Her dead face changed as the light changed. She seemed youny and old, exhausted and quite utterly beautiful. He smiled at her as she lay still, her face pale and drawn, yet exquisite and fine. He remembered her anger at being left a life interest in a shawl and other worldly goods by her aunt Kate. Both he and his sister would die childless; what they owned was theirs only while they lived. There would be no direct heirs. They had never wanted it. He felt they had both been banished, sent into exile, left alone, while their siblings had married and their parents had followed one another into death. Sadly and tenderly, he touched her cold, composed hands.
Henry loved the softness of the colors on the beach near Rye, the changing light, the creamy clouds moving across the sky as through with a purpose. He had spent the last few summers here, and this summer in particular as he walked briskly, trying for once to enjoy the day without making plans, he could not stop asking himself what he wished for now, and answering that he wanted only more of this -- calm work, calm days, a beautiful small house and this soft summer light. Before he left London, he had purchased the bicycle which now lay waiting for him in the lane that led to the beach. He realized that he did not even want the past back, that he had learned not to ask for that. His dead would not return. Being freed of the fear of their going gave him this strange contentment, the feeling that he wanted nothing more now but for time to go slowly.
"Not at all, sir. Nothing is settled." She smiled at him. Her expression was almost condescending as she continued. "Very simply, I do not know if being physically weaker than man means we understand less, or live less intelligently in the world. You see, I have the evidence close at hand which is my own weak mind, but I do not think it is weaker than anyone else's."
"Sleep," she said. "Oh, I don't sleep. I've given it up."
"Yes," Henry replied, stretching. "I used to think it went more slowly in England, but having lived here for so long I know that to be an illusion. I depend now on Italy as the place where time goes most slowly."
This longing, he knew, would in time come to him, too as the garden door cracked, or the branches of the trees beat against the window as he read by lamplight, or lay awake in that old house, and in one of those seconds before worthier thoughts could surface, the first thought would be to welcome what was coming now to break the sad, helpless monotony of the self, to feel a moment of desperate hope that it was come at least, whatever it was. Even in its darkest shape, it would offer the same moment of pure, sharp release as a flash of lightning offers to the brittle air in a dried-up landscape.
Even still, all these years later, he thought, he hated doctors, and had drawn a portrait of a most unpleasant member of the profession with much relish in Washington Square, using some of Dr.Richardson's more obnoxious mannerisms in his description of his Dr. Sloper's professional habits. He wondered indeed if the visit itself, in all its humiliation and roughness, had not in fact caused a genuine, serious backache that was with him to this day. He had suffered a great deal from constipation as well, and often blamed it on Dr. Richardson, and made sure to keep away from others of his profession lest they should cause some new malady.
He sat on a deck chair on the steamboat back to Newport that evening, he and Perry keeping apart as the creaking vessel paddled slowly home. While he watched the dwindling light and wallowed in the fading heat, he felt involved for once in an America from which he had kept himself apart. He had listened carefully but he had not known how to respond. He tried to imagine that young man's life under the canvas battling for survival, expecting the worst while hoping for home. He tried to conjure up the moment when the surgeon's knife was solemnly unsheathed and the leg held down, and whatever available morphine and whiskey were taken, and the arms were pinned back and the gag put into the mouth. He wanted to hold his young friend, help him now that the worst was over, take him home to his family to be looked after. But he also knew that, as much as he wanted to aid and console the soldier, he wanted to be alone in his room withe the night coming down and a book close by and pen and paper and the knowledge that the door would remain shut until the morning came and he would not be disturbed. The gap between these two desires filled him with sadness and awe at the mystery of the self, the mystery of having a single consciousness, knowing merely its own bare feelings and experiencing singly and alone its own pain or fear or pleasure or complacency.
As soon as he leased the house, Henry had retained George Gammon, a local gardener, part-time. Every day he had some discussion with him about changes which might be made, new plantings and seasonal adjustment , but mainly they spoke about what was blooming now, or likely to bloom soon, how different this year was to last year, and how much work could be soon completed. Both of them then took in the walled space in its detail and its totality. He enjoyed how George Gammon let the silence linger, adding nothing further, and waited until Henry decided it was time to go back to his work before moving away himself.
