The Death of the Lion

Henry James

The Death of the Lion

CHAPTER I

I had simply, I suppose, a change of heart, and it must have begun when I received my manuscript back from Mr. Pinhorn.  Mr. Pinhorn was my “chief,” as he was called in the office: he had the high mission of bringing the paper up.  This was a weekly periodical, which had been supposed to be almost past redemption when he took hold of it.  It was Mr. Deedy who had let the thing down so dreadfully: he was never mentioned in the office now save in connexion with that misdemeanour.  Young as I was I had been in a manner taken over from Mr. Deedy, who had been owner as well as editor; forming part of a promiscuous lot, mainly plant and office-furniture, which poor Mrs. Deedy, in her bereavement and depression, parted with at a rough valuation.  I could account for my continuity but on the supposition that I had been cheap.  I rather resented the practice of fathering all flatness on my late protector, who was in his unhonoured grave; but as I had my way to make I found matter enough for complacency in being on a “staff.”  At the same time I was aware of my exposure to suspicion as a product of the old lowering system.  This made me feel I was doubly bound to have ideas, and had doubtless been at the bottom of my proposing to Mr. Pinhorn that I should lay my lean hands on Neil Paraday.  I remember how he looked at me—quite, to begin with, as if he had never heard of this celebrity, who indeed at that moment was by no means in the centre of the heavens; and even when I had knowingly explained he expressed but little confidence in the demand for any such stuff.  When I had reminded him that the great principle on which we were supposed to work was just to create the demand we required, he considered a moment and then returned: “I see—you want to write him up.”

“Call it that if you like.”

“And what’s your inducement?”

“Bless my soul—my admiration!”

Mr. Pinhorn pursed up his mouth.  “Is there much to be done with him?”

“Whatever there is we should have it all to ourselves, for he hasn’t been touched.”

This argument was effective and Mr. Pinhorn responded.  “Very well, touch him.”  Then he added: “But where can you do it?”

“Under the fifth rib!”

Mr. Pinhorn stared.  “Where’s that?”

“You want me to go down and see him?” I asked when I had enjoyed his visible search for the obscure suburb I seemed to have named.

“I don’t ‘want’ anything—the proposal’s your own.  But you must remember that that’s the way we do things now,” said Mr. Pinhorn with another dig Mr. Deedy.

Unregenerate as I was I could read the queer implications of this speech.  The present owner’s superior virtue as well as his deeper craft spoke in his reference to the late editor as one of that baser sort who deal in false representations.  Mr. Deedy would as soon have sent me to call on Neil Paraday as he would have published a “holiday-number”; but such scruples presented themselves as mere ignoble thrift to his successor, whose own sincerity took the form of ringing door-bells and whose definition of genius was the art of finding people at home.  It was as if Mr. Deedy had published reports without his young men’s having, as Pinhorn would have said, really been there.  I was unregenerate, as I have hinted, and couldn’t be concerned to straighten out the journalistic morals of my chief, feeling them indeed to be an abyss over the edge of which it was better not to peer.  Really to be there this time moreover was a vision that made the idea of writing something subtle about Neil Paraday only the more inspiring.  I would be as considerate as even Mr. Deedy could have wished, and yet I should be as present as only Mr. Pinhorn could conceive.  My allusion to the sequestered manner in which Mr. Paraday lived—it had formed part of my explanation, though I knew of it only by hearsay—was, I could divine, very much what had made Mr. Pinhorn nibble.  It struck him as inconsistent with the success of his paper that any one should be so sequestered as that.  And then wasn’t an immediate exposure of everything just what the public wanted?  Mr. Pinhorn effectually called me to order by reminding me of the promptness with which I had met Miss Braby at Liverpool on her return from her fiasco in the States.  Hadn’t we published, while its freshness and flavour were unimpaired, Miss Braby’s own version of that great international episode?  I felt somewhat uneasy at this lumping of the actress and the author, and I confess that after having enlisted Mr. Pinhorn’s sympathies I procrastinated a little.  I had succeeded better than I wished, and I had, as it happened, work nearer at hand.  A few days later I called on Lord Crouchley and carried off in triumph the most unintelligible statement that had yet appeared of his lordship’s reasons for his change of front.  I thus set in motion in the daily papers columns of virtuous verbiage.  The following week I ran down to Brighton for a chat, as Mr. Pinhorn called it, with Mrs. Bounder, who gave me, on the subject of her divorce, many curious particulars that had not been articulated in court.  If ever an article flowed from the primal fount it was that article on Mrs. Bounder.  By this time, however, I became aware that Neil Paraday’s new book was on the point of appearing and that its approach had been the ground of my original appeal to Mr. Pinhorn, who was now annoyed with me for having lost so many days.  He bundled me off—we would at least not lose another.  I’ve always thought his sudden alertness a remarkable example of the journalistic instinct.  Nothing had occurred, since I first spoke to him, to create a visible urgency, and no enlightenment could possibly have reached him.  It was a pure case of profession flair—he had smelt the coming glory as an animal smells its distant prey.

