The Death of the Lion
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Henry James >> The Death of the Lion
Transcribed from the 1915 Martin Secker edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
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 modem 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.
"I find he hasn't read the article in The Empire," Mr. Morrow
remarked to me. "That's so very interesting--it's something to
start with," he smiled. He had begun to pull off his gloves, which
were violently new, and to look encouragingly round the little
garden. As a "surrounding" I felt how I myself had already been
taken in; I was a little fish in the stomach of a bigger one. "I
represent," our visitor continued, "a syndicate of influential
journals, no less than thirty-seven, whose public--whose publics, I
may say--are in peculiar sympathy with Mr. Paraday's line of
thought. They would greatly appreciate any expression of his views
on the subject of the art he so nobly exemplifies. In addition to
my connexion with the syndicate just mentioned I hold a particular
commission from The Tatler, whose most prominent department,
'Smatter and Chatter'--I dare say you've often enjoyed it--attracts
such attention. I was honoured only last week, as a representative
of The Tatler, with the confidence of Guy Walsingham, the brilliant
author of 'Obsessions.' She pronounced herself thoroughly pleased
with my sketch of her method; she went so far as to say that I had
made her genius more comprehensible even to herself."
Neil Paraday had dropped on the garden-bench and sat there at once
detached and confounded; he looked hard at a bare spot in the lawn,
as if with an anxiety that had suddenly made him grave. His
movement had been interpreted by his visitor as an invitation to
sink sympathetically into a wicker chair that stood hard by, and
while Mr. Morrow so settled himself I felt he had taken official
possession and that there was no undoing it. One had heard of
unfortunate people's having "a man in the house," and this was just
what we had. There was a silence of a moment, during which we
seemed to acknowledge in the only way that was possible the
presence of universal fate; the sunny stillness took no pity, and
my thought, as I was sure Paraday's was doing, performed within the
minute a great distant revolution. I saw just how emphatic I
should make my rejoinder to Mr. Pinhorn, and that having come, like
Mr. Morrow, to betray, I must remain as long as possible to save.
Not because I had brought my mind back, but because our visitors
last words were in my ear, I presently enquired with gloomy
irrelevance if Guy Walsingham were a woman.
"Oh yes, a mere pseudonym--rather pretty, isn't it?--and
convenient, you know, for a lady who goes in for the larger
latitude. 'Obsessions, by Miss So-and-so,' would look a little
odd, but men are more naturally indelicate. Have you peeped into
'Obsessions'?" Mr. Morrow continued sociably to our companion.
Paraday, still absent, remote, made no answer, as if he hadn't
heard the question: a form of intercourse that appeared to suit
the cheerful Mr. Morrow as well as any other. Imperturbably bland,
he was a man of resources--he only needed to be on the spot. He
had pocketed the whole poor place while Paraday and I were wool-
gathering, and I could imagine that he had already got his "heads."
His system, at any rate, was justified by the inevitability with
which I replied, to save my friend the trouble: "Dear no--he
hasn't read it. He doesn't read such things!" I unwarily added.
"Things that are TOO far over the fence, eh?" I was indeed a
godsend to Mr. Morrow. It was the psychological moment; it
determined the appearance of his note-book, which, however, he at
first kept slightly behind him, even as the dentist approaching his
victim keeps the horrible forceps. "Mr. Paraday holds with the
good old proprieties--I see!" And thinking of the thirty-seven
influential journals, I found myself, as I found poor Paraday,
helplessly assisting at the promulgation of this ineptitude.
"There's no point on which distinguished views are so acceptable as
on this question--raised perhaps more strikingly than ever by Guy
Walsingham--of the permissibility of the larger latitude. I've an
appointment, precisely in connexion with it, next week, with Dora
Forbes, author of 'The Other Way Round,' which everybody's talking
about. Has Mr. Paraday glanced at 'The Other Way Round'?" Mr.
Morrow now frankly appealed to me. I took on myself to repudiate
the supposition, while our companion, still silent, got up
nervously and walked away. His visitor paid no heed to his
withdrawal; but opened out the note-book with a more fatherly pat.
"Dora Forbes, I gather, takes the ground, the same as Guy
Walsingham's, that the larger latitude has simply got to come. He
holds that it has got to be squarely faced. Of course his sex
makes him a less prejudiced witness. But an authoritative word
from Mr. Paraday--from the point of view of HIS sex, you know--
would go right round the globe. He takes the line that we HAVEN'T
got to face it?"
I was bewildered: it sounded somehow as if there were three sexes.
My interlocutor's pencil was poised, my private responsibility
great. I simply sat staring, none the less, and only found
presence of mind to say: "Is this Miss Forbes a gentleman?"
Mr. Morrow had a subtle smile. "It wouldn't be 'Miss'--there's a
wife!"
"I mean is she a man?"
"The wife?"--Mr. Morrow was for a moment as confused as myself.
But when I explained that I alluded to Dora Forbes in person he
informed me, with visible amusement at my being so out of it, that
this was the "pen-name" of an indubitable male--he had a big red
moustache. "He goes in for the slight mystification because the
ladies are such popular favourites. A great deal of interest is
felt in his acting on that idea--which IS clever, isn't it?--and
there's every prospect of its being widely imitated." Our host at
this moment joined us again, and Mr. Morrow remarked invitingly
that he should be happy to make a note of any observation the
movement in question, the bid for success under a lady's name,
might suggest to Mr. Paraday. But the poor man, without catching
the allusion, excused himself, pleading that, though greatly
honoured by his visitor's interest, he suddenly felt unwell and
should have to take leave of him--have to go and lie down and keep
quiet. His young friend might be trusted to answer for him, but he
hoped Mr. Morrow didn't expect great things even of his young
friend. His young friend, at this moment, looked at Neil Paraday
with an anxious eye, greatly wondering if he were doomed to be ill
again; but Paraday's own kind face met his question reassuringly,
seemed to say in a glance intelligible enough: "Oh I'm not ill,
but I'm scared: get him out of the house as quietly as possible."
Getting newspaper-men out of the house was odd business for an
emissary of Mr. Pinhorn, and I was so exhilarated by the idea of it
that I called after him as he left us: "Read the article in The
Empire and you'll soon be all right!"