The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  More than once today I have reflected seriously whether I ought not at once to turn round and go back to Ceylon. As I am much the older and presumably the one of us two who is responsible for whatever mischief can happen, I feel as though I had led you into the mistake of bringing me here, and am about to lead you into the worse mistake of bringing me home. Not that I take a French view of the matter, or imagine you to be in the least peril of falling into the conventional dilemmas of the French heroines; but because, no matter how much I may efface myself or how little I may ask, I must always make more demand on you than you can gratify, and you must always have the consciousness that, whatever I may profess, I want more than I can have. Sooner or later the end of such a situation is estrangement, with more or less disappointment and bitterness. I am not old enough to be a tame cat; you are too old to accept me in any other character. You were right last year in sending me away, and if I had the strength of mind of an average monkey, and valued your regard at anything near its true price, I should guard myself well from running so fatal a risk as that of losing it by returning to take a position which cannot fail to tire out your patience … but … as I have learned to follow fate with docility surprising to myself, I shall come back gaily, with a heart as sick as ever a man had who knew that he should lose the only object he loved because he loved too much. I am quite prepared to have you laugh at all this, and think it one of my morbid ideas. So it is; all my ideas are morbid, and that is going to be your worst trouble, as I have always told you. Yet I would give you gladly as many opal and diamond necklaces as Mr Cameron would let you wear if I could only for once look clear down to the bottom of your mind and understand the whole of it. I lie for hours wondering whether you, out on the dark ocean, in surroundings which are certainly less cheerful than mine, sometimes think of me, and divine or suspect that you have undertaken a task too hard for you; whether you feel that the last month has proved to be—not wholly a success, and that the fault is mine for wanting more than I had a right to expect; whether you are almost on the verge of regretting a little that you tried the experiment; … whether you are fretting, as I am, over what you can and what you cannot do; whether you are not already a little impatient with me for not being satisfied, and for not accepting in secret, as I do accept in pretence, whatever is given me, as more than enough for any deserts or claims of mine; and whether in your most serious thoughts, you have an idea what to do with me when I am again on your hands…. French novels are not the only possible dramas. One may be innocent as the angels, yet as unhappy as the wicked; and I, who would lie down and die rather than give you a day’s pain, am going to pain you the more, the more I love.

  After a week of brooding among the crumbled walls of the medieval abbey, Henry told Lizzie that he wished he had been born in the Middle Ages. “Progress has much to answer for in depriving weary and broken men and women of their natural end and happiness; but even now I can fancy myself contented in the cloister, and happy in the daily round of duties, if only I still knew a God to pray to, or better yet, a Goddess; for as I grow older I see that all the human interest and power that religion ever had, was in the mother and child, and I would have nothing to do with a church that did not offer both. There you are again! you see how the thought always turns back to you.”

  17

  House of Madness

  Reluctant to subject himself to the emotional predicaments of Washington, Henry wandered from Wenlock Abbey to the Scottish castle of his friend Sir John Clark, back to Wenlock and London, and on to Paris, where he dined alone on Christmas Eve. His cri de coeur had drawn no response, and when he reported, with some amusement, that Sir John thought he should take a wife, Lizzie delivered a second blow by rushing to agree. “You ought to marry,” she declared in her first letter from Lafayette Square. “And it is I who say it to you! But I have never thought otherwise, not for one moment. Women are not so cheap and worthless as you think them and fine noble characters do exist who could become that other self about which you used to talk.”

  La Farge’s reacquaintance with reality was less crushing but no more triumphant. For fifteen blissful months, with Adams underwriting their travels, the artist had been spared the indignities of earning a living. He returned to a desk piled high with unpaid bills and menacing letters from creditors. To stave off the fiercest threats, he was forced to sell one of his favorite sketches of the siva to Isabella Stewart Gardner, the Boston collector, for $2,000.

