Mrs. Osmond Page 6

  “Ah, I see,” Isabel said, returning the lady’s look with a hint of irony of her own. “You are suffragettes.”

  “We,” Miss Janeway gently corrected her, “are suffragists. It was the gentlemen of the press who invented the word ‘suffragette,’ as a term of derision.” She paused. “I hardly imagine news of our movement has reached as far as the gates of the Eternal City?”

  Isabel shook her head. “Not yet, alas. I fear the women of Italy know their place very well. Certainly the men know it, and keep them firmly to it.”

  “But you are not a ‘woman of Italy’—you are an American. And your husband too, I believe, is a native of the New World?”

  “Yes, he is. Or was. He was born in Baltimore, but has lived so long in Europe, and has so mastered its ways, that he has raised himself to a position from which he considers himself perfectly at liberty to patronise the natives.”

  On this Miss Janeway settled grimly. “And one of the ways of old Europe he has mastered is the subjugation of Woman?”

  She had sought to mitigate the harshness of her words with a tight-lipped smile, yet Isabel was startled by the lady’s vehemence nonetheless. “I have not come here to disparage my husband,” she said quietly, directing her eyes at the table-top. She was aware of the question suspended in the air between them, the altogether pertinent question as to why she had come, but she was content to let it hang there unaddressed. “I would not have him thought some kind of conventional monster. Indeed, I know of no man less brutish, if we are to speak of such things as subjugation, and none more alive to the nuances of what it is to be free.”

  “And unfree?” Miss Janeway pursued, still keeping in place that polite pinched smile; the lady had, Isabel acknowledged, her own rules of tolerance and urbanity, or of the appearance of such, at least.

  The maid came then to ask if there was anything else required. Miss Janeway said there was not, and the smiling girl bobbed out again. Her mistress turned to Isabel. “Forgive me, my dear,” she said, “I am remiss—perhaps there is something else you’d like? We do not drink coffee, I’m afraid, and”—her smile softened—“I should not dare to ask what is surely by now a thoroughly Italianated palate to risk the sampling of one of our less than Dionysian fruit cordials.”

  Isabel was aware of being mocked, albeit without malice, and in response stoutly declared that there was not a thing more in the world she required at this moment, which was true, insofar as beverages were concerned. Then the two put aside their napkins—they were made of calico, not linen, in keeping with the general frugality and modesty of the house—and rose from the table. Miss Janeway seated herself at one end of a small sofa upholstered in dark-green fustian that was shiny along the tops of the armrests, while Isabel wandered to the window. As she stood there, viewing through sun-bright panes the nascent hollyhocks and the flowering lilac blossom in the narrow strip of front garden outside, she suddenly found the word that she had been searching for earlier, the German word of which her husband was so fond. It was Schadenfreude, which meant, as she knew all too well, the taking of pleasure in the misfortunes of others. Trust the precise and finical Teutons, she thought, to compress so broad a concept into a single handy term. But what was it now that had caused the elusive word to alight so promptly in her consciousness? She had no sooner posed the question than the answer came flying at her with the violent swiftness of a seabird plunging after its prey. It was that the disposition of herself and Miss Janeway in the room, she standing while her hostess sat, had brought to mind a similar but far less casual arrangement witnessed elsewhere, and in what seemed to her already another life. One day at the Palazzo Roccanera, her grand but incurably oppressive house in Rome that she shared with her husband and his daughter, she had entered one of the drawing rooms and, stopping just past the threshold, had seen, in the second before she was noticed by them, her husband and their friend—their friend!—Madame Merle there together, quite still, regarding each other silently in what must be a pause in a conversation that had been going on for some time. There was nothing untoward in their being thus engaged in familiar colloquy—Gilbert Osmond of Baltimore had known Brooklyn’s Serena Merle for many years before Isabel had made an appearance in either of their lives—yet Isabel had been struck not only by the absorbed yet easy fashion in which they regarded each other, but by the fact that Madame Merle was standing, her large fair head held aloft as usual, while Osmond was seated in a deep armchair, looking up at her, with his legs extended and his hands loosely in his trouser pockets, in somewhat the way, as Isabel fondly remembered, that Ralph Touchett used to sit, or lounge, rather, but in such lazy relaxation as Isabel’s husband would never permit himself to be seen enjoying. Catching sight of his wife, Osmond had hurriedly gathered himself up and, fairly scrambling to his feet, had as good as fled the room, mumbling of the need of a walk. Madame Merle, on the other hand, had remained as she had been, bravely erect and calm of gaze, and with the same small sharp light in her eye that some few minutes earlier Isabel believed she had detected in Miss Janeway’s look, the light of secret gratification before the spectacle of another’s distress, perplexity and general helplessness. Helpless, perplexed and in distress Isabel had not been that day, amid the gloomy splendours of the Roman palazzo that was her home, hers and her husband’s, but sooner or later she would be, oh, certainly she would, as who should know better than this same Madame Merle?

