Henry James
Greville Fane

GREVILLE FANE

Coming in to dress for dinner, I found a telegram: “Mrs. Stormer dying; can you give us half a column for to-morrow evening?  Let her off easy, but not too easy.”  I was late; I was in a hurry; I had very little time to think, but at a venture I dispatched a reply: “Will do what I can.”  It was not till I had dressed and was rolling away to dinner that, in the hansom, I bethought myself of the difficulty of the condition attached.  The difficulty was not of course in letting her off easy but in qualifying that indulgence.  “I simply won’t qualify it,” I said to myself.  I didn’t admire her, but I liked her, and I had known her so long that I almost felt heartless in sitting down at such an hour to a feast of indifference.  I must have seemed abstracted, for the early years of my acquaintance with her came back to me.  I spoke of her to the lady I had taken down, but the lady I had taken down had never heard of Greville Fane.  I tried my other neighbour, who pronounced her books “too vile.”  I had never thought them very good, but I should let her off easier than that.

I came away early, for the express purpose of driving to ask about her.  The journey took time, for she lived in the north-west district, in the neighbourhood of Primrose Hill.  My apprehension that I should be too late was justified in a fuller sense than I had attached to it—I had only feared that the house would be shut up.  There were lights in the windows, and the temperate tinkle of my bell brought a servant immediately to the door, but poor Mrs. Stormer had passed into a state in which the resonance of no earthly knocker was to be feared.  A lady, in the hall, hovering behind the servant, came forward when she heard my voice.  I recognised Lady Luard, but she had mistaken me for the doctor.

“Excuse my appearing at such an hour,” I said; “it was the first possible moment after I heard.”

“It’s all over,” Lady Luard replied.  “Dearest mamma!”

She stood there under the lamp with her eyes on me; she was very tall, very stiff, very cold, and always looked as if these things, and some others beside, in her dress, her manner and even her name, were an implication that she was very admirable.  I had never been able to follow the argument, but that is a detail.  I expressed briefly and frankly what I felt, while the little mottled maidservant flattened herself against the wall of the narrow passage and tried to look detached without looking indifferent.  It was not a moment to make a visit, and I was on the point of retreating when Lady Luard arrested me with a queer, casual, drawling “Would you—a—would you, perhaps, be writing something?”  I felt for the instant like an interviewer, which I was not.  But I pleaded guilty to this intention, on which she rejoined: “I’m so very glad—but I think my brother would like to see you.”  I detested her brother, but it wasn’t an occasion to act this out; so I suffered myself to be inducted, to my surprise, into a small back room which I immediately recognised as the scene, during the later years, of Mrs. Stormer’s imperturbable industry.  Her table was there, the battered and blotted accessory to innumerable literary lapses, with its contracted space for the arms (she wrote only from the elbow down) and the confusion of scrappy, scribbled sheets which had already become literary remains.  Leolin was also there, smoking a cigarette before the fire and looking impudent even in his grief, sincere as it well might have been.

To meet him, to greet him, I had to make a sharp effort; for the air that he wore to me as he stood before me was quite that of his mother’s murderer.  She lay silent for ever upstairs—as dead as an unsuccessful book, and his swaggering erectness was a kind of symbol of his having killed her.  I wondered if he had already, with his sister, been calculating what they could get for the poor papers on the table; but I had not long to wait to learn, for in reply to the scanty words of sympathy I addressed him he puffed out: “It’s miserable, miserable, yes; but she has left three books complete.”  His words had the oddest effect; they converted the cramped little room into a seat of trade and made the “book” wonderfully feasible.  He would certainly get all that could be got for the three.  Lady Luard explained to me that her husband had been with them but had had to go down to the House.  To her brother she explained that I was going to write something, and to me again she made it clear that she hoped I would “do mamma justice.”  She added that she didn’t think this had ever been done.  She said to her brother: “Don’t you think there are some things he ought thoroughly to understand?” and on his instantly exclaiming “Oh, thoroughly—thoroughly!” she went on, rather austerely: “I mean about mamma’s birth.”

