The Master (20 page)

He would, he thought, return to buy the tapestry once a suitable length of time had elapsed.

H
E WAS LOSING
London; he put himself down for the Reform Club, joining the long list, knowing it would take many years and much attrition before his
name would be at the top. He loved imagining a London life in the comfort of the Reform Club, the care and attention of the staff, and the vast city at his disposal. He had, he mused to himself,
been exposed to London all his life, having been taken here at the age of six months on one of his father’s early quests for eternal wisdom, earthly satisfaction and something nameless and
numinous which would always manage to evade him.

He knew, because his Aunt Kate had told him many times throughout his teenage years, that they had rented a cottage near the Great Park of Windsor and were the most fortunate of families,
possessing two healthy boys whose daily antics held their parents and their aunt in thrall, and having enough money for Henry senior to pursue his private interests among the most famous minds of
the age, to search for truth, and, if it could not be found, to make the journey towards it memorable and serious and worthwhile. Henry senior was interested in goodness, in the great good plan
which God had set for man; each of us, he believed, must learn to decipher this plan, and live as though no one had ever lived before. His task, in reading and writing and talking and bringing up
his children, was to reconcile the essential newness and goodness of each member of the human species with the darkness which lay all around and lurked within.

As Henry prepared to leave London, Edmund Gosse became a regular visitor, making sure as much as he could that he was not disturbing Henry, or outstaying the welcome which was generally extended
to him. He had been reading one of the few copies of the writings of Henry James senior to have made its way across the Atlantic and he had also become interested, for reasons of his own, in
childhood experience, especially experience in infancy, which he believed, as a result of a series of lectures he had attended, could affect behaviour more than was previously imagined. He became
fascinated by the account he read by Henry’s father about a central experience in his life which had occurred in the house he had rented in the Great Park of Windsor.

His father had written of what happened to him in that cottage near the Park as a moment of revelation and exhilaration; he mentioned it often and Henry remembered that his mother’s face
darkened each time the subject was rehearsed. Aunt Kate’s face darkened too, but it was she who had several times recounted the story to Henry, and there was, he remembered, in her expression
a sense of satisfaction that the story could be told again and to as concerned and attentive a listener as young Henry.

Gosse had not known that Henry was an infant in the house when it happened. He had raised the subject merely to ask if it had affected Henry’s father’s subsequent behaviour. When he
discovered that Henry and William were present, then he asked Henry, in a hushed and urgent tone, to tell him everything he knew about it, promising that it was neither for publication nor for
dissemination. Henry pointed out that he was an infant and had no memory of it, and that his father’s account was in the book.

‘But it must have been spoken about in the family?’ Gosse asked.

‘Yes, my Aunt Kate spoke of it to me, but my mother disliked the subject.’

‘Your Aunt Kate was present when it occurred?’ Gosse asked.

Henry nodded.

‘How did she describe it?’ Gosse asked.

‘She was a great story-teller, so one cannot be sure of her veracity,’ Henry said.

‘But you must tell me what she said.’

He tried to recount to Gosse how his aunt had told him the story. It was an afternoon in late spring, she always began, warm for the time of year, and bright, and once they had eaten and retired
from the table her brother-in-law had remained there alone, rapt in thought as was his habit. Often, she said, he would move blindly from the table to reach for pen and paper and write obsessively,
discarding some of the pages he read over by making them into a ball and flinging them fiercely across the room. Often he would search for a book, standing up suddenly and walking too fast across
the room dragging his wooden leg behind him as though it were a burden. He could be very excited by the book’s meaning or message. There was a battle going on, Aunt Kate used the same words
each time, between his own sweetness and the heavy puritan hand which his father, old William James of Albany, had placed on his shoulder. Everywhere he went, she said, Henry James senior saw love
and the beauty of God’s plan, but the old puritan teaching would not let him believe his eyes. Daily, within him, the battle went on. He was restless and impossible, but he was also, in his
searching, innocent and easily enraptured. His first great crisis had come in his youth when his leg had had to be amputated after a fire; now in the late spring in London, he was awaiting his
second visitation.

