Dictation (2 page)

She did not know what the two men talked about that long afternoon. As usual, she was shut out, though she thirsted to hear. There was a cat in the garden, and Borys was sufficiently amused through the hours of exile. If only Mr. James would come out to see how charming her little boy really was! But Mrs. Smith had been directed to carry half the tea things into the garden, where she set a table for Jessie and the child. Plainly, it was Conrad who had maneuvered this arrangement—or so Jessie believed. Her nostrils tightened: the woman did smell awfully of whiskey, and her faltering steps over the uneven ground made the tray of pastries wobble. One of them dropped to the grass nearby, luring the cat, who gave it a lick and left it alone. Soon a party of ants massed underfoot. But except for the ants, and after a time a squad of circling bees, it was pleasant in these secluded floral precincts (oh, that remarkable man's way of speaking!); she had taken along her sewing, and Borys was content to stalk the cat along the wall, or to draw its silky tail through his fingers. Mrs. Smith, in a second appearance, had inexplicably brought out the basket of plums. Jessie was alarmed, and felt it an insult to their host, when, looking up from her needle, she noticed that Borys had eaten every last one. He had also consumed four of the sticky tarts, and finally fell asleep in the late sun, with his head on the cat.

When they had thanked Mr. James, and Jessie had apologized for the disappeared plums, and they had said their goodbyes, and were halfway home in the trap, Jessie asked Conrad what had been the chief points of the conversation indoors.

"Books," said Conrad. And then: "That damnable racket, what on earth was ailing the boy?"

"It was only he was hungry," Jessie said. "But what was Mr. James telling you?"

"You oughtn't to have brought the fruit. He doesn't like them raw."

"Is
that
what the two of you talked about?"

"Only in passing. Books mostly."

"His own? Yours?"

"Everybody's, so make an end of it, Jess. And we won't be taking the boy again, that's clear."

The plums had been mentioned, yes, but only because of the tarts—Mrs. Smith, tipsy as she regrettably too often was in her kitchen, had despite this impediment a knack, James said, for the manufacture of fruit pastries, which doubtless accounted for the size of his butter bill. From the cost of dairy, they passed on to writerly gossip—H. G. Wells was in the general neighborhood, at Sandgate on the coast, and Stephen Crane, the brilliant young American, at Brede, a mere eight-mile bicycle run to Rye; and also Ford Madox Hueffer, at Winchelsea. In fact, Hueffer had turned up only yesterday, bringing Edmund Gosse. So many intimate connections! In this very season, with an eye to the market, Conrad and Hueffer were collaborating on a novel, hoping to win the popular libraries—a thing that bemused James, since their separate styles had little in common. This observation led naturally to a discussion of style, and whether it remains distinct from the writer's intrinsic personality. Conrad thought not. The novelist, he argued (while out of the blue a shooting pain was assaulting his knuckles), surely the novelist stands confessed in his works? On the other hand, James countered (but the hurt just then was in both the poor visitor's hands: that cursed gout flaring up when least desired!), the artist
multiplies
his confessions, thereby concealing his inmost self. The talk went back and forth in this way, the two labyrinthine minds locking and unlocking, and how, after all, was Conrad reasonably to recount it all to Jessie when she pressed him on it, as she was certain to do? James was free; there was no one to press him; yet Conrad was determined to press him now. As for style, he persisted, was there not an intervening influence, a contamination or a crippling, however you may tell it, when the roiling abyss, in whose bottommost bowel the secrets of language lie coiled, is thrown open to mundane elements?
Cher maître,
what of your Machine, your MacAlpines and Welds! Your sharers and intercessors!

It was past sundown when Conrad and Jessie reached their cramped old farmhouse—a property rented from Hueffer, and not far from Winchelsea, to facilitate the collaboration. After Borys had been put to bed, and Jessie had resumed her sewing, Conrad fell into his old complaint.

"It came on so, Jess, the pain in my hands, that I could hardly keep my wits. And worse in the right, as always."

"Oh my dear, and you haven't held a pen all day—"

"I had it from Mr. James that he has done well enough with his Remington these last years. I had rather thought it a vise, but he assures me that the whole of
The Ambassadors
was spoken aloud, and he believes it has enriched his tone—he feels his very breathing has gone into it. That glorious lavishness, dictated! And he finds Miss Weld decidedly a jewel. Jess, I have been too faint-hearted. Likely one can get one of these Remingtons at a fair price—Mr. James calculated for me the cost of his own. I'm confident we'll soon be able to afford it, especially if all goes right with Hueffer and the work."

Jessie let out a small snort. "The work," she said. "It appears to me it's you does most of it. It's not him that'll make your fortune. A man who won't keep his own name, and goes about calling himself Ford Ford, like a stutterer!"

