The Jolly Corner

by Henry James
CHAPTER I

"Every one asks me what I 'think' of everything," said Spencer
Brydon; "and I make answer as I can - begging or dodging the

question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn't matter
to any of them really," he went on, "for, even were it possible to

meet in that stand-and-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a
subject, my 'thoughts' would still be almost altogether 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 to talk; this disposition and
this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in fact

presented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in
the considerable array of rather unattenuated surprises attending

his so strangelybelated return to America. Everything was somehow
a surprise; and that might be natural when one had so long and so

consistently neglected everything, taken pains to give surprises so
much margin for play. He had given them more than thirty years -

thirty-three, to be exact; and they now seemed to him to have
organised their performance quite on the scale of that licence. He

had been twenty-three on leaving New York - he was fifty-six to-
day; unless indeed he were to reckon as he had sometimes, since his

repatriation, found himself feeling; in which case he would have
lived longer than is often allotted to man. It would have taken a

century, he repeatedly said to himself, and said also to Alice
Staverton, it would have taken a longer absence and a more averted

mind than those even of which he had been guilty, to pile up the
differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the

bignesses, for the better or the worse, that at present assaulted
his visionwherever he looked.

The great fact all the while, however, had been the
incalculability; since he HAD supposed himself, from decade to

decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent
manner, for brilliancy of change. He actually saw that he had

allowed for nothing; he missed what he would have been sure of
finding, he found what he would never have imagined. Proportions

and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected, the
ugly things of his far-away youth, when he had too promptly waked

up to a sense of the ugly - these uncannyphenomena placed him
rather, as it happened, under the charm; whereas the "swagger"

things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had
more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every

year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay. They
were as so many set traps for displeasure, above all for reaction,

of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring. It
was interesting, doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been

too disconcerting hadn't a certain finer truth saved the situation.
He had distinctly not, in this steadier light, come over ALL for

the monstrosities; he had come, not only in the last analysis but
quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with which they had

nothing to do. He had come - putting the thing pompously - to look
at his "property," which he had thus for a third of a century not

been within four thousand miles of; or, expressing it less
sordidly, he had yielded to the humour of seeing again his house on

the jolly corner, as he usually, and quite fondly, described it -
the one in which he had first seen the light, in which various

members of his family had lived and had died, in which the holidays
of his overschooled boyhood had been passed and the few social

flowers of his chilled adolescence gathered, and which, alienated
then for so long a period, had, through the successive deaths of

his two brothers and the termination of old arrangements, come
wholly into his hands. He was the owner of another, not quite so

"good" - the jolly corner having been, from far back, superlatively
extended and consecrated; and the value of the pair represented his

main capital, with an income consisting, in these later years, of
their respective rents which (thanks precisely to their original

excellent type) had never been depressingly low. He could live in
"Europe," as he had been in the habit of living, on the product of

these flourishing New York leases, and all the better since, that
of the second structure, the mere number in its long row, having

within a twelvemonth fallen in, renovation at a high advance had
proved beautifully possible.

These were items of property indeed, but he had found himself since
his arrival distinguishing more than ever between them. The house

within the street, two bristling blocks westward, was already in
course of construction" target="_blank" title="n.重建(物)；修复">reconstruction as a tall mass of flats; he had acceded,

some time before, to overtures for this conversion - in which, now
that it was going forward, it had been not the least of his

astonishments to find himself able, on the spot, and though without
a previous ounce of such experience, to participate with a certain

intelligence, almost with a certain authority. He had lived his
life with his back so turned to such concerns and his face

addressed to those of so different an order that he scarce knew
what to make of this lively stir, in a compartment of his mind

never yet penetrated, of a capacity for business and a sense for
construction. These virtues, so common all round him now, had been

dormant in his own organism - where it might be said of them
perhaps that they had slept the sleep of the just. At present, in

the splendid autumn weather - the autumn at least was a pure boon
in the terrible place - he loafed about his "work" undeterred,

secretly agitated; not in the least "minding" that the whole
proposition, as they said, was vulgar and sordid, and ready to

climb ladders, to walk the plank, to handle materials and look wise
about them, to ask questions, in fine, and challenge explanations

and really "go into" figures.
It amused, it verily quite charmed him; and, by the same stroke, it

amused, and even more, Alice Staverton, though perhaps charming her
perceptibly less. She wasn't, however, going to be better-off for

it, as HE was - and so astonishingly much: nothing was now likely,
he knew, ever to make her better-off than she found herself, in the

afternoon of life, as the delicately" target="_blank" title="ad.精美地；微妙地">delicatelyfrugal possessor and tenant of
the small house in Irving Place to which she had subtly managed to

cling through her almost unbroken New York career. If he knew the
way to it now better than to any other address among the dreadful

multiplied numberings which seemed to him to reduce the whole place
to some vast ledger-page, overgrown, fantastic, of ruled and criss-

crossed lines and figures - if he had formed, for his consolation,
that habit, it was really not a little because of the charm of his

having encountered and recognised, in the vast wilderness of the
wholesale, breaking through the mere gross generalisation of wealth

and force and success, a small still scene where items and shades,
all delicate things, kept the sharpness of the notes of a high

voice perfectly trained, and where economy hung about like the
scent of a garden. His old friend lived with one maid and herself

dusted her relics and trimmed her lamps and polished her silver;
she stood oft, in the awful modern crush, when she could, but she

sallied forth and did battle when the challenge was really to
"spirit," the spirit she after all confessed to, proudly and a

little shyly, as to that of the better time, that of THEIR common,
their quite far-away and antediluvian social period and order. She

made use of the street-cars when need be, the terrible things that
people scrambled for as the panic-stricken at sea scramble for the

boats; she affronted, inscrutably, under stress, all the public
concussions and ordeals; and yet, with that slim mystifying grace

of her appearance, which defied you to say if she were a fair young
woman who looked older through trouble, or a fine smooth older one

who looked young through successful indifference with her precious
reference, above all, to memories and histories into which he could

enter, she was as exquisite for him as some pale pressed flower (a
rarity to begin with), and, failing other sweetnesses, she was a

sufficient reward of his effort. They had communities of
knowledge, "their" knowledge (this discriminating possessive was

always on her lips) of presences of the other age, presences all
overlaid, in his case, by the experience of a man and the freedom

of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity, by passages of
life that were strange and dim to her, just by "Europe" in short,