The result of the whole quality of her welcome, at any rate, was that the first evening, in his room, before going to bed, he relieved his mind in a letter to Addie, which, if space allowed us to embody it in our text, would usefully perform the office of a "plate." It would enable us to present ourselves as profusely illustrated.But the process of reproduction, as we say, costs.
He wished his friend to know how grandly their affair turned out.
She had put him in the way of something absolutely special--an old house untouched, untouchable, indescribable, an old corner such as one didn't believe existed, and the holy calm of which made the chatter of studios, the smell of paint, the slang of critics, the whole sense and sound of Paris, come back as so many signs of a huge monkey-cage.He moved about, restless, while he wrote; he lighted cigarettes and, nervous and suddenly scrupulous, put them out again; the night was mild and one of the windows of his large high room, which stood over the garden, was up.He lost himself in the things about him, in the type of the room, the last century with not a chair moved, not a point stretched.He hung over the objects and ornaments, blissfully few and adorably good, perfect pieces all, and never one, for a change, French.The scene was as rare as some fine old print with the best bits down in the corners.
Old books and old pictures, allusions remembered and aspects conjectured, reappeared to him; he knew not what anxious islanders had been trying for in their backward hunt for the homely.But the homely at Flickerbridge was all style, even as style at the same time was mere honesty.The larger, the smaller past--he scarce knew which to call it--was at all events so hushed to sleep round him as he wrote that he had almost a bad conscience about having come.How one might love it, but how one might spoil it! To look at it too hard was positively to make it conscious, and to make it conscious was positively to wake it up.Its only safety, of a truth, was to be left still to sleep--to sleep in its large fair chambers and under its high clean canopies.
He added thus restlessly a line to his letter, maundered round the room again, noted and fingered something else, and then, dropping on the old flowered sofa, sustained by the tight cubes of its cushions, yielded afresh to the cigarette, hesitated, stared, wrote a few words more.He wanted Addie to know, that was what he most felt, unless he perhaps felt, more how much she herself would want to.Yes, what he supremely saw was all that Addie would make of it.Up to his neck in it there he fairly turned cold at the sense of suppressed opportunity, of the outrage of privation that his correspondent would retrospectively and, as he even divined with a vague shudder, almost vindictively nurse.Well, what had happened was that the acquaintance had been kept for her, like a packet enveloped and sealed for delivery, till her attention was free.He saw her there, heard her and felt her--felt how she would feel and how she would, as she usually said, "rave." Some of her young compatriots called it "yell," and in the reference itself, alas!
illustrated their meaning.She would understand the place at any rate, down to the ground; there wasn't the slightest doubt of that.
Her sense of it would be exactly like his own, and he could see, in anticipation, just the terms of recognition and rapture in which she would abound.He knew just what she would call quaint, just what she would call bland, just what she would call weird, just what she would call wild.She would take it all in with an intelligence much more fitted than his own, in fact, to deal with what he supposed he must regard as its literary relations.She would have read the long-winded obsolete memoirs and novels that both the figures and the setting ought clearly to remind one of;she would know about the past generations--the lumbering country magnates and their turbaned wives and round-eyed daughters, who, in other days, had treated the ruddy sturdy tradeless town,--the solid square houses and wide walled gardens, the streets to-day all grass and gossip, as the scene of a local "season." She would have warrant for the assemblies, dinners, deep potations; for the smoked sconces in the dusky parlours; for the long muddy century of family coaches, "holsters," highwaymen.She would put a finger in short, just as he had done, on the vital spot--the rich humility of the whole thing, the fact that neither Flickerbridge in general nor Miss Wenham in particular, nor anything nor any one concerned, had a suspicion of their characters and their merit.Addie and he would have to come to let in light.
He let it in then, little by little, before going to bed, through the eight or ten pages he addressed to her; assured her that it was the happiest case in the world, a little picture--yet full of "style" too--absolutely composed and transmitted, with tradition, and tradition only, in every stroke, tradition still noiselessly breathing and visibly flushing, marking strange hours in the tall mahogany clocks that were never wound up and that yet audibly ticked on.All the elements, he was sure he should see, would hang together with a charm, presenting his hostess--a strange iridescent fish for the glazed exposure of an aquarium--as afloat in her native medium.He left his letter open on the table, but, looking it over next morning, felt of a sudden indisposed to send it.He would keep it to add more, for there would be more to know; yet when three days had elapsed he still had not sent it.He sent instead, after delay, a much briefer report, which he was moved to make different and, for some reason, less vivid.Meanwhile he learned from Miss Wenham how Addie had introduced him.It took time to arrive with her at that point, but after the Rubicon was crossed they went far afield.
