Henry James

The spoils of Poynton

Extracts from the author’s notebooks

34 De Vere Gardens, W, December 24th, 1893.

Three little histories were lately mentioned to me which (2 of the 3 in particular) appear worth making a note of. One of these was related to me last night at dinner at Lady Lindsay’s, by Mrs Anstruther-Thompson. It is a small and ugly matter – but there is distinctly in it, I should judge, the subject of a little tale – a little social and psychological picture. It appears that the circumstance is about to come out in a process-at-law. Some young laird, in Scotland, inherited, by the death of his father, a large place filled with valuable things – pictures, old china, etc., etc. His mother was still living, and had always lived, in this rich old house, in which she took pride and delight. After the death of her husband she was at first left unmolested there by her son, though there was a small dower-house (an inferior and contracted habitation) attached to the property in another part of the country. But the son married – married promptly and young – and went down with his wife to take possession – possession exclusive, of course – according to English custom. On doing so he found that pictures and other treasures were absent – and had been removed by his mother. He enquired, protested, made a row; in answer to which the mother sent demanding still other things, which had formed valuable and interesting features of the house during the years she had spent there. The son and his wife refuse, resist; the mother denounces, and (through litigation or otherwise) there is a hideous public quarrel and scandal. It has ended, my informant told me, in the mother – passionate, rebellious against her fate, resentful of the young wife and of the loss of her dignity and her home – resorting to tremendous argument (though of no real value to her) of declaring that the young man is not the son of his putative father. She has been willing to dishonour herself to put an affront upon him. It is all rather sordid and fearfully ugly, but there is surely a story in it. It presents a very fine case of the situation in which, in England, there has always seemed to me to be a story – the situation of the mother deposed, by the ugly English custom, turned out of the big house on the son’s marriage and relegated. One can imagine the rebellion, in this case (the case I should build on the above hint), of a particular sort of proud woman – a woman who had loved her home, her husband’s home and hers (with a knowledge and adoration of artistic beauty, the tastes, the habits of a collector). There would be circumstances, details, intensifications, deepening it and darkening it all. There would be the particular type and taste of the wife the son would have chosen – a wife out of a Philistine, a tasteless, a hideous house; the kind of house the very walls and furniture of which constitute a kind of anguish for such a woman as I suppose the mother to be. That kind of anguish occurred to me, precisely, as a subject, during the 2 days I spent at Fox Warren (I didn’t mean to write the name), a month or so ago. I thought of the strange, the terrible experience of a nature with a love and passion for beauty, united by adverse circumstances to such a family and domiciled in such a house. I imagine the young wife coming, precisely, out of it. I imagine the mother having fixed on a girl after her own heart for the son to marry; a girl with the same exquisite tastes that she has and having grown up surrounded with lovely things. The son doesn’t in the least take to this girl – he perversely and stupidly, from the mother’s point of view, takes to a girl infatuated with hideousness. It is in this girl’s people’s house, before the marriage, that the story opens. The mother meets there the other girl – the one that pleases her: the one with whom she discovers a community of taste – of passion, of sensibility and suffering.

May 13th, 1895.

I have just promised Scudder 3 short stories for the Atlantic. I have a number of things noted here to choose from; but wish, in general, to remind myself that, more and more, every thing of this kind I do must be a complete and perfect little drama. The little idea must resolve itself into a little action, and the little action into the essential drama aforesaid. Voilà. It is the way – it is perhaps the only way – to make some masterpieces. It is at any rate what I want to do.

Mrs Anstruther-Thompson, whom I sat next to at a Xmas dinner at Lady Lindsay’s. She told me an anecdote that I noted at the time, in another book (than this) and have just hunted up. Reading over my little statement I find the case vividly enough, though very briefly, presented, and I can probably go on with my beginning. What is wanting is a full roundness for the action – the completeness of the drama-quality. I see the action up to a certain point, but what can be the solution, the denouement? The action is the mother’s refusal to give up the house, or the things. But that is, in itself, no conclusion, no climax. What is it that follows on that?

May 15th, 1895.

I seem to see the thing in three chapters, like 3 little acts, the 1st of which terminates with the son’s marriage to one – the dreaded one – of the Brigstocks. In this 1st act Mrs Gereth takes the girl – her own girl (Muriel Veetch) – to her own house and adopts her there, as it were, shows her its beauty. Her initiation – their relation. A scene with Albert there, before the marriage. Mrs Gereth’s threat of rupture if it takes place. She must have had a scene with Nora Brigstock at Waterbath – the scene that determines her. All this splendidly foreshortened, as it were; as the whole thing must be. Then, Act 2, the little drama of Mrs Gereth’s attitude, her preparations to leave the house – her going over it in farewell; then her collapse, her inability to s’en arracher and surrender her treasures. Of course in Act 1 all due prominence given to the element of Albert’s ‘want of taste’ – his terrible, fatal penchant to ugliness, the thing that has made his mother precisely want so to redeem him, to safeguard, by a union with such a girl as Muriel Veetch – and makes her feel that the union with a Brigstock precisely loses him forever. All this crystalline in Act 1. It surely gives me plenty of material for that act. Each act is 50 pages of my MS. Well then, in 2, I give her collapse, her refusal to surrender. But I must carry the action on a step, a stride beyond that, to get the climax of my Chapter 2. What can this climax be? May it be some act or step on the part of the son – some resolution, some violence of his? And then the denouement, the solution, the climax that Chapter 3 leads up to, may that be something done by Muriel Veetch? I have a dim sense that the denouement must be through her. One thing strikes me as certain, that she must really be in love with Albert. The battle between Albert and his mother must be arrayed – and she in some way intervenes. His ‘taking up the glove’ ends Act 2. Muriel takes the field in Act 3 – she interposes, she achieves. I seem vaguely to disembroil something like THIS: That Mrs Gereth’s démarche in 2, the circumstance of her deciding to fight, is that she determines to have all the most precious things removed to the dower-house. She not only determines it – she does it. The element of her resentment at the way ‘the mother’ is treated in England is an active force in this. Perhaps she has a sister married in France – a silhouette, a thumbnail sketch chalked in – who sharpens the contrast and eggs her on. She despoils Umberleigh, or whatever the name is – she skims it, she strips it. She has everything that is really precious and exquisite carted away to her own house. She does it in Muriel’s absence – while Muriel is away on a family errand (her dying father or something of that sort). She does it too without telling Albert of what she intends. He comes and finds it done – comes back from his wedding-tour – or from some later absence. This discovery, on his part, is the ‘climax’ of Chapter 2. The mother and son are face to face in a ‘row’. He threatens to prosecute – his wife eggs him on. Muriel’s intervention takes the form of trying to avert all this hideousness, getting Mrs Gereth to make the terrible concession and restore what she has taken away. She secretly loves the young man – that is why. She prevails, Mrs Gereth has the things restored. The horrible, the atrocious conflagration – which may at any rate, I think, serve as my working hypothesis for a denouement.

