The Master

by Colm Toibin

  William and he did not communicate much with each other during these months, even though they ate at the same table three times a day. If a letter came from his mother which Henry thought that William should see, he handed it to him without comment; and William did the same. Both brothers were enjoying their solitude, the pleasures of introspection and intermittent company and freedom from parental interference and the noise of domestic life, but more than anything they were both wrapped up in their reading.

  This was, on the other hand, an heroic time in Wilky’s life, which he would not experience again, and would not, indeed, recover from. He volunteered to serve under Colonel Shaw as an officer in the 54th Regiment. Its departure from Boston was a glorious occasion, which Henry James senior travelled specially to Boston to see, using the house of Oliver Wendell Holmes senior as a vantage point to view the parade, which would be for him a pivotal moment in the history of his family and the history of liberty in America.

  William and Henry learned of the event from their mother. When her letter came informing them of their father’s arrival, it was clear that she presumed both brothers would wish to view for themselves Wilky’s brave triumph and personally to witness a singular conjoining of the family’s history with that of the country’s destiny. It seemed not to occur to her that they might not wish to attend.

  William wrote, however, immediately to tell her that he had an important experiment to perform in the laboratory on that very day, that he would make every effort to be there, but should these efforts fail, then the event would have to take place without him.

  Henry waited until the date came closer and then he wrote to his mother about his back, which was providing him with pain, and his need for rest and his hope that he would be much improved by 28 May, the date of the event, and, in fact, he promised to do his utmost to be there, but should his back continue to trouble him, or take a turn for the worse, then he would not be able to meet his father and accompany him to the house of Dr Holmes. He did not read it over before he sent it.

  On the morning of 28 May Henry did not go to breakfast at Miss Upsham’s and, on arriving for lunch, found that William had arranged to absent himself from all meals that day. Professor Child and two of the others, all fanatical abolitionists, were preparing to attend the parade and presumed that William’s absence was due to his eagerness to see his brother, whose bravery in joining the 54th under Colonel Shaw they all admired. It struck Henry that they also presumed he had organized his own viewing of the regiment and, as he got ready to slip away, no one asked him where he was going.

  As Henry lay on his bed, having returned quietly to his quarters, he felt that the stillness and the silence were more profound than usual, as if all noise had concentrated itself into the path of the parade and left him in this place on the undisturbed margins where there was no sound or action or movement. He stretched and walked over to the table and drummed his fingers lightly on its polished surface and relished the dullness, the faintness of the sound. He took down from his shelf a volume of Sainte-Beuve and flicked through it, but the feeling of being away from the heart of things was overwhelming now. He was suspended like a caught breath. It was almost exciting, but, more than that, as the afternoon wore on, he felt something approaching happiness, which did not resemble the happiness arising from work done, or from pure repose. Rather, he was in a room with a bed and books and a desk on a day when the outside air carried danger with it. When everyone else had fire in their blood, he was calm. So calm that he could neither read nor think, merely bask in the freedom that the afternoon offered, savour, as deeply as he could, this quiet and strange treachery, his own surreptitious withdrawal from the world.

  THE HOUSEHOLD, when he returned to Newport, was in a constant state of expectation. The family barely noticed his arrival and did not pay any attention to his semi-exiled state. At meals nothing but Wilky and Bob and their comrades, many of whose names were known to the family, was discussed. Each letter was greeted with a fluttering cry from his mother and Aunt Kate and Alice but was preserved unopened to be handed first to Henry senior, who read it slowly and judiciously and quietly to himself before handing it over to his wife, who would read aloud the parts she deemed worthy of immediate release. Then it was given to Henry or William,if they were present,and then to Aunt Kate and Alice, who read it in unison. Henry senior would then peruse the letter again several times over, deeming some of Wilky’s correspondence worthy of reproduction in the Newport News, and he would set out alone, as briskly as he could and with much purpose, to hand over the missive to the editor.

