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Henry James >> The Real Thing
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from the 1893 Macmillan and Co. edition. Proofing was by Nina
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The Real Thing
by Henry James
CHAPTER I.
When the porter's wife (she used to answer the house-bell), announced
"A gentleman--with a lady, sir," I had, as I often had in those days,
for the wish was father to the thought, an immediate vision of
sitters. Sitters my visitors in this case proved to be; but not in
the sense I should have preferred. However, there was nothing at
first to indicate that they might not have come for a portrait. The
gentleman, a man of fifty, very high and very straight, with a
moustache slightly grizzled and a dark grey walking-coat admirably
fitted, both of which I noted professionally--I don't mean as a
barber or yet as a tailor--would have struck me as a celebrity if
celebrities often were striking. It was a truth of which I had for
some time been conscious that a figure with a good deal of frontage
was, as one might say, almost never a public institution. A glance
at the lady helped to remind me of this paradoxical law: she also
looked too distinguished to be a "personality." Moreover one would
scarcely come across two variations together.
Neither of the pair spoke immediately--they only prolonged the
preliminary gaze which suggested that each wished to give the other a
chance. They were visibly shy; they stood there letting me take them
in--which, as I afterwards perceived, was the most practical thing
they could have done. In this way their embarrassment served their
cause. I had seen people painfully reluctant to mention that they
desired anything so gross as to be represented on canvas; but the
scruples of my new friends appeared almost insurmountable. Yet the
gentleman might have said "I should like a portrait of my wife," and
the lady might have said "I should like a portrait of my husband."
Perhaps they were not husband and wife--this naturally would make the
matter more delicate. Perhaps they wished to be done together--in
which case they ought to have brought a third person to break the
news.
"We come from Mr. Rivet," the lady said at last, with a dim smile
which had the effect of a moist sponge passed over a "sunk" piece of
painting, as well as of a vague allusion to vanished beauty. She was
as tall and straight, in her degree, as her companion, and with ten
years less to carry. She looked as sad as a woman could look whose
face was not charged with expression; that is her tinted oval mask
showed friction as an exposed surface shows it. The hand of time had
played over her freely, but only to simplify. She was slim and
stiff, and so well-dressed, in dark blue cloth, with lappets and
pockets and buttons, that it was clear she employed the same tailor
as her husband. The couple had an indefinable air of prosperous
thrift--they evidently got a good deal of luxury for their money. If
I was to be one of their luxuries it would behove me to consider my
terms.
"Ah, Claude Rivet recommended me?" I inquired; and I added that it
was very kind of him, though I could reflect that, as he only painted
landscape, this was not a sacrifice.
The lady looked very hard at the gentleman, and the gentleman looked
round the room. Then staring at the floor a moment and stroking his
moustache, he rested his pleasant eyes on me with the remark:
"He said you were the right one."
"I try to be, when people want to sit."
"Yes, we should like to," said the lady anxiously.
"Do you mean together?"
My visitors exchanged a glance. "If you could do anything with ME, I
suppose it would be double," the gentleman stammered.
"Oh yes, there's naturally a higher charge for two figures than for
one."
"We should like to make it pay," the husband confessed.
"That's very good of you," I returned, appreciating so unwonted a
sympathy--for I supposed he meant pay the artist.
A sense of strangeness seemed to dawn on the lady. "We mean for the
illustrations--Mr Rivet said you might put one in."
"Put one in--an illustration?" I was equally confused.
"Sketch her off, you know," said the gentleman, colouring.
It was only then that I understood the service Claude Rivet had
rendered me; he had told them that I worked in black and white, for
magazines, for story-books, for sketches of contemporary life, and
consequently had frequent employment for models. These things were
true, but it was not less true (I may confess it now--whether because
the aspiration was to lead to everything or to nothing I leave the
reader to guess), that I couldn't get the honours, to say nothing of
the emoluments, of a great painter of portraits out of my head. My
"illustrations" were my pot-boilers; I looked to a different branch
of art (far and away the most interesting it had always seemed to
me), to perpetuate my fame. There was no shame in looking to it also
to make my fortune; but that fortune was by so much further from
being made from the moment my visitors wished to be "done" for
nothing. I was disappointed; for in the pictorial sense I had
immediately SEEN them. I had seized their type--I had already
settled what I would do with it. Something that wouldn't absolutely
have pleased them, I afterwards reflected.
