‘Oh, I don’t agree with either of you then,’ Minny said, her face bright with excitement. ‘When you close
The Mill on the Floss
, for example, you know much more
about how strange and beautiful it is to be alive than when you read a thousand sermons.’
Gray had not read George Eliot and when presented with a copy of
The Mill on the Floss
by an enthusiastic Minny he flicked through the pages judiciously.
‘She is,’ Minny said, ‘the person in the world I most adore, the person I would most like to meet.’
Gray looked up quizzically, suspiciously.
‘She understands,’ Minny went on, ‘the character of a generous woman, that is, of a woman who believes in generosity and who feels keenly how hard it is, practically,
to,’ she stopped for a moment to think, ‘why, to live it, to follow it out.’
‘Follow “it” out?’ Gray asked. ‘What’s the “it”?’
‘Generosity, as I said,’ Minny replied.
Minny also handed Gray a copy of the March issue of the
North American Review
which had a story by Henry called
The Story of a Year
. She told him that while she and her sisters had
been forbidden to read Henry’s previous story, full, they were told, of highly French immorality, they had been permitted to read his new one. Over the previous days, Henry, a novice in the
matter of publication, had waited for Holmes to say something about the story. He knew Holmes had told William that he believed the mother in the story was based on his mother and the soldier was
based on him. Suddenly then, William had a new and interesting way to tease Henry. The Holmes family, he told him, was in a rage and old father Holmes was going to complain to Henry’s father.
Later, William had confessed that he had invented most of this, except for Holmes’s original comments.
Holmes had said nothing. Now Henry watched Gray crossing the garden with a chair in one hand and the
North American Review
in the other to find a shady place in which he could sit and
read the story. Henry was nervous about Gray’s response, but pleased also that the story could now be mentioned. He imagined Gray reading it with the sharp eye of a war veteran, finding not
enough about the action of the war and finding too much about women. Watching him begin the story, and being able from the vantage point of another chair in the garden some distance away from him
to see him proceed, was difficult, almost unnerving. After a while he could manage it no more, he had had enough, and he took a long walk that afternoon and did not come back until suppertime.
As soon as they were sitting down, Minny spoke.
‘So, Mr Gray, what did you think of the story? For me, it is so exciting having a cousin who is a writer, it is exciting beyond imagining.’
Henry realized, and he wondered if Minny did too, the effect her words would have on the two young men who had offered their lives for their country. For them, the war remained raw and fresh,
and their very presence was a reminder to all of the great losses and heroism of their side. In her enthusiasm for Henry’s story, Minny now seemed to be lessening the importance, indeed the
excitement, of having two soldiers at her table.
‘Interesting,’ he said, and seemed ready to leave it at that.
‘We all loved it and are so proud of it,’ Elly, Minny’s sister, said.
‘If it had not had his name on it,’ Gray said, ‘I would have guessed that the author was a woman, but perhaps that was part of your plan.’
He turned to Henry, who looked at him but did not speak.
‘He wrote a story, not a plan,’ Minny said.
‘Yes, but if you think about the war, or speak to those involved, or even read about it, I’m sure there are more interesting stories, ones that are more true to life.’
‘But this wasn’t about the war,’ Minny said. ‘It was about a girl’s heart.’
‘Are there not plenty of girls who can write such stories?’ Gray asked.
Holmes put his hands behind his head and began to laugh.
‘We cannot all be soldiers,’ he said.
The talk between the three visitors and the Temple sisters returned again and again to the war. Since the girls’ brother and their cousin Gus Barker had been killed, the two soldiers had
to be careful not to gloat too much about their survival, or their bravery. Nonetheless, it was difficult to avoid discussing specific exploits and the extraordinary phenomenon of injured soldiers
such as Henry’s brother Wilky and Holmes himself and Gus Barker who insisted, once recovered, on returning to the fray. Holmes and Wilky had lived to receive more injuries and survived them
too. Gus Barker, however, had been killed by a sniper two years earlier, when he was barely twenty, at the Rappahannock River in Virginia. All of them grew silent now as his name and the place
where he died were mentioned.