CHAPTER II

I may as well say at once that this little record pretends in no degree to be a picture either of my introduction to Mr. Paraday or of certain proximate steps and stages.  The scheme of my narrative allows no space for these things, and in any case a prohibitory sentiment would hang about my recollection of so rare an hour.  These meagre notes are essentially private, so that if they see the light the insidious forces that, as my story itself shows, make at present for publicity will simply have overmastered my precautions.  The curtain fell lately enough on the lamentable drama.  My memory of the day I alighted at Mr. Paraday’s door is a fresh memory of kindness, hospitality, compassion, and of the wonderful illuminating talk in which the welcome was conveyed.  Some voice of the air had taught me the right moment, the moment of his life at which an act of unexpected young allegiance might most come home to him.  He had recently recovered from a long, grave illness.  I had gone to the neighbouring inn for the night, but I spent the evening in his company, and he insisted the next day on my sleeping under his roof.  I hadn’t an indefinite leave: Mr. Pinhorn supposed us to put our victims through on the gallop.  It was later, in the office, that the rude motions of the jig were set to music.  I fortified myself, however, as my training had taught me to do, by the conviction that nothing could be more advantageous for my article than to be written in the very atmosphere.  I said nothing to Mr. Paraday about it, but in the morning, after my remove from the inn, while he was occupied in his study, as he had notified me he should need to be, I committed to paper the main heads of my impression.  Then thinking to commend myself to Mr. Pinhorn by my celerity, I walked out and posted my little packet before luncheon.  Once my paper was written I was free to stay on, and if it was calculated to divert attention from my levity in so doing I could reflect with satisfaction that I had never been so clever.  I don’t mean to deny of course that I was aware it was much too good for Mr. Pinhorn; but I was equally conscious that Mr. Pinhorn had the supreme shrewdness of recognising from time to time the cases in which an article was not too bad only because it was too good.  There was nothing he loved so much as to print on the right occasion a thing he hated.  I had begun my visit to the great man on a Monday, and on the Wednesday his book came out.  A copy of it arrived by the first post, and he let me go out into the garden with it immediately after breakfast, I read it from beginning to end that day, and in the evening he asked me to remain with him the rest of the week and over the Sunday.

That night my manuscript came back from Mr. Pinhorn, accompanied with a letter the gist of which was the desire to know what I meant by trying to fob off on him such stuff.  That was the meaning of the question, if not exactly its form, and it made my mistake immense to me.  Such as this mistake was I could now only look it in the face and accept it.  I knew where I had failed, but it was exactly where I couldn’t have succeeded.  I had been sent down to be personal and then in point of fact hadn’t been personal at all: what I had dispatched to London was just a little finicking feverish study of my author’s talent.  Anything less relevant to Mr. Pinhorn’s purpose couldn’t well be imagined, and he was visibly angry at my having (at his expense, with a second-class ticket) approached the subject of our enterprise only to stand off so helplessly.  For myself, I knew but too well what had happened, and how a miracle—as pretty as some old miracle of legend—had been wrought on the spot to save me.  There had been a big brush of wings, the flash of an opaline robe, and then, with a great cool stir of the air, the sense of an angel’s having swooped down and caught me to his bosom.  He held me only till the danger was over, and it all took place in a minute.  With my manuscript back on my hands I understood the phenomenon better, and the reflexions I made on it are what I meant, at the beginning of this anecdote, by my change of heart.  Mr. Pinhorn’s note was not only a rebuke decidedly stern, but an invitation immediately to send him—it was the case to say so—the genuine article, the revealing and reverberating sketch to the promise of which, and of which alone, I owed my squandered privilege.  A week or two later I recast my peccant paper and, giving it a particular application to Mr. Paraday’s new book, obtained for it the hospitality of another journal, where, I must admit, Mr. Pinhorn was so far vindicated as that it attracted not the least attention.

