The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  Henry’s decision, however correct and comfortable from his point of view, robbed Clover’s art of a chance for public acclaim. Having seconded his opinion, Clover was hardly blameless in the matter, and there is little to be gained by speculating on the fame she might have won if Henry had agreed to the Century’s request. But there can be no doubt that she relished the idea of public recognition. When a newspaper review of an exhibit of works by several amateur photographers described her pictures as “very skillful,” she beamed. The mention was brief, but she considered it important enough to clip and send to her father. “Save this,” the gesture meant. Her art was art, too.

  9

  Vagrant Hearts

  The Clarence King who sailed from New York to Liverpool in the spring of 1882 was a boy of forty—the owner of a thickening middle, thinning hair, and an impish delight in his own charms. Prancing about the first-class decks of the Britannic, he flipped twenty-dollar gold pieces high into the air and invited one and all to admire the huge letters of credit in his wallet. Pointing out one draft for $5,000, he earnestly explained that he meant to spend the entire sum on a single work of art.

  Perhaps because he seemed astonished by his good fortune, King managed these high jinks without giving off the least odor of bad form. A fellow passenger would remember him not as a boor but a pilgrim, a man questing after beauty “as gravely as if he were a Knight of the Grail.”

  Ecstatic to be launched on the first long holiday of his life, King abandoned all thought of the business hurdles waiting abroad, where he needed to find new investors for the Yedras silver mine in Mexico. Nor did he trouble himself over the confusion he had left in his wake, where his friends the Hays had the distinct impression that he would travel to Europe with them—in July. “Did you ever hear of a more characteristic performance than that of our gorgeous Rex?” Hay marveled to Adams on learning that King had sailed May 6. “He went away—just as I knew he wouldn’t—and did not give up his room for the 15th of July nor say a word to me about it…. He is more trouble to me than all my money.” Hay wondered whether King meant for his mother to use the stateroom, and hoped the Adamses knew Mrs. Howland’s full name and address. They did not. Henry puckishly advised writing “several thousand copies, to all possible initials, as to Mrs. A. B. Howland, Mrs. B. A. Howland and the like.”

  Addressing Florence King Howland as plain “Mrs. Howland, Newport,” Hay learned that she would not be going to Europe. In the cloying cadences of the veteran martyr, she explained that in spite of a deep yearning to share her “first impressions of the old world” with Clarence, “I believed that my child’s rest of mind would be more complete if he knew I held the family helm.” Mrs. Howland’s mother, at eighty-three, was “liable to the changes of nature,” and her son by her second marriage, George Howland, was “like an exquisite vessel of cracked glass which a rough touch might shiver in atoms.” For Hay’s sake, she regretted her ignorance of King’s whereabouts, but mother and son had agreed that Clarence should be free from the burden of letter writing.

  From Liverpool, King sped to London, determined to take care of business. The Boston entrepreneurs who controlled the Yedras were willing to part with their interest for $1 million, but King’s high spirits led him to think he could do even better. He upped the asking price by half, hired an agent to look for buyers in London, and crossed the Channel to meet with the financiers of Paris. After a week of appointments, nothing was settled, but seeds had been sown. The geologist felt entitled to a little spree.

  Decked out in a large beret and a green velvet suit with knee breeches, King headed for Spain. Henry and Clover had scorned Madrid as a “hole” and John Hay had dismissed the Spanish as incurable liars, but to King, the land below the Pyrenees overflowed with enchantments. He loved the “rich, vigorous odor of onions and garlic,” the “dusty leather” look of the mountains, the sight of owls sailing through crumbled church walls. A devotee of Cervantes, King hunted up a Spanish barber’s basin of the sort Don Quixote had worn as a helmet. He recorded this adventure in an essay called “The Helmet of Mambrino,” bound it in a piece of fabric dating from the days of Cervantes, and bundled the package off to an old friend in San Francisco.

