“You know I should be the one to speak with Professor Ticknor about helping our Dante cause,” Holmes said to Fields. He had stopped by Fields’s office at the Corner.
“What’s that?” Fields was reading three things at once: a manuscript, a contract, and a letter. “Where are those royalty agreements?”
J. R. Osgood handed him another pile of papers.
“Your time is much occupied, Fields, and you have the next number of the Atlantic to think about—you need to rest your tired brain, in any case,” argued Holmes. “Professor Ticknor was my teacher, after all. I may well have the most influence over the old fellow, for Longfellow’s sake.”
Holmes still remembered a time when Boston was known as Ticknorville by the literary set: If you were not invited to Ticknor’s library salon, you were nobody. That chamber had once been known as Ticknor’s Throne Room; now, more often, Ticknor’s Iceberg. The former professor had fallen into disrepute with much of their society as a refined idler and an anti-abolitionist, but his position as one of the city’s first literary masters would always remain. His influence could be revived to their benefit.
“My life is worn by more creatures than I can endure, my dear Holmes,” Fields said, sighing. “The sight of a manuscript is like a swordfish nowadays—it cuts me in two.” He looked Holmes over for a long moment, then agreed to send him in his place to Park Street. “But remember me kindly to him, won’t you, Wendell.”
Holmes knew that Fields was relieved to pass on the task of speaking with George Ticknor. Professor Ticknor—that title was still insisted upon, though he had taught nothing since his retirement thirty years earlier– had never thought much of his younger cousin, William D. Ticknor, and his low opinion extended to William’s partner, J. T. Fields, as he made clear to Holmes after the doctor was led up the winding staircase of nearby 9 Park Street.
“The noisy shuffle of profits, viewing books as sales and losses,” Professor Ticknor said with dried lips puckered in revulsion. “My cousin William suffered that malady, Dr. Holmes, and infected my nephews too, I’m afraid. Those who sweat over labors must not control the literary arts. Don’t you believe so, Holmes?”
“But Mr. Fields has something of a brilliant eye, though, doesn’t he? He knew your History would flourish, Professor. He does think Longfellow’s Dante will find an audience.” In fact, Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature found few readers outside of the contributors to the magazines, but the professor thought that an exacting measure of its success.
Ticknor ignored Holmes’s loyalty and delicately pulled his hands out of a bulky machine. He had had the writing machine—a sort of miniature printing press, as he described it—built when his hands began to be too shaky to write. As a result, he had not seen his own handwriting in several years. He had been at work on a letter when Holmes arrived.
Ticknor, sitting in his purple velvet skullcap and slippers, let his critical eye take in, for the second time, the cut of Holmes’s clothes and the quality of his necktie and handkerchief.
“I’m afraid, Doctor, that while Mr. Fields knows what people read, he shall never quite understand why. He grows carried away by the enthusiasm of close friends. A dangerous trait.”
“You always said how important it was to spread knowledge of foreign cultures to the educated class,” Holmes reminded him. With the curtains drawn, the old professor was lit faintly by the library’s wood fire, which in its subdued light was merciful to his crow’s-feet. Holmes dabbed his forehead. Ticknor’s Iceberg was in fact rather boiling from the always stoked hearth.
“We must work to understand our foreigners, Dr. Holmes. If we do not conform newcomers to our national character and bring them in willing subjection to our institutions, the multitudes of outside people will one day conform us.”
Holmes persisted, “But between us, Professor, what do you think the chances for Mr. Longfellow’s translation to be embraced by the public?” Holmes had such a look of resolute concentration that Ticknor paused to genuinely deliberate. His old age had bought, as a defense to sadness, a tendency to offer the same dozen or so automatic replies to all questions concerning his health or the state of the world.
“There can be, I think, no doubt that Mr. Longfellow shall do something astonishing. Is that not why I selected him to succeed me at Harvard? But remember, I too once envisioned introducing Dante here, until the Corporation made my post a farce…” A mist clouded Ticknor’s jet-black eyes. “I had not thought it possible that I would live to see an American translate Dante, and I cannot comprehend how he will accomplish the task. Whether or not the ungloved masses will accept it is a different question, one that must be settled by the popular voice, as separate from that of scholarly lovers of Dante. On that bench of judges, I can never be competent to sit,” Ticknor said with unrestrained pride that brightened him. “But I grow to believe that when we hold out hope that Dante shall be read widely, we fall prey to pedantic folly. Do not misunderstand, Dr. Holmes. I have owed Dante many years of my life, as Longfellow does. Do not ask what brings Dante to man but what brings man to Dante—to personally enter his sphere, though it is forever severe and unforgiving.”
IV
Beneath the streets that Sunday, among the dead, Reverend Elisha Talbot, minister of the Second Unitarian Church of Cambridge, held a lantern high as he weaved through the passageway, sidestepping the staggered coffins and heaps of broken bones. He wondered whether he required the guidance of his kerosene lantern at all by now, for he had grown quite accustomed to the elaborate darkness of the winding underground passage, his nasal contractions invincible to its unpleasant stew of decomposition. One day, he dared himself, he would conquer the way without a lamp, with only his trust in God before him.
For a moment, he thought he heard a rustle. He spun around, but the tombs and slate columns did not stir.
“Anyone alive tonight?” His famously melancholy voice struck the black air. It was perhaps an inappropriate comment coming from a minister, but the truth was he was suddenly scared. Talbot, like all men who lived most of their life alone, suffered many closeted fears. Death had always frightened him beyond the normal measure; this was his great shame. This might have provided one reason he walked the underground tombs of his church, to overcome his irreligious fear of corporeal mortality. Perhaps it also helped to explain, if one were to write his biography, how anxiously Talbot upheld the rationalistic precepts of Unitarianism over the Calvinist demons of the older generations. Talbot whistled nervously into his lantern and soon approached the stairwell at the far end of the vault, which promised a return to the warm gaslights and a shorter route to his home than the streets.
“Who’s there?” he asked, swinging his lantern around, this time certain he had heard movement. But again nothing. The movement was too heavy for rodents, too quiet for street urchins. What the Moses? he thought.
Reverend Talbot steadied the humming lantern at eye level. He had heard that bands of vandals, displaced by development and war, had lately taken to congregating in abandoned burial vaults. Talbot decided he would send for a policeman to look into the matter the next morning. Although what good had it done him a day earlier, when he had reported the robbery of a thousand dollars from his home safe? He was sure the Cambridge police had done nothing about it. He was only glad that the thieves of Cambridge were equally incompetent, neglecting to take the safe’s valuable remaining contents.