Dictation (5 page)

So it was only play. A diversion. Fear? What was there to fear? But the skylight was as dense as the walls, oppressively so: the whole weight of stony astronomies seemed about to crash in on their heads. And here was Theodora, larking about with talk of eternal life for those forgettable wisps of ephemera who are faithful at their Machines day after day, typing, typing, typing, until they disintegrate into the dust of the earth...

"Think!" said Theodora. "Everlastingness for such as us! Who!"

Conciliating, Lilian overreached. "Boswell," she said finally.

"Boswell immortal? As an amanuensis? Never! An annoying sycophant. His only occupation was to follow in Dr. Johnson's wake, whether he was wanted or not."

"Still, he set down whatever Johnson spoke—"

"He wasn't wanted. Johnson didn't
choose
him. An amanuensis must be chosen. You and I, Lily, have been chosen. Try again."

Lilian released a dreary sigh. This diversion—this digression (but from what goal?)—was not to her taste. Perhaps it was true that like her mother—like Mr. Conrad himself!—she had been born to an uneasy lingering gloom. "Then Moses," she said, "who took dictation directly from the author. And was certainly chosen. Now there it is, done, your riddle is solved."

"Not satisfactorily. Truly," Theodora scoffed, "what have you and I to do with Moses? All those tedious Jewish rules! I ask you, my dearest Lily, why must we be confined by rules, when all the world's joy runs past them? I promised you a profundity. The chance lies before us—we shall be the first. If only you have courage enough, we two, separately and entwined, will live forever. Forever, Lily! The generations will
feel
what we do."

Under the skylight, opaque and invisible, and between the cryptic blotches on the walls, darkened now to a row of indistinct smudges (a single lamp stood in a distant corner), Theodora's look sent out a feral copper gleam. It came to Lilian then, sadly, horribly—oh, horribly—that it was not a game at all: she was being drawn instead into some dire scheme of an unbalanced spirit.

"No one," she said (and to her surprise, she heard her mother's bleak reproachful wisdom creeping up from her own throat), "no one can live forever."

But Theodora let out her jubilant larking laugh. "The Master will. Doubtless your Mr. Conrad will. And so shall we—we mere amanuenses.—Wait, Lily, where are you off to? We agreed you would stay the night—"

Lilian flung herself from Theodora's touch. "It's been weeks since I had a proper visit with Mother," she called back—what foolishness, it was two in the morning!—and hurried down the stairs.

***

Theodora had frightened Lilian, but Theodora was, as it happened, altogether in her right mind. She was far from mad; she was consummately clever. Her stratagem was both ingenious and simple. And it was covert, designed to remain permanently undetected—this accounted for its originality. Also, it eschewed what has always been regarded as axiomatic: that immortality implies, and resides in, a name. Shakespeare is immortal, we say; and Archimedes, because his bath water spilled over, permitting him to dub the mess "physics." The Pyramids are rumored to owe their shape to Pythagoras and his hypotenuse. Shakespeare, Archimedes, Pythagoras, and any number of other luminaries (not forgetting James and Conrad) may all merit immortality in the ordinary sense—but Theodora's notion of everlastingness was more cunning than any such homage given to the longevity of a proper noun. What Theodora was after was distinctly radical: she wished to send into the future a nameless immutability, visible though invisible, smooth while bent, unchangeable yet altered, integrated even as it sought to be wholly alien. And it was to be secret. Nor could she accomplish it alone. It demanded a sharer, a double, a partner.

But meanwhile she had lost Lilian, and Lilian was indispensable for Theodora's plan. How to get her back? Four or five notes, wreathed in remorse and painted sunflowers (copied from one of those smeary foreign artists she incomprehensibly admired), went unanswered. It was a month before Lilian replied. Her tone was cool. Mr. Conrad, she explained, was keeping her exceedingly occupied; and her mother's spirits had sunk yet again, requiring Lilian's almost nightly attendance; and Mrs. Conrad had lately been particularly disagreeable. "I hope," the letter ended, "that in view of these increasing difficulties you will understand why I must discontinue our meetings, which by their nature distract me from my obligations and concerns."

Theodora was undiscouraged.

