MR. BENDER indeed, formidably advancing, scarce had use for this assistance. “Happy to meet you—especially in your beautiful home, Lord Theign.” To which he added while the master of Dedborough stood goodhumouredly passive to his approach: “I’ve been round, by your kind permission and the light of nature, and haven't required support; though if I had there's a gentleman there who seemed prepared to allow me any amount.” Mr. Bender, out of his abundance, evoked as by a suggestive hand this contributory figure. “A young, spare, nervous gentleman with eyeglasses— I guess he's an author. A friend of yours too?” he asked of Lord John.

The answer was prompt and emphatic. “No, the gentleman is no friend at all of mine, Mr. Bender.”

“A friend of my daughter’s,” Lord Theign easily explained. “I hope they’re looking after him.”

“Oh, they took care he had tea and bread and butter to any extent; and were so good as to move something,” Mr. Bender conscientiously added, “so that he could get up on a chair and see straight into the Moretto.”

This was a touch, however, that appeared to affect Lord John unfavourably. “Up on a chair? I say!”

Mr. Bender took another view. “Why, I got right up myself—a little more and I’d almost have begun to paw it! He got me quite interested”—the proprietor of the picture would perhaps care to know—“in that Moretto.” And it was on these lines that Mr. Bender continued to advance. “I take it that your biggest value, however, Lord Theign, is your splendid Sir Joshua. Our friend there has a great deal to say about that too—but it didn't lead to our moving any more furniture.” On which he paused as to enjoy, with a show of his fine teeth, his host's reassurance. “It has yet, my impression of that picture, sir, led to something else. Are you prepared, Lord Theign, to entertain a proposition?”

Lord Theign met Mr. Bender's eyes while this inquirer left these few portentous words to speak for themselves. “To the effect that I part to you with ‘The Beautiful Duchess of Waterbridge’? No, Mr. Bender, such a proposition would leave me intensely cold.”

FACE to face with his visitor the master of Dedborough betrayed the impression his daughter appeared to have given him. “She didn't want to go?” And then before Lord John could reply: “What the deuce is the matter with her?”

Lord John took his time. “I think perhaps a little Mr. Crimble.”

“And who the deuce is a little Mr. Crimble?”

“A young man who was just with her—and whom she appears to have invited.”

“Where is he then?” Lord Theign demanded.

“Off there among the pictures—which he seems partly to have come for.”

“Oh!”—it made his lordship easier. “Then he's all right—on such a day.”

His companion could none the less just wonder. “Hadn't Lady Grace told you?”

“That he was coming? Not that I remember.” But Lord Theign, perceptibly preoccupied, made nothing of this. “We’ve had other fish to fry, and you know the freedom I allow her.”

His friend had a vivid gesture. “My dear man, I only ask to profit by it!” With which there might well have been in Lord John's face a light of comment on the pretension in such a quarter to allow freedom.

Yet it was a pretension that Lord Theign sustained—as to show himself far from all bourgeois narrowness. “She has her friends by the score—at this time of day.” There was clearly a claim here also—to know the time of day. “But in the matter of friends where, by the way, is your own—of whom I’ve but just heard?”

“Oh, off there among the pictures too; so they’ll have met and taken care of each other.” Accounting for this inquirer would be clearly the least of Lord John's difficulties. “I mustn't appear to Bender to have failed him; but I must at once let you know, before I join him, that, seizing my opportunity, I have just very definitely, in fact very pressingly, spoken to Lady Grace. It hasn't been perhaps,” he continued, “quite the pick of a chance; but that seemed never to come, and if I’m not too fondly mistaken, at any rate, she listened to me without abhorrence. Only I’ve led her to expect— for our case—that you’ll be so good, without loss of time, as to say the clinching word to her yourself.”

