The Master (12 page)

Gosse spoke idly of the Symondses and did not realize how Henry was taking this in. The story came to Henry, in any case, so quickly and easily that he did not have time to tell Gosse. He set to
work.

What if such a couple had a child, a boy, impressionable, intelligent, alert to the world around him and deeply loved by both his parents? How would the child be educated? How would the child be
taught to look at life? He listened to Gosse and asked questions and from the answers began to construct his story. His first ideas emerged later as too stark and so he abandoned the ambitions of
the parents for their son – one wanting the child to serve the Church, the other, the father, wanting the child to become an artist. Instead he dramatized the idea that the mother merely
wanted to save her son’s soul, and in order to do so she needed to protect him from his father’s writings.

He wondered at first if he should allow the child to grow up a lout and an ignoramus, as far away as possible from his mother’s hopes and his father’s ambitions. But as he worked,
alone, away from Gosse’s conversation, he decided to deal only with the boy, and to make the time frame of the story short and dramatic. And he would bring in an outsider, an American, an
admirer of the father’s work, one of the few who understood the father’s true genius. The father, he thought, could be a poet or a novelist or both. The American is very kindly
received, he remains near the family for some weeks, weeks which coincide with the child’s illness and death. The American understands something which the father does not know – that
during the night, as the child lay ill, his mother made up her mind secretly that it were better he should die, and she watched him sink, holding his hand, but doing nothing, allowing him for very
tenderness to fade away. The American never imparts this information to the author he so much admires.

Henry wrote down the bones of the story one night after Gosse had departed and then worked steadily, daily. He knew that it would take prodigious delicacy of touch, and even then would probably
be too gruesome and unnatural. Nonetheless, the story intrigued him, and he thought he would try it, for the general idea, corruption and Puritanism and innocence, was also full of interest and
typical of certain modern situations.

Gosse, he remembered, had been frightened by the appearance of the story in the pages of the
English Illustrated
magazine. Most people would recognize the Symondses, he said, and those
who did not would imagine that the subject was Robert Louis Stevenson. Henry told him that the story was now written and published; it did not cost him a thought who recognized themselves or
others. Gosse remained nervous, knowing how much he had contributed. He insisted that writing a story using factual material and real people was dishonest and strange and somehow underhand. Henry
refused to listen to him. In retaliation, Gosse began to refrain from providing him with his usual store of gossip. Soon, however, his friend forgot his objections to the art of fiction as a cheap
raid on the real and the true, and began once more to tell Henry all the news he had picked up since their last meeting.

As Sturges told Henry that Wilde’s wife had travelled from Switzerland to tell her prisoner husband personally of his mother’s death, he mused once more on the fate of the children
of a union between two opposing forces. He pictured himself and William at the window of the Hôtel de l’Ecu in Geneva when he was twelve and William thirteen and their time in
Switzerland seemed to him an eternity of woe: infinite hours of dullness, the dingy streets, the courtyards and alleys black with age. He imagined Oscar Wilde’s two sons, their names changed
and their fate uncertain, watching from a window as their mother departed. He wondered what they feared most now when night came down, two frightened children in the unforgiving city, its shadows
steep and sombre, half knowing why their mother had left them in the care of servants and haunted by unnamed fears and barely grasped knowledge and the memory of their evil father who had been shut
away.

CHAPTER FIVE

H
IS HAND HURT HIM.
If he wrote with it, moving the pen calmly with no flourishes, then he did not feel even a mild discomfort, but when he stopped
writing, when he moved his hand about, he could, on turning a door handle, for example, or shaving, feel an excruciating pain in his wrist and the bones which ran towards his little finger. Lifting
a sheet of paper was a form of mild torture now. He wondered if this were a message from the gods to keep writing, to wield his pen at all times.

