HENRY JAMES
439
or from the enclosing social body, a body rent with a thousand wounds
and that thus treated one to the honour of a sort of tragic fellowship.
The twenty minutes had sufficed, at all events, to establish a relation–
a relation to everything occurring round me not only for the next four
years but for long afterward-that was at once extraordinarily intimate
and quite awkwardly irrelevant. I must have felt in some befooled way
in presence of a crisis-the smoke of Charleston Bay still so acrid in the
air--at ·which the likely young should be up and doing or, as familiarly
put, lend a hand much wanted; the willing youths, all round, were
mostly starting to their feet, and to have trumped up a lameness at such
a juncture could be made to pass in no light for graceful. Jammed into
the acute angle between two high fences, where the rhythmic play of my
arms, in tune with that of several other pairs, but at a dire disadvantage
of position, induced a rural, a rusty, a quasi-extemporised old engine to
work and a saving stream to flow, I had done myself, in face of a shabby
conflagration, a horrid even if an obscure hurt; and what was interest–
ing from the first was my not doubting in the least its duration-though
what seemed equally clear was that I needn't as a matter of course adopt
and appropriate it, so to speak, or place it for increase of interest on ex–
hibition. The interest of it, I very presently knew, would certainly be
of the greatest, would even in conditions kept as simple as I might make
them become little less than absorbing. The shortest account of what
was to follow for a long time after is therefore to plead that the interest
never did fail. It was naturally what is called a painful one, but it con–
sistently
declin~d,
as an influence at play, to drop for a single instant.
Circumstances, by a wonderful chance, overwhelmingly favoured
it-as
an interest, an inexhaustible, I mean; since I also felt in the whole en–
veloping tonic atmosphere a force promoting its growth. Interest, the
interest of life and <-Of death, of our national existence, of the fate of
those, the vastly numerous, whom it closely concerned, the interest of
the extending War, in fine, the hurrying troops, the transfigured scene,
formed a cover for every sort of intensity, made tension itself in fact
contagious-so that almost any tension would do, would serve for one's
share.
Two points stand out in these stirring words: first, James did
not doubt from the beginning that his hurt would involve much and
last long; and, second, he could not view it as a merely personal ex–
perience but found it indissolubly united with the war which was at
that moment engulfing the entire nation. The former consideration
shows clearly that somewhere in his personality the seed had been
sown for what had now transpired, despite the appearance of mere
accident, just as in
his
later tale, "The Beast in the Jungle," the hero
knew without any statable basis that he would one day suffer some
extremity of disaster from which his life would acquire its significance.
It may be conjectured from what has already been said regarding the
accidental crippling of the father at the age of thirteen that the dire
