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🟡 Jolly Corner (Alternative Reading) (Full Audiobook) | Henry James · Weird Fiction Audiobooks: Cosmic Horror, Strange Realities & Uncanny Tales

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Chapter one of The Jolly Corner. This is a LibriVox recording.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: by Tony Addison. The Jolly Corner by Henry James, Chapter one.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Everyone asks me what I think of everything, said Spencer Brydon,
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: and I make answer as I can, begging or dodging
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: the question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn't
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: matter to any of them, really, he went on, for
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: even were it possible to meet in that stand and
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: deliver a way so demand on so big a subject,
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: my thoughts would still be almost altogether about something that
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: concerns only myself. He was talking to Miss Staverton, with
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: whom for a couple of months now he had availed
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: himself of every possible occasion to talk this disposition and
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: fact presented itself, Having promptly enough taken the first place
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: in the considerable array of rather unattenuated surprises attending his
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: so strangely belated return to America, everything was somehow a surprise,
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: and that might be natural when one had so long
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: and so consistently neglect, did everything taken pains to give
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: surprises so much margin for play. He had given them
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: more than thirty years thirty three, to be exact, and
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: they now seemed to him to have organized their performance
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: quite on the scale of that license. He had been
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: twenty three on leaving New York, he was fifty six
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: to day, unless, indeed, he were to reckon, as he
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: had sometimes since his repatriation, found himself feeling, in which
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: case he would have lived longer than is often allotted
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: to man. It would have taken a century, he repeatedly
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: said to himself, and said also to less Stabaton. It
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: would have taken a longer absence and a more averted
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: mind than those even of which he had been guilty
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: to pile up the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all,
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: the bignesses for the better or the worse that at
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: present assaulted his vision wherever he looked. The great fact
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: or the while, however, had been the incalculability. Since he
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: had supposed himself from decade to decade to be allowing,
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: of change, he actually saw that he had allowed for nothing.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: He missed what he would have been sure of finding.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: He found, and what you would never have imagined. Proportions
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: and values were upside down. The ugly things he had expected,
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: the ugly things of his far away youth, when he
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: had too promptly walked up to a sense of the ugly.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: These unclanny phenomena placed him, rather as it happened, under
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: the charm. Whereas the swagger things, the modern, the monstrous,
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: the famous things, those he had more particularly like thousands
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: of ingenuous inquirers every year come over to see, were
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: exactly his sources of dismay. They were, as so many
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: set traps for displeasure, above all, for he action of
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: which his restless shread was constantly pressing the spring. It
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: was interesting, doubtless, the whole show. But it would have
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: been too disconcerting hadn't a certain finer truth saved the situation.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: He had distinctly not, in this steadier light, come over
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: all for the monstrosities. He had come, not only in
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: the last analysis, but quite on the face of the act,
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: under an impulse with which they had nothing to do.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: He had come, putting the thing pompously to look at
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: his property, which he had thus for a third of
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: a century not been within four thousand miles of pressing
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: it less sordidly, he had yielded to the humor of
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: seeing again his house on the Jolly Corner, as he
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: usually and quite fondly described it, the one in which
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: he had first seen the light, in which various members
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: of his family had lived and had died, in which
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: the holidays of his overschooled boyhood had been passed, and
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: the few social flowers of his chilled adolescence gathered, and
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: which alienated then for so long a period, had, through
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: the successive deaths of his two brothers and the termination
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: of old arrangements, come wholly into his hands. He was
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: the owner of another not quite so good, the Jolly
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: Corner having been from far back superlatively extended and consecrated,
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: and the value of the pair represented his main capital.
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  Speaker 1: With an income consisting in these later years of their
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: respective rents, which, thanks precisely to their original excellent type,
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: had never been depressingly low, he could live in Europe
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: as he had been in the habit of living on
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: the product of these flourishing New York leases, and all
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: the better sense that of the second structure. The mere
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: number in its long grow, having within a twelvemonth fallen
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: inn a renovation at a high advance, had proved beautifully possible.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: These were items of property, indeed, but he had found
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: himself since his arrival distinguishing more than ever between them.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: The house within the street, two bristling blocks westward, was
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: already in course of reconstruction, as a tall mass of flats.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: He had exceeded some time before to overtures for this conversion,
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: in which, now that it was going forward, it had
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: been not the least of his astonishments to find himself
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: able on the spot, and though without a previous ounce
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: of such experience, to participate with a certain intelligence, almost
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: with a certain authority. He had lived his life with
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: his back so turned to such concerns, and his face
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: addressed to those so different an order that he scarce
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: knew what to make of this lively stir in a
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: compartment of his mind, never yet penetrated of a capacity
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  Speaker 1: for business and a sense for construction, These virtues so
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: common all around him now have been dormant in his
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: own organism, where it might be said of them, perhaps
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: that they had slept to the sleep of the just
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: at present in the splendid autumn weather. The autumn, at least,
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: was a pure boon in the terrible place, he loafed
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: about his work, undeterred, secretly agitated, not in the least
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: minding that the whole proposition, as they said, was vulgar
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: and sordid, and ready to climb ladders, to walk the plank,
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: to handle materials and look wise about them, to ask
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: questions in fine and challenge explanations, and really go into figures.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: It amused, it verily, quite charmed him, and by the
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: same stroke it amused and even more Alice Staverton, though
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: perhaps charming her perceptibly less. She wasn't, however, a going
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: to be better off for it as he was, and
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: so astonishingly much nothing was now likely he knew, ever,
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: to make her better off than she found herself in
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: the afternoon of life as the delicately frugal possessor and
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: tenant of the small house in Irving Place, to which
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: he had subtly managed to cling through her almost unbroken
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: New York career. If he knew the way to it
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: now better than to any other address among the dreadful,
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  Speaker 1: multiplied numberings, which seemed to him to reduce the whole
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: place to some vast ledger page, overgrown fantastic of ruled
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: and crisscrossed lines and figures. If he had formed for
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: his consolation that habit, it was really not a little
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: because of the charm of his having encountered and recognized
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: in the vast wilderness of the wholesale, breaking through the
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: mere gross generalization of wealth and force and success, a
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: small still scene were items and shades, all delicate things,
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: kept the sharpness of the notes of a high voice,
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  Speaker 1: perfectly trained, and where economy hung about like the scent
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  Speaker 1: of a garden. His old friend lived with one maid
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: and herself dusted her relics, and trimmed her lamps and
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: polished her silver. She stood off in the awful modern
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: crush when she could, but she sallied forth and did
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: battle when the challenge was really to spirit. The spirit
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: she after all confessed to proudly and a little shyly,
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: as to that of the better time, that of their
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: common there quite far away and antediluvian social period and order.
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  Speaker 1: She made use of the street cars when need be.
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  Speaker 1: The terrible things that people scrambled for as the panic
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: stricken at sea scrambled for the boats. She affronted, inscrutably undistress,
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  Speaker 1: all the public concussions and ordeals, and yet with that
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  Speaker 1: slim mystifying grace of her appearance, which defied you to
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  Speaker 1: say if she were a fair young woman who looked
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  Speaker 1: older through trouble, or a fine, smooth older one who
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: looked young through successful indifference. With her precious reference above
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: all to memories and histories into which he could enter,
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  Speaker 1: she was as exquisite for him as some pale pressed flower,
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  Speaker 1: a rarity to begin with, and failing other sweetnesses, she
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: was a sufficient reward of his effort. They had communities
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: of knowledge. Their knowledge, this discriminating possessive was always on
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  Speaker 1: her lips of presences of the other age, presences all
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: overlaid in his case by the experience of a man
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: and the freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity,
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  Speaker 1: by passages of life that were strange and dim to her,
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: just by Europe. In short, but still unobscured, still exposed
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: and cherished under that pious visitation of the spirit from
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: which she had never been diverted. She had come with
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: him one day to see how his apartment house was rising.
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: He had helped her over gaps and explained to her plans,
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  Speaker 1: and while they were there had happened to have before
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  Speaker 1: her a brief but lively discussion and with the man
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  Speaker 1: in charge, the representative of the building fund that had
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  Speaker 1: undertaken his work. He had found himself quite standing up
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  Speaker 1: to this personage over a failure on the latter's part
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  Speaker 1: to observe some detail of one of their noted conditions,
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: and had so lucidly argued his case that, besides ever
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: so prettily flushing at the time for sympathy in his triumph,
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: she had afterwards said to him, though to a slightly
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: greater effect of irony, that he had clearly, for too
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: many years neglected a real gift. If he had but
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: stayed at home, he would have anticipated the inventor of
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: the skyscraper. If he had but stayed at home, he
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: would have discovered his genius in time. A really to
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: start some new variety of awful architectural hair and run
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: it till it burrowed in a gold mine. He was
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: to remember these words while the weeks elapsed for the
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: small silver ring. They had sounded over the queerest and
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: deepest of his own lately most disguised and most muffled vibrations.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: It had begun to be present to him after the
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: first fortnight. It had broken out with the oddest abruptness,
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: this particular wanton wonderment. It met him there, And this
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: was the image under which he himself judged the matter,
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: or at least not a little thrilled and flushed with it,
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: very much as he might have been met by some
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: strange figure, some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: of the dim passages of an empty house. The quaint analogy,
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: quite hauntingly remained with him when he didn't indeed, rather
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: improve it by a still intensiform that of his opening
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: a door behind which he would have made sure of
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: finding nothing, a door into a room shuttered and void,
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: and yet so coming with a great suppressed start on
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: some quite erect confronting presence, something planted in the middle
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: of the place and facing him through the dusk. After
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: that visit to the house in construction, he walked with
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: his companion to see the other, and always so much
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: the better, one, which in the eastward direction formed one
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: of the corners, the Jolly One, precisely of the street
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: now so generally dishonored and disfigured in its westward reaches,
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: and of the comparatively conservative Avenue. The avenue still had pretensions,
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: As Miss Staverton said to decency, the old people had
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: mostly gone, the old names were unknown, and here and
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: there an old association seemed to stray all vaguely, like
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: some very aged person out too late, whom you might
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: meet and feel the impulse to watch or follow in
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: kindness for safe restoration to shelter. They went in together,
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: our friends, he admitted himself with his key, as he
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: kept no one there, he explained, preferring for his reasons
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: to leave the place empty under a simple arrangement with
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: a good woman living in the neighborhood, and you came
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: for a daily hour to open windows and dustn't sweep.