  Clarence King in the green velvet touring costume he often wore during his two-year European holiday.HUNTINGTON LIBRARY, SAN MARINO, CALIFORNIA

  By July he was back in Paris, cabling promises to meet Hay in Britain. “Of course he will not,” Hay moaned to Adams, “but I am glad he is alive, for general reasons, though I may never see him more.” In September, when King materialized at the Bristol Hotel in London, Hay forgave him on sight. “He is the same delightful and irrational creature as of yore—if possible, more amiable than ever,” Hay told the Adamses of the “vagrant Heart.” King had shed his drab American wardrobe for the plumage of Savile Row—impeccably tailored suits, elegant shirts with stand-up collars, and a pair of yellow shoes shaped, he noted fondly, like Italian daggers. The sartorial masterpiece had little to impart of the Yedras, but he bubbled over about the land of Cervantes and showed off his $30,000 trove of art and bric-a-brac: a spangled matador’s costume, brocades, silks, scarves, rugs, porcelain, ecclesiastical oddments, and several paintings by Mariano Fortuny, whose small and meticulous pictures commanded princely sums.

  London in the autumn of 1882 teemed with famous Americans. W. D. Howells was there, as were Charles Dudley Warner, who had written The Gilded Age with Mark Twain, and J. R. Osgood, the Bostonian who published Twain, Howells, Hay, and King. Bret Harte was also in town, a perennial truant from the Glasgow consulship Hay had laboriously secured during his tenure as assistant secretary of state. Harte did not seem compelled to account for his delinquency, and Hay, practiced diplomat, held his tongue. The expatriate Henry James was a regular at the Americans’ dinner parties, waving their invitations as proof that he did not despise his native land. “You see I am very national,” he wrote an American friend; “do insist on that to people when you hear them abuse me.”

  With his unbounded joie de vivre, King struck James as “a kind of fairy-godmother,” an impression undoubtedly fortified by King’s extravagant generosity. When Howells waxed envious over the Fortunys, King insisted he have one. Howells and the rest of King’s entourage watched with amusement as the geologist waged an unsuccessful struggle to tear himself away from the merriment of London. Expected at a country house in Scotland, King resolutely purchased a railroad ticket every day, and every day telegraphed his host that he would come tomorrow.

  The novel Democracy had recently appeared in England, and Prime Minister William Gladstone’s admiration of the work made it the talk of London. During a stroll among the great oaks and elms of Kensington Park, Hay and King listened with poker faces as Howells announced that he and a friend had identified the author: John W. De Forest of Hartford, Connecticut. It was not a bad guess since De Forest had written two novels about corruption in Washington during the Grant years.

  Even Henry Adams, who had forsaken the Old World, wished he were part of the London scene. “My dear Hay-oh,” he wrote in October from Beverly Farms. “Your name naturally prolongs itself into a sigh as I think what fun I should have had I been with you in England.” Noting that a “brace of baronets”—his friends Sir John Clark and Sir Robert Cunliffe—had sent glowing reports of their encounters with the Hays, Adams rejoiced in the wonder of friendship. “The universe hitherto has existed in order to produce a dozen people to amuse the five of hearts,” he mused. “Among us we know all mankind. We or our friends have canvassed creation, and there are but a dozen or two companions in it;—men and women, I mean, whom you like to have about you, and whose society is an active pleasure.”

  The only sour note in London was struck by Charles Dudley Warner, who confessed in King’s presence that he had disliked Spain. Warner traveled like a typical Yankee, King fulminated, “his dull eye agreeably frappé by the red and yellow novelties of the warmer world, but his heart (burglar-proof with its
hereditary chilled iron doors) beyond the reach of the southern spirit.” A few days later, laid low by a cold, King was overcome with remorse. “It is low and mean to grumble and find fault with blind and deaf men,” he told Hay. Begging him to forget the outburst, King explained that normal human obtuseness often puffed him up with pride in his own superior sensitivity. To cure his arrogance, he thought he should learn to mind his “commonplace business” and “pick out a decent woman and marry her and taste the cup of human joy which certain, ahem! aspiring, nose in the air, young men of my acquaintance don’t seem to have the power to do.”