Osborne Hotel, Torquay, August 11th, 1895.

Voyons un peu ou j’en suis in the little story of the situation between the mother and the son, in the little tale I have called the House Beautiful and of which I have hammered out some 70 pp. of MS. It is a question of a concision – for the rest of my 150 pp. in all, my rigid limit, for the Atlantic – truly masterly. Mona Brigstock and her mother are down at Poynton, brought by Owen Gereth, who considers that Mona shows to great advantage there and is having a great success. This infatuated density, this singleness and stupidity of perception, so often characteristic of the young Englishman in regard to the inferior woman, is the note of his attitude throughout. It makes Fleda wonder, marvel – and marvel without jealousy – see clearly how much more doué he is for marital than for filial affection. He cares, comparatively, nothing for his mother – would sacrifice her any day to his virtuous, Philistine, instinctive attachment to Mona. It is only for Mrs Gereth that Fleda is, as it were, jealous; she says, in the face of Mona: “Good heavens, if she were my mother, how common and stupid she would make, in comparison and contrast, such a girl as that, appear!” What I should like to do, God willing, is to thresh out my little remainder, from this point, tabulate and clarify it, state or summarize it in such a way that I can go, very straight and sharp, to my climax, my denouement. What I feel more and more that I must arrive at, with these things, is the adequate and regular practice of some such economy of clear summarization as will give me from point to point, each of my steps, stages, tints, shades, every main joint and hinge, in its place, of my subject – give me, in a word, my clear order and expressed sequence. I can then take from the table, successively, each fitted or fitting piece of my little mosaic. When I ask myself what there may have been to show for my long tribulation, my wasted years and patiences and pangs, of theatrical experiment, the answer, as I have already noted here, comes up as just possibly this: what I have gathered from it will perhaps have been exactly some such mastery of fundamental statement – of the art and secret of it, of expression, of the sacred mystery of structure. Oh yes – the weary, woeful time has done something for me, has had in the depths of all its wasted piety and passion, an intense little lesson and direction. What that resultant is I must now actively show.

What then is it that the rest of my little 2d act, as I call it, of The House Beautiful must do? Its climax is in the removal – must absolutely and utterly be: voilà – from the house, by Mrs Gereth, of her own treasures. What are the steps that lead to that? Well, these.
1st. Owen must have a morsel with Fleda in which he shows how happy he is with the result of their visit, and which she doesn’t retail to his mother.
2d. Mrs G., the morning they go (the Brigstocks), does take the alarm, though Owen doesn’t give her the news himself. He hasn’t got it yet – Mona doesn’t speak till they get back to town. But Mrs Brigstock has spoken more or less, and Owen has shown, does show, to Mrs Gereth, how pleased he is. There must be a scene of some sort between the young man and his mother – and between Mrs G. and Mona. Yet surely all this must be very, very, VERY brief and rapid – for it is after all preliminary, and the centre of gravity of the piece, which is that Owen marries Mona, is in danger of being thrust much too far forward, out of its place. As it is I’ve almost no room at all for my people to talk. What I think I want to make take place between Mrs Gereth and Owen and Mona is the striking utterance on her part of some note of warning – some expression to them of her own ground, of what she expects, how she feels. It must take place before Fleda. Make it, n’est-ce pas?, that the pieces follow each other in this order.
(a) Owen shows himself to his mother and Fleda in the morning; and Fleda, after a vision of what is going on between them, goes out, leaves them together. She goes out into the grounds and finds Mona there; ten words about what passes between the 2 women. They come in again, and then it is that Fleda has the sense of what Mrs G. has said to Owen – has probably, dreadfully said – about her.
(b) The scene, for Mrs G. before Owen and Fleda, with Mona – the scene that as Fleda feels, practically settles and clinches Mona. (It is Owen’s own indications that have, after the night when they went downstairs, alarmed Mrs G.) They depart, the ladies and Owen, leaving Mrs G. under the impression that she has frightened them away. But Fleda knows better – though she pretends to agree. It is then – after they are gone – that Mrs Gereth lets her know or suspect, to her horror, what she has already seemed to divine, to apprehend – that she did speak (while F. was in the garden with M.) about her, F., being her ideal for a daughter-in-law. This it is that makes F. doubly sure that the engagement to Mona will now be precipitated. Owen comes down alone in a few days, in fact, to announce it. What action does his mother then take? There must be the scene, before Fleda, about her surrender of the house – the scene of her, Mrs G.’s, waiting for him to say, passionately, grievingly giving him a chance to say, that she may stay, that feeling as she does, he won’t turn her out – or even that he’ll give her up some of the things. But he doesn’t say it.