The morning meetings during which he gave her instructions became tense. Nothing she actually said made the difference; merely the set of her face, the silences and the slow, soft sighs. He paid no attention to her new attitude, he told her who was coming and what should be done and did not wait for any response. But after a while she began to detain him with sour comments, alluding to the increased cost of caring for guests, or the dreadful butcher, or the nuisance that was Burgess Noakes. A note of belligerence crept into her voice when more visitors were due. He could not contain his own longing to see old friends and members of his family and found it shocking and irritating that Mrs. Smith should express her ill-feeling against his guests in such clear terms.
There was another guest on the estate, a minor French novelist. Henry did everything he could, in the early days of his stay, not to discuss Zola or the Dreyfus case with Paul or Minnie Bourget or their guest, feeling that his own views on the matter would diverge from those of his hosts. His support for Zola and, indeed, for Dreyfus was sufficiently strong not to wish to hear the Bourgets' luxury and exquisite taste and the superior nature of their daily routine were connected with the hardness and hatreds of their illiberal politics. The English, he thought, were softer in theri views, more ambiguous in the connections between their personal circumstances and their political convictions.
In January, once Constance took possession of Casa Brichieri Colombi, Henry moved down to Florence. His days were idle, his afternoons and evenings taken up with the society Constance contemptuously avoided. He was bored and often irritated by the excesses of the colony, but he had learned to disguise such feelings and eventually in any case one evening such feelings fled. Seeing the Countess Gamba, who, it was known, had possession of a cache of Byron letters, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, a great literary gossip, told Henry that her presence had reminded him of a story about another cache of letters. Claire Clairmont, Byron's mistress and Shelley's sister-in-law, had, Lee-Hamilton said, lived to be old. She had spent her declining years in seclusion in Florence wit ha grandiniece. An American obsessed with Shelley, knowing that she had papers belonging to the two poets, laid siege to her, according to Lee-Hamilton. And on her death the man laid siege t o her grandniece, a lady of fifty, until the grandniece invited the American to marry her if he wanted to see the papers.
Slowly, in the months that followed, as Henry sarted to work on translations from the French, Henry Senior gradually changed his mind about the war. He began to see it not just as a cause worth supporting in theory but as a cause worth volunteering for. And as he propounded his opinions at the family table, much to the delight of Bob, too young to join but old enough to be fired with enthusiasm, his wife became increasingly solicitous of Henry.
In the morning Andersen, Henry saw, was nervous and shy. He did not speak when Henry appeared, merely offered his customary bow. Henry could not tell how alert he was to his own handsomeness, a handsomeness which, when he smiled, gave way to an astonishing clear-eyed beauty. As they made their way by cab to the old walled graveyard near the pyramid, Andersen's expression managed to be both searching and tenderly hesitant at the same time. Even though he spoke like an American, he did not have the calm and confident manners of one. Henry wondered if his seeming indifference to his own appeal, his lack of brashness and his intense presence arose simply from his Scandinavian origin. Yet when Andersen alighted from the cab and turned and waited for him at the gate, there was an aggression in his movements which belonged to someone more confident than he seemed when he smiled or spoke or allowed his face to rest.
When they had talked for a while after supper, Henry went to bed leaving Andersen downstairs reading one of his collections, insisting that he would finish at least a substantial number of the stories before he left Rye the next day. After a time he heard the stairs creak and he began to imagine Andersen's tall frame, book in hand, arriving on the landing; he pictured him opening his door and going into his bedroom and then return to the bedroom and close the door.
Henry attempted to convey by his silence that he silence that he would listen to her with sympathy for as long as she wished to speak.
Lamb House was his again. He moved around it relishing the silence and the emptiness. He welcomed the Scot, who was waiting for him to begin a day's work, but he needed more time alone first. He walked up and down the stairs, going into the rooms as though they, too, in how they yielded to him, belonged to an unrecoverable past, and would join the room with the tasseled tablecloths and the screens and the shadowed corners, and all the other rooms from whose windows he had observed the world, so that they could be remembered and captured and held.