Authors: Dan Simmons
“It was a comedy then?” said James.
“In part,” said Clemens. “Certainly John T. Raymond made it so. I would have appreciated it if he had played his famous turnip-eating scene more in the spirit of the pure pathos of poverty which I’d intended rather than the broad comedy Raymond made of it. But I cannot complain.
Colonel Sellers
netted ten thousand dollars in its first three months and I imagine that it will make me seventy-five or a hundred thousand dollars before it, or I, or both of us together, die of old age.”
There was another silence then amongst the four men as the vulgarity of someone stating how much money he’d made from a job was left to drift away slowly with the cigar, cigarette, and pipe smoke. Holmes looked at Samuel Clemens with his most analytical gaze. Much of Holmes’s job depended upon reading people as much as reading clues. Coming to a decision on the quality of a person or the veracity of his statements or the solidity of his personality led to more revelations in detective work than did the inspection of footprints or types of cigarette ash left behind. Clemens, Holmes saw, used vulgarity as a device—not only to shock his audience (and everyone around him was, always, his audience), but to move beyond that shock at obvious vulgarity to some (hoped-for) higher level of humor or farce.
Or at least to Clemens it would seem a higher level.
As if reading Holmes’s thoughts, Clemens removed the cigar from his mouth and leaned forward into the circle of men facing each other. “What about you, Mr. James? What do you think of seeking one’s fortune by writing for mere actors?”
James smiled. “I have friends who would say that such money is tainted.”
“By Jove, it
is
tainted!” cried Clemens in a loud voice while slapping his knee. All of the boy’s embarrassment and guilt was gone now, replaced by a boy’s enthusiasm. “The kind of wealth being made these days by writing for the stage by, say, that Irishman Oscar Wilde is
twice
tainted!”
“Twice tainted?” echoed Henry James.
“Twice tainted,” repeated Clemens. “Tain’t yours, and certainly tain’t mine.”
* * *
Hartford was a dreary one-business town—insurance companies on every other dreary corner and no civic architecture of any significance—but by the time the brougham carrying the four men to Nook Farm turned onto Farmington Avenue, Holmes and James could see the beauty of Mark Twain’s old neighborhood.
The houses were large but distinct from one another, obviously designed by architects with their particular clients’ dreams and desires in mind. Each lot covered several acres and, while a house might put an iron fence around some of the front yard to separate it from the paved and gently curving avenue, the larger properties themselves tended to blend together in forest and glade with no proprietary fencing.
“See that gazebo?” said Clemens, pointing into the trees between two fine homes. “Harriet Beecher Stowe and I shared the expense of building that since it sits right on the invisible line between our properties. She and I would meet there often on a warm summer day or brisk autumn morning to swap yarns and discuss the inevitable decline of Western Civilization.”
“Is she still living?” asked Holmes.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
had run on the stage in London literally for decades since his boyhood.
“Oh, yes,” said Clemens. “Almost eighty-two now, I believe, and still as gracious and cussed as ever. The little woman, as President Lincoln said upon first meeting her, whose book started the great war.”
Their brougham paused to let two builders’ wagons slowly pass and since they were still gazing at the gazebo amidst the trees, Clemens went on, “Some nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d steal out to sit on the railing in the gazebo and smoke and admire the stars or moonlight. Often I’d find Mrs. Stowe already there. We’d talk ’til almost dawn, two happy insomniacs.”
“One must wonder,” said Henry James, “what two writers of such major accomplishment and diverse talents would discuss in the starlight or moonlight. The nature of evil? The past and future of the black race in America? Thoughts on literature or dramaturgy?”
“Mostly,” said Clemens, taking the cigar from his mouth, “we talked about our aches and pains. Especially before
Mr
. Stowe died in ’eighty-six. She’d tell me hers; I’d tell ’er mine.”
Holmes saw Howells smile at this. Obviously some Sam Clemens story was imminent while they waited for the dray wagons to rumble past.
“I remember one night,” said Clemens between blue puffs, “when she listed her aches and pains, sure that they must signify imminent mortality . . . the darling lady was almost as hypochondriacal as I was . . . when I was amazed to hear that her problems exactly matched a recent list of my own . . . and a list of pains and symptoms of which I had just been cured!”