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: Spencer Brighton had his reasons and was growingly aware of them.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: They seemed to him better each time he was there,
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: though he didn't name them all to his companion anymore
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: than he told her as yet, how often, how quite
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: absurdly often, he himself came. He only let her see
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: for the present while they walked through the great blank rooms,
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: that absolute vacancy reigned, and that from top to bottom
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: there was nothing but Missus Muldoon's broomstick in a corner
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: to tempt the burglar. Missus Muldoon was then on the premises,
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: and she loquaciously attended the visitors, preceding them from room
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: to room, and pushing back shutters and throwing up sashes,
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: all to show them, as she remarked, how little there
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: was to see. There was little, indeed to see in
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: the great gaunt shell, where the main dispositions and the
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: general apportionment of space the style of an age of
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: ampler allowances have nevertheless for its master their honest, pleading message,
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: affecting him as some good old servants, some life long
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: retainers appeal for a character, or even for a retiring pension.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: Yet it was also a remark of Missus Muldoon's that,
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: glad as she was to oblige him by her noonday ram,
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: there was a request she greatly hoped he would never
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: make of a If he should wish her for any
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: reason to come in after the dog, she would just
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: tell him if he plays that he must ask it
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: of somebody else. The fact that there was nothing to
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: see didn't militate for the worthy woman against what one
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: might see, and she put it frankly to Miss Staverton
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: that no lady could be expected to like could she
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: craping up to them top staries? In the able hours
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: the guests and the electric light were off the house,
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: and she fairly evoked a gruesome vision of her march
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: through the great gray rooms, so many of them as
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: there were too, With her glimmering taper. Miss Daverton met
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: her honest, glab with a smile and the profession that
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: she herself certainly would recoil from such an adventure. Spencer
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: Brighton meanwhile, held his peace for the moment. The question
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: of the evil hours in his old home had already
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: become too grave. He had begun some time since to create,
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: and he knew just why a packet of candles addressed
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: to that pursuit had been stowed by his own hand
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: three weeks before, at the back of a drawer of
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: the fine old sideboard that occupied as a fixture the
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: deep recess in the dining room. Just now, he laughed
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: at his companions, e quickly, however, changing the subject for
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: the reason that in the first place, his laugh struck
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: him even at that moment as starting the odd echo
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: the conscious human resonance, he scarce knew how to qualify it,
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: that sounds made while he was there alone, sent back
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: to his ear or his fancy, and that in the
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: second he imagined Alice Stabberton for the instant on the
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: point of asking him with the divination if he ever
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: so prowled. There were divinations he was unprepared for, and
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: he had, at all events averted inquiry. By the time
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: Missus Muldoon had let them passing on to other parts,
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: there was happily enough to say on so consecrated a
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: spot that could be said freely and fairly, so that
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: a whole train of declarations was precipitated by his friends,
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: having herself broken out after a yearning look round. But
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: I hope you don't mean they want you to pull
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: this to pieces, His answer came promptly, with his reawakened wrath.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: It was, of course exactly what they wanted. On what
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: they were at him for daily, with the iteration of
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: people who couldn't for their life understand a man's liability
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: to decent feelings, he had found the place just as
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: it stood, and beyond what he could express an interest
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: and a joy. There were values other than the beastly
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: rent values. And in short, in short, but it was
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: thus miss Stabberton took him up. In short, he ought
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: to make so good a thing of your skyscraper that
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: living in luxury on those ill gotten gains you can
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: afford for a while. But to be sentimental here her
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: smile had for him with the words the particular mild
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: irony with which she found half her talk suffused an
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: irony without bitterness, and that came exactly from her having
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: so much imagination, not like the cheap sarcasms with which
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: one heard most people about the world of sci society
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: bid for the reputation of cleverness from nobody's really having any.
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: It was agreeable to him at this very moment to
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: be sure that when he had answered, after a brief demur, well, yes,
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: so precisely you may put it, her imagination would still
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: do him justice. He explained that even if never a
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: dollar were to come to him from the other house,
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: he would nevertheless cherish this one. And he dwelt further
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: while they lingered and wandered on the fact of the
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: stupid faction. He was already exciting the positive mystification he
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: felt himself create. He spoke of the value of all
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: he read into it, into the mere sight of the wars,
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: mere shapes of the rooms, mere sound of the floors,
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: mere feel in his hand of the old silber plated
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: knobs of the several mahogany doors, which suggested the pressure
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: of the palms of the dead, the seventy years of
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: the past. In fine that these things represented the annals
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: of nearly three generations, counting his grandfather's the one that
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: had ended there, and the impalpable ashes of his long,
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: extinct youth afloat in the very air, like microscopic motes.
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: If she listened to everything, she was a woman who
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: answered intimately, but who utterly didn't chatter. She scattered abroad,
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: therefore no cloud of words. She could assent, she could
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: agree above all, she could encourage without doing that. Only
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: at the last she went a little further than he
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: had done himself. And then, how do you know? You may, still,
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: after all want to live here? It rather, indeed pulled
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: him up, for it wasn't what he had been thinking,
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: at least in her sense of the words. You mean,
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: I may decide to stay on for the sake of
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: it well, with such a home, But quite beautifully she
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: had too much tat to dot so monstrous an eye,
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: And it was precisely an illustration of the way she
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: didn't rattle. How could anyone of any war insist on
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: anyone else's wanting to live in New York? Oh, he said,
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: I might have lived here, since I had my opportunity
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: early in life. I might have put in here all
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: these years. Then everything would have been different enough, and
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: I dare say, funny enough. But that's another matter. And
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: then the beauty of it, I mean, of my perversity,
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: of my refusal to agree to a deal, is just
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: in the total absence of a reason. Don't you see
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: that if I had a reason about the matter at all,
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: it would have to be the other way, and would
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: then be inevitably a reason of dollars, for the honor
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: reasons here, But of dollars. Let us therefore have none whatever,
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: not the ghost of one. They were back in the
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: hall then for departure, But from where they stood the
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: vista was large through an open door into the great
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: square main saloon, with its almost antique felicity of brave
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: spaces between windows. Her eyes came back from that reach
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: and met his own a moment. Are you very sure
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: the ghost of one doesn't much? Rather, sir? He had
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: a positive sense of turning pale. But it was as
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: near as they were then to come. For he made answer.
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: He believed between a glare and a grin. Oh, ghosts.
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: Of course the place must warm with them. I should
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: be ashamed of it if it didn't. Poor missus Muldoon's right,
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: and it's why I haven't asked her to do more
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: than look in. Miss Staverton's gaze again lost itself, and
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: things she didn't utter, it was clear, came and went
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: in her mind. She might, even for the minute off
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: there in the fine room, have imagined some element dimly
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: gathering simplified, like the death mask of a handsome face.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: It perhaps produced for her just then an affect again
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: to the stir of an expression in the set commemorative plaster. He.
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: Whatever her impression may have been, she produced instead a
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: vague platitude. Well, if it were only furnished and lived in,
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: She appeared to imply that in case of its being
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: still furnished, he might have been a little less opposed
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: to the idea of a return. But she passed straight
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: into the vestibule, as if to leave her words behind her,
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: And the next moment he had opened the house door
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: and was standing with her on the steps. He closed
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: the door, and while he repocketed his key, looking up
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: and down, they took in the comparatively harsh actuality of
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: the avenue, which reminded him of the assault of the
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: outer light of the desert on the traveler emerging from
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: an Egyptian tomb. But he risked before they stepped into
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: the street. His gathered answer to her speak for me,
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: it is lived in. For me, it is furnished, at
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: which it was easy for her to sigh ah yes,
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: all vaguely and discreetly, since his parents and his favorite sister,
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: to say nothing of other kin in numbers, had run
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: their course and met their end there that represented within
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: the walls ineffaceable life. It was a few days after
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: this that, during an hour passed with her again, he
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: had expressed his impatience of the too flattering curiosity among
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: the people he met about his appreciation of New York.
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: He had arrived at none at all that was socially producible.
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: And as for that matter of his thinking, thinking, the
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: better the worse of anything there he was wholly taken
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: up with one subject of thought. It was mere vain egoism,
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: and it was moreover, if she liked a morbid obsession.
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: He found all things come back to the question of
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: what he personally might have been, how he might have
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: led his life and turned out if he had not so,
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: at the outset, given it up, and confessing for the
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: first time to the intensity within him of this absurd speculation,
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: which but proved also no doubt the habit of too
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: selfishly thinking, he affirmed the impotence that of any other
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: source of interest, any other native appeal, or what would
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: it have made of me? Or what would it have
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: made of me? I keep ever wondering, all idiotically as
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: if I could possibly know. I see what it has
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: made of dozens of others those I meet, and it
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: positively aches within me to the point of exasperation, that
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: it would have made something of me as well, Only
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: I can't make out what. And the worry of it,
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: the small rage of curiosity, never to be satisfied, brings
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: back what I remember to have felt, once or twice,
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: after judging best afore reasons to burn some important letter unopened.
