In the spring of 1890, as Hay slogged through the last sheaves of Lincoln proof, he decided to join Adams in retiring from authorship. “I can write no more, I sincerely believe,” he told Howells. But as much as he longed to be shut of Lincoln, he dreaded the emptiness of his future. Adams had the South Seas and China to explore. Hay had nothing—no dreams, no ambitions, no plans. As he confessed to Adams, “I envy you many things, but, most of all, that power of making up your mind to do things, and then doing them without any fuss.” At Adams’s suggestion, Nannie Lodge had been enlisted to try to persuade Hay to dash off a short biography of William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state. Hay refused. Nor was he tempted by the princely $12,000 annual retainer Whitelaw Reid offered in exchange for casting an occasional eye on the Tribune political coverage. “I am growing old and irritable and I hate controversy,” he explained to his brother. “A mean personal attack, sent by some sneak in an envelope, makes me uncomfortable for all day.” The Lincoln biographer was not as easily incensed as the author of The Bread-Winners, but he had had his fill of critics and grievance-bearers while Abraham Lincoln ran in the Century. Each day’s mail brought new annoyances, such as the query from a New England parson who suspected that Lincoln’s assassination had been masterminded by the Jesuits. “The whole thing is growing very ridiculous,” he grumbled to Nicolay. “Every old deadbeat politician in the country is coming forward to protest that he was the depositary of Lincoln’s inmost secrets and the engineer of his campaigns.”
Hay was mildly interested in the noisy political passions of Lodge and Roosevelt, but unlike them he was content to stand on the sidelines until someone asked his help. In 1889, soon after Benjamin Harrison’s inauguration, Hay had been dispatched to smooth the feathers of Whitelaw Reid, who felt that Harrison owed him an appointment as minister to London in exchange for the Tribune’s support during the campaign. Working quietly in the background, Hay persuaded Reid to settle for the ministry in Paris. In the gloomy summer of 1890, when Adams deserted Hay for the South Pacific, the idea that Hay himself would one day represent America in London would have struck him as preposterous.
The following spring, after his winter of thwarted assignations with Nannie Lodge, Hay sailed for Europe alone. “His love for Nannie does not wane,” Lizzie wrote Henry. “I am awfully sorry for him.” Lizzie was to follow a few weeks later, and she and Hay had made a pact to see each other as soon as she arrived. “I’ll talk of you and he of Nannie!” she told Adams. In London, Hay hosted a dinner in her honor, seating her between himself and the silver-haired Bret Harte, who had been dismissed from the Glasgow consulate in 1885 after President Cleveland chanced upon one of his short stories. All but forgotten in the United States, Harte scratched out a living by reworking his tales of the Wild West for English magazines.
From France, Lizzie reported to Adams that she and Hay had gone on “a real Parisian spree. I hope that you are jealous? Please don’t tell him I told you, but we dined in cabinet particulier, and went in a lower loge to a ballet. I actually felt wicked and improper. He did too, for he felt obliged to follow up the precedent and to tell me how much he loved me. I feel as if we’ll always have this delicious secret between us—only I have to take you in.”
Back in London at the end of May, Hay suffered a series of fainting spells and what he described as a heart attack. His doctor diagnosed the malady as “nerves” and assured him there was no cause for alarm. Weak and frightened, Hay told Lizzie he expected to die within the year. Lizzie agonized over how much to reveal to Henry, who was half a world away. “I am really afraid that he will die before he gets started home,” she wrote. She crossed out “die” and inserted “be ill” but did not obliterate her first choice of words. Adams would have to draw his own conclusions.
Waiting for his ship, which sailed July 1, Hay went to a few parties, rested, took the iron pills prescribed by his doctor, and wrote his wife a letter she would be sure to cherish if he did not survive the voyage home.