Holmes folded his arms. The dray wagons were past and now their brougham turned onto a paved lane that curved up a gentle hill.
“I told her . . .” continued Clemens. “I told her . . . ‘Harriet,’ I said . . . ‘my doctor just cured me of precisely those ailments. Precisely!’ ‘What medicine did he prescribe?’ asked little Mrs. Stowe. ‘Why, no medicines at all!’ says I. ‘My doctor just told me to take a two-month sabbatical from my habits of heavy drinking, constant smoking, and exploding into wild bouts of profanity in irregular but frequent intervals.’ I told her, ‘Harriet, you give up cussin’, drinkin’, and smokin’ for a couple of months and you’ll be right as rain.’ ”
Clemens peered at them through the smoke, making sure that they were still absorbed in his tale.
“ ‘Mr. Clemens!’ cried she. ‘I have never partaken of any of those terrible behaviors.’ ‘Never?’ says I, and I can tell you, gentlemen, I was shocked. ‘Never,’ says Harriet Beecher Stowe, gathering her shawl around her because the night was nippy. ‘Well then, my dear lady,’ I broke it to her with infinite sadness, ‘there is no hope for you. You are a balloon going down and you have no ballast to cast overboard.
You have neglected your vices
.’ ”
The brougham stopped at the crest of a rise and there was Samuel Clemens’s former home. Although he still owned it, he explained, for the last two years he and Livy had leased it to a certain John Day and his wife Alice, the daughter of Isabella Hooker, for a much-needed two hundred dollars a month. Clemens said that he’d cabled ahead and John and Alice would be out this afternoon; the house was theirs for the time-being.
Stepping out of the carriage, Holmes looked at the house. The sunlight created a rich mixture of shade and colors on three stories of salmon-colored bricks. The steeply pitched gables along with five balconies gave the large home a bit of a castle look. Its main window was on a two-story tower and overlooked the porte cochère over the driveway.
Clemens saw where the detective was gazing. “Some have written or said that I wanted that bit to resemble a riverboat’s pilot house,” he said, stubbing his last cigar out on the curb. “But I didn’t. That wasn’t the plan at all. It’s just, as they say, a happy coincidence.”
Clemens fetched a key from a flower pot on the front porch, unlocked the door, and swept it open for them to enter.
A few yards down the hallway they could peer into the main rooms and Holmes knew that it was a home dedicated to good taste and quality items. Sherlock Holmes’s bachelor bedroom and sitting room at 221 B Baker Street might be a toss-about mess—
was
a toss-about mess when Mrs. Hudson wasn’t interfering—with everything thrown and dropped rather than folded and placed, but Holmes knew attractive domestic order when he saw it. He was seeing it now.
“Nineteen rooms, seven bathrooms,” Clemens was saying as if he were a real estate man intent upon selling the house to them. “All the bathrooms with flush toilets, which was a curiosity in its day. Speaking tubes so that anyone can talk to anyone from any floor. In this parlor—enter, gentlemen—you see Hartford’s first telephone in its particular little niche there. Since I was one of the first to install the infernal device, there were precious few other telephonic interlocutors I might talk to.
“Here’s the drawing room . . . the stencil designs on the walls were from Lockwood de Forest.”
“A partner in the firm begun by Mr. Tiffany,” added Howells.
“This little solar conservatory area was where my girls would put on their plays,” said Clemens, gesturing to an area filled with plants. “You see how the drapes can be drawn across here like a theater curtain.” Clemens paused and then seemed to look at the room and peer into the adjoining rooms for the first time.
“This is . . . strange,” he said in a choked voice. “For the first year or so we were abroad, Livy and I had all the furniture, carpets, vases, beds, knick-knacks in storage, but when John and Alice leased the place, rather than have the young couple furnish such a large house, we got everything out of storage for them . . . for a small additional fee. But . . .”
Clemens walked into the library and returned to the drawing room. Above the broad, carved mantel in front of them was a window looking out onto the yard from above the fireplace. Clemens patted it. “This was my idea. Few things are cozier than sitting inside on a winter day with one’s family, watching the snow fall just above the crackling fire.” He touched little carvings and vases set along the mantel and atop the bookcases on either side.