Every year as the summer approached he felt the same persistent dull worry which led eventually to panic. As transatlantic travel became easier, and more comfortable, it also became more
popular. As time went by, his many cousins in America seemed to develop many more cousins of their own, and his friends many more friends. In London all of them wished to visit the Tower and
Westminster Abbey and the National Gallery, and over the years his name had been added to the list of the great local monuments, essential to see. As soon as the evenings lengthened and the
swallows returned from the south, the letters began to arrive, letters of introduction and what he called letters of determination from the very tourists themselves, certain that their visit to the
capital would lack all due shine were they to miss the famous writer and not receive the benefit of his company and counsel. Should his gates be locked to them, their letters implied –
indeed, they often insisted and implored – then they would not get full value for their money, and this he discovered meant more and more to his compatriots as the century came to an end.

He remembered what he had written in his notebook the previous year; it was a scene which had been on his mind since then. Jonathan Sturges had told him of a meeting in Paris with William Dean
Howells, now almost sixty. Howells had told Sturges that he did not know the city, all of it was new to him, and every sensation came to him freshly. Howells seemed sad and brooding, as if to
suggest that it was too late for him in the evening of his life when he could do nothing except take in the sensations and regret that they had not come to him when he was young. Then, in response
to something Sturges had said, Howells laid his hand on his shoulders and exclaimed: ‘Oh you are young, be glad of it and live, live all you can, it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t
so much matter what you do – but live.’ Sturges had acted out the lines, making them into a strange and plaintive appeal, a sudden burst of drama, as though Howells were speaking the
truth for the first time.

Henry had known Howells for thirty years and corresponded with him regularly. Whenever Howells came to London, he behaved as though he were at home there, as though he were a well-travelled
cosmopolitan gentleman. Henry was amazed then by his response to Paris, the sense Sturges got from him that he had not lived at all and that it was too late for him now to begin to do so.

Henry wished that London made his American guests express themselves as Howells did. He wished that the visits instilled awe or regret, or caused them to understand the world and their place in
it as never before. Instead, he listened as they told him and each other that there were towers in the United States too, and that some of their own correctional institutions compared rather
favourably in size, if nothing else, with the Tower of London. And, in addition, their own Charles River seemed to serve its purpose more efficiently than the Thames.

Nonetheless, as each summer came around, watching London through his visitors’ eyes interested him; he imagined himself as them, seeing London for the first time, just as he imagined the
lives he could have lived when he went to Italy or on his return visits to the United States. A new streetscape, even a single building, could fill him with thoughts about who he might have become,
who he might be now had he stayed in Boston or spent his days in Rome or Florence.

For him as a boy and for William, and perhaps even for Wilky and Bob and maybe even Alice, the reasons given for moving from Paris to Boulogne or from Boulogne back to London, or from Europe in
general back to the United States, never seemed as solid as their father’s own restlessness, his great agitation, which they knew but never managed to understand. The finding of a haven only
to be uprooted after a time, or the arriving, as his family did throughout his boyhood, at an unfortunate lodging, not knowing how long it would take his father to announce that they would soon
have to depart, made him long for security and settlement. He could not think why his family had translated themselves from Paris to Boulogne. He must have been twelve or thirteen then, and there
may have been a crisis on the stock exchange or a failure of some leaseholder to pay rent or an alarming letter about dividends.

In the time they lived in Boulogne, Henry walked with his father on the beach. On one of those occasions, it was a windless and calm day, the beginning of summer, with a long sandy expanse and a
wide sweep of sea. They had been to a cafe with large clear windows and a floor sprinkled with bran in a manner that for Henry gave it something of the charm of a circus. It was empty save for an
old gentleman who picked his teeth with great facial contortions and another gentleman who soaked his buttered rolls in his coffee, to Henry’s fascinated pleasure, and then disposed of them
in the little interval between his nose and chin. Henry did not wish to leave, but his father wanted his daily walk on the beach and thus he had to abandon his delight in observing the eating
habits of the French.

His father must have talked as they went along. The image in his mind now, in any case, was of him gesticulating, discussing a lecture or a book or a new set of ideas. He liked his father
talking, especially when William was elsewhere.

