In the Cage E-Book

Henry James

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Hesperus Classics
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 187

Beschreibung

Henry James's 1898 novella In the Cage (written in the same year as the more well-known The Turn of the Screw) is a sly, slight, vaguely sentimental work but one that acts as a fine introduction to this most convoluted of writers. Exact ("exacting" yet with a pointillist's precision) is the word most often used to describe James's prose but very often the modern reader will find his hesitant, pedantic, clause-heavy sentences difficult to follow, overlong and tortuously complex. But the key to reading and enjoying James is in succumbing to those very sentences, allowing his perfect ear and fine metre to establish its own rhythm, letting it guide one's response to his beautiful, matchless use of language. In the Cage tells the story of a young women, the "betrothed of Mr Mudge", who works at a post-office counter sending telegrams mostly from the "idle rich" to their fellows to arrange their meetings, parties and other affairs. Concerned, as ever, with the plight of the not so well-to-do--and particularly the role and circumstances of women--James finely delineates our heroine's increasing preoccupation with Captain Everard for whom she sends a considerable number of messages and about whom she has increasingly warm thoughts: "people of her sort... didn't count as infidelity, counted only as something else: she might have been curious, since it came to that, to see exactly as what".

Leseprobe

In the Cage

Henry James

CONTENTS

Title Page

Foreword by Libby Purves

In the Cage

Biographical note

Copyright

FOREWORD

By 1898 you would not have known him for an American, not at all. The writer had lived in London more than twenty years, mingling in the upper ranks of society: if a girl behind the frail cage of wood and wire in some Mayfair telegraph office had noticed him, she would probably have paid little attention to a heavy-set, well-dressed, softly spoken man in his middle fifties.

Twenty years a Londoner and an unexceptionable part of the Victorian London scene, Henry James had watched an era rumbling towards its close. The pace had speeded up a little with the coming of the motor car and the telegraph office, harbingers of a ruder and more populist century to come: but essentially Victorian Britain still maintained a fundamental complacency, a determination to ignore the fact that its fossilised social hierarchy was being slowly, stealthily undermined by rumblings of dissent and mental rebellion, and challenged ever more stridently from the newer world across the Atlantic. James saw all this, amused and intrigued and observant of every nuance; but he did not cut a revolutionary figure himself. There can have been little about the quiet, staid gentleman to stir the exotic fancy of the young person who lived behind the counter, leading – as his fancy privately put it – ‘in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or a magpie.’

No: the busy humble girls who, in the age before the democracy of telephone and email, sat providing instant communication for the careless rich, would not have thought him a person of note. Nor, one suspects, would the other patrons in the queue: smart young officers on the make, society ladies with frivolous or furtive messages scribbled for the telegraphist’s patient interpretation, spendthrift beaux wiring instructions to gillies or hatters.

But Henry James was watching them, all right. His empathetic imagination worked wherever he was, however humdrum or socially insignificant his companions. He was watching that telegraph girl, noting the smallest tremors of eyelash and lip, seeing how the busy hands worked among familiar papers, guessing what flame of youth, opinion and passionate invention might be masked by the decorum of a rigid social conditioning. Perhaps he was also sorrowing, as a democrat born, at the pallor of her cheek and the tell-tale signs of extreme poverty in childhood and acquaintance with the brink of black, Dickensian disaster. Two things in particular endear Henry James to modern sensibilities. Firstly, that he not only liked women but deeply respected their emotions; and secondly that he was no snob. He might have been twenty years away from his American origins, but still his innocent eye saw through the fustian of late Victorian and Edwardian English life, and quietly held it to be self-evident that all are created equal. To Henry James, a portrait of a caged and humble telegraphist could be as engrossing as that of a Lady.

So we have this gem of a novella, from the rich middle years of his creativity – it was published, indeed, in the same year as The Turn of the Screw. The story of In the Cage could hardly be more slight, and the language typically, and here, complimentarily, convoluted in its gropings for precise meaning (this is the man who in old age had a stroke and was found the next day searching through the thesaurus for an apter word than ‘paralytic’ to describe his state in his deathbed notes). Yet despite the slightness and the mannered telling, the suspense and anxiety and romance of the unnamed telegraphist’s life holds the reader in a uniquely Jamesian golden fog of vague suspense, all the way to the denouement.