Rather, indeed, why may he not say this last? Doesn’t his mother have, there, her long-smothered outbreak – flash about upon him about Mona’s barbarism and the horrors of Waterbath? It’s a dreadful, fatal scene: Fleda sees it or knows it. Then it is she has the scene with Owen that is to come after her knowing what his mother has said to him about her. It leads to the fact that Owen does offer to let his mother keep some of the things. Fleda puts in her own plea for this and makes her own reflection. Owen tells his mother, before he leaves, what he’ll do. Before the marriage, however, he retracts – he lets her know that his wife has refused to part with anything. It was as he showed her Poynton, that day, that she wants to have it. It was the sight of it that day, that settled her. Therefore he must keep faith with her – and after all isn’t he within his absolute rights? The marriage takes place – all in Act 3. Fleda isn’t present at it – the young couple go to Italy. But after she is settled in her own house Fleda goes down to see Mrs Gereth. The 1st thing she perceives in her house – her little dower-cottage – are the things Mrs G. has removed from Poynton. Voilà. That was to have been the climax of my 2d act, as it were; but I don’t see how it can be, with any feasible adjustment to my space, if I try to make my 2d act one with my second chapter or section – my little ‘2’. My only issue, here, is in multiplying, throughout the whole, my divisions.

Osborne Hotel, Torquay, September 8th, 1895.

I am face to face with several little alternatives of work, and am in fact in something of a predicament with things promised and retarded. I must thresh out my solutions, must settle down to my jobs. It’s idiotic, by the way, to waste time in writing such a remark as that! As if I didn’t feel in all such matters infinitely more than I can ever utter!

My immediate necessity is to tackle again the question of one of the little stories that I have promised to do for Scudder: the question round which, in general, as I have found before this, such tragic little accidents are apt to cluster. By tragic little accidents, I mean the tragic accident of the waste of labour to which I have often found myself condemned in trying to do the short (the really, I mean, the very short) thing. I am just crawling out of one of them, in this particular connection: the attempt, in The House Beautiful, to meet Scudder on the basis of 10,000 words – an attempt that has ended, irremissibly, incurably, in almost 30,000 – leaving on my hands a production that he doesn’t want and that I must try to make terms for in some other way, terms bad, terms sadd<en>ing, at the best. Ah, but let me not go, here, into the question of the reason for which this larger manner now imposes itself upon me – as it has every right and power to do: reasons with which my spirit is sufficiently saturated! Suffice it that I’m simply face to face with the little question: ‘Can I do the thing in 10,000 words or can I not?’ The answer to it is surely that I’m not prepared to say I can’t. The difficulty has been, I think, when I’ve failed, that I haven’t tried right. I’ve lost sight too much of the necessary smallness, necessary singleness of the subject. I’ve been too proud to take the very simple thing. I’ve almost always taken the thing requiring developments. Now, when I embark on developments I’m lost, for they are my temptation and my joy. I’m too afraid to be banal. I needn’t be afraid, for my danger is small. I must try now, to do the thing of 10,000 words (which there is every economic reason for my recovering and holding fast the trick of). I must try it, I say, on the basis of rigid limitation of subject. That is, I must take, and take only, the single incident. I know what I mean by the single incident. The Real Thing, The Middle Years, Brooksmith, even, The Private Life, Owen Wingrave, are what I call single incidents. Many others are essentially ideas requiring development. Cherchons, piochons, patientons – tenons-nous-en to the opposite kind. Try to make use, for the brief treatment, of nothing, absolutely nothing, that isn’t ONE, as it were – that doesn’t begin and end in its little self.

Osborne Hotel, Torquay, October 15th, ’95.

My little story has grown upon my hands – I am speaking of The House Beautiful – and will make a thing of 30,000 words. But though I have been scared at the dimensions it was taking – scared in view of the meagerness of the little subject – yet I think I see the way to make it fill out its skin and be very fairly solid and fine.