LORD JOHN, reannounced the next instant from the nearest quarter and quite waiving salutations, left no doubt of the high pitch of his eagerness and tension as soon as the door had closed behind him. “What on earth then do you suppose he has come back to do—?” To which he added while his hostess's gesture impatiently disclaimed conjecture: “Because when a fellow really finds himself the centre of a cyclone——!”

“Isn't it just at the centre,” she interrupted, “that you keep remarkably still, and only in the suburbs that you feel the rage? I count on dear Theign's doing nothing in the least foolish——!”

“Ah, but he can't have chucked everything for nothing,” Lord John sharply returned; “and wherever you place him in the rumpus he can't but meet somehow, hang it, such an assault on his character as a great nobleman and good citizen.”

“It's his luck to have become with the public of the newspapers the scapegoat-in-chief: for the sins, so-called, of a lot of people!” Lady Sandgate inconclusively sighed.

“Yes,” Lord John concluded for her, “the mercenary millions on whose traffic in their trumpery values—when they’re so lucky as to have any!—this isn't a patch!”

“Oh, there are cases and cases: situations and responsibilities so intensely differ!”—that appeared on the whole, for her ladyship, the moral to be gathered.

“Of course everything differs, all round, from everything,” Lord John went on; “and who in the world knows anything of his own case but the victim of circumstances exposing himself, for the highest and purest motives, to be literally torn to pieces?”

“Well,” said Lady Sandgate as, in her strained suspense, she freshly consulted her bracelet watch, “I hope he isn't already torn—if you tell me you’ve been to Kitty’s.”

“Oh, he was all right so far: he had arrived and gone out again,” the young man explained, “as Lady Imber hadn't been at home.”

“Ah cool Kitty!” his hostess sighed again—but diverted, as she spoke, by the reappearance of her butler, this time positively preceding Lord Theign, whom she met, when he presently stood before her, his garb of travel exchanged for consummate afternoon dress, with yearning tenderness and compassionate curiosity.

LEFT alone he had a moment's meditation where he stood; it found issue in an articulate “Poor dear thing!”—an exclamation marked at once with patience and impatience, with resignation and ridicule. After which, waiting for his daughter, Lord Theign slowly and absently roamed, finding matches at last and lighting his cigarette—all with an air of concern that had settled on him more heavily from the moment of his finding himself alone. His luxury of gloom—if gloom it was—dropped, however, on his taking heed of Lady Grace, who, arriving on the scene through the other room, had had just time to stand and watch him in silence.

“Oh!” he jerked out at sight of her—which she had to content herself with as a parental greeting after separation, his next words doing little to qualify its dryness. “I take it for granted that you know I’m within a couple of hours of leaving England under a necessity of health.” And then as, drawing nearer, she signified without speaking her possession of this fact: “I’ve thought accordingly that before I go I should—on this first possible occasion since that odious occurrence at Dedborough—like to leave you a little more food for meditation, in my absence, on the painfully false position in which you there placed me.” He carried himself restlessly even perhaps with a shade of awkwardness, to which her stillness was a contrast; she just waited, wholly passive—possibly indeed a trifle portentous. “If you had plotted and planned it in advance,” he none the less firmly pursued, “if you had acted from some uncanny or malignant motive, you couldn't have arranged more perfectly to incommode, to disconcert and, to all intents and purposes, make light of me and insult me.” Even before this charge she made no sign; with her eyes now attached to the ground she let him proceed. “I had practically guaranteed to our excellent, our charming friend, your favourable view of his appeal—which you yourself too, remember, had left him in so little doubt of!—so that, having by your performance so egregiously failed him, I have the pleasure of their coming down on me for explanations, for compensations, and for God knows what besides.”

