Authors: Matthew Pearl
I was quite flabbergasted by the coolness of Duponte’s advice on love, if that is what this was, and I did not pursue the subject any further.
At length the doorbell rang. The servants had left for the day, and I had gone downstairs. After several moments, Duponte clapped his book closed, rose from his place with a sigh, and descended to the street door. There on the other side stood a short, bespectacled man peering inside expectantly.
“What is it you wish for me, sir?” the man asked politely.
“Is it not you who has come to the door?” replied Duponte. “I should think I would have asked you that very question, had I any interest in the answer.”
“Why—?” said the visitor, flustered. “Well, I’m Reynolds. Henry Reynolds, may I come inside?”
I watched this from the kitchen corridor. Mr. Reynolds found a place for his hat. He showed Duponte the card he had received from me earlier that day.
I had planned that Duponte might have a greater degree of interest if he were to unexpectedly greet Reynolds at the door, and thus be the proprietor of the discovery and, finding the opportunity irresistible, pursue all information that could be extracted from the visitor.
This was not to be. Duponte, his hand cupping his book of Poe tales, bid a polite good evening to the guest and walked past me to the stairs. I rushed after him.
“But where are you going?”
“Monsieur. You have a caller, a Monsieur Reynolds, I believe,” Duponte answered me. “I suppose you gentlemen wish to talk together.”
“But—!” I fell quiet.
“Someone did call for me?” asked Reynolds loudly and impatiently from the bottom of the stairs. “I have other appointments too. One of you fellows is Clark?”
I caught up to Duponte with a sheepish shrug. “I know I should have told you about leaving word for Reynolds to call. I saw the Baron Dupin speaking with this fellow, and found out that he was an election judge at the voting place where Poe was found. But this man wouldn’t give the Baron any information. Just hold for a moment! Come to the drawing room. I thought you might refuse at first, and this is why I have done this secretly. I believe it is a matter of utter importance that we interview him.”
Duponte remained impassive. “What do you wish me to do?”
“Sit in the room. You needn’t say a single word.”
Of course, I hoped that Duponte, incited by whatever knowledge was held by the carpenter, would not only say a single word; I hoped he would intervene with extensive interrogatories once I began the dialogue. The analyst assented to come with me to the drawing room.
“Well, how are we today?” The carpenter forced a friendly smile as he looked around the gigantic room and up at the impressive dome that rose to the height of the third floor. “Planning on bettering the structure of your home, Mr. Clark? Its beauty is a bit in decay, if I may take the liberty to say. I’ve appreciated not a few mansions this year with betterments.”
“What?” I demanded, perturbed, forgetting for a moment his profession.
Duponte sat in the corner armchair by the hearth. He propped his head in his hand, and his fingers spread in a web over the side of his face. He sucked his tongue, as was his habit.
Instead of feeling compelled by the situation to speak, Duponte directed his glare beyond Reynolds and me to some indefinite point of the room’s horizon, and yet betrayed a look of distant enjoyment at how the conversation progressed.
“I am in no need of carpentry,” I said.
“Not carpentry? Why have I been requested to make this visit, gentlemen?” Reynolds frowned and then fed himself some chewing tobacco, as though to say that if there was no carpentry, there might as well be tobacco.
“Well, Mr. Reynolds, if I may…” My mouth felt dry, and my words dribbled out uncertainly.
“If I made this visit for you gentlemen’s amusement—” he said indignantly.
“We require some information,” I said. This seemed like a good start to me. Duponte’s mouth twitched, and I waited for him to speak, but it was a yawn. He crossed his legs at a different place.
Reynolds was speaking over me. “—well, because I shouldn’t like to think I have wasted my time. I am a key figure to the future dignity of Baltimore. I have helped erect the athenaeum, have lent my hand to raising the Maryland Institute, and directed the first iron building in the city for the Baltimore
Sun.
”
I tried to pull him to the primary subject. “You served as a ward judge for the Fourth Ward polling station at Ryan’s hotel in 1849, is that true?”
Duponte was now most fixedly looking at absolutely nothing. Sometimes a cat coils into such a careless, comfortable position as to fall soundly asleep but forgets to close her eyes. This was Duponte’s current appearance.
