Генри Джеймс - The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

But enough of my own otherwise meagre annals.... I must catch my post. I haven't sounded you for the least news of your own—it being needless to tell you that I hold out my cap for it even as an organ-grinder who makes eyes for pence to a gentleman on a balcony: especially when the balcony overhangs your luxuriant happy valley and your turquoise sea. I go on taking immense comfort in the "Second Home," as I beg your pardon for calling it, that your sister and her husband must make for you, and am almost as presumptuously pleased with it as if I had invented it. I am myself literally eating a baked apple and a biscuit on Xmas evening all alone: I have no one in the house, I never dine out here under any colour (there are to be found people who do!) and I have been deaf to the syren voice of Paris, and to other gregarious pressure. But I wish you a brave feast and a blameless year and am yours, my dear Norris, all faithfully and fondly,

H.J. had inadvertently addressed the preceding letter to 'E. W. Norris Esq.'

My dear Norris,

It came over me in the oddest way, weirdly and dimly, as I lay soaking in my hot bath an hour ago, that my jaded and inadvertent hand (I have written so many letters in so few days, and you see the effect on everyone doubtless but your own impeccably fingered self) superscribed my Xmas envelope with the monstrous collocation "E.W."! The effect has been probably to make you think the letter a circular and chuck it into the fire—or, if you have opened it, to convince you that my handsome picture of my "health" is true—if true at all—of my digestion and other vulgar parts, at the expense of my brain. Clearly you must believe me in distinct cerebral decline. Yet I'm not, I am only—or was—in a state of purely and momentarily manual muddle. But the curious and interesting thing is: Why, suddenly, as I lay this cold morning agreeably steaming , did the vision of the hind-part-before order come straight at me out of the vapours, after three or four days, when I didn't know I was thinking of you?

Well, it only shows how much you are, my dear Norris, in the thoughts of yours remorsefully,

P.S. I hope, now, I did do it after all!

H.J. had enjoyed the hospitality of these friends at Philadelphia, during his last visit to America.

Dictated.

Dear William and Letitia!

It would be monstrous of me to say that what I most valued in William's last brave letter was Letitia's gentle "drag" upon it; and I hasten to insist that when I dwell on the pleasure so produced by Letitia's presence in it (to the extent of her gently "dragging") I feel that she at least will know perfectly what I mean! Explain this to William, my dear Letitia: I leave all the burden to you —so used as you are to burdens! It was delightful, I can honestly say, to hear from you no long time since—and whether by controlled or uncontrolled inspiration; and I tick a small space clear this morning—clear in an air fairly black with the correspondence "of the season"—just to focus you fondly in it and make, for the friendly sound of my Remington, a penetrable medium and a straight course. I am shut up, as mostly, you see, in the little stronghold your assault of which has never lost you honour, at least—I mean the honour of the brave besieger—however little else it may have brought you; and I waggle this small white flag at you, from my safe distance, over the battlements, as for a cheerful truce or amicable New Year's parley. I think I must figure to you a good deal as a "banked-in" Esquimau with his head alone extruding through the sole orifice of his hut, or perhaps as a Digger Indian, bursting through his mound, by the same perforation, even as a chicken through its shell: by reason of the abject immobility practised by me while you and Letitia hurl yourselves from one ecstasy of movement, one form of exercise, one style of saddled or harnessed or milked or prodded or perhaps merely "fattened," quadruped, to another. Your letter—this last—is a noble picture of a free quadrupedal life—which gives me the sense, all delightful, of seeing you both alone erect and nimble and graceful in the midst of the browsing herd of your subjects. Well, it all sounds delightfully pastoral to one whose "stable" consists but of the go-cart in which the gardener brings up the luggage of those of my visitors (from the station) who advance successfully to the stage of that question of transport; and my outhouses of the shed under which my solitary henchman (but sufficient to a drawbridge that plays so easily up!) "attends to the boots" of those confronted with the inevitable subsequent phase of early matutinal departure! All of which means, dear both of you, that I do seem to read into your rich record the happiest evidences of health as well as of wealth. You take my breath away—as, for that matter, you can but too easily figure with your ever-natural image of me gaping through a crevice of my door!—the only other at all equal loss of it proceeding but from my mild daily revolution up and down our little local eminence here. No, you won't believe it—that these have been my only revolutions since I last risked, at a loophole, seeing you thunder past. I shall risk it again when you thunder back—and really, though it spoils the consistency of my builded metaphor, watch fondly for the charming flash that will precede, and prepare! I haven't been even as far as to see the good Abbeys at Fairford—was capable of not even sparing that encouragement when she kindly wrote to me for a visit toward the autumn's end. I haven't so much as pilgrimised to the other shrine in Tite St.—and, having so little to tell you, really mustn't prolong this record of my vacancy. I am quite spending the winter here—"bracing" for what the spring and summer may bring. But I do get, as the very breath of the Spice-islands, the balmy sidewind of your general luxuriance, and it makes me glad and grateful for you, and keeps me just as much as ever your faithful, vigilant, steady, sturdy friend,

The work just finished was the revision of The High Bid , shortly to be produced by Mr. and Mrs. Forbes Robertson.

My dear Edith,

G. T. Lapsley has gone to bed—he has been seeing the New Year in with me (generously giving a couple of days to it)—and I snatch this hour from out the blizzard of Xmas and Year's End and New Year's Beginning missives, to tell you too belatedly how touched I have been with your charming little Xmas memento—an exquisite and interesting piece for which I have found a very effective position on the little old oak-wainscotted wall of my very own room. There it will hang as a fond reminder of tout ce que je vous dois. (I am trying to make use of an accursed "fountain" pen—but it's a vain struggle; it beats me, and I recur to this familiar and well-worn old unimproved utensil.) I have passed here a very solitary and casanier Christmastide (of wondrous still and frosty days, and nights of huge silver stars,) and yesterday finished a job of the last urgency for which this intense concentration had been all vitally indispensable. I got the conditions, here at home thus, in perfection—I put my job through, and now—or in time—it may have, on my scant fortunes, a far-reaching effect. If it does have, you'll be the first all generously to congratulate me, and to understand why, under the stress of it, I couldn't indeed break my little started spell of application by a frolic absence from my field of action. If it, on the contrary, fails of that influence I offer my breast to the acutest of your silver arrows; though the beautiful charity with which you have drawn from your critical quiver nothing more fatally-feathered than that dear little framed and glazed, squared and gilded étrenne serves for me as a kind of omen of my going unscathed to the end.... I admit that it's horrible that we can't—nous autres—talk more face to face of the other phenomena; but life is terrible, tragic, perverse and abysmal—besides, patientons . I can't pretend to speak of the phenomena that are now renewing themselves round you; for there is the eternal penalty of my having shared your cup last year—that I must taste the liquor or go without—there can be no question of my otherwise handling the cup. Ah I'm conscious enough, I assure you, of going without, and of all the rich arrears that will never—for me—be made up—! But I hope for yourselves a thoroughly good and full experience—about the possibilities of which, as I see them, there is, alas, all too much to say. Let me therefore but wonder and wish!… But it's long past midnight, and I am yours and Teddy's ever so affectionate