The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  Sunapee also inspired King to new flights of financial fancy. Expecting that he would soon be able to repay a $12,500 loan from Hay, he offered his friend a novel alternative: “I have wondered whether it would be perfectly agreeable to you if I put that into my part of the purchase and into a cottage which should be ready for my occupation next summer. As the title to the land will be [yours] and the house insured, it will be good security.” While he acknowledged that there was no reason for Hay to grant such an indulgence, he said he offered the suggestion in case “it would amuse you to do it.” Certain that Hay would consent, King had already sketched the house he wanted. Stanford White estimated the cost at $8,000. King urged Hay to hurry to Sunapee with an architect of his own and “cover in a cottage by snowfly.”

  The would-be summer colonists were soon having second—and third—thoughts. Recounting a trip he and Clara took to New Hampshire with King in the spring of 1887, Hay told Adams, “Ten minutes before we got there, we looked each other in the three faces,—we had been making conversation for an hour to keep from saying the things that beset us,—and all at once we said in chorus:—“We don’t want the place!” and each begged pardon of the other for changing our minds. We got off at old Durgin’s, feeling like murderers, and kept up a ghastly chatter to throw dust in his eyes. He harnessed up his machine and took us to see the farm—and lo! we fell in love with it over again.” King, undoubtedly because of his deepening involvement with Ada, decided not to join in the purchase.

  The Hearts came close to a reunion in September 1887, when King tried to organize a group expedition to Mexico. But the Hays, just home from Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, quickly bowed out. “We both feel we need rest and recreation, after our arduous summer drinking tea with them there Kings,” Hay joshed. Hay faced several weeks of business chores in Cleveland as well as a deadline on the Lincoln biography; he had promised Nicolay a first draft by spring. Adams was still game, and King promised that they would travel by way of New Orleans, where, he said, he would “be entranced to pour gumbo over your soul.” From that cheery prospect King tumbled deep into gloom. Freed from family obligations, he said, he would gladly rove forever in search of “the Garden of Eden or the Fountain of Eternal Wit or any other thing we were sure not to find. But fate has rivetted the chains of prosaic labor and dull duty forever on my legs and I shall never in time or space get beyond their tether and their clank. I am told that self sacrifice and the stabbing to death of one’s heart’s desires are most desirable and that if I am duly meek and lay low I shall derive much advantage in the line of noble qualities but when I look over the rather parched surface of my soul I don’t find the promised spiritual herbage sprouting up as yet.”

  At the last minute, floods in Mexico forced them to cancel the trip. During the next year, the vagrant Heart would drop out of another Mexican excursion as well as a voyage to Cuba with his friends, and his whereabouts would become increasingly uncertain. In the autumn of 1888, when the second Mexican trip was still pending, Hay joked to Adams, “Won’t you join us in this twice-told imaginary journey which will not be made?” A few months earlier, Hay had gone to King’s Wall Street office and learned that the geologist was in California. When Hay returned to his New York hotel, however, there sat King, surrounded by the four little Hays. Frustrated by the geologist’s errant ways and “the Silence of the King, which passeth the power of profanity to do justice unto,” Hay suspected his friend had joined “some oath-bound order which pledged him, under fearful sanctions, never to tell anybody anything.”

  The peripatetic Clarence King, FROM CLARENCE KING MEMOIRS, COURTESY OF THE JOHN HAY COLLECTION, JOHN HAY LIBRARY, BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

  King blamed his unpredictability on his health. Years of camping out and working in damp mines had left him vulnerable to throat and lung infections. The problem was real, but it also enabled him to disguise his disappearances as periods of convalescence.

  Ultimately the strains of secrecy and business reverses exacted their toll. In July 1888, two months before the sham wedding, King’s health collapsed. His doctor prescribed a year’s rest beginning with a long stay at Hot Springs, Arkansas. King was in no position to heed the advice. “I am awfully poor now and must work hard,” he confided to Adams. Desperate for money, he even stooped to consulting on a platinum mine that he suspected did not exist. “The central figure is an alchemist of eighty years who had devoted 45 years to this ore in as quaint a hocus pocus laboratory as ever was,” he wrote Hay from a Pennsylvania backwater. “I spend all my time in wondering that I listened to the story and came.”