The Genesis of the Text

The last novel that Henry James completed and published in his lifetime derived directly from his 1909 play of the same name. This had been commissioned for the 1910 repertory season at London's Duke of York's Theatre produced by the American theatre-manager Charles Frohman (1856–1915) which, with new work promised from Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), John Galsworthy (1867–1933), Harley Granville Barker and others, looked set to follow the ground-breaking 1904–7 Court Theatre seasons of avant-garde plays organized by Barker (1877–1946) and John Vedrenne (1867–1930). James set about the project enthusiastically, telling his agent, James Pinker (1863–1922), on 14 October 1909, that he was ‘very ardent and interested; feeling, the more I get into it—into the whole thing— that that way, for me the Future (what is left me of it!) lies’. It lay there particularly, perhaps, because his 1908 royalty statement for the New York Edition of his novels, after years of intensive revision work, had been he said, ‘a greater disappointment than I have been prepared for’ and his literary income his lowest for twenty-five years (LL 468). In mid-December, 1909, having completed the play, he noted that ‘the “dramatic” way’ was the only way he would ‘henceforth be able, with any vital, or any artistic, economy, to envisage [his] material at all’, his ‘so absorbing and endearing plunge into the whole process of “The Outcry”’ having cast ‘so large and rich and vivid a light’ on ‘the whole matter of method’. The novel James was then contemplating, ‘The Ivory Tower’, would remain unfinished at his death; the one that did eventuate was The Outcry, published almost simultaneously in England and America, in October 1911.

The novel's dust-jacket gloss,most likely, as Leon Edelmaintains, to have been printed fromJames's own prospectus, locates the plot in current events:

As Hugh recognised in this friend's entrance and face the light of welcome he went, full of his subject, straight to their main affair. “I haven't been able to wait, I’ve wanted so much to tell you—I mean how I’ve just come back from Brussels, where I saw Pappendick, who was free and ready, by the happiest chance, to start for Verona, which he must have reached some time yesterday.”

The girl's responsive interest fairly broke into rapture. “Ah, the dear sweet thing!”

“Yes, he's a brick—but the question now hangs in the balance. Allowing him time to have got into relation with the picture, I’ve begun to expect his wire, which will probably come to my club; but my fidget, while I wait, has driven me”—he threw out and dropped his arms in expression of his soft surrender—“well, just to do this: to come to you here, in my fever, at an unnatural hour and uninvited, and at least let you know I’ve ‘acted.’”

“Oh, but I simply rejoice,” Lady Grace declared, “to be acting with you.”

“Then if you are, if you are,” the young man cried, “why everything's beautiful and right!”

“It's all I care for and think of now,” she went on in her bright devotion, “and I’ve only wondered and hoped!”

Well, Hugh found for it all a rapid, abundant lucidity. “He was away from home at first, and I had to wait—but I crossed last week, found him and settled it; coming home by Paris, where I had a grand four days’ jaw with the fellows there and saw their great specimen of our master: all of which has given him time.”

“And now his time's up?” the girl eagerly asked.

“It must be—and we shall see.” But Hugh postponed that question to a matter of more moment still. “The thing is that at last I’m able to tell you how I feel the trouble I’ve brought you.”

It made her, quickly colouring, rest grave eyes on him. “What do you know—when I haven't told you—about my ‘trouble’?”

LADY SANDGATE, on a morning late in May, entered her drawing-room by the door that opened at the right of that charming retreat as a person coming in faced Bruton Street; and she met there at this moment Mr. Gotch, her butler, who had just appeared in the much wider doorway forming opposite the Bruton Street windows an apartment not less ample, lighted from the back of the house and having its independent connection with the upper floors and the lower. She showed surprise at not immediately finding the visitor to whom she had been called.

“But Mr. Crimble——?”

“Here he is, my lady.” And he made way for that gentleman, who emerged from the back room; Gotch observing the propriety of a prompt withdrawal.

“I went in for a minute, with your servant's permission,” Hugh explained, “to see your famous Lawrence—which is splendid; he was so good as to arrange the light.” The young man's dress was of a form less relaxed than on the occasion of his visit to Dedborough; yet the soft felt hat that he rather restlessly crumpled as he talked marked the limit of his sacrifice to vain appearances.