Fleda Vetch is down at Ricks – has come down to find Mrs Gereth installed and in possession of most of the treasures of Poynton. I did what I could yesterday to handle her arrival, but I must thresh out finely every inch of the action from that point to the end. The sense of what her friend has done quite appals the girl, and what has now passed between her and Owen prepares her for a great stir of feeling in his favour – a resentment on his behalf and pitying sense of his spoliations. I am here dealing with very delicate elements, and I must make the operation, the presentation, of each thoroughly sharp and clear. If this climax of my little tale is confused and embrouillé it will be nothing; if it’s as crystalline as possible it will be worth doing. I have, a little, to guard myself against the drawback of having in the course of the story determined on something that I had not intended – or had not expected – at the start. I had intended to make Fleda ‘fall in love’ with Owen, or, to express it moins banalement, to represent her as loving him. But I had not intended to represent a feeling of this kind on Owen’s part. Now, however, I have done so; in my last little go at the thing (which I have been able to do only so interruptedly), it inevitably took that turn and I must accept the idea and work it out. What I felt to be necessary, as the turn in question came, was that what should happen between Fleda and Owen Gereth should be something of a certain intensity. My idea was that it should be, whatever it is, determining for her; and it didn’t seem to me that I could make it sufficiently intense and sufficiently determining without making it come, as it were, from Owen. Je m’entends. – Fleda suddenly perceives that on the verge of his marriage to Mona – he is, well, what I have in fact, represented. My present question – not to waste words about it – is as to what takes place between them when he comes down to Ricks. For I seem to see it so – that he does come down to Ricks. Mrs Gereth must have achieved her devastation by a coup de main – proceeded with extraordinary celerity: this is made clear as between her and Fleda: the way she proceeded – got off in a night, as it were – is made perfectly distinct. Definite questions and answers about this. Fleda’s night, after this, in the ‘lovely’ room Mrs Gereth had arranged for her – her suffering under it, hatred of it, hatred of profiting by such things at Owen’s cost, as it were. What has happened makes her think only of Owen. His marriage hasn’t as yet taken place, but it’s near at hand – it’s there. She expects nothing more from him – has a dread of its happening. She wants only, as she believes, or tries to believe, never to see him again. She surrenders him to Mona. She has a dread of his not doing his duty – backing out in any way. That would fill her with horror and dismay. But she has no real doubt that he’ll go through with his marriage. In going down to Ricks she has only seemed to herself to be going further away from him. She has had no prevision – she could have none – that he would turn up there. All she has wanted is to hear of his marriage. Touch the note that it has seemed to her even unduly delayed – delayed in a way to act on her nerves. She has got no invitation, but she hasn’t expected that. The light on Mrs Gereth’s action, however, that she encounters at Ricks, changes the whole situation; causes her to hold her breath – making her not know exactly WHAT may happen. Now, voyons un peu, mon bon: the whole idea of my thing is that Fleda becomes rather fine, DOES something, distinguishes herself (to the reader), and that this is really almost all that has made the little anecdote worth telling at all. It gives me a lift – an air – and I must make it give me as much of these things as it ever possibly can. But I am confronted with a little difficulty which requires my looking it as coolly and calmly as I can in the face and figuring it out. What I have seen Fleda do is operate successfully (to state it as broadly as possible), to the end that the things be mainly sent back to Poynton. Now there are 2 necessary facts in regard to this. One is that a certain event, or certain events, certain forces, lead up to it, with their irresistible pressure on the girl. The other resides in the particular way in which she responds to that pressure. She gets the things back. How does she get them back? My idea had been that she successfully persuades Mrs Gereth to send them. That seemed possible and adequate so long as my thought was simply that she had a sentiment for Owen: it seemed in the key of that little suppressed emotion. But now that the emotion is developed more and Owen himself is made, as it were, active, I feel as if I wanted something more – I don’t know what to call it except dramatic. Let me make out first, however, exactly what precedes, and then I shall see my way a little more into what follows. Owen is brought down to Ricks by his discovery of the spoliation of Poynton. He has gone over, after his mother’s departure, and taken in the scene. He has notified Mona, and Mona has then come over with him and seen for herself, and the upshot has been that – having had the matter out between them – he has come down to his mother to demand a surrender. I must motiver his coming – his coming in person. Mona has wanted him to communicate only through their solicitor. He won’t do that – he will be more tender: but Fleda sees that he takes his own way first because Mona has been strenuous about hers. I must represent Owen as not coming down with a preoccupation about Fleda: he doesn’t know she’s there – he thinks she in fact isn’t. He has come because he simply has to. The reason WHY he simply has to, comes out in what takes place between him and Fleda. His mother refuses to see him – he is over at the inn. She makes Fleda see him for her. This takes place the day after Fleda’s arrival. The girl thinks of refusing – then she consents. She has tried to refuse – for the trouble and torment the thing inflicts upon her – and because she has made it her rule, now, not to meet him, not to ‘encourage’ him, not to let herself go to this ‘lawless love’. It seems to me I have really here the elements of something rather fine. The fineness is the fineness of Fleda. Let me carry that as far as possible – be consistent and bold and high about it: allow it all its little touch of poetry. She is forced again, as it were, by Mrs Gereth, to renew a relation that she has sought safety and honour, tried to be ‘good’, in not keeping up. She is almost, as it were, thrown into Owen’s arms. It is the same with the young man. He too has tried to be good. He has renounced the relation. He has determined to stick to Mona. He is thrust by his mother into danger again. Mrs Gereth is operating with so much more inflammable material than she knows. The young people meet at first as if that scene in Kensington Gdns hadn’t occurred; and Fleda says to herself that he repents of it, is ashamed of it. But they get into deeper waters. He informs her of the sommation he bears to his