• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7116 0

more contingencies. The season was, in local parlance, ‘on’, the elements were assembled; the big windy hotel, the draughty social hall, swarmed with ‘types’, in Charlotte’s constant phrase, and resounded with a din in which the wild music of gilded and befrogged1 bands, Croatian, Dalmatian, Carpathian,2 violently exotic and nostalgic, was distinguished as struggling against the perpetual popping of corks. Much of this would decidedly have disconcerted our friends if it hadn’t all happened, more preponderantly, to give them the brighter surprise. The noble privacy of Fawns had left them – had left Mr Verver at least – with a little accumulated sum of tolerance to spend on the high pitch and high colour of the public sphere. Fawns, as it had been for him, and as Maggie and Fanny Assingham had both attested, was out of the world, whereas the scene actually about him, with the very sea a mere big booming medium for excursions and aquariums, affected him as so plump in the conscious centre that nothing could have been more complete for representing that pulse of life which they had come to unanimity at home on the subject of their advisedly not hereafter forgetting. The pulse of life was what Charlotte, in her way, at home, had lately reproduced, and there were positively current hours when it might have been open to her companion to feel himself again indebted to her for introductions. He had ‘brought’ her, to put it crudely, but it was almost as if she were herself, in her greater gaiety, her livelier curiosity and intensity, her readier, happier irony, taking him about and showing him the place. No one, really, when he came to think, had ever taken him about before – it had always been he, of old, who took others and who in particular took Maggie. This quickly fell into its relation with him as part of an experience – marking for him no doubt what people call considerately a time of life; a new and pleasant order, a flattered passive state that might become – why shouldn’t it? – one of the comforts of the future.

Mr Gutermann-Seuss proved, on the second day – our friend had waited till then – a remarkably genial, a positively lustrous young man occupying a small neat house in a quarter of the place remote from the front and living, as immediate and striking signs testified, in the bosom of his family. Our visitors found themselves introduced, by the operation of close contiguity, to a numerous group of ladies and gentlemen older and younger, and of children larger and smaller, who mostly affected them as scarce less anointed for hospitality and who produced at first the impression of a birthday party, or some anniversary gregariously and religiously kept, though they subsequently fell into their places as members of one quiet domestic circle, preponderantly and directly indebted for their being in fact to Mr Gutermann-Seuss. To the casual eye a mere smart and shining youth of less than thirty summers, faultlessly appointed in every particular, he yet stood among his progeny – eleven in all, as he confessed without a sigh, eleven little brown clear faces, yet with such impersonal old eyes astride of such impersonal old noses – while he entertained the great American collector whom he had so long hoped he might meet, and whose charming companion, the handsome frank familiar young lady, presumably Mrs Verver, noticed the graduated offspring, noticed the fat ear-ringed aunts and the glossy cockneyfied, familiar uncles, inimitable of accent and assumption, and of an attitude of cruder intention than that of the head of the firm; noticed the place in short, noticed the treasure produced, noticed everything, as from the habit of a person finding her account at any time, according to a wisdom well learned of life, in almost any ‘funny’ impression. It really came home to her friend on the spot that this free range of observation in her, picking out the frequent funny with extraordinary promptness, would verily henceforth make a different thing for him of such experiences, of the customary hunt for the possible prize, the inquisitive