The Jolly Corner | Page 3

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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
strangely belated 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 vision wherever 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 uncanny phenomena
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