“John and Alice have placed everything
just
as we had it,” he said in that strange voice. “Every vase and carpet that Livy and I had purchased on our early travels. Every beloved-by-the-children carving and knick-knack.” He touched one of the carved pieces on the mantel. “You see, every Saturday, Susy and Jean and Clara would demand stories about various ornaments and paintings that stood on these top shelves and on this mantelpiece. At one end of the procession, you see, was a framed oil painting of a cat’s head; at the other end was a head of a beautiful young girl, life size, called
Emmeline
, an impressionist watercolor. Between the one picture and the other there were twelve or fifteen of the bric-a-brac things . . . oh, and also an oil painting by Elihu Vedder, the
Young Medusa
. So my little girls required me to construct a romance—always impromptu—not a moment’s preparation permitted—and into that romance I had to get all that bric-a-brac and the three pictures. I had to start always with the cat and finish with
Emmeline
. I was never allowed the refreshment of a change, end for end. It was not permissible to introduce a bric-a-brac ornament into the story out of its place in the procession. These bric-a-bracs were never allowed a peaceful day, a reposeful day, a restful Sabbath. In their lives there was no Sabbath. In their lives there was no peace. They knew no existence but a monotonous career of violence and bloodshed. In the course of time the bric-a-brac and the pictures showed wear. It was because they had had so many and such violent adventures in their romantic careers.”
“Good practice for a writer,” chuckled Howells.
“The stories often included a circus,” said Clemens. He hadn’t seemed to have heard Howells. He didn’t seem to remember that the other men were in the room with him.
“The girls truly loved stories about a circus and so I usually wove a circus into . . .”
Clemens seemed stunned. He took a few staggering steps and collapsed more than sat in a flowery chair.
“Sam?” said Howells.
“I’m all right,” said Clemens, shielding his eyes with his hand as if hiding tears. “It’s just that . . . it is only, you see, that everything is in its proper place.”
The others stood without knowing what to say.
“I promised Livy that even though I had to see old Hartford friends about investing in some of my endeavors, I would not get close enough to the Farmington Avenue house even to see its high chimney. But as soon as I entered the front door here I was seized with a furious desire to have my entire family in this house again . . . and right away . . . and never go outside the grounds of here and Nook Farm anymore forever. Certainly never again to Europe.”
Clemens lowered his hand and looked around him as if in a dream.
“Everything in its place. Everything that Livy and I so treasured and shopped for and debated purchasing and celebrated in what now feels like our youth. When the girls were babies or toddlers or wee ones.”
He turned and looked directly into the eyes of Howells, then James, and finally Holmes.
“How ugly, tasteless, repulsive are all the domestic interiors I have ever seen in Europe, gentlemen. Compare that baroque awfulness with the perfect taste of this ground floor, with its delicious dream of harmonious color and its all-pervading spirit of peace and serenity and deep, deep contentment. This is simply nothing more than the loveliest home that ever was.”
“It
is
beautiful, Sam,” said Howells.
It was as if Clemens hadn’t heard him speak. “Somehow, through some dark, malevolent enchantment, I had wholly forgotten our home’s olden aspect,” he said softly, speaking to himself. “This . . .
this
. . .” Clemens simultaneously slapped his palms on the arms of his chair and brought his polished shoes down hard on the floor, although he meant to signify neither in its isolation. “This place, to me, gentlemen, is bewitchingly bright and splendid and homelike and natural and it seems at this moment as if I have just burst awake out of a long and hellish dream. It is, gentlemen, as if I have never been away and that I will turn my head . . .”
He did so toward the stairway.
“ . . . and see my dearest Livy drifting down out of those dainty upper regions with the little children tagging after her.” He looked at them each in turn again. “But I feel in my heart that it is not to be. That it is
never
to be.”
No one spoke after this.
Clemens passed his hands over his eyes again and stood abruptly. “Enough of this nonsense,” he said, voice harsh. “Let us get up to the billiards room on the third floor where I kept my typewriter . . . that instrument of the Devil around which Mr. Holmes’s murder investigation pivots so ingeniously.”