“As I say,” I babbled on, “the information I seek, about that night at the polls, I mean, at the Fourth Ward, there was a man named Poe—”
“Now, see here,” Reynolds interrupted. “You’re something to do with that fellow, Baron Whatnot, who’s been bothering me, leaving me letters and notes, aren’t you?”
“Please, Mr. Reynolds—”
“Talking of Poe, Poe, Poe! What is all this about Poe anyway?”
“It is true,” said Duponte philosophically to me, “as Mr. Reynolds implies, that the decease of a person of some interest to the public will be looked at for the person rather than the death, and thus will obtain larger holes of error and misperception. Very good, Reynolds.”
This helped nothing except to confound our guest’s line of thought. Reynolds wagged his finger at me, and then at Duponte, as though the analyst was an equal culprit in this attempted interview. “Just see here.” Black tobacco juice was sent flying around the room by the venom of his speech. “This bangs all things! I do not care that the other fellow’s a baron, or that you are lords and kings. I don’t have nothing to say to ’im, and I have much to do! I don’t have a word to say to you two! Is that it? Well, my good princes, please
never
call for me again or I shall send for the police.”
When I came down for breakfast, there was a note from Duponte that I should find him in the library at noon. He had not said a word to me before parting for the night. To my surprise, he was more interested in the fact that I had seen the Baron Dupin than that I had surreptitiously sent for Reynolds.
“So,” he said when I met him in the library, “you found yourself following the Baron Dupin.”
I recounted all that had passed between the Baron and Reynolds and what I had seen at the cemetery and hospital. I pleaded my side for leaving my card for Reynolds. “Understand, monsieur. Poe called out for ‘Reynolds’ again and again when he was dying. That Henry Reynolds was one of the election judges that day in charge of overseeing the Fourth Ward polls, which were held in Ryan’s—where Poe was found! Do you not think this was too remarkable a connection?” I answered for him: “It is too remarkable to ignore!”
“It is, at most, incidental, and to a lesser and more forceful degree coincidental.”
Incidental! Coincidental! Poe calling for Reynolds at his hour of judgment, and here one Henry Reynolds had been in the very same place as Poe days before. But you see, Duponte was a persuasive personality, even when he said little. If he had said Baltimore’s cathedrals were incidental to its Catholics, one would be inclined to find reason to agree.
He agreed to my suggestion of a walk. I hoped it would render him more willing to consider my latest suppositions. I had fallen into a rather concerned state about our inquiry, and not only because of Duponte’s refusal to consider Mr. Reynolds as the Baron had. It seemed to me there was much else we could be missing, insulated as we were—for instance, the probability that Poe had traveled from Baltimore to Philadelphia and was in that city before his death. I made reference to this point as we walked.
“He was not.”
“Do you mean he was not in Philadelphia that week he was discovered?” I asked, surprised at his certainty as to the point. “The newspapers have been throwing their hands up wondering about it.”
“It is easily in front of their eyes, too accessible to such frantic minds as the public press, who never lose confidence that they are able to find some true detail, as long as it is at all times far from them. They are surprised at everything, when they should be surprised at nothing. If a fact is said once, we may pay attention, but if a fact is fixed in four places, ignore it, for along the way its replication has stopped all thought.”
“But how could we know positively? After his attempt to visit Dr. Brooks, we hardly possess a solitary fact about Poe’s days in Baltimore until he was nearly five days later seen at Ryan’s. How do we know Poe did not, sometime between these times, board the train to Philadelphia, and, further, if he did, can we dismiss the possibility that there, in that other city, lie all the chief keys to the right understanding of the events that followed?”
“Let us settle your worries on this point. You do recall the reasons Monsieur Poe had planned to visit Philadelphia, I suppose,” said Duponte.
I did, and repeated them to Duponte. Poe had been asked to edit the poems of Mrs. Marguerite St. Leon Loud for publication, for which her wealthy husband, Mr. Loud, would pay a sum of one hundred dollars. It had been reported by the newspapers that Poe had agreed to this lucrative arrangement in his last weeks when Mr. Loud, a piano manufacturer, visited Richmond. Poe had even instructed Muddy Clemm to write him there, in Philadelphia, under the strange pseudonym of E. S. T. Grey, Esquire, adding, “I hope that our troubles are nearly over.”
