantastically elaborate plaits and in whose appearance "figure" enjoyed such striking predominance—he would not have had a heavy weight on his conscience if he had remained an irresponsible bachelor: these questions, and many others bearing with varying degrees of immediacy on the subject, were much propounded but scantily answered, and this history need not be charged with resolving them. Mrs. Rowland, for so handsome a woman, proved a tranquil neighbour and an excellent housewife. Her extremely fresh complexion, however, was always suffused with an air of apathetic homesickness, and she played her part in American society chiefly by having the little squares of brick pavement in front of her dwelling scoured and polished as nearly as possible into the likeness of Dutch tiles. Rowland Mallet remembered having seen her as a child—an immensely stout white-faced lady, wearing a high cap of very stiff tulle, speaking English with a formidable accent and suffering from dropsy. Captain Rowland was a little bronzed and wizened man, with eccentric opinions. He advocated the creation of a public promenade along the sea, with arbours and little green tables for the consumption of beer, and a platform, surrounded by Chinese lanterns, for dancing. He especially desired the town library to be opened on Sundays; though, as he never entered it on week days, it was easy to turn the proposition into ridicule. Therefore if Mrs. Mallet was a woman of an exquisite moral tone it was not that she had inherited her temper from forefathers with a turn for casuistry. Jonas Mallet at the time of his marriage was conducting with silent shrewdness a small unpromising business. Both his shrewdness and his silence increased with his years, and at the close of his life he was an extremely well-dressed, well-brushed gentleman with a frigid grey eye, who said little to anybody, but of whom everybody said that he had a very handsome fortune. He was not a sentimental father, and the introduction into Rowland's life of that grim ghost of the wholesome by which I spoke of it just now as haunted dated from early boyhood. Mr. Mallet, whenever he looked at his son, felt extreme compunction at having made a fortune. He remembered that the fruit had not dropped ripe from the tree into his own mouth, and he determined it should be no fault of his if the boy were corrupted by luxury. Rowland therefore, except for a good deal of expensive instruction in foreign tongues and abstruse sciences, received the education of a poor man's son. His fare was plain, his temper familiar with the discipline of patched trousers and his habits marked by an exaggerated simplicity which was kept up really at great expense. He was banished to the country for months together, in the midst of servants who had strict injunctions to see that he suffered no serious harm, but were as strictly forbidden to wait upon him. As no school could be found conducted on principles sufficiently rigorous, he was attended at home by an instructor who had set a high price—high for Jonas Mallet—on the understanding that he was to illustrate the beauty of abstinence not only by precept but by example. Rowland passed for a child of ordinary parts, and certainly, during his younger years, was an excellent imitation of the boy—most usual of boys—who has inherited nothing whatever that is to make his presence on earth shine from afar. He was passive, pliable, frank, extremely slow at his books and inordinately fond of trout-fishing. His hair, a memento of his Dutch ancestry, was of the fairest shade of yellow, his complexion absurdly rosy and the measurement of his middle, when he was about ten years old, quite alarmingly large. This, however, was but an episode in his growth; he became afterwards a fresh-coloured, yellow-bearded man, but was never accused of anything more material than a manly stoutness. He emerged from childhood a simple, wholesome, round-eyed lad, with no suspicion that a less circuitous course might have been taken to make him happy, but with a vague sense that his young experience was not a fair sample of human freedom and that he was to make a great many discoveries. When he was about fifteen he achieved a momentous one. He ascertained that his mother was a saint. She had always been a very vivid presence in his life, but of an intensity so mild, so diffused and so regulated that his sense was fully opened to it only by the danger of losing her. She had an illness which for many months was liable at any moment to carry her off, and during her long-arrested convalescence she removed the mask that she had worn for years by her husband's order. Rowland spent his days at her side, and felt before long as if he had made a new friend. All his impressions of this period were to be commented upon andin terpreted during the comparative ease of the future, and it was only at the later time that he understood how his mother had been for fifteen long years a woman heavily depressed, and her marriage an irredeemable error which she had spent her life in trying to look in the face. She had found nothing to oppose to her husband's rigid and consistent will but the appearance of absolute compliance; her courage had sunk, and she had lived for a while in a sort of spiritual torpor. But at last, as her child emerged from babyhood, she had begun to find a certain charm in patience, to discover the uses of ingenuity, and to learn that somehow or other one can always arrange one's life. She had cultivated from this time forward a little plot of independent feeling, and it was of this private precinct that before her death she had given her son the key. Rowland's allowance at college was barely sufficient to maintain him decently, and, his degree nevertheless achieved, he was taken into his father's counting-house to do small drudgery on a proportionate stipend. For three years he earned his living as regularly as the obscure functionary in fustian who swept out the place. Mr. Mallet was consistent, but the perfection of his consistency was known only on his death. He left but a third of his property to his son, devoting the remainder to various public institutions and local charities. Rowland's third was a very easy competence, and he never felt a moment's jealousy of his fellow pensioners; but when one of the establishments which had figured most advantageously in his father's will bethought itself to affirm the existence of a later instrument in which it had been still more handsomely treated, the young man felt a sudden passionate need to repel the claim by process of law. There was a sharp contest, but he gained his case; immediately after which he made in another quarter a donation of the disputed sum. He cared nothing for the money, but he had felt a just desire to protest against a star which seemed determined only not to pamper him. It struck him that he could put up with a little pampering. And yet he treated himself to a very modest quantity and submitted without reserve to the