  Toward the end of October, Hay moved his wife and three children to Paris. Clara headed for the Rue de la Paix to consult Charles Worth about cashmere. John, once again in dreadful, mysterious health, paid a visit to Jean Charcot, the Continent’s leading neurologist. Hay’s gait and pulse were unsteady, he suffered from dizziness, and late afternoon regularly brought on deep depression. Most discouraging of all was his “invincible sense of something worse waiting just around the corner.” Unable to diagnose his condition, the best American physicians had advised him to “brace up and not think about it.” Hay had tried, to no effect, finally deciding to come abroad for a year of rest and medical consultations.

  Charcot had little to offer but a label—Neurasthenie Cephalique, or weak nerves. It was the malady of the age. George M. Beard, an American physician and author of two books on nervousness, blamed modern civilization: steam engines, the rapid spread of information by press and telegraph, science, and “the mental activity of women.” Railroads were unyielding in their demands for human punctuality, cities were noisy, stock speculation created unbearable tension. The victims of nervousness endured a plethora of symptoms, most of them familiar to Hay: insomnia, fatigue, noises in the ears, irritability, and phobias ranging from “fear of fears” to “fear of everything.”

  A letter from Henry Adams to John Hay on the official Five of Hearts stationery, which was furnished by Hay. Hay called Clover “First Heart” and assigned her the pip at the upper left. Henry was at her right, Clarence King in the middle, and Clara and John Hay became, in Henry’s words, “the nether Hearts.”MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

  Whatever the merits of Charcot’s diagnosis and Beard’s theories, it remained for Whitelaw Reid of the New York Tribune to detect what the doctors could not. Writing to Hay in Europe in the hope of luring him back to the paper, Reid pointed out that Hay thrived in New York and Washington but fell ill in Cleveland. Why not give up Euclid Avenue and move to Manhattan? Reid asked. Anticipating that Hay’s father-in-law might object, Reid noted that Hay’s presence in New York would give Amasa Stone’s financial affairs a firmer footing in the capital of capitalism.

  Reid’s timing was as uncanny as his insight. Clara’s father, who no longer felt well enough to manage his business, wanted Hay to come home from Europe but could not quite bring himself to insist upon it. “I am some better in health than I was, but now have not much confidence in my health,” one typical letter reported. “I can only say that I wish you were here now—It may be best you should not come—I fully appreciate the disturbance it would make were you to come here now.” The old man asked Hay to carry this burden alone; he did not want to alarm Clara with news of his deterioration.

  The only light spilling into the gloom of this Paris autumn was a rendezvous with Clarence King and Henry James, who joined the Hays for a few weeks at the Grand Hotel. In French that was as self-assured as it was eccentric, King informed the city’s finest dealers in antiques that their wares were trash. To Hay’s amazement, they responded by posting themselves outside his hotel-room door for hours, promising him Van Eycks and other treasures, and begging him to return to their galleries.

  Eager to find King the wife he said he wanted, Hay arranged an evening at the Opéra Comique in the company of an American novelist named Constance Fenimore Woolson. King said only a few words during the outing, Hay gossiped to Lafayette Square, but Fenimore, “that very clever person, to whom men are a vain show—loved him at sight and talks of nothing else.” A grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper and distantly related to the Hays, Fenimore was slim and quietly pretty, with a high forehead and regular features set in an oval face. She also possessed intelligence, sensitivity, and a comfortable income of her own. None of it stirred Clarence King.

  Henry James knew the Five of Hearts well. John Hay admired James greatly, Clarence King found him a bit too fastidious, and Clover Adams thought his prose overstuffed. For his part, James was charmed by King’s devil-may-care nature, valued Hay’s friendship, and gently mocked the Adamses in a short story.LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  Hay also misunderstood Fenimore’s interest. King was an intriguing sprite, but the real object of her affection was Henry James. She had moved abroad in 1879 bearing a letter of introduction from one of his cousins, and when she met him the following year in Florence, she was immediately taken with his “beautiful regular profile” and his large light gray eyes, which took in everything and revealed nothing. James reveled in her praise of his work, and Fenimore interpreted his pleasure as a sign of mutual attraction. She did not perceive, nor did he think to mention, that he would have no bride but literature.