  Determined to ignore the demands pressing in on all sides, King once more sought refuge in the world of letters. “Artium Magister,” an essay in the October 1888 North American Review, scolded institutions of higher learning for their “joyless” methods of teaching the classics, which forced a boy to “parse instead of feel Aeschylus, and scan rather than discuss Virgil.” Better that the youth should be “a cowboy, with the Bible and Shakespeare in his saddle-bags, the constellations his tent, the horse his brother, than to have life, originality, and the bounding spirit of youthful imagination stamped out of him by a competent and conscientious corps of badgering grammarians.” The issue was crucial, King argued, because classical ideals could offset the deleterious effects of life in an age of “sodden materialism.” Once instruction moved beyond “the mechanics of dialects” and “dry pedantic torture,” the classics could have “inestimable value in the creation of American character,” King concluded. “Then a university parchment may cease to add irony to ignorance. Then will come some man whom the world will recognize as Artium Magister.”

  Like his pronouncements on Grant’s Tomb, King’s opinions on pedagogy mattered less for their intellectual content than for what they showed of his character, and the most telling passages of “Artium Magister” had nothing to do with education. On the brink of committing himself to Ada, King was obsessed by what he saw as the utter failure of nineteenth-century womanhood. Woman per se lay beyond the scope of his essay, but he managed to work in a diatribe on the shortcomings of heroines in modern fiction, who were, he assumed, “more or less true to the human model.”

  Think of the stunted and petty women and their incredible meanness; of the primeval, monkey-scale of their average intelligence; remember how few wholesome, sweet, strong women are found in that army of distorted, diseased creatures who march between the covers of English fiction, laden down as they go with all the tragicomic foibles flesh is heir to, and all the conceivable deviations from noble and normal womanhood; and then reflect how French realism has flung woman naked in the ditch and left her there scorned of men, and grinning in cynical and shameless levity over her own dishonor. Or to come nearer home, recall the pretty, brightish, smug little people who are made with inimitable skill to illustrate the sawdust stuffing of middle-class democratic society.

  Out of it all is there one figure for weary eyes to linger upon: one type of large and satisfying womanhood; natural in the rare and ravishing charm of a perfect body; sweet with the endowment of a warm, quick, sympathetic temperament; sound and bright in intellect; pure and spiritual, with a soul in whose pellucid depths fixed stars of the moral heaven reflect themselves, undimmed by mists of earth, untrembling from the jar of modern conflict? Is there any more womanhood in them all, English, French, and American put together and fused into one, than can be learned in a single hour before that Greek Venus in the Louvre, who is only perfect goddess because she is perfect woman? Is there not in this one ideal, with her rich femininity, her Doric strength, the calm warmth of her countenance, the supple pose of her vital body, and that irradiating aura of love which enfolds her with its mysterious veil, more of human nature than one can patch together out of all the thousands of photographic portraits of actual, but distorted and incomplete characters that crowd modern fiction?

  Among the women King saw in society during 1888, the only ones he could tolerate were th
e self-effacing and the harmless, such as Clara Hay and his old teacher, Gail Hamilton. Twice during the summer he felt moved to express his admiration for Clara, not realizing that her very blankness allowed him to see in her precisely what he needed to see. Writing to Henry Adams, King praised Clara in terms he might have used to describe the statue of the Greek Venus: “her Archaic Grace is Doric as ever in the indisturbable balance of her rooted repose.” Women who were “not covered deep with a luxuriant growth of juicy temperament” made him “miserable,” he added. “To kiss a woman and feel teeth through her thin lips paralises me for a week.” Apologizing for his “snarl,” he explained that it had been set off by a recent social gathering, where he had had to kiss a number of young women whom he did not want to kiss. “Their little minds squirm and contract under the irrita of light conversation as a dead frog curls up his wiry toes at the galvanic touch but I am not deceived by their involuntary simulation of life. I know they are dead.”

