Washington Square
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Henry James >> Washington Square
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14 This etext was scanned by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk,
from the 1921 Macmillan and Co. edition. Proofing was by
Dimitri Papadopoulos, Lynn A. Weinberg, Stuart Bennett and Mary
Willard.
WASHINGTON SQUARE
by Henry James
CHAPTER I
During a portion of the first half of the present century, and more
particularly during the latter part of it, there flourished and
practised in the city of New York a physician who enjoyed perhaps an
exceptional share of the consideration which, in the United States,
has always been bestowed upon distinguished members of the medical
profession. This profession in America has constantly been held in
honour, and more successfully than elsewhere has put forward a claim
to the epithet of "liberal." In a country in which, to play a social
part, you must either earn your income or make believe that you earn
it, the healing art has appeared in a high degree to combine two
recognised sources of credit. It belongs to the realm of the
practical, which in the United States is a great recommendation; and
it is touched by the light of science--a merit appreciated in a
community in which the love of knowledge has not always been
accompanied by leisure and opportunity. It was an element in Dr.
Sloper's reputation that his learning and his skill were very evenly
balanced; he was what you might call a scholarly doctor, and yet
there was nothing abstract in his remedies--he always ordered you to
take something. Though he was felt to be extremely thorough, he was
not uncomfortably theoretic, and if he sometimes explained matters
rather more minutely than might seem of use to the patient, he never
went so far (like some practitioners one has heard of) as to trust to
the explanation alone, but always left behind him an inscrutable
prescription. There were some doctors that left the prescription
without offering any explanation at all; and he did not belong to
that class either, which was, after all, the most vulgar. It will be
seen that I am describing a clever man; and this is really the reason
why Dr. Sloper had become a local celebrity. At the time at which we
are chiefly concerned with him, he was some fifty years of age, and
his popularity was at its height. He was very witty, and he passed
in the best society of New York for a man of the world--which,
indeed, he was, in a very sufficient degree. I hasten to add, to
anticipate possible misconception, that he was not the least of a
charlatan. He was a thoroughly honest man--honest in a degree of
which he had perhaps lacked the opportunity to give the complete
measure; and, putting aside the great good-nature of the circle in
which he practised, which was rather fond of boasting that it
possessed the "brightest" doctor in the country, he daily justified
his claim to the talents attributed to him by the popular voice. He
was an observer, even a philosopher, and to be bright was so natural
to him, and (as the popular voice said) came so easily, that he never
aimed at mere effect, and had none of the little tricks and
pretensions of second-rate reputations. It must be confessed that
fortune had favoured him, and that he had found the path to
prosperity very soft to his tread. He had married at the age of
twenty-seven, for love, a very charming girl, Miss Catherine
Harrington, of New York, who, in addition to her charms, had brought
him a solid dowry. Mrs. Sloper was amiable, graceful, accomplished,
elegant, and in 1820 she had been one of the pretty girls of the
small but promising capital which clustered about the Battery and
overlooked the Bay, and of which the uppermost boundary was indicated
by the grassy waysides of Canal Street. Even at the age of twenty-
seven Austin Sloper had made his mark sufficiently to mitigate the
anomaly of his having been chosen among a dozen suitors by a young
woman of high fashion, who had ten thousand dollars of income and the
most charming eyes in the island of Manhattan. These eyes, and some
of their accompaniments, were for about five years a source of
extreme satisfaction to the young physician, who was both a devoted
and a very happy husband. The fact of his having married a rich
woman made no difference in the line he had traced for himself, and
he cultivated his profession with as definite a purpose as if he
still had no other resources than his fraction of the modest
patrimony which on his father's death he had shared with his brothers
and sisters. This purpose had not been preponderantly to make money-
-it had been rather to learn something and to do something. To learn
something interesting, and to do something useful--this was, roughly
speaking, the programme he had sketched, and of which the accident of
his wife having an income appeared to him in no degree to modify the
validity. He was fond of his practice, and of exercising a skill of
which he was agreeably conscious, and it was so patent a truth that
if he were not a doctor there was nothing else he could be, that a
doctor he persisted in being, in the best possible conditions. Of
course his easy domestic situation saved him a good deal of drudgery,
and his wife's affiliation to the "best people" brought him a good
many of those patients whose symptoms are, if not more interesting in
themselves than those of the lower orders, at least more consistently
displayed. He desired experience, and in the course of twenty years
he got a great deal. It must be added that it came to him in some
forms which, whatever might have been their intrinsic value, made it
the reverse of welcome. His first child, a little boy of
extraordinary promise, as the Doctor, who was not addicted to easy
enthusiasms, firmly believed, died at three years of age, in spite of
everything that the mother's tenderness and the father's science
could invent to save him. Two years later Mrs. Sloper gave birth to
a second infant--an infant of a sex which rendered the poor child, to
the Doctor's sense, an inadequate substitute for his lamented first-
born, of whom he had promised himself to make an admirable man. The
little girl was a disappointment; but this was not the worst. A week
after her birth the young mother, who, as the phrase is, had been
doing well, suddenly betrayed alarming symptoms, and before another
week had elapsed Austin Sloper was a widower.
