"He didn't marry, he didn't go upon adventures; lust, avarice,
ambition, all these things that as Milton says are to be got 'not
without dust and heat,' were not for him. Blood and dust and heat--he
ruled them out. But he had independent means, he could live freely and
delicately and charmingly, he could travel and meet and be delighted
by all the best sorts of people in the best sorts of places. So for
years he enriched his resonances, as an admirable violin grows richer
with every note it sounds. He went about elaborately, avoiding
ugliness, death, suffering, industrialism, politics, sport, the
thought of war, the red blaze of passion. He travelled widely in the
more settled parts of the world. Chiefly he visited interesting and
ancient places, putting his ever more exquisite sensorium at them,
consciously taking delicate impressions upon the refined wax of his
being. In a manner most carefully occasional, he wrote. Always of
faded places. His 'Ypres' was wonderful. His 'Bruges' and his 'Hour of
Van Eyk'....
"Such," said Boon, "is the hero. The story begins, oh! quite in the
James manner with----" He read--
"'At times it seemed inaccessible, a thing beyond hope, beyond
imagining, and then at times it became so concrete an imagination, a
desire so specific, so nearly expressed, as to grow if not to the
exact particulars of longitude and latitude, yet at any rate so far as
county and district and atmosphere were concerned, so far indeed as an
intuition of proximity was concerned, an intimation that made it seem
at last at certain moments as if it could not possibly be very much
farther than just round the corner or over the crest....'
"But I've left a good bit of that to write up. In the book there will
be pages and sheets of that sentence. The gist is that Mr. Blandish
wants a house to live in and that he has an idea of the kind of house
he wants. And the chapter, the long, unresting, progressing chapter,
expands and expands; it never jumps you forward, it never lets you
off, you can't skip and you can't escape, until there comes at last a
culminating distension of statement in which you realize more and more
clearly, until you realize it with the unforgettable certainty of a
thing long fought for and won at last, that Mr. Blandish has actually
come upon the house and with a vigour of decision as vivid as a flash
of lightning in a wilderness of troubled clouds, as vivid indeed as
the loud, sonorous bursting of a long blown bladder, has said '_This
is it!_' On that '_This is it_' my chapter ends, with an effect of
enormous relief, with something of the beautiful serenity that follows
a difficult parturition.
"The story is born.
"And then we leap forward to possession.
"'And here he was, in the warmest reality, in the very heart of the
materialization of his dream----' He has, in fact, got the house. For
a year or so from its first accidental discovery he had done nothing
but just covet the house; too fearful of an overwhelming
disappointment even to make a definite inquiry as to its
accessibility. But he has, you will gather, taken apartments in the
neighbourhood, thither he visits frequently, and almost every day when
he walks abroad the coveted house draws him. It is in a little seaside
place on the east coast, and the only available walks are along the
shore or inland across the golf-links. Either path offers tempting
digressions towards _it_. He comes to know it from a hundred aspects
and under a thousand conditions of light and atmosphere.... And while
still in the early stage he began a curious and delicious secret
practice in relationship. You have heard of the Spaniard in love, in
love with a woman he had seen but once, whom he might never see again,
a princess, etiquette-defended, a goddess, and who yet, seeing a
necklace that became her, bought it for the joy of owning something
that was at least by fitness hers. Even so did Mr. Blandish begin to
buy first one little article and then, the fancy growing upon him more
and more, things, 'pieces' they call them, that were in the vein of
Samphire House. And then came the day, the wonderful day, when as he
took his afternoon feast of the eye, the door opened, some one came
out towards him....
"It was incredible. They were giving him tea with hot, inadvisable
scones--but their hotness, their close heaviness, he accepted with a
ready devotion, would have accepted had they been ten times as hot and
close and heavy, not heedlessly, indeed, but gratefully, willingly
paying his price for these astonishing revelations that without an
effort, serenely, calmly, dropped in between her gentle demands
whether he would have milk and her mild inquiries as to the exact
quantity of sugar his habits and hygienic outlook demanded, that his
hostess so casually made. These generous, heedless people were talking
of departures, of abandonments, of, so they put it, selling the dear
old place, if indeed any one could be found to buy a place so old and
so remote and--she pointed her intention with a laugh--so very, very
dear. Repletion of scones were a small price to pay for such a
glowing, such an incredible gift of opportunity, thrust thus straight
into the willing, amazed hands....
