Henry James

The Real Right Thing

Henry James

(1843–1916)

The Real Right Thing

(1900)

Table of Contents

I

II

III

I

When, after the death of Ashton Doyne—but three months after—George Withermore was approached, as the phrase is, on the subject of a ‘volume’, the communication came straight from his publishers, who had been, and indeed much more, Doyne’s own; but he was not surprised to learn, on the occurrence of the interview they next suggested, that a certain pressure as to the early issue of a Life had been brought to bear upon them by their late client’s widow. Doyne’s relations with his wife had been, to Withermore’s knowledge, a very special chapter—which would present itself, by the way, as a delicate one for the biographer; but a sense of what she had lost, and even of what she had lacked, had betrayed itself, on the poor woman’s part, from the first days of her bereavement, sufficiently to prepare an observer at all initiated for some attitude of reparation, some espousal even exaggerated of the interests of a distinguished name. George Withermore was, as he felt, initiated; yet what he had not expected was to hear that she had mentioned him as the person in whose hands she would most promptly place the materials for a book.

These materials—diaries, letters, memoranda, notes, documents of many sorts—were her property, and wholly in her control, no conditions at all attaching to any portion of her heritage; so that she was free at present to do as she liked—free, in particular, to do nothing. What Doyne would have arranged had he had time to arrange could be but supposition and guess. Death had taken him too soon and too suddenly, and there was all the pity that the only wishes he was known to have expressed were wishes that put it positively out of account. He had broken short off—that was the way of it; and the end was ragged and needed trimming. Withermore was conscious, abundantly, how close he had stood to him, but he was not less aware of his comparative obscurity. He was young, a journalist, a critic, a hand-to-mouth character, with little, as yet, as was vulgarly said, to show. His writings were few and small, his relations scant and vague. Doyne, on the other hand, had lived long enough—above all had had talent enough—to become great, and among his many friends gilded also with greatness were several to whom his wife would have struck those who knew her as much more likely to appeal.

The preference she had, at all events, uttered—and uttered in a roundabout, considerate way that left him a measure of freedom—made our young man feel that he must at least see her and that there would be in any case a good deal to talk about. He immediately wrote to her, she as promptly named an hour, and they had it out. But he came away with his particular idea immensely strengthened. She was a strange woman, and he had never thought her an agreeable one; only there was something that touched him now in her bustling, blundering impatience. She wanted the book to make up, and the individual whom, of her husband’s set, she probably believed she might most manipulate was in every way to help it to make up. She had not taken Doyne seriously enough in life, but the biography should be a solid reply to every imputation on herself. She had scantly known how such books were constructed, but she had been looking and had learned something. It alarmed Withermore a little from the first to see that she would wish to go in for quantity. She talked of ‘volumes’—but he had his notion of that.

“My thought went straight to you, as his own would have done,” she had said almost as soon as she rose before him there in her large array of mourning—with her big black eyes, her big black wig, her big black fan and gloves, her general gaunt, ugly, tragic, but striking and, as might have been thought from a certain point of view, ‘elegant’ presence. “You’re the one he liked most; oh, much!”—and it had been quite enough to turn Withermore’s head. It little mattered that he could afterward wonder if she had known Doyne enough, when it came to that, to be sure. He would have said for himself indeed that her testimony on such a point would scarcely have counted. Still, there was no smoke without fire; she knew at least what she meant, and he was not a person she could have an interest in flattering. They went up together, without delay, to the great man’s vacant study, which was at the back of the house and looked over the large green garden—a beautiful and inspiring scene, to poor Withermore’s view—common to the expensive row.

“You can perfectly work here, you know,” said Mrs Doyne: “you shall have the place quite to yourself—I’ll give it all up to you; so that in the evenings, in particular, don’t you see? for quiet and privacy, it will be perfection.”

Perfection indeed, the young man felt as he looked about—having explained that, as his actual occupation was an evening paper and his earlier hours, for a long time yet, regularly taken up, he would have to come always at night. The place was full of their lost friend; everything in it had belonged to him; everything they touched had been part of his life. It was for the moment too much for Withermore—too great an honour and even too great a care; memories still recent came back to him, and, while his heart beat faster and his eyes filled with tears, the pressure of his loyalty seemed almost more than he could carry. At the sight of his tears Mrs Doyne’s own rose to her lids, and the two, for a minute, only looked at each other. He half expected her to break out: ‘Oh, help me to feel as I know you know I want to feel!’ And after a little one of them said, with the other’s deep assent—it didn’t matter which: “It’s here that we’re with him.” But it was definitely the young man who put it, before they left the room, that it was there he was with them.