  King insisted to Hay that the “calm and grand” Clara was unique among her sex. If other women possessed her heart and mind and the “strength of nature too, I don’t know where they live.” Then he lapsed into a self-defense that must have left his friend wondering what was wrong: “I have a sort of grim muttering sound in my ear that seems to me as if you were taking me to task for not writing literature, but if you saw my life you would not. If you knew the difficulties of my situation in all its respects and phases, you would not blame me for consenting to sink into a quiet drudgery from which I frankly see that I may never emerge.”

  A more despairing bridegroom would be hard to find. And whatever happiness King knew in his stolen hours with Ada was soon interrupted. Early in November, he left for Hot Springs. Sending Hay a “thousand thanks” and a receipt for yet another loan, he asked that his destination be kept secret. “I have told no one except Mother where I have gone as people think one only goes to Arkansas for malign influence of the planet Venus.”

  While it is tempting to speculate that King wanted the secrecy because Ada went with him, the darkness of his mood suggests that he was alone in Arkansas. Sentenced to sixty days of mineral baths and “farcical” meals, affronted by a physician “who thinks my sorrows are a form of deep muscular rheumatism,” King wondered whether he had “the pluck to stand it with all the visible horrors of human wrecks surrounding me on every side and no human being to talk to.” He seethed when he learned that local officials routinely solved racial disputes simply by posting notices requiring Negroes to leave town. Arkansas, he told Hay, “is to me the most barbarous and terrible place I ever was in.”

  A few months later, back on the East Coast, King stopped off in Washington for a brief visit. As he and Henry Adams strolled in the spring sunshine of Lafayette Square, Adams was surprised to see that King’s hair had grown almost as gray as his own.

  14

  Passions and Tensions

  Henry Adams had returned from Japan at the end of 1886 certain that his life in Washington was over. As much as he treasured John Hay, the friendship was not enough to keep him in Lafayette Square. Like Madeleine Lee in Democracy, he longed to burrow into a remote corner of the world, perhaps never to return. He preferred China to Mrs. Lee’s Egypt, and all that stood in the way was the task of finishing his massive History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. To hasten the end of the work, he persuaded Theodore Dwight, who had lived at 1603 H Street during his absence, to stay on and help with research.

  But little by little, without realizing it, Henry began to piece together a new life on H Street. Agonizingly unsure of himself in the beginning, he issued no invitations and could barely respond when friends took the initiative. To Lizzie Cameron, who urged him and Dwight to dine with her until they found a cook of their own, he stammered, “I—or we, if you prefer it—should of course delight in taking you—and your cuisine—at your word to its full extent; but if we did, we should never get a cook; the inducements to delay would be irresistible, and Dwight would see untold blemishes in every new candidate. On the other hand, we—or I—or he—are, am or is delighted to accept any invitation you will send us.”

  Two of Henry Adams’s favorite visitors were Elizabeth Sherman Cameron, his beautiful young neighbor on Lafayette Square, and her daughter, Martha.FRANCES BENJAMIN JOHNSTON, FROM THE COLLECTIONS OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  Part of Henry’s shyness sprang from his attraction to the attentive slate-blue eyes and the vivacity that endeared tall, slender “Mrs. Don” to Washington. But beyond the fear of making a spectacle of himself by falling in love with a married woman twenty years his junior, Henry was having difficulty conceiving of his place in society without Clover at his side. He had not gone to a dinner party in the capital since the spring of 1885, when Clover’s breakdown began, and he did not relish the picture of himself as the extra guest for whom a dinner partner had to be found. Nor did he wish to preside over afternoon tea. Tea had been Clover’s glory. Henceforth Henry would pass his five o’clocks with the Hays.

  For all this self-consciousness and timidity, Henry saw no need to bar his own door, and it did not take long for his breakfast table to gain the notoriety his drawing room had once had. Served at twelve-thirty, a Henry Adams breakfast was governed by only one rule: guests must invite themselves. “When his colored major-domo answered your ring, you never inquired, ‘Is Mr. Adams in?’” one frequent guest remembered. “He was always in, and the right number of seats were ready.” Friends were encouraged to bring new faces; without being told, they understood that the host would tolerate anyone but a bore. Adams soon boasted that his house was “the haunt of all the most charming women going,” including Mrs. Cameron, and he was equally proud to note, as a testament to his popularity, that his grocery bill had ballooned to $500 a month. Recalling his own youthful pleasure at the London breakfasts of Monckton Milnes, Adams made young visitors especially welcome. “Uncle Henry,” they called him, and he regarded them as nieces and nephews “in wish.”