For a man whose trade was to keep people alive, he had certainly done
poorly in his own family; and a bright doctor who within three years
loses his wife and his little boy should perhaps be prepared to see
either his skill or his affection impugned. Our friend, however,
escaped criticism: that is, he escaped all criticism but his own,
which was much the most competent and most formidable. He walked
under the weight of this very private censure for the rest of his
days, and bore for ever the scars of a castigation to which the
strongest hand he knew had treated him on the night that followed his
wife's death. The world, which, as I have said, appreciated him,
pitied him too much to be ironical; his misfortune made him more
interesting, and even helped him to be the fashion. It was observed
that even medical families cannot escape the more insidious forms of
disease, and that, after all, Dr. Sloper had lost other patients
beside the two I have mentioned; which constituted an honourable
precedent. His little girl remained to him, and though she was not
what he had desired, he proposed to himself to make the best of her.
He had on hand a stock of unexpended authority, by which the child,
in its early years, profited largely. She had been named, as a
matter of course, after her poor mother, and even in her most
diminutive babyhood the Doctor never called her anything but
Catherine. She grew up a very robust and healthy child, and her
father, as he looked at her, often said to himself that, such as she
was, he at least need have no fear of losing her. I say "such as she
was," because, to tell the truth--But this is a truth of which I will
defer the telling.
CHAPTER II
When the child was about ten years old, he invited his sister, Mrs.
Penniman, to come and stay with him. The Miss Slopers had been but
two in number, and both of them had married early in life. The
younger, Mrs. Almond by name, was the wife of a prosperous merchant,
and the mother of a blooming family. She bloomed herself, indeed,
and was a comely, comfortable, reasonable woman, and a favourite with
her clever brother, who, in the matter of women, even when they were
nearly related to him, was a man of distinct preferences. He
preferred Mrs. Almond to his sister Lavinia, who had married a poor
clergyman, of a sickly constitution and a flowery style of eloquence,
and then, at the age of thirty-three, had been left a widow, without
children, without fortune--with nothing but the memory of Mr.
Penniman's flowers of speech, a certain vague aroma of which hovered
about her own conversation. Nevertheless he had offered her a home
under his own roof, which Lavinia accepted with the alacrity of a
woman who had spent the ten years of her married life in the town of
Poughkeepsie. The Doctor had not proposed to Mrs. Penniman to come
and live with him indefinitely; he had suggested that she should make
an asylum of his house while she looked about for unfurnished
lodgings. It is uncertain whether Mrs. Penniman ever instituted a
search for unfurnished lodgings, but it is beyond dispute that she
never found them. She settled herself with her brother and never
went away, and when Catherine was twenty years old her Aunt Lavinia
was still one of the most striking features of her immediate
entourage. Mrs. Penniman's own account of the matter was that she
had remained to take charge of her niece's education. She had given
this account, at least, to every one but the Doctor, who never asked
for explanations which he could entertain himself any day with
inventing. Mrs. Penniman, moreover, though she had a good deal of a
certain sort of artificial assurance, shrank, for indefinable
reasons, from presenting herself to her brother as a fountain of
instruction. She had not a high sense of humour, but she had enough
to prevent her from making this mistake; and her brother, on his
side, had enough to excuse her, in her situation, for laying him
under contribution during a considerable part of a lifetime. He
therefore assented tacitly to the proposition which Mrs. Penniman had
tacitly laid down, that it was of importance that the poor motherless
girl should have a brilliant woman near her. His assent could only
be tacit, for he had never been dazzled by his sister's intellectual
lustre. Save when he fell in love with Catherine Harrington, he had
never been dazzled, indeed, by any feminine characteristics whatever;
and though he was to a certain extent what is called a ladies'
doctor, his private opinion of the more complicated sex was not
exalted. He regarded its complications as more curious than
edifying, and he had an idea of the beauty of REASON, which was, on
the whole, meagrely gratified by what he observed in his female
patients. His wife had been a reasonable woman, but she was a bright
exception; among several things that he was sure of, this was perhaps
the principal. Such a conviction, of course, did little either to
mitigate or to abbreviate his widowhood; and it set a limit to his
recognition, at the best, of Catherine's possibilities and of Mrs.
