Now, as they sat through law lectures, a shadow hung over them, the shadow of the war for which they had not volunteered, a war never mentioned among them unless there was fresh and urgent news. They did not look like young men who would easily accept or give orders, or march in unison, or have their limbs amputated. They believed in the Union and the abolition of slavery as they believed in God, but they also believed in their own freedom and privilege. They knew that abolition was a noble cause, and they included it in their prayers; at the same time they took notes and read large tomes to prepare themselves for their future. Looking at them, Henry found, was easier than talking to them. In their physiognomies he saw a boyish rectitude guarding the rest of them like a great stone wall.
While Henry attended his lectures assiduously, he barely opened a book on the law. Instead, he read Sainte-Beuve, he wandered into Lowell ’s lectures on English and French literature, he listened to Emerson, when he came to Boston, attacking slavery. He went to the theatre. He steeped himself in whatever life Cambridge and Boston had to offer. The war was a faint sound which at intervals became louder and a few times piercingly close. One day in Harvard he had seen his cousin Gus Barker, clearly home on leave, in the distance but he had not run after him, believing that he would see him in the days that followed. But he did not see him and when Gus was shot dead in Virginia, he could not reconcile the memory of his cousin, his skin so white and his eyes so brimming with expectation, his body so full of coiled strength, with the idea that he had been broken and destroyed by a bullet, that he, so young and unready, had been wrenched asunder with pain, and left lying there as others passed by before he was buried in a distant place where no one knew him.
His mother, when she wrote telling him the news of Gus, said that she had also written to William. As Henry went to his next meal at Miss Upsham’s he did not know what he might say to William about their cousin, and he noticed as William came into the dining room a look of dark embarrassment crossing his face. He found himself shaking William’s hand, and this made the unease between them even worse. William nodded at him gravely. Neither of them could say anything. It was only when William told Professor Child that their cousin had been killed in Virginia by a sniper’s bullet that the spell was broken and Gus Barker’s death could be discussed.
‘All the doomed young men,’ Professor Child said, ‘all of them healthy and brave, and leaving those who loved them far behind, lying dead on the battlefield while the war goes on.’
Henry wondered if Professor Child was quoting from a ballad or if he was attempting to speak naturally. He noticed that William had tears in his eyes.
‘The best went to war,’ Professor Child said, ‘and the best were cut down.’
Sometimes, during these meals at Miss Upsham’s, Professor Child seemed on the verge of stating that those who remained at home, including his fellow diners at Miss Upsham’s, were cowards, but then he appeared to restrain himself.
In the months that followed neither William nor Henry ever mentioned the name of Gus Barker to each other. Each of them felt, Henry guessed, a guilt which they did not wish to admit to, or discuss.
WHEN HENRY went to visit Wilky at Readville he could not believe that this soft companion of his childhood should have mastered, by mere aid of his own gaiety and sociability, such mysteries and such hardships as the army offered. To become first a happy soldier and then an easy officer was, it seemed to Henry, for his younger brother an exercise in liking his fellow man. He later remembered his brother’s companions as laughing, welcoming and sunburnt youth, who, like his companions in law school, seemed to bristle with Boston genealogies, but, despite this, had taken to army life, displaying an openness, a joy in the outdoors and even a jokiness that belied their upbringing and background. The hospital camp at Portsmouth seemed very far away and, as he left that day to return to Harvard, he felt that a long war, or even a bloody one, was a distant prospect from the picture of golden order and good feeling that he had just witnessed.
His mother transcribed the parts of Wilky’s letters which she judged most informative or most edifying or most alarming and included them in her letters to Henry and William. In January Wilky wrote home about a malignant fever called malaria which was affecting both armies. ‘Two weeks ago,’ he wrote, ‘we buried two of our company in three days, and a great many have been taken sick with it.’ He managed to sound both impatient for action and impatient for home, but what Henry took from the letters more than anything was his brother’s idealism and belief in the rightness of his cause and his readiness to fight for it. Wilky wrote and his mother transcribed,
I am very well and in capital spirits, but now and then rather blue about home. If things don’t look more promising than they do now by the end of next May, I fear very much we shall not see home, for the government will I expect make an appeal to the 300,000 nine-months men to stay three months longer, that their services are really needed. What could they say to an appeal emanating from such a high place and for such a high cause. For myself, I am content to stay if the country needs it, but it would come hard I assure you.
Henry imagined his mother writing this out, having carefully selected it. He knew that she would have been in two minds about sending it as it suggested clearly where duty lay. She added nothing and Henry contented himself with the idea that she, as much as he or William, had engineered this state of affairs in which Wilky and Bob represented the James family in the war.
William and he did not communicate much with each other during these months, even though they ate at the same table three times a day. If a letter came from his mother which Henry thought that William should see, he handed it to him without comment; and William did the same. Both brothers were enjoying their solitude, the pleasures of introspection and intermittent company and freedom from parental interference and the noise of domestic life, but more than anything they were both wrapped up in their reading.
This was, on the other hand, an heroic time in Wilky’s life, which he would not experience again, and would not, indeed, recover from. He volunteered to serve under Colonel Shaw as an officer in the 54th Regiment. Its departure from Boston was a glorious occasion, which Henry James senior travelled specially to Boston to see, using the house of Oliver Wendell Holmes senior as a vantage point to view the parade, which would be for him a pivotal moment in the history of his family and the history of liberty in America.
William and Henry learned of the event from their mother. When her letter came informing them of their father’s arrival, it was clear that she presumed both brothers would wish to view for themselves Wilky’s brave triumph and personally to witness a singular conjoining of the family’s history with that of the country’s destiny. It seemed not to occur to her that they might not wish to attend.
William wrote, however, immediately to tell her that he had an important experiment to perform in the laboratory on that very day, that he would make every effort to be there, but should these efforts fail, then the event would have to take place without him.
Henry waited until the date came closer and then he wrote to his mother about his back, which was providing him with pain, and his need for rest and his hope that he would be much improved by 28 May, the date of the event, and, in fact, he promised to do his utmost to be there, but should his back continue to trouble him, or take a turn for the worse, then he would not be able to meet his father and accompany him to the house of Dr Holmes. He did not read it over before he sent it.