There are, as you would expect, some wonderful lines; it is hard not to see as clearly as the author does how Mrs Jordan’s smile is ‘suggestive of a large benevolent bite’. There is intense, accurate observation of the dull physical details of the counter-clerks’ work, but never a word wasted: what, after all, could be more meanly typical of Captain Everard than his asking for a Post Office Guide but only wanting to consult it, not buy his own copy? There is an underpinning anger about the condemnation of the girl to a reality of ‘ugliness and obscurity’ and Mr Mudge; and some nice observation of the mercantile class’ timeless view of the profligate rich as necessary milch cows for the grocer: ‘the exuberance of the aristocracy was the advantage of trade. […] Lash them up then, lead them on, keep them going, some of it can’t help, sometime, coming our way’.

But what remains most powerfully in the mind when you finally wind your way to the conclusion, and the return of hard reality, is the silken, liberating romance of the story. Our human dreams always exceed our reach, and we needs must love the highest when we see it. Even if, like the girl behind the wire, we offer our concentrated devotion to a ludicrously unworthy object, that does not devalue the emotion or the sacrifice in all its distorted beauty. Mrs Mudge, as she will inexorably become, has in the end more dignity than her mysterious object of desire. Wandering the streets near the captain’s home she is in modern terms a slightly unbalanced stalker. In medieval terms, she would have been something seen as nobler: a hopeless protagonist in an impossible saga of courtly love. Living in the age of matter-of-fact sex and stroppy individualism we have tended to lose sight of such dreams, but Henry James respected them. Indeed he respected all the quirks and desires and dreams and flashes of resentment and longings for justice which together make up the private, mysterious human soul.

And here, in this leisurely, inconsequential watercolour sketch of an unregarded London life at a hard century’s end, they are all laid gently before us. Here is the rueful mystery of human desire and human resignation, in the person of an anonymous telegraph girl. She is no saint, but she is certainly a sister.

– Libby Purves, 2002

In the Cage

1

It had occurred to her early that in her position – that of a young person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or a magpie – she should know a great many persons without their recognising the acquaintance. That made it an emotion the more lively – though singularly rare and always, even then, with opportunity still very much smothered – to see anyone come in whom she knew outside, as she called it, anyone who could add anything to the poor identity of her function. Her function was to sit there with two young men – the other telegraphist and the counter-clerk; to mind the ‘sounder’, which was always going, to dole out stamps and postal orders, weigh letters, answer stupid questions, give difficult change and, more than anything else, count words as numberless as the sands of the sea, the words of the telegrams thrust, from morning to night, through the gap left in the high lattice, across the encumbered shelf that her forearm ached with rubbing. This transparent screen fenced out or fenced in, according to the side of the narrow counter on which the human lot was cast, the duskiest corner of a shop, pervaded not a little, in winter, by the poison of perpetual gas, and at all times by the presence of hams, cheese, dried fish, soap, varnish, paraffin, and other solids and fluids that she came to know perfectly by their smells without consenting to know them by their names.

The barrier that divided the little post-and-telegraph office from the grocery was a frail structure of wood and wire; but the social, the professional separation was a gulf that fortune, by a stroke quite remarkable, had spared her the necessity of contributing at all publicly to bridge. When Mr Cocker’s young men stepped over from behind the other counter to change a five-pound note – and Mr Cocker’s situation, with the cream of the ‘Court Guide’ and the dearest furnished apartments, Simpkin’s, Ladle’s, Thrupp’s, just round the corner, was so select that his place was quite pervaded by the crisp rustle of these emblems – she pushed out the sovereigns as if the applicant were no more to her than one of the momentary appearances in the great procession; and this perhaps all the more from the very fact of the connection – only recognised outside indeed – to which she had lent herself with ridiculous inconsequence. She recognised the others the less because she had at last so unreservedly, so irredeemably, recognised Mr Mudge. But she was a little ashamed, nonetheless, of having to admit to herself that Mr Mudge’s removal to a higher sphere – to a more commanding position, that is, though to a much lower neighbourhood – would have been described still better as a luxury than as the mere simplification that she contented herself with calling it. He had, at any rate, ceased to be all day long in her eyes, and this left something a little fresh for them to rest on of a Sunday. During the three months that he had remained at Cocker’s after her consent to their engagement, she had often asked herself what it was marriage would be able to add to a familiarity so final. Opposite there, behind the counter of which his superior stature, his whiter apron, his more clustering curls and more present, too present, h’s had been for a couple of years the principal ornament, he had moved to and fro before her as on the small sanded floor of their contracted future. She was conscious now of the improvement of not having to take her present and her future at once. They were about as much as she could manage when taken separate.