Henry had seen him on return trips to America during his childhood at his grandmother’s house in Albany, where he had also met the Temples, and later at Newport. As the others started
again to talk about him, Henry’s mind wandered back to five years earlier when the Civil War seemed an impossible nightmare and the James family had returned to Newport from Europe so that
William could study art.
One day in the fall of 1860 Henry had come into the studio to find his cousin Gus Barker standing naked on a pedestal while the advanced students sketched him. Gus was strong and wiry,
red-haired and white-skinned. He stood immobile and unembarrassed as the five or six students, including William, worked on their drawings as though they did not know the model. Gus Barker, like
the Temples, had lost his mother, and his orphanhood gave him the same mystery and independence. No mother could arrive to tell him to cease this display and put on his clothes forthwith. His form
was beautiful and manly, and Henry was surprised by his own need to watch him, while pretending that his interest in Gus Barker, like that of the other students, was distant and academic. He
studied William’s drawing closely so that he could then raise his eyes and study at some length his naked cousin’s perfect gymnastic figure, his strength, and his calm sensual aura.
It struck him all these years later that he had been thinking something which he could not tell Gray or Holmes or even Minny, that his mind during these few minutes had wandered over a scene
whose meaning would have to remain secret to him. He simply did not suppose that Gray’s mind worked like that, or the mind and imagination of Holmes, or the Temple sisters. He did not even
know if his brother William’s mind moved into areas that would always have to remain obscure to those around him. He thought about the result if he spoke his mind, told his companions as
truthfully as he could what the name Gus Barker had provoked in his memory. He wondered at how, every day, as they moved around each other, each of them had stored away an entirely private world to
which they could return at the sound of a name, or for no reason at all. For a second as he thought about this, he caught Holmes’s eye, and he found that he had not been able to disguise
himself fully, that Holmes had seen through his social mask to the mind which had strayed into realms which could not be shared. Both of them shared something now, tacitly, momentarily, which the
others did not even notice.
Gradually, then, over the days, Minny Temple made a choice. She chose subtly and carefully so that no one saw at first that she had done so, but what was not apparent to Gray or Holmes or her
sisters became clear to Henry because she wished it to be clear to him. She chose Henry as her friend and confidant, the one she trusted most, could speak to most easily. And she may have chosen
Holmes for something too because she never ignored him, or shone her light on the others more than on him. But she chose Gray as the one on whom she could have most effect, who most needed her. She
paid no attention to his military talk and his gruff, practical comments and his clipped witticisms. She wished to change him, and Henry watched her gently cajoling him, without allowing herself to
become offensive.
One day when she handed Gray lines of Browning to read, he held back and asked her to read them aloud.
‘No, I want you to read them to yourself,’ she said.
‘I can’t read poetry,’ he said.
Henry and Holmes and her two sisters did not speak; this, Henry knew, was a decisive moment in Minny’s fight to mould John Gray into a shape acceptable to her.
‘Of course you can read poetry,’ she said, ‘but you must first forget the “read” part and the “poetry” part and concentrate on the “I” part
and find new credentials for it, and soon you will be a changed man and your youth will return. But if you really want me to, then I will read the verse aloud.’
‘Minny,’ her sister said, ‘you must not be abrupt to Mr Gray.’
‘Mr Gray is going to be a great lawyer,’ Holmes said. ‘He is learning to defend himself, I feel, so that he will in time learn to defend others more worthy of defence,
perhaps.’
‘I long for you to read it aloud,’ Gray said.
‘And I long for the day when you will read it too, quietly and with emotion,’ Minny said taking the book.
H
ENRY BEGAN
to imagine an heiress, recently orphaned, who had three suitors, a young woman whose patient intelligence had never been fully appreciated
by those around her. He did not want to make her as beautiful as Minny was that August; instead, he made his heroine positively plain but for the frequent recurrence of a magnificent smile. He made
two of the suitors military men; the third, who gave his name to the story, Poor Richard, whose manner was that of a nervous headstrong man, brought close to desperation by unrequited love, was a
civilian. Richard adored Gertrude Whittaker, but she did not take him as seriously as she took the two Civil War soldiers. One of them, Captain Severn, was himself a serious and conscientious man,
who was discreet, deliberate and unused to acting without a definite purpose. And Major Lutrell, on the other hand, who could play the part of Gray, was both agreeable and insufferable. All three
began a siege to win Miss Whittaker’s love and marry her. In the end, she accepted none of them.
