Holmes and Lowell were overcome, hearts contorted in their throats. Lowell’s beard hung low while Greene, glistening with vitality, described how Dante clutches the head of the berating sinner and demands his name, cruelly twisting out shocks of his hair by their roots. Though thou strip off my hair, I will not tell thee who I am! One of the other sinners unwittingly calls by name for his fellow shade to stop his galling shouts, much to Dante’s satisfaction. He could now record the sinner’s name for posterity.
Greene promised to reach bestial Lucifer—the worst of all Traitors and all sinners, the three-headed beast who is punisher and punished—in his next sermon. The energy that had charged through the old minister during the sermon drained rapidly when it was over, leaving only a pinwheel of color in his cheeks.
Lowell struggled against the crowd in the darkened chapel, parting soldiers mingling and squawking in the aisles. Holmes chased behind.
“Why, my dear friends!” Greene said cheerfully at the first sign of Lowell and Holmes. They shuttled Greene into a small chamber in the rear of the chapel, Holmes fastening the door. Greene took a seat on a board by a heating stove and held up his palms. “I daresay, fellows,” he observed. “With this dreadful weather and a new cough, I shan’t complain if we—”
Lowell roared, “Tell us everything directly, Greene!”
“Why, Mr. Lowell, I haven’t the most remote notion what you are driving at,” Greene said meekly, and glanced at Holmes.
“My dear Greene, what Lowell means…” But Dr. Holmes could not maintain his calm, either. “But what in the devil were you doing here, Greene?”
Greene looked hurt. “Well, you know, my dear Holmes, that I offer guest sermons at a number of churches around the city and in East Greenwich whenever I am asked and able. A sickbed is a dull place at best, and mine has grown anxious and painful in the last year, so I am more willing than ever when such requests arise.”
Lowell interrupted. “We know of your guest preaching. But you were preaching Dante out there!”
“Ah, that! It is a quite harmless amusement, really. Preaching to these woebegone soldiers was so challenging an experience, rather different from any I had known. In speaking with the men the first weeks after the war, especially when Lincoln was so treacherously killed, I found them plagued, in great numbers, with urgency by worries of their own fate and of the workings of the afterlife. One afternoon—sometime in the late-summer weeks—feeling inspired by Longfellow’s commitment to his translation, I introduced some Dantesque descriptions during my sermon and judged their effect rather successful. And so I began with general summaries of Dante’s spiritual history and journey. At moments—forgive me. Look how I blush to confess to you —I fancied I could teach Dante myself and that these brave young men were my pupils.”
“And Longfellow knew nothing of this?” Holmes asked.
“I wished to share the tidings of my modest experiment, but, well…” Greene’s skin was pale as he fixed his gaze into the flaming porthole of the heating stove. “I suppose, dear friends, I was a trifle embarrassed to profess myself a teacher of Dante next to a man like Longfellow. Only, don’t tell him so, if you please. It will only discomfit him, you know he doesn’t like to think himself different…”
“This sermon just now, Greene,” Lowell interrupted. “It was entirely made up of Dante’s encounters with the Traitors.”
“Yes, yes!” Greene said, rejuvenated by the reminder. “Isn’t it marvelous, Lowell? Soon enough I discovered that expressing a canto or two in its entirety held the attention of the soldierly quarter quite better than a sermon of my own frail thoughts, and doing so served well to arm me for our Dante sessions the following week.” Greene laughed with the nervous pride of a child who has reached some accomplishment unexpected by his elders. “When the Dante Club started Inferno, I began my current practice, preaching one of the cantos we were to translate in the next meeting of our club. I daresay I now feel quite prepared to take on this vociferous canto, for Longfellow has scheduled it for tomorrow! Normally, I would offer my sermon on Thursday afternoon, shortly before railroading back to Rhode Island.”
“Every Thursday?” asked Holmes.
“There were times when I was confined to bed. And the weeks that Longfellow canceled our Dante sessions, alas, I had no heart to speak of Dante then,” said Greene. “Then this last week, how wondrous! Longfellow has been translating at such a rapid, eager pace, I have stayed put in Boston and given a Dante sermon nearly every night for a week!”
Lowell lunged forward. “Mr. Greene! Review in your mind every moment of your experience here! Were any of the soldiers especially set on mastering the contents of your Dante sermons?”
Greene pushed himself to his feet and looked around him confusedly, as though he had suddenly forgotten their purpose. “Let me think. There were some twenty or thirty soldiers every session, understand, never all the same men. I’ve always wished I were better with faces. A number of them, now and again, did express admiration for my sermons. You must believe me—if I could aid you…”
“Greene, if you don’t instantly…” Lowell began in a choking voice.
“Lowell please!” Holmes said, assuming Fields’s usual role in taming his friend.
Lowell emitted a billowing exhale and waved Holmes forward.
Holmes began, “My dear Mr. Greene, you will aid us—tremendously, I know. Now, you must think fast for our benefit, dear friend, for Longfellow. Revisit all the soldiers you might have conversed with since starting this.”
“Oh, hold.” Greene’s half-moon eyes opened unnaturally large. “Hold now. Yes, there was one specific inquiry directed at me by a soldier wishing to read Dante for himself.”
“Yes! How did you reply?” Holmes asked, beaming.
“I asked whether the young man was at all familiar with foreign languages. He suggested he was the sharpest brand of reader since early boyhood but only of the English language, so I encouraged him to take up Italian. I noted that I was helping to complete the first American translation with Longfellow, for which we had a small club at the poet’s home. He seemed quite enticed. So I urged him to look for news of the Ticknor and Fields publication early next year at his bookseller,” Greene said with all the zeal of one of Fields’s planted puffs in the gossip pages.
Holmes paused for a hopeful glance at Lowell, who urged him on. “This soldier,” Holmes said slowly. “Might he have given you his name?” Greene shook his head. “Do you remember what he looked like, my dear Greene?”
“No, no, I’m terribly sorry.”
“It’s more important than you can imagine,” Lowell entreated him.
“I have but the foggiest recollection of the exchange,” Greene said, and closed his eyes. “I seem to remember he was rather tall, with a hay-colored mustache of the handlebar shape. And perhaps walked with a limp. But so many of them have become stumps of men. It was months ago, and I did not pay any special mind to the man at the time. As I say, I am not gifted at remembering faces—precisely why I’ve never written fiction, my friends. Fiction is all faces.” Greene laughed, finding this last statement enlightening. But the distress on the faces of his companions sagged into heavy stares. “Gentlemen? Pray tell me, have I contributed to some sort of problem?”
As they carefully made their way outside through groups of veterans, Lowell helped Greene step up into the carriage. Holmes had to rouse the cabman and horse, and the driver turned his lethargic horse’s head away from the old church.
In the meantime, from behind a dingy window of the soldiers’-aid home, the sight of the fleeing party was swallowed whole by the sentinel eyes of the man the Dante Club called Lucifer.