The Master (16 page)

He asked himself if the intensity of her personality, and the sheer originality of her ambitions, placed against the dullness and banality and penury which surrounded her, might have unsettled
her will to live. He felt this especially when her sisters married for security rather than love, and when Minny was forced to depend on their husbands for her upkeep as her lungs began to
haemorrhage and her health began to fail. He remembered seeing her in New York for the last time two days before he sailed for Europe alone for the first time, and he made an effort then to
disguise, as much as he could, his pure excitement, his boundless appetite for what was to come. They had agreed that the same journey would be the right thing for her and it was detestable that he
was sailing off without her. Despite her illness and her envy, the hour they spent that day was bright, their talk all gaiety. They spoke of meeting in Rome the following winter, and of his plans
in London, whom he would see, where he would visit. Her envy became extravagant only when he spoke of a possible visit to Mrs Lewes, her beloved George Eliot. She tossed her head and laughed at the
enormity of her own jealousy.

It was clear that she was ill, and so apparent to them both that she would not recover that they did not mention it. Nonetheless, as he was leaving her, he asked her how she was sleeping.

‘Sleep,’ she said. ‘Oh, I don’t sleep. I’ve given it up.’

But then she laughed bravely and freely and her smile to him was carefully arranged so that there was nothing hollow or false about it. And then she left him.

I
N ENGLAND
when he came to visit Mrs Lewes on a Sunday afternoon at North Bank, having secured admission through the intervention of a family friend, he
imagined Minny with him, asking George Eliot the questions that no one in Minny’s own circle wished to ask, or wished indeed to answer. He imagined her voice, awed now but slowly building in
richness in the room. At the moment of departure he pictured his cousin standing up and being noticed by the novelist, having made an impression, and reaching out warmly to shake her hand, and
being invited to return. In a letter, he tried to describe Mrs Lewes to Minny, her accent, the calm severity of her gaze, her strange ugliness, her mingled sagacity and sweetness, her dignity and
character, her graciousness and remote indifference. It was easier, however, to write to his father about her; writing to Minny had now become like writing to a ghost.

M
INNY DIED
in March, a year after he had last seen her. He was still in England. He felt it as the end of his youth, knowing that death, at the last,
was dreadful to her. She would have given anything to live. In the years that followed, he longed to know what she would have thought of his books and stories, and of the decisions he made about
his life. This sense of missing her deep and demanding response made itself felt to Gray and Holmes as well, and also to William. All of them wondered in their nervous ambition and great, agitated
egotism what Minny would have thought about them or said about them. Henry wondered too what life would have had for her and how her exquisite faculty of challenge could have dealt with a world
which would inevitably attempt to confine her. His consolation was that at least he had known her as the world had not, and the pain of living without her was no more than a penalty he paid for the
privilege of having been young with her. What once was life, he thought, is always life and he knew that her image would preside in his intellect as a sort of measure and standard of brightness and
repose.

It was not true to say that Minny Temple haunted him in the years that followed; rather, he haunted her. He conjured up her presence everywhere, when he returned to his parents’ house, and
later when he travelled in France and Italy. In the shadows of the great cathedrals, he saw her emerge, delicate and elegant and richly curious, ready to be stunned into silence by each work of art
that she saw, and then trying to find the words which might fit the moment, allow her new sensuous life to settle and deepen.

Soon after she died he wrote a story, ‘Travelling Companions’, in which William, travelling in Italy from Germany, met her by chance in Milan Cathedral, having seen her first in
front of Leonardo’s
The Last Supper
. He loved describing her white umbrella with a violet lining and the sense of intelligent pleasure in her movements, her glance and her voice. He
could control her destiny now that she was dead, offer her the experiences she would have wanted, and provide drama for a life which had been so cruelly shortened. He wondered if this had happened
to other writers who came before him, if Hawthorne or George Eliot had written to make the dead come back to life, had worked all day and all night, like a magician or an alchemist, defying fate
and time and all the implacable elements to re-create a sacred life.

He could not stop wondering how she would have lived, what she would have done. With Alice, the question of Minny was not to be raised, as his sister envied everything that Minny had possessed:
her strange beauty and allure, her confidence, her deep seriousness, her effect on men. And later, Alice envied Minny her being dead.

Speculation about Minny did, however, interest William, and both he and Henry were certain in their discussion on the subject that she would not have known whom to marry, that her choice, had
she lived, would have been too idealistic, or too impetuous, or too unnatural. Her marriage, both agreed, would have been mistaken, and this seemed to suggest that something in her complex organism
had understood this, had known that her future as a penniless, clever woman was a sadly insoluble problem.

Both brothers had felt that, at some level, at most levels, narrow life contained no place for her. All her conduct and character, Henry thought, seemed to have pointed to this conclusion
– how profoundly inconsequential, in her history, continued life might have been.

He often imagined her married to Gray or Holmes or William, how diminished she would seem, how marriage for her would be a battle that she would have to lose. In
Poor Richard
, he had sent
her to Europe where she did not marry. In
Daisy Miller
, in which he had emphasized her brashness and bravery and careless attitude to conventions, she had died in Rome. In
Travelling
Companions
, he had invented a marriage for her, dramatizing the Italian circumstances of her meeting with her consort. He did not follow her into the daily domestic routines managed in the
shadow of a dull man.

It was when he read
Daniel Deronda
that something came into his mind which had not occurred to him before – the dramatic possibilities of a spirited woman being destroyed by a
stifling marriage. By coincidence, at this time he happened also to read
Phineas Finn
by Trollope, mainly as a way of getting to sleep, and was struck too by the marriage of Lady Laura
Kennedy and the sheer interest such an alliance had for the reader whose sympathies had been drawn to the brave, bright heroine confronting her destiny with the illusion of freedom.