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: I've been sorry, I've hated it. I've never known what
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: was in the letter. You may, of course say it's
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: a trifle. I don't say it's a trifle. Miss Tabbarton
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: gravely interrupted. She was seated by her fire, and before her.
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: On his feet and restless, he turned to and fro
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: between this intensity of his idea and a fitful and
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: unseeing inspection through his single eyeglass of the dear little
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: old objects on her chimney piece. Her interruption made him
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: for an instant look at her heart. I shouldn't care
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: if you did, He laughed, however, And it's only a
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: figure at any rate for the way I now feel
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: not to have followed my perverse young course, and almost
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: in the teeth of my family's curse, as I may say,
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: not to have kept it up so over there from
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: that day to this without a doubt or a pang,
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: not above all, to have liked it, to have loved
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: it so much, loved it, no doubt, with such an
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: abysmal conceit of my own preference. Some variation from that
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: I say, must have produce some different effect for my
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: life and for my form. I should have stuck here
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: if it had been possible, And I was too young
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: at twenty three to judge the poor dur sue whether
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: it were possible. If I had waited, I might have
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: seen it was, and then I might have been by
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: staying here something nearer to one of these types who
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: have been hammered so hard and made so keen by
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: their conditions. It isn't that I admired them so much.
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: The question of any charm in them, or of any
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: charm beyond that of the rank money passion exerted by
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: their conditions for them, has nothing to do with the matter.
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: It's only a question of what fantastic yet perfectly possible
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: development of my own nature I mayn't have missed. It
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: comes over me that I had then a strange alter
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: ego deep down somewhere within me, as the full blown
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: flower is in the small, tight bud, and that I
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: just took the course. I just transferred him to the
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: climate that blighted him for once and for ever. And
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: you wonder about the flower, Miss Dabboton, said, so do
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: I if you want to know, And so I've been
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: wondering these several weeks. I believe in the flowers, she continued,
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: I feel it would have been quite splendid, quite hued,
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: and monstrous, monstrous above all, her visitor echoed. And I imagine,
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: by the same stroke, quite hideous and offensive. You don't
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: believe that, she returned. If you did, you wouldn't wonder,
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: you'd know, and that would be enough for you. What
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: you feel, and what I feel for you, is that
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: you'd have had power. He you'd have liked me that way,
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: he asked. She barely hung fire. How should I not
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: have liked you? I see you'd have liked me, have
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: preferred me a billionaire. How should I not have liked you,
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: she simply again asked. He stood before her still. Her
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: question kept him motionless. He took it in so much
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: there was of it, and indeed he's not otherwise meeting
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: it testified to that I know at least what I am,
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: he simply went, on the other side of the medals.
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: Clear enough, I've not been edifying. I believe I'm thought
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent. I've
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: followed strange paths and worshiped strange gods, it must have
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: come to you again and again. In fact, you've admitted
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: to me as much that I was needing at any
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: time these thirty years, a selfish, frivolous, scandalous life. And
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: you see what it has made of me? She just waited,
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: smiling at him. You see what it has made of me. Oh,
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: you're a person whom nothing can have altered. You were
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: born to be what you are anywhere any way. You've
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: the perfection nothing else could have blighted. And don't you
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: see how without my exile, I shouldn't have been waiting
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: till now. But he pulled up for the strange pang.
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: The great thing to see, she presently said, seems to
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: me to be that it has spoiled nothing. It hasn't
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: spoiled your being here. At least it hasn't spoiled this.
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: It hasn't spoiled your speaking. She also, however, faltered. He
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: wondered at ever a thing her controlled emotion might mean.
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: Do you believe then, too? Dreadfully? But I am as
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: good as I might ever have been. Oh, no, far
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: from it, with which she got up from her chair
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: and was nearer to him. But I don't care, she smiled.
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: You mean I'm good enough, she considered a little. Will
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: you believe it if I say so? I mean, will
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: you let that subtle your question for you? And then,
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: as if making out in his face that he drew
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: back from this, that he had some idea, which, however absurd,
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: he couldn't yet bargain away. Oh you don't care either,
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: but very differently, you don't care for anything but yourself.
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: Spencer Brighton recognized it. It was, in fact what he
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: had absolutely professed. Yet he importantly qualified, he isn't myself,
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: he is the just so totally other person. But I
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: do want to see him, he added, and I can
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: I shall. Their eyes met for a minute, while he
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: guessed from something in hers that she divined his strange sense,
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: but neither of them otherwise expressed it, and her apparent understanding,
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: with no protesting shock, no easy derision, touched him more
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: deeply than anything, yet, constituting for his stifled perversity on
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: the spot, an element that was like breathable air. What
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: she said, however, was unexpected. Well, I've seen him you,
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: I've seen him in a dream. Oh a dream. It
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: let him down, but twice sober she continued, I saw
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: him as I see you now. You dreamed the same
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: dream twice Ober, she repeated the very same. This did
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: some now a little speak to him, as it also
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: gratified him. You dream about me at that rate? About him?
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: She smiled. His eyes again sounded her. Then you know
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: all about him? And as she said, nothing more, what's
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: the wretch like? She hesitated, And it was as if
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: he were pressing her so hard that, resisting for reasons
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: of her own, she had to turn away. I'll tell
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: you some other time. And of chapter one, chapter two
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: of The Jolly Corner by Henry James. This Deeper Box
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: recording is in the public domain recording by Tony Addison.
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: Chapter two. It was after this that there was most
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: of a virtue for him, most of a cultivated charm,
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: most of a preposterous secret thrill, in the particular form
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: of surrender to his obsession, and of address to what
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: he more and more believed to be his privilege. It
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: was what in these weeks he was living for, since
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: he really felt late to begin. But after missus Muldoon
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: had retired from the scene, and visiting the Ample House
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: from attic to sullat, making sure he was alone, he
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: knew himself in safe possession, and as he tacitly expressed it,
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: let himself go. He sometimes came twice in the twenty
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: four hours. The moments he liked best were those of
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: gathering dusk, of the short autumn twilight. This was the
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: time of which, again and again he found himself hoping
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: most Then he could, as seemed to him most intimately,
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: wonder and wait, linger and listen, feel his fine attention,
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: never in his life before so fine on the pulse
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: of the great vague place. He preferred the lampless hour,
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: and only wished he might have prolonged each day the
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: deep crepuscular spell. Later, rarely much before midnight, but then
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: for a considerable vigil he watched with his glimmering light,
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: moving slowly, holding it high, playing it far, rejoicing above
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: all as much as he might, in open vistas, the
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: reaches of communication between rooms and by passages, the long
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: straight chance, or show, as he would have called it,
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: for the revelation he pretended to invite. It was a
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: practice he found he could perfectly work without exciting remark.
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: No one was in the least the wiser for it,
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: even Alice Staverton, who was moreover a well of discussion.
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: It didn't quite fully imagine. He left himself in and
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: let himself out with the assurance of calm, proprietorship and
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: accidents so far favored him that if a fat avenue
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: officer had happened on occasion to see him entering at
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: eleven thirty, he had never yet, to the best of
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: his belief, been noticed as emerging at two. He walked
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: there on the crisp November nights, arrived regularly at the evenings,
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: and it was as easy to do this after dining
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: out as to take his way to a club or
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: to his hotel. When he left his club, if he
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: hadn't been dining out, it was ostensibly to go to
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: his hotel, and when he left his hotel, if he
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: had spent a part of the evening there, it was
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: ostensibly to go to his club. Everything was easy, in fine,
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: everything conspired and promoted. There was truly, even in the
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: strain of his experience, something that glossed over, something that
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: solved and simplified all the rest of consciousness. He circulated, talked, renewed, loosely, unpleasantly.
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: Old relations met indeed, so far as he could new expectations,
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: and seemed to make out on the whole that in
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: spite of the career of such different contacts which he
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: had spoken of to miss Stabaton as ministering so little
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: for those who might have watched it to edification, he
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: was positively rather light than not. He was a dim
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: secondary social success, and all with people who had truly
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: not an idea of him. It was all mere surface sound,
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: this murmur of their welcome, this popping of their corks,
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: just as his gestures of response were the extravagant shadows,
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: emphatic in proportion, as they meant little of some game
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: of arm braschine noirs. He projected himself all day in thought,
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: straight over the bristling line of hard unconscious heads and
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: into the other, the real, the waiting life, the life that,
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: as soon as he had heard behind him the click
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: of his great house door began for him on the
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: jolly corner, as beguilingly as the slow opening bars of
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: some rich music follows the tap of the conductor's Wand
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: he always caught the first effect of the steel point
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: of his stick on the old marble of the hall pavement,
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: large black and white squares that he remembered as the
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: admiration of his childhood, and that had then made in him,
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: as he now saw, for the growth of an early
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: conception of style. This effect was the dim, reverberating tinkle,
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: as of some far off bell hung who should say
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: where in the depths of the house of the past,
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: of that mystical other world that might have flourished for him,
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: had he not, for wheel or woe, abandoned it. On
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: this impression he did, ever, the same thing. He put
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: his stick noiselessly away in a corner, feeling the place
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: once more in the likeness of some great glass bowl,
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: all precious concave crystal, set delicately humming by the play
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: of a moist finger around its edge. The concave crystal held,
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: as it were, this mystical other world, and the indescribably
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: fine murmur of its rim was the sigh that the scarce, audible,
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: pathetic wail to his strained ear of all the old
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: baffled for swarm possibilities. What he did, therefore, by this
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: appeal of his hushed presence, was to wake them into
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: such measure of ghostly life as they might still enjoy.