The young man began to come as soon as he could arrange it, and then it was, on the spot, in the charmed stillness, between the lamp and the fire and with the curtains drawn, that a certain intenser consciousness crept over him. He turned in out of the black London November; he passed through the large, hushed house and up the red-carpeted staircase where he only found in his path the whisk of a soundless, trained maid, or the reach, out of a doorway, of Mrs Doyne’s queenly weeds and approving tragic face; and then, by a mere touch of the well-made door that gave so sharp and pleasant a click, shut himself in for three or four warm hours with the spirit—as he had always distinctly declared it—of his master. He was not a little frightened when, even the first night, it came over him that he had really been most affected, in the whole matter, by the prospect, the privilege and the luxury, of this sensation. He had not, he could now reflect, definitely considered the question of the book—as to which there was here, even already, much to consider: he had simply let his affection and admiration—to say nothing of his gratified pride—meet, to the full, the temptation Mrs Doyne had offered them.

How did he know, without more thought, he might begin to ask himself, that the book was, on the whole, to be desired? What warrant had he ever received from Ashton Doyne himself for so direct and, as it were, so familiar an approach? Great was the art of biography, but there were lives and lives, there were subjects and subjects. He confusedly recalled, so far as that went, old words dropped by Doyne over contemporary compilations, suggestions of how he himself discriminated as to other heroes and other panoramas. He even remembered how his friend, at moments, would have seemed to show himself as holding that the ‘literary’ career might—save in the case of a Johnson and a Scott, with a Boswell and a Lockhart to help—best content itself to be represented. The artist was what he did—he was nothing else. Yet how, on the other hand, was not he, George Withermore, poor devil, to have jumped at the chance of spending his winter in an intimacy so rich? It had been simply dazzling—that was the fact. It hadn’t been the ‘terms’, from the publishers—though these were, as they said at the office, all right; it had been Doyne himself, his company and contact and presence—it had been just what it was turning out, the possibility of an intercourse closer than that of life. Strange that death, of the two things, should have the fewer mysteries and secrets! The first night our young man was alone in the room it seemed to him that his master and he were really for the first time together.

II

Mrs Doyne had for the most part let him expressively alone, but she had on two or three occasions looked in to see if his needs had been met, and he had had the opportunity of thanking her on the spot for the judgment and zeal with which she had smoothed his way. She had to some extent herself been looking things over and had been able already to muster several groups of letters; all the keys of drawers and cabinets she had, moreover, from the first placed in his hands, with helpful information as to the apparent whereabouts of different matters. She had put him, in a word, in the fullest possible possession, and whether or no her husband had trusted her, she at least, it was clear, trusted her husband’s friend. There grew upon Withermore, nevertheless, the impression that, in spite of all these offices, she was not yet at peace, and that a certain unappeasable anxiety continued even to keep step with her confidence. Though she was full of consideration, she was at the same time perceptibly there: he felt her, through a supersubtle sixth sense that the whole connection had already brought into play, hover, in the still hours, at the top of landings and on the other side of doors, gathered from the soundless brush of her skirts the hint of her watchings and waitings. One evening when, at his friend’s table, he had lost himself in the depths of correspondence, he was made to start and turn by the suggestion that some one was behind him. Mrs Doyne had come in without his hearing the door, and she gave a strained smile as he sprang to his feet. “I hope,” she said, “I haven’t frightened you.”

“Just a little—I was so absorbed. It was as if, for the instant,” the young man explained, “it had been himself.”

The oddity of her face increased in her wonder. “Ashton?”

“He does seem so near,” said Withermore.

“To you too?”

This naturally struck him. “He does then to you?”

She hesitated, not moving from the spot where she had first stood, but looking round the room as if to penetrate its duskier angles. She had a way of raising to the level of her nose the big black fan which she apparently never laid aside and with which she thus covered the lower half of her face, her rather hard eyes, above it, becoming the more ambiguous. “Sometimes.”

“Here,” Withermore went on, “it’s as if he might at any moment come in. That’s why I jumped just now. The time is so short since he really used to—it only was yesterday. I sit in his chair, I turn his books, I use his pens, I stir his fire, exactly as if, learning he would presently be back from a walk, I had come up here contentedly to wait. It’s delightful—but it’s strange.”

Mrs Doyne, still with her fan up, listened with interest. “Does it worry you? ”

“No—I like it.”

She hesitated again. “Do you ever feel as if he were—a—quite—a—personally in the room?”

“Well, as I said just now,” her companion laughed, “on hearing you behind me I seemed to take it so. What do we want, after all,” he asked, “but that he shall be with us?”