Lady Sandgate was at once interested in the punctuality of his reported act. “Gotch thinks as much of my ancestress as I do—and even seems to have ended by taking her for his very own.”

“One sees, unmistakably, from her beauty, that you at any rate are of her line,” Hugh allowed himself, not without confidence, the amusement of replying; “and I must make sure of another look at her when I’ve a good deal more time.”

His hostess heard him as with a lapse of hope. “You hadn't then come for the poor dear?” And then as he obviously hadn’t, but for something quite else: “I thought, from so prompt an interest, that she might be coveted—!” It dropped with a yearning sigh.

“You imagined me sent by some prowling collector?” Hugh asked. “Ah, I shall never do their work—unless to betray them: that I shouldn't in the least mind!—and I’m here, frankly, at this early hour, to ask your consent to my seeing Lady Grace a moment on a particular business, if she can kindly give me time.”

“AH, Mr. Crimble,” he cordially inquired, “you’ve come with your great news?”

Hugh caught the allusion, it would have seemed, but after a moment. “News of the Moretto? No, Mr. Bender, I haven't news yet.” But he added as with high candour for the visitor's motion of disappointment: “I think I warned you, you know, that it would take three or four weeks.”

“Well, in my country,” Mr. Bender returned with disgust, “it would take three or four minutes! Can't you make ‘em step more lively?”

“I’m expecting, sir,” said Hugh good-humouredly, “a report from hour to hour.”

“Then will you let me have it right off?”

Hugh indulged in a pause; after which very frankly: “Ah, it's scarcely for you, Mr. Bender that I’m acting!”

The great collector was but briefly checked. “Well, can't you just act for Art?”

“Oh, you’re doing that yourself so powerfully,” Hugh laughed, “that I think I had best leave it to you!”

His friend looked at him as some inspector on circuit might look at a new improvement. “Don't you want to go round acting with me?”

“Go ‘on tour,’ as it were? Oh, frankly, Mr. Bender,” Hugh said, “if I had any weight——!”

“You’d add it to your end of the beam? Why, what have I done that you should go back on me—after working me up so down there? The worst I’ve done,” Mr. Bender continued, “is to refuse that Moretto.”

“Has it deplorably been offered you?” our young man cried, unmistakably and sincerely affected. After which he went on, as his fellow-visitor only eyed him hard, not, on second thoughts, giving the owner of the great work away: “Then why are you—as if you were a banished Romeo—so keen for news from Verona?” To this odd mixture of business and literature Mr. Bender made no reply, contenting himself with but a large vague blandness that wore in him somehow the mark of tested utility; so that Hugh put him another question: “Aren't you here, sir, on the chance of the Mantovano?”

“THEN Theign's not yet here!” Lord John had to resign himself as he greeted his American ally. “But he told me I should find you.”

“He has kept me waiting,” that gentleman returned—“but what's the matter with him anyway?”

“The matter with him”—Lord John treated such ignorance as irritating—“must of course be this beastly thing in the ‘Journal.’”

Mr. Bender proclaimed, on the other hand, his incapacity to seize such connections. “What's the matter with the beastly thing?”

“Why, aren't you aware that the stiffest bit of it is a regular dig at you?”

“If you call that a regular dig you can't have had much experience of the Papers. I’ve known them to dig much deeper.”

“I’ve had no experience of such horrid attacks, thank goodness; but do you mean to say,” asked Lord John with the surprise of his own delicacy, “that you don't unpleasantly feel it?”

“Feel it where, my dear sir?”

“Why, God bless me, such impertinence, everywhere!”

“All over me at once?”—Mr. Bender took refuge in easy humour. “Well, I’m a large man—so when I want to feel so much I look out for something good. But what, if he suffers from the blot on his ermine—ain't that what you wear?—does our friend propose to do about it?”

Lord John had a demur, which was immediately followed by the apprehension of support in his uncertainty. Lady Sandgate was before them, having reached them through the other room, and to her he at once referred the question. “What will Theign propose, do you think, Lady Sandgate, to do about it?”