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: They were shy, all but unappeasably shy. But they weren't
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: really sinister. At least they weren't as he had hitherto
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: felt them before they had taken the form he so
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: yearned to make them take, the form he at moments
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: saw himself in the light of fairly hunting on tow
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: the points of his evening shoes, from room to room
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: and from story to story. That was the essence of
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: his vision, which was all rank folly, if one would,
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: while he was out of the house and otherwise occupied,
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: but which took on the last very similitude. As soon
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: as he was placed and posted. He knew what he
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: meant and what he wanted. It was as clear as
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: the figure on a check presented in demand for cash.
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: His alter ego walked. That was the note of his
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: image of him, while his image of his motive for
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: his own odd pastime was the desire to waylay him
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: and meet him. He roamed slowly, warily, but all restlessly.
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: He himself did. Missus Muldoon had been right absolutely with
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: a figure of their creping and the presence he watched
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: for would roam restlessly too, But it would be as
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: cautious and as shifty. The conviction of its probable, in fact,
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: its already quite sensible, quite audible, evasion of pursuit grew
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: for him from night to night, laying on him finally
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: a rigor to which nothing in his life had been comparable.
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: It had been the theory of many superficially judging persons.
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: He knew that he was wasting that life in a
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: surrender to sensations, but yetted of no pleasure so fine
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: as his actual tension had been introduced to, no sport
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: that demanded at once the patience and the nerve of
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: this stalking of a creature more subtle, yet at bay,
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: perhaps more formidable than any beast of the forest. The terms,
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: the comparisons, the very practices of the chase positively came
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: again into play. There were even moments when passages of
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: his occasional experience as a sportsman stirred. Memories from his
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: younger time of moore and mountain and desert revived for him,
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: and to the increase of his keenness by the tremendous
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: force of analogy. He found himself at moments once he
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: had placed his single light on some mantel shelf, or
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: in some recess, stepping back into shelter or shade, effacing
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: himself behind a door, or in an embrasure, as he
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: had sort of old the vantage of rock and tree.
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: He found himself holding his breath and living in the
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: joy of the instant, the supreme suspense created by big
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: game alone. He wasn't afraid, though putting himself the question,
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: as he believed gentlemen on Bengal tiger shoots or in
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: close quarters with the great bear of the Rockies, had
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: been known to confess to having put it. And this indeed,
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: since here at least he might be frank because of
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: the impression so intimate and so strange, that he himself
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: produced as yet a dread produced certainly a strain beyond
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: the liveliest he was likely to feel. They fell for
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: him into categories. They fairly became familiar, the signs for
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: his own perception of the alarm, his presence and his
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: vigilance created, though leaving him always to remark portentously on
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: his probably having formed a relation, his probably enjoying a
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: consciousness unique in the experience of man. People enough first
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: and last had been in terror of apparitions, But who
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: had ever before so turned the tables and become himself
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: in the apparitional world, an incalculable terror. He might have
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: found this sublime, had he quite dared to think of it,
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: but he didn't too much insist truly on that side
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: of his privilege. With habit and repetition, he gained to
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: an extraordinary degree the power to penetrate the dusk of
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: distances and the darkness of corners, to resolve back into
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: their innocence, the treacheries of uncertain light, the evil looking
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: forms taken in the gloom by mere shadows, by accidents
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: of the air, by shifting effects of perspective. Putting down
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: his dim luminary he could still wander on without it,
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: pass into other rooms and only knowing it was there
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: behind him in case of need, see his way about,
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: visually project for his purpose a comparative clearness. It made
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: him feel this acquired faculty like some monstrous, stealthy cat.
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: He wondered if he would have glad at these moments
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: with large, shining yellow eyes, and what it mightn't verily
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: be for the poor, hard pressed alter ego to be
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: confronted with such a type. He liked, however, of the
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: open shutters he opened everywhere those Missus Muldoon had closed,
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: closing them as carefully afterwards, so that she shouldn't notice.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: He liked, Oh, this he did like. And above all
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: in the upper rooms the sense of the hard silver
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: of the autumn stars through the window panes, and scarcely
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: less the flare of the street lamps below the white
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: electric luster, which it would have taken curtains to keep out.
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: This was human, actual social. This was of the world
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: he had lived in, and he was more at his ease,
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: certainly for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal that all
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: the while, and in spite of his detachment, and it
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: seemed to give him. He had support, of course, mostly
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: in the rooms at the wide front and the prolonged side.
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: It failed him considerably in the central shades and the
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: parts at the bank. But if he sometimes on his rounds,
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: was glad of his optical reach. So nonetheless often the
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: rear of the house affected him as the very jungle
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: of his prey. The place was there more subdivided, a
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: large extension, in particular, where small rooms for servants had
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: been multiplied, abounded in nooks and corners, in closets and
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: passages in the ramifications, especially of an ample back staircase,
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: over which he leaned many a time to look far down,
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: not deterred from his gravity, even while aware that he might,
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: for a spectator, have figured some solemn simpleton playing at
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: hide and seek outside. In fact, he might himself make
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: that ironic raprochement. But within the walls, and in spite
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: of the clear windows, his consistency was proof against the
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: cynical light of New York. It had belonged to that
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: idea of the exasperated consciousness of his victim to become
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: a real test for him, since he had quite put
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: it to himself from the first, that, oh distinctly he
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: could cultivate his whole perception, felt it as above all
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: open to cultivation, which indeed was but another name for
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 1: his manner of spending his time. He was bringing it on,
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: bringing it to perfection by practice, in consequence of which
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: it had grown so fine that he was now aware
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: of impressions attestations of his general postulate that couldn't have
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: broken upon him at once. This was the case, more specifically,
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: with a phenomenon at last quite frequent for him in
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: the upper rooms, the recognition absolutely unmistakable, and by a
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: turn dating from a particular hour, his resumption of his
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: campaign after a diplomatic drop, a calculated absence of three
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: nights of his being definitely followed, tracked at a distance
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: carefully taken, and to the express end that he should
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: the less competently, less arrogantly appear to himself merely to
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: pursue it. Worried it finally quite broke him up, for
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: it proved, of all the conceivable impressions, the one least
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: suited to his book. He was kept in sight while
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: remaining himself as regards the essence of his position sightless,
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: and his owner recourse then was in abrupt turns, rapid
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: recoveries of ground. He wheeled about, retracing his steps, as
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: if he might so catch in his face at least
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: the stirred air of some other quick revolution. It was
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: indeed true that his fully dislocalized thought of these maneuvers
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: recall to him Pantaloon at the Christmas farce, buffeted and
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: tricked from behind by ubiquitous harlequin. But it left intact
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: the influence of the conditions themselves. Each time he was
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: re exposed to them, so that in fact this association,
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: had he suffered it to become constant, would on a
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: certain side, have but ministered to his intenser gravity. He
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: had made, as I have said, to create on the
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: premises the baseless sense of a reprieve his three absences,
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: and the result of the third was to confirm the
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: after effect of the second. On his return that night,
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: the night succeeding his last intermission, he stood in the
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: hall and looked up the staircase with a certainty more
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: intimate than any he had yet known. He's there at
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: the top and waiting, not as in general falling back
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: for disappearance. He's holding his ground, and it's the first time,
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: which is a proof, isn't it that something has happened
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: for him? So Brydon argued, with his hand on the
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: banister and his foot on the lowest stair, in which
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: position he felt as never before, the air chilled by
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: his logic, he himself turned cold in it, where he
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: seemed of a sudden to know what now was involved.
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: Harder pressed, Yes, he takes it in with its thus
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: making clear to him that I've come, as they say,
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: to stay. He finally doesn't like and can't bear it
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: in the sense I mean that is rough. His menaced
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: interest now balances with his dread. I've hunted him till
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: he has turned that up. There is what has happened.
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: He's the fanged of the antlered animal, brought at last
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: to bay. There came to him, as I say, but
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: determined by an luence beyond my notation, the acuteness of
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: this certainty, under which, however, the next moment he had
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: broken into a sweat that he would as little have
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: consented to attribute to fear as he would have dared
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: immediately to act upon it for enterprise. It marked, nonetheless
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: a prodigious thrill, a thrill that represented sudden dismay, no doubt,
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: but also represented, and with the self same throb, the strangest,
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: the most joyous, possibly the next minute, almost the proudest
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: duplication of consciousness. He has been dodging, retreating, hiding, but
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: now worked up to anger, he'll fight. This intense impression
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: made a single mouthful, as it were, of terror and
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: of aplause. But what was wondrous was that the applause
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: for the felt fact was so eager, Since if it
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: was his other self, he was running to earth. This
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: ineffable identity was thus, in the last resort not unworthy
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: of him. It bristled there somewhere near at hand, however,
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: unseen still as the hunted thing, even as the trodden
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: worm of the ad age must at last bristle and brighten.
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: At this instant tasted probably of a sensation more complex
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity. It
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: was as if it would have shamed him that a
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: character so associated with his own should triumphantly succeed in
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: just skulking, should to the end not risk the open,
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: so that the drop of this danger was, on the
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 1: spot a great lift of the whole situation. Yet with
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: another shift of the same subtlety, he was already trying
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: to measure by how much more he himself might now
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: be in peril of fear, so rejoicing that he could
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 1: in another form actively inspire that fear, and simultaneously quaking
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: for the form in which he might passibly know it.