“Yes, as you said he would be—that first time.” She stared in full assent. “He is with us.”

She was rather portentous, but Withermore took it smiling. “Then we must keep him. We must do only what he would like.”

“Oh, only that, of course—only. But if he is here—?” And her sombre eyes seemed to throw it out, in vague distress, over her fan.

“It shows that he’s pleased and wants only to help? Yes, surely; it must show that.”

She gave a light gasp and looked again round the room. “Well,” she said as she took leave of him, “remember that I too want only to help.” On which, when she had gone, he felt sufficiently—that she had come in simply to see he was all right.

He was all right more and more, it struck him after this, for as he began to get into his work he moved, as it appeared to him, but the closer to the idea of Doyne’s personal presence. When once this fancy had begun to hang about him he welcomed it, persuaded it, encouraged it, quite cherished it, looking forward all day to feeling it renew itself in the evening, and waiting for the evening very much as one of a pair of lovers might wait for the hour of their appointment. The smallest accidents humoured and confirmed it, and by the end of three or four weeks he had come quite to regard it as the consecration of his enterprise. Wasn’t it what settled the question of what Doyne would have thought of what they were doing? What they were doing was what he wanted done, and they could go on, from step to step, without scruple or doubt. Withermore rejoiced indeed at moments to feel this certitude: there were times of dipping deep into some of Doyne’s secrets when it was particularly pleasant to be able to hold that Doyne desired him, as it were, to know them. He was learning many things that he had not suspected, drawing many curtains, forcing many doors, reading many riddles, going, in general, as they said, behind almost everything. It was at an occasional sharp turn of some of the duskier of these wanderings ‘behind’ that he really, of a sudden, most felt himself, in the intimate, sensible way, face to face with his friend; so that he could scarcely have told, for the instant, if their meeting occurred in the narrow passage and tight squeeze of the past, or at the hour and in the place that actually held him. Was it ’67, or was it but the other side of the table?

Happily, at any rate, even in the vulgarest light publicity could ever shed, there would be the great fact of the way Doyne was ‘coming out’. He was coming out too beautifully—better yet than such a partisan as Withermore could have supposed. Yet, all the while, as well, how would this partisan have represented to any one else the special state of his own consciousness? It wasn’t a thing to talk about—it was only a thing to feel. There were moments, for instance, when, as he bent over his papers, the light breath of his dead host was as distinctly in his hair as his own elbows were on the table before him. There were moments when, had he been able to look up, the other side of the table would have shown him this companion as vividly as the shaded lamplight showed him his page. That he couldn’t at such a juncture look up was his own affair, for the situation was ruled—that was but natural—by deep delicacies and fine timidities, the dread of too sudden or too rude an advance. What was intensely in the air was that if Doyne was there it was not nearly so much for himself as for the young priest of his altar. He hovered and lingered, he came and went, he might almost have been, among the books and the papers, a hushed, discreet librarian, doing the particular things, rendering the quiet aid, liked by men of letters.

Withermore himself, meanwhile, came and went, changed his place, wandered on quests either definite or vague; and more than once, when, taking a book down from a shelf and finding in it marks of Doyne’s pencil, he got drawn on and lost, he had heard documents on the table behind him gently shifted and stirred, had literally, on his return, found some letter he had mislaid pushed again into view, some wilderness cleared by the opening of an old journal at the very date he wanted. How should he have gone so, on occasion, to the special box or drawer, out of fifty receptacles, that would help him, had not his mystic assistant happened, in fine prevision, to tilt its lid, or to pull it half open, in just the manner that would catch his eye?—in spite, after all, of the fact of lapses and intervals in which, could one have really looked, one would have seen somebody standing before the fire a trifle detached and over-erect—somebody fixing one the least bit harder than in life.

III

That this auspicious relation had in fact existed, had continued, for two or three weeks, was sufficiently proved by the dawn of the distress with which our young man found himself aware that he had, for some reason, from a certain evening, begun to miss it. The sign of that was an abrupt, surprised sense—on the occasion of his mislaying a marvellous unpublished page which, hunt where he would, remained stupidly, irrecoverably lost—that his protected state was, after all, exposed to some confusion and even to some depression. If, for the joy of the business, Doyne and he had, from the start, been together, the situation had, within a few days of his first new suspicion of it, suffered the odd change of their ceasing to be so. That was what was the matter, he said to himself, from the moment an impression of mere mass and quantity struck him as taking, in his happy outlook at his material, the place of his pleasant assumption of a clear course and a lively pace. For five nights he struggled; then, never at his table, wandering about the room, taking up his references only to lay them down, looking out of the window, poking the fire, thinking strange thoughts and listening for signs and sounds not as he suspected or imagined, but as he vainly desired and invoked them, he made up his mind that he was, for the time at least, forsaken.