  It was a letter they received dated 18 July 1863 that told them Wilky was now entering his most testing time and that every day he would be in the most serious danger. The Newport News proudly printed it in full:

  Dear Father, We are sailing down the Ediston River, on our way to the front. I have only time to say that we came out of the fight on the 16th with 47 killed and wounded. The regiment behaved nobly; and I would give my right arm to keep up the good name it has won. We are now on our way to Morris Island, the new attack on Fort Wagner commencing tomorrow at dawn. I hope and pray to God that the regiment will do as nobly there as it did at James Island.

  All of them knew about Fort Wagner. It was, Henry senior told them gravely, the strongest single earthwork in the history of warfare. It would have to be taken, he said, but it could not be taken easily. Henry senior was greatly exercised at the wisdom of sending in the 54th, a regiment whose footsoldiers were mostly black, whose very appearance would provoke a fury among the Confederate soldiers. In the days afterwards, when they heard no news, he discussed this with the many anxious visitors who called to the James’s house and repeated everything he said to the next visitor and the next until he was sure that his attitude towards the battle was the correct one, indeed the only one worth having.

  All they could do was wait. They knew that the battle had been a disaster and that Fort Wagner was still held by the confederate soldiers. They heard that the soldiers of the 54th had excelled themselves in bravery. And they heard that many of them were dead. But they knew nothing of Wilky. In the hot summer days and nights, so deeply associated with ease and happiness and pleasure, they did not sleep, their meals became enforced, awkward gatherings, and as time passed they understood that Wilky could not have walked away unscathed from the battle. He would have notified them by now. And so they waited in dread.

  Henry thought of him buried with a pile of bodies, having no name to mark his resting place.

  ‘That would be the worst for your mother,’ Aunt Kate said to him, ‘thinking that he might have survived and thinking that he might come into the hall at any moment to surprise her. Your mother would never stop hoping.’

  No one at any stage mentioned the threat, or rumour of a threat, that Jeff Davis had issued in a manifesto ordering the white officers of the 54th Massachusetts hanged if captured alive. When Aunt Kate found it in a newspaper, where Henry had already seen it, he watched her taking the paper into the kitchen and burning it in the stove.

  In time, of course, they would discover the full horror of what happened at Fort Wagner, the ranks mowed down at almost every step, the bodies heaped high, the death of Colonel Shaw personally witnessed by Wilky, the death of his friend Cabot Russell, Wilky’s first wound in the side, and then the shock of a canister ball in the foot. As he lay injured he was noticed by two stretcher bearers who began to carry him to a temporary resting place for the wounded when a round shot blew off the head of the stretcher bearer to his rear. Wilky witnessed his instant and horrible death. The other stretcher bearer took to his heels. Wilky woke the morning of the following day inside the tents of the Sanitary Commission,nearly three miles away. After a while he was moved to Port Royal Hospital, which was not really a hospital, but a field full of the desperately injured and the dying, barely covered with a thin canvas, its patients offered only the slightest medical assistance. Wilky lay there half conscious, his wounds slowly
becoming infected, with no way of contacting his family.

  He was saved by a miracle. Cabot Russell’s father had travelled to South Carolina in search of his son, believing that he had been taken prisoner. Although he had been assured that his son had not survived the battle, he made a desperate, grief-stricken search in the tents where the wounded lay, and this was how he found Wilky, spotting him quite by chance among the injured soldiers. Immediately, he notified the James family by telegram and let them know that, while he would continue to look for his own son, he would also ensure that Wilky James was transported home. By the beginning of August, Mr Russell gave up his vain search in the chaos of South Carolina and accepted what he had originally been told – that his son was dead. He travelled by boat with Wilky on a stretcher as far as New York, Wilky’s infection worsening all the time, the canister ball which had lodged in his foot having to be removed on board. The other wound,close to Wilky’s spine,was even more severely infected but could not be touched.