mother. Then briefly, quickly, de fil en aiguille, they come to the question of his alternative – his alternative or contemplated course if Mrs Gereth refuses. Owen lets her know – practically what it is. It is Mona who now determines it. Mona has insisted on his insisting – and if he doesn’t insist she will break off their marriage. She has made it a condition of their marriage. This is the climax of the ‘scene’ between the 2. It helps to constitute whatever beauty I may put into the thing. It is Fleda’s opportunity – Fleda’s temptation. If Mrs Gereth doesn’t surrender Mona will break, and if Mona breaks – her opening seems to lie there before her. Well – it’s a part of what the girl does that she resists. She sees this, yet she does her best, heroically, to shut her eyes to it. She sees that Owen is ashamed of his disloyalty to Mona, and she has such a feeling about him that she doesn’t want, she can’t bear, to see him disloyal. That’s about the gist of it. If I want beauty for her – beauty of action and poetry of effect, I can only, I think, find it just there; find it in making her heroic. To be heroic, to achieve beauty and poetry, she must conceal from him what she feels. I have it then that he shows, but that she doesn’t. What’s the matter with Owen is that he has never known a girl like her, and that it’s a girl like her he wants. She reads it all for him and in him, and we see it as she sees it, without his telling, his coming out with it. It’s all on his part inarticulate and clumsy; but we see – though she doesn’t let him give Mona away. What does she do then? – how does she work, how does she achieve her heroism? She does it in the first and highest way by urging him on to his marriage – putting it before him that it must take place without a week’s more delay. She settles this, as it were – she fixes it: she says she’ll take care of the rest. It’s the question of how she takes care of it that is the tight knot of my donnée. She sends Owen off, sends him back to Mona, answers to him for it that what they demand shall be done. At least, rather (for she can’t of course really ‘answer’), she gives him her word that she will do her utmost to bring the restitution about; and it’s on this he leaves her, promising her, as it were, to get married immediately. That confronts me with the question of the action Fleda exercises on Mrs Gereth and of how she exercises it. My old idea was that she worked, as it were, on her feelings. Well, eureka! I think I have found it – I think I see the little interesting turn and the little practicable form. How a little click of perception, of this sort, brings back to me all the strange sacred time of my thinkings-out, this way, pen in hand, of the stuff of my little theatrical trials. The old patiences and intensities – the working of the old passion. The old problems and dimnesses – the old solutions and little findings of light. Is the beauty of all that effort – of all those unutterable hours – lost forever? Lost, lost, lost? It will take a greater patience than all the others to see! – My new little notion was to represent Fleda as committing – for drama’s sake – some broad effective stroke of her own. But that now looks to me like a mistake: I’ve got hold, very possibly, of the tail of the right thing. Isn’t the right thing to make Fleda simply work upon Mrs Gereth, but work in an interesting way? She proceeds to the execution of Owen’s commission auprès de sa mère, but she is conscious that she can proceed to it only by an appeal. She has no idea of there being anything else she can do. She appeals therefore, frankly, strongly – has the most strenuous and equal sort of scene with her friend that she has ever had. She places her behaviour in the light of honour, duty, etc. – of the failure of Owen’s contract with Mona, which was to give her the house as Mona came down that day and saw it. She produces an impression – she shakes and influences Mrs Gereth; but it isn’t from the point of view of these special arguments that she uses. It’s by the very fact of her urgency, the very accent of her earnestness, of her hidden passion. Mrs Gereth guesses that hidden passion, and by this she’s affected – she throws herself into the possibility. She pricks up her ears – she stares – she exclaims: she suddenly breaks out and charges the girl with the sentiment which is her motive, the sentiment that she has divined in her. Fleda, taken aback at first, upset, bewildered, sees in a moment the chance (towards her ideal end) that it will give her to admit to Mrs Gereth the truth. She admits then – but admits nothing else; nothing of what has supremely passed between Owen and herself. There must be an absolute definiteness about what has passed: the promise, as it were, in exchange for her promise to act, that Owen has made her to go and get married. There must have been an opening here for the question of date, of postponement. Owen tells Fleda, in their interview, that Mona has postponed, so as to give him time to act and his mother time to restitute. (The original date of the marriage was otherwise close at hand.) Fleda makes Owen PROMISE to make Mona fix a day – make it by telling her that she (Fleda) undertakes for what Mrs Gereth will do, and that she (Fleda) desires him to inform her to that effect. This constitutes a definite transaction between him and Fleda. It is on this transaction that the girl, to Mrs Gereth, observes a studied silence. (Fleda, by the way, has coerced Owen into this agreement, or transaction, as I call it, by being in possession – entering into possession – of his secret, as it were, without having surrendered to him her own. This secret of his change about Mona is used by her in her ‘heroism’.) She not only keeps Mrs Gereth off the scent of finding out, of perceiving or inferring, Owen’s condition, but she tells a virtuous, ‘heroic’ lie on the subject. “Does he know?” “Thank God, no!” Fleda can say that with truth; but when – at some turn of her investigation – Mrs Gereth has a gleam of wonder sufficient to make her say: “Can it be possible he doesn’t feel as he did about Mona – that he likes you?”. Fleda emphatically denies this. But Mrs Gereth insists. “He has not said a word to you that could give colour to such a possibility?” “He has not said a word to me.” Reste the question of the postponement. She learns, Mrs G., that the wedding is postponed. It is really postponed to give her time to send back the furniture; but Fleda doesn’t tell her this. She doesn’t tell her of Mona’s condition, as communicated by Owen; for in her appeal to her she has not put it on that ground – she has put <it> on the ground of Owen’s honour, etc. But she works, as it were, the fact of the postponement – allows Mrs Gereth to see a reason, an encouragement and hope in it. “If he should break with her – should ask you to marry him, would you take him?”
“I’d take him,” says Fleda, profoundly. After this they still don’t hear of the marriage. This determines Mrs Gereth and she takes action in consequence. She sends back all but a few things – sends them all back and goes abroad.