  If Hay felt any disappointment as a matchmaker, it mattered little next to his gratitude for the distractions of King’s company. Beaming at the exploits of the gorgeous Rex, Hay reported that King was “run after by princes, dukes and millionaires, whom he treats with amiable disdain.” His most fervent admirer was the flamboyant Ferdinand de Rothschild, intimate of the Prince of Wales and creator of Waddesdon Manor, a 222-room palace on grounds measured not in acres but miles. By exposing the great diamond hoax in 1872, King had rescued several million Rothschild dollars, and when the geologist arrived in England, the baron rushed to embrace him. He showered King with invitations, sought his approval of Waddesdon Manor’s Gainsboroughs and Beauvais tapestries and Bourbon furniture, and despaired whenever King left his side. The baron followed him to Paris, dining one evening on artichokes and Belgian oysters with King, Hay, and James. Highly amused by the baron’s pursuit, Hay reported it to Howells, who in turn told Mark Twain that Rothschild “all but sleeps with [King]; chases him round and wants him to come and spend the rest of his life with him.”

  American expatriate novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson. John Hay hoped for a match between Woolson and King, but she loved Henry James, who had no interest in marriage.HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

  For all his adoration, however, neither the baron nor his influential friends showed an interest in Mexican silver. As 1883 began, King complained that “not even the geological processes are so slow as a London company.” Again he thought the Yedras sale was imminent, and again he was braced for defeat. “Oh how I hate it all,” he told Hay. Planning to sit for a portrait, he said he would not pose “in the dignified costume of a mountaineer but with my nose to a grindstone and fate holding me down.”

  The portrait was to be done by a young Swedish artist named Anders Zorn. Waiting for the money men in Lombard Street to make up their minds, King sat for two portraits and dreamed of making Zorn famous in Paris. But when two more Yedras deals collapsed, Zorn caught the brunt of King’s wrath. Declaring both portraits complete failures, King refused to accept either. Zorn, with no money to show for months of work, turned in desperation to King’s friends. Rothschild bought one of the paintings, and Hay cheerfully agreed to take the other. King, convinced that he would never sell the mine, fell into despair. “Soon I shall give it all up,” he told Hay, “and go home with my tail between my legs whupped for the first time.”

  In Boston, King’s financial backers were nearing the end of their patience. They had had no word from him since he had sailed with a vow to sell the Yedras in two months. Instead they heard endless rumors of his return: In October 1882, he said he would sail in November; in January 1883 he promised February. When Adams heard rumblings of their displeasure, he thoughtfully
passed the word to Hay. Hay was incensed. King had “worked like a Turk for their interests all the time he was in Paris,” Hay insisted. The fault lay not with King but with the “vacillation and treachery of Frenchmen in business matters,” obstacles which Hay felt the “square and serious” Bostonians could not fully appreciate.

  But Adams was less swayed by Hay’s stoutness of heart than his own sense that King had pushed Alexander Agassiz and his fellow financiers to their limit. “Is King insane or not?” Adams asked Hay. “Agassiz seems seriously to think he is, and I myself sometimes suspect it. He acts most strangely to the eye of a bystander. In Boston they talk pretty freely about him.” The talk, Adams was too delicate to say, was gossip about King’s capers in the slums of London. If Hay had not yet heard such stories, he soon would, through colorful dispatches from an American diplomat named Frank Mason. King, said Mason,

  goes down to the lowest dive at Seven Dials, chirps to the pretty bar maid of a thieves’ gin mill, gives her a guinea for a glass of “bittah,” gets the frail simple thing clean gone on him. Then whips out his notebook and with a smile that would charm a duchess asks her to tell her story. Naturally she is pleased and fires away in dialect that never saw print which the wily ex-geologist nails on the spot. Of course she is a poor pitiful wronged thing who would have been an angel if she had been kindly treated and taken to Sunday school when she was a child.—They are all so, you know. Think, Hay, often such girls, with their plump red cheeks, their picturesque slang … corralled in one book written for a good moral purpose…. I suppose, rather let us say we hope, that King is walking through all these narrow, slippery places upright and unstained as an archangel.