“Yes, and her connections,” Leolin added.

I professed every willingness, and for five minutes I listened, but it would be too much to say that I understood.  I don’t even now, but it is not important.  My vision was of other matters than those they put before me, and while they desired there should be no mistake about their ancestors I became more and more lucid about themselves.  I got away as soon as possible, and walked home through the great dusky, empty London—the best of all conditions for thought.  By the time I reached my door my little article was practically composed—ready to be transferred on the morrow from the polished plate of fancy.  I believe it attracted some notice, was thought “graceful” and was said to be by some one else.  I had to be pointed without being lively, and it took some tact.  But what I said was much less interesting than what I thought—especially during the half-hour I spent in my armchair by the fire, smoking the cigar I always light before going to bed.  I went to sleep there, I believe; but I continued to moralise about Greville Fane.  I am reluctant to lose that retrospect altogether, and this is a dim little memory of it, a document not to “serve.”  The dear woman had written a hundred stories, but none so curious as her own.

When first I knew her she had published half-a-dozen fictions, and I believe I had also perpetrated a novel.  She was more than a dozen years older than I, but she was a person who always acknowledged her relativity.  It was not so very long ago, but in London, amid the big waves of the present, even a near horizon gets hidden.  I met her at some dinner and took her down, rather flattered at offering my arm to a celebrity.  She didn’t look like one, with her matronly, mild, inanimate face, but I supposed her greatness would come out in her conversation.  I gave it all the opportunities I could, but I was not disappointed when I found her only a dull, kind woman.  This was why I liked her—she rested me so from literature.  To myself literature was an irritation, a torment; but Greville Fane slumbered in the intellectual part of it like a Creole in a hammock.  She was not a woman of genius, but her faculty was so special, so much a gift out of hand, that I have often wondered why she fell below that distinction.  This was doubtless because the transaction, in her case, had remained incomplete; genius always pays for the gift, feels the debt, and she was placidly unconscious of obligation.  She could invent stories by the yard, but she couldn’t write a page of English.  She went down to her grave without suspecting that though she had contributed volumes to the diversion of her contemporaries she had not contributed a sentence to the language.  This had not prevented bushels of criticism from being heaped upon her head; she was worth a couple of columns any day to the weekly papers, in which it was shown that her pictures of life were dreadful but her style really charming.  She asked me to come and see her, and I went.  She lived then in Montpellier Square; which helped me to see how dissociated her imagination was from her character.

An industrious widow, devoted to her daily stint, to meeting the butcher and baker and making a home for her son and daughter, from the moment she took her pen in her hand she became a creature of passion.  She thought the English novel deplorably wanting in that element, and the task she had cut out for herself was to supply the deficiency.  Passion in high life was the general formula of this work, for her imagination was at home only in the most exalted circles.  She adored, in truth, the aristocracy, and they constituted for her the romance of the world or, what is more to the point, the prime material of fiction.  Their beauty and luxury, their loves and revenges, their temptations and surrenders, their immoralities and diamonds were as familiar to her as the blots on her writing-table.  She was not a belated producer of the old fashionable novel, she had a cleverness and a modernness of her own, she had freshened up the fly-blown tinsel.  She turned off plots by the hundred and—so far as her flying quill could convey her—was perpetually going abroad.  Her types, her illustrations, her tone were nothing if not cosmopolitan.  She recognised nothing less provincial than European society, and her fine folk knew each other and made love to each other from Doncaster to Bucharest.  She had an idea that she resembled Balzac, and her favourite historical characters were Lucien de Rubempré and the Vidame de Pamiers.  I must add that when I once asked her who the latter personage was she was unable to tell me.  She was very brave and healthy and cheerful, very abundant and innocent and wicked.  She was clever and vulgar and snobbish, and never so intensely British as when she was particularly foreign.

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