CHAPTER III

I was frankly, at the end of three days, a very prejudiced critic, so that one morning when, in the garden, my great man had offered to read me something I quite held my breath as I listened.  It was the written scheme of another book—something put aside long ago, before his illness, but that he had lately taken out again to reconsider.  He had been turning it round when I came down on him, and it had grown magnificently under this second hand.  Loose liberal confident, it might have passed for a great gossiping eloquent letter—the overflow into talk of an artist’s amorous plan.  The theme I thought singularly rich, quite the strongest he had yet treated; and this familiar statement of it, full too of fine maturities, was really, in summarised splendour, a mine of gold, a precious independent work.  I remember rather profanely wondering whether the ultimate production could possibly keep at the pitch.  His reading of the fond epistle, at any rate, made me feel as if I were, for the advantage of posterity, in close correspondence with him—were the distinguished person to whom it had been affectionately addressed.  It was a high distinction simply to be told such things.  The idea he now communicated had all the freshness, the flushed fairness, of the conception untouched and untried: it was Venus rising from the sea and before the airs had blown upon her.  I had never been so throbbingly present at such an unveiling.  But when he had tossed the last bright word after the others, as I had seen cashiers in banks, weighing mounds of coin, drop a final sovereign into the tray, I knew a sudden prudent alarm.

“My dear master, how, after all, are you going to do it?  It’s infinitely noble, but what time it will take, what patience and independence, what assured, what perfect conditions!  Oh for a lone isle in a tepid sea!”

“Isn’t this practically a lone isle, and aren’t you, as an encircling medium, tepid enough?” he asked, alluding with a laugh to the wonder of my young admiration and the narrow limits of his little provincial home.  “Time isn’t what I’ve lacked hitherto: the question hasn’t been to find it, but to use it.  Of course my illness made, while it lasted, a great hole—but I dare say there would have been a hole at any rate.  The earth we tread has more pockets than a billiard-table.  The great thing is now to keep on my feet.”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

Neil Paraday looked at me with eyes—such pleasant eyes as he had—in which, as I now recall their expression, I seem to have seen a dim imagination of his fate.  He was fifty years old, and his illness had been cruel, his convalescence slow.  “It isn’t as if I weren’t all right.”

“Oh if you weren’t all right I wouldn’t look at you!” I tenderly said.

We had both got up, quickened as by this clearer air, and he had lighted a cigarette.  I had taken a fresh one, which with an intenser smile, by way of answer to my exclamation, he applied to the flame of his match.  “If I weren’t better I shouldn’t have thought of that!”  He flourished his script in his hand.

“I don’t want to be discouraging, but that’s not true,” I returned.  “I’m sure that during the months you lay here in pain you had visitations sublime.  You thought of a thousand things.  You think of more and more all the while.  That’s what makes you, if you’ll pardon my familiarity, so respectable.  At a time when so many people are spent you come into your second wind.  But, thank God, all the same, you’re better!  Thank God, too, you’re not, as you were telling me yesterday, ‘successful.’  If you weren’t a failure what would be the use of trying?  That’s my one reserve on the subject of your recovery—that it makes you ‘score,’ as the newspapers say.  It looks well in the newspapers, and almost anything that does that’s horrible.  ‘We are happy to announce that Mr. Paraday, the celebrated author, is again in the enjoyment of excellent health.’  Somehow I shouldn’t like to see it.”

“You won’t see it; I’m not in the least celebrated—my obscurity protects me.  But couldn’t you bear even to see I was dying or dead?” my host enquired.