I want the days to pass and bring the 1st, so that I can feel that every hour brings me nearer to my beloved ones. I am so weak and good for nothing. I hope your presence and your love will be the medicine that will make me well again. I feel stricken with remorse some times to think how much you have done for me and how little I have done for you. And yet I know it will continue so until the end. I shall bear the ever increasing load of obligation and shall do nothing to lighten it. Yet, after all, you would never have met with a man who could love you more or appreciate more fully your sweet and noble qualities. But that does not make my obligation less. It merely increases it. For seventeen years your true heart, your rich and noble nature, your beauty, has been mine, and have made me happier than it is possible for most men ever to be. And I cannot think what I have done, more than anybody might have done, to make you happier, my darling. If Heaven grants me a return to health and to life, it shall be my study in the future to try to find some way of adding to your happiness. I am not half good enough for you—but I do love you with all my heart and nobody could love you more. God bless and guard you and bring us together again.
The Hay summer house, Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire.JOHN HAY COLLECTION, JOHN HAY LIBRARY, BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
Three weeks after arriving home, Hay arranged to go up to Lake Sunapee alone, ostensibly to put an end to the dawdling of carpenters, painters, and paperhangers. He also found time for an excursion to Boston. Writing to Adams, Hay would admit to no more than the extraordinary coincidence of meeting Nannie and a friend in the street. The trio then proceeded to the Somerset Club, where the ubiquitous Cabot joined them for lunch. Firmly in control of the Republican Party in Massachusetts, Pinky was feeling “pretty gay,” Hay reported, “and rather enjoys kicking his enemies.” Mrs. Lodge was also “in high spirits,” which Hay attributed to the news that Adams had decided not to go to China.
But not even the engaging Mrs. Lodge could coax Hay out of his melancholy as 1891 wound to a close. Sitting by the fire on a snowy December day, with Clara embroidering handkerchiefs at his side, Hay asked her what to write to Henry. “Tell him to come home!” she said. Lizzie Cameron and Nannie Lodge felt likewise, he added. “But what can I do? I can say I hunger and thirst for the sight of you, but that is all. If you are happy where you are, I would be sorry to see you change your habitat. For I feel myself just now the worst company in the world and as if I should not cumber the earth much longer.”
16
Tame Cat
On August 30, 1890, Henry Adams and John La Farge and their mountain of luggage ascended a Honolulu hillside to a spacious, comfortable house with a sweeping view of the city and the vast blue Pacific. While La Farge explored their new quarters, fingering mosquito nets in the bedrooms and inhaling the perfume of sandalwood and roses wafting through the house, Adams sulked on the veranda. Hawaii, he feared, would prove nothing more than “a case of Japan aggravated to final dissolution.” The streets of Honolulu had been clogged with Japanese, readily identifiable by their blue-and-white kimonos and the infernal clack of their wooden sandals. Nor did he care for palms, he decided. To his ear, they did not rustle or beckon, as the poets insisted, they moaned, like humans in distress.
But Henry’s misgivings proved no match for La Farge’s enthusiasm. Ignoring his temperamental stomach, La Farge eagerly sampled squid, spooned guava from the rind, and persuaded Adams to surrender to the luscious pleasures of the mango. With the artist as a guide, Henry also learned to savor the infinity of violets in the clouds above the luminous sea (which was “butterfly blue,” according to La Farge), the purplish-rose of bougainvillaea blossoms, the brilliance of the lemons, and the “fiercely green” acacia.
La Farge set up his easel on the terrace and quickly discovered the futility of trying to catch the fleeting light and chaos of color in the tropics. As Adams watched one watercolor after another turn to thick purple soup, he deduced that Hawaiian “skies and seas and mountains are not to be caught by throw
ing paint on their tails with ever so accurate an aim. The painter is only maddened by their evanescence when he tries to fix them.” La Farge’s sartorial exactitude compounded the challenge. One morning as he waited for his servant to fetch trousers and slippers, the sunrise he yearned to capture changed into a scene that meant nothing to him. Undaunted, La Farge went to his easel every day, and with his encouragement, Henry painted too—stiff little watercolors that reminded him of young ladies’ embroidery.
