The Master (35 page)

As far as possible, he had lived an undisturbed life. He neither gave offence, he believed, nor took it easily. Publishers irritated him, and there was a theatre producer called Augustin Daly
whose dealings had enraged him, and magazine editors required constant patience which often ran out; also, a payment not coming and being promised and still not arriving, or a book not printed in
time, or a book not selling at all, or his work being maliciously handled in the newspapers, these could prey on his mind especially when night fell. But once a measure of time had passed, they
became minor matters which took up very little time or energy. He forgot about them and did not harbour grudges.

Now, the idea of Constance in Venice, spending her evenings in the palazzi of the Grand Canal and discussing him freely, despite the stubborn reticence on which she prided herself, began to prey
on his mind. A further letter from her describing her fellow lodgers at Casa Biondetti, including Lily Norton whose father and aunt were close friends of Henry and William, filled him with
foreboding. He worked on his play and lived, he enjoyed telling Constance, the life of a hermit in London. He did not mention going to Venice or taking rooms there until he was pressed to confirm
his interest by both Constance and Mrs Curtis, who now seemed to him to be working in tandem.

Twice, with the help of Constance, he had managed to inhabit the hill above Florence with almost no one knowing he was there. The road to Bellosguardo was steep and narrow and winding, and those
who wished to visit would have to make an effort and have precise directions. It seemed that Constance had other ideas for him in Venice. It was not that he had ever imagined the possibility of
living there in secret, but now that his association with Constance had been made public he foresaw a social round in which they would both be included. He imagined her listening with barely
disguised impatience with her good ear to the oft-told tales of Daniel Curtis, or Mrs Bronson’s accounts of her exploits with Browning. He imagined her turning to him and in a single, biting
glance hinting at her contempt for the company. She would also, and this was what concerned him most, be ready to conspire on his behalf with his old friends now that she had joined their society.
These conspiracies would be well intentioned, but they would interfere crucially with his inviolable need to make his own arrangements and do as he pleased. Slowly, in the weeks after he received
the news that she and Mrs Curtis had been searching for an apartment on his behalf, he felt a powerlessness that he had not felt since he was a child.

In July he wrote to Mrs Curtis to correct Miss Woolson’s misconception that he was looking for a flat in Venice. He realized, he said, that he had been toying with the affections of the
watery city, but wondered if he had expressed himself clumsily to Miss Woolson in appearing to intimate that he might come to live in Venice. In fact, he had no plans to do so, he wrote, needing to
live in London for all sorts of practical reasons. Every time he came to Venice, he said, and no doubt the next time would be the same, he cherished the dream of having a modest
pied-á-terre, the dream being more vivid, he wrote, when he was on the spot, fading once he had returned home. He thanked Mrs Curtis for all her trouble, adding that while he had the fondest
hope of going to Italy that winter, he had learned by stern experience not to make hard and fast plans.

He knew that his letter would be shown to Constance and he imagined her response. In England, they had come, in strange and subtle ways, to depend on each other. Even though there were matters
which they never discussed, other things, including what they were writing and their relationships to editors and publishers, were shared. He knew how much she loved his confidences, such as they
were, and later in solitude went over, he imagined, every detail he had told her. She would know now that he did not intend to take a place in Venice, but also that he seemed inclined not to visit
in the coming winter, despite his promises to her that he would. She was to be left to her own devices in Venice among people, especially the idle rich, whom he knew she would come to despise.

Perhaps they could meet in the spring, he thought, in Geneva or Paris, but he did not think he would come to Venice. He had an image of her studying him critically as he arrived at the salon of
Mrs Curtis and alluding sharply later to his charming behaviour as he enjoyed the hospitality of the Anglo-American society there, whose members viewed him as a valuable prize.

He did not hear from her as summer went into autumn. He presumed that she was offended and he imagined also that she was working, as he was. With all his correspondents, he allowed for large
intervals in which he did not write to them. But the silence between Kensington and Venice was of a different order. Eventually in late September she wrote, but the tone was distant and chilly, the
letter merely informing him that she had moved from Casa Biondetti, where she had been very well looked after, to more private quarters, where she could be alone, in Casa Semitecolo nearby. She
mentioned almost in passing that she was exhausted, having written and re-written her latest novel, and hoped for nothing now except a bookless winter. Affectionately yours, she wrote, and then
signed her name. He read the letter over, knowing that she would have chosen every word carefully. He looked at the mention of the bookless winter and considered it, but it was only later that he
understood its ominous implications.

H
E SPENT
December in further dispute with the theatre producer Augustin Daly, who had behaved insolently and returned his play
Mrs Jaspar
. There
was much correspondence about the matter, and for a number of weeks near Christmas the row with Daly filled a good deal of his waking life. His Christmas and New Year in London, however, were quiet
and reflective as he rewrote his play.

One afternoon in January he was working quietly when Smith put a telegram on the mantelpiece. Henry must, he later thought, have left it there without looking at it for an hour or more, being
engrossed in his writing. It was only when he broke for tea that he moved absent-mindedly to the fireplace and opened the envelope. The telegram informed him that Constance was dead. His first
response was to go to Smith and ask him calmly for tea; he then returned to his study and, closing the door and sitting at his desk, he studied the telegram which had come from Constance’s
sister, Clara Benedict, in the United States. He knew that he would have to go to Venice and wondered now from whom he should enquire about the details of her death. He drank the tea when it was
brought, and then he went to the window and frantically studied the street outside as though some distant detail there, some movement, a sound even, might help him to a full realization of what had
happened or might erase such a realization as it slowly dawned.