"But you see," he held firm, "it's not to be just the cost of the Remington—"

"Of course I see. There's to be a Miss Weld. You want a jewel of your own." Her warming good humor came tumbling out in all its easy laughter. "Well, Mr. Conrad, this
will
be a revolution! And here you let me think the two of you were talking all afternoon about plums."

***

Winters in Lamb House, when few visitors came, was lonely for Henry James; too often an insidious depression set in. At times he felt defined by it. It was, he admitted—especially to himself—deeper than anything else in his character, deeper even than the subterranean windings of his art. An extraordinary avowal: in the country he kept it hidden under great gusts of hospitality. But London, whatever its flaws, had never been openly lonely, and the Reform Club, where he took up seasonal residence in spacious upper rooms, and could entertain guests at luncheon in the pillared splendors below, was the metropolis at its finest. His windows oversaw the rooftops and chimney pots of handsome embassies and lofty mansions. It was here that he shaved off his whitening beard, itself a reason for melancholy: he thought it made him look old. And it was here, on a rainy afternoon in January of 1910, that Miss Lilian Hallowes and Miss Theodora Bosanquet almost did not meet.

Conrad and his wife had come to London to consult a surgeon. Jessie was suffering from the effects of her last knee operation (there had already been several), and would need yet another—some years earlier, she had fallen on the pavement during a shopping excursion, further damaging the troublesome injury of her teens. She had begun to take on the life of a serious cripple. Availing himself of an interval in the day's plans—Jessie was resting in their hotel—Conrad had arranged for Miss Hallowes to deliver some newly transcribed pages of his current work to the Reform Club, where James, learning his friend was in town, had invited him for one of their old talks. Conrad's instructions were plain: he had some necessary revisions in mind, and meant to apply them immediately. Miss Hallowes was to make herself known to the concierge, and was then simply to ascend to Mr. James's quarters, hand over the typewritten sheets to her employer, and rapidly and unobtrusively depart. Any chance of an encounter with Miss Bosanquet, however fleeting, must be urgently avoided. It was an hour when James would likely be dismissing Miss Bosanquet at the close of the morning's dictation. He was intermittently engaged at this time in composing the prefaces for his crowning New York Edition; his ambition was to gather up, and at last to perfect, all the novels and tales, the labors of a lifetime. He intended to vet each one, line by line, imposing his maturer style on his earlier manner, and he was looking forward to hearing Conrad's view of this obsessive revisiting—after so many years, did Conrad still hold to his theory that style confesses the inner man? And what if style were finally to be altered? Might it not signify that one's essential self, one's ostensibly immutable character, was, in fine, mutable?

When Conrad, considerably rain-dampened, penetrated the Grecian luxuriances of the Reform Club's lower halls, he had no inkling that this was to be the quizzical, possibly the fraught, theme of the visit. But he knew anyhow that the simultaneous appearance of the two ladies, in the presence of himself and James, would be damnably awkward. Miss Hallowes had seen (was constantly seeing) into the blackest recesses of his mind. She was privy to his hesitations, his doubts, his reversals, and certainly his excitements; she was in the most crucial sense his double, since everything that came out of him she instantly duplicated on the Machine. His thoughts ran straight through her, unchanged, unmitigated, unloosed. Without doubt the same was true with respect to James and the spirited Miss Bosanquet: every vibration of James's sensibility ran through the woman who served and observed—how could it be otherwise? These two, Miss Hallowes and Miss Bosanquet, brought together even momentarily, could only mean exposure. In Miss Hallowes's face, in her posture, in the very shape and condition of her shoes, James would detect, with the divining rod that was his powerful instinct, the secret thing Conrad harbored against him: that the Master's cosmopolitanism, his civilized restraint, his perfection of method, his figures so finished, chiseled, and carved, were, when you came down to it, stone. Under the glow lay heartlessness and cold. And in Miss Bosanquet's face and posture and perhaps even in the shape and condition of her shoes, Conrad himself might recognize, frighteningly, the arrow of James's hidden dislike.

These vulnerable premonitions did not come to pass. Luckily, Miss Bosanquet had already left when Conrad knocked and James opened, and patted Conrad on the back, and led him in and stood him before the fire with many a "delighted to see you" and exclamations of "my dear good fellow" and worried inquiries about poor Mrs. Conrad's health, and exhortations to a libation of sherry, and urgings to take the chair that allowed a view of the grand edifice opposite, which housed the Turkish legation: a green crescent and a green star were painted on its roof. And then another knock, and it was Miss Hallowes, precisely as directed, bringing the latest portion of the sea tale Conrad was thinking of calling "The Second Self," or "The Secret Stranger," though he might yet settle on something else...