  “We were speaking of freedom, and of what it is to be free,” Isabel said now to Miss Janeway, without turning from the window. “I fear I speak of these concepts in such a general fashion that you hardly recognise them as what you know. I mean, freedom for you, I should imagine, is a matter of immediate and graspable practicalities.”

  “And what is it for you?” Miss Janeway, behind her, enquired. “Is it not a practical matter, for instance, as to whether or not to stop off at Paris on your way to Italy and home?”

  About that word, “home,” Isabel had clearly discerned the imprint of quotation marks, and once more she was aware of being mocked, although this time she felt distinctly the sting of it; Miss Janeway, she divined, was, for all the calm certitudes of her position and opinions, not immune to the smarting effect of plain envy. Isabel regretted having spoken of Paris, regretted the large liberalities, as well as the bottomless depths of her pocket, that mention of that city, that place of grand possibilities, had implied. She decided she must meet the matter directly. She turned from the window and, approaching the sofa, requested leave to be seated. Taking her place on a worn and decidedly unaccommodating cushion, she realised, too late, that she had made a mistake, for the proximity to her hostess in which she had placed herself—it really was a very small sofa—created an unwilling and awkward condition of intimacy, like that between two young ladies at a debutantes’ ball who find themselves thrown together on the periphery of the dance floor for no other reason than a want of partners. And yet she pressed on.

  “Money,” she said, “that is, the having of it, is of course an aspect of freedom, if not, at certain times and in certain circumstances, freedom itself.”

  “It certainly allows of wider aspects,” Miss Janeway observed, after a pause; it was plain she was puzzled by and somewhat wary of the candidly, even the brazenly, mercenary turn the conversation had taken.

  “The money which I possess,” Isabel went on, gazing before her with a musing frown, “was left to me by my uncle—an uncle by marriage, my aunt’s husband—but recently I discovered that in fact it came to me, clandestinely, from my cousin, the one who has just died.”

  “That would be young Mr. Touchett,” Miss Janeway gently offered. “Henrietta spoke of him to me.”

  “Charitably, I hope,” Isabel said, and smiled. “She claimed to disapprove of him as an idler and a cynic, while he for his part liked nothing better than to feed her disapproval by endlessly teasing her. She never quite believed him to be as ill as he was.”

  “And now that he has proved it, she feels g
uilty?”

  “Oh, don’t say so!” Isabel smilingly cried. “Ralph would be horrified to think he should have caused her the faintest prickings of remorse. Whatever she thought of him, or pretended to think, he saw the point of her, as few others did, or do.”

  They fell silent, as if out of respect for the passage of something, an acknowledging sigh, perhaps, from the land of the shades. Miss Janeway was the first to stir.

  “May I be permitted to enquire,” she tentatively resumed, leaning forward a little, “how it came about that your cousin made an heiress of you, and without your knowing of it until recently?”

  Miss Janeway saw, from the blurred look Isabel had taken on, that she was no longer fully there, that the livelier part of her consciousness was somewhere else, back at the side of her cousin’s deathbed, no doubt. When she spoke, her voice, too, seemed to come from a distant place.

  “He separated off half of his own inheritance—more than half, perhaps, I don’t know—and persuaded his father to settle it on me instead, swearing him to secrecy. He wanted, Ralph wanted, to see my sails filled out as I set off on the voyage of my life. In return he desired only to have dispatches now and then, to hear word of the wonders I encountered, and the fabulous ports I should stop at along the way. I’m afraid I proved to be no Marco Polo or Vasco da Gama. I no sooner set out than my frail bark struck upon the rocks.”