"Ah, you're--you're--a--?" I began, as soon as I had mastered my
surprise. I couldn't bring out the dingy word "models"; it seemed to
fit the case so little.
"We haven't had much practice," said the lady.
"We've got to DO something, and we've thought that an artist in your
line might perhaps make something of us," her husband threw off. He
further mentioned that they didn't know many artists and that they
had gone first, on the off-chance (he painted views of course, but
sometimes put in figures--perhaps I remembered), to Mr. Rivet, whom
they had met a few years before at a place in Norfolk where he was
sketching.
"We used to sketch a little ourselves," the lady hinted.
"It's very awkward, but we absolutely MUST do something," her husband
went on.
"Of course, we're not so VERY young," she admitted, with a wan smile.
With the remark that I might as well know something more about them,
the husband had handed me a card extracted from a neat new pocket-
book (their appurtenances were all of the freshest) and inscribed
with the words "Major Monarch." Impressive as these words were they
didn't carry my knowledge much further; but my visitor presently
added: "I've left the army, and we've had the misfortune to lose our
money. In fact our means are dreadfully small."
"It's an awful bore," said Mrs. Monarch.
They evidently wished to be discreet--to take care not to swagger
because they were gentlefolks. I perceived they would have been
willing to recognise this as something of a drawback, at the same
time that I guessed at an underlying sense--their consolation in
adversity--that they HAD their points. They certainly had; but these
advantages struck me as preponderantly social; such for instance as
would help to make a drawing-room look well. However, a drawing-room
was always, or ought to be, a picture.
In consequence of his wife's allusion to their age Major Monarch
observed: "Naturally, it's more for the figure that we thought of
going in. We can still hold ourselves up." On the instant I saw
that the figure was indeed their strong point. His "naturally"
didn't sound vain, but it lighted up the question. "SHE has got the
best," he continued, nodding at his wife, with a pleasant after-
dinner absence of circumlocution. I could only reply, as if we were
in fact sitting over our wine, that this didn't prevent his own from
being very good; which led him in turn to rejoin: "We thought that
if you ever have to do people like us, we might be something like it.
SHE, particularly--for a lady in a book, you know."
I was so amused by them that, to get more of it, I did my best to
take their point of view; and though it was an embarrassment to find
myself appraising physically, as if they were animals on hire or
useful blacks, a pair whom I should have expected to meet only in one
of the relations in which criticism is tacit, I looked at Mrs.
Monarch judicially enough to be able to exclaim, after a moment, with
conviction: "Oh yes, a lady in a book!" She was singularly like a
bad illustration.
"We'll stand up, if you like," said the Major; and he raised himself
before me with a really grand air.
I could take his measure at a glance--he was six feet two and a
perfect gentleman. It would have paid any club in process of
formation and in want of a stamp to engage him at a salary to stand
in the principal window. What struck me immediately was that in
coming to me they had rather missed their vocation; they could surely
have been turned to better account for advertising purposes. I
couldn't of course see the thing in detail, but I could see them make
someone's fortune--I don't mean their own. There was something in
them for a waistcoat-maker, an hotel-keeper or a soap-vendor. I
could imagine "We always use it" pinned on their bosoms with the
greatest effect; I had a vision of the promptitude with which they
would launch a table d'hote.
Mrs. Monarch sat still, not from pride but from shyness, and
presently her husband said to her: "Get up my dear and show how
smart you are." She obeyed, but she had no need to get up to show
it. She walked to the end of the studio, and then she came back
blushing, with her fluttered eyes on her husband. I was reminded of
an incident I had accidentally had a glimpse of in Paris--being with
a friend there, a dramatist about to produce a play--when an actress
came to him to ask to be intrusted with a part. She went through her
paces before him, walked up and down as Mrs. Monarch was doing. Mrs.
Monarch did it quite as well, but I abstained from applauding. It
was very odd to see such people apply for such poor pay. She looked
as if she had ten thousand a year. Her husband had used the word
that described her: she was, in the London current jargon,
essentially and typically "smart." Her figure was, in the same order
of ideas, conspicuously and irreproachably "good." For a woman of
her age her waist was surprisingly small; her elbow moreover had the
orthodox crook. She held her head at the conventional angle; but why
did she come to ME? She ought to have tried on jackets at a big
shop. I feared my visitors were not only destitute, but "artistic"--
which would be a great complication. When she sat down again I
thanked her, observing that what a draughtsman most valued in his
model was the faculty of keeping quiet.