"He gets the house. He has it done up. He furnishes it, and every
article of furniture seems a stroke of luck too good to be true. And
to crown it all I am going to write one of those long crescendo
passages that James loves, a sentence, pages of it, of happy event
linking to happy event until at last the incredible completion, a
butler, unquestionably Early Georgian, respectability, competence
equally unquestionable, a wife who could cook, and cook well, no
children, no thought or possibility of children, and to crown all, the
perfect name--Mutimer!
[Illustration: _Mutimer at first._]
"All this you must understand is told retrospectively as Blandish
installs himself in Samphire House. It is told to the refrain, 'Still,
fresh every morning, came the persuasion "This is too good to be
true."' And as it is told, something else, by the most imperceptible
degrees, by a gathering up of hints and allusions and pointing
details, gets itself told too, and that is the growing realization in
the mind of Blandish of a something extra, of something not quite
bargained for,--the hoard and the haunting. About the house hangs a
presence....
"He had taken it at first as a mere picturesque accessory to the whole
picturesque and delightful wreathing of association and tradition
about the place, that there should be this ancient flavour of the
cutlass and the keg, this faint aroma of buried doubloons and
Stevensonian experiences. He had assumed, etc.... He had gathered,
etc.... And it was in the most imperceptible manner that beyond his
sense of these takings and assumptions and gatherings there grew his
perception that the delicate quiver of appreciation, at first his
utmost tribute to these illegal and adventurous and sanguinary
associations, was broadening and strengthening, was, one hardly knew
whether to say developing or degenerating, into a nervous reaction,
more spinal and less equivocally agreeable, into the question, sensed
rather than actually thought or asked, whether in fact the place
didn't in certain lights and certain aspects and at certain
unfavourable moments come near to evoking the ghost--if such sorites
are permissible in the world of delicate shades--of the ghost, of the
ghost of a shiver--of _aversion_....
"And so at page a hundred and fifty or thereabouts we begin to get
into the story," said Boon.
"You wade through endless marshes of subtle intimation, to a sense of
a Presence in Samphire House. For a number of pages you are quite
unable to tell whether this is a ghost or a legend or a foreboding or
simply old-fashioned dreams that are being allusively placed before
you. But there is an effect piled up very wonderfully, of Mr.
Blandish, obsessed, uneasy, watching furtively and steadfastly his
guests, his callers, his domestics, continually asking himself, 'Do
they note it? Are they feeling it?'
"We break at last into incidents. A young friend of the impossible
name of Deshman helps evolve the story; he comes to stay; he seems to
feel the influence from the outset, he cannot sleep, he wanders about
the house.... Do others know? _Others?_... The gardener takes to
revisiting the gardens after nightfall. He is met in the shrubbery
with an unaccountable spade in his hand and answers huskily. Why
should a gardener carry a spade? Why should he answer huskily? Why
should the presence, the doubt, the sense of something else elusively
in the air about them, become intensified at the encounter? Oh!
conceivably of course in many places, but just _there_! As some sort
of protection, it may be.... Then suddenly as Mr. Blandish sits at his
lonely but beautifully served dinner he becomes aware for the first
time of a change in Mutimer.
[Illustration: _Mutimer at the end of a year._]
"Something told him in that instant that Mutimer also _knew_....
"Deshman comes again with a new and disconcerting habit of tapping the
panelling and measuring the thickness of the walls when he thinks no
one is looking, and then a sister of Mr. Blandish and a friend, a
woman, yet not so much a woman as a disembodied intelligence in a
feminine costume with one of those impalpable relationships with
Deshman that people have with one another in the world of Henry James,
an association of shadows, an atmospheric liaison. Follow some almost
sentenceless conversations. Mr. Blandish walks about the shrubbery
with the friend, elaborately getting at it--whatever it is--and in
front of them, now hidden by the yew hedges, now fully in view, walks
Deshman with the married and settled sister of Mr. Blandish....
"'So,' said Mr. Blandish, pressing the point down towards the newly
discovered sensitiveness, 'where we feel, he it seems _knows_.'
"She seemed to consider.
"'He doesn't know completely,' was her qualification.
"'But he has something--something tangible.'
"'If he can make it tangible.'
"On that the mind of Mr. Blandish played for a time.
"'Then it isn't altogether tangible yet?'
"'It isn't tangible enough for him to go upon.'
"'Definitely something.'
"Her assent was mutely concise.
"'That we on our part----?'
"The _we_ seemed to trouble her.
"'He knows more than you do,' she yielded.
"The gesture, the half turn, the momentary halt in the paces of Mr.
Blandish, plied her further.
"'More, I think, than he has admitted--to any one.'
"'Even to you?'
