The Jolly Corner | Page 5

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, but
still unobscured, still exposed and cherished, under that pious visitation
of the spirit from which she had never been diverted.
She had come with him one day to see how his "apartment-house" was
rising; he had helped her over gaps and explained to her plans, and
while they were there had happened to have, before her, a brief but
lively discussion with the man in charge, the representative of the
building firm that had undertaken his work. He had found himself quite
"standing up" to this personage over a failure on the latter's part to
observe some detail of one of their noted conditions, and had so lucidly
argued his case that, besides ever so prettily flushing, at the time, for
sympathy in his triumph, she had afterwards said to him (though to a
slightly greater effect of irony) that he had clearly for too many years
neglected a real gift. If he had but stayed at home he would have
anticipated the inventor of the sky-scraper. If he had but stayed at home
he would have discovered his genius in time really to start some new
variety of awful architectural hare and run it till it burrowed in a gold
mine. He was to remember these words, while the weeks elapsed, for
the small silver ring they had sounded over the queerest and deepest of
his own lately most disguised and most muffled vibrations.
It had begun to be present to him after the first fortnight, it had broken
out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton wonderment: it
met him there - and this was the image under which he himself judged
the matter, or at least, not a little, thrilled and flushed with it - very
much as he might have been met by some strange figure, some

unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty
house. The quaint analogy quite hauntingly remained with him, when
he didn't indeed rather improve it by a still intenser form: that of his
opening a door behind which he would have made sure of finding
nothing, a door into a room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, with
a great suppressed start, on some quite erect confronting presence,
something planted in the middle of the place and facing him through
the dusk. After that visit to the house in construction he walked with his
companion to see the other and always so much the better one, which in
the eastward direction formed one of the corners, - the "jolly" one
precisely, of the street now so generally dishonoured and disfigured in
its westward reaches, and of the comparatively conservative Avenue.
The Avenue still had pretensions, as Miss Staverton said, to decency;
the old people had mostly gone, the old names were unknown, and here
and there an old association seemed to stray, all vaguely, like some
very aged person, out too late, whom you might meet and feel the
impulse to watch or follow, in kindness, for safe restoration to shelter.
They went in together, our friends; he admitted himself with his key, as
he kept no one there, he explained, preferring, for his reasons, to leave
the place empty, under a simple arrangement with a good woman living
in the neighbourhood and who came for a daily hour to open windows
and dust and sweep. Spencer Brydon had his reasons and was
growingly aware of them; they seemed to him better each time he was
there, though he didn't name them all to his companion, any more than
he told her as yet how often, how quite absurdly often, he himself came.
He only let her see for the present, while they walked through the great
blank rooms, that absolute vacancy reigned and that, from top to
bottom, there was nothing but Mrs. Muldoon's broomstick, in a corner,
to tempt the burglar. Mrs. Muldoon was then on the premises, and she
loquaciously attended the visitors, preceding them from room to room
and pushing back shutters and throwing up sashes - all to show them, as
she remarked, how little there was to see. There was little indeed to see
in the great gaunt shell where the main dispositions and the