"Oh, SHE can keep quiet," said Major Monarch. Then he added,
jocosely: "I've always kept her quiet."
"I'm not a nasty fidget, am I?" Mrs. Monarch appealed to her husband.
He addressed his answer to me. "Perhaps it isn't out of place to
mention--because we ought to be quite business-like, oughtn't we?--
that when I married her she was known as the Beautiful Statue."
"Oh dear!" said Mrs. Monarch, ruefully.
"Of course I should want a certain amount of expression," I rejoined.
"Of COURSE!" they both exclaimed.
"And then I suppose you know that you'll get awfully tired."
"Oh, we NEVER get tired!" they eagerly cried.
"Have you had any kind of practice?"
They hesitated--they looked at each other. "We've been photographed,
IMMENSELY," said Mrs. Monarch.
"She means the fellows have asked us," added the Major.
"I see--because you're so good-looking."
"I don't know what they thought, but they were always after us."
"We always got our photographs for nothing," smiled Mrs. Monarch.
"We might have brought some, my dear," her husband remarked.
"I'm not sure we have any left. We've given quantities away," she
explained to me.
"With our autographs and that sort of thing," said the Major.
"Are they to be got in the shops?" I inquired, as a harmless
pleasantry.
"Oh, yes; hers--they used to be."
"Not now," said Mrs. Monarch, with her eyes on the floor.
CHAPTER II.
I could fancy the "sort of thing" they put on the presentation-copies
of their photographs, and I was sure they wrote a beautiful hand. It
was odd how quickly I was sure of everything that concerned them. If
they were now so poor as to have to earn shillings and pence, they
never had had much of a margin. Their good looks had been their
capital, and they had good-humouredly made the most of the career
that this resource marked out for them. It was in their faces, the
blankness, the deep intellectual repose of the twenty years of
country-house visiting which had given them pleasant intonations. I
could see the sunny drawing-rooms, sprinkled with periodicals she
didn't read, in which Mrs. Monarch had continuously sat; I could see
the wet shrubberies in which she had walked, equipped to admiration
for either exercise. I could see the rich covers the Major had
helped to shoot and the wonderful garments in which, late at night,
he repaired to the smoking-room to talk about them. I could imagine
their leggings and waterproofs, their knowing tweeds and rugs, their
rolls of sticks and cases of tackle and neat umbrellas; and I could
evoke the exact appearance of their servants and the compact variety
of their luggage on the platforms of country stations.
They gave small tips, but they were liked; they didn't do anything
themselves, but they were welcome. They looked so well everywhere;
they gratified the general relish for stature, complexion and "form."
They knew it without fatuity or vulgarity, and they respected
themselves in consequence. They were not superficial; they were
thorough and kept themselves up--it had been their line. People with
such a taste for activity had to have some line. I could feel how,
even in a dull house, they could have been counted upon for
cheerfulness. At present something had happened--it didn't matter
what, their little income had grown less, it had grown least--and
they had to do something for pocket-money. Their friends liked them,
but didn't like to support them. There was something about them that
represented credit--their clothes, their manners, their type; but if
credit is a large empty pocket in which an occasional chink
reverberates, the chink at least must be audible. What they wanted
of me was to help to make it so. Fortunately they had no children--I
soon divined that. They would also perhaps wish our relations to be
kept secret: this was why it was "for the figure"--the reproduction
of the face would betray them.