  Among the young men who found their way to his table in 1887, his pride was Cecil Spring Rice, a twenty-eight-year-old junior secretary newly posted to the British legation. Women adored his spaniel face, his unfailing good nature, and a sartorial ineptitude that made him, as one of his biographers kindly put it, “untidy to excess.” Lizzie and her friends “elder-sistered him,” insisting that he “bring his socks and linen to be revised and corrected.” They also fretted over Springy’s absentmindedness about eating, a worry Uncle Henry soon put to rest. Once introduced to Adams, Springy proved willing to come for dinner as well as breakfast, and since the British legation was only a block east on H Street, he often dropped by between meals.

  Springy’s sunny wit was keen enough to hold its own against Adams’s dark humor, and his observations on American life were sufficiently wry to appeal to the historian’s rarefied tastes. When the New York Harbor Board was caught paying large sums to a company that dredged by day and dumped the dredgings back into place by night, Springy and Adams could greet the news with more laughter than indignation. To Springy, American politics was “all dullness relieved by rascality”—a sentiment congenial to the jaded Adams.

  The young man, who considered Uncle Henry “rather an interesting sort of cynic,” needed only slight acquaintance to discern that the descendants of John and John Quincy Adams were “as odd as can be.” There was no denying the cleverness of Henry Adams and his brothers, he told an English friend, “but they all make a sort of profession of eccentricity. One of them wrote a book of which a review appeared so bitter and strong that he wrote the Editor to ask who had done it. He was told, his brother.—Two of them were arguing. One said, ‘It seems to me I am the only one of the family who inherits anything of our grandfather’s manners.’ ‘But you dissipated your inheritance young,’ answered the other.”

  With Uncle Henry’s tutelage, Springy soon endorsed the idea that mediocrity and corruption were inescapa
ble in a political system wholly dependent on funds raised by party machines. He saw at once that the Senate, which had come to be known as the Millionaires’ Club, cared less for voters than for the titans of copper and railroads, and that the House of Representatives was little more than a collection of errand boys hand-picked by senators. Washington had no room for a cultivated intellectual like Secretary of State Thomas Bayard, Springy observed: “That sort of thing doesn’t go down among a lot of politicians and business men like the Senators. They don’t like to call him their superior and so say he is a pompous ass.”

  Springy also adopted his mentor’s disdain for White House public receptions. Sounding uncannily like the author of Democracy, he reported that visitors to Grover Cleveland’s White House were herded into a large drawing room “with a ghastly picture of Lincoln opposite Mrs. Washington, as if they were married.” There the crowd waited until “the fat short President” appeared. “You form a line and move past as hard as you can, shaking hands. The children get their heads patted.” No matter what Cleveland said, Springy noticed, everyone agreed—“like people on the stage, all at once.”

  Much as Spring Rice revered the opinions of his Uncle Henry, they parted company on the merits of the first lady. Frances Folsom Cleveland, who had married the president in 1886, had made no impression on Adams apart from her “splendid vigor in hand-shaking.” Springy, accustomed to the reserve of royalty, was delighted by Mrs. Cleveland’s informality. To his amazement, she thought nothing of telling him about a spat with her husband. In the middle of a heat wave, Cleveland had “gone on the loose and bought himself an orange tawny linen suit,” Springy wrote home to England, explaining that the President was “5 feet high and 4 feet wide” and had “no neck and six chins.” Mrs. Cleveland’s predicament was plain. “What would he look like in it, think?” she had asked Spring Rice. Using one ruse after another, the first lady managed to keep the president away from the suit, but the mercury continued to rise, and finally he said he had to wear it because all his other suits were too warm. He capitulated only when Mrs. Cleveland insisted that no self-respecting son of Erin could vote for a man wearing orange.