The story began for him in a small single moment in which Richard watches Captain Severn sinking into a silence very nearly as helpless as his own as they observe the progress of a lively
dialogue between Miss Whittaker and Major Lutrell. So too at North Conway had this become for Henry and for Holmes a daily routine, as Minny continued her battle to soften Gray, to make him more
conscious of his soul than his uniform, of his deepest fears and longings rather than of his self-protective army talk, suitably censored for ladies. Holmes began by believing that Minny did not
like Gray, which pleased him, and then became aware with flashes of alarm that Gray was winning. Holmes’s alarm made a sound that Minny and her sisters and Gray were too distracted to hear,
but which Henry picked up easily and stored and thought about when he was alone.
He did not realize then and did not, in fact, grasp for many years how these few weeks in North Conway – the endlessly conversing group of them gathered under the rustling pines –
would be enough for him, would be, in effect, all he needed to know in his life. In all his years as a writer he was to draw on the scenes he lived and witnessed at that time: the two ambitious,
patrician New Englanders, already alert to the eminence which awaited them, and the American girls, led by Minny, fresh and open to life, so inquisitive, so imbued with a boundless curiosity and
charm and intelligence. And between them much that would have to be left unsaid and a great deal that would never be known. Already, on that lawn beside the house where the Temple sisters stayed
that summer, there were secrets and unstated alliances, and already a sense that Minny Temple would escape them and soar above them, although none of them had an idea how soon this would happen and
how sad it would be.
He had no memory of when he first knew she was dying. Certainly, that summer there was no intimation of any illness.
He remembered that some time later his mother had mentioned Minny’s being poorly, her tone disapproving, as though believing at first that Minny’s illness was a way of drawing
attention to herself.
Their group met once more in his parents’ parlour in Quincy Street near the end of the following year; he recalled how surprising it was to find that Minny had been corresponding with both
Gray and Holmes. His mother, he remembered, liked Gray and thought he was as nice as ever, nicer than Holmes, and reported later that Minny had told her she was quite disenchanted with Holmes and
had talked to her of Holmes’s egotism, but also his beautiful eyes. Henry was surprised that Minny now seemed to be confiding in his mother.
He sat on his terrace now thousands of miles away and many years later. As the crescent moon appeared, he studied its strange, thin, implacable beauty, and sighed as he remembered William coming
into his room with the news that Minny had a deposit on her lung. Henry was not sure that this was his first hearing of the news, but he was certain that it was the first time it was not whispered.
Henry recalled his own depression in the months that followed, his own immobility, and he knew that he had not seen her, but was kept abreast of the news by his mother, who was keenly interested in
the illness of everyone, but especially young women of marriageable age, and was now taking Minny’s illness seriously.
He tried to think when John Gray had told him first of Minny’s long letters to him. Gray had found them difficult, somewhat embarrassing, he said, confidential and feverish, but he had
replied, and so she wrote to Gray over and over in the last year of her life. And in one of those letters she had written the words which Gray had repeated to him and which Henry thought now maybe
meant more to him than any others, including all the words he had written himself, or anyone else had written. Her words haunted him so that saying them now, whispering them in the silence of the
night, brought her exacting presence close to him. The words constituted one sentence. Minny had written: ‘You must tell me something that you are sure is true.’ That, he thought, was
what she wanted when she was alive and happy, as much as when she was dying, but it was her illness, her knowledge that time was short, that made her desperate to formulate the phrase that summed
up her great and generous quest. ‘You must tell me something that you are sure is true.’ The words came to him in her sweet voice, and as he sat on his terrace in the darkness he
wondered how he would have answered her if she had written the sentence to him.