Wild Nights! Read online

  “Please wait here, sir. The nurse supervisor will be with you shortly. Thank you!”

  The waiting room was rather a blow to Henry’s pride: a makeshift space with but one grimy window looking out onto an air shaft, where some ten or twelve fellow volunteers—sister volunteers, for all were women—were waiting nervously. This was so very different a setting from Lady Crenshaw’s Belgravia drawing room where, in the company of others, the Master had joined the Civilian Volunteers Hospital Corps with such excitement. He did not recognize a face here from Lady Crenshaw’s gathering yet he steeled himself for the inevitable Is it—Mr. James? What an honor! I am one of your greatest admirers—and was both relieved and somewhat disappointed when no one seemed to recognize him. Courteously he greeted the women, without singling out any individual, at once seeing that these were ladies of the privileged class to which, at least by reputation, Henry James belonged; though judging from the fussy quality of their clothing and footware, and by the opulence of their wedding rings, he understood that they were surely richer than he. All the straight-back chairs in the waiting room were taken and when one of the younger women stood to offer her chair to him, quickly Henry thanked her and murmured it would not be necessary.

  The Master’s face throbbed with indignation. As if he were so very infirm, at the age of seventy-one! Pointedly he remained standing just inside the doorway, leaning on his cane.

  In the corridor, hospital workers were carrying patients on stretchers, some of them unconscious, if not comatose, into the interior of the building; pushing them in wheelchairs and on gurneys, in a ghastly procession at which it was impossible not to stare with mounting pity and alarm. Here and there were ambulatory young men hobbling on crutches, escorted by nurses. Some were still wearing their badly bloodied uniforms, or remnants of uniforms. There were bandaged heads, torsos and limbs wrapped in blood-soaked gauze; there were hideous gaps where limbs were missing. Henry turned away, shielding his eyes. So this was war! This was the consequence of war! He had quite admired Napoleon, at one time—the gloire of military triumph and, yes, tyranny; precisely why, he would have been ashamed to speculate. Because I am weak. Weak men bow to tyrants. Weak men fear physical pain, their lives are stratagems for avoiding pain. He felt the tinge of angina pain, like a schoolboy taunt.

  He’d had such attacks. He was not in perfect health: his blood pressure was high, he was overweight, easily winded. In his inside coat pocket he carried a precious packet of nitroglycerine tablets, to swallow quickly should the pain increase.

  Prudently, Henry retreated from the doorway. From somewhere a crude footstool was found for him, that he consented to accept, with gratitude; not wishing to note, in the women’s eyes, that veiled concern one might feel for an older relation. Awkwardly Henry sat on the stool, gripping his cane. Almost, he’d forgotten why he was here, in this cramped place; for whom he, along with these ladies with whom he was not acquainted, seemed to be waiting. He did not join with them as they murmured anxiously together, complaining of being rudely treated by the hospital staff, and lamenting the latest news of German aggression. News of further atrocities wreaked by the Imperial German Army in Belgium, the fear that England would be invaded next. Much was being made in the newspapers of the fact that, in this hellish war of the new century, many numbers of civilians were being deliberately killed. That morning, Henry had not been able to finish reading the Times but had had to set the paper aside at breakfast; and then, feeling very weak, he had not been able to finish breakfast. Since the outbreak of the war in late August, now nearly five weeks ago, he had taken to reading a half-dozen papers, both dreading the lurid news and eager for it. His own, so finely textured prose he had set aside, he was transfixed now by the banner headlines, the astonishing photographs unlike any previously published in British journals, the vividly described battlefield scenes, accounts of the bravery of British officers and soldiers and of their tragic woundings and deaths, that quite outshone the newspapers’ interior, editorial pages with their reasoned analyses of the political situation. His nerves were raw, wounded. He slept but fitfully. He did not wish to think that, from this new wartime perspective, all of the Master’s efforts might be seen as but the elegant flowering of a civilization that had, all along, been rotting from within, and was now in danger of extinction. He thought I have outlived my life. And yet: he’d signed up as a hospital volunteer. He’d given money: to the Belgian Refugee Relief Fund, organized by a wealthy woman friend, to the International Red Cross, and to the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps. Since the outbreak of this hideous war with a rapacious Germanic aggressor, Henry had been almost reckless in giving away money, that he could scarcely afford to give away; his earnings for 1913, as for 1912 and preceding years, were scarcely more than one thousand pounds.

