The Master (25 page)

One of these, he discovered, was younger than he was, a blond youth with clear blue eyes totally devoid of fear or fright. He asked the boy politely how he had been injured, then leaned in close
to listen to his reply. The boy said nothing at first, shaking his head from side to side, but soon, as though he had been interrupted and was resuming a previous conversation, he began to speak
about how he had not felt the bullet entering his leg, he had not felt it at all, he said, as though that alone were his problem. It was nothing more than a bite from a bug, he said, and it was
only when he put his hand down and touched the place, that a terrible burning began.

He had hated the waiting, the boy said, the days sitting doing nothing, getting orders to march one way and then orders to march another way, with rumours all the time and nothing happening. And
now, he said, the waiting was all over and he wished he were back waiting again.

Henry told the boy that he was sure he would get better, but the boy neither assented nor demurred. He had learned stoicism, Henry thought, which sat oddly with his youth. The agony had somehow
entered into his spirit and rested there, unyielding. Henry wondered if the boy’s parents had been told of his missing limb, or if they knew where their son was. He thought of asking if he
wanted a letter written or word sent, but he did not feel he could ask. It was obvious that if the infection did not clear he would have further surgery or he would die, and what Henry could not
fathom as he tried to speak naturally and gently to the boy was his calm bravery, his whispering readiness for what was coming.

In the end, when he could think of nothing else, he offered the boy money, which the injured soldier quietly accepted, and he wrote his address at Newport down for him in case he was in need
once he had recovered. The boy studied the writing and nodded, unsmiling. Henry did not think he could ask him if he was able to read.

He sat on a deckchair on the steamboat back to Newport that evening, he and Perry keeping apart as the creaking vessel paddled slowly home. While he watched the dwindling light and wallowed in
the fading heat, he felt involved for once in an America from which he had kept himself apart. He had listened carefully but he had not known how to respond. He tried to imagine that young
man’s life under the canvas, battling for survival, expecting the worst while hoping for home. He tried to conjure up the moment when the surgeon’s knife was solemnly unsheathed and the
leg held down, and whatever available morphine and whisky were taken, and the arms were pinned back and the gag put into the mouth. He wanted to hold his young friend, help him now that the worst
was over, take him home to his family to be looked after. But he also knew that, as much as he wanted to aid and console the soldier, he wanted to be alone in his room with the night coming down
and a book close by and pen and paper and the knowledge that the door would remain shut until the morning came and he would not be disturbed. The gap between these two desires filled him with
sadness and awe at the mystery of the self, the mystery of having a single consciousness, knowing merely its own bare feelings and experiencing singly and alone its own pain or fear or pleasure or
complacency.

And suddenly now, on this return journey by steamboat in the warm evening, with the view of the soft and settling horizon, the realization of how deeply real and apart this self was came
fiercely home to him; how intact and separate this self was once the knife was cutting ruthlessly into the flesh of someone else, into the fat and muscles, the tendons and nerves and blood vessels,
the hard bone of another self, the someone in agony who was not you, the someone injured far from home under the canvas. He realized that his own separateness was complete, inviolate, just as the
soldier could never know the comfort and privilege which came from being the son of Henry James senior, who had been kept away from the war.

I
N
S
EPTEMBER
1862 his father travelled to Boston with Wilky and there he helped him and his friend Cabot Russell to join the Northern Army. Soon, having
lied about his age, Bob James also joined. Wilky and Bob became the focus of all attention. Their most casual observations were treasured and often repeated; any scrap of news about either of the
younger brothers was passed on without delay to the older ones.

In Cambridge Henry, after lodging with William for a brief stretch, found himself a small, square, low-browed room with deep window benches where he set about arranging his books with a highly
refined system of classification. He walked the country roads around Cambridge and he studied with relish the solitary dwellings on the long grassy slopes under the tall elms; he imagined not only
the life within, but how that life could be rendered, how it would be shaped and moulded were a young Hawthorne to pass by.