Penniman's ministrations. He, nevertheless, at the end of six
months, accepted his sister's permanent presence as an accomplished
fact, and as Catherine grew older perceived that there were in effect
good reasons why she should have a companion of her own imperfect
sex. He was extremely polite to Lavinia, scrupulously, formally
polite; and she had never seen him in anger but once in her life,
when he lost his temper in a theological discussion with her late
husband. With her he never discussed theology, nor, indeed,
discussed anything; he contented himself with making known, very
distinctly, in the form of a lucid ultimatum, his wishes with regard
to Catherine.
Once, when the girl was about twelve years old, he had said to her:
"Try and make a clever woman of her, Lavinia; I should like her to be
a clever woman."
Mrs. Penniman, at this, looked thoughtful a moment. "My dear
Austin," she then inquired, "do you think it is better to be clever
than to be good?"
"Good for what?" asked the Doctor. "You are good for nothing unless
you are clever."
From this assertion Mrs. Penniman saw no reason to dissent; she
possibly reflected that her own great use in the world was owing to
her aptitude for many things.
"Of course I wish Catherine to be good," the Doctor said next day;
"but she won't be any the less virtuous for not being a fool. I am
not afraid of her being wicked; she will never have the salt of
malice in her character. She is as good as good bread, as the French
say; but six years hence I don't want to have to compare her to good
bread and butter."
"Are you afraid she will turn insipid? My dear brother, it is I who
supply the butter; so you needn't fear!" said Mrs. Penniman, who had
taken in hand the child's accomplishments, overlooking her at the
piano, where Catherine displayed a certain talent, and going with her
to the dancing-class, where it must be confessed that she made but a
modest figure.
Mrs. Penniman was a tall, thin, fair, rather faded woman, with a
perfectly amiable disposition, a high standard of gentility, a taste
for light literature, and a certain foolish indirectness and
obliquity of character. She was romantic, she was sentimental, she
had a passion for little secrets and mysteries--a very innocent
passion, for her secrets had hitherto always been as unpractical as
addled eggs. She was not absolutely veracious; but this defect was
of no great consequence, for she had never had anything to conceal.
She would have liked to have a lover, and to correspond with him
under an assumed name in letters left at a shop; I am bound to say
that her imagination never carried the intimacy farther than this.
Mrs. Penniman had never had a lover, but her brother, who was very
shrewd, understood her turn of mind. "When Catherine is about
seventeen," he said to himself, "Lavinia will try and persuade her
that some young man with a moustache is in love with her. It will be
quite untrue; no young man, with a moustache or without, will ever be
in love with Catherine. But Lavinia will take it up, and talk to her
about it; perhaps, even, if her taste for clandestine operations
doesn't prevail with her, she will talk to me about it. Catherine
won't see it, and won't believe it, fortunately for her peace of
mind; poor Catherine isn't romantic."
She was a healthy well-grown child, without a trace of her mother's
beauty. She was not ugly; she had simply a plain, dull, gentle
countenance. The most that had ever been said for her was that she
had a "nice" face, and, though she was an heiress, no one had ever
thought of regarding her as a belle. Her father's opinion of her
moral purity was abundantly justified; she was excellently,
imperturbably good; affectionate, docile, obedient, and much addicted
to speaking the truth. In her younger years she was a good deal of a
romp, and, though it is an awkward confession to make about one's
heroine, I must add that she was something of a glutton. She never,
that I know of, stole raisins out of the pantry; but she devoted her
pocket-money to the purchase of cream-cakes. As regards this,
however, a critical attitude would be inconsistent with a candid
reference to the early annals of any biographer. Catherine was
decidedly not clever; she was not quick with her book, nor, indeed,
with anything else. She was not abnormally deficient, and she
mustered learning enough to acquit herself respectably in
conversation with her contemporaries, among whom it must be avowed,
however, that she occupied a secondary place. It is well known that
in New York it is possible for a young girl to occupy a primary one.