In a month of climbing, riding, and sailing around the islands of Hawaii, the only real surprise encountered by the travelers was the “old-gold girl” who had sent Clarence King into ecstasy years before. Seeking out the spot where King had watched bare-breasted young goddesses glide down a waterfall, Adams and La Farge found that the franchise had passed to a troupe of sullen young men who performed only for money. “The old-gold girl, and all King’s illusions of 1872, belong to a region of youth and poetry which no longer exists in 1890,” Adams reported to Hay. “The native is rather sympathetic and rather pathetic, but is no longer archaic and as yet affects me little. What is more to the point, I notice that La Farge, in spite of excellent intentions, evidently fails to feel a yearn towards them.”
So surfaced the first signs of Henry’s fear of the fabled sexual powers of Polynesian women: his relief at finding himself unstirred and the validation implicit in La Farge’s indifference. With Hay, Adams pretended that his feelings might change, but a letter he wrote to Lizzie Cameron as he waited for the steamer from Hawaii to Samoa made it plain why the South Seas female held so little appeal. “I still cling to you,” he confessed. Then, as if worried that he had gone too far, he reminded her that he would be “wholly white-haired” when he returned. If she threw him over, he added, “I shall not struggle.”
Lizzie professed not to understand. “You are bound to me in no way,” she insisted. “You went your way free as air and I have no claim on you but the claim of the weak on the strong. It is for you to throw me over, not I you. The dependence is wholly one-sided as proved by your going away.”
Squeezed between Lizzie’s refusal to divorce and Henry’s unwillingness to have a sexual tie to a married woman, their relationship had had little room to flourish in the four years since Henry’s return from Japan. At most, they offered each other safe haven, Lizzie prying Henry loose from his endless introspection and self-doubt, Henry soothing the hurts of her life with a bourbon-soaked tyrant. Now, with thousands of miles and the possibility of years between them, they were inclined to scrutinize their complicated bond. Both of them were afraid—Henry of being dismissed, Lizzie of being loved with an ardor she could not return. Composing her first letter after Henry’s departure, she felt obliged to acknowledge his farewell sonnet on the vain struggle of the waves to embrace the rocks of Eagle Head, but the intensity of the poem made her uneasy. “It isn’t every day that one receives lovely sonnets from distinguished writers!” she chirped. Perhaps feeling that she owed him more, she turned deftly to a subject that was certain to please him. Even without sonnets, she said, she considered him a poet of high order. “Esther makes me doubt if I shall ever find your limitation.” Like Henry’s other intimates, she knew that he cared more for the novel than for the entire nine volumes of his history.
Early in October, after ten days on the heaving Pacific, Adams and La Farge transferred from their steamer to a small schooner for the final leg of the voyage to the Samoan village of Pago-Pago. The boat dropped anchor close to shore, and an ebony giant wearing little but an ivory nose-ring bundled La Farge into a waterproof tarp, slung him over a shoulder, and carried him—flailing and protesting—to the beach. When the giant splashed back to the schooner for his second passenger, the diminutive Adams climbed obediently into his arms and held fast to his neck.
With elaborate courtesy the travelers were escorted to the village guesthouse, where a young girl began grating pepper roots for kava, the traditional drink of Samoa. Coal oil, Adams thought as he drank, and no amount of coconut milk seemed to wash away the taste. La Farge bravely downed his bowl, but only once. For the rest of their stay he would politely accept the kava and leave it undrunk.
In the evening, sitting cross-legged before a kerosene lamp, they witnessed their first siva. Out of the darkness sprang five girls naked to the waist, their bronze skin gleaming with coconut oil. Seated in a row facing their guests, the girls began singing and swaying, clapping their hands and extending their arms in all directions. “La Farge’s spectacles quivered with emotion,” Adams noted. After the performance Henry’s cigars and La Farge’s pipe were fetched from their lodgings, more kava was brewed, and, Henry told Lizzie, “soon we were all sprawling over the mats, smoking, laughing, trying to talk, with a sense of shoulders, arms, legs, cocoa-nut oil, and general nudeness most strangely mixed with a sense of propriety. Anyone would naturally suppose such a scene to be an orgy of savage license. I don’t pretend to know what it was, but I give you my affidavit that we could see nothing in the songs or dances that suggested impropriety…. Unusual as the experience is of half-dressed or undressed women lying about the floor, in all sorts of attitudes, and as likely as not throwing their arms or their shoulders across one as one lies or sits near them, as far as we could see the girls were perfectly good.” At the end of the evening, Adams and La Farge, still in their suits and ties, were commanded to lie on the floor of the guesthouse. The girls covered them with a large mosquito net, left a lamp burning to keep away the evil spirits, and retired to their own well-lighted huts.