  So scorned by the vast, plebeian reading public, yet, so ironically, designated in literary circles, the Master! Though his heart was broken, yet Henry was resolved to see the humor here.

  “Ladies. You will come with me to Ward Six.” A nurse of some authority, about forty-five, rather stout, with flushed cheeks, appeared abruptly in the doorway: Nurse Supervisor Edwards. Seeing the lone gentleman in the waiting room, Nurse Edwards amended, with more annoyance than apology, “And you, sir. Now.”

  Again, Henry felt the sting of insult. His large somber face darkened with embarrassment as, with the assistance of one of the women, he heaved himself to his feet.

  With no more ceremony, Nurse Supervisor Edwards led the contingent of volunteers along the treacherous corridors, scarcely taking notice if they were able to keep pace with her. The nurse supervisor was a stalwart woman who carried herself with a military bearing. She wore a starched white blouse and a white apron over a navy blue skirt that fell nearly to her ankles; on her feet were white rubber-soled shoes. Her gray hair was tightly coiled into a bun and on her head was a starched white cap. Her brusque manner suggested nothing sociable or yielding, as one might expect of a woman of her class, in the presence of her superiors; for Nurse Edwards seemed not to consider the volunteers her social superiors, which was disconcerting. Henry, at the rear of the wavering procession, was made to feel uneasy by any such breach of decorum, which did not bode well for his first morning of volunteer work. The congestion of the hospital alarmed him, and such odors!—he could not allow himself to identify.

  Yet more dismaying, in the midst of such rank smells, attendants were pushing trolleys laden with food trays, smelling of rashers, grease, sweet baked goods.

  Ward Six was, at the very first impression, a hive of sheer noise: a vast open space like a hall, crammed with cot-like beds so close together you could not imagine how the medical staff might ease between them. The volunteers were being told that all that was wanted from them, at least initially, was to “comfort”—“visit with”—the wounded men who were capable of communication. Those who could speak French were urged to seek out the French-speaking Belgians. Volunteers were not to offer any sort of medical opinion or advice but to defer to the medical staff exclusively. They were not to register alarm, or horror, or pity, or disgust, but only to provide solace. At the rear of the group, that stood out so awkwardly, in civilian clothes, there was the elderly gentleman-volunteer leaning on his cane, his large, regal, sculpted-looking head held erect; even as Henry desperately fought a sensation of nausea. The smells in Ward Six were repulsive, terrifying: rank animal smells, bodily wastes, a powerful stink as of rancid, rotting flesh: gangrene? And yet Henry was being led—where? What was expected of him? How had he stepped, as in a mocking dream, from the splendor of Lady Crenshaw’s drawing room to this hellish place?