He joined his brother for meals at Miss Upsham’s at the corner of Kirkland and Oxford Streets, listening to every word uttered by the other diners, enjoying the protection of his voluble
brother and not being called on to speak much himself. He loved the spare, dry, witty talk of the theology student; he listened with respect to old Professor Child, whose tone when the war was
discussed was as sombre and darkly morbid as the many ballads he had collected.

During the lectures, Henry paid as much attention as he could to the subject in question, but mainly he examined his fellow students, studying the types, weighing the expressions from the dull
and vaguely handsome to the memorable and remarkable. He sought to let his eyes do the thinking for him, deciphering the faces, the smiles and scowls, the ways of walking and moving, and
transforming them into characters and temperaments. Most of his fellow students were New Englanders, and he could easily detect in their solemn faces during the lectures, in their lack of softness
or easy humour, in the way they composed themselves and walked, that their ancestors had stood in pulpits and preached with fervour the difference between right and wrong, and that they had been
brought up in homes where such principles were firmly established.

Now, as they sat through law lectures, a shadow hung over them, the shadow of the war for which they had not volunteered, a war never mentioned among them unless there was fresh and urgent news.
They did not look like young men who would easily accept or give orders, or march in unison, or have their limbs amputated. They believed in the Union and the abolition of slavery as they believed
in God, but they also believed in their own freedom and privilege. They knew that abolition was a noble cause, and they included it in their prayers; at the same time they took notes and read large
tomes to prepare themselves for their future. Looking at them, Henry found, was easier than talking to them. In their physiognomies he saw a boyish rectitude guarding the rest of them like a great
stone wall.

While Henry attended his lectures assiduously, he barely opened a book on the law. Instead, he read Sainte-Beuve, he wandered into Lowell’s lectures on English and French literature, he
listened to Emerson, when he came to Boston, attacking slavery. He went to the theatre. He steeped himself in whatever life Cambridge and Boston had to offer. The war was a faint sound which at
intervals became louder and a few times piercingly close. One day in Harvard he had seen his cousin Gus Barker, clearly home on leave, in the distance but he had not run after him, believing that
he would see him in the days that followed. But he did not see him and when Gus was shot dead in Virginia, he could not reconcile the memory of his cousin, his skin so white and his eyes so
brimming with expectation, his body so full of coiled strength, with the idea that he had been broken and destroyed by a bullet, that he, so young and unready, had been wrenched asunder with pain,
and left lying there as others passed by before he was buried in a distant place where no one knew him.

His mother, when she wrote telling him the news of Gus, said that she had also written to William. As Henry went to his next meal at Miss Upsham’s he did not know what he might say to
William about their cousin, and he noticed as William came into the dining room a look of dark embarrassment crossing his face. He found himself shaking William’s hand, and this made the
unease between them even worse. William nodded at him gravely. Neither of them could say anything. It was only when William told Professor Child that their cousin had been killed in Virginia by a
sniper’s bullet that the spell was broken and Gus Barker’s death could be discussed.

‘All the doomed young men,’ Professor Child said, ‘all of them healthy and brave, and leaving those who loved them far behind, lying dead on the battlefield while the war goes
on.’

Henry wondered if Professor Child was quoting from a ballad or if he was attempting to speak naturally. He noticed that William had tears in his eyes.

‘The best went to war,’ Professor Child said, ‘and the best were cut down.’

Sometimes, during these meals at Miss Upsham’s, Professor Child seemed on the verge of stating that those who remained at home, including his fellow diners at Miss Upsham’s, were
cowards, but then he appeared to restrain himself.

In the months that followed neither William nor Henry ever mentioned the name of Gus Barker to each other. Each of them felt, Henry guessed, a guilt which they did not wish to admit to, or
discuss.