They did not paddle or walk too near the waves. His memory was that they walked briskly. His father may even have carried a stick. It was a picture of happiness. And for a stranger watching, it
might have remained like that, an idyllic scene of a father and son at ease together in the late morning on the beach in Boulogne. There was a woman bathing, a young woman being watched by an older
woman on the beach. The bather was large, perhaps even overweight, and well protected from the elements by an elaborate bathing costume. She swam out expertly, allowing herself to float back with
the waves. Then she stood facing out to sea letting her hands play with the water. Henry barely noticed her at first as his father stopped and made as though to examine something on the far
horizon. Then his father walked forward for a while, silently, distracted, and turned back to study the horizon once more. This time Henry realized that he was watching the bather, examining her
fiercely and hungrily and then turning away, observing the low dunes behind him, pretending that they also interested him to the same intense degree.

As his father turned away once more and began walking towards home, he sounded out of breath and did not speak. Henry wanted to find an excuse to run ahead and get away from him, but then his
father turned again, the expression on his face vivid, the skin blotched and the eyes sharp as though he were angry. His father was now standing on the shore, trembling, watching the swimmer who
had her back to him, her costume clinging to her. His father made no further effort to seem casual. His stare was deliberate and pointed, but no one else noticed it. The woman did not look behind,
and her companion had moved away. It was important, Henry knew, for him to pretend that this was nothing; there was no question that this could be mentioned or commented on. His father did not
move, and seemed unaware of his presence, but he must have known he was there, Henry thought, and whatever this was, this keen-eyed drinking in of the woman bather, it was enough to make his father
not care about Henry’s presence. Finally, as he turned and set out on the journey home, his father stared back regularly with the look of someone who had been hunted down and defeated. The
woman, once more, swam out to sea.

H
ENRY LOVED
the softness of the colours on the beach near Rye, the changing light, the creamy clouds moving across the sky as though with a purpose. He
had spent the last few summers here, and this summer in particular, as he walked briskly, trying for once to enjoy the day without making plans, he could not stop asking himself what he wished for
now, and answering that he wanted only more of this – calm work, calm days, a beautiful small house and this soft summer light. Before he left London, he had purchased the bicycle which now
lay waiting for him in the lane that led to the beach. He realized that he did not even want the past back, that he had learned not to ask for that. His dead would not return. Being freed of the
fear of their going gave him this strange contentment, the feeling that he wanted nothing more now but for time to move slowly.

He wished every morning when he stood on his terrace that he could find some way to catch this picture of beauty and keep it close to him. The terrace was paved and curved like the prow of a
ship and it overhung a view both as pure and as full of change as an expanse of sea. And below was Rye, the most un-English of English places, red-roofed with meandering streets and clustered
buildings, an Italian hill town with cobbled streets, its atmosphere sensuous, but reticent also and austere. He walked the streets of Rye almost every day now, studying the houses, the old shops
with small-paned windows, the square church tower, the weathered beauty of the brick. Back home, his terrace was his opera box, from where he could survey all the kingdoms of the earth. His
terrace, he thought, was as amiable as a person, perhaps even more so. He wished he could buy this house; he knew that he had already begun to resent the owner’s plans to retake the cottage
at the end of July.

In June there was hardly any night at all. He lingered on the terrace as a slow mist came over the valley and a mild, gauzed darkness fell. Within a few hours there would be hints of the
beginning of dawn. His only visitor in these days of industry and indolence wrote once again to confirm his arrival and departure. Oliver Wendell Holmes junior was an old friend, become now a
distant one, part of a group of associates, young men he had known in Newport and Boston, who had become eminent in their thirties and were now leading influences on the age. When they came to
England, they appeared mysterious to him, so confident, so adept at finishing their sentences, so used to being listened to, and yet they seemed to him, compared with men of their kind in England
and France, oddly raw and boyish, their brashness a kind of innocence. His brother William had all of that too, but it was only one half of him; the other half was made up of a deep
self-consciousness where all his rawness and freshness had been buried in irony. William knew the effect which his own deliberate and complex personality could have, but this was something that
their contemporaries, who held power in the literary world in the United States, or in the law, knew nothing about. They remained natural, and this, for Henry, was a matter of enormous
interest.