‘Ah Father, it is easy preaching faith in God’s care,’ he said, ‘but it was hard, where I have been, to practise it.’
Henry senior was silent. They watched Wilky gasping for breath, trying to speak more. His father turned to Henry as though to ask if his second son would know whether he should go on with the
sermon or wait to see if Wilky had more to say. Henry did not respond, but soon Wilky’s voice found the strength to continue and he left them in no doubt that he did not wish to be preached
to any more, even if it was he who had originally requested it.
‘I woke up lying in the sand under my tent, and slowly recalled much that had happened, my wounds, my fall, the two men that tried to drag me to the hospital tent, the fall of one of them,
my feeble crawling to the ambulance. I woke up to find myself forgotten, and sick and faint for loss of blood. As I lay wondering whether I should ever see home again, I saw a poor Ohio man with
his jaw shot away who found, I suppose, that I was near to him and unable to stand, he crept over and deluged me with his blood. At that I felt …’
Wilky covered his face with his hands and began to cry uncontrollably, but he could shape no more words. His crying grew louder, more hysterical, until he shook in the bed, his father and his
brother watching him helplessly. Once his mother came, she held him and calmed him and spoke softly to all three of them.
‘When Wilky was a baby,’ she said when Wilky had finally fallen asleep, ‘and in his crib, he always seemed to be smiling. I tried to find out if he was smiling all the time, or
if he heard me coming and began to smile only then. But I never could find out. That’s what I’d like now, that’s what I’m waiting for – that he will start to smile
again.’
W
ILLIAM RETURNED
to Harvard that September to continue his studies, but Henry did not follow him. His parents remained preoccupied with Wilky but were
much relieved when, on a further assault on Fort Wagner which, fortunately, had been evacuated just before the attack, Bob survived unscathed.
Henry remained in his room as Wilky recovered and Bob stayed with his regiment. His mother’s response to his seclusion and his silence became sweeter once Wilky began to declare that he
wished to return to the army as soon as he himself rather than his doctors felt that he could. His mother at mealtimes talked a great deal about the sacrifice and bravery of her two younger sons,
but her tone was bitter rather than proud.
‘They have both seen things which no one of their age should see. They have both witnessed horrors and felt horrors, and I do not know now how they will ever settle down without being
haunted by sights that none of us will ever be able to imagine. I wish they hadn’t joined. That’s all I can say. And I wish the war had never started.’
Aunt Kate nodded, but Henry senior stared passively and vaguely into the distance, as though his wife had made some mild observation. As soon as each meal was over, Henry returned to his room.
His mother began, once more, to worry about his back, bringing him cushions and making him lie down rather than sit when he was reading.
He did not know what to tell them when his first story, written in the French style about an adulterous woman, was accepted by the
Continental Monthly
in New York. It would be published
anonymously, so he knew that he could keep the news from them if he wished. He waited for a day or two, but then, on finding his father in the library alone, he decided to reveal his secret. Within
an hour his father had read the story and expressed his disapproval of its contents, less than uplifting, he thought, and dramatizing the baser motives. Then his father wrote to William, who sent
Henry a note mocking him and wondering how he came by his knowledge of adulterous French ladies. Finally, his father moved around Newport spreading the news of his son who was about to publish a
story in the French style.
W
ILKY WENT
back to his regiment, but was judged too unwell to continue, and so he returned home once more, determined on improving so that he could see
the war out and be there for the victory. Nothing dimmed his enthusiasm. It became Henry’s habit, in this interlude as Wilky waited to rejoin his regiment, to sit with him silently reading
while Wilky dozed or lay still without speaking. One night as he quietly prepared to return to his own room, leaving Wilky peaceful, he was confronted in the corridor by his Aunt Kate. She
whispered to Henry that she had left some sweet-cake and some milk for him in the kitchen. Just as he was about to tell her that he did not want any cake or milk, he noticed her face darkening and
her brow furrowing, and he understood that she wanted him to follow her to the kitchen.