She breathed both her hospitality and her vagueness. “To ‘do’——?”

“Don't you know about the thing in the ‘Journal’—awfully offensive all round?”

“There’d be even a little pinch for you in it,” Mr. Bender said to her—“if you were bent on fitting the shoe!”

Well, she met it all as gaily as was compatible with a firm look at her elder guest while she took her place with them. “Oh, the shoes of such monsters as that are much too big for poor me!” But she was more specific for Lord John.

LEFT with her friend, Lady Grace had a prompt question. “Lord John warned me he was ‘funny’; but you already know him?”

There might have been a sense of embarrassment in the way in which, as to gain time, Lady Sandgate pointed, instead of answering, to the small picture pronounced upon by Mr. Bender. “He thinks your little Cuyp a fraud.”

“That one?” Lady Grace could but stare. “The wretch!” However, she made, without alarm, no more of it; she returned to her previous question. “You’ve met him before?”

“Just a little—in town. Being ‘after pictures,’” Lady Sandgate explained, “he has been after my great-grandmother.”

“She,” said Lady Grace with amusement, “must have found him funny! But he can clearly take care of himself, while Kitty takes care of Lord John, and while you, if you’ll be so good, go back to support father—in the hour of his triumph: which he wants you so much to witness that he complains of your desertion and goes so far as to speak of you as sneaking away.”

Lady Sandgate, with a slight flush, turned it over. “I delight in his triumph, and whatever I do is at least above board; but if it's a question of support aren't you yourself failing him quite as much?”

This had, however, no effect on the girl's confidence. “Ah, my dear, I’m not at all the same thing, and as I’m the person in the world he least misses—” Well, such a fact spoke for itself.

“You’ve been free to return and wait for Lord John?”—that was the sense in which the elder woman appeared to prefer to understand it as speaking.

The tone of it, none the less, led her companion immediately, though very quietly, to correct her. “I’ve not come back to wait for Lord John.”

“Then he hasn't told you—if you’ve talked—with what idea he has come?”

Lady Grace had for a further correction the same shade of detachment. “Kitty has told me—what it suits her to pretend to suppose.”

LADY SANDGATE, left alone with Lord Theign, drew the line at their companion's enthusiasm. “That may be true of Mr. Bender—for it's dreadful how he bears one down. But I simply find him a terror.”

“Well,” said her friend, who seemed disposed not to fatigue the question, “I dare say a terror will help me.” He had other business to which he at once gave himself. “And now, if you please, for that girl.”

“I’ll send her to you,” she replied, “if you can't stay to luncheon.”

“I’ve three or four things to do,” he pleaded, “and I lunch with Kitty at one.”

She submitted in that case—but disappointedly. “With Berkeley Square then you’ve time. But I confess I don't quite grasp the so odd inspiration that you’ve set those men to carry out.”

He showed surprise and regret, but even greater decision. “Then it needn't trouble you, dear—it's enough that I myself go straight.”

“Are you so very convinced it's straight?”—she wouldn't be a bore to him, but she couldn't not be a blessing.

“What in the world else is it,” he asked, “when, having good reasons, one acts on ‘em?”

“You must have an immense array,” she sighed, “to fly so in the face of Opinion!”

“‘Opinion’?” he commented—“I fly in its face? Why, the vulgar thing, as I’m taking my quiet walk, flies in mine! I give it a whack with my umbrella and send it about its business.” To which he added with more reproach: “It's enough to have been dished by Grace—without your falling away!”

Sadly and sweetly she defended herself. “It's only my great affection— and all that these years have been for us: they it is that make me wish you weren't so proud.”

“I’ve a perfect sense, my dear, of what these years have been for us—a very charming matter. But ‘proud’ is it you find me of the daughter who does her best to ruin me, or of the one who does her best to humiliate?”