  When Wilky arrived in Newport, Mr Russell having travelled with him all the way, he was close to death. The stretcher was carried into the hallway, but the doctor ordered that it should be taken no further. The family gathered around him, relieved that the moment had come and he had been returned to them alive, but aware also that his time could be short, all of them sure that his survival was more important now than any other matter on the earth. Then they noticed the grieving face of Mr Russell, and Henry watched each of them as they tried not to sound too openly jubilant or too concerned about Wilky to the exclusion of all else in front of this broken father fresh from the battlefield where his son lay dead. In those first hours, as William took instructions from the doctor so that he could minister personally to his brother, and his parents held Wilky’s hand and kept visitors at bay, and his aunt and sister moved from the kitchen to the hallway with hot water and towels and fresh bandages, Henry studied Mr Russell, impressed by his grave and steady gentleness, and aware of the difference it would have made for him to be observing the patient with a still more intimate pity. Mr Russell remained quiet and tactful as he waited to depart; it was this very quietness and tact which eventually seeped into the atmosphere until the idea that this good, kind man was bereft of his only son and yet sat erect and dry-eyed at the guarded fact of the family’s relief made each one of them, as Henry saw it, move carefully and watchfully around him.

  Less than a year earlier, Wilky and Cabot had lived in a state of complacent expectation, as if the stretch of earth they inhabited had been created and cleared especially for their freedom and happiness. In Boston and Newport and in the villages of New England, they were everywhere welcomed, their accents understood, their manners appreciated. In time their boyish openness would be tempered by experience, just as their handsomeness would ripen and their beliefs solidify. No one told them and no one warned their parents that they would be shot down before they were twenty. The New England which their grandparents and great-grandparents had created was not a place of violent death or battle roar or infected wounds, but of settlement, propriety, peace, righteousness. Henry knew, as he sat on a bench in the hallway close to Mr Russell, that their visitor’s shock came not only from the brutal disappearance from the earth of his golden son, but from the idea that a public pact, a version of the civic order as ordained by history, had been cruelly broken.

  Wilky came home with no belongings. Even his uniform was rotting and had to be carefully removed. The blanket that covered him was thrown aside and left in a corner of the hallway. It was a few days before Henry, doing vigil over his brother, noticed it and carried it to the kitchen. As he unfolded it there, the smell was overwhelming,but so fiercely redolent of what Wilky’s suffering in the battlefield must have been like that he could not easily cast it aside. It smelled of tobacco, and it smelled of the strange mixture of rot and human sweat which Wilky’s uniform had reeked of. But more than anything, it smelled of the earth itself, the earth of mud and muck and of war, the earth which had been stormed by regiments and disturbed by grave diggers, the foetid earth. He found a place for the blanket in a shed behind the kitchen and went back to the hallway, but the smell remained with him. It was the most vivid testament to what his brother had been through.

  THE HOUSE lived on the ebb and flow of Wilky’s pain. Henry realized that he had paid such close attention to Mr Russell on that first day because he would have done anything to avoid having to look at his brother and contemplate his future. Once Mr Russell had left, he had no choice but to take in the scene in all its horror. Wilky’s hair was matted and his body limp and sweaty. Wilky did not seem to sleep; he lay on his side, constantly moaning and as the pain intensified crying out suddenly. Sometimes the cries turned into shrieks and they filled the house. Henry believed that his brother was going to die.

  Over breakfast on the third morning, his mother said that all of them, in whatever way they could, should try to share Wilky’s pain, take some of it from him and live with it themselves. Everyone in this house, she said, as her husband nodded, should dedicate themselves to taking the pain from Wilky and suffering a small part of it in their own bodies. When Henry looked at William, he discovered that his brother was nodding too, as though something eminently wise and practical had been said. When Henry went back to his room, he lay on the bed and concentrated on the infected wound in Wilky’s side which the doctors had cut open but which had not been cleared of infection. No amount of wishing, he thought, could do anything to alleviate his brother’s suffering. He went down to the hallway and sat close to Wilky who was groaning softly. He moved closer to him – as his Aunt Kate, who was already there, smiled at him – and held Wilky’s hand for a moment, but since this seemed to cause him pain he withdrew it. He wished that his brother could smile as he had always smiled, but his drawn face now appeared as though it would never smile again. It would wince and wrinkle up in distress rather than open in warm recognition. Henry and his Aunt Kate sat there with Wilky silently until his mother came and without speaking took her sister’s place on the bench beside the stretcher.