  Clarence King was thrilled to see La Farge again, gloom and all. The artist was “more and more an interesting phase of humanity,” King wrote to Hay from the Century Club in January 1892. “In Polynesia he evidently did not fully realize the sex side of the great problem of primitive culture. Once back here the women begin to grate on his relaxed and comforted nerves and he reacts instantly by hating them. They annoy and irritate him beyond words, and he begins to reflect and cry out that the brown sister of the palm grove didn’t exasperate him at all, and he turns and rends the blizzards that blow into his studio door and then comes up to the Century and talks as I have for years.” Though it seemed to King that the South Seas had heightened La Farge’s sensitivity (and left him “more unfitted than ever for the practical side of his work”), King still felt that the essence of Polynesia had eluded La Farge: “it is the droll germs of civilization not the full stature of naturalism which have captivated him. I could see with Henry that what delighted him were the things he could be sure the Dona [Lizzie Cameron] would appreciate and enjoy—in short the primitive culture. With La Farge it is the gay naif’s faltering first steps in social matters that tickle his sense of humor just as a very clever man is charmed with the little ways of children.”

  Months later, when Tati Salmon came to the United States, King could not resist quizzing him on the Tahitian view of Adams and La Farge. “It is just what I outlined to you when they were in the islands,” King told Hay, delighted to have his suspicions confirmed. “They classed them as either angels or demigods without passions or sentiments…. Other white men wanted women and didn’t care a damn for legends and ghosts. They wanted legends and ghosts and didn’t care a damn for women. The like was never seen before and all the old women came to the front and the gamy ones kept in the dark. But, said Tati, coiling his huge anaconda-like arm around me and making my ribs crack, ‘If either of them had given me the wink I would have shown them a world they never dreamed of’”

  The Tahiti of Paul Gauguin, who arrived three days after the departure of Adams and La Farge, would have been much more to King’s liking. Gauguin soon shared his hut with a thirteen-year-old girl, easily persuading his conscience that she was “the equivalent of eighteen or twenty in Europe.” He admired the Salmon family and apparently gave Tati the wink, for he had no difficulty in seeing the erotic entertainments that Adams preferred to think ancient history. Putting the matter as delicately as possible in his South Seas memoir, Noa-Noa, Gauguin told of nude dancers who whirled round and round the king, aiming to “touch certain parts of his body with certain parts of theirs…. The peaceful island vibrates with frightful cries. The falling evening shows the fantastic spectacle of a multitude in ecstatic madness.” (La Farge had little use for Gauguin’s words or his pictures. Noa-Noa was “foolish,” he told Adams when he read it in 1906, and the paintings seemed “driven to do something to attract attention. Even their own attention.”)

  For King, Tati and the South Seas represented a dream not only of uninhibited sex but of escape—from the conflicts of his secret life with Ada, from a seemingly endless string of business failures, from the demands of his hypersensitive mother and her stormy household, from scientific disappointment, and from civilization in general, which he regarded as an assault on human nerves. Since 1889, King’s financial affairs had been locked in a downward spiral. Profits at the Sombrerete mine in Mexico, never robust, disappeared entirely as a result of a long, steady decline in the price of silver. In the spring of 1890 King raced to England in search of
new capital, but before he could succeed, his partners sold control of the mine to investors in Kansas City.

  A partnership with Charles Adams fared no better. As president of the Union Pacific, Charles retained the geologist to evaluate coal deposits and had promised a commission whenever the railroad made a purchase. But when a stock market crash in 1890 forced a reorganization of the Union Pacific, Charles was cashiered and King’s services were no longer required. “[T]hat coal arrangement which he had cooked up with your brother Charles, and which he looked forward to as a provision for his declining years, has gone to Hades,” Hay told Henry. So, apparently, had five of King’s business associates. The “tornado of falling stocks” carried off three of them, a fourth perished in a train wreck. The last suffered a fate unknown, but, said Hay, “each in his agony kicked over a full pail of milk which King had been a year in drawing.”

  A Clarence King defeat always seemed to trace the same arc: just as he prepared to harvest his riches, they were snatched away. By King’s account, the Sombrerete had been sold at the very moment he had reached an understanding with European financiers. Now five unexpected deaths had obliterated a year of hard work. Fortune kept one step ahead no matter how swiftly he ran. Not for him the self-flagellation of Charles Adams, who willingly shouldered the blame for the Union Pacific debacle. “I lack combativeness,” Charles admitted. “I get into a fight easily enough; but, being in it, I lack desperate courage. Neither am I alert and ready. I fail because I cannot make up my mind on the instant and my reserves are not at my command.” King preferred to fault the malign hand of destiny.