"I'm much obliged to you, Miss Hallowes," he said, accepting the moist folder; she had struggled to shelter it under her coat. "Mr. James, may I present the very person your example inspired? My amanuensis, Miss Hallowes, who flies off to enjoy her day in London, despite this wretched weather—"

Under her wet clumsy hat with its wet little feather, Miss Hallowes's somewhat obvious nose reddened. She had a long neck—she was long all over—at the base of which sat a bun. The bun confined brown hair, the sort of brown that is so common as to be always overlooked, except in a very pretty woman. Miss Hallowes was not a very pretty woman. She was thirty-seven, just starting a jowl. It was mostly inconspicuous, but formed a soft round bulge whenever she lowered her head. Her head, bending over the Machine, was usually lowered. Sometimes the quick agitation of her fingers and shoulders shook out her bun and uncaged it from its pins, and then her hair would cascade down over her long back; she wondered if Mr. Conrad noticed. She had been employed by him for the past six years, and was and was not a member of the household—rather like a governess in a book. She often took Borys to school. Yet after all this time Mr. Conrad still misspelled her Christian name, and wrote it as "Lillian," with two
l
's, when it had only one, and referred to her as his "girl." She was gratified that he had not said "my girl" to Mr. James, who was right now looking at her, or
into
her, with those lantern eyes he had. He was much fatter than she had expected, and showed a paunch and a developed jowl that reminded her hu-miliatingly of the probable future of her own. She was dripping on his nice carpet; outdoors it was raining like mad; she wished she could go stand in front of his fire. Her feet were soaked through, and cold. But she was not to stay—she understood she was merely a necessary intrusion. If only Mr. James would not judge her by the ruin of her shoes!

She said, "How do you do, Mr. James," and moved to the door. Her hand was on the knob, but it was already vigorously turning, as if of itself, and a hand on the other side of the door slid through, and brushed against her own, and in leaped Miss Bosanquet.

"I do apologize, I was nearly on my way out—I seem to have forgotten my umbrella—"

The forgotten umbrella! Worn device, venerable ruse! Yet perhaps not—it was a fact, after all, that Miss Bosanquet, with James's permission, habitually kept an umbrella in his rooms. It hadn't been raining so heavily when she arrived at ten o'clock, and she was insouciant about such nonsense as getting a little wet—unlike some ladies, who behaved as if they were made of sugar and were bound to melt. But even Miss Bosanquet might acknowledge the need of an umbrella when the rain bounced upward from the pavement and a cutting wind pelted icy rivers into one's face: hence the contingency article in the Master's cupboard. The morning's drizzle had by now blown into a brutish January storm, which might very well explain why Miss Bosanquet burst in to fetch her umbrella just as Miss Hallowes was leaving, all inadvertently touching Miss Hallowes's large interesting hand.

Possibly there was another explanation. As Miss Bosanquet, having been discharged for the day, was passing through the monumental lower hall on her way out to the street, she heard a voice speaking the Master's name. A tall woman with a disheveled bun and wearing a charmingly silly hat stood at the concierge's desk, announced that she was expected, and asked where she might find Mr. James's apartment. She walked on through the hall's massive columns, halting to remove from under her coat a folder of the kind used to enclose manuscript. This was unquestionably odd: Miss Bosanquet was scrupulously cognizant of every sacred sheet of paper that entered or left the Master's sanctum; every hallowed word he breathed aloud danced through her agile fingertips and registered indelibly in her brain. Was this woman, apparently summoned by the Master, some hidden competitor? Under the excessive burden of preparing his strenuous New York Edition, did he feel that he required
two
amanuenses, one for the earlier part of the day, the other for the later? Miss Bosanquet was aware that she had had predecessors—and that she outshone them all: was there now to be a rival? For the too-costly MacAlpine the Master had found other employment, and Miss Weld had gone off in the bloom of her youth to be married. The last, a Miss Lois Baker, was sometimes called on, Miss Bosanquet knew, when she herself was compelled to be absent: could this be the same Miss Baker, harried and hurried, who was just then stopping to prop the suspicious folder against the base of a pillar while she rearranged the pins in her bun? She had loosened her hair; it swept free before she could scoop it up again, and in this one disclosing moment, when the length of it swung innocently by its own dark weight, Miss Bosanquet reflected that Miss Baker, if Miss Baker it was, resembled a mermaid all at once released from a spell—she was certainly wet enough! Were shining scales and a forked tail concealed, together with some errant manuscript, under her coat? Her long lurking body, like a mermaid cast up on solid earth, was spilling puddles on the marble floor. She had a broad shy mouth in a broad shy face, the sort of face you might see in an old painting of the Madonna, where the model had clearly been a plain peasant girl, coarse-skinned, yet with a transcendentally devoted mien. Miss Baker's eyes, if Miss Baker it was, were too small, and the lobes of her nostrils too fleshy, but standing there, with her hands lifted to the back of her neck, and looking all around, as if under the ceiling of some great cathedral, she seemed dutiful and unguarded and glowingly virginal. She picked up the folder and went on.