I liked them--they were so simple; and I had no objection to them if
they would suit. But, somehow, with all their perfections I didn't
easily believe in them. After all they were amateurs, and the ruling
passion of my life was the detestation of the amateur. Combined with
this was another perversity--an innate preference for the represented
subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to
be a lack of representation. I liked things that appeared; then one
was sure. Whether they WERE or not was a subordinate and almost
always a profitless question. There were other considerations, the
first of which was that I already had two or three people in use,
notably a young person with big feet, in alpaca, from Kilburn, who
for a couple of years had come to me regularly for my illustrations
and with whom I was still--perhaps ignobly--satisfied. I frankly
explained to my visitors how the case stood; but they had taken more
precautions than I supposed. They had reasoned out their
opportunity, for Claude Rivet had told them of the projected edition
de luxe of one of the writers of our day--the rarest of the
novelists--who, long neglected by the multitudinous vulgar and dearly
prized by the attentive (need I mention Philip Vincent?) had had the
happy fortune of seeing, late in life, the dawn and then the full
light of a higher criticism--an estimate in which, on the part of the
public, there was something really of expiation. The edition in
question, planned by a publisher of taste, was practically an act of
high reparation; the wood-cuts with which it was to be enriched were
the homage of English art to one of the most independent
representatives of English letters. Major and Mrs. Monarch confessed
to me that they had hoped I might be able to work THEM into my share
of the enterprise. They knew I was to do the first of the books,
"Rutland Ramsay," but I had to make clear to them that my
participation in the rest of the affair--this first book was to be a
test--was to depend on the satisfaction I should give. If this
should be limited my employers would drop me without a scruple. It
was therefore a crisis for me, and naturally I was making special
preparations, looking about for new people, if they should be
necessary, and securing the best types. I admitted however that I
should like to settle down to two or three good models who would do
for everything.
"Should we have often to--a--put on special clothes?" Mrs. Monarch
timidly demanded.
"Dear, yes--that's half the business."
"And should we be expected to supply our own costumes?"
"Oh, no; I've got a lot of things. A painter's models put on--or put
off--anything he likes."
"And do you mean--a--the same?"
"The same?"
Mrs. Monarch looked at her husband again.
"Oh, she was just wondering," he explained, "if the costumes are in
GENERAL use." I had to confess that they were, and I mentioned
further that some of them (I had a lot of genuine, greasy last-
century things), had served their time, a hundred years ago, on
living, world-stained men and women. "We'll put on anything that
fits," said the Major.
"Oh, I arrange that--they fit in the pictures."
"I'm afraid I should do better for the modern books. I would come as
you like," said Mrs. Monarch.
"She has got a lot of clothes at home: they might do for
contemporary life," her husband continued.
"Oh, I can fancy scenes in which you'd be quite natural." And indeed
I could see the slipshod rearrangements of stale properties--the
stories I tried to produce pictures for without the exasperation of
reading them--whose sandy tracts the good lady might help to people.
But I had to return to the fact that for this sort of work--the daily
mechanical grind--I was already equipped; the people I was working
with were fully adequate.
"We only thought we might be more like SOME characters," said Mrs.
Monarch mildly, getting up.
Her husband also rose; he stood looking at me with a dim wistfulness
that was touching in so fine a man. "Wouldn't it be rather a pull
sometimes to have--a--to have--?" He hung fire; he wanted me to help
him by phrasing what he meant. But I couldn't--I didn't know. So he
brought it out, awkwardly: "The REAL thing; a gentleman, you know,
or a lady." I was quite ready to give a general assent--I admitted
that there was a great deal in that. This encouraged Major Monarch
to say, following up his appeal with an unacted gulp: "It's awfully
hard--we've tried everything." The gulp was communicative; it proved
too much for his wife. Before I knew it Mrs. Monarch had dropped
again upon a divan and burst into tears. Her husband sat down beside
her, holding one of her hands; whereupon she quickly dried her eyes
with the other, while I felt embarrassed as she looked up at me.
"There isn't a confounded job I haven't applied for--waited for--
prayed for. You can fancy we'd be pretty bad first. Secretaryships
and that sort of thing? You might as well ask for a peerage. I'd be
ANYTHING--I'm strong; a messenger or a coalheaver. I'd put on a
gold-laced cap and open carriage-doors in front of the haberdasher's;
I'd hang about a station, to carry portmanteaus; I'd be a postman.
But they won't LOOK at you; there are thousands, as good as yourself,
already on the ground. GENTLEMEN, poor beggars, who have drunk their
wine, who have kept their hunters!"
I was as reassuring as I knew how to be, and my visitors were
presently on their feet again while, for the experiment, we agreed on
an hour. We were discussing it when the door opened and Miss Churm
came in with a wet umbrella. Miss Churm had to take the omnibus to
Maida Vale and then walk half-a-mile. She looked a trifle blowsy and
slightly splashed. I scarcely ever saw her come in without thinking
afresh how odd it was that, being so little in herself, she should
yet be so much in others. She was a meagre little Miss Churm, but
she was an ample heroine of romance. She was only a freckled
cockney, but she could represent everything, from a fine lady to a
shepherdess; she had the faculty, as she might have had a fine voice
or long hair.