Catherine, who was extremely modest, had no desire to shine, and on
most social occasions, as they are called, you would have found her
lurking in the background. She was extremely fond of her father, and
very much afraid of him; she thought him the cleverest and handsomest
and most celebrated of men. The poor girl found her account so
completely in the exercise of her affections that the little tremor
of fear that mixed itself with her filial passion gave the thing an
extra relish rather than blunted its edge. Her deepest desire was to
please him, and her conception of happiness was to know that she had
succeeded in pleasing him. She had never succeeded beyond a certain
point. Though, on the whole, he was very kind to her, she was
perfectly aware of this, and to go beyond the point in question
seemed to her really something to live for. What she could not know,
of course, was that she disappointed him, though on three or four
occasions the Doctor had been almost frank about it. She grew up
peacefully and prosperously, but at the age of eighteen Mrs. Penniman
had not made a clever woman of her. Dr. Sloper would have liked to
be proud of his daughter; but there was nothing to be proud of in
poor Catherine. There was nothing, of course, to be ashamed of; but
this was not enough for the Doctor, who was a proud man and would
have enjoyed being able to think of his daughter as an unusual girl.
There would have been a fitness in her being pretty and graceful,
intelligent and distinguished; for her mother had been the most
charming woman of her little day, and as regards her father, of
course he knew his own value. He had moments of irritation at having
produced a commonplace child, and he even went so far at times as to
take a certain satisfaction in the thought that his wife had not
lived to find her out. He was naturally slow in making this
discovery himself, and it was not till Catherine had become a young
lady grown that he regarded the matter as settled. He gave her the
benefit of a great many doubts; he was in no haste to conclude. Mrs.
Penniman frequently assured him that his daughter had a delightful
nature; but he knew how to interpret this assurance. It meant, to
his sense, that Catherine was not wise enough to discover that her
aunt was a goose--a limitation of mind that could not fail to be
agreeable to Mrs. Penniman. Both she and her brother, however,
exaggerated the young girl's limitations; for Catherine, though she
was very fond of her aunt, and conscious of the gratitude she owed
her, regarded her without a particle of that gentle dread which gave
its stamp to her admiration of her father. To her mind there was
nothing of the infinite about Mrs. Penniman; Catherine saw her all at
once, as it were, and was not dazzled by the apparition; whereas her
father's great faculties seemed, as they stretched away, to lose
themselves in a sort of luminous vagueness, which indicated, not that
they stopped, but that Catherine's own mind ceased to follow them.
It must not be supposed that Dr. Sloper visited his disappointment
upon the poor girl, or ever let her suspect that she had played him a
trick. On the contrary, for fear of being unjust to her, he did his
duty with exemplary zeal, and recognised that she was a faithful and
affectionate child. Besides, he was a philosopher; he smoked a good
many cigars over his disappointment, and in the fulness of time he
got used to it. He satisfied himself that he had expected nothing,
though, indeed, with a certain oddity of reasoning. "I expect
nothing," he said to himself, "so that if she gives me a surprise, it
will be all clear again. If she doesn't, it will be no loss." This
was about the time Catherine had reached her eighteenth year, so that
it will be seen her father had not been precipitate. At this time
she seemed not only incapable of giving surprises; it was almost a
question whether she could have received one--she was so quiet and
irresponsive. People who expressed themselves roughly called her
stolid. But she was irresponsive because she was shy, uncomfortably,
painfully shy. This was not always understood, and she sometimes
produced an impression of insensibility. In reality she was the
softest creature in the world.
CHAPTER III
As a child she had promised to be tall, but when she was sixteen she
ceased to grow, and her stature, like most other points in her
composition, was not unusual. She was strong, however, and properly
made, and, fortunately, her health was excellent. It has been noted
that the Doctor was a philosopher, but I would not have answered for
his philosophy if the poor girl had proved a sickly and suffering
person. Her appearance of health constituted her principal claim to
beauty, and her clear, fresh complexion, in which white and red were
very equally distributed, was, indeed, an excellent thing to see.