[October 16th, 1895]
From the point I have reached (Oct. 16th) it must all be an absolute and unmitigated action. I have in 7 Fleda’s impression of the situation at Ricks. This must go to p. 210 of MS. – to Owen’s arrival and include what passes between the 2 women on the subject of it.
8 – p. 211-240. The ‘Scene’ at Ricks between Fleda and Owen, including the latter’s departure.
9 – p. 241-271; the whole business of the Restitution, between Mrs Gereth and Fleda, including the former’s decision.
10.

February 13th, ‘96.

I am pressingly face to face with the FINISH, for the Atlantic, of The Old Things, as the House Beautiful seems now destined, better, to be called. I must cipher out here, to the last fraction, my last chapters and pages. As usual I am crowded – my first two-thirds are too developed: my third third bursts my space or is well nigh squeezed and mutilated to death in it. But that is my problem. Let me state first, broadly, what I have now to show. The crude essence of what I have to show is this: that Mrs Gereth sends back the things, that the marriage of Owen and Mona then takes place and that after the treasures are triumphantly relodged at Poynton the house takes fire and burns down before Fleda’s eyes. Those are the bare facts. Voyons un peu les détails. Mrs Gereth surrenders the things partly because she believes – has reason to – that Fleda will eventually come into them. But that calculation won’t – doesn’t – appear a sufficient motive: she must have another to strengthen it. She surrenders them therefore, furthermore, because she appears to see that the knowledge of their being back again at Poynton, as an incentive, a heritage, a reward, a future (settled there again immutably, this time), will operate to make Fleda do what she has so passionately appealed to her to do – get Mona away from Owen. She, Mrs G., is seeing if Mona WON’T break. She does it first what the end of 10 shows her as doing – she keeps on the things as she threatens. 11 must begin, I think, this way. It is that same evening.
FLEDA: “Well, then what answer am I to write Mr Owen?”
MRS ;G.: “Write him to come up to town to meet you there.”
FLEDA: “For what purpose?”
MRS GERETH: “For any purpose you like!”
She sets the girl on him – cynically, almost, or indecently (making her feel AGAIN how little account – in the way of fine respect – she makes of her. Touch that, Mrs G.’s unconscious brutality and immorality, briefly and finely). She presses Fleda – yes – upon him: would ALMOST like her, in London, to give herself up to him. She has a vision of a day with him there as ‘fetching’ him – IN SPITE of Fleda’s fine fit about the young man’s not caring for her. She’ll see, Mrs G. will, if he won’t care. The very essence of this turn of the story is that the escape of the girl’s ‘secret’, the revelation to Mrs G. that she loves Owen, completely alters (in a manner still for the better – as regards at least the mother’s attitude) the relations of the two women. It develops them further – develops Mrs Gereth’s feeling for Fleda – though not Fleda’s (with all her dimnesses and delicacies) for her pushing, urging, overwhelming, hinting, suggesting friend. It is on this basis of her ‘love’ that Mrs G. now extravagantly handles her. She is free with her on it, bold, frank, urgent, humorous, cynical with her on it, beyond what Fleda’s fineness enjoys. She alludes perpetually, wonderingly, admiringly to it – all the while – attributing to her a FIERCER kind of sentiment (judging by herself) than Fleda’s sacrificial exaltation really is – making her wince and draw back in this flood of familiarity. At the same time I catch for her, here, in this connection – ADMIRABLY, I think – a prime element of my denouement. Fleda is left ‘sick’ at the end of 10 by her companion’s threatened postponement of the surrender – but that only spurs her to renewed, to confirmed, action and endeavour. It is an idée fixe with her that she shall serve Owen – bring about the disgorgement. She becomes hereby capable of lending herself in appearance to Mrs G.’s inflamed view of her possible effect on Owen and routing of Mona. The thing she still cherishes is Owen’s secret (his shy, barely revealed feeling for her); everything else has been blown upon and she is willing to accept that condition of things and use it as far as she can. What I see is, here, that she MUST have one more personal meeting with Owen. It is the last time she sees him. She must go up to town – with a ‘subtle’ appearance of profiting by Mrs Gereth’s directions and injunctions and suggestions – she must go up to town and have, somehow and somewhere, an hour with him. Say at her father’s in West Kensington. I just suggest to myself that. If I can from this point on only clarify this to the SCENIC intensity, brevity, beauty – make it march as straight as a pure little dramatic action – I shall, I think, really score. What Fleda writes to Owen after that opening bit of dialogue with Mrs G. is that, 1st, he is to hold on, that it’s difficult, but that she is helping him; and that 2d, she will come and meet him in town. It comes to me that her meeting with him in town must be une scène de passion – yes, I must give my readers that. Don’t I get a glimpse, this way, of the real and innermost mechanism of my end? Fleda breaks down – lets Owen see she loves him. It is all covert – and delicate and exquisite: she adjures him to do his literal duty to Mona. They arrive at some definite and sincere agreement about this. That is the ground, the fond, the deep ground TONE of their scene. It must be for MONA to break – only for Mona. He mustn’t – by all that’s honourable – do it if she doesn’t. He agrees to this – he sees it, feels it, understands it, gives her his word on it.
“But she WILL break if mamma doesn’t send back the things. Therefore she mustn’t NOW,” says Owen. Fleda’s aveu has changed all.
“You mustn’t say that – you mustn’t. You so must do your part – impeccably. I’ve worked your mother up to it.”
“Very good – leave it so. But she won’t – she WON’T!” says Owen jubilantly.
What I have my glimpse of as my right issue is that even while they are talking, as it were, Mrs Gereth DOES. She does it because, 1st: she has a visit from Mrs Brigstock in which she reads a virtual revelation that the marriage is off; and 2d: she does it to fetch Fleda. To make these things possible I must represent the meeting between Owen and Fleda as an incident of an ABSENCE that Fleda makes from Ricks. She goes up to town for a week – goes to her father, goes to escape Mrs G.’s hounding on, AND to prove to Mrs G. that she will go at Owen in the sense she (Mrs G.) pleads for. So I have roughly something like this.
11. The new situation at Ricks between the 2 women, on the basis of Fleda’s aveu. Fleda’s attitude on this new footing, and the letter she 1st writes to Owen. It tells him to hold on: she is serving him – it is difficult – he must be patient. She 1st declines Mrs G.’s suggestion about meeting him – then at last (after a fortnight [?]) she turns, changes, can’t stand it at Ricks, pleads that she must go up to town. She goes with Mrs G.’s high approbation. What Mrs G. sees in it.
12. Her meeting with Owen in town.
13. Her meeting, their meeting, with Mrs B.
14. Her return to Ricks to find everything gone. The last have just left. Mrs Gereth has ACTED. She shows WHY. Fleda is partly prepared. There has appeared that a.m. in the Morning Post an announcement that the marriage, etc., will not take place. Then she describes Mrs B.’s visit – a stupid frightened visit – to complain of Fleda. For it comes to me that they must have had in London – Owen and Fleda – an encounter with Mrs B. SHE COMES TO SEE FLEDA – for news of Mrs G.’s intentions and she finds Owen there. As an old acquaintance – her hostess, in Chap. 1, at Waterbath, she knows her whereabouts or address. Yes – SHE COMES TO COMPLAIN. That encourages and determines Mrs G. – she will, I have said, make it sure, ‘fetch’ Fleda and act on her. There she is – in the nudity of Ricks; but the news in the Morning Post rejoices her; and though Fleda, NOW THAT THE THINGS ARE GONE BACK, practically has her doubts and fears (which she doesn’t communicate) the two women have together, an hour, a week of happiness and hope, vis-à-vis of the future. FLEDA MUST NOW HAVE LET OUT OWEN’S SECRET.
15. The news that the marriage has taken place. This must (with other indispensable things) be a chapter by itself. They wait – the 2 women, first – for Owen to come down – almost immediately to propose for Fleda. The situation altered again – by a further shift – (I mean by Fleda’s aveu, now, of Owen’s ‘caring for her’) in a degree equivalent to that in which it has been altered in 10 by her aveu of her caring for him. They wait, they wait. Fleda tells Mrs G. of Owen’s offer to her of something from Poynton – anything: any small thing she can pick out. She rejoices: she says there is something at Ricks – the Maltese Cross. She will have THAT. (It occurs to me that she had better not go back to Ricks – but that Mrs G. comes up to town. The house is despoiled – the packers have been at it. Fleda has been on the POINT of going when she arrives. She learns from her that everything has gone – including the Maltese Cross. She arrives the evening of the day the M.P. gives the news of the rupture. She stays at an hotel. Owen is at Poynton.) It is thus in London that the news comes to them together of the marriage HAVING taken place. It comes at the end of about 10 days. Mrs G. then (her state, just heaven, her condition) determines to go abroad. But she hears the young couple are going. LAST CHAPTER. – Fleda goes down to rescue the Maltese Cross and finds the house in flames – or already burnt down to the ground.

