“Do you know the things put in my mind as a boy, Melia?” Holmes said as he flung into the fire a set of proof sheets he had saved from Longfellow’s Dante Club meetings.
He had kept a box of all documents related to the club: Longfellow’s proofs, his own annotations, Longfellow’s reminders for him to be there on Wednesday evenings. Holmes had thought that one day he might write a memoir of their meetings. He had mentioned this in passing once to Fields, who immediately began planning who might write a puff for Holmes’s work. Once a publisher, always a publisher. Holmes now threw another batch into the fire. “Our country-bred kitchen servants would tell me that our shed was full of demons and black devils. Another bucolic lad informed me that if I wrote my name in my own blood, the prowling agent of Satan, if not the Evil One himself, would pocket it, and from that day forth I’d become his servant.” Holmes chuckled humorlessly. “However much you educate a man out of his superstitions, he will always think as the Frenchwoman did about ghosts: Je n’y croispas, maisje les crains–I don’t believe in them, but I fear them, nevertheless.”
“You have said that men are tattooed with their special beliefs, like a South Sea Islander.”
“Did I say that, Melia?” Holmes asked, then repeated it to himself. “Graphic kind of phrase. I must have said it. Not at all the kind of phrase a woman would invent.”
“Wendell.” Amelia stamped a foot on the rug in front of her husband, who was roughly her height when stripped of his hat and boots. “If you would only explain what’s upset you, I could help you. Let me hear, dear Wendell.”
Holmes fidgeted. He did not respond.
“Have you written any new verses then? I’m waiting for more of yours to read at night, you know.”
“With all the books on our library shelves,” Holmes replied, “with Milton and Donne and Keats in all their fullness, why wait for me to do anything, my dear ‘Melia?”
She leaned forward and smiled. “I like my poets better alive than dead, Wendell.” She took his hand in hers. “Now will you tell me your troubles? Please.”
“Pardon the interruption, ma’am.” Holmes’s redheaded maid stepped to the door. She announced Dr. Holmes’s visitor. Holmes nodded hesitantly. The maid departed and brought up the new arrival.
“He’s been in his old den all day. Well, he’s in your hands now, sir!” Amelia Holmes threw up her own hands and closed the study door behind her.
“Professor Lowell.”
“Dr. Holmes.” James Russell Lowell removed his hat. “I cannot stop for very long. I just wanted to thank you for all the help you’ve given us. My apologies. Holmes, for growing warm with you. And for not helping you up when you fell on the floor. And for saying what I did…”
“No need, no need.” The doctor tossed another batch of proofs into the fire.
Lowell watched the Dante papers fight and dance against the flames, spitting out sparks as they incinerated verses.
Holmes waited halfheartedly for Lowell to shout at the spectacle, but he did not. “If I know anything, Wendell,” Lowell said, and bowed his head at the pyre, “I know it was the Comedy that lured me into whatever little learning I possess. Dante was the first poet who ever thought to make a poem wholly out of the fabric of himself—to think that not only might the story of some heroic person be epical but also that of any man, and that the way to Heaven was not outside the world but through it. Wendell, there is something I’ve always meant to say since we’ve been helping Longfellow.”
Holmes arched his unruly eyebrows.
“When I came to know you, so many years ago, perhaps my very first thought was how much you reminded me of Dante.”
“I?” Holmes asked, mocking humility. “I and Dante?” But he saw that Lowell was very serious.
“Yes, Wendell. Dante was schooled in every field of science of his day, a master of astronomy, philosophy, law, theology, and poetry. Some, you know, have even said he went through medical school and that is how he could think so much of how the human body suffers. Like you, he did everything well. Too well, as far as other people were concerned.”
“I’ve always thought I had drawn a prize, a five-dollar one at least, in the intellectual sweepstakes of life.” Holmes turned his back on the hearthstone and placed some translation proofs on his bookcase, feeling the weight of Lowell’s errand. “I may be lazy, Jamey, or indifferent or timid, but I am by no means one of those men… it is just that I believe at present we cannot prevent anything.”
“The lively pop of the cork has so much power over the imagination at first.” Lowell said, and laughed with subdued pensiveness. “I suppose for a few blessed hours in all this I forgot that I was a professor and felt as if I were something real. I confess that ‘do right though the heavens fall’ is an admirable precept until the heavens take you at your word. I know what it is to doubt, my dearest friend. But for you to give up on Dante is for all of us to do so.”
“If you could only know how Phineas Jennison remains planted in my mind’s eye… shredded and broken and… The consequences of failing this…”
“It could be the greatest calamity but one, Wendell. And that is being afraid of it,” Lowell said, and headed solemnly for the study door. “Well, I chiefly wanted to send my apologies, and Fields, of course, insisted I should. It is my happiest thought that with all the drawbacks of my temperament, I have yet to lose a real friend.” Lowell paused as he reached for the door and turned back. “And I like your lyrics. You know that, my dear Holmes.”
“Yes? Well, I thank you, but perhaps there is something too hopping about them. I suppose my nature is to snatch at all the fruits of knowledge and take a good bite out of the sunny side—and after that, let in the pigs. I am a pendulum with a very short range of oscillation.” Holmes’s gaze met his friend’s large and open eyes. “How have you been these days, Lowell?”
Lowell gave a half shrug in response.
Holmes did not let his question pass. “I won’t say to you, ‘Be of good courage,’ because men of ideas are not put down by accidents of a day or a year.”
“We all revolve around God with larger or lesser orbits, I suppose, Wendell, sometimes one half of us in the light, sometimes the other. Some people seem always in the shadow. You are one of the few people I can unbutton my heart to… Well.” The poet cleared his throat gruffly and lowered his voice. “I am due at an important conference at Castle Craigie.”
“Oh? And the arrest of Willard Burndy?” Holmes asked cautiously, with feigned disinterest, just before Lowell could exit.
“Patrolman Rey has rushed to look into it as we speak. Do you think it a farce?”
“Pure moonshine, no question!” declared Holmes. “Yet the papers say the prosecuting attorney shall seek to hang him.”
Lowell crowded his unruly waves of hair into his silk hat. “Then we have one more sinner to save.”
Holmes sat with his Dante box long after Lowell’s footsteps faded from the stairs. He continued to toss proof sheets into the fire, determined to finish the painful task, yet he could not stop reading Dante’s words as he went. At first he read with the indifference of manner one employs when reading proofs, noting details but not arrested by the emotions. Then he read them quickly and greedily, absorbing passages even as they blackened into nonexistence. His sense of discovery recalled the times he first heard Professor Ticknor asserting with such earnest prescience the impact Dante’s journey would one day have on America.
Dante and Virgil are approached by the Malebranche demons… Dante remembers, “And thus beheld I once the fearful soldiers who issued under safeguard from Caprona, seeing themselves among so many foes.”
Dante was remembering the battle of Caprona against the Pisans, in which he fought. Holmes thought of something Lowell had omitted from his list of Dante’s talents: Dante was a soldier. Like you, he did everything well. And unlike me too, thought Holmes. A soldier had to assert guilt at every step, silently and thoughtlessly. He wondered whether it had made Dante a better poet to see his friends die beside him for the soul of Florence, for some meaningless Guelf banner. Wendell Junior had been the class poet at his Harvard commencement—many said only because of the name he shared with his father—but now Holmes wondered whether Junior could still know poetry after the war. In battle, Junior had seen something that Dante had not, and it had kicked the poetry—and the poet—right out of him, leaving it only to Dr. Holmes.