‘My Aunt Kate,’ Henry said, ‘was very dramatic in her delivery. She told me that they had left him reading. The day was mild and they had taken us young boys for a walk. He was
alone when the attack came; it appeared suddenly from nowhere, like a huge obscure shape in the night, an angry, broken, pecking bird of prey, squatting in the corner ready to take him, all black
spirit, yet palpable, visibly there, hissing, come for him alone. He knew why it had appeared, she said; it had been sent to destroy him. From that moment, he was reduced to the state of an infant
terrified and then terrified again until he believed that it would never go from him, whatever it was. When they found him, he was curled on the ground, his hands over his ears, whimpering, calling
for them. William and I were two and a half and one, and were in turn terrified by the sight of his fear and the sound of his whimpering voice. Aunt Kate brought us instantly away. William, she
said, was pale for days afterwards and would not sleep without his mother in the room. Neither of us, of course, has any memory of it.’

‘There is no guarantee of that,’ Gosse said. ‘The memory may be locked within.’

‘No,’ Henry said sternly. ‘Nothing is locked within. We have no memory of it. I am certain of that.’

‘Go on, please continue,’ Gosse said.

‘My aunt told me that my mother had to lift him from the ground, believing at first that he had been attacked by felons, and then she had to listen to his description of what he saw,
telling him all the while that there was no black shape, no strange figure squatting in the corner, that he was safe. She could not stop his tears, nor could she fully ascertain what had happened.
Soon, she realized that he was not talking about an animal or a thief; what had happened had occurred in his mind, his imagination. It was a dark vision and she did now as she had done in the first
year of their marriage when he had nightmares. She found a pair of scissors and slowly and gently began to cut his fingernails, talking to him softly and making him concentrate on the motions of
the scissors. Then he became calm and she took him to their room and stayed with him.’

‘But she left you alone?’ Gosse asked.

‘No, of course not,’ Henry replied. ‘My aunt looked after us. When we were in bed that night and my father had finally calmed down, she sat with my mother and they did not know
whom to consult or what to do. My father, once she began to comfort him, became silent, his eyes vacant, his mouth open. He did not stop making low whimpering sounds or uttering phrases which
sounded like gibberish. They were away from home and knew no one other than my father’s distinguished friends, and they did not know if they could call on Carlyle or Thackeray and ask them
how the patient, if that was the word, could be treated, or indeed if such dark and terrifying moments were common to men who teased out the meanings of things to the exclusion of professional or
domestic duties.’

‘So what did they do?’ Gosse asked.

‘My father slept that night, as did we, but the two women watched over us, aware that life would change now. My mother knew what it was, my aunt told me, and she always believed it no
matter what else was said. She believed that the devil had visited a philosopher, but it was a devil my father had imagined, or come to see in his own dreamlife which merged oddly with his reading
life in those months. My mother believed in the devil, but knew that only he could see it, and to him it was utterly real, a face that lurked on the other side of the glass of every window he
approached. No one else could see it because no one else had been delving into thoughts and beliefs in which darkness itself, and devilry, would be banished from our concept of the world. That was
my father.’

‘But what did your mother and aunt finally do?’ Gosse asked.

‘They had, Aunt Kate said, two children and a house to take care of and they only saw what was there. The doctors insisted he be quiet, neither read nor write, and not think, if he could
help it, nor make visits. What Aunt Kate remembered most from these months was that every time my mother came into the room, my father stretched out his arms as though he were an infant seeking to
be lifted. He lived in fear that what he had seen would return; he scoured the corners of rooms and the window with his eyes. He lived in a world beyond them; even his speech seemed
impaired.’

‘Did your aunt say how this affected you and your brother?’ Gosse asked.

Henry sighed. He did not know why he had agreed to tell his friend the story.