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: The apprehension of knowing it must after a while have
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: grown in him, And the strangest moment of his adventure,
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: perhaps the memorable, or really most interesting afterwards of his crisis,
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: was the lapse of certain instants of concentrated conscious combat,
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: the sense of a need to hold on to something,
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: even after the manner of a man slipping and slipping
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: on some awful incline, The vivid impulse above all to move,
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: to act, to change somehow and upon something, to show
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 1: himself in a word that he wasn't afraid. The state
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: of holding on was thus the state to which he
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: was momentarily reduced. If there had been anything in the
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: great vacancy to seize, he would presently have been aware
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: of having clutched it, as he might, under a shock
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: at home, have clutched the nearest chair back. He had
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: been surprised at any rate of this. He was aware
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: into something unprecedented since his original appropriation of the place.
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: He had closed his eyes held them tight for a
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: long minute, as with that instinct of dismay and that
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: terror of vision. When he opened them, the room, the
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: other contiguous rooms extraordinarily seemed lighter, so light almost that
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: at first he took the change for dead. He stood firm. However,
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: that might be just where he had paused. His resistance
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: had helped him. It was as if there was something
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: he had tied it over. He knew after a little
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: what this was. It had been in the imminent danger
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: of flight he had stiffened his will against going. Without this,
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: he would have made for the stairs, And it seemed
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: to him that still with his eyes closed, he would
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: have descended them, would have known how straight and swiftly
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: to the bottom. Well as he had held out here,
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: he was still at the top among the more intricate
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: upper rooms, and with the gauntlet of the others, of
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: all the rest of the house still to run. When
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: it should be his time to go, he would go
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: at his time. Only at his time, didn't he go
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: every night very much at the same hour. He took
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: out his watch. There was light for that. It was
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: scarcely a quarter past one, and he had never withdrawn
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: so soon. He reached his lodgings for the most part
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: of two with his walk of a quarter of an hour.
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: He would wait for the last quarter. He wouldn't stir
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: till them, And he kept his watch there with his
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 1: eyes on it, reflecting while he held it that this
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: deliberate weight, a weight with an effort which he recognized,
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: would serve perfectly for the attestation he desired to make.
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: It would prove his courage, unless indeed the latter might
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: most be proved by his budging at last from his place.
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 1: What he mainly felt now or was that, since he
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 1: hadn't originally scuttled, he had his dignities, which had never
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: in his life seemed so many, all to preserve and
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: to carry aloft. This was before him, in truth as
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: a physical image, an image almost worthy of an age
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: of greater romance. That remark, indeed glimmered for him, only
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: to glow the next instant with a finer light. Since
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: what age of romance, after all, could have matched either
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: the state of his mind, or, objectively, as they said,
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: the wonder of his situation, The only difference would have
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: been that, brandishing his dignities over his head, as in
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: a parchment scroll, he might, then, that is, in the
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: heroic time, have proceeded downstairs with a drawn sword in
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: his other grasp. At present, really, the light he had
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: set down on the mantle of the next room would
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: have to figure his sword, which utensil. In the course
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: of a minute he had taken the requisite number of
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: steps to possess himself of the door between the rooms
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: was open, and from the second another door opened to
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: a third. These rooms, as he remembered, gave all three
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: upon a common corridor as well, but there was a
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: fourth beyond them without issue save through the preceding to
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: have moved. To have heard his step again was appreciably
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: a help, though even in recognizing this he lingered once
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: more a little by the chimney piece on which his
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: light addrested. When he next moved, just hesitating where to turn,
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: he found himself considering a circumstance up to his first
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 1: and comparatively vague apprehension of it produced in him the
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: start that often attends some pang of recollection, the violent
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: shock of having ceased happily to forget. He had come
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: into sight of the door in which the brief chain
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 1: of communication ended, and which he now surveyed from the
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: nearer threshold, the one not directly facing it, placed at
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: some distance to the left of this point, It would
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: have admitted him to the last room of the forg
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: the room without other approach or egress, had it not,
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: to his intimate conviction, been closed since his former visitation,
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: the matter probably of a quarter of an hour before
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: he stared with all his eyes at the wonder of
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: the fact arrested again where he stood, and again holding
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: his breath while he sounded his sense. Surely it had
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 1: been subsequently closed, that is, it had been on his
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 1: previous passage, indubitably open. He took it full in the
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: face that something had happened between that he couldn't have
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: noticed before, by which he meant, on his original tour
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: of all the rooms that evening, that such a barrier
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: had exceptionally presented itself. He had, indeed, since that moment
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: undergone an agitation so extraordinary that it might have muddled
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 1: for him any earlier view. And he tried to convince
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: himself that he might perhaps then have gone into the
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: room and inadvertently, automatically, on coming out, have drawn the
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 1: door after him. The difficulty was that this exactly was
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: what he never did. It was against his whole policy,
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: as he might have said, the essence of which was
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: to keep vistas cleared. He had them from the first,
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: as he was well aware, quite on the brain, the
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 1: strange apparition at the far end of one of them,
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: of his baffled prey, which had become by so sharp
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: an irony, so little. The term now to apply was
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: the form of success his imagination had most cherished, projecting
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: into it always a refinement of beauty. He had known
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: fifty times the start of perception that had afterwards dropped
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 1: un fifty times gasped to himself there under some fond,
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: brief hallucination, the house, as the case stood, admirably lent itself.
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: He might wonder at the taste the native architecture of
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: the particular time, which could rejoice so in the multiplication
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: of doors, the opposite extreme to the modern, the actual
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: almost complete prescription of them. But it had fairly contributed
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: to provoke this obsession of the presence, and countered telescopically,
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: as he might say, focused and studied in diminishing perspective,
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: and as by arrest for the elbow. It was with
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: these considerations that his present attention was charged. They perfectly
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: to make what he saw a portentous He couldn't, by
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: any lapse, have blocked that aperture. And if he hadn't,
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: if it was unthinkable, why what else was clear but
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: that there had been another agent, another agent he had
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: been catching as he felt a moment back the very
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: breath of him. But when had he been so close
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: as in this simple this logical, this completely personal act.
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 1: It was so logical, that is, that one might have
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: taken it for personal. Yet for what did Brighton take it?
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: He asked himself. While softly panting, He felt his eyes
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: almost leave their sockets. Ah. This time, at last they
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: were the too, the opposed projections of him in presence.
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: And this time, as much as one would, the question
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: of danger aloof with it rose, as not before, the
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: question of courage. For what he knew the blank face
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: of the door to say to him was show us
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 1: how much you have it stared? It glared back at him.
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: With that challenge, it put to him the two alternatives,
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: Should he just push it open or not? Oh? To
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: have this consciousness was to think, and to think, Brandon
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 1: knew as he stood there was, with elapsing moments, not
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: to have acted. Not to have acted, that was the misery,
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: and the pang was even still not to act, was
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: in fact all to feel the thing in another in
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: a new and terrible way. How long did he pause
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: and how long did he debate? There was presently nothing
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: to measure it, for his vibration had already changed, as
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 1: just by the effect of its intensity. Shut up there
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 1: at big, defiant, and with the prodigy of the thing
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: palpably provably dumb, thus giving notice, like some stark signboard.
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: Under that accession of accent, the situation itself had turned
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: and brightened at last remarkably made up his mind on
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: what it had turned to. It had turned altogether to
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: a different admonition, to a supreme hint for him of
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: the value of discretion. This slowly dawned no doubt, for
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: it could take its time so perfectly on his threshold
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 1: had he been stayed so little as yet, had he
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: either advanced or retreated. It was the strangest of all
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: things that, now, when by his taking ten steps and
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: applying his hand to alatch, or even his shoulder and
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: his knee, if necessary, to a panel, all the hunger
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 1: of his prime need might have been met. His high
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: curiosity crowned his unrest assuage. It was amazing, but it
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: was also exquisite and rare that insistence should have, at
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: a touch quite dropped from him discretion. He jumped at that,
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: and yet not verily at such a pitch because it
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: saved his nerves or his skin, but because much more valuably,
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: it saved the situation. When I say he jumped at it.
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: I feel the constants of this term, with the fact
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: that at the end, indeed of I know not how
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 1: long he did move again, he crossed straight to the door.
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: He wouldn't touch it, it seemed now that he might.
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: If he would, he would only just wait there, a
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: little to show to prove that he wouldn't hered. Thus
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 1: another station close to the thin partition by which revelation
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: was denied him. But with his eyes bent and his
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 1: hands held off, in a mere intensity of stillness, he
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: listened as if there had been something to hear. But
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: this attitude, while it lasted, was his own communication. If
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 1: you won't, then good, I spare you, and I give up.
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: You affect me as by the appeal positively pity. You
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 1: convinced me that, for reasons rigid and sublime, what do
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: I know, we both of us should have suffered. I
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: respect them, then, and though moved and privileged, as I
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: believe it has never been given to man, I retire.
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: I renounce never on my honor to try again. So
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 1: rest forever and let me that for Brighton was the
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: deep sense of this last demonstration, solemn, measured, directed as
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: he felt it to be he brought it to a close.