She had nonetheless to give her mind steadily to what Mr Mudge had again written her about, the idea of her applying for a transfer to an office quite similar – she couldn’t yet hope for a place in a bigger – under the very roof where he was foreman, so that, dangled before her every minute of the day, he should see her, as he called it, ‘hourly’, and in a part, the far NW district, where, with her mother, she would save on their two rooms alone, nearly three shillings. It would be far from dazzling to exchange Mayfair for Chalk Farm, and it was something of a predicament that he so kept at her; still, it was nothing to the old predicaments, those of the early times of their great misery, her own, her mother’s and her elder sister’s – the last of whom had succumbed to all but absolute want when, as conscious, incredulous ladies, suddenly bereaved, betrayed, overwhelmed, they had slipped faster and faster down the steep slope at the bottom of which she alone had rebounded. Her mother had never rebounded any more at the bottom than on the way; had only rumbled and grumbled down and down, making, in respect of caps and conversation, no effort whatever, and too often, alas! smelling of whisky.

2

It was always rather quiet at Cocker’s while the contingent from Ladle’s and Thrupp’s and all the other great places were at luncheon, or, as the young men used vulgarly to say, while the animals were feeding. She had forty minutes in advance of this to go home for her own dinner; and when she came back and one of the young men took his turn, there was often half an hour during which she could pull out a bit of work or a book – a book from the place where she borrowed novels, very greasy, in fine print and all about the fine folks, at a ha’penny a day. This sacred pause was one of the numerous ways in which the establishment kept its finger on the pulse of fashion and fell into the rhythm of the larger life. It had something to do, one day, with the particular vividness marking the advent of a lady whose meals were apparently irregular, yet whom she was destined, she afterwards found, not to forget. The girl was blasé; nothing could belong more, as she perfectly knew, to the intense publicity of her profession; but she had a whimsical mind and wonderful nerves; she was subject, in short, to sudden flickers of antipathy and sympathy, red gleams in the grey, fitful awakings and followings, odd caprices of curiosity. She had a friend who had invented a new career for women – that of being in and out of people’s houses to look after the flowers. Mrs Jordan had a manner of her own of sounding this illusion; ‘the flowers’, on her lips, were, in happy homes, as usual as the coals or the daily papers. She took charge of them, at any rate, in all the rooms, at so much a month, and people were quickly finding out what it was to make over this delicate duty to the widow of a clergyman. The widow, on her side, dilating on the initiations thus opened up to her, had been splendid to her young friend over the way she was made free of the greatest houses – the way, especially when she did the dinner-tables, set out so often for twenty, she felt that a single step more would socially, would absolutely, introduce her. On its being asked of her, then, if she circulated only in a sort of tropical solitude, with the upper servants for picturesque natives, and on her having to assent to this glance at her limitations, she had found a reply to the girl’s invidious question. ‘You’ve no imagination, my dear!’ – that was because the social door might at any moment open so wide.

Our young lady had not taken up the charge, had dealt with it good-humouredly, just because she knew so well what to think of it. It was at once one of her most cherished complaints and most secret supports that people didn’t understand her, and it was accordingly a matter of indifference to her that Mrs Jordan shouldn’t; even though Mrs Jordan, handed down from their early twilight of gentility and also the victim of reverses, was the only member of her circle in whom she recognised an equal. She was perfectly aware that her imaginative life was the life in which she spent most of her time; and she would have been ready, had it been at all worthwhile, to contend that, since her outward occupation didn’t kill it, it must be strong indeed. Combinations of flowers and greenstuff forsooth! What she could handle freely, she said to herself, was combinations of men and women. The only weakness in her faculty came from the positive abundance of her contact with the human herd; this was so constant, had the effect of becoming so cheap, that there were long stretches in which inspiration, divination and interest, quite dropped. The great thing was the flashes, the quick revivals, absolute accidents all, and neither to be counted on nor to be resisted. Someone had only sometimes to put in a penny for a stamp and the whole thing was upon her. She was so absurdly constructed that these were literally the moments that made up – made up for the long stiffness of sitting there in the stocks, made up for the cunning hostility of Mr Buckton and the importunate sympathy of the counter-clerk, made up for the daily, deadly, flourishy letter from Mr Mudge, made up even for the most haunting of her worries, the rage at moments of not knowing how her mother did ‘get it’.

