Читать книгу The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II - Генри Джеймс, Henry Foss James - Страница 38

Lamb House, Rye.

December 23rd, 1907.

My dear Norris,

I want you to find this, as by ancient and inviolate custom, or at least intention, on your table on Christmas a.m.; but am convinced that, whenever I post it, it will reach you either before or after, and not with true dramatic effect. It will take you in any case, however, the assurance of my affectionate fidelity—little as anything else for the past year, or I fear a longer time, may have contributed to your perception of that remembrance. The years and the months go, and somehow make our meetings ingeniously rarer and our intervals and silences more monstrous. It is the effect, alas, of our being as it were antipodal Provincials—for even if one of us were a Capitalist the problem (of occasional common days in London) would be by so much simplified. I am in London less, on the whole (than during my first years in this place;) and as you appear now to be there never, I flap my wings and crane my neck in the void. Last spring, I confess, I committed an act of comprehensive disloyalty; I went abroad at the winter's end and remained till the first days of July (the first half of the time in Paris, roughly speaking—and on a long and very interesting, extraordinarily interesting, motor-tour in France; the second in Rome and Venice, as to take leave of them forever.) This took London almost utterly out of my year, and I think I heard from Gosse, who happily for him misses you so much less than I do, (I mean enjoys you so much more—but no, that isn't right either!) that you had in May or June shone in the eye of London. I am not this year, however, I thank my stars, to repeat the weird exploit of a "long continental absence"—such things have quite ceased to be in my real mœurs—and I shall therefore plan a campaign in town (for May and June) that will have for its leading feature to encounter you somewhere and somehow. Till then—that is to a later date than usual—I expect to bide quietly here, where a continuity of occupation—strange to say—causes the days and the months to melt in my grasp, and where, in spite of rather an appalling invasion of outsiders and idlers (a spreading colony and a looming menace,) the conditions of life declare themselves as emphatically my rustic "fit" as I ten years ago made them out to be. I have lived into my little house and garden so thoroughly that they have become a kind of domiciliary skin, that can't be peeled off without pain—and in fact to go away at all is to have, rather, the sense of being flayed. Nevertheless I was glad, last spring, to have been tricked, rather, into a violent change of manners and practices—violent partly because my ten weeks in Paris were, for me, on a basis most unprecedented: I paid a visit of that monstrous length to friends (I had never done so in my life before,) and in a beautiful old house in the heart of the Rive Gauche, amid old private hotels and hidden gardens (Rue de Varenne), tasted socially and associatively, so to speak, of a new Paris altogether and got a bellyful of fresh and nutritive impressions. Yet I have just declined a repetition of it inexorably, and it's more and more vivid to me that I have as much as I can tackle to lead my own life—I can't ever again attempt, for more than the fleeting hour, to lead other people's. (I have indeed, I should add, suffered infiltration of the poison of the motor—contemplatively and touringly used: that, truly, is a huge extension of life, of experience and consciousness. But I thank my stars that I'm too poor to have one.) I'm afraid I've no other adventure to regale you with. I am engaged, none the less, in a perpetual adventure, the most thrilling and in every way the greatest of my life, and which consists of having more than four years entered into a state of health so altogether better than I had ever known that my whole consciousness is transformed by the intense alleviation of it, and I lose much time in pinching myself to see if this be not, really, "none of I." That fact, however, is much more interesting to myself than to other people—partly because no one but myself was ever aware of the unhappy nature of the physical consciousness from which I have been redeemed. It may give a glimmering sense of the degree of the redemption, however, that I should, in the first place, be willing to fly in the face of the jealous gods by so blatant a proclamation of it, and in the second, find the value of it still outweigh the formidable, the heaped-up and pressed together burden of my years.

But enough of my own otherwise meagre annals.... I must catch my post. I haven't sounded you for the least news of your own—it being needless to tell you that I hold out my cap for it even as an organ-grinder who makes eyes for pence to a gentleman on a balcony: especially when the balcony overhangs your luxuriant happy valley and your turquoise sea. I go on taking immense comfort in the "Second Home," as I beg your pardon for calling it, that your sister and her husband must make for you, and am almost as presumptuously pleased with it as if I had invented it. I am myself literally eating a baked apple and a biscuit on Xmas evening all alone: I have no one in the house, I never dine out here under any colour (there are to be found people who do!) and I have been deaf to the syren voice of Paris, and to other gregarious pressure. But I wish you a brave feast and a blameless year and am yours, my dear Norris, all faithfully and fondly,

HENRY JAMES.