Transcribed from the 1918 Martin Secker edition , emailccx074@coventry.ac.uk
THE JOLLY CORNER
by Henry James
CHAPTER I
“Every one asks me what I ‘think’ of everything,”said Spencer Brydon; “and I make answer as I can—beggingor dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense. Itwouldn’t matter to any of them really,” he went on, “for,even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver way so sillya demand on so big a subject, my ‘thoughts’ would stillbe almost altogether about something that concerns only myself.” He was talking to Miss Staverton, with whom for a couple of months nowhe had availed himself of every possible occasion to talk; this dispositionand this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in factpresented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in theconsiderable array of rather unattenuated surprises attending his sostrangely belated return to America. Everything was somehow asurprise; and that might be natural when one had so long and so consistentlyneglected everything, taken pains to give surprises so much margin forplay. He had given them more than thirty years—thirty-three,to be exact; and they now seemed to him to have organised their performancequite on the scale of that licence. He had been twenty-three onleaving New York—he was fifty-six to-day; unless indeed he wereto reckon as he had sometimes, since his repatriation, found himselffeeling; in which case he would have lived longer than is often allottedto man. It would have taken a century, he repeatedly said to himself,and said also to Alice Staverton, it would have taken a longer absenceand a more averted mind than those even of which he had been guilty,to pile up the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above allthe bignesses, for the better or the worse, that at present assaultedhis vision wherever he looked.
The great fact all the while, however, had been the incalculability;since he had supposed himself, from decade to decade, to be allowing,and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change. He actually saw that he had allowed for nothing; he missed what he wouldhave been sure of finding, he found what he would never have imagined. Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected,the ugly things of his far-away youth, when he had too promptly wakedup to a sense of the ugly—these uncanny phenomena placed him rather,as it happened, under the charm; whereas the “swagger” things,the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly,like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every year, come over to see,were exactly his sources of dismay. They were as so many set trapsfor displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless treadwas constantly pressing the spring. It was interesting, doubtless,the whole show, but it would have been too disconcerting hadn’ta certain finer truth saved the situation. He had distinctly not,in this steadier light, come over all for the monstrosities;he had come, not only in the last analysis but quite on the face ofthe act, under an impulse with which they had nothing to do. Hehad come—putting the thing pompously—to look at his “property,”which he had thus for a third of a century not been within four thousandmiles of; or, expressing it less sordidly, he had yielded to the humourof seeing again his house on the jolly corner, as he usually, and quitefondly, described it—the one in which he had first seen the light,in which various members of his family had lived and had died, in whichthe holidays of his overschooled boyhood had been passed and the fewsocial flowers of his chilled adolescence gathered, and which, alienatedthen for so long a period, had, through the successive deaths of his