great national discipline which began in 1861. When the Civil War broke out he immediately obtained a commission, doing his duty afterwards, for the three first long years, by the aid of much grinding of the teeth. His duty happened to remain, for the most part, obscure, but he never lost a certain private satisfaction in remembering that on two or three occasions it had been performed, if not with glory, at least with a noted propriety. He had disentangled himself from business, and after the war he felt a deep disinclination to take up again the harsh and broken threads. He had no desire to make money, he had money enough; and although he knew, and was frequently reminded, that a young man is the better for a fixed occupation, he could perceive no advantage to his soul in his driving a lucrative trade. Yet few young men of means and leisure ever made less of a parade of idleness, and indeed idleness in any degree could hardly be laid at the door of a personage who took life in the conscious, serious, anxious fashion of our friend. It often seemed to Mallet that he wholly lacked the prime requisite of an expert flâneur—the simple, sensuous, confident relish of pleasure. He had frequent fits of melancholy in which he declared that he was neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. His was neither an irresponsibly contemplative nature nor a sturdily practical one, and he was for ever looking in vain for the uses of the things that please and the charm of the things that sustain. He was an awkward mixture of moral and aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made an ineffective reformer and an indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action of some thoroughly keen kind on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts. Oftenest, perhaps, he wished he had been a vigorous young man of genius without a penny. As it was, he could only buy pictures and not paint them; and in the way of action he had to content himself with making a rule to render scrupulous justice to fine strokes of it in others. On the whole he had an incorruptible modesty. With his blooming complexion and his quiet grey eyes he felt the friction of existence more than was suspected; but he asked no allowance on grounds of temper, he assumed that fate had treated him inordinately well and that he had no excuse for taking an ill-natured view of life, and he engaged to believe that all women were fair, all men were brave and the world a delightful place of sojourn, until the contrary should be distinctly proved.
Cecilia's blooming garden and shady porch had seemed so friendly to repose and a cigar that she reproached him the next morning with indifference to her ordered little parlour, not less in its way a monument to her ingenious taste. "And by the way," she added as he followed her in, "if I refused last night to show you a pretty girl, I can at least show you a remarkably pretty boy."
She threw open a window and pointed to a statuette which occupied a place of honour among the ornaments of the room. Rowland looked at it a moment and then turned to her with an exclamation of surprise. She gave him a rapid glance, perceived that her statuette was of striking interest, and then smiled knowingly, as if this were a familiar idea.
"Who in the world did it, and how did you ever come by it?" Rowland had visibly received a sharp impression.
"Oh," said Cecilia, adjusting the light, "it's a little thing of poor Mr. Hudson's."
"And who the deuce is poor Mr. Hudson?" asked Rowland. But he was absorbed; he lost her immediate reply. The statuette, in bronze, something more than two feet high, represented a naked youth drinking from a gourd. The attitude was perfectly simple. The lad was squarely planted on his feet, with his legs a little apart; his back was slightly hollowed, his head thrown back; his hands were raised to support the rustic cup. There was a loosened fillet of wild flowers about his head, and his eyes, under their dropped lids, looked straight into the cup. On the base was scratched the Greek word Δύψα, Thirst. The figure might have been some beautiful youth of ancient fable—Hylas or Narcissus, Paris or Endymion. Its beauty was the beauty of natural movement; nothing had been sought to be represented but the perfection of an attitude. This had been attentively studied—it was rendered with charming truth. Rowland demanded more light, dropped his head on this side and that, uttered vague exclamations. He said to himself, as he had said more than once in the Louvre and the Vatican, "We ugly mortals, what beautiful creatures we are!" Nothing for a long time had given him so much pleasure. "Hudson—Hudson," he asked again; "who may Hudson be?"
"A young man of this very place," said Cecilia.
"A young man? How young?"
"I suppose he 's three or four and twenty."
"Of this very place, you say—of Northampton, Massachusetts?"
"He lives here, but his people belong to Virginia."
"Is he a sculptor then by profession?"
"Oh, no—he 's studying Law."
Rowland burst out laughing. "He has found something in Blackstone that I never did. He makes statues like this then simply for his pleasure?"
Cecilia, with a smile, gave a little toss of her head. "He makes them perhaps sometimes for mine!"
"I congratulate you," said Rowland, "on having so generous a provider. I wonder if he could be induced to do anything for a mere man."
"For you? Oh, this was a matter of friendship. I saw the figure when he had modelled it in clay, and of course I greatly admired it. He said nothing at the time, but a week ago, on my birthday, he arrived in a buggy, with his treasure done up in a morsel of old blanket. He had had it cast at the foundry at Chicopee; I believe it 's a beautiful piece of bronze. He begged me, in the most natural way in the world, to accept."
"He has, upon my word, a grand conception of the natural!" With which Rowland fell to admiring the statue again.
"Really then," said Cecilia, "it 's a very remarkable thing?"
"Why, my dear cousin," Rowland answered, "Mr. Hudson of Virginia is an extraordinary—" Then suddenly stopping, "Is he a great friend of yours?" he asked.
"A great friend?" Cecilia hesitated. "I regard him practically as a child."
"Well," said Rowland, "he's a very precocious child! Tell me something about him. I should like to see him."
Cecilia was obliged to go to her daughter's music-lesson, but she assured Rowland that she would arrange for him a meeting with the young sculptor. He was a frequent visitor, and as he had not called for some days it was quite possible he would come that evening. Rowland, left alone, examined the statuette at his leisure, and returned more than once during the day to take another look at it. He discovered its weak points, but its charm was of finest essence. It had taken form under the breath of genius. Rowland envied the happy youth who, in a New England village, without aid or encouragement, without models or examples, had found it so easy to produce a lovely work.