THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA. Генри ДжеймÑ
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she thought families were all rot. Hyacinth wished she would leave his alone; and while they lingered in front of her house, before she went in, he said —
“I have no doubt you ‘re a jolly girl, and I am very happy to have seen you again. But you have awfully little tact.”
“I have little tact? You should see me work off an old jacket!”
He was silent a moment, standing before her with his hands in his pockets. “It’s a good job you ‘re so handsome.”
Millicent didn’t blush at this compliment, and probably didn’t understand all it conveyed, but she looked into his eyes a while, with a smile that showed her teeth, and then said, more inconsequently than ever, “Come now, who are you?”
“Who am I? I’m a wretched little bookbinder.”
“I didn’t think I ever could fancy any one in that line!” Miss Henning exclaimed. Then she let him know that she couldn’t ask him in, as she made it a point not to receive gentlemen, but she didn’t mind if she took another walk with him, and she didn’t care if she met him somewhere — if it were handy. As she lived so far from Lomax Place, she didn’t care if she met him halfway. So, in the dusky bystreet in Pimlico, before separating, they took a casual tryst; the most interesting, the young man felt, that had yet been — he could scarcely call it granted him.
Chapter VI
ONE DAY, shortly after this, at the bindery, his friend Poupin was absent, and sent no explanation, as was customary in case of illness or domestic accident. There were two or three men employed in the place whose nonappearance, usually following close upon pay-day, was better unexplained, and was an implication of moral feebleness; but as a general thing Mr. Crookenden’s establishment was a haunt of punctuality and sobriety. Least of all had Eustache Poupin been in the habit of asking for a margin. Hyacinth knew how little indulgence he had ever craved, and this was part of his admiration for the extraordinary Frenchman, au ardent stoic, a cold conspirator, and an exquisite artist, who was by far the most interesting person in the ranks of his acquaintance, and whose conversation, in the workshop, helped him sometimes to forget the smell of leather and glue. His conversation! Hyacinth had had plenty of that, and had endeared himself to the passionate refugee — Poupin had come to England, early in life, as a victim of the wide proscriptions by which the Second French Empire was ushered in — by the solemnity and candor of his attention. He was a republican of the note of 1848, humanitary and idealistic, infinitely addicted to fraternity and equality, and inexhaustibly surprised and exasperated at finding so little enthusiasm for them in the land of his exile. Poupin had a high claim upon Hyacinth’s esteem and gratitude, for he had been his godfather, his protector, at the bindery. When Theophilus Vetch found something for Miss Pynsent’s protege to do, it was through the Frenchman, with whom he had accidentally formed an acquaintance, that he found it.
When the boy was about fifteen years of age Mr. Vetch made him a present of the essays of Lord Bacon, and the purchase of this volume had important consequences for Hyacinth. Theophilus Vetch was a poor man, and the luxury of giving was for the most part denied him; but when, once in a way, he tasted it, he liked the sensation to be pure. No man knew better the difference between the common and the rare, or was more capable of appreciating a book which opened well — of which the margin was not hideously sliced, and of which the lettering on the back was sharp. It was only such a book that he could bring himself to offer even to a poor little devil whom a fifth-rate dressmaker (he knew Pinnie was fifth rate) had rescued from the workhouse. So when it was a question of fitting the pages of the great Elizabethan with a new coat, a coat of full morocco, discreetly, delicately gilt, he went with his little cloth-bound volume, a Pickering, straight to Mr. Crookenden, whom every one that knew anything about the matter knew to be a prince of binders, though they also knew that his work, limited in quantity, was mainly done for a particular bookseller and only through the latter’s agency. Theophilus Vetch had no idea of paying the bookseller’s commission, and though he could be lavish (for him) when he made a present, he was capable of taking an immense deal of trouble to save sixpence. He made his way into Mr. Crookenden’s workshop, which was situated in a small, superannuated square in Soho, and where the proposal of so slender a job was received at first with coldness. Mr. Vetch, however, insisted, and explained with irresistible frankness the motive of his errand: the desire to obtain the best possible binding for the least possible money. He made his conception of the best possible binding so vivid, so exemplary, that the master of the shop at last confessed to that disinterested sympathy which, under favoring circumstances, establishes itself between the artist and the connoisseur. Mr. Vetch’s little book was put in hand as a particular favor to an eccentric gentleman, whose visit had been a smile-stirring interlude (for the circle of listening workmen) in a merely mechanical day; and when he went back, three weeks later, to see whether it were done, he had the pleasure of finding that his injunctions, punctually complied with, had even been bettered. The work had been accomplished with a perfection of skill which made him ask whom he was to thank for it (he had been told that one man should do the whole of it), and in this manner he made the acquaintance of the most brilliant craftsman in the establishment, the incorruptible, the imaginative, the unerring Eustache Poupin.
In response to an appreciation which he felt not to be banal, M. Poupin remarked that he had at home a small collection of experiments in morocco, Russia, parchment, of fanciful specimens, with which, for the love of the art, he had amused his leisure hours, and which he should be happy to show his interlocutor, if the latter would do him the honor to call upon him at his lodgings in Lisson Grove. Mr. Vetch made a note of the address, and, for the love of the art, went one Sunday afternoon to see the binder’s esoteric studies. On this occasion he made the acquaintance of Madame Poupin, a small, fat lady with a bristling mustache, the white cap of an ouvriere, a knowledge of her husband’s craft that was equal to his own, and not a syllable of English save the words, “What you think, what you think?” which she introduced with startling frequency. He also discovered that his new acquaintance was a political proscript, and that he regarded the iniquitous fabric of church and state with an eye scarcely less reverent than the fiddler’s own. M. Poupin was a socialist, which Theophilus Vetch was not, and a constructive democrat (instead of being a mere scoffer at effete things), and a theorist, and an optimist, and a visionary; he believed that the day was to come when all the nations of the earth would abolish their frontiers and armies and custom-houses, and embrace on both cheeks, and cover the globe with boulevards, radiating from Paris, where the human family would sit, in groups, at little tables, according to affinities, drinking coffee (not tea, par exemple I) and listening to the music of the spheres. Mr. Vetch neither prefigured nor desired this organized felicity: he was fond of his cup of tea, and only wanted to see the British constitution a good deal simplified; he thought it a much overrated system. But his heresies rubbed shoulders, sociably, with those of the little bookbinder, and his friend in Lisson Grove became for him the type of the intelligent foreigner whose conversation completes our culture. Poupin’s humanitary zeal was as unlimited as his English vocabulary was the reverse, and the new friends agreed with each other enough, and not too much, to discuss, which was much better than an unspeakable harmony. On several other Sunday afternoons the fiddler went back to Lisson Grove, and having, at his theatre, as a veteran, a faithful servant, an occasional privilege, he was able to carry thither, one day in the autumn, an order for two seats in the second balcony. Madame Poupin and her husband passed a lugubrious evening at the English comedy, where they didn’t understand a word that was spoken, and consoled themselves by gazing at their friend in the orchestra. But this adventure did not arrest the development of a friendship into which, eventually, Amanda Pynsent was drawn. Madame Poupin, among the cold insularies, lacked female society, and Mr. Vetch proposed to his amiable friend in Lomax Place to call upon her. The little dressmaker, who in the course of her life had known no Frenchwoman but the unhappy Florentine (so favorable a specimen till she began to go wrong), adopted his suggestion, in the hope that she should get a few ideas from a lady whose appearance would doubtless exemplify (as Florentine’s originally had done) the fine taste of her nation; but she found the bookbinder and his wife a bewildering mixture