The extraordinary thing thus became that it made him not only sad not to feel Doyne’s presence, but in a high degree uneasy. It was stranger, somehow, that he shouldn’t be there than it had ever been that he was—so strange indeed at last that Withermore’s nerves found themselves quite inconsequently affected. They had taken kindly enough to what was of an order impossible to explain, perversely reserving their sharpest state for the return to the normal, the supersession of the false. They were remarkably beyond control when, finally, one night, after resisting an hour or two, he simply edged out of the room. It had only now, for the first time, become impossible to him to remain there. Without design, but panting a little and positively as a man scared, he passed along his usual corridor and reached the top of the staircase. From this point he saw Mrs Doyne looking up at him from the bottom quite as if she had known he would come; and the most singular thing of all was that, though he had been conscious of no notion to resort to her, had only been prompted to relieve himself by escape, the sight of her position made him recognize it as just, quickly feel it as a part of some monstrous oppression that was closing over both of them. It was wonderful how, in the mere modern London hall, between the Tottenham Court Road rugs and the electric light, it came up to him from the tall black lady, and went again from him down to her, that he knew what she meant by looking as if he would know. He descended straight, she turned into her own little lower room, and there, the next thing, with the door shut, they were, still in silence and with queer faces, confronted over confessions that had taken sudden life from these two or three movements. Withermore gasped as it came to him why he had lost his friend. “He has been with you?”

With this it was all out—out so far that neither had to explain and that, when “What do you suppose is the matter? ” quickly passed between them, one appeared to have said it as much as the other. Withermore looked about at the small, bright room in which, night after night, she had been living her life as he had been living his own upstairs. It was pretty, cosy, rosy; but she had by turns felt in it what he had felt and heard in it what he had heard. Her effect there—fantastic black, plumed and extravagant, upon deep pink—was that of some ‘decadent’ coloured print, some poster of the newest school. “You understood he had left me?” he asked.

She markedly wished to make it clear. “This evening—yes. I’ve made things out.”

“You knew—before—that he was with me?”

She hesitated again. “I felt he wasn’t with me. But on the stairs—”

“Yes?”

“Well—he passed, more than once. He was in the house. And at your door—”

“Well?” he went on as she once more faltered.

“If I stopped I could sometimes tell. And from your face,” she added, “to-night, at any rate, I knew your state.”

“And that was why you came out?”

“I thought you’d come to me.”

He put out to her, on this, his hand, and they thus, for a minute, in silence, held each other clasped. There was no peculiar presence for either, now—nothing more peculiar than that of each for the other. But the place had suddenly become as if consecrated, and Withermore turned over it again his anxiety. “What is then the matter?”

“I only want to do the real right thing,” she replied after a moment.

“And are we not doing it?”

“I wonder. Are you not? ”

He wondered too. “To the best of my belief. But we must think.”

“We must think,” she echoed. And they did think—thought, with intensity, the rest of that evening together, and thought, independently—Withermore at least could answer for himself—during many days that followed. He intermitted for a little his visits and his work, trying, in meditation, to catch himself in the act of some mistake that might have accounted for their disturbance. Had he taken, on some important point—or looked as if he might take—some wrong line or wrong view? had he somewhere benightedly falsified or inadequately insisted? He went back at last with the idea of having guessed two or three questions he might have been on the way to muddle; after which he had, above stairs, another period of agitation, presently followed by another interview, below, with Mrs Doyne, who was still troubled and flushed.

“He’s there?”

“He’s there.”

“I knew it!” she returned in an odd gloom of triumph. Then as to make it clear: “He has not been again with me.”

“Nor with me again to help,” said Withermore.

She considered. “Not to help?”

“I can’t make it out—I’m at sea. Do what I will, I feel I’m wrong.”

She covered him a moment with her pompous pain. “How do you feel it?”

“Why, by things that happen. The strangest things. I can’t describe them—and you wouldn’t believe them.”

“Oh yes, I would!” Mrs Doyne murmured.

“Well, he intervenes.” Withermore tried to explain. “However I turn, I find him.”

She earnestly followed. “ ‘Find’ him?”

“I meet him. He seems to rise there before me.”

Mrs Doyne, staring, waited a little. “Do you mean you see him?”

“I feel as if at any moment I may. I’m baffled. I’m checked.” Then he added: “I’m afraid.”

“Of him?” asked Mrs Doyne.

He thought. “Well—of what I’m doing.”

“Then what, that’s so awful, are you doing?”