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: He turned away, and now verily he knew how deeply
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: he had been stirred. He retraced his steps, taking up
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 1: his candle burnt, he observed well nigh to the socket,
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: and marking again, lighten it as he would, the distinctness
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 1: of his footfall, after which in a moment he knew
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: himself at the other side of the house. He did
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 1: hear it what he had not yet done at these hours.
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: He opened half a casement, one of those in the front,
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 1: and let in the air at the night, a thing
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: he would have taken at any time previous, for a
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 1: sharp rupture of his spell. His spell was broken now,
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 1: and it didn't matter, broken by his concession and his surrendered,
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: which made it idle henceforth that he should ever come back.
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 1: The empty street, its other life, so marked even by
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 1: great lamp lit vacancy, was within call, with in touch.
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: He stayed there as to be in it again, high
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 1: above it, though he were still perched, he watched as
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: for some comforting common fact, some vulgar human note, the
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: passage of a scavenger or a thief, some night bird.
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: However base, he would have blessed that sign of life,
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: he would have welcomed positively the slow approach of his friend,
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: the policeman, whom he had hitherto only sought to avoid,
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: and was not sure that if the patrol had come
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: into sight, he mightn't have felt the impulse to get
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 1: into relation with it, to hail it on some pretext
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: from his fourth floor, the pretext that wouldn't have been
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: too silly or too compromising. The explanation that would have
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 1: saved his dignity and kept his name in such a
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 1: case out of the papers was not definite to him.
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: He was so occupied with the thought of recording his
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: discretion as an effect of the vow he had just
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: uttered to his intimate adversary that the importance of this
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 1: loomed large, and something had overtaken all, ironically his sense
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: of proportion. If there had been a ladder applied to
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 1: the front of the house, even one of the buttigenous
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: perpendiculars employed by painters and roofers and sometimes left standing
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: over night, he would have managed somehow astride of the
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: window sill to compass by outstretched leg and arm that
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 1: mode of dissent. If there had been some such uncanny
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: thing as he had found in his room at hotels
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: a workable fire escape in the form of notched cable
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 1: or a canvas shoot, he would have availed himself of
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: it as a proof well of his present delicacy. He
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 1: nursed that sentiment, as the question stood a little in vain,
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 1: and even at the end of he scarce knew once
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: more how long found that as by the action on
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: his mind of the failure of response of the outer world.
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: Sinking back to vague anguish, it seemed to him he
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: had waited an age for some stir of the great
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: grim hush. The life of the town was itself under
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: a spell, so unnaturally up and down the whole prospect
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 1: of known and rather ugly objects, the blankness and the
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 1: silence lasted. Had they ever, he asked himself, the hard
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: faced houses which had begun to look livid in the
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 1: dim dawn, had they ever sp oken so little to
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: any need of his spirit? Great builded voids, great crowded stillnesses,
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 1: put on often in the heart of cities for the
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 1: small hours, a sort of sinister mass. And it was
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 1: of this large collective negation that Brydon presently became conscious.
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 1: All the more that the break of day was almost
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 1: incredibly now at hand, proving to him what a night
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: he had made of it. He looked again at his watch,
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: saw what had become of his time values. He had
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 1: taken hours for minutes, not as in other tense situations,
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: minutes for hours. And the strange air of the streets
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: was but the weak the sullen flush of a dawn
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: in which ever a thing was still locked up. His
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 1: choked appear from his own open window had been the
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: sole note of life, and he could but break off
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: at last, as for a worse despair. Yet, while so
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: deeply demoralized as he was capable again of an impulse
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: denoting at least by his present measure, extraordinary resolution, of
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 1: retracing his steps to the spot where he had turned cold,
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 1: with the extinction of his last pulse of doubt as
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: to their being in the place another presence than his own.
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: This required an effort strong enough to sicken him, But
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 1: he had his reason, which overmastered for the moment everything else.
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 1: There was the whole of the rest of the house
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 1: to traverse, And how should he screw himself to that
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: If the door he had seen closed were at present open,
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 1: he could hold to the idea that the closing had
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 1: practically been for him an act of mercy, a chance
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 1: offered him to descend, depart, get up the ground, and
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 1: never again profie it. This conception held together, it worked,
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: but what it meant for him depended now clearly on
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 1: the amount of forbearance. His recent action, or rather his
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 1: recent inaction, had engendered the image of the presence whatever
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: it was waiting there for him to go. This image
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 1: had not yet been so concrete by his nerves as
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: when he stopped short of the point at which certainty
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: would have come to him. For with all his resolution,
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 1: or more exactly, with all his dread, he did stop short.
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 1: He hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great,
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: and his fear too deafinite. It took at this moment
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 1: an awful specific form. He knew, yes, as he had
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: never known anything, that should he see the door open,
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 1: it would all to abjectly be the end of him.
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 1: It would mean that the agent of his shame, for
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: his shame was the deep abjection, was once more at
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 1: large and in general possession. And what glared him thus
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 1: in the face was the act that this would determine
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 1: for him. It would send him straight about to the
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 1: window he had left open, and by that window be
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 1: long gladder and dangling rope as absent as they would.
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: He saw himself uncontrollably, insanely, fatally take his way to
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: the street. The hideous chance of this he at least
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 1: could avert. But he could only avert it by recoiling
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: in time from assurance. The whole house to deal with
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 1: this fact was still there. Only he now knew that
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: uncertainty alone could start him. He stole back from where
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: he had checked himself, merely to do so was suddenly
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: like safety, and making blindly for the greater staircase, left
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 1: gaping rooms and sounding passages behind. Here was the top
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: of the stairs, with a fine, large, dim descent, and
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 1: three spacious landings to mark off. His instinct was awe
• 1:37:36
  Speaker 1: for mildness, but his feet were harsh on the floors,
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 1: and strangely, when he had, in a couple of minutes
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 1: become aware of this, it counted somehow for help. He
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 1: couldn't have spoken. The tone of his voice would have
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 1: scared him, and the common conceit or resource of whistling
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 1: in the dark, whether literally or figuratively, have appeared basely vulgar,
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 1: yet he liked none the less to hear himself go.
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: And when he had reached his first landing, taking it
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 1: all with no rush but quite steadily, that stage of
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: success drew from him a gasp of relief. The house
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 1: withal seemed immense, the scale of space again inordinate, The
• 1:38:29
  Speaker 1: open rooms to know, one of which his eyes deflected,
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: gloomed in their shuttered state, like mouths of caverns. Only
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: the high skylight that formed the crown of the deep
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 1: well created for him a medium in which he could advance,
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 1: but which might have been for queerness of color, some
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 1: watery underworld. He tried to think of something noble, as
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 1: that his property was really grand and a splendid possession.
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 1: But this nobleness took the form too, of the clear
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 1: delight with which he was finally to sacrifice it. They
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: might come in now, the builders, the destroyers. They might
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 1: come as soon as they would. At the end of
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: two flights, he had dropped to another zone, and from
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: the middle of the third, with only one more left,
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 1: he recognized the influence of the lower windows, of half
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 1: drawn blinds, of the occasional gleam of street lamps, of
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 1: the glazed spaces of the vestibule. This was the bottom
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 1: of the seat, which showed an illumination of its own,
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 1: and which he even saw paved, when at a given
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: moment he drew up to sink a long look over
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: the banisters with the marble squares of his childhood. By
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 1: that time, indubitably he felt, as he might have said,
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 1: in a commoner cause better. It had allowed him to
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 1: stop and draw breath, and the case increased with the
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 1: sight of the old black and white slabs. But what
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 1: he most felt was that now, surely, with the element
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 1: of impunity pulling him as by hard firm hands, the
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 1: case was subtled. For what he might have seen above
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 1: had he dared that last look. The closed door, blessedly remote,
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: now was still closed, and he had only in short
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: to reach that of the house. He came down further,
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 1: he crossed the passage forming the access to the last flight,
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 1: And if here again he stopped an instant, it was
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 1: almost for the sharpness of the thrill of a sured escape.
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 1: It made him shut his eyes, which opened again to
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 1: the straight slope of the remainder of the stairs. Here
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 1: was impunity still, but impunity almost excessive inasmuch as the
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 1: side lights and the high fan tracery of the entrance
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: were glimmering straight into the hall, an appearance produced. He
• 1:41:25
  Speaker 1: the next instant sought by the fact that the vestibule
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 1: gaped wide, that the hinged harbs of the inner door
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 1: had been thrown far back out of that Again, the
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 1: question sprang at him, making his eyes as he felt
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: half start from his head, as they had done at
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 1: the top of the house before the sign of the
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 1: other door. If he had left that one open, hadn't
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 1: he let this one closed? And wasn't he now in
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 1: most immediate presence of some inconceivable occult activity. It was
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 1: as sharp the question as a knife in his side,
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: But the answer hung fire still and seemed to lose
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 1: itself in the vague darkness to which the thin admitted dawn,
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 1: glimmering archwise over the whole outer door, made a semi
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 1: circular margin, a cold, silvery nimbus that seemed to play
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 1: a little as he looked to ship and expand and contract.
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 1: It was as if there had been something within it,
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 1: protected by indistinctness and corresponding in extent with the opaque
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 1: surface behind the painted panels of the last barrier to
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: his escape, of which the key was in his pocket.