W
HEN
H
ENRY
went to visit Wilky at Readville he could not believe that this soft companion of his childhood should have mastered, by mere aid of his own
gaiety and sociability, such mysteries and such hardships as the army offered. To become first a happy soldier and then an easy officer was, it seemed to Henry, for his younger brother an exercise
in liking his fellow man. He later remembered his brother’s companions as laughing, welcoming and sunburnt youth, who, like his companions in law school, seemed to bristle with Boston
genealogies, but, despite this, had taken to army life, displaying an openness, a joy in the outdoors and even a jokiness that belied their upbringing and background. The hospital camp at
Portsmouth seemed very far away and, as he left that day to return to Harvard, he felt that a long war, or even a bloody one, was a distant prospect from the picture of golden order and good
feeling that he had just witnessed.

His mother transcribed the parts of Wilky’s letters which she judged most informative or most edifying or most alarming and included them in her letters to Henry and William. In January
Wilky wrote home about a malignant fever called malaria which was affecting both armies. ‘Two weeks ago,’ he wrote, ‘we buried two of our company in three days, and a great many
have been taken sick with it.’ He managed to sound both impatient for action and impatient for home, but what Henry took from the letters more than anything was his brother’s idealism
and belief in the rightness of his cause and his readiness to fight for it. Wilky wrote and his mother transcribed,

I am very well and in capital spirits, but now and then rather blue about home. If things don’t look more promising than they do now by the end of next May, I fear very much
we shall not see home, for the government will I expect make an appeal to the 300,000 nine-months men to stay three months longer, that their services are really needed. What could they say to an
appeal emanating from such a high place and for such a high cause. For myself, I am content to stay if the country needs it, but it would come hard I assure you.

Henry imagined his mother writing this out, having carefully selected it. He knew that she would have been in two minds about sending it as it suggested clearly where duty lay. She added nothing
and Henry contented himself with the idea that she, as much as he or William, had engineered this state of affairs in which Wilky and Bob represented the James family in the war.

William and he did not communicate much with each other during these months, even though they ate at the same table three times a day. If a letter came from his mother which Henry thought that
William should see, he handed it to him without comment; and William did the same. Both brothers were enjoying their solitude, the pleasures of introspection and intermittent company and freedom
from parental interference and the noise of domestic life, but more than anything they were both wrapped up in their reading.

This was, on the other hand, an heroic time in Wilky’s life, which he would not experience again, and would not, indeed, recover from. He volunteered to serve under Colonel Shaw as an
officer in the 54th Regiment. Its departure from Boston was a glorious occasion, which Henry James senior travelled specially to Boston to see, using the house of Oliver Wendell Holmes senior as a
vantage point to view the parade, which would be for him a pivotal moment in the history of his family and the history of liberty in America.

William and Henry learned of the event from their mother. When her letter came informing them of their father’s arrival, it was clear that she presumed both brothers would wish to view for
themselves Wilky’s brave triumph and personally to witness a singular conjoining of the family’s history with that of the country’s destiny. It seemed not to occur to her that
they might not wish to attend.

William wrote, however, immediately to tell her that he had an important experiment to perform in the laboratory on that very day, that he would make every effort to be there, but should these
efforts fail, then the event would have to take place without him.

Henry waited until the date came closer and then he wrote to his mother about his back, which was providing him with pain, and his need for rest and his hope that he would be much improved by 28
May, the date of the event, and, in fact, he promised to do his utmost to be there, but should his back continue to trouble him, or take a turn for the worse, then he would not be able to meet his
father and accompany him to the house of Dr Holmes. He did not read it over before he sent it.

On the morning of 28 May Henry did not go to breakfast at Miss Upsham’s and, on arriving for lunch, found that William had arranged to absent himself from all meals that day. Professor
Child and two of the others, all fanatical abolitionists, were preparing to attend the parade and presumed that William’s absence was due to his eagerness to see his brother, whose bravery in
joining the 54th under Colonel Shaw they all admired. It struck Henry that they also presumed he had organized his own viewing of the regiment and, as he got ready to slip away, no one asked him
where he was going.