  Again there fell between them a brief resounding silence, and again it was Miss Janeway who broke it. “You married, you mean,” she said, in a voice as flat as the air about them.

  “I married,” Isabel said, and her tone was equally subdued, pressed upon by a weight of resignation. “Or perhaps I should say I was led into marriage”—she turned her face fully towards her hostess where she sat so straight at the other corner of the sofa—“that is, to put it at its plainest and most vulgar, I was married for my money.”

  She rose now and crossed again to stand with her face to the window. Sunlight glowed in the soft auburn ringlets at her temples. She was so young, Miss Janeway reflected—she was, in truth, not even thirty yet!—a young woman whom disenchantment had already made to seem almost middle-aged.

  “Was there so much of it, your money?”

  Isabel turned again to face her questioner. “Well, there was enough of it to make me an asset worth acquiring. And by now there is a great deal more. Whatever my husband may not be, he is shrewd. With my blessing he made himself trusted at the bank—my bank, here in London—and succeeded in turning my modest fortune into—”

  She hesitated. Miss Janeway coolly twinkled. “An immodest one?” she murmured.

  “Modest or immodest,” Isabel declared, a little surprised at the almost belligerent force of her own voice, “my fortune has for now become the central fact of my life, the mountain that blocks out all the rest of the view before me.”

  To this Miss Janeway returned a dry stare. She was silent for a moment, and when she spoke it was as if she were distracted by some other thought unconnected with what she was saying. “I have always been struck by the ambiguity of the word ‘fortune’ in the context in which you use it,” she vaguely murmured.

  However, Isabel as good as brushed this aside. “I intend to use it, my fortune—my money—to buy my freedom.”

  A new light had sprung up in her eye, a light that illumined her entire countenance—her entire being, as it seemed. Miss Janeway regarded her with a startled interest, drawing back a little way on the sofa. It was as if a new person had come sweeping into the room, a figure all fortitude and determination, with metaphorical sleeves rolled, to replace by some transformative magic the uncertain and troubled young woman who had been there until a moment ago.

  “You mean to make your money over to your husband,” the older lady shrewdly ventured.

  Isabel, with nostrils flared, glowed at her like a veritable beacon.

  “I mean,” she said, “to purchase my emancipation—my suffrage, if you like!”

  VII

  She worried, afterwards, that her departure should have appeared rudely precipitate. Immediately following her grand statement of intent as to the purchasing of her freedom, and feeling somewhat abashed for what must have seemed the baldly pecuniary tone of it, she had snatched up her gloves and her bonnet, uttered hurried thanks for a delightful luncheon, added a brisk farewell, and made for the front door with such haste that her hostess had been compelled almost to scramble to be first at the latch. Outside, the sunlight dazzled her eyes. Her only thought was how she was to procure a cab in what on her journey hither had proved itself to be a suburban wilderness. She stood on the pavement turning her head this way and that with bird-like urgency. Miss Janeway was able to tell her that there was a rank but two short streets away, and even offered to escort her there, to be sure she did not miss the spot, but Isabel said no, no, she would not hear of it, for she knew her hostess had much to attend to, and she would find her own way with ease. She was flushed and agitated, and wished for nothing more dearly than to be on her way back to Dover Street. But plain mannerliness, such as had been dinned into her over the years when she was a little girl in Albany, forced her to hesitate. Miss Janeway stood beside the hollyhocks with her hands folded at her waist, watching her with what appeared to be a certain bemusement. There was, Isabel realised, the question of whether to offer the exchange of a kiss, again if only for the sake of being polite. But Miss Janeway seemed to see her thinking of it, and drew back with an infinitesimal yet significant movement, twisting her lips in the same peculiar fashion as she had done when greeting Isabel on her arrival at the house, a facial gesture that was not so much a smile as the mark of a smile withheld; no doubt the lady considered kissing and such carrying-on as not the kind of thing to be indulged in by serious people, and Miss Janeway, if she was nothing else, was categorically serious.