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 1: The indistinctness mocked him even while he's dead, affected him
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 1: a summer shrouding or challenging certitude, so that after faltering
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 1: an instant on his step, he let himself go with
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 1: the sense that here was at last something to meet,
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: to touch, to take, to know something or unnatural and dreadful,
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 1: but to advance upon, which was the condition for him,
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 1: either of liberation or a supreme defeat. The per number
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 1: of dense and dark was the virtual screen of a
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 1: figure which stood in it as still a some image
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 1: erect in the niche, or some black visored sentinel guarding
• 1:43:53
  Speaker 1: a treasure. Brydon was to know afterwards was to recall
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 1: and make out the particular thing he had believed during
• 1:44:05
  Speaker 1: the rest of his descent. He saw in its great gray,
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 1: glimmering margin, the central vagueness diminish, and he felt that
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 1: to be taking the very form toward which for so
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 1: many days the passion of his curiosity had yearned. It gloomed,
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 1: It loomed. It was something. It was somebody, the prodigy
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 1: of a personal presence, rigid, unconscious, spectral yet human, a
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 1: man of his own substance and stature, waited there to
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 1: measure himself with his power to dismay this only. Could
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 1: it be this only till he recognized with his advance
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: that what made the face dim was the pair of
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: raised hands that covered it, and in which, so far
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 1: from being offered in defiance, it was buried. As for
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 1: dark deprecation so brightened before him took him in with
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 1: every effect of him now in the higher light, hard
• 1:45:17
  Speaker 1: and acute, his planted stillness, his vivid truth, his grizzled
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 1: bent head and white masking hands, his queer actuality, of
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 1: evening dress, of dangling double eye, glass, of gleaming silk
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 1: lappet and white linen, of pearl button and gold watch guard,
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 1: and polished shoes. No portrait by a great mudern master
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: could have presented him with more intensity, thrust him out
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: of his frame with more art, as if there had
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 1: been treatment of the consummate sort in his every shade
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 1: and salience. The revulsion for our friend had become before
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 1: he knew it, immense, this drop in the act of
• 1:46:08
  Speaker 1: apprehension to the sense of his Adversari's inscrutable maneuver that
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 1: meaning at least while he gaped it offered him, for
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 1: he could but gape at his other self in this
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 1: other anguish gape as a proof that he standing there
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 1: for the achieved, the enjoyed, the triumphant life. Couldn't be
• 1:46:35
  Speaker 1: faced in his triumph? Wasn't the proof in the splendid
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 1: covering hands strung and completely spread, so spread and so
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 1: intentional that, in spite of a special verted that surpassed
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: every other, the fact that one of these hands had
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 1: lost two fingers, which were reduced to stumps, as if
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: accidentally shut away, the face was effectually guarded and saved. Saved,
• 1:47:10
  Speaker 1: though would it be. Bridon breathed his wonder till the
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: very impunity of his attitude and the very incestence of
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 1: his eyes produced as he felt a sudden stir which
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: showed the next instant as a deep important while the
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 1: head raised itself the betrayal of a braver purpose. The hands,
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 1: as he looked, began to move to open. Then, as
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 1: if deciding in a flash, dropped from the face and
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 1: left it uncovered and presented. Horror with the sight had
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 1: leaped into Bridon's throat, Gasping there in a sound, he
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 1: couldn't utter, for the bad identity was too hideous as his,
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 1: and he glad was the passion of his protest. The face,
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 1: that face, Spencer Brighton's. He searched it, still, but looking
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 1: away from it in dismay and denial. Falling straight from
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 1: his height of sublimity, It was unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 1: from any possibility. He had been sold. He inwardly moaned
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 1: stalking such game as this. The presence before him was
• 1:48:36
  Speaker 1: a presence, the horror within him a horror. But the
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 1: waste of his nights had been only grotesque, and the
• 1:48:44
  Speaker 1: success of his adventure and irony. Such an identity fitted
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 1: his at no point made its alternative monstrous A thousand times. Yes,
• 1:48:56
  Speaker 1: as it came upon him nearer now, the face was
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 1: the face of a stranger. It came upon him nearer now,
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 1: quite as one of those expanding fantastic images projected by
• 1:49:09
  Speaker 1: the magic lantern of childhood. For the stranger, whoever he
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 1: might be, evil, odious, blatant, Bulgat, had advanced as for aggression,
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 1: and he knew himself give grand then harder pressed, still
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 1: sick with the force of his shock, and falling back
• 1:49:29
  Speaker 1: as under the hot breath, and the roused passion of
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 1: a light larger than his own, a rage of personality
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 1: before which his own collapsed. He felt the whole vision
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 1: turned to darkness, and his very feet give way. His
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: head went round. He was going. He had gone. End
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 1: of chapter two, Chapter three of The Jolly Corner by
• 1:50:07
  Speaker 1: Henry James. This Deeper Box recording is in the public domain.
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 1: Recording by Tony Addison, Chapter three. What had next brought
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 1: him back clearly, though, after her long was Missus Muldoon's
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 1: voice coming to him from quite near, from so near
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 1: that he seemed presently to see her as kneeling on
• 1:50:36
  Speaker 1: the ground before him, while he lay looking up at
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 1: her himself, not wholly on the ground, but half raised
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 1: and upheld, conscious yes of tenderness, of support, and more
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 1: particularly of a head pillowed in extraordinary softness and faintly refreshing,
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 1: fragrant he considered, he wondered his wit, but half at
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 1: his service. Then another face intervened, bending more directly over him,
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 1: and he finally knew that Alice Staburton had made her
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 1: lap an ample and perfect cushion to him, and that
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 1: she had, to this end seated herself on the lowest
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 1: degree of the staircase, the rest of his long person
• 1:51:32
  Speaker 1: remaining stretched on his old black and white slabs. They
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 1: were cold, these marble squares of his youth. But he
• 1:51:45
  Speaker 1: somehow was not, in this rich return of consciousness the
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 1: most wonderful hour, little by little that he had ever known,
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 1: leaving him as it did, so gratefully passive, and yet
• 1:52:02
  Speaker 1: as with a treasure of intelligence waiting all around him,
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 1: for quiet appropriation dissolved, he might call it, in the
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: air of the place, and producing the golden glow of
• 1:52:16
  Speaker 1: a late autumn afternoon. He had come back, yes, come
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 1: back from further away than any man but himself had
• 1:52:27
  Speaker 1: ever traveled. But it was strange, how, with this sense
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 1: what he had come back too seemed really the great thing,
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 1: and as if his prodigious journey had been all for
• 1:52:41
  Speaker 1: the sake of it. Slowly but surely his consciousness grew
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 1: his vision of his state, thus completing itself. He had
• 1:52:53
  Speaker 1: been miraculously carried back, lifted and carefully borne, as from
• 1:53:00
  Speaker 1: where he had been picked up the uttermost end of
• 1:53:04
  Speaker 1: an interminable great passage. Even with this he was suffered
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 1: to rest, and what had now brought him to knowledge
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 1: was the break in the long, mild motion. It had
• 1:53:19
  Speaker 1: brought him to knowledge, to knowledge. Yes, this was the
• 1:53:24
  Speaker 1: beauty of his state, which came to resemble more and
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 1: more that of a man who has gone to sleep
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 1: on some news of a great inheritance, and then, after
• 1:53:35
  Speaker 1: dreaming it away, after profaning it with matters strange to it,
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 1: has waked up again to a serenity of certitude, and
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 1: do only to lie and watch it grow. This was
• 1:53:50
  Speaker 1: the drift of his patients, that he had only to
• 1:53:54
  Speaker 1: let it shine on him. He must, moreover, with intermissions,
• 1:54:00
  Speaker 1: still have been lifted and born. Since why and how
• 1:54:05
  Speaker 1: else should he have known himself? Later on, with the
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 1: afternoon glow, Intenser no longer at the foot of his stairs,
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 1: situated as these now seemed, at that dark other end
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 1: of his tunnel, but on a deep window bench of
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 1: his eye saloon, over which had been spread couch fashion
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 1: a mantle of soft stuff lined with gray fur that
• 1:54:35
  Speaker 1: was familiar to his eyes, and that one of his
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 1: hands kept fondly feeling as for its pledge of truth.
• 1:54:45
  Speaker 1: Missus Mulgoon's face had gone, but the other, the second
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: he had recognized, hung over him in a way that
• 1:54:55
  Speaker 1: showed how he was still propped and pillowed. He took
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 1: it all in, and the more he took it, the
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 1: more it seemed to Suffice. He was as much at
• 1:55:07
  Speaker 1: peace as if he had had food and drink. It
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 1: was the two women who had found him, on missus Muldoon's,
• 1:55:18
  Speaker 1: having plied at a usual hour her latch key, and
• 1:55:23
  Speaker 1: on her having above all arrived while Miss Stabaton still
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 1: lingered near the house. She had been turning away all
• 1:55:33
  Speaker 1: anxiety from worrying the vain bell handle, her calculation having
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 1: been of the hour of the good woman's visit. But
• 1:55:43
  Speaker 1: the latter, blessedly had come up while she was still there,
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 1: and they had entered together. He had then lain beyond
• 1:55:53
  Speaker 1: the vestibule, very much as he was lying now, quite
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 1: that is, as he appeared to have fallen, but all
• 1:56:03
  Speaker 1: so wondrously with that bruise or gash. Only in the
• 1:56:07
  Speaker 1: depth of stupor. What he most took in. However, at present,
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 1: with the steadier clearance, was that Alice Stabberton had, for
• 1:56:18
  Speaker 1: a long unspeakable moment not doubted he was dead. It
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 1: must have been that I was. He made it out
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: as she held him. Yes, I can only have died.