My dear Lilian [she wrote],

Of the "difficulties" you allude to, surely your relation to Mrs. Conrad continues as the most onerous. I believe I can, even at this removal, discern what you must bear. A great man's wife, should he have one—and unlike Mr. James, Mr. Conrad is very much a married man!—will
too often be under the delusion that, by virtue of conjugal proximity, she can see into the heart of his genius. Yet how can this be? A shameful hubris! It is only you, the artist's true vessel, the sole brain to receive the force of creation in its first flooding, who can make this claim. A day may come—that day inevitably
will
come—when an imperious wife will publicly usurp your knowledge, your penetration, your having
inhabited
the work, and will profess to see and feel what you alone have seen and felt. What form this wrongful seizure will take, who can tell? In gossip to future biographers perhaps, in boastful letters (doubtless she already misleads Mr. Pinker), and, heaven forfend, even in a braggart's memoir from her own unskilled pen.

No, Lily, this cannot go forward. You must forestall such a devouring—it has the power to demean Mr. Conrad's art. You rightly speak of obligation and concern.
Here
must be your obligation and concern. Lily, come back to me! Together we will thwart these spousal depredations!

The response was quick:

Then you must make me a promise. You will no longer speak absurdly of the soul's afterlife—I hold with Mr. Conrad that we are tragic creatures destined to become dust. That is why his ambition is pure (it is the ambitiousness mortality confers), while Mrs. Conrad's is impure: it is, as you say, a lust to purloin, to burn with a stolen fire.—Secondly, though not secondarily, you will no longer press on me unfamiliar intimacies. If you keep to this agreement, I will consent to a resumption of our acquaintance.

How easily it was done! Theodora had won her back—wooed her, rather, through the bait of jealousy, that lowest of human passions. Lilian, Theodora concluded, was now sufficiently primed to collaborate—on the condition that Theodora would merely revise the footing of their connection. Easily, easily done! Lilian cannot be tempted by the sweet fruit of everlastingness? No matter: then she will be seduced by the bitter hope of undermining her persecutor. Lilian repudiates Theodora's kisses? Ah, but what transports are being granted elsewhere, and without the impediment of the other's reluctance!

In the weeks during which Lilian had absented herself, Henry James had received yet another eminent literary visitor: Mr. Leslie Stephen, accompanied by the younger of his two daughters. She had come to pay homage to the Master, who welcomed her charmingly, partly out of deference to her redoubtable father, a stern bearded figure with the bent back of a myopic scholar, but also because she had begun to acquire some respectable small notice of her own. At twenty-eight, she was already an accomplished critic. Theodora, watchful as she went on tidying the masses of papers surrounding her Machine, took care to observe Miss Stephen in particular. She was impatient and nervous, and appeared to be irritated by her father, who was enveloping their host in a burst of egotistical volubility. It was well known that Miss Stephen had a denigrating wit, and that she belonged to a notorious cenacle of youthful writers and artists, Fabians and freethinkers all, two or three of whom Theodora had encountered in those dusky contentious heterodox cellars. Miss Stephen herself was said to be melancholic and reclusive; even here, in this pleasant and spacious room, she kept her distance from her father, roaming disconsolately from the hearth to the window, where she took in with an indifferent blink the Turkish embassy's rooftop, and again back to the fire. Her troubled eyes were round and gray and judging, her throat was bare of any ornament, and she wore her hair in a softly sculpted chignon (a chignon as unlike Lilian's unreliable falling-apart bun as a croissant is different from a dumpling), so that in profile she had the look of a dreaming Aphrodite. An unprompted indulgence drew Theodora to the clear silhouette of that brow and nose and chin; but Miss Stephen's magnetism was reserved and unconfessed.

That same night (Theodora learned this only long afterward) Miss Stephen wrote in her diary: "Poor Mr. James eaten alive by Father today, who harangued incessantly, evidently taking the wrong side of the Conrad question. Miss Bosanquet rather handsome, an overvigilant coxswain in white shirtwaist and cinched blue skirt. For a loyal amanuensis she is not notably submissive. A sapphist, I wager."

Easily, easily done. Soon enough, Theodora had no further desire for Lilian's clandestine lips. She had Miss Stephen's. And when Miss Stephen became, of all things, engaged to a penniless Jew, she had them still.