‘On one of those days when he seemed most helpless, it seems I began to walk,’ Henry said. ‘It came suddenly and surprisingly, and soon, I was an eager and confident little
walker. It was as though I had changed places with my father. Slowly they understood why I had been so quick to learn. I wished to follow William everywhere he went; I watched William with hungry
eyes in case he moved, and now if William went outside, or crossed the room, I followed him and clung to him, much to his annoyance. I had not, apparently, smiled or laughed easily, but now that I
could walk I laughed at anything William did which seemed to me even mildly funny. It was, Aunt Kate said, a difficult household as the English summer began.’

‘I can imagine,’ Gosse said. ‘How extraordinary!’

‘In the end, of course,’ Henry went on, ‘it was all forgotten, or placed in history, as you know, as an important moment in my father’s climb towards the peaks of
knowledge and wisdom.’

‘But did it seem like that to them?’ Gosse asked.

‘No.’ Henry smiled. ‘No, Aunt Kate said it never seemed like that to herself or her sister. And to their horror, my father began to describe his dark ordeal to all visitors and
then to strangers.

And thus, as you must have read, in a watering place, he met a lady, a certain Mrs Chichester, and he described to her his squatting, hissing beast. Mrs Chichester responded immediately: what
had happened to him had happened to others and was a sign that he had come close to understanding the great plan, God’s dream for man, she said, and he must read the Swedish philosopher
Swedenborg who understood these things as no one else did. During that time, it seems, my father took any new suggestion as vastly superior to the previous suggestion. In London he read two books
by Swedenborg, even though he had foresworn reading, and in one of these books he found that what had occurred to him that afternoon was called a vastation, and nothing he ever heard again
convinced him that it was not so. This vastation, it seemed, was a step on the road to the full understanding that God made us in his likeness, and that our urges and appetites, our thoughts and
feelings are profoundly sanctified. Thus my father became happy again, and, filled with Swedenborg, believed it his mission to spread the truth to all mankind, at least to the English-speaking
variety, and indeed, mainly in America, not, I should add, that any of them paid much attention.’

‘Perhaps it explains why you have come back here,’ Gosse said.

‘To England?’ Henry asked.

‘Close to the scene of where it happened. The lectures say that a child can take in everything, hold it but not absorb it in what they call the unconscious.’

‘Why is not William here then?’ Henry asked.

‘I do not know,’ Gosse said. ‘It is a mystery.’

‘Perhaps you will understand when I say that I do not wish to discuss it again,’ Henry said.

For several days he could not work and found when he woke in the morning that he suffered from a great regret at having told Gosse the story, until he put the episode out of his mind so that he
might continue making his plans in peace.

S
OME DAYS
, Henry believed, he wrote too much and too quickly, working his Scot too hard. Once the stories were published, he paid little attention to
them, revising them once for book publication and then forgetting about them. However, when his new collection
Embarrassments
appeared and Gosse had much to say about one of the stories, he
read it over so that he could discuss it further with his friend. It was one of his ghost stories, called ‘The Way It Came’, and it seemed to him now too thin to survive even as a
potboiler. Gosse wanted to discuss the technique of the first-person voice, how very difficult it was to make it convincing. He was, Henry thought, too polite and tactful to allow himself to stray
from the general point to the particular story. But, as the conversation between them about the story proceeded over a few meetings and began to irritate him, a second matter raised by Gosse began
to interest him profoundly. Gosse insisted that, since most readers did not fully believe in ghosts, then most ghost stories could not fully be credible. They needed, he said, both to be ghost
stories and to have a rational explanation at the same time; they needed to be both frightening and within the bounds of the possible, he insisted.

Henry disagreed. He believed that a story should be able to suggest anything at all, including the most outlandish matter, but he was, nonetheless, interested in Gosse’s argument, although
it was too vehement and too eager to impose rules on subjects which, in Henry’s opinion, required great latitude. Privately, Henry was appalled by ‘The Way It Came’ and regretted
collecting it in a volume, knowing that it might have been better to let it sink. He quite resented Gosse for noticing it.