  Hay knew that hedonism and distractability contributed heavily to King’s bad luck, but he was inclined to explain his friend’s troubles in kinder terms. “He handles vast interests but cares so little for money that he gains very little,” Hay wrote W. D. Howells in 1890, when King went to Cuba to scout minerals for American investors. “A touch of avarice would have made him a Vanderbilt. A touch of plodding industry would have made him anything he chose. Yet I fear he will die without anything except to be a great scientist and the sweetest-natured creature the Lord ever made,—but, come to think of it, that’s something.”

  As the year drew to a close, King seemed as chipper as ever, though Hay worried that his ruin was permanent. Hay had cheerfully advanced him more than $100,000, which King secured with his art collection, scientific books, and stock in the El Paso National Bank. The bank had been organized by King and some friends a few years before in the hope of catching a boom as El Paso grew into a railroad hub. Hay had also done what he could to shore up King’s professional reputation, using his influence as an alumnus of Brown University to arrange an honorary LL.D. for the geologist in 1890. But neither loans nor laurels seemed to help. “Every struggle he makes in his world of finance gets him deeper in the mire, costs him something of life as well as of money,” Hay had fretted in a letter to the South Seas. “It would be an advantage to his pocket as well as his immortal soul to drop everything and go sailing away to you and happiness. I think I would have the inertia to go with him, if he and my wife gave me a good shove. But he will not go.”

  Ostensibly King refused because of a fresh crisis at his mother’s house in Newport. His half-sister Marian Howland was about to marry a young artillery officer against Florence King Howland’s wishes. As Mrs. Howland had told Clara Hay in a letter announcing the engagement, she held the lieutenant in the highest regard but deplored a career that “dooms my daughter to poverty and homelessness…. The grim realities of arithmetic are veiled by the rosy mists of joyful hope.” King felt he ought to be on hand after Marian’s wedding in case their mother broke down. True to form, Mrs. Howland suffered from insomnia and frayed nerves for months, forcing Clarence to divide his time between New York and Newport.

  But there were deeper reasons for passing up a trip to the South Seas in 1891. On January 24 King became a father for the second time, when a daughter was born to James and Ada Todd of 291 Hudson Street in Brooklyn. King named the baby Grace, probably in memory of the infant sister who had died when he was six.

  In the year before Grace Todd’s birth, King had taken lengthy business trips to Colorado, Cuba, Europe, and the Mother Lode country of California. Ada, believing him to be a Pullman porter, did not doubt the necessity of his long absences, but she could not help wishing that he spent more time with her. In one of the few letters to survive their relationship, King tried to assuage her disappointment with a reminder of their need for caution. “My darling, I know all your feelings,” he told her. “I know just how you love me and how you miss me and how you long for the days and nights to come again when we can lie together and let our love flow out to each other and full hearts have their way. Your letter gave me true joy. I read it over and over and felt like a new man.” He had stayed away, he explained, for fear of being seen by people who might do them harm. “The most important thing to us of all others is that the property which will one day come to me shall not be torn away from us by some foolish, idle person talking about us and some word getting to my old aunt. For the sake of your darling babies we must keep this secret of our love and our lives from the world.” James Todd’s old aunt, like James Todd himself, was a convenient fiction: if a mining bonanza ever did materialize for Clarence King, James Todd could claim that he had finally come into his inheritance.

  Except for the vigils at his mother’s bedside, King stayed closer to home in 1891, leaving New York only for short jaunts to Boston, Lake Sunapee, and Washington. His Mexican mining failures and devil-may-care reputation hampered new business prospects, and red ink continued to stream into his ledgers. Embarrassed that he had not yet squared his account with Hay, he blamed the problem on his obligations to his mother, “who had four times previously in her life seen everything swept away and who is, I know, incapable of standing another great shock in life. She has suspected that I have been in trouble but I have been forced to keep up appearances with her.” Mulling the alternatives, King thought he could auction his art and his geology books, but he feared that that “would be an open advertisement of my ruin and hence enormously decrease the opportunities for further business.” A better tack might be to sell the El Paso National Bank stock, which would cover his debts without creating untoward publicity. “I think I shall decide that way but will consider details and act soon,” he promised Hay.