She had surrendered herself moreover, of late, to a certain expansion of her consciousness; something that seemed perhaps vulgarly accounted for by the fact that, as the blast of the season roared louder and the waves of fashion tossed their spray further over the counter, there were more impressions to be gathered and really – for it came to that – more life to be led. Definite, at any rate, it was that by the time May was well started the kind of company she kept at Cocker’s had begun to strike her as a reason – a reason she might almost put forward for a policy of procrastination. It sounded silly, of course, as yet, to plead such a motive, especially as the fascination of the place was, after all, a sort of torment. But she liked her torment; it was a torment she should miss at Chalk Farm. She was ingenious and uncandid, therefore, about leaving the breadth of London a little longer between herself and that austerity. If she had not quite the courage, in short, to say to Mr Mudge that her actual chance for a play of mind was worth, any week, the three shillings he desired to help her to save, she yet saw something happen in the course of the month that, in her heart of hearts at least, answered the subtle question. This was connected precisely with the appearance of the memorable lady.

3

She pushed in three bescribbled forms which the girl’s hand was quick to appropriate, Mr Buckton having so frequent a perverse instinct for catching first any eye that promised the sort of entertainment with which she had her peculiar affinity. The amusements of captives are full of a desperate contrivance, and one of our young friend’s ha’p’orths had been the charming tale of Picciola. It was of course the law of the place that they were never to take no notice, as Mr Buckton said, whom they served; but this also never prevented, certainly on the same gentleman’s own part, what he was fond of describing as the underhand game. Both her companions, for that matter, made no secret of the number of favourites they had among the ladies; sweet familiarities in spite of which she had repeatedly caught each of them in stupidities and mistakes, confusions of identity and lapses of observation that never failed to remind her how the cleverness of men ended where the cleverness of women began. ‘Marguerite, Regent Street. Try on at six. All Spanish lace. Pearls. The full length.’ That was the first; it had no signature. ‘Lady Agnes Orme, Hyde Park Place. Impossible tonight, dining Haddon. Opera tomorrow, promised Fritz, but could do play Wednesday. Will try Haddon for Savoy, and anything in the world you like, if you can get Gussy. Sunday, Montenero. Sit Mason Monday, Tuesday. Marguerite awful. Cissy.’ That was the second. The third, the girl noted when she took it, was on a foreign form: ‘Everard, Hôtel Brighton, Paris. Only understand and believe. 22nd to 26th, and certainly 8th and 9th. Perhaps others. Come. Mary.’

Mary was very handsome, the handsomest woman, she felt in a moment, she had ever seen – or perhaps it was only Cissy. Perhaps it was both, for she had seen stranger things than that – ladies wiring to different persons under different names. She had seen all sorts of things and pieced together all sorts of mysteries. There had once been one – not long before – who, without winking, sent off five over five different signatures. Perhaps these represented five different friends who had asked her – all women, just as perhaps now Mary and Cissy, or one or other of them, were wiring by deputy. Sometimes she put in too much – too much of her own sense; sometimes she put in too little; and in either case this often came round to her afterwards, for she had an extraordinary way of keeping clues. When she noticed, she noticed; that was what it came to. There were days and days, there were weeks sometimes, of vacancy. This arose often from Mr Buckton’s devilish and successful subterfuges for keeping her at the sounder whenever it looked as if anything might amuse; the sounder, which it was equally his business to mind, being the innermost cell of captivity, a cage within the cage, fenced off from the rest by a frame of ground glass. The counter-clerk would have played into her hands; but the counter-clerk was really reduced to idiocy by the effect of his passion for her. She flattered herself moreover, nobly, that with the unpleasant conspicuity of this passion she would never have consented to be obliged to him. The most she would ever do would be always to shove off on him whenever she could the registration of letters, a job she happened particularly to loathe. After the long stupors, at all events, there almost always suddenly would come a sharp taste of something; it was in her mouth before she knew it; it was in her mouth now.