“What you proposed to me. Going into his life.”

She showed, in her gravity, now, a new alarm. “And don’t you like that?”

“Doesn’t he? That’s the question. We lay him bare. We serve him up. What is it called? We give him to the world.”

Poor Mrs Doyne, as if on a menace to her hard atonement, glared at this for an instant in deeper gloom. “And why shouldn’t we?”

“Because we don’t know. There are natures, there are lives, that shrink. He mayn’t wish it,” said Withermore. “We never asked him.”

“How could we?”

He was silent a little. “Well, we ask him now. That’s, after all, what our start has, so far, represented. We’ve put it to him.”

“Then—if he has been with us—we’ve had his answer.”

Withermore spoke now as if he knew what to believe. “He hasn’t been ‘with’ us—he has been against us.”

“Then why did you think—”

“What I did think, at first—that what he wishes to make us feel is his sympathy? Because, in my original simplicity, I was mistaken. I was—I don’t know what to call it—so excited and charmed that I didn’t understand. But I understand at last. He only wanted to communicate. He strains forward out of his darkness; he reaches toward us out of his mystery; he makes us dim signs out of his horror.”

“ ‘Horror’?” Mrs Doyne gasped with her fan up to her mouth.

“At what we’re doing.” He could by this time piece it all together. “I see now that at first—”

“Well, what?”

“One had simply to feel he was there, and therefore not indifferent. And the beauty of that misled me. But he’s there as a protest.”

“Against my Life?” Mrs Doyne wailed.

“Against any Life. He’s there to save his Life. He’s there to be let alone.”

“So you give up?” she almost shrieked.

He could only meet her. “He’s there as a warning.”

For a moment, on this, they looked at each other deep. “You are afraid!” she at last brought out.

It affected him, but he insisted. “He’s there as a curse!”

With that they parted, but only for two or three days; her last word to him continuing to sound so in his ears that, between his need really to satisfy her and another need presently to be noted, he felt that he might not yet take up his stake. He finally went back at his usual hour and found her in her usual place. “Yes, I am afraid,” he announced as if he had turned that well over and knew now all it meant. “But I gather that you’re not.”

She faltered, reserving her word. “What is it you fear?”

“Well, that if I go on I shall see him.”

“And then—?”

“Oh, then,” said George Withermore, “I should give up!”

She weighed it with her lofty but earnest air. “I think, you know, we must have a clear sign.”

“You wish me to try again?”

She hesitated. “You see what it means—for me—to give up.”

“Ah, but you needn’t,” Withermore said.

She seemed to wonder, but in a moment she went on. “It would mean that he won’t take from me—” But she dropped for despair.

“Well, what?”

“Anything,” said poor Mrs Doyne.

He faced her a moment more. “I’ve thought myself of the clear sign. I’ll try again.”

As he was leaving her, however, she remembered. “I’m only afraid that to-night there’s nothing ready—no lamp and no fire.”

“Never mind,” he said from the foot of the stairs; “I’ll find things.”

To which she answered that the door of the room would probably, at any rate, be open; and retired again as if to wait for him. She had not long to wait; though, with her own door wide and her attention fixed, she may not have taken the time quite as it appeared to her visitor. She heard him, after an interval, on the stair, and he presently stood at her entrance, where, if he had not been precipitate, but rather, as to step and sound, backward and vague, he showed at least as livid and blank.

“I give up.”

“Then you’ve seen him?”

“On the threshold—guarding it.”

“Guarding it?” She glowed over her fan. “Distinct?”

“Immense. But dim. Dark. Dreadful,” said poor George Withermore.

She continued to wonder. “You didn’t go in?”

The young man turned away. “He forbids!”

“You say I needn’t,” she went on after a moment. “Well then, need I?”

“See him?” George Withermore asked.

She waited an instant. “Give up.”

“You must decide.” For himself he could at last but drop upon the sofa with his bent face in his hands. He was not quite to know afterwards how long he had sat so; it was enough that what he did next know was that he was alone among her favourite objects. Just as he gained his feet, however, with this sense and that of the door standing open to the hall, he found himself afresh confronted, in the light, the warmth, the rosy space, with her big black perfumed presence. He saw at a glance, as she offered him a huger, bleaker stare over the mask of her fan, that she had been above; and so it was that, for the last time, they faced together their strange question. “You’ve seen him?” Withermore asked.

He was to infer later on from the extraordinary way she closed her eyes and, as if to steady herself, held them tight and long, in silence, that beside the unutterable vision of Ashton Doyne’s wife his own might rank as an escape. He knew before she spoke that all was over. “I give up.”

The End