On tiptoe the two of them moved down through the house. In the kitchen, she began to whisper something about Wilky’s recovery until she closed the door and then could talk out loud.
‘He’s mad to go back to the war,’ she said. ‘As though he didn’t have enough injuries, enough suffering.’
‘He remains idealistic about the cause,’ Henry said.
Aunt Kate pursed her lips disapprovingly.
‘He’ll never settle now, once this war is over. He is like all of the Jameses, except for you,’ she went on. ‘Headstrong, full of foolish enthusiasm.’
She studied his face to see if she had gone too far, but he smiled at her, amused, signalling that she could say more if she wished.
‘They were all the same, your father’s family. If they had one drink, then they had thousands of drinks. One night’s gambling led to them losing every penny. One page of
theology and then …’ She stopped and shook her head and sighed.
‘And half of them died young, you know, leaving your cousins orphans, the Temple girls and poor Gus Barker. Of course, the old father, old William James of Albany, was as rich at that time
as Mr Astor, but the Astors were all good at business, level-headed people, and the Jameses, once the father was dead, were good at gambling and drinking and dying young and running headlong
towards foolish causes. Every time I listen to Wilky talking about going back to fight, I see the Jameses writ large, always ready to do something foolish. And William wanting to be a painter one
day and a doctor the next. You’re the only one who takes after our side of the family, you’re the only solid one.’
‘But I studied law last year and changed my mind,’ Henry said.
‘You had no enthusiasm for the law. You did it to get away from here and with all the war madness going on, you were right. If you had stayed, they’d have joined you up and you would
be limping around here with half of you amputated.’
Her voice was harsh now, and her eyes sharp, almost wild. In the dim lamplight she resembled a drawing of an old woman, both wise and mad. She stopped speaking and let her mouth and jaw settle.
She watched him, waiting for a response. When he did not speak, she began again.
‘You’re the consistent one, the one who’ll know how to mind himself. At least we have you.’
B
Y THE TIME
his son’s first story had appeared in print, Henry senior had grown restless once more and decided, he said, to move his family
definitively to Boston. Henry was happy to leave Newport. He kept his stories secret now, letting his family see only the reviews he was writing for the periodicals – the
Atlantic
Monthly
, the
North American Review
, the
Nation
. Without any of them knowing, he worked slowly and carefully every day on the story of a boy who goes to war, leaving his mother and
his swee heart behind. When he began he was involved in a pure and artful invention, as though he were writing a ballad which Professor Child might collect. He established the difficult, proud and
ambitious mother; John, her courageous and light-hearted son; and Lizzie, the sweetheart, innocent and pretty and flirtatious. He created each scene with deliberation, reading over each morning
what he had written the previous day, constantly erasing and adding. He tried to work quickly so that there would be speed and flow to the narrative and, on one of these days, in the family’s
new rented quarters on Beacon Hill, something occurred to him which shocked him but did not cause him to stop.
‘On the fourth evening, at twilight, John Ford,’ he wrote, ‘was borne up to the door on his stretcher, with his mother stalking beside him in rigid grief, and kind, silent
friends pressing about with helping hands.’
John was too ill to be moved, and his injuries were too severe for him to be visited by his sweetheart Lizzie. As he wrote, Henry felt that he was closest to what concerned him in his waking
life and most of his dreams: the fate of his injured brother. His father could not blame him for immorality nor William mock him for writing about a world he did not know. Suddenly an image came to
him and he held his breath for worry that he might lose it: ‘When Lizzie was turned from John’s door, she took a covering from a heap of draperies that had been hurriedly tossed down in
the hall: it was an old army blanket. She wrapped it round her and went out onto the veranda.’
