self-inflicted lashes that had cut through skin and flesh.
“Excuse me,” James had said, still standing in the open door to the stateroom. “I did not . . .” He did not know what he “did not” so he stopped there.
Holmes turned and looked at him. There were more white scars on his pale chest. James had time to note that despite the tall man’s extreme thinness—his flanks were all but hollowed in the way of some runners and other athletes whom James had seen compete—Mr. Sherlock Holmes, whose flesh in the lamplight glowed almost as white as James’s cousin Gus Barker’s had been, was a mass of corded muscles which seemed just waiting to be flexed and used in some urgent circumstance.
“Excuse me,” James had said again and had gone back out through the door. He stayed in the First Class Lounge that night, smoking and reading some irrelevant magazine, until he was certain that Holmes would be in bed asleep before he himself returned to the stateroom.
* * *
The
Paris
, far behind its own rather unambitious schedule, came into New York Harbor in early evening when part of the city’s oldest skyline was backlit by the setting sun. Most of the transatlantic liners James had taken back from Europe over the years, if arriving in New York, did so early in the morning. He realized that this evening arrival was not only more aesthetically pleasing—although James could no longer tolerate the aesthetics of New York City—but also seemed somehow more appropriate to their covert mission.
Holmes had joined him, uninvited, at the railing where James had been watching the scurry of tug boats and flurry of harbor traffic, listening to the hoots and bells and shouts of one of the world’s busiest harbors.
“Interesting city, is it not?” asked Holmes.
“Yes,” was James’s only response. When he’d left New York and America ten years earlier in 1883, he’d vowed never to return. Safely back in Kensington, he had written essays about his American and New York impressions. The city itself—where James had enjoyed years of what he thought was a happy childhood in their home near Washington Square Park—had changed, James observed, beyond all recognition. Between the 1840’s and the 1880’s, he said, New York had become a city of immigrants and strangers. The civilities and certainties of the semi-rural yet still pleasantly urban Washington Square years had been replaced by these hurtling verticalities, these infusions of strange-smelling, strange-speaking foreigners.
At one point, James had compared the Jews in their ghettoes of the Lower East Side to rats and other vermin—scurrying around the feet of their distracted and outnumbered proper Anglo-Saxon predecessors—but he also admired the fact that these . . .
immigrants
. . . put out more daily newspapers in Hebrew than appeared in the city in English; that they had created a series of Yiddish theaters that entertained more people nightly—however boorishly and barbarically—than did the Broadway theaters; that the Jews—and the Italians and other lower orders of immigrants, including most of the Irish—had made such a niche for themselves in the new New York that Henry James was certain that they could never, having attached themselves like limpets to that proud Dream of America shared by so many of its inhabitants, be displaced.
It had made Henry James feel like a stranger in his own land, in his own city, and his essays had returned to that theme again and again and again.
He said nothing of that now as he and Holmes silently watched the final preparations for the old liner to be nudged into its proper berth along the busy docks.
“You will want to know how I knew that night along the Seine that you were carrying your sister Alice’s ashes,” Holmes said very softly. People were shoving and milling to lean along the long railing now, but there nonetheless seemed to be a bubble of privacy around the two men.
“I want to know
“Excuse me,” James had said, still standing in the open door to the stateroom. “I did not . . .” He did not know what he “did not” so he stopped there.
Holmes turned and looked at him. There were more white scars on his pale chest. James had time to note that despite the tall man’s extreme thinness—his flanks were all but hollowed in the way of some runners and other athletes whom James had seen compete—Mr. Sherlock Holmes, whose flesh in the lamplight glowed almost as white as James’s cousin Gus Barker’s had been, was a mass of corded muscles which seemed just waiting to be flexed and used in some urgent circumstance.
“Excuse me,” James had said again and had gone back out through the door. He stayed in the First Class Lounge that night, smoking and reading some irrelevant magazine, until he was certain that Holmes would be in bed asleep before he himself returned to the stateroom.
* * *
The
Paris
, far behind its own rather unambitious schedule, came into New York Harbor in early evening when part of the city’s oldest skyline was backlit by the setting sun. Most of the transatlantic liners James had taken back from Europe over the years, if arriving in New York, did so early in the morning. He realized that this evening arrival was not only more aesthetically pleasing—although James could no longer tolerate the aesthetics of New York City—but also seemed somehow more appropriate to their covert mission.
Holmes had joined him, uninvited, at the railing where James had been watching the scurry of tug boats and flurry of harbor traffic, listening to the hoots and bells and shouts of one of the world’s busiest harbors.
“Interesting city, is it not?” asked Holmes.
“Yes,” was James’s only response. When he’d left New York and America ten years earlier in 1883, he’d vowed never to return. Safely back in Kensington, he had written essays about his American and New York impressions. The city itself—where James had enjoyed years of what he thought was a happy childhood in their home near Washington Square Park—had changed, James observed, beyond all recognition. Between the 1840’s and the 1880’s, he said, New York had become a city of immigrants and strangers. The civilities and certainties of the semi-rural yet still pleasantly urban Washington Square years had been replaced by these hurtling verticalities, these infusions of strange-smelling, strange-speaking foreigners.
At one point, James had compared the Jews in their ghettoes of the Lower East Side to rats and other vermin—scurrying around the feet of their distracted and outnumbered proper Anglo-Saxon predecessors—but he also admired the fact that these . . .
immigrants
. . . put out more daily newspapers in Hebrew than appeared in the city in English; that they had created a series of Yiddish theaters that entertained more people nightly—however boorishly and barbarically—than did the Broadway theaters; that the Jews—and the Italians and other lower orders of immigrants, including most of the Irish—had made such a niche for themselves in the new New York that Henry James was certain that they could never, having attached themselves like limpets to that proud Dream of America shared by so many of its inhabitants, be displaced.
It had made Henry James feel like a stranger in his own land, in his own city, and his essays had returned to that theme again and again and again.
He said nothing of that now as he and Holmes silently watched the final preparations for the old liner to be nudged into its proper berth along the busy docks.
“You will want to know how I knew that night along the Seine that you were carrying your sister Alice’s ashes,” Holmes said very softly. People were shoving and milling to lean along the long railing now, but there nonetheless seemed to be a bubble of privacy around the two men.
“I want to know
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