Thus William Dean Howells could fall for Paris, having built no defences against the sensuous world, defences that any European man of his age would assiduously and carefully have developed. Howells was ready to be seduced by beauty and prepared to feel deep regret that beauty had passed him by in Boston. Henry loved the yearning openness of Americans, their readiness for experience, their eyes bright with expectation and promise. As he worked on his novels of English morals and manners, he felt the dry nature of the English experience – sure of its own place and unready for change, steeped in the solid and the social, a system of manners developed without much interruption for a thousand years. On the other hand, these educated and powerful American visitors seemed so shiny, so ready to be new, so sure that their moment had come that now, as he sat on his terrace in the twilight, he felt their force, how much could still be done with them, how little attention he had paid them in recent years. He was glad then that he had invited Oliver Wendell Holmes to stay at Point Hill and he vowed that he would see him in London also if he could. He who had come to dread these interruptions found himself rather interested in this one.
When he began to picture Holmes, to place him against the background of when he had first known him, he remembered the aura of certainty and dependability which lay about his friend. Even at twenty-two Holmes had believed that the world he inhabited was a world in which he would thrive. He was formed like a planing machine to gorge a deep self-beneficial groove through life. He made sure that when fresh experience came his way it was rich and rewarding and gave him pleasure. As he learned to think, however, his mind became like a stiff spring. He was caught thus between the venal and the exacting and it made his presence nervous and exciting. He had found a public voice, a way of holding himself and forming sentences and formulating policy and judgement, to ensure that the personal and the carnal would be held in check and not have to be on parade. He could be pompous and intimidating when he pleased. Henry had known him too well to be affected by this, yet, at William’s instigation, he had paid enough attention to Holmes’s role as a judge to be deeply impressed by him at the same time.
From William, too, he learned about aspects of Holmes which Holmes was careful never to display to him. Holmes loved, it seemed, to talk lightly of women to his old friends. This was something which offered William considerable amusement, especially when he learned that Holmes never alluded to such matters when Henry was present. In company, William insisted, Holmes also loved to refight the battles of the Civil War and explain his wounds to the assembled listeners.
‘When it gets late,’ William said, ‘Holmes becomes like his father, the old doctor and autocrat. He enjoys his own often-told anecdotes and loves a listener.’
William expressed incredulity that Holmes, in his meetings with Henry over the previous thirty years, had never mentioned the Civil War.
‘It’s all day long and then through the night, William went on, bullets whizzing and rifles and men charging and the dead lying everywhere and the wounded beyond description. And, indeed, his own wounds, even when there are ladies present he discusses his wounds. The only wonder is that he did not die of them. Surely he has shown you his wounds?’
Henry remembered that this conversation had taken place in William’s study. He could see William enjoying his own tone, allowing himself freedoms with his brother that he normally reserved for his wife.
Henry remembered with satisfaction how the conversation had ended.
‘What then do the two of you talk about?’ William asked. He seemed to want real information, a factual response.
Henry hesitated and looked into the distance, then focussed his eyes carefully on a number of leather-bound volumes on a far shelf, and quietly responded, ‘Wendell is formed, I fear, to testify simply and solely about himself.’
HE WAITED on his terrace after supper as night came down. Holmes, he remembered now, generally spoke to him about his career, his colleagues, new cases, new developments in law and politics and then new conquests he had made among the British aristocracy. He gossiped about old friends and boasted about new ones, speaking freely and solemnly. Henry loved his worldliness, his practised, clipped sentences and then a sudden burst of something else when he allowed himself to use words and phrases which hardly belonged to the law or the war, but more to the pulpit or the essay. Holmes loved to speculate, argue with himself, explain his own logic as though it were a side in a battle with opposing forces and much interior drama.
Henry did not mind what Holmes said. He saw him seldom and knew that what connected them was simple. They were part of an old world, fully respectable and oddly Puritan, led by the enquiring, protean minds of their fathers and the deeply cautious, watchful eyes of their mothers. They both had a sense of their destiny. More precisely, they belonged to the group of young men who had been to Harvard and who had known and loved Minny Temple, had sat at her feet and sought her approval and whom she haunted as they grew into middle age. In her company, they remembered, their experience had meant nothing, nor their innocence either, as she demanded something else from them. She elated them, and they felt a strange and insistent nostalgia when they recalled the time when they knew her.
She was Henry’s cousin, one of six Temple children, left as orphans when their parents died. For Henry and for William, the idea of the Temples not having parents made their cousins interesting and romantic. Their position seemed enviable, as all authority over them was vague and provisional. It made them appear free and loose, and it was only later, as each of them struggled in various ways, and indeed suffered, that he understood the unrecoverable nature and the deep sadness of their loss.
There was, between the time when he envied them and the time when he pitied them, a long gap. When he first reencountered Minny Temple aged seventeen, not having seen her for some years, the sentiment was still very much one of admiration, even awe. He instantly knew that she, among her sisters, would be special for him and that she would remain so. There were many words to describe her: she was light and curious and spontaneous and she was natural – that was important – and, perhaps, he felt, her lack of parenting gave her a sort of ease and freshness; she had never had to reflect anyone, or seek to become like anyone, or fight against such influences. Maybe, he later thought, in the shadow of so much death, she had developed what was her most remarkable feature – a taste for life. Her mind was restless; there was nothing she did not want to know, no matter on which she did not wish to speculate. She managed, he thought, to combine a questioning inner life with a quick sense of the social. She loved coming into a room to find people there. More than anything else, he remembered her laugh, its suddenness and its richness, but also its lightness, the strange, touching, ringing sound of it.
She had not, when she struck him first with all her moral force, appeared so ethereal. She came to Newport with one of her sisters and they seemed to him beautiful and clear-eyed and free, being looked after lightly at the time by their aunt and uncle. On that first visit Minny had argued with Henry’s father. Henry had never known a time when people did not argue with his father. As soon as he could listen, he had witnessed William and his father in deep discussion which involved raised voices and heated divergence of views. Most male visitors and some female ones too seemed to come to the house specifically to argue. Freedom of all sorts, and especially religious freedom, was his father’s great subject, but he also had many others; he did not believe in confining himself, it was one of his principles.