At the giant brick building housing the Riverside Press, Longfellow requested that H. 0. Houghton provide the full printing records for the translation of Dante’s Inferno. Despite its untested subject matter, the translation, breaking years of virtual silence by the most beloved poet in their country’s history, was anxiously awaited by the literary world. With the bells and trumpets Fields had in store for it, its first printing of five thousand would sell out within a month. Anticipating this, Oscar Houghton had been preparing plates from Longfellow’s proofs as the poet brought them in, maintaining a detailed, unimpeachably accurate log of dates.
The three scholars commandeered the printer’s private counting room.
“I’m at a loss,” Lowell said, not one to remain focused on the finer points of his own publishing projects, much less someone else’s.
Fields showed him the schedule. “Longfellow submits his proofs with revisions the week after our translation sessions. So whatever date we find here recording Houghton’s receipt of the proofs, the Wednesday of the week before that would be the meeting of our Dante circle.”
The translation of Canto Three, the Neutrals, had taken place three or four days after the murder of Justice Healey. Reverend Talbot’s murder had occurred three days before the Wednesday set aside for the translation of Cantos Seventeen, Eighteen, and Nineteen—the latter containing the punishment of the Simoniacs.
“But then we found out about the murder!” Lowell said.
“Yes, and I set our schedule ahead to the Ulysses canto at the last minute so that we might reinvigorate ourselves, and worked on the intermediate cantos myself. Now, the latest, the massacre of Phineas Jennison, has by all accounts occurred on this Tuesday—one day before yesterday’s translation of the very same verses which give rise to that gross deed.”
Lowell turned white and then steamy red.
“I see, Longfellow!” Fields cried.
“Each one—each crime—happens directly before our Dante Club translates the canto on which the murder has been based,” Longfellow said.
“How could we have not seen that before?” cried Fields.
“Somebody has been playing with us!” Lowell boomed. Then quickly he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Someone has been watching us all along, Longfellow! It has to be someone who knows our Dante Club! Whoever it is has timed each murder with our translation!”
“Wait a minute. This could only be a dreadful coincidence.” Fields looked at the chart again. “Look here. We have translated nearly two dozen Inferno cantos, yet there have been but three murders.”
“Three deadly coincidences,” said Longfellow.
“There’s no coincidence,” Lowell insisted. “Our Lucifer has been racing us to see what will come first—Dante translated into ink or into blood! We have been losing the race by two or three lengths each time!”
Fields protested. “But who could possibly know our schedule in advance? With enough time to plan such elaborate crimes? We write up no timetable. Sometimes we miss a week. Sometimes Longfellow skips a canto or two that he does not feel we are prepared for and goes out of order.”
“My own Fanny would not know which cantos we sit down with, much less would she care to know,” Lowell admitted.
“Who would possibly possess such particulars, Longfellow?” asked Fields.
“If this were all true,” Lowell interrupted, “it means we are somehow implicated firsthand with the murders having begun at all!”
They were silent. Fields looked at Longfellow protectively. “Humbug!” he said. “Humbug, Lowell!” That was all he could think to argue.
“I do not profess to understand this strange pattern,” Longfellow said as he rose from Houghton’s desk. “But we cannot escape its implication. Whatever course of action Patrolman Rey decides, we can no longer consider our involvement merely as our prerogative. Thirty years have passed since the day I first sat at my desk in happier times to translate the Commedia. I have laid my hands upon it with such great reverence that it has sometimes amounted to unwillingness. But the time has come to make haste, to complete this work, or risk more loss.”
After Fields started in his carriage for Boston, Lowell and Longfellow walked through the falling snow to their homes. Word of Phineas Jennison’s murder had burned through their society. The elmy quiet of the Cambridge street was deafening. Wreaths of ascending snow-white chimney smoke vanished like ghosts. The windows not covered by shutters were blocked from the inside with clothing, shirts and blouses hanging loosely, for it was too cold to dry them outside. The latch strings were lowered on all the doors. Houses that had newly installed iron locks and metal chains, on the advice of local patrolmen, were kept tightly shut; some residents had even concocted a type of alarm for their doors, using a system of currents sold by door-to-door Jeremy Didlers from the West. No children were playing in the plush snowbanks. With these three murders, there was no hiding the certainty that there was one hand at work. Newspaper stories soon included the information that each victim had had his suit of clothing folded neatly at the scene of death and suddenly the whole city felt naked. The terror that started with the demise of Artemus Healey had now descended over Beacon Hill, along Charles Street, across Back Bay, and over the bridge to Cambridge. All at once, there seemed irrational but palpable reasons to believe in a scourge, in apocalypse.
Longfellow paused a block from Craigie House. “Could we be responsible?” His voice sounded frighteningly weak to his own ears.
“Don’t let that maggot get into your brain. I wasn’t thinking when I said that, Longfellow.”
“You must be honest with me, Lowell. Do you think—”
Longfellow’s words were splintered. A little girl’s shout rose up from the air and shook the very foundations of Brattle Street.
Longfellow’s knees buckled as his mind traced the sound back to his own house. He knew he would have to make a mad dash down Brattle Street through the virgin blanket of snow. But for a moment his thoughts trapped him in place, snared him with the trembling of possibility as one who wakes from a terrible nightmare searches for signs of bloody calamities in the peaceful room around him. Memories flooded the air ahead. Why could I not save you, my love?
“Should I go for my rifle?” Lowell cried frantically.
Longfellow sprinted ahead.
The two men reached the front step of Craigie House at about the same time, a remarkable feat for Longfellow, who, unlike his neighbor, was not practiced in physical exertion. They rushed side by side into the front hall. In the parlor, they found Charley Longfellow kneeling down trying to calm the excited little Annie Allegra, who was shouting and squealing joyfully at the gifts her brother had brought for them. Trap was growling in delight and wagging his pudgy tail in circles, showing all his teeth in an expression comparable to a human smile. Alice Mary came into the hall to greet them.
“Oh, Papa,” she cried. “Charley has just come home for Thanksgiving! And he has brought us French jackets, striped red-and-black!” Alice posed in her jacket for Longfellow and Lowell.
“What a dasher!” Charley applauded. He embraced his father. “Why, Papa, you’re whiter than a sheet, aren’t you? Are you feeling unwell? I meant only to give you a small surprise! Perhaps you’ve gotten too old for us.” He laughed.
The color had returned to Longfellow’s fair skin by the time he pulled Lowell aside. “My Charley has come home,” he said confidentially, as if Lowell could not see for himself.
Later that evening, after the children were asleep upstairs and Lowell had departed, Longfellow felt profoundly calm. He leaned at his standing desk and passed his hand over the smooth wood on which most of his translation was written. When he had first read Dante’s poem, he had to confess to himself, he did not have faith in the great poet. He feared how it might end, beginning so gloriously. But throughout, Dante bore himself so valiantly that Longfellow could but wonder more and more, not only at his great but at his continuous power. The style rose with the theme, and swelled like tidewaters, and at length its flood lifted the reader, freighted with doubts and fears. Most often it had seemed that Longfellow was serving the Florentine, but sometimes Dante taunted, his meaning eluding all words, all language. Longfellow felt at these times as a sculptor who, unable to represent in cold marble the living beauty of the human eye, had recourse to such devices as sinking the eye deeper and making the brow above more prominent than it is in the living model.