Lady Sandgate, not undiscernibly, took her choice of ignoring the point of this. “Your surrenders to Kitty are your own affair—but are you sure you can really bear to see Grace?”

There was just one lifetime edition of The Outcry. It was published in October 1911, by Methuen, London, and Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. James corrected the proofs of the novel for Scribner's immediately before leaving America in August 1911 and requested the corrected proofs be sent via his agent, Pinker, to Methuen who published on 5 October. Although Scribner's agreed simultaneous publication, their earlier intended date, ‘September 1911’, remains on the fly-leaf of the volume that was released on 8 October. Methuen 1911 is the copy text for this edition. While some punctuation differences between the two editions – the insertion of commas to indicate parentheses and a hyphen in ‘Thank-you!’ – might well be house style, the claim in the Library of America’s ‘Note on the Texts’ that, although there are minor differences in spelling and punctuation, ‘there are no variations in wording’ (N1903–11 1183) is not quite correct: an occasional word or phrase is different. It is unclear when these differences arose but alterations may well have been made by James after he arrived back in England. Certainly, he told Pinker on 10 August that, although Scribner's had been asked to send a paged copy direct to Methuen, he ‘should still like to see his proof’ and asked his agent to arrange this. Michael Anesko has suggested that slight differences of vocabulary between the English and American versions of James's novels demonstrate his ‘concern for “verisimilitude” and his awareness of two distinct markets for his work’. Such evidently authorial differences include: ‘fête’ in Scribner's appearing as ‘feast’ in Methuen and ‘the young man said’ as ‘said this observer’. Where darkness ‘seemed to clear’ in Scribner’s, it ‘seemed to drop’ in Methuen. In single instances, ‘it’ appears as ‘this’, ‘can't not’ as ‘can't but’, ‘grandmother’ as ‘ancestress’, ‘newspaper’ as ‘newspapers’, ‘our thing’ as ‘the thing’ and ‘a long moment’ as ‘a very long moment’. There is one change to word order when ‘as for positively’ in Scribner's reads ‘as positively for’ in Methuen. Variants between the Methuen and Scribner's texts are listed at the beginning of the Textual Variants section.

HUGH CRIMBLE had come back from his voyage of discovery, and it was visible as he stood there flushed and quite radiant that he had caught in his approach Lord Theign's last inquiry and Mr. Bender's reply to it. You would have imputed to him on the spot the lively possession of a new idea, the sustaining sense of a message important enough to justify his irruption. He looked from one to the other of the three men, scattered a little by the sight of him, but attached eyes of recognition then to Lord Theign’s, whom he remained an instant longer communicatively smiling at. After which, as you might have gathered, he all confidently plunged, taking up the talk where the others had left it. “I should say, Lord Theign if you’ll allow me, in regard to what you appear to have been discussing, that it depends a good deal on just that question—of what your Moretto, at any rate, may be presumed or proved to ‘be.’ Let me thank you,” he cheerfully went on, “for your kind leave to go over your treasures.”

The personage he so addressed was, as we know, nothing if not generally affable; yet if that was just then apparent it was through a shade of coolness for the slightly heated familiarity of so plain, or at least so free, a young man in eye-glasses, now for the first time definitely apprehended. “Oh, I’ve scarcely ‘treasures’—but I’ve some things of interest.”

Hugh, however, entering the opulent circle, as it were, clearly took account of no breath of a chill. “I think possible, my lord, that you’ve a great treasure—if you’ve really so high a rarity as a splendid Mantovano.”

“A ‘Mantovano’?” You wouldn't have been sure that his lordship didn't pronounce the word for the first time in his life.

“There have been supposed to be only seven real examples about the world; so that if by an extraordinary chance you find yourself the possessor of a magnificent eighth——”

But Lord John had already broken in. “Why, there you are, Mr. Bender!” “Oh, Mr. Bender, with whom I’ve made acquaintance,” Hugh returned, “was there as it began to work in me——”