She couldn't spell, and she loved beer, but she had two or three
"points," and practice, and a knack, and mother-wit, and a kind of
whimsical sensibility, and a love of the theatre, and seven sisters,
and not an ounce of respect, especially for the H. The first thing
my visitors saw was that her umbrella was wet, and in their spotless
perfection they visibly winced at it. The rain had come on since
their arrival.
"I'm all in a soak; there WAS a mess of people in the 'bus. I wish
you lived near a stytion," said Miss Churm. I requested her to get
ready as quickly as possible, and she passed into the room in which
she always changed her dress. But before going out she asked me what
she was to get into this time.
"It's the Russian princess, don't you know?" I answered; "the one
with the 'golden eyes,' in black velvet, for the long thing in the
Cheapside."
"Golden eyes? I SAY!" cried Miss Churm, while my companions watched
her with intensity as she withdrew. She always arranged herself,
when she was late, before I could turn round; and I kept my visitors
a little, on purpose, so that they might get an idea, from seeing
her, what would be expected of themselves. I mentioned that she was
quite my notion of an excellent model--she was really very clever.
"Do you think she looks like a Russian princess?" Major Monarch
asked, with lurking alarm.
"When I make her, yes."
"Oh, if you have to MAKE her--!" he reasoned, acutely.
"That's the most you can ask. There are so many that are not
makeable."
"Well now, HERE'S a lady"--and with a persuasive smile he passed his
arm into his wife's--"who's already made!"
"Oh, I'm not a Russian princess," Mrs. Monarch protested, a little
coldly. I could see that she had known some and didn't like them.
There, immediately, was a complication of a kind that I never had to
fear with Miss Churm.
This young lady came back in black velvet--the gown was rather rusty
and very low on her lean shoulders--and with a Japanese fan in her
red hands. I reminded her that in the scene I was doing she had to
look over someone's head. "I forget whose it is; but it doesn't
matter. Just look over a head."
"I'd rather look over a stove," said Miss Churm; and she took her
station near the fire. She fell into position, settled herself into
a tall attitude, gave a certain backward inclination to her head and
a certain forward droop to her fan, and looked, at least to my
prejudiced sense, distinguished and charming, foreign and dangerous.
We left her looking so, while I went down-stairs with Major and Mrs.
Monarch.
"I think I could come about as near it as that," said Mrs. Monarch.
"Oh, you think she's shabby, but you must allow for the alchemy of
art."
However, they went off with an evident increase of comfort, founded
on their demonstrable advantage in being the real thing. I could
fancy them shuddering over Miss Churm. She was very droll about them
when I went back, for I told her what they wanted.
"Well, if SHE can sit I'll tyke to bookkeeping," said my model.
"She's very lady-like," I replied, as an innocent form of
aggravation.
"So much the worse for YOU. That means she can't turn round."
"She'll do for the fashionable novels."
"Oh yes, she'll DO for them!" my model humorously declared. "Ain't
they had enough without her?" I had often sociably denounced them to
Miss Churm.
CHAPTER III.
It was for the elucidation of a mystery in one of these works that I
first tried Mrs. Monarch. Her husband came with her, to be useful if
necessary--it was sufficiently clear that as a general thing he would
prefer to come with her. At first I wondered if this were for
"propriety's" sake--if he were going to be jealous and meddling. The
idea was too tiresome, and if it had been confirmed it would speedily
have brought our acquaintance to a close. But I soon saw there was
nothing in it and that if he accompanied Mrs. Monarch it was (in
addition to the chance of being wanted), simply because he had
nothing else to do. When she was away from him his occupation was
gone--she never HAD been away from him. I judged, rightly, that in
their awkward situation their close union was their main comfort and
that this union had no weak spot. It was a real marriage, an
encouragement to the hesitating, a nut for pessimists to crack.
Their address was humble (I remember afterwards thinking it had been
the only thing about them that was really professional), and I could
fancy the lamentable lodgings in which the Major would have been left
alone. He could bear them with his wife--he couldn't bear them
without her.