  The family kept the gravity of Wilky’s state from Bob,and only when the patient began to improve did they tell Bob the truth about him. Bob managed to send them a private letter expressing his opinion and that of many others about the assault on Fort Wagner – that large matters of strategy were overlooked. The slain, he said, were monuments to folly. Bob’s letter did not please his parents; it lacked idealism and optimism. Bob, it became clear from other letters, was bored. He had suffered from sunstroke and dysentery and lack of respect for his superiors. His letters were read only by the immediate family, his mother expressing her disapproval by leaving some of the letters unread, allowing her husband to read her the more uplifting extracts, if he could find them.

  As Wilky’s wounds began to heal, his nightmares started. He cried out as though the heat of battle or the mayhem of retreat were upon him. Each one of the family took turns to stay with him at night once he was well enough to be moved to his room, but no one knew how to restore order to his sleep, make him believe that he was not being attacked and shot at and his friends and comrades killed all around him. His nightmares stopped only when all the thrashing and frantic movement in the dreams caused him to wake. It was the pain that brought him back to his senses.

  Often the day was no better as the memory of what he had seen and felt became a waking nightmare for Wilky. His father remained optimistic, certain of his recovery, and certain also that the dead of the war would now experience an eternal morning, an unimagined happiness. Even Wilky’s pain, he said, had united the family and could only lead Wilky to great spiritual distinction in the future.

  Henry sat in the bedroom one day as Wilky, now able haltingly to speak, asked their father to preach a sermon. Wilky’s voice was weak, but his eyes were eager and he watched his father with an innocent hunger as Henry senior began, explaining that each mortal, the healthy and the rich, as much as the sick and the wounded, was equa
lly dependent on the Divine hand, and our best interest lay in becoming as innocently ready to follow him as sheep. He continued until Wilky, at first falteringly, but then louder and with tears in his eyes, interrupted.

  ‘Ah Father, it is easy preaching faith in God’s care,’ he said, ‘but it was hard, where I have been, to practise it.’

  Henry senior was silent. They watched Wilky gasping for breath, trying to speak more. His father turned to Henry as though to ask if his second son would know whether he should go on with the sermon or wait to see if Wilky had more to say. Henry did not respond, but soon Wilky’s voice found the strength to continue and he left them in no doubt that he did not wish to be preached to any more, even if it was he who had originally requested it.

  ‘I woke up lying in the sand under my tent, and slowly recalled much that had happened, my wounds, my fall, the two men that tried to drag me to the hospital tent, the fall of one of them, my feeble crawling to the ambulance. I woke up to find myself forgotten, and sick and faint for loss of blood. As I lay wondering whether I should ever see home again, I saw a poor Ohio man with his jaw shot away who found, I suppose, that I was near to him and unable to stand, he crept over and deluged me with his blood. At that I felt …’

  Wilky covered his face with his hands and began to cry uncontrollably, but he could shape no more words. His crying grew louder, more hysterical, until he shook in the bed, his father and his brother watching him helplessly. Once his mother came, she held him and calmed him and spoke softly to all three of them.

  ‘When Wilky was a baby,’ she said when Wilky had finally fallen asleep, ‘and in his crib, he always seemed to be smiling. I tried to find out if he was smiling all the time, or if he heard me coming and began to smile only then. But I never could find out. That’s what I’d like now, that’s what I’m waiting for – that he will start to smile again.’