He set to work. By then he had lived some years in England, he felt that he could see America more clearly, and he wanted more than anything to bring to life an American spirit who was fresh and
free, ready for life and certain only of her own great openness to others and to experience. It was not hard to place his young lady in his grandmother’s house in Albany, the strange,
cramped, old-fashioned rooms from which Mrs Touchett, bossy and rich, could rescue Isabel Archer and take her to England where so many of his heroines had longed to go. In England, he could easily
surround her with his old and carefully wrought trio of suitors, the straight-talking serious one; the gentler, patrician one; and the one who would be her friend and the fascinated student of her
destiny, being too unfit or ill or steeped in irony to be her lover.

He worked on the book in Florence and felt, as he woke each morning in his hotel on the river or later in rooms on Bellosguardo, that he had a great mission now to make Minny walk these streets,
to allow the soft Tuscan sunlight to shine on her soft face. But more than that, he sought to re-create her moral presence more finely and more dramatically than he had ever done before. He wanted
to take this penniless American girl and offer her a solid, old universe in which to breathe. He gave her money, suitors, villas and palaces, new friends and new sensations. He had never felt as
powerful and as dutiful; he walked the streets of Florence and the quays and the steep, winding hill to Bellosguardo with a new lightness, and this lightness made its way into the book. It moved
elegantly, easily and freely as though Minny herself were protecting him, presiding over him. There were scenes he wrote in which, having imagined everything and set it down, he was, at moments,
unsure whether it had genuinely happened or whether his imagined world had finally come to replace the real.

Yet Minny was real for him throughout the years, more real than any of the new people he met and associated with. She belonged to the part of him he guarded most fiercely, his hidden self, which
no one in England knew about or understood. It was easier to preserve her under English skies, in a land where no one cared to remember the dead as he remembered his cousin, where the flat present
with its attendant order ruled. It was here he let her walk with the power and haunting resonance of an old song echoing through the years, sounding its sad notes to him wherever he went.

H
E HAD FORGOTTEN
, until he saw Holmes, how much his old friend loved the English; as soon as Holmes alighted from the train at Rye, he filled the air
with stories of whom he had seen and how they were, how deaf Leslie Stephen had become since Julia had died, how Margot Tennant was not the same since her marriage, how charming his new friend Lady
Castletown was and how grand. Henry did not even consider speaking, and he knew that if he had, he would have been interrupted immediately. Holmes was bright-eyed, almost fervid, and managed,
despite the years, to look even more handsome than ever before, more gallant. Perhaps his time with Lady Castletown, Henry thought, had made him so.

‘I’m afraid,’ he said when he finally found a gap in Holmes’s narrative, ‘I’m afraid there are no lords and ladies at all in Rye. It will be very quiet.
Indeed, it
is
very quiet.’

Holmes clapped him on the back and smiled as if he had just now noticed him. His elevation to the bench seemed to have made him less reserved, if anything. Maybe this was the way, Henry mused,
eminent men in their fifties were behaving in America now, but then he pictured William Dean Howells and his brother William and understood that it was merely Holmes who was behaving like this. He
tried to explain to Holmes that he had been working on not one but two novels and had not had much company over the previous months other than his servants. Holmes was extolling the landscape and
too busy to listen and Henry was suddenly glad that he was staying at Point Hill for only one night. He knew from William and from Howells and others that Holmes had become a famous judge whose
theories were discussed in the higher circles of law and politics as the theories of Darwin were discussed by scientists and the clergy. Henry remembered that he had asked William what these
theories were and William had put it bluntly that Holmes did not believe in anything and had managed to make this view seem both reasonable and popular. His position was, William said, that he had
no position. Howells, on the other hand, was not given to bluntness; he explained merely that Holmes had sought rather forcefully to apply the human and practical element rather than the historical
or the theoretical or indeed the moral elements to law. Like Darwin, Howells said, Holmes had developed a theory of winners, but it was his pointed and plain rhetoric that won the day as much as
anything else.

He had often wondered, Holmes now said as they made their way through Rye, if he should have come to England to live. He did not suppose, he added, that they would take him to their bosom if he
planned to stay. Henry nodded in assent, but soon his mind was elsewhere.

They dined on the terrace, and having eaten they sat in repose watching the great plain below in the fading evening light. Holmes groaned and stretched his legs as though settling down for a
long and relaxed evening while Henry wished it were an hour later and he could excuse himself. The talk between them was desultory as they carefully avoided the subjects which would divide them,
such as William, with whom Holmes seemed to have quarrelled, and Mrs Holmes, who languished in Boston, and Henry’s novels, on which he knew that Holmes had views. The subjects which they
could discuss, the gossip about private and public America, the law and politics, soon petered out. Henry found that he had asked too many questions about too many old friends and Holmes had
replied too many times that he hardly saw them and knew very little about them. He suspected, he said several times, that Henry knew more about them than he did.

The twilight lingered and the two men grew silent until Henry felt that they would never think of anything to say again. He moved his chair so that he could study Holmes and saw him now in the
gloaming as a deeply contented fellow, at home with himself, and he felt a mild distaste for the aura of good-humoured complacency which Holmes gathered around him.

‘It is strange how time goes,’ Holmes said.

‘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.’

‘I was thinking of that summer when we were all together,’ Holmes said.

‘Yes,’ Henry said. ‘That glorious, heroic summer.’

Henry now expected Holmes to say that time had flown since then or that it seemed like yesterday and he wondered how he would respond to Holmes’s banalities. He was already preparing a
missive to William, telling him that Holmes as a conversationalist had been laid low.