How had she died? What occurred to him now and caused him suddenly to freeze was the suspicion that she had not died of any illness. She was strong, he thought, and perfectly healthy and he
could not imagine her succumbing to an ailment. She had finished her book, and that would have left her, as it always did, forlorn. He knew that she hated the winter, and the winter in Venice could
be especially dark and severe. He thought in cold fright about his own refusal to come to Venice and his not letting her know this directly. He was sure that his not having made arrangements to see
her must have depressed her deeply. And thus, as he stood at the window, it struck him that she might have killed herself. And that was when he began to shake and had to move towards an armchair in
his study, where he sat frozen, making himself go over and over the facts of her existence during the previous year.

Some time later he was interrupted by Smith with a second telegram. He opened it hastily. It was from Constance’s niece, who, having been in Munich when she heard the news, had now arrived
in Venice. She confirmed the news. As he put the telegram aside, he made the decision that he would not now go to Venice. He would be helpless there, and the idea of her inert body, the physical
fact of her corpse, and her dead face masking and unmasking its own history as the light allowed, filled him with horror. He did not want to see her body, or to be close to her coffin, which was,
the telegram told him, to be interred a week later in the Protestant cemetery in Rome.

He remained in his flat all day and told no one what had happened. He wrote to Constance’s doctor, who was also a friend, in Italy, expressing his shock, still not sure how she had died.
It was all, he said, ghastly amazement and distress. He had not even known she was sick, he said, and had a dismal, dreadful image of her being alone and unfriended at the last, someone who had had
intrinsically one of the saddest and least happy natures he had ever met. As he finished the letter, an image of her face in all its complex life, her eyes shining, her expression brilliantly
intelligent and receptive came to him. He allowed himself to cry before going to the window again and staring down at the scene below, at people who meant nothing to him moving on the street.

In the morning he knew that, although he had not dreamed about her, her spirit, the questing essence of who she was, had made itself known to him during the night, and he wanted, as soon as he
woke, to close his eyes and go back to sleep to avoid the cold fact of her extinction. No one whom he knew had read his work as carefully, had tried to know him as clearly. No one had her mixture
of ambition and sharpness, vulnerability and melancholy, unpredictability and bravery. No one had her great sympathy, and it became a heavy burden in the hollow of himself to imagine that sympathy
coming to the end of its endurance.

He received no further news, and as every hour went by, he imagined a different scenario, following its path and working out its implications. He began to veer between definitely not going to
Rome for the funeral and setting off immediately; several times he sent Smith to book and unbook a passage to Italy. And then, having prevaricated for several days, he opened
The Times
to
find the news that Constance had jumped to her death from the window of the house where she lived in Venice. It was, the paper said, suicide. At once, he began to reassure himself that he was not
at fault. He had owed her nothing, he thought, he had made her no promises that were binding. They had not been lovers; they were not related by blood. He owed her only his friendship, just as he
owed it to many others, he told himself, and all of the others knew that when a book was being written, his blinds were down, he was not available. All of his friends knew not to make demands on
him, and Constance knew that too.

Henry wrote to John Hay, a mutual friend who was already in Rome. He told Hay that he had, in fact, been ready to travel, to stand by her grave in the Protestant cemetery, but once the nature of
her death had been confirmed, he had collapsed before the pity and the horror of it, he wrote, and he could not travel now. She had always been, he added, a woman so little formed for positive
happiness that half one’s affection for her was, in its essence, a kind of anxiety.

He resisted the thought that came to him when he had written the letter and was alone. It had a heavy crushing force, and he held it from him for as long as he could. He allowed himself to think
that Constance had not lightly taken up his time, nor had she lightly allowed her own emotions to become so focussed. She had been subtle enough and nervous enough to make her demands silently, but
they were all the clearer and more emphatic for that. He now had to face the idea that he, in turn, had sent her powerful and subtle signals of his need for her. And each time it became apparent to
him what effect they were having, he retreated into the locked room of himself, a place whose safety he needed as desperately as he needed her involvement with him.

She had been caught, as it were, in a large misunderstanding, not only in the snare of his solitary, sedentary exile, but also in the idea that he was a man who did not, and would not ever,
desire a wife. Her intelligence surely should have warned her that he would, under the slightest pressure, even out of fear, pull back; but her need and the quality of her sympathy came to outpace
her intelligence, he thought. Nonetheless, she had been careful: she had acknowledged his needs and his reticence and was ready to make space for them, but when she moved too close, became too
public, he rejected her.

He had his reasons for choosing to remain alone; his imagination, however, had stretched merely as far as his fears and not beyond. He had exerted control; what he had done made him shudder. Had
he gone to Venice that winter, he knew, she would not have killed herself. If she had appealed to him to visit and he had refused, it might be easier for him now to feel simple guilt. But her
appeals were all over and they would be for ever. He had let her down. He did not know if her friends in Venice, and friends of his, understood that this was the case and discussed it in the days
after her death.

He could not face the idea that Constance’s suicide had been planned for a long time. He wrote to others, to Rhoda Broughton, to Francis Boott, to William, saying to each in turn that
Constance’s last act had been rash, a form of madness, a demented moment. He did not fully believe what he wrote, although each time he set it down, it seemed to become more plausible and
definitive. He did not express to anyone his reservations about this version of how she ended. However, as some part of her spirit brushed through his rooms in the weeks after her death, he had a
sense of her as the only person he had ever known who was fully skilled at deciphering the unsaid and the unspoken. There was no need even to whisper the words, or let them form fully in his mind;
her fresh ghost understood that he knew, he knew well that she was not given to moments of insanity or sudden abrupt gestures, no matter what the pressures. She was a woman of great determination
who made decisions carefully and rationally. She had an abiding dislike for shrillness and theatricality.