Lamb House, Rye.
[August 4th, 1914.]
Dearly beloved Howard!
I think one of the reasons is that I have so allowed silence and separation to accumulate—the effort of breaking through the mass becomes in that case so formidable; the mass being thus the monstrous mountain that blocks up the fair scene and that one has to explain away. I am engaged in that effort at the present moment, however—I am breaking through the mass, boring through the mountain, I feel, as I put pen to paper—and this, too, though I don't, though I shan't, though I can't particularly "explain." And why should I treat you at this time of day—or, to speak literally, of night—as if you had begun suddenly not to be able to understand without a vulgar demonstration on the blackboard? As I should never dream of resorting to that mode of public proof that I tenderly and unabatedly love you, so why should I think it necessary to chalk it up there that there was, all those strange weeks and months during which I made you no sign, an absolute inevitability in the graceless appearance? I call them strange because of the unnatural face that they wear to me now—but they had at the time the deadliest familiar look; the look of all the other parts of life that one was giving up and doing without—even if it didn't resemble them in their comparative dismissability. From them I learned perforce at last to avert my head, whereas there wasn't a moment of the long stretch during which I never either wrote or wired you for generous leave to come down to tea or dinner or both, there wasn't a moment when I hadn't, from Chelsea to Windsor, my eyes fondly fixed on you. You seemed rather to go out of their reach when I was placed in some pretended assurance that you had left Qu'acre for Scotland, but now that I hear, by some equally vague voice of the air, that you are still at home—and this appears more confirmed to me—I have you intensely before me again; yes, and so vividly that I even make you out as sometimes looking at me. I think in fact it's a good deal the magnanimous sadness I so catch from you that makes me feel to-night how little longer I can bear my own black air of having fallen away while I yet really and intensely stick, and therefore get on the way to you again, so far as this will take me.
It will soon be three weeks since I came back here from Chelsea—which I was capable of leaving, yes, without having made you a sign. It was a case, dearest Howard, of the essential inevitability—the mark you yourself must in these days so recognise in all your omissions and frustrations, all your lapses from the mortal act. Even you must have to know them so on your own part—and you must feel them just to have to be as they are (and as you are.) That was the way the like things had to be with me—as I was; and it's to insult our long and perfect understanding not to feel that you have treasures of the truest interpretation of everything whatever in our common condition. Oh how I so want at last, all the same, to have a direct word or two from your blest self on your own share of that community! I have questioned whomsoever I could in any faint degree suppose worth questioning on this score of the show you are making—but of course, I admit, elicited no word of any real value. Five words of your own articulation—by which I mean scratches of your own pen—will go further with me than any amount of roundabout twaddle. I hear of predatory loose women quartered upon you again—and I groan in my far-off pain; especially when I reflect that their fatuous account would be that you were in health and joy quite exactly by reason of them. I think the great public blackness most of all makes me send out this signal to you—as if I were lighting the twinkle of a taper to set over against you in my window.
August 5th. The taper went out last night, and I am afraid I now kindle it again to a very feeble ray—for it's vain to try to talk as if one weren't living in a nightmare of the deepest dye. How can what is going on not be to one as a huge horror of blackness? Of course that is what it is to you, dearest Howard, even as it is to your infinitely sickened inditer of these lines. The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of those two infamous autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words. But one's reflections don't really bear being uttered—at least we each make them enough for our individual selves and I didn't mean to smother you under mine in addition to your own....
But good-night again—my lamp now is snuffed out. Have I mentioned to you that I am not here alone?—having with me my niece Peggy and her younger brother—both "caught" for the time, in a manner; though willing, even glad, as well as able, to bear their poor old appalled Uncle the kindest company—very much the same sort as William bears you. I embrace you, and him too, and am ever your faithfullest old
H. J.
To Henry James, junior.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
August 6th, 1914.