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 1: You brought me literally to life, only, he wondered, his
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 1: eyes rising to her, only in the name of all
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 1: the benedictions. Oh, it took her but an instant to
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 1: bend her face and kiss him. And something in the
• 1:56:53
  Speaker 1: manner of it, and in the way her hands clasped
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 1: unlocked his head, while he felt the cool, charity and
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 1: virtue of her lips. Something in all this beatitude somehow
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 1: answered everything. And now I keep you, she said, Oh,
• 1:57:14
  Speaker 1: keep me, keep me, he pleaded, while her face still
• 1:57:20
  Speaker 1: hung over him, in response to which it dropped again
• 1:57:24
  Speaker 1: and stayed close, clingingly close. It was the seal of
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 1: their situation, of which he tasted the Impress for a long,
• 1:57:34
  Speaker 1: blissful moment in silence. But he came back. Yet, how
• 1:57:38
  Speaker 1: did you know? I was uneasy? You were to have come,
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 1: you remember, and you had sent no word. Yes, I remember,
• 1:57:47
  Speaker 1: I was to have gone to you at one today.
• 1:57:51
  Speaker 1: It caught on to their old life and relation, which
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 1: was so near and so far. I was still out
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 1: there in my range darkness. Where was it? What was it?
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 1: I must have stayed there so long? He could but
• 1:58:07
  Speaker 1: wonder at the depth and the duration of his swoon,
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 1: since last night, she asked, with a shade of fear
• 1:58:16
  Speaker 1: for her possible indiscretion. Since this morning, it must have
• 1:58:20
  Speaker 1: been the cold, dim dawn of to day. Where have
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 1: I been? He vaguely wailed, Where have I been? He
• 1:58:29
  Speaker 1: felt to hold him close, and it was as if
• 1:58:32
  Speaker 1: this helped him now to make in all security his
• 1:58:37
  Speaker 1: mild moan, what a long dark day? Or in her
• 1:58:43
  Speaker 1: tenderness she had waited a moment in the cold dim dawn,
• 1:58:50
  Speaker 1: she quavered, but he had already gone on piecing together
• 1:58:55
  Speaker 1: the parts of the whole prodigy. As I didn't turn up,
• 1:58:59
  Speaker 1: you came straight, she barely cast about. I went first
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 1: to your hotel. There they told me of your absence.
• 1:59:09
  Speaker 1: You had dined out last evening and hadn't been back since.
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 1: But they appeared to know you had been at your club.
• 1:59:16
  Speaker 1: So you had the idea of this, of what, she
• 1:59:20
  Speaker 1: asked in a moment, well, of what has happened? I
• 1:59:26
  Speaker 1: believed at least you'd have been here. I've known all along,
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 1: she said, that you've been coming. Known it well. I
• 1:59:37
  Speaker 1: believed it. I said nothing to you after that talk
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 1: we had a month ago, but I felt sure I
• 1:59:43
  Speaker 1: knew you would. She declared that i'd persist. You mean
• 1:59:49
  Speaker 1: that you'd see him? Ah, but I didn't, cried brighton
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 1: with his long wail. There's somebody, an af full beast
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 1: whom I brought too horribly to beg But it's not
• 2:00:05
  Speaker 1: me at this. She bent over him again, and her
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 1: eyes were in his eyes. No, it's not you, And
• 2:00:15
  Speaker 1: it was as if while her face hovered, he might
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 1: have made out in it. Hadn't it been so near
• 2:00:23
  Speaker 1: some particular meaning blurred by a smile. No, thank Heaven,
• 2:00:28
  Speaker 1: she repeated, it's not you. Of course it wasn't to
• 2:00:33
  Speaker 1: have been. Ah, but it was, he gently insisted, and
• 2:00:39
  Speaker 1: he stared before him now, as he had been staring
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: for so many weeks. I was to have known myself,
• 2:00:48
  Speaker 1: you couldn't, she returned, consolingly, and then reverting and as
• 2:00:55
  Speaker 1: if to account further for what she had herself done.
• 2:00:59
  Speaker 1: But it wasn't only that that you hadn't been at home,
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 1: she went on. I waited till the hour at which
• 2:01:08
  Speaker 1: we had found missus Muldoon that day of my going
• 2:01:12
  Speaker 1: with you, and she arrived, as I told you, while
• 2:01:16
  Speaker 1: failing to bring anyone to the door, I lingered in
• 2:01:20
  Speaker 1: my despair on the steps after a little If she
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 1: hadn't come by such a mercy, I should have found
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 1: means to hunt her up. But it wasn't, said Alice Stabberton,
• 2:01:33
  Speaker 1: as if once more with her fine intentions. It wasn't
• 2:01:37
  Speaker 1: only that his eyes as he lay turned back to her.
• 2:01:43
  Speaker 1: What more, then she met it the wonder she had
• 2:01:48
  Speaker 1: stirred in the cold dim dawn. You said, Well, in
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 1: the cold dim dawn of this morning, I too saw you,
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 1: saw me saw him, said Alice Stabberton. It must have
• 2:02:05
  Speaker 1: been at the same moment he lay an instant taking
• 2:02:10
  Speaker 1: it in as if he wished to be quite reasonable.
• 2:02:14
  Speaker 1: At the same moment. Yes, in my dream again, the
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 1: same one I've named to you. He came back to me.
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 1: Then I knew it for a sign he had come
• 2:02:25
  Speaker 1: to you. At this, Brydon raised himself. He had to
• 2:02:30
  Speaker 1: see her better. She helped him when she understood his movement,
• 2:02:35
  Speaker 1: and he sat up, steadying himself beside her there on
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 1: the window bench, and with his right hand grasping her left.
• 2:02:44
  Speaker 1: He didn't come to me, You came to yourself, she
• 2:02:50
  Speaker 1: beautifully smiled. Ah, I come to myself now, thanks to you, dearest.
• 2:02:57
  Speaker 1: But this brute with his awful face. This brute's a
• 2:03:01
  Speaker 1: black stranger. He's none of me, even as I might
• 2:03:04
  Speaker 1: have been, Brydon sturdily declared. But she kept the clearness
• 2:03:10
  Speaker 1: that was like the breath of infallibility. Isn't the whole
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 1: point that you'd have been different? He almost scowled, for
• 2:03:20
  Speaker 1: it as different as that. Her look again was more
• 2:03:25
  Speaker 1: beautiful to him than the things of this world. Haven't
• 2:03:30
  Speaker 1: you exactly wanted to know? How different? So this morning,
• 2:03:35
  Speaker 1: she said, you appeared to me like him, a black stranger.
• 2:03:42
  Speaker 1: Then how did you know it was? I? Because, as
• 2:03:46
  Speaker 1: I told you weeks ago, my mind, my imagination has
• 2:03:51
  Speaker 1: worked so over what you might what you mightn't have been,
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 1: to show you. You see how I thought of you
• 2:03:59
  Speaker 1: in the midst that you came to me that my
• 2:04:02
  Speaker 1: wonder might be answered. So I knew she went on
• 2:04:05
  Speaker 1: and believed that since the question held you too so fast,
• 2:04:09
  Speaker 1: as you told me that day, you too would see
• 2:04:12
  Speaker 1: for yourself. And when this morning I again saw, I
• 2:04:16
  Speaker 1: knew it would be because you had And also then
• 2:04:20
  Speaker 1: from the first moment, because you somehow wanted me he
• 2:04:24
  Speaker 1: seemed to tell me of that. So why she strangely smiled.
• 2:04:30
  Speaker 1: Shouldn't I like him? It brought Spencer Brdon to his feet?
• 2:04:36
  Speaker 1: You like that horror? I could have liked him? And
• 2:04:41
  Speaker 1: to me, she said, he was no horror. I had
• 2:04:45
  Speaker 1: accepted him, accept it, Brydon oddly sounded before for the
• 2:04:53
  Speaker 1: interest of his difference. Yes, and as I didn't disown him,
• 2:04:59
  Speaker 1: as I knew, which you at last confronted with him
• 2:05:04
  Speaker 1: in his difference so cruelly didn't my dear Well, he
• 2:05:10
  Speaker 1: must have been, you see less dreadful to me, and
• 2:05:14
  Speaker 1: it may have pleased him that I pitied him. She
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 1: was beside him, on her feet, but still holding his hand,
• 2:05:24
  Speaker 1: still with her arms supporting him. But though it all
• 2:05:28
  Speaker 1: brought for him thus a dim light, you pitied him,
• 2:05:33
  Speaker 1: he grudgingly, resentfully asked. He has been unhappy, He has
• 2:05:39
  Speaker 1: been ravage, she said, And haven't I been unhappy? Am not? I?
• 2:05:46
  Speaker 1: You only to look at me ravage. Ah. I don't
• 2:05:51
  Speaker 1: say I like him better, she granted, after a thought.
• 2:05:56
  Speaker 1: But he's grim, he's warm, and things of happened to him.
• 2:06:01
  Speaker 1: He doesn't make shift for sight with your charming monocle. No,
• 2:06:08
  Speaker 1: it struck Brighton, I couldn't have sported mine downtown. They'd
• 2:06:14
  Speaker 1: have guide me there, his great convex ponce nay I
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 1: saw it. I recognize the kind is for his poor
• 2:06:23
  Speaker 1: ruined sight and his poor right hand, Ah Brighton went
• 2:06:29
  Speaker 1: weather Be's proved identity, or for his lost fingers. Then
• 2:06:35
  Speaker 1: he has a million a year, he lucidly added. But
• 2:06:39
  Speaker 1: he hasn't you, And he isn't No, he isn't you,
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 1: she murmured as he drew her to his breast. And
• 2:06:52
  Speaker 1: of Chapter three and of The Jolly Corner by Henry James. Yes,