  In one of the narrow, badly stained beds, a young man looking scarcely more than eighteen lay motionless between thin covers, head wrapped in gauze, eyes covered like a mummy’s, if indeed he had eyes any longer; at a ragged, red-stained hole where a mouth, or a jaw, should have been, a nurse was inserting a tube, with some difficulty, that the wounded man might be fed. Henr
y looked away, panicked. In a bed at his very elbow, another young man lay raving with pain, his features feverish and distended, his right leg missing. On all sides were cries of pain and fear, moans, maddened eyes of terror. Henry stumbled forward, led farther into the ward. What was this—flies brushing against his face? And on the discolored ceiling overhead, clusters of blackflies, glistening. There were loud voices, male voices of authority, Henry was deeply grateful to see at least two doctors on the scene; but he dared not approach them. Another time he stumbled, he was being led forward, perhaps to visit with one of the Belgian soldiers, quite distracted by seeing in a tangle of bedsheets what appeared to be a disfigured male torso, raw moist flesh like a side of beef, and the young man’s head wrapped in gauze, lying at an unnatural angle as if the neck had been broken. Someone was calling Sir? with an air of concern, Henry turned to see who it was, and what was wanted of him, in that instant seeing on a trolley in the aisle, in what appeared to be a porcelain bedpan, or a container very like a bedpan, bloody human vomit yet writhing with white grains of rice—maggots? Had one of the stricken men been infested with—maggots? Henry stumbled forward, the skin of his face taut and cold and his lips fixed in a small dazed smile very unlike the aloof, poised smile of the Master in public settings, one of the young nurses was leading him to the bedside of a ravaged-looking young man with pale blue dazed eyes and dimly he was aware that his fellow volunteers did not appear to be having so much difficulty as he was and in protest he thought But they are women, they are accustomed to the horrors of the body. Henry’s vision was rapidly narrowing, he seemed suddenly to be peering with difficulty through a darkened tunnel. At the bedside of the dazed-looking young man he began to stammer, “Pardonnez-moi? S’il vous plaît, je suis—” but a black pit opened suddenly at his feet, he fell into it, and was gone.

  2.

  Unspeakable. Beyond shame. As civilization itself crashes.

  That shameful day at St. Bartholomew’s, he would mark in his diary with a tiny black-inked cross:†

  Scattered through the diary, most concentrated since the outbreak of the war, were these mysterious black-inked crosses, to indicate, in secret code, Days of Despair: † † † † † † †

  The rare Day of Happiness, the diarist noted with a tiny red-inked cross:.

  He’d had to devise a code, for secrecy’s sake. So very much of the Master’s passional life was secret, subterranean. No biographer would ever plumb the depths of his soul, he vowed.

  “Except perhaps it is a shallow soul, after all. And will become more shallow with age.”

  How disappointed he was with himself! How poorly the Master had performed, put to the test.

  In dread of what he would discover, Henry glanced back through the diary. On numerous pages there were cryptic black crosses. Not very frequently, red crosses. The last red cross seemed to have been months ago, in June: friends had come by motorcar to have lunch with Henry in Rye, at Lamb House. Since then, only just unmarked days, or days marked in black.

  The elderly gentleman has fallen. Revive him quickly and get him out of here.

  Somehow, they’d gotten Henry onto his feet. Strapping male attendants. He’d been half-carried out of the ward and to the front entrance of the hospital and by taxi he’d been delivered back home to the brownstone near the river from which, earlier that morning, in such hopeful spirits, he’d bravely departed.

  In the privacy of his flat for days afterward Henry heard the nurse supervisor’s uplifted voice that had registered rather more vexation than concern or even alarm. The terrible woman, trained as a nurse, and no doubt a very skilled nurse, who would not have greatly cared if the elderly volunteer had died, so long as he didn’t die in her ward.

  Elderly gentleman. Out of here. Quickly!

  What erupted from the Master’s pen, scrawled in his notebook, were but shrieks of raw animal pain.

  brute matter/brutes

  atrocities against unarmed civilians, children & the elderly

  rot/gangrene/gloire of history

  private wounds, mortification: teeth extracted

  angina/jaundice/shingles/food loathing

  migraine/malaise

  crash of civilization/sickness unto death

  the world as a raw infected wound

  the world as a hemorrhaging wound

  Ward Six, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital: an anteroom of Hell

  damned dentures ill-fitting/overly shiny/costly

  failure of the New York Edition

  piteous royalties, after a career of four decades

  Imperial German Army: marching columns of voracious ants

  deep inanition & depression

  “not to wake—not to wake”: my prayer

  “avert my face from the monstrous scene”

  Yet how to avert his face, when the monstrous scene enveloped him on all sides, like rising sewage!

  Here is a secret of the Master’s early life: how in 1861, as a boy of eighteen living in Newport, Rhode Island, with his family, at a time of mounting war-excitement when men and boys were eagerly enlisting in the Union Army to fight against the rebellious Confederates, Henry had claimed to have suffered an “obscure hurt”—a “prevailing pain” in the region of his back, that made enlisting as a soldier, for him, not possible.