  The strains of supporting two families on borrowed money drove King from one geological consulting assignment to another, and with no hope of a rest in the South Pacific or anywhere else, he burrowed into an old refuge: intellectual endeavor. Four years earlier, just before his sham wedding to Ada, he had kept up his nerve by composing “Artium Magister,” a critique of higher learning. This time he threw himself into the task of writing “The Education of the Future” for the March 1892 issue of Forum.

  In a single generation, America had progressed from barbarism to “Philistine vulgarity,” King observed. As soon as modern men understood the value of science, they made the error of leaving the classics behind. “Science found education blundering peacefully along, cultivating half of the mind with charming results and letting the other die of disuse: it worked the startling miracle of electrifying this dead half into life and bringing it to perfect activity; and straightaway, satisfied with this remarkable achievement, it proceeded to neglect the ideal half which the classics had made so much of, drove it into disuse, and caused it to perish. It has substituted a new sort of half-man for the old one.”

  Marveling at the speed with which the discoveries of physics were converted to practical use, King predicted, “Energy will be made cheap. Flight through the upper air will be a daily matter of course.” But he bewailed the lack of similar progress in the biological sciences. “We have been quick to adopt railways, but we cannot realize heredity; we have eagerly put our ear to the telephone, and been wilfully deaf to the voice of science which is offering to tell us how to make our own children strong and fair…. We a
ccept the army of incompetence, of insanity and disease, as a burden from Providence, and think ourselves very virtuous for liberally wasting the pound of cure when the ounce of prevention is utterly neglected. This is the age of energy; next will be the age of biology.”

  King rambled from one abstraction to another, pointed out the flaws in classical and Renaissance precepts of education, and abruptly concluded that “science will do with education whatever it sees fit.” Educators themselves would be the last to devise a remedy for the present deficiencies. The answer, whatever it was, would come “out of biology and psychology. It will be the magnificent gift of science.”

  As in the past, King’s essay mattered less as social comment than as a source of clues to the author’s tempestuous life. His hopes for advances in biology and psychology undoubtedly sprang from the disordered nerves he saw in his mother’s family, and the death of his young son Leroy, which probably occurred in 1891, may have inspired his wish to know how to “make our own children strong and fair.” The essay also offered a revealing glimpse of King’s struggle, in the face of mounting odds, to persuade himself not to abandon his first mistress, science. There was no “truer hero,” he said, “than an investigator who never loses heart in a life-long grapple with the powers of the universe. It requires courage of the highest order to stand for years face to face with one of the enigmas of nature; to interrogate patiently, and hear no answer; to try all known methods and weapons of attack, and yet see the lips of the sphinx compressed in stony immobility; to invoke the uttermost powers of imagination; to fuse the very soul in the fire of effort, and still press the listening ear against a wall of silence. It is easier to die in the breach.”

  The financial disasters of 1890 rekindled King’s old ambition to join the ranks of these true heroes by making a lasting contribution to geology. In the late 1870s, as the Fortieth Parallel crew finished writing up the results of its pioneering survey, King, at his own expense, had outfitted a sophisticated laboratory to gather the data he needed to test a hypothesis on the upheaval and subsidence of the earth’s surface. If he succeeded, he thought he would be able to determine the age of the earth. A British scientist, Lord Kelvin, speculated that the earth had begun in a molten state and was still in the process of cooling. Lord Kelvin theorized that the earth’s temperature was hottest at the core and cooled gradually toward the surface. King began where Lord Kelvin left off, imagining a thick couche, or bed, forty or fifty miles beneath the earth’s surface. As molten substances flowed along the underside of the couche, they forced it to expand, which ultimately pushed new mountains through the earth’s crust.