"He perceived an interesting wave of irritation. 'Even to me,' he had
wrung from her, but at the price of all further discussion.
"Putting the thing crassly," said Boon, "Deshman has got wind of a
hoard, of a treasure, of something--Heaven as yet only knows what
something--buried, imbedded, in some as yet unexplained way
incorporated with Samphire House. On the whole the stress lies rather
on treasure, the treasure of smuggling, of longshore practices, of
illegality on the high seas. And still clearer is it that the amiable
Deshman wants to get at it without the participation of Mr. Blandish.
Until the very end you are never quite satisfied why Deshman wants to
get at it in so private a fashion. As the plot thickens you are played
about between the conviction that Deshman wants the stuff for himself
and the firm belief of the lady that against the possible intervention
of the Treasury, he wants to secure it for Mr. Blandish, to secure it
at least generously if nefariously, lest perhaps it should fall under
the accepted definition and all the consequent confiscations of
treasure trove. And there are further beautiful subtleties as to
whether she really believes in this more kindly interpretation of the
refined but dubitable Deshman.... A friend of Deshman's, shameless
under the incredible name of Mimbleton, becomes entangled in this
thick, sweet flow of narrative--the James method of introducing a
character always reminds me of going round with the lantern when one
is treacling for moths. Mimbleton has energy. He presses. Under a
summer dawn of delicious sweetness Mimbleton is found insensible on
the croquet lawn by Mr. Blandish, who, like most of the characters in
the narrative from first to last, has been unable to sleep. And at the
near corner of the house, close to a never before remarked ventilator,
is a hastily and inaccurately refilled excavation....
"Then events come hurrying in a sort of tangled haste--making
sibyl-like gestures.
"At the doorway Mutimer appears--swaying with some profound emotion.
He is still in his evening attire. He has not yet gone to bed. In
spite of the dawn he carried a burning candle--obliquely. At the sight
of his master he withdraws--backwards and with difficulty....
"Then," said Boon, "I get my crowning chapter: the breakfast, a
peculiar _something_, something almost palpable in the
atmosphere--Deshman hoarse and a little talkative, Mimbleton with a
possibly nervous headache, husky also and demanding tea in a thick
voice, Mutimer waiting uneasily, and Mr. Blandish, outwardly calm, yet
noting every particular, thinking meanings into every word and
movement, and growing more and more clear in his conviction that
_Mutimer knows--knows everything_....
[Illustration: _Mutimer as the plot thickens._]
"Book two opens with Mr. Blandish practically in possession of the
facts. Putting the thing coarsely, the treasure is--1813 brandy, in
considerable quantities bricked up in a disused cellar of Samphire
House. Samphire House, instead of being the fine claret of a refuge
Mr. Blandish supposed, is a loaded port. But of course in the novel we
shall not put things coarsely, and for a long time you will be by no
means clear what the 'spirit' is that Mr. Blandish is now resolved to
exorcise. He is, in fact, engaged in trying to get that brandy away,
trying to de-alcoholize his existence, trying--if one must put the
thing in all the concrete crudity of his fundamental intention--to
sell the stuff....
"Now in real life you would just go and sell it. But people in the
novels of Henry James do not do things in the inattentive, offhand,
rather confused, and partial way of reality: they bring enormous
brains to bear upon the minutest particulars of existence. Mr.
Blandish, following the laws of that world, has not simply to sell his
brandy: he has to sell it subtly, intricately, interminably, with a
delicacy, with a dignity....
"He consults friends--impalpable, intricate, inexhaustible friends.
"There are misunderstandings. One old and trusted intimate concludes
rather hastily that Mr. Blandish is confessing that he has written a
poem, another that he is making a proposal of marriage, another that
he wishes an introduction to the secretary of the Psychical Research
Society.... All this," said Boon, "remains, perhaps indefinitely, to
be worked out. Only the end, the end, comes with a rush. Deshman has
found for him--one never gets nearer to it than the 'real right
people.' The real right people send their agent down, a curious blend
of gentleman and commercial person he is, to investigate, to verify,
to estimate quantities. Ultimately he will--shall we say it?--make an
offer. With a sense of immense culmination the reader at last
approaches the hoard....
"You are never told the thing exactly. It is by indefinable
suggestions, by exquisite approaches and startings back, by
circumlocution the most delicate, that your mind at last shapes its
realization, that--the last drop of the last barrel has gone and that
Mutimer, the butler, lies dead or at least helpless--in the inner
cellar. And a beautiful flavour, ripe and yet rare, rich without
opulence, hangs--_diminuendo morendo_--in the air...."