  As it turned out, Isabel succeeded in making her way to the rank directly and with ease. There was a single cab waiting, as if specially for her; it looked very shinily black and somewhat funereal, standing so still there in the gay spring sunshine. The driver, unlike the earlier one, was briskly young, and eager to the point of unctuousness. When with much fussing and balletic skipping about he helped her to negotiate the not very perilous step, she settled back against the sun-warmed cushioned seat and gave herself up to basking in the luxury of having so bravely and conclusively made up her mind. This, she realised, was what she had set herself, on the neutral ground of Miss Janeway’s house, to do: to come to a decision, or at least to consolidate what, without realising it, she had already decided. Her husband would get the money, or a sufficient portion of it, anyway, and in return she should have what she would stoutly continue to call, striking inwardly a defiant stance against Miss Janeway’s half-suppressed scepticism, her liberty.

  As the cab negotiated its way along the tree-lined streets, wheeling in a sharp right-angle at every other corner, her mind was, as it might be, jolted into relaxedness, and in a state of wakeful reverie she allowed her thoughts to return to the lady whose Spartan hospitality she had, if not enjoyed, then at least appreciated. Isabel considered herself to be as contemporary-minded and as “up” with the vital matters of the day as her years as an expatriate in a southern land should allow, but Miss Janeway seemed so radical a being as to belong to a different species from the one of which she was herself a member. However, as she came now to see, in reflecting upon it, the older lady’s radicalism was not necessarily of a modern or progressive kind. In fact she seemed to Isabel a primordial figure, something out of the ancient drama, one of those shroud-clad anonymous Cassandras who step forward from the chorus calmly to prophesy the sacked city, the toppling towers and the errant king expiring in a welter of his own blood. Miss Janeway, in her quiet and considered fashion, would bring crashing down into the dust the entire world as it was at present constituted, if only she could print sufficient placards, and mount enough parades. And yet was she not precisely what was required, if there was to be any
change at all in society? She was not nice, nor meant to be; she was not accommodating; she had sharp edges, awkward corners; any man attempting to lay a patronising hand upon her would quickly draw back, his flesh pierced by the bristling spines of her conviction, her zealot’s self-sustaining réssentiment.

  The hotel, when Isabel gained the sanctuary of it, was cool and quiet, as it always somehow managed to be, or at least to seem. The corridors were empty, save for the odd furtive porter or scurrying maid, and the reception rooms that she glanced into were suffused with a grainy radiance so mild and still and self-absorbed that she was almost loath to disturb it. She wandered about for a while, charmed by the unwonted solitude of the place; she felt like a child given the run of a delightfully deserted house. She had spoken to Miss Janeway of freedom—she rather feared she had spoken to her of little else—and now, in these unpeopled, dreaming spaces, she was being given a sample of the thing itself, as a seamstress might press upon her without charge a sample of fine silk. She consulted the timepiece suspended on a gold chain about her neck, and sighed to see how early the hour was; her appetite had not been at all satisfied by the unglimpsed Mrs. Pullan’s boiled greens, and she was looking forward to her dinner with an almost vengeful keenness. She felt it her duty, after that blameless viridescent luncheon, to fly the flag of the carnivore, and she determined to take herself to Wilton’s restaurant in Jermyn Street and order a rare steak and a glass of claret, followed by something unhealthily sweet and rich, the entire great feast to be rounded off with a pot of wickedly strong coffee. But then she recalled where she was, and sighed again: in London it was “not the done thing” for a lady to dare to dine alone in the public glare of a restaurant.

  She went up to her room and drew one of the chintz-covered armchairs to the window and sat there placidly for a while, listening to the early-evening noises in the street below. All over the city the telegraph wires would be humming with last-minute invitations, and ladies would be already instructing their maids as to which gowns to lay out, and in the clubs the gentlemen would be sighingly consulting their timepieces and folding their newspapers and requesting that their cabs be ordered up. Indeed, as she recalled now, Isabel herself had been invited forth, for had not Henrietta Stackpole informed her that she would be at her usual lodging in Wimpole Street, and since Isabel was to stay the night there, she might think of coming early and joining her friend for supper. Perhaps she would do so; she did not have to decide quite yet, and it was pleasant to sit here quiet and calm in the soft light of the summer evening.