Her eye was small and quiet, her features were rather thick, her
tresses brown and smooth. A dull, plain girl she was called by
rigorous critics--a quiet, ladylike girl by those of the more
imaginative sort; but by neither class was she very elaborately
discussed. When it had been duly impressed upon her that she was a
young lady--it was a good while before she could believe it--she
suddenly developed a lively taste for dress: a lively taste is quite
the expression to use. I feel as if I ought to write it very small,
her judgement in this matter was by no means infallible; it was
liable to confusions and embarrassments. Her great indulgence of it
was really the desire of a rather inarticulate nature to manifest
itself; she sought to be eloquent in her garments, and to make up for
her diffidence of speech by a fine frankness of costume. But if she
expressed herself in her clothes it is certain that people were not
to blame for not thinking her a witty person. It must be added that
though she had the expectation of a fortune--Dr. Sloper for a long
time had been making twenty thousand dollars a year by his
profession, and laying aside the half of it--the amount of money at
her disposal was not greater than the allowance made to many poorer
girls. In those days in New York there were still a few altar-fires
flickering in the temple of Republican simplicity, and Dr. Sloper
would have been glad to see his daughter present herself, with a
classic grace, as a priestess of this mild faith. It made him fairly
grimace, in private, to think that a child of his should be both ugly
and overdressed. For himself, he was fond of the good things of
life, and he made a considerable use of them; but he had a dread of
vulgarity, and even a theory that it was increasing in the society
that surrounded him. Moreover, the standard of luxury in the United
States thirty years ago was carried by no means so high as at
present, and Catherine's clever father took the old-fashioned view of
the education of young persons. He had no particular theory on the
subject; it had scarcely as yet become a necessity of self-defence to
have a collection of theories. It simply appeared to him proper and
reasonable that a well-bred young woman should not carry half her
fortune on her back. Catherine's back was a broad one, and would
have carried a good deal; but to the weight of the paternal
displeasure she never ventured to expose it, and our heroine was
twenty years old before she treated herself, for evening wear, to a
red satin gown trimmed with gold fringe; though this was an article
which, for many years, she had coveted in secret. It made her look,
when she sported it, like a woman of thirty; but oddly enough, in
spite of her taste for fine clothes, she had not a grain of coquetry,
and her anxiety when she put them on was as to whether they, and not
she, would look well. It is a point on which history has not been
explicit, but the assumption is warrantable; it was in the royal
raiment just mentioned that she presented herself at a little
entertainment given by her aunt, Mrs. Almond. The girl was at this
time in her twenty-first year, and Mrs. Almond's party was the
beginning of something very important.
Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his
household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living
ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite
copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street
within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days
(from the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of
fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York,
thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do,
and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of
Broadway. By the time the Doctor changed his residence the murmur of
trade had become a mighty uproar, which was music in the ears of all
good citizens interested in the commercial development, as they
delighted to call it, of their fortunate isle. Dr. Sloper's interest
in this phenomenon was only indirect--though, seeing that, as the
years went on, half his patients came to be overworked men of
business, it might have been more immediate--and when most of his
neighbours' dwellings (also ornamented with granite copings and large
fanlights) had been converted into offices, warehouses, and shipping
agencies, and otherwise applied to the base uses of commerce, he
determined to look out for a quieter home. The ideal of quiet and of
genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where
the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with
a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble
steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble.
This structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly
resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results
of architectural science, and they remain to this day very solid and
honourable dwellings. In front of them was the Square, containing a
considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden
paling, which increased its rural and accessible appearance; and
round the corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue,
taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident air
which already marked it for high destinies. I know not whether it is
owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of
New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind
of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other
quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more
honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great
longitudinal thoroughfare--the look of having had something of a
social history. It was here, as you might have been informed on good
authority, that you had come into a world which appeared to offer a
variety of sources of interest; it was here that your grandmother
lived, in venerable solitude, and dispensed a hospitality which
commended itself alike to the infant imagination and the infant
palate; it was here that you took your first walks abroad, following
the nursery-maid with unequal step and sniffing up the strange odour
of the ailantus-trees which at that time formed the principal umbrage
of the Square, and diffused an aroma that you were not yet critical
enough to dislike as it deserved; it was here, finally, that your
first school, kept by a broad-bosomed, broad-based old lady with a
ferule, who was always having tea in a blue cup, with a saucer that
didn't match, enlarged the circle both of your observations and your
sensations. It was here, at any rate, that my heroine spent many
years of her life; which is my excuse for this topographical
parenthesis.
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