***

Lilian was safe; she
felt
safe. She had abandoned Theodora and returned—it meant she had prevailed. She had warned Theodora, and Theodora had yielded. There were no more endearments, no more embraces, no more unwanted kisses. The kisses especially disturbed: they called up shivery hallucinations, illicit longings, and always at the rim of these, the threatening accusing glaring phantom of a scornful Jessie Conrad. It was a relief to be rid of them. And strange to say, Theodora in the relinquishment of these affectionate habits was as peacefully gratified as before, and even multiplied her smiles. With the kisses gone, so was that foolish talk of immortality, whatever Theodora had intended by it—it seemed to have nothing to do with heaven or angels.

Yet the plan was to go on precisely as it had first been conceived. It was only that they must now confront it through Lilian's eyes. "I have been too terribly selfish," Theodora said. "You were right to chastise me, Lilian. I have been forgetful of what you must be enduring—"

"It's not Mother I mind so much," Lilian said, mildly enough.

"Your mother's resentments are minor. Mrs. Conrad's are mammoth. She treats you as an appendage. A household tool, perhaps."

"She hates me," Lilian said.

"Then you will triumph in the end."

"In the end?"

"When our purpose is in place."

Cozening Lilian was becoming tedious. Theodora was restless: when
would
their purpose be in place? The beautiful task lay just ahead. She was eager to effect it, she had transformed its carapace to please her necessary confederate, and here was Lilian, dragging, dragging, perpetually in want of wheedling. It was difficult to be attentive: her innermost thoughts were dizzying, they were with Miss Stephen, who had begun to say Teddie, and Teddie had begun to say ... but meanwhile Lilian was reflecting that Theodora no longer cared to call her Lily, though once or twice the old companionable syllables slipped out, broken or misspoken, so that Lilian believed she almost heard—it could not have been—something that sounded like ... was it Ginny? Or was it Lily after all? Or
was
it Ginny? Or perhaps—but of course it must have been Geneva.

"That time in the hotel," Lilian joined in, "in Geneva, when Mr. Conrad had the gout again—"

Theodora stared. A lurking heat engorged her neck. The dream is father to the word: good Lord, had she actually pronounced Miss Stephen's name aloud? No, not her name exactly...

"You remember, don't you, when he was wrestling with his anarchist story, three years ago or so, and Mrs. Conrad
would
insist on taking the children abroad, and the baby had the whooping cough, and Borys came down with a fever—"

"Geneva, yes," Theodora agreed, unbuttoning her collar—bloody hot or no, she must recover now—"you mention it so often. How Mrs. Conrad blundered."

"Interfered! Underfoot night and day with those sick boys, never permitting him to concentrate, despoiling his work—"

This, then, was the hour.

"And that is why," Theodora trumpeted, "it is imperative to defeat her. We are going to defeat her, Lilian," and at long last she defined her design.

***

Theodora's plot.

Plot? Should art be dismissed as a conniving? The will to change nature's given is the font of all creation. Even God, faced with
tohu vavohu,
welter and waste, formlessness and void, thought it suitable to introduce light and dark, day and night: the seamlessness of disparity. Or regard the mosaic maker, painstakingly choosing one tessera to set beside another, in a glorious pattern of heretofore unimagined juxtapositions—yet because the stones as they were found have been disarranged, shall he be despised as a violator? If Theodora's scheme is sinful, let Michelangelo be ashamed: he prevails on God to touch Adam's finger. Like twinned with unlike is beauty's shock. And beauty, as Theodora knows, is eternal.

"Now first," she began, "you must tell me Mr. Conrad's procedure exactly as it occurs each day."

"He dictates, I type," Lilian said.

"Of course. And when do you present him with a finished typescript?"

"Never immediately. Sometimes our sessions are very long. Mr. Conrad rushes on, he puts up his hand as if to seize an elusive word out of the air. And sometimes—well, it can happen that he misspeaks an English idiom. Which, I will confess, I silently correct. Often I must retype a day's work several times in order to have a fair copy."

"All that is similar to my own experience with Mr. James. Mr. James, however, is beyond correction."

"Mr. James was not born in Poland."

"But he was born in America, which makes his intimacy with the English language all the more remarkable. Then you believe you have Mr. Conrad's trust?"