“One hundred dollars would be an enormous difference to Poe, for he was quite pushed for money for himself
and
his magazine,” I said. “One hundred dollars, to edit a small book of poems—for Poe, who had been the editor of some five periodicals, for which he was hardly rewarded enough to supply bread to his family, this was a task that could be done while sleeping. But how, with no evidence to the contrary, should we know when Poe made his visit to Philadelphia?”
“Through Mrs. Loud, of course.”
I frowned. “I’m afraid that has not been helpful. I penned a few letters to this woman, but have received no reply.”
“You misunderstand my meaning. I would not think to write to Mrs. Loud. By the nature of her circumstance, aspiring poetess and wife of an affluent husband, she would likely in this season be in the country or on the shore, so correspondence would be rendered inefficient. We need not bother the poor woman herself in order to listen to her.”
Duponte removed a thin, handsomely printed volume from inside his coat.
Wayside Flowers: A Collection of Poems, by Mrs. M. St. Leon Loud,
published by Ticknor, Reed, and Fields.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Here is the very book of poems, we may presume, that Poe had agreed to edit, and that has been recently published with little attention—thankfully.”
I opened up to the page listing its contents. I hesitate to print a sample. “I Wooed Thee,” “To a Friend on the Birth of a Son,” “The Dying Buffalo,” “Invitation to a Prayer Meeting,” “It Is I: Be Not Afraid,” “On Parting with a Friend,” “On Seeing a Monument,” “The First Day of Summer,” and, of course, “The Last Day of Summer.” The contents list alone went on for pages. Duponte explained that he had ordered this book from one of the local booksellers.
“We know Monsieur Poe never arrived at Philadelphia to edit Madame Loud’s poems,” said Duponte.
“How, monsieur?”
“Because it is quite clear
nobody
has edited these poems, judging from the terrific numbers of them here included. If
somebody
had edited them, heaven forgive them, it was not a poet of experience and strong principles regarding the brevity and unity of verse, as we know Monsieur Poe to have been.”
This did seem a fact. I saw now the practical gains that Duponte had made by spending hours in the parlor with Poe’s poetry.
I had a doubt about his conclusions, however. “What if, Monsieur Duponte, Poe did go to Philadelphia and begin to edit the poems, and simply had a disagreement with the poetess, or balked at the quality of her work, and returned to Baltimore?”
“An intelligent question, if also an unobservant one. It would be possible that Poe arrived at the Louds’ estate in order to fulfill his obligation, and once there could not agree on some final term of compensation or other fine point of the arrangement. However, we need only consider this possibility briefly before discarding it.”
“I do not see why, monsieur.”
“Search again through the book’s contents. I am confident this time you will know where to stop.”
By this point we had taken a table at a restaurant. Duponte leaned over and looked at the title where my finger was pointing. “Very good, monsieur. Now, read the verses from those pages, if you would.”
The poem was entitled “The Stranger’s Doom.” It began:
They gathered round his dying bed,
—
His failing eye was glazed and dim;
But ’mong the many gazers, there
Were none who wept or cared for him.
Oh! ’tis a sad, a fearful thing,
To die with none but strangers near;
To see within the darkened room
No face, no form, to memory dear!
“It sounds rather like the scene, as we know it, at the college hospital when Poe was dying!”
“As our romancer imagines it, yes. Continue, please. I rather like your recitation. Spirited.”
“Thank you, monsieur.” The next verses spoke of the man’s lonely demise with “no clasping hand, no farewell kiss.” It continued with the scene of death:
Yet thus he died
—
afar from all
Who might have mourned his early doom!
Strange hands his drooping eyelids closed,
And bore him to his nameless tomb.
They laid him where tall forest trees
Cast their dark shadows o’er his bed,
And hurriedly, in silence, heaped
The wild-grass turf above his head.
None prayed, none wept, when all was o’er,
Nor lingered near the sacred spot;
But turned them to the world again,
And soon his very name forgot.