When Adams and La Farge moved on to Apia, the capital of Samoa, they sat through siva after siva without seeing any sign of the lewdness that led the missionaries to threaten the dancers with excommunication. For one performance the dancers deferred to the clergy by covering themselves with banana leaves, a gesture that succeeded only in reminding onlookers of “the world and the devil,” Henry thought. Sometimes a dancer favored one of the visitors with a kiss at the end of the performance, an act of boldness invariably followed by an embarrassed flight into the darkness. One evening after the village elders retired, the dancers slipped off their waistcloths for a moment, but even that struck La Farge as “innocent and childish.” Writing to Lizzie about this dance, known as the pai-pai, Henry said only that he had been unaroused. For Hay’s eyes he furnished more detail. After the usual beginning, the pai-pai dancers soon pretended that their waistcloths were about to fall off. “The dancer pretends to tighten it,” Henry said, “but only opens it so as to show a little more thigh, and fastens it again so low as to show a little more hip. Always turning about and moving with the chorus, she repeats this process again and again, showing more legs and hips every time, until the siapa [waistcloth] barely hangs on her, and would fall except that she holds it. At last it falls; she turns once or twice more, in full view; then snatches up the siapa and runs away.” Though Henry admitted that the pai-pai gave him joy, lust seemed out of place. “The audience is far less moved by it than a French audience is by a good ballet. Any European suddenly taken to such a show would assume that the girl was licentious, and if he were a Frenchman he would probably ask for her. The chief would be scandalised at European want of decency.”
John La Farge struggled valiantly to do the impossible: Capture the grace of Samoan dancers on paper.ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER MUSEUM, BOSTON
For La Farge, the graceful dancers furnished as many frustrations as delights. Over and over he tried to sketch the siva, but the lines changed as fast as he could see them. Nor could he capture the shimmering glow of the coconut-palm fire, which bathed the dancers in a “perpetual ripple of light.” Looking at his sketches he decided that the effort to freeze exquisite motion on paper was nothing short of “stupid.”
Adams and La Farge passed most of their days in the village guesthouse, an oval chamber forty feet long with a high thatched roof. Coral gravel covered the earthen floor, and finely woven straw mats covered the coral. The straw panels that served as walls could be
raised and lowered as the weather required. Food was as close as the roof posts, which were hung with oranges and bananas. Eggs were plentiful but elusive: Samoan hens ran free and laid their eggs where they pleased, exhibiting a decided preference for the thick underbrush of the forest at the edge of the village.
The visitors were soon known to everyone in Apia. Young girls came calling, enchanted by such Western appurtenances as the handkerchief and the teaball. As soon as the young women understood that La Farge was not a misonari, they eagerly bared their chests to pose for him, though they seemed constitutionally incapable of sitting still for more than a minute before curiosity compelled them to jump up and admire themselves on the sketch pad. When Adams and La Farge donned the native loincloth, the lava-lava, and headed for the beach, children trailed behind in the hope of glimpsing the exotic Caucasian body parts concealed beneath. Their curiosity amused Adams, but the impeccable La Farge was much troubled by his lava-lava, which kept slipping its knot and floating away.
Thanks to the natives’ familiarity with the John Adams, an American frigate that had once called regularly at Apia, John Adams’s great-grandson and his friend were accorded all the courtesies shown to visiting potentates. The king brought them a large sea turtle, a gift reserved for royalty. But since custom dictated that each present be returned with a more expensive item, the generosity of Samoan chieftains was a mixed blessing. “If I increase my presents, they double theirs,” Henry sighed. “They are ruinously extravagant in such matters and of course expect the same style from me.”
The Five of Hearts Page 25
