Henry James

The Jolly Corner Henry James

"Every one asks me what I 'think' of everything," said Spencer Brydon; "and I make answeras I can-begging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn'tmatter to any of them really," he went on, "for, even were it possible to meet in that standand-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my 'thoughts' would still be almostaltogether about something that concerns only myself." He was talking to Miss Staverton, with whom for a couple of months now he had availed himself of every possible occasion totalk; this disposition and this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in factpresented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in the considerable array ofrather unattenuated surprises attending his so strangely belated return toAmerica. Everything was somehow a surprise; and that might be natural when one had solong and so consistently neglected everything, taken pains to give surprises so muchmargin for play. He had given them more than thirty years-thirty-three, to be exact; andthey now seemed to him to have organised their performance quite on the scale of thatlicence. He had been twenty-three on leaving New York-he was fifty-six to-day; unlessindeed he were to reckon as he had sometimes, since his repatriation, found himselffeeling; in which case he would have lived longer than is often allotted to man. It wouldhave taken a century, he repeatedly said to himself, and said also to Alice Staverton, itwould have taken a longer absence and a more averted mind than those even of which hehad been guilty, to pile up the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all thebignesses, for the better or the worse, that at present assaulted his vision wherever helooked. The great fact all the while, however, had been the incalculability; since he had supposedhimself, from decade to decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligentmanner, for brilliancy of change. He actually saw that he had allowed for nothing; hemissed what he would have been sure of finding, he found what he would never haveimagined. Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected, theugly things of his far-away youth, when he had too promptly waked up to a sense of theugly-these uncanny phenomena placed him rather, as it happened, under the charm;whereas the "swagger" things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he hadmore particularly, like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of disma