February 19th, 1896.

I shall push (D. V.) bravely through The Old Things; but I must, a little, look into the matter of Fleda’s second meeting with Owen in London, and Mrs Brigstock’s finding them together. Il me faut en tirer everything – especially in the way of beauty – it can possibly give. It can give, surely, some little scène de passion; but I want also, from this point on, the whole thing closely and admirably mouvementé. It must be unmitigatedly objective narration – unarrested drama. It must be in a word a close little march of cause and effect. Fleda is a week in London without anything happing. Then Owen comes to West Kensington. He comes because his mother has let him know she is there. Fleda immediately challenges him – and he gives her that reason. His mother has written to him that Fleda has come up and has something to ask him on her behalf. He tells Fleda this. He has come to see what she has to ask him. She, painfully disconcerted, thinks Mrs G. has been capable of meaning that she (Fleda) shall communicate to Owen her (Mrs G.’s) idea. She is revolted – but Owen gives her a clue – in his having, as he shows, taken for granted what his mother does mean by Fleda’s errand. Fleda actively CHALLENGES him on this – finds out instantly, before she lets him go further, as it were, what he has thus assumed – assures herself in other words that what she has first feared is NOT the case – that Mrs Gereth has not put him up to the idea that she is in love with him. She actually cross-questions him about this; and his answers show – clearly enough – that Mrs G. has not gone so far – that she has been still AFRAID to. Fleda breathes, at this – feels more free to receive him. Then his communicated vision of what his mother HAS entendu by her message gives her the cue for a basis to let him stay a little without her giving herself away by emotion of any sort. WHAT Owen has assumed is that his mother has commissioned her to ask him, for her, whether if she engages to send back the things he will break with Mona – on the basis that Mona’s delay, Mona’s WAITING, seems obviously to have suggested the reality of. Besides, nothing is more natural than that he should rush to Fleda for more news than her note and her silence have given, of où ils en sont, tous, in the interminable transactions – of où il en est, lui, as to what he may really hope. She has been ‘working for him’, she has said: “Well then, has nothing at all been done?” His mother’s note has sent him to Fleda to hear what has been done. It is of the essence – or at least of the necessity – of this scene, that Fleda shall with real directness question him. She didn’t talk of Mona before – she talks of her NOW. She questions him straight – as he questions her. He asks her what has happened, on her side, since their hour together at Ricks – she asks him what has happened on his. What does Owen tell her? – Her questions must DRAW OUT what he tells her. He must be categoric. So, on her side, to meet and satisfy him, HER information must be. What has he, then, to tell her? What has she to tell him? He has to tell her that they are still waiting – that Mona is – and he must speak of that young woman more plainly, as it were, than Fleda has let him do at Ricks. He must speak very plainly indeed. He must tell the extreme and, to him, humiliating tension of the things not coming. AT THE SAME TIME HE MUST let her know that if they DON’T come he is free, he is hers. He must tell her that he hasn’t seen Mona for a fortnight – but that he has had to describe to her – had described to her fully his scene with Fleda at Ricks, every detail of that visit. Mona knows therefore that he is dealing with Fleda – that Fleda has absolute charge of their affairs. This knowledge is part of the tension – of his present trouble and embarrassment and worry. He must tell her all – he tells her all, every scrap. I mustn’t interrupt it too much with elucidations or it will be interminable. IT MUST BE AS STRAIGHT AS A PLAY – that is the only way to do. Ah, mon bon, make this, here, justify, crown, in its little degree, the long years and pains, the acquired mastery of scenic presentation. What I am looking for is my joint, my hinge, for making the scene between them pass, at a given point, into passion, into pain, into their facing together the truth. Some point that it logically reaches must DETERMINE the passage. I want to give Fleda her little hour. She can only get it if Owen fully comes out. Owen can only fully come out if he sees what is really in her. He must offer to give up Mona for her – and she must utterly refuse that. What her response IS is that she will take him if Mona really breaks. Yes, here I get my evolution don’t I? – an understanding between them dependent on the things not coming. The difference is now, with the other scene (at Ricks), that they are really – morally – face to face and that they speak of it all. But voyons, voyons, I must be utterly crystalline and complete, and my charpente must be of steel. What must be thrown up to the surface is the coming back, through Owen, of Mrs Gereth’s OFFER of Fleda at Poynton. Owen has understood it since – lived on it – and it all is in him now. Thus it is a prime necessity that Mrs G.’s attitude shall be absolutely – NOW – recognized between them. Owen must KNOW, from Fleda – must get it out of her, that his mother WILL absolutely surrender if he’ll marry Fleda. Now it comes to me, in connection and accordance with this, that must separate this London episode into 2 chapters, 2 occasions: making the 1st culminate in the arrival of Mrs Brigstock at West Kensington. She then and there takes Owen away with her. She has come to get information and satisfaction from Fleda. She knows what Mona knows – that Fleda has charge of Owen’s case auprès de sa mère. Owen, moreover, must have told Fleda that he has told Mona (by letter) of his having learned from Mrs G. that she, Fleda, is in town. This is how Mrs Brigstock knows it. She has more faith in the girl than her daughter has; and she comes to say: “Do you realise this hideous deadlock?” Then she finds her daughter’s worst suspicions and her jealousies confirmed, by what she seems to have surprised between the young couple upon whom she comes in. Owen must have told Fleda definitely that Mona is jealous. That is the prompt hinge or joint of his fuller frankness. But what I want to mark just here is the evolution of the second chapter of the pair. This is the chapter of passion – determined by Mrs B.’s intervention. She has made him a scene of jealousy. By the chapter of ‘passion’ I mean the scene of Fleda’s aveux. I don’t see what it can do but take place the next day. Owen comes back to tell her what has happened between Mrs Brigstock and himself. HE DOESN’T KNOW she has made up her mind to go straight down to Ricks. What overwhelms me, however, is the reflection that I have almost no space. FORTY PAGES of small (my smallest) penmanship (like this) must do it all. There can be almost no dialogue at all. This is an iron law. It is absolute. I can squeeze what I can into 40 pp.; but I can’t have a line more. Therefore in 13, at least, it must be pure, dense, summarized narration. How can I bring in Mrs Brigstock, in the tiny space, if it isn’t? But above all what I must fix is what is the basis of emotion on which the 2d meeting between Owen and Fleda takes place? They feel that the situation has altered by Mrs B.’s intervention. MONA WILL BREAK. Fleda surrenders herself – she tells him that she will marry him if Mona does break. On this they get their little duet. It is their hour of illusion – it is their fool’s paradise. But it is indispensable to make clear that Fleda won’t listen to anything but freedom by Mona’s rupture; and therefore to have made clear antecedently exactly what Mona’s actual attitude IS – at the point the affair has reached. Mona – voyons – must have given an ultimatum – a date: if the things are not sent back by such and such a day she will break. This day is near at hand. Mrs Brigstock has been ANGRY – therefore she will be angering Mona by the description of how she found the pair together in West Kensington. Fleda’s aveux are all qualified – saddened and refined, and made beautiful, by the sense of the IMPOSSIBLE – the sense of the infinite improbability of Mona’s not really hanging on – and by the perfectly firm and definite ground she takes on the absolute demand of Owen’s honour that he shall go on with Mona if she DOESN’T break.

