But even this friendship, imperfect as it was, soon came to a tragic end. Pollard died in Baltimore, December 7, 1911. His death was a great blow even to Bierce, whose reaction to death had been dulled by hard usage. He was stubbornly adamant about Pollard’s death, as though he would stifle his suffering by the harshness of brusque statement. He wrote to Howes, announcing the fact of Pollard’s death, and added: “That is all I feel like writing.” A few days later he wrote again to Howes: “You would hardly care to have in memory the image of Pollard that I must carry for life. You’d not have recognized that handiwork of death. Poor Percy! he must have suffered horribly to become like that. Well, we put him into the furnace, as he would have wished, and there is no more Percy.” He was determined that nothing should matter, but there is a fatal hesitancy about that “well.” He attended the funeral in company with Mr. Mencken, who recalls that he wore an “elegant plug-hat,” and told some curious anecdotes on the way to the crematory, chiefly of morgues, dissecting-rooms, and lonely churchyards.
The horrible image of Pollard’s face, writhed in agony, haunted Bierce for days. The giddy emