I broke off this a.m. to go over to Lydd, where I've had, all summer, a friend in camp, and promised to pay him a visit. My amanuensis, who has been taking at the Paris exhibition a week of joy refused to his employer (and indeed wholly undesired by him—did your "slow" return from Marienbad partly consist of the same?) comes back to-morrow, and my friend's battalion departs on Saturday—so it was my one chance to redeem my perpetually falsified vow. I went by train and bicycled back—in the teeth of a gale now fully developed here and howling in my old chimneys; which sounds the knell of this (to do it justice) incomparable September. I don't quite know what Drury Lane military drama effects I had counted on—but I trundled home with the depressed sense of something that hadn't wholly come off (in the way of a romantic appeal,) a dusty, scrubby plain in which dirty, baby soldiers pigged about with nothing particular to do. However, I've performed my promise, and I sit down to a pile of correspondence that, for many days past, has refused visibly to shrink.... You excite, with your Scandinavian and Austrian holidays and junketings, the envious amaze of poor motionless and shillingless me. I've been thinking of appealing to your "Suffrages," but I more and more feel that I could never afford you. My watering place is Hastings, and my round tour is rounded by the afternoon. But good-night; my servant has just deposited by my side the glass of boiling water which constitutes his nightly admonition that it's "high time" I went to bed—and constitutes my own inexpensive emulation of Marienbad and Copenhagen—where I am sure Gosse drinks the most exotic things. Please say to Miss Effie that I doubly regret having to be deaf to any kind urgency of hers, and that I hope she will find means to include me in some prayer for the conversion of the benighted. But my hot water is cooling, and it takes me so long to let it gouge its inward course that I will be first yours, my dear Norris, always—though I'm afraid you will say always impracticably—
HENRY JAMES.
To A. F. de Navarro.
"The Place of the Thirty Peacocks" was H. J.'s name for the old moated house of Groombridge Place, near Tunbridge Wells, which he had visited some years before with Mr. de Navarro.
Lamb House, Rye.
November 13, 1900.
Dear and exquisite Tony,
I would deal death, or à peu près, to the man who should have said that I would have delayed these too many days to acknowledge your beautiful little letter from—or about—the Place of the Thirty Peacocks. Yet he, low wretch, would have been, after all, in the secrets of Fate; he would have foreseen me a good deal accablé with arrears, interruptions, a deluge of proofsheets, a complexity of duties and distractions; he would have heard in advance my ineffectual groans and even have pitied my baffled efforts. These things have eventuated to-night in the irresistible desire to chat with you by the fire before turning in. The fire burns low, and the clock marks midnight: everything but the quantity of combustion reminds me of those small nocturnal hours, two years ago, when I was communing with you thus and the fire didn't burn low. You saved my life then, and my house, and all that was mine; and for aught I know you are now saving us all again—from some other deadly element. To-night it's water—or the absense of it; I don't quite understand which. Something has happened to my water supply, through a pulling-up of the street, though it doesn't yet quite appear whether I'm to perish by thirst or by submersion. Here I sit as usual, at any rate, holding on to you—also as usual—while the clock ticks in the stillness.—I can't tell you how happily inspired I feel it to have been of you to remember our erstwhile pilgrimage to the Maeterlinck house and moat and peacocks and ladies—for that's how—as a moated Maeterlinck matter—the whole impression of our old visit, yours and mine and Miss Reubell's comes back to me. I rejoice that they are still en place, and how glad they must have been to see you! Willingly would I too taste again the sweet old impression—which your letter charmingly expresses. But I seem to travel, to peregrinate, less and less—and I am reduced to living on my past accumulations. I wish they were larger. But I make the most of them. They include very closely you and Mrs. You. To them I do seem reduced with you. What with our so far separated country settlements and present absence of a London common centre (save the Bond St. corner of which J. S. is the pivot!) memories and sighs, echoes and ghosts are our terms of intercourse. You oughtn't, you know, to have driven in stakes in your merciless Midland. This southern shore, twinkling and twittering, with a semi-foreign light, a kind of familiar wink in the air, would have favoured your health, your spirits, and heaven knows your being here would have favoured mine. I breakfast all these weeks, mostly, with my window open to the garden and a flood of sunshine pouring in. It's really meridional. It would—Rye would—remind you of Granada—more or less. But I hope, after Xmas, to be in town for three or four months. You will surely pass and repass there. When I, at intervals, go up, on some practical urgency, for three or four hours, I always see the abysmal Jon. He usually has some news of you to give; and when he hasn't it's not for want of—on my part—solemn invocation. However, I must now solemnly invoke slumber. Good-night—good-morning. I bless your house, its glorious mistress and its innocent heir.
Yours always and ever,
HENRY JAMES.