Ever your fondest of the fond,
H. J.
To Mrs. Archibald Grove.
Lamb House, Rye.
August 22nd, 1913.
My dear Kate Grove,
Please don't measure by my not-to-be-avoided delay (of three or four—or five, days) to acknowledge it, the degree of pleasure and blest relief your most kind letter represents for me. I have fallen these last years on evil days, physically speaking, and have to do things only when and as I rather difficultly can, and not after a prompter fashion. But you give me a blest occasion, and I heartily thank you for it. Ever since that so pleasant meeting of ours in Piccadilly toward the end of 1909—nearly four long years ago—have I been haunted with the dreadful sense of a debt to your benevolence that has remained woefully undischarged. I came back to this place that same day—of our happy encounter—to be taken on the morrow with the preliminaries of a wretched illness that dismally developed, that lasted actively, in short, for two long years, and that has left me for the rest of my ancient days much compromised and disqualified (though I should be better of some of it all now—I mean betterer!—if I weren't so much older—or olderer!) However, the point is that just as I had begun, on that now far-off occasion, to take the measure of what was darkly before me—that is had been clapped into bed by my Doctor here and a nurse clapped down beside me (the first of a perfect procession)—I heard from you in very kind terms, asking me to come and see you and Archibald in the country—probably at the Pollards inscribed upon your present letter. Well, I couldn't so much as make you a sign—my correspondence had so utterly gone to pieces on the spot. Little by little in the aftertime I picked up some of those pieces—others are forever scattered to the winds—and this particular piece you see I am picking up now, with a slight painful contortion, only after this lapse of the years! It is too strange and too graceless—or would be so if you hadn't just put into it a grace for which, as I say, I can scarce sufficiently thank you. The worst of such disasters and derelictions is that they take such terrific retrospective explanations and that one's courage collapses at all there is to tell, and so the wretched appearance continues. However, I repeat, you have transformed it by your generous condonation—you have helped me to tell you a small scrap of my story. It was on your part a most beautiful inspiration, and I bless my ponderous volume for its communication to you of the impulse. Quite apart from this balm to my stricken conscience, I do rejoice that the fatuous book has beguiled and interested you. I had pleasure in writing it, but I delight in the liberality of your appreciation. But I wish you had told me too something more of yourself and of Grove, more I mean than that you are thus ideally amiable—which I already knew. Your "we" has a comprehensive looseness, and I should have welcomed more dots on the i's. Almost your only detail is that you were here at some comparatively recent hour (I infer,) and that you only gave my little house a beautiful dumb glare and went your way again. Why do you do such things?—they give you almost an air of exulting in them afterwards! If I only had a magic "car" of my own I would jump into it tomorrow and come over to see you at Crowborough—I was there in that fashion, by an afternoon lift from a friend, exactly a year ago. My brother William's only daughter, a delightful young woman, and her eldest brother, a most able and eminent young man, are with me at this time, though he too briefly, and demand of me, or receive from me, all the attention my reduced energies are capable of in a social (so to speak) and adventurous way, but if anything is possible later on I will do my best toward it. I wish you were both conceivable at luncheon here. Do ask yourselves candidly if you aren't—and make me the affirmative sign. I should so like to see you. I recall myself affectionately to Archibald—I think of the ancient wonders, images, scenes—all fantasmagoric now. Yours and his all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
To William Roughead, W. S.
Mr. Roughead, at this time a stranger, had sent H. J. some literature of a kind in which he always took a keen interest—the literature of crime. The following refers to the gift of a publication of the Juridical Society of Edinburgh, dealing with trials of witches in the time of James I. Other volumes of the same nature followed, and the correspondence led to a valued friendship with the giver.
Lamb House, Rye.
August 24th, 1913.