“Dead—passe encore; there’s nothing so safe.  One never knows what a living artist may do—one has mourned so many.  However, one must make the worst of it.  You must be as dead as you can.”

“Don’t I meet that condition in having just published a book?”

“Adequately, let us hope; for the book’s verily a masterpiece.”

At this moment the parlour-maid appeared in the door that opened from the garden: Paraday lived at no great cost, and the frisk of petticoats, with a timorous “Sherry, sir?” was about his modest mahogany.  He allowed half his income to his wife, from whom he had succeeded in separating without redundancy of legend.  I had a general faith in his having behaved well, and I had once, in London, taken Mrs. Paraday down to dinner.  He now turned to speak to the maid, who offered him, on a tray, some card or note, while, agitated, excited, I wandered to the end of the precinct.  The idea of his security became supremely dear to me, and I asked myself if I were the same young man who had come down a few days before to scatter him to the four winds.  When I retraced my steps he had gone into the house, and the woman—the second London post had come in—had placed my letters and a newspaper on a bench.  I sat down there to the letters, which were a brief business, and then, without heeding the address, took the paper from its envelope.  It was the journal of highest renown, The Empire of that morning.  It regularly came to Paraday, but I remembered that neither of us had yet looked at the copy already delivered.  This one had a great mark on the “editorial” page, and, uncrumpling the wrapper, I saw it to be directed to my host and stamped with the name of his publishers.  I instantly divined that The Empire had spoken of him, and I’ve not forgotten the odd little shock of the circumstance.  It checked all eagerness and made me drop the paper a moment.  As I sat there conscious of a palpitation I think I had a vision of what was to be.  I had also a vision of the letter I would presently address to Mr. Pinhorn, breaking, as it were, with Mr. Pinhorn.  Of course, however, the next minute the voice of The Empire was in my ears.

The article wasn’t, I thanked heaven, a review; it was a “leader,” the last of three, presenting Neil Paraday to the human race.  His new book, the fifth from his hand, had been but a day or two out, and The Empire, already aware of it, fired, as if on the birth of a prince, a salute of a whole column.  The guns had been booming these three hours in the house without our suspecting them.  The big blundering newspaper had discovered him, and now he was proclaimed and anointed and crowned.  His place was assigned him as publicly as if a fat usher with a wand had pointed to the topmost chair; he was to pass up and still up, higher and higher, between the watching faces and the envious sounds—away up to the dais and the throne.  The article was “epoch-making,” a landmark in his life; he had taken rank at a bound, waked up a national glory.  A national glory was needed, and it was an immense convenience he was there.  What all this meant rolled over me, and I fear I grew a little faint—it meant so much more than I could say “yea” to on the spot.  In a flash, somehow, all was different; the tremendous wave I speak of had swept something away.  It had knocked down, I suppose, my little customary altar, my twinkling tapers and my flowers, and had reared itself into the likeness of a temple vast and bare.  When Neil Paraday should come out of the house he would come out a contemporary.  That was what had happened: the poor man was to be squeezed into his horrible age.  I felt as if he had been overtaken on the crest of the hill and brought back to the city.  A little more and he would have dipped down the short cut to posterity and escaped.

CHAPTER IV

When he came out it was exactly as if he had been in custody, for beside him walked a stout man with a big black beard, who, save that he wore spectacles, might have been a policeman, and in whom at a second glance I recognised the highest contemporary enterprise.

“This is Mr. Morrow,” said Paraday, looking, I thought, rather white: “he wants to publish heaven knows what about me.”

I winced as I remembered that this was exactly what I myself had wanted.  “Already?” I cried with a sort of sense that my friend had fled to me for protection.

Mr. Morrow glared, agreeably, through his glasses: they suggested the electric headlights of some monstrous modern ship, and I felt as if Paraday and I were tossing terrified under his bows.  I saw his momentum was irresistible.  “I was confident that I should be the first in the field.  A great interest is naturally felt in Mr. Paraday’s surroundings,” he heavily observed.

“I hadn’t the least idea of it,” said Paraday, as if he had been told he had been snoring.

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