He wanted to go into the shed behind the pantry and look for the blanket he had taken from Wilky, but then he remembered that they were in Boston now and not Newport and that the blanket would
surely have been thrown out or left there in the move. He began to summon up the smell of the blanket, its aura of the battlefield and the army: ‘A strange earthy smell lingered in that faded
old rug, and with it a faint perfume of tobacco. Instantly, the young girl’s senses were transported as they had never been before to those far-off Southern battlefields. She saw men lying in
swamps and puffing their kindly pipes, drawing their blankets closer, canopied with the same luminous dusk that shone down upon her comfortable weakness. Her mind wandered amid these scenes
…’
The feeling of power was new to him. This raid on his own memories, this parading of an object so close to him, so deeply part of his own personal store that no one might ever know where this
moment in his story came from, made him believe that he had done something daring and original.
CHAPTER EIGHT
H
E WATCHED HIS FRIEND
the novelist moving towards the window in the drawing room, but did not suggest to her that she might be more comfortable where he
had originally placed her. She sought a position with her back to the light. He wondered if she remembered that two, or even three, of her heroines had entered rooms in this way and sat happily and
deliberately with their backs to a large window so that the company might view them in the most flattering light.
Once seated, however, Mrs Florence Lett did not seem to care about her face as she wrinkled her brow and grimaced. She could not utter a sentence without making passionate changes to her
expression, smiling and frowning, and puckering up her rather perfect nose. He wondered how her face had withstood so many changes in its weather. Soon, he thought, there would be a landslide,
something would have to give. In the meantime, he enjoyed her talk of her time in Italy, her next book, her charming daughter, the slowness of the train to Rye, her sorrow that she could stay only
a short time, and back again to her beautiful daughter, aged six, who was being fêted in the kitchen by the staff, her daughter’s education and inheritance, and then back to Italy and
the death, by suicide, of Henry’s great friend, the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson.
‘In Venice,’ she said, ‘they spoke of you and why you departed so abruptly and why you have not returned. He is an artist, I told them, a supreme artist, not a diplomat, but
they long to see you. Venice is sad, it was always sad, but more so now, and people whom I don’t think ever knew Constance claim to miss her. Poor Constance, you know I could not walk in
those streets. I had to turn back, I don’t know what you will do.’
Slowly, the door opened and Mrs Florence Lett’s daughter came quietly into the room. Her mother was in mid-sentence and did not stop. The little girl studied the room, her expression
placid. She was wearing a long blue dress. Henry noticed also the intensely soft blue of her eyes and her clear fair skin. In that moment, as she stood there, respectful of her mother’s
conversation, he thought her immensely beautiful. From the sofa, he put out his arms to her and, without any further consideration, she came stealthily towards him and embraced him, sitting herself
on his lap and putting her arms around him.
‘We’ve all gone to see her grave, of course,’ his visitor continued. ‘With some graves you know that the person is at rest, that their lying there is part of nature. But
I did not feel that at all with poor Constance, although that graveyard is the most perfect place. She would have loved it. But I don’t feel she is at rest. I don’t feel that at
all.’
Henry listened as Mrs Florence Lett held forth. He did not speak to the girl on his lap, and he presumed that she would, after a few moments, move across the room towards her mother. Clearly,
however, she had found comfort as gradually her arms fell limp and she settled into sleep. He did not know if feeling at ease with strangers was an aspect of the child’s charm, but he decided
not to ask her mother.
By the time the child woke, the light in the room was fading, the maid had taken away the tea and Mrs Florence Lett had exhausted a large number of subjects. The girl smiled at him as she opened
her eyes. He felt enormously touched by her as though her coming to him with all the confidence of a child to a parent brought with it a trust and a good luck. He smiled as she stood up.
When Mrs Florence Lett did not comment on what had just occurred, he said nothing either. He would have given anything to spare the little girl embarrassment. She had come to him so naturally.
As they were leaving and the servants came to say goodbye to her, it was clear that she had made a great impression during her visit to the kitchen and the pantry. The child now became shy for the
first time and clung to her mother who spoke to her carefully and firmly, encouraging her to offer a withdrawn, half-willing smile and a small wave before she left.