  And so, Henry had been spared further bodily harm, and even the possibility of harm. So sensitive a young man!—so clearly unfitted, as both his parents discerned, for any sort of “masculine” endeavor like the army, or marriage; he’d been spared even accusations of coward, malingerer.

  And yet it was so. He was a coward, and a malingerer. At the age of seventy-one, as at eighteen. He had hidden from the great, grave dangers of war while others of his generation had gone off to fight to preserve the Union and to end slavery. Some had died on the battlefield, some had returned maimed, crippled. Some had returned without evident injury yet altered, matured and “manly.” Henry had hidden away, and very soon then Henry had traveled to Europe, to inaugurate his destiny.

  In the bay window of his London flat, in the attenuated light of autumn, he thought of these matters, obsessively. Stiffly he sat on a leather divan poised to write, pen in hand and a notebook on his knees, his brooding eyes turned toward the river in the near distance where tugboats and barges passed with ever more urgency in this time of war. In his right hand he gripped a pen, but he could not write. He could not concentrate to write. Thoughts ran helter-skelter through his mind like heat lightning. Why had that nurse supervisor woman taken so immediate a dislike to him? Why to him? That by his clothes and bearing he was a gentleman, and Nurse Edwards was hardly of the British genteel class, he could understand; yet the woman’s animus had seemed personal. His heart beat in resentment and fear of her, as though she were close by, in this very room with him.

  Elderly gentleman. Out of here!

  Each time Henry heard the voice, more clearly he heard: the gratification, the malicious satisfaction in it.

  “She has triumphed over ‘the Master.’ There is nothing to be done—is there?”

  Henry was not one to drink. Not alone. Yet now in this season of hell 1914, with ever more distressing war news in the papers, and this personal shame gnawing at his bowels, to steady his shredded nerves, and to allow him to sleep, very deliberately Henry poured a glass of heavy Madeira port for himself, to sip as he brooded. Recalling then, as the port began to warm his veins, a memory he had quite suppressed: how, some years ago when he’d first acquired Lamb House in Rye, to live a more concentrated and a more frugal bachelor-writer existence than seemed possible in London, he’d been kept awake one summer night by a hellishly yowling creature; and had gone outside, in a rage quite uncharacteristic of him, located the creature, a cat, a large black-and-white mottled cat, spoke at first cajolingly to the cat to win its trust and then, to his own astonishment, struck the cat with his cudgel, with such force that the poor creature died on the spot, its head broken.

  Immediately then,
Henry had backed away, beginning to vomit.

  Yet in recalling the incident, as the port so warmly coursed through his veins, he felt rather differently about it: more astonishment than horror, and a thrill of exultation.

  3.

  “Why, sir. You are back with us.”

  The voice was flat, unwelcoming. The mineral eyes stared and the clenched bulldog-jaws suggested how badly Nurse Supervisor Edwards wished she might forbid him entry to Ward Six, but of course a mere member of the nursing staff, regardless of her rank, had not that authority. For the volunteer program had proved popular in the understaffed hospital and Henry, this time acknowledged as “Mr. James,” was being escorted into the ward by one of the senior physicians on the hospital staff, a close friend of Lady Crenshaw.

  Henry murmured yes, he was back: “I want so badly to be of use, you see. As I am rather too old to sign up as a soldier.”

  Under the wing of the physician, one of the administrators of St. Bartholomew’s, Henry knew himself invulnerable to the nurse supervisor. He would not challenge the woman’s authority but simply avoid her, for Nurse Edwards was that most disagreeable of females: one who cannot be charmed. A younger and more congenial nurse had been assigned to oversee the morning’s volunteers, and was leading Henry forward to introduce him to patients who were not so desperately injured or in such delirium that volunteers were discouraged from approaching them. Ward Six did not seem, to Henry’s relief, to be so chaotic as it had several days before, though the odors were as discomfiting as before, and it was an ominous sight, that opaque white curtains had been set up around several of the beds, to hide what was taking place inside.