The Jolly Corner
1
The Jolly Corner
by Henry James
The Jolly Corner
2
CHAPTER I
"Every one asks me what I 'think' of everything," said Spencer Brydon;
"and I make answer as I can - begging 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 - thirty-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 - he was fifty-six to- day;
unless indeed he were to reckon as he had sometimes, since his
repatriation, found himself feeling; in which case he would have lived
longer 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.
The great fact all the while, however, had been the incalculability;
since he HAD supposed 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.
The Jolly Corner
3
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 - these 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 enquirers 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
ALL for 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 - putting the thing pompously - to 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, he had yielded to the
humour of seeing again his house on the jolly corner, as he usually, and
quite fondly, described it - the 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" - the 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.
These were items of property indeed, but he had found himself since
his arrival distinguishing more than ever between them. The house
The Jolly Corner
4
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 - in 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 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 -
where it might be said of them perhaps that they had slept the sleep of the
just. At present, in the splendid autumn weather - the autumn at least
was a pure boon in the terrible place - he 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.
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 HE
was - and 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 - if 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
The Jolly Corner
5
items and shades, all delicate things, kept the sharpness of the notes of a
high voice 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 oft, 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 THEIR
common, their quite far-away and antediluvian social period and order.
She made use of the street-cars 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.
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 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)
The Jolly Corner
6
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.
It had begun to be present to him after the first fortnight, it had broken
out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton wonderment: it
met him there - and this was the image under which he himself judged the
matter, or at least, not a little, thrilled and flushed with it - very 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 the eastward direction formed one of the
corners, - 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 impulse to watch or follow, in kindness, for safe
restoration to shelter.
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
The Jolly Corner
7
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 - all 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 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.
The fact that there was nothing to see didn't militate for the worthy
woman against what one MIGHT see, 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 - so many of them as there were too! - with
her glimmering taper. 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 - for 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 that occupied, as a "fixture," the deep recess in the dining-room.
Just now he laughed at his companions - quickly however changing the
The Jolly Corner
8
subject; for the reason that, in the first place, his 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 enquiry by the time Mrs. Muldoon had left them,
passing on to other parts.
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 THIS to
pieces!" His answer came, promptly, with his re-awakened 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 - ! 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 THOSE 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 - not, 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, "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.
He spoke of the value of all he read into it, into the mere sight of the
The Jolly Corner
9
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?"
"Well, WITH such a home - !" But, quite beautifully, she had too
much tact to dot so monstrous an I, and it was precisely an illustration of
the way she didn't rattle. How could any one - of any wit - insist on any
one else's "wanting" to live in New York?
"Oh," he said, "I MIGHT have 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 - and, I dare say, 'funny' enough. But
that's another matter. And then the beauty of it - I mean of my perversity,
of my refusal to agree to a 'deal' - is 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 HAVE
to be the other way, and would then be inevitably a reason of dollars?
There are no reasons here BUT of dollars. Let us therefore have none
whatever - not the ghost of one."
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 - ?"
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
The Jolly Corner
10
and a grin: "Oh ghosts - of 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."
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 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.
本文档为【The Jolly Corner(快乐的角落)】,请使用软件OFFICE或WPS软件打开。作品中的文字与图均可以修改和编辑,
图片更改请在作品中右键图片并更换,文字修改请直接点击文字进行修改,也可以新增和删除文档中的内容。
该文档来自用户分享,如有侵权行为请发邮件ishare@vip.sina.com联系网站客服,我们会及时删除。
[版权声明] 本站所有资料为用户分享产生,若发现您的权利被侵害,请联系客服邮件isharekefu@iask.cn,我们尽快处理。
本作品所展示的图片、画像、字体、音乐的版权可能需版权方额外授权,请谨慎使用。
网站提供的党政主题相关内容(国旗、国徽、党徽..)目的在于配合国家政策宣传,仅限个人学习分享使用,禁止用于任何广告和商用目的。