The Ball

The Ball by Dennis L. O'Connor, Georgetown University "I, on the contrary, am compelled to toss the ball so that it travels from wall to wall .... " here with a gesture he [Henry James] seemed to indicate that he was standing in a titanic fives-court, following with anxious eyes the ball he had just tossed against the waI I of life. . . "from waI I to waI I until at last, losing momentum with every new angle from which it rebounds, the ball returns to earth and dribbles slowly to my feet, when I arduously bend over, all my bones creaking, and with infinite difficulty manage to reach it and pick ¡t up." (Oompton Mackenzie conversation with Henry James, quoted In Simon Nowel l-Smith, The Legend of the Master !London: Constable, 19471, p. 115). That it alt came so suddenly, so precipitately, without a clue of announcement or introduction, that It all "came" at al 1 was, for Snether, from the very first (even before he had reached—for it was nothing less than that—the presentiment, the pitch of "heightened curiosity," as it was later to be called) something of a muddle in fine. It was simple enough, he supposed, at the time, a reflection ample In the psychologic glow of the past moment that flowed, as it were, like a current hurrying leaves, which, themselves directionless, remained so save to the attentive viewer who, upon presenting himself to the leaves in the situation "at hand," could, to quite some effect, watch. This, at first, was, to speak openly, enough. There had been, and surely that was, of itself, remarkable, no waiting at all or even to speak of. What had happened to Snether, and the occurrence had long since resolved Itself into that, beautiful and suggestive as it might still appear to him in the torpid dimness of a winter perambulation about the park, a practice and a mood not unusual for our friend who, all too recently bereft of the one, to him, dearest in this world, or so it might seem to the sympathetic viewer registering the sad figure in black, seen, as it could only be seen, from a distance, what had happened to Snether, what had so deucedIy, almost irretrievably, taken place, it now came back to him, was the confirmation Inward and Inexorable of her palpable absence. Snether had had the thought that he might take his only daughter, PrIIIa, who was, by that time, all but an orphan, for what she liked to term a "walk." The young girl had elected to run, after the fashion of those diminutive representatives of her sex, with such a total and, it might be added, excusable want of forethought, after a ball, which, upon nearing her, seemed to be approaching them in a manner not unrelated to the matter of this little incident. They were In the park, St. James's, when it happened. "Daddy," she began, in that voice that remi nded him of her to whom he owed her, Pr i I Ia, and all else that was formerly to him all that so splendidly. If fleetingly—and to this he could not help averting—, was. "Daddy," she continued, after hanging fire, her eyes bestowing a cooling sweetness upon him, waiting, as they knew they must, upon the moment for his now distant mind, tireless and sparsely adorned, to return. It was all dear PrMIa could so prodigiously do to avoid letting him know openly how decidedly clear it was, to her purpose, not to let him know the topography, so to speak, of his grief. For she quite understood it, understood it all with that dissembling briskness that allowed her to peep from within the cloister of her childish years (the fact that she was a child fairly bristled before her own budding consciousness with a limpid drollness scarcely to be Imagined) as though she herself were a Benedictine of the actual, robed in that contemplative vision whose blest value lay in the unceasing discrimination of further shades of pitying fineness. As If in answer, though hardly "an" answer since he had not heard her question, being all the while—perhaps...