March 30th, 1896.

I am face to face now with my last part of The Old Things, and I must (D. V.) put it through with the aid of every drop that can be squeezed from it. It will take 10 days of real application – and then I shall have to get straight at the 65,000 for Clement Shorter.

What I have, here, is that, in 18, Fleda perceives what it is that Mrs Gereth has done and why she has done it: the full proportions of the bribe, the bid, the pressure of her friend’s confidence. I must do it all in 3 chapters of 35 pages each. In 18 the impression on Fleda, the overwhelmedness, the sense that everything is lost, and her confession of everything to Mrs Gereth – their complete intimacy and exchange of all emotion and explanation over the matter. I see the whole instalment as between them – but this chapter as especially between them. They have it out together as it were – they are more face to face than they have ever been. What they are together, face to face with, is the question of what Owen will have done – Fleda lets Mrs Gereth see that she believes it’s too late, believes that Mona holds him. Mrs Gereth denounces him with passion – denounces him for a milksop and a muff, declares that he’s less than a man and that she’s horribly ashamed of him. Fleda defends him, and the chapter (18) which ought, after all, to be of 3000 words at most, terminates on their suspense. What I am asking myself is whether I bring back Owen at all. I am not well this a.m. and still shaky from a sick cold, a small assault of influenza; though convalescent, I’m not quite in my assiette and must puzzle my little problem out here with a mild patience and a considerable imperfection. But patience and courage – through endless small botherations and interruptions – will see me through – and I have only to me cramponner – and add word to word. Se cramponner and add word to word, is the endless and eternal receipt. Owen is married – that’s what has happened; that is what I have to deal with in 19 and 20. HOW do I deal with it? How is the revelation made to the 2 women? It seems to me indispensable that OWEN should NOT come back. That’s impossible – absolutely, and gives me ½ a dozen impossibilities and gaucheries of every kind. The whole thing must be between the two women, and the little problem of art is, finely, inspiringly, keeping it between them, to make it palpitate, make it close and dramatic and full to the very end. Little by little, as I press, as I ponder, it seems to come to me, the manner of my denouement – it seems to fall into its proportions and to compose. I see 4 little chapters, rather, of 25 pages each. I think, at any rate, I see Fleda return to Maggie’s at the end of 18. There, after 2 or 3 days, Mrs Gereth comes to her. Yes, Mrs Gereth must see her there. This gives me the manner of my revelation to Fleda – it is Mrs Gereth who makes it. Mrs Gereth has had it herself from Owen: HE HAS COME TO HER IN TOWN TO THANK HER FOR WHAT SHE HAS DONE: he has been at Poynton and seen the things restored. Yes, that is it. That has clinched Mona, and they have been married at the registrar’s on the spot. This scene of reproduction of these occurrences takes place between Mrs G. and Fleda at Maggie’s.

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