第6章

At last, when I had dallied with my privilege long enough, Idespatched to him the missive of the American poet.He had already gone out of town; he shrank from the rigour of the London "season"and it was his habit to migrate on the first of June.Moreover Ihad heard he was this year hard at work on a new book, into which some of his impressions of the East were to be wrought, so that he desired nothing so much as quiet days.That knowledge, however, didn't prevent me--cet age est sans pitie--from sending with my friend's letter a note of my own, in which I asked his leave to come down and see him for an hour or two on some day to be named by himself.My proposal was accompanied with a very frank expression of my sentiments, and the effect of the entire appeal was to elicit from the great man the kindest possible invitation.He would be delighted to see me, especially if I should turn up on the following Saturday and would remain till the Monday morning.We would take a walk over the Surrey commons, and I could tell him all about the other great man, the one in America.He indicated to me the best train, and it may be imagined whether on the Saturday afternoon I was punctual at Waterloo.He carried his benevolence to the point of coming to meet me at the little station at which I was to alight, and my heart beat very fast as I saw his handsome face, surmounted with a soft wide-awake and which I knew by a photograph long since enshrined on my mantel-shelf, scanning the carriage-windows as the train rolled up.He recognised me as infallibly as I had recognised himself; he appeared to know by instinct how a young American of critical pretensions, rash youth, would look when much divided between eagerness and modesty.He took me by the hand and smiled at me and said: "You must be--a--YOU, I think!" and asked if I should mind going on foot to his house, which would take but a few minutes.Iremember feeling it a piece of extraordinary affability that he should give directions about the conveyance of my bag; I remember feeling altogether very happy and rosy, in fact quite transported, when he laid his hand on my shoulder as we came out of the station.

I surveyed him, askance, as we walked together; I had already, I had indeed instantly, seen him as all delightful.His face is so well known that I needn't describe it; he looked to me at once an English gentleman and a man of genius, and I thought that a happy combination.There was a brush of the Bohemian in his fineness; you would easily have guessed his belonging to the artist guild.He was addicted to velvet jackets, to cigarettes, to loose shirt-collars, to looking a little dishevelled.His features, which were firm but not perfectly regular, are fairly enough represented in his portraits;but no portrait I have seen gives any idea of his expression.There were innumerable things in it, and they chased each other in and out of his face.I have seen people who were grave and gay in quick alternation; but Mark Ambient was grave and gay at one and the same moment.There were other strange oppositions and contradictions in his slightly faded and fatigued countenance.He affected me somehow as at once fresh and stale, at once anxious and indifferent.He had evidently had an active past, which inspired one with curiosity; yet what was that compared to his obvious future? He was just enough above middle height to be spoken of as tall, and rather lean and long in the flank.He had the friendliest frankest manner possible, and yet I could see it cost him something.It cost him small spasms of the self-consciousness that is an Englishman's last and dearest treasure--the thing he pays his way through life by sacrificing small pieces of even as the gallant but moneyless adventurer in "Quentin Durward" broke off links of his brave gold chain.He had been thirty-eight years old at the time "Beltraffio" was published.He asked me about his friend in America, about the length of my stay in England, about the last news in London and the people I had seen there; and I remember looking for the signs of genius in the very form of his questions and thinking I found it.I liked his voice as if I were somehow myself having the use of it.

There was genius in his house too I thought when we got there; there was imagination in the carpets and curtains, in the pictures and books, in the garden behind it, where certain old brown walls were muffled in creepers that appeared to me to have been copied from a masterpiece of one of the pre-Raphaelites.That was the way many things struck me at that time, in England--as reproductions of something that existed primarily in art or literature.It was not the picture, the poem, the fictive page, that seemed to me a copy;these things were the originals, and the life of happy and distinguished people was fashioned in their image.Mark Ambient called his house a cottage, and I saw afterwards he was right for if it hadn't been a cottage it must have been a villa, and a villa, in England at least, was not a place in which one could fancy him at home.But it was, to my vision, a cottage glorified and translated;it was a palace of art, on a slightly reduced scale--and might besides have been the dearest haunt of the old English genius loci.