To Mrs. Wharton.
This moment was that of the height of the "Russian legend," and like everyone else H. J. was eagerly welcoming the multitudinous evidence of the passage of a vast Russian army through England to France.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
September 1st, 1914.
Dear E. W.,
Cast your intelligent eye on the picture from this a.m.'s Daily Mail that I send you and which you may not otherwise happen to see. Let it rest, with all its fine analytic power, on the types, the dress, the caps and the boots of the so-called Belgians disembarked—disembarked from where, juste ciel!—at Ostend, and be struck as I have been as soon as the thing was shown to me this a.m. by the notice-taking Skinner (my brave Dr.,) so much more notice-taking than so many of the persons around us. If they are not straight out of the historic, or even fictive, page of Tolstoy, I will eat the biggest pair of moujik boots in the collection! With which Skinner told me of speech either this morning or last evening, on his part, with a man whose friend or brother, I forget which, had just written him from Sheffield: "Train after train of Russians have been passing through here to-day (Sunday); they are a rum-looking lot!" But an enormous quantity of this apparently corroborative testimony from seen trains, with their contents stared at and wondered at, has within two or three days kept coming in from various quarters. Quantum valeat! I consider the reproduced snap-shot enclosed, however, a regular gem of evidence. What a blessing, after all, is our—our—refined visual sense!
This isn't really by way of answer to your own most valuable letter this morning received—but that is none the less gratefully noted, and shall have its independent acknowledgment. I am better, thank you, distinctly; the recovery of power to eat again means everything to me. I greatly appreciated your kind little letter to my most interesting and admirable Peggy, whom you left under the charm.
My own small domestic plot here rocks beneath my feet, since yesterday afternoon, with the decision at once to volunteer of my invaluable and irreplaceable little Burgess! I had been much expecting and even hoping for it, but definitely shrinking from the responsibility of administering the push with my own hand: I wanted the impulse to play up of itself. It now appears that it had played up from the first, inwardly—with the departure of the little Rye contingent for Dover a fortnight ago. The awfully decent little chap had then felt the pang of patriotism and martial ardour rentrés and had kept silent for fear of too much incommoding me by doing otherwise. But now the clearance has taken place in the best way in the world, and I part with him in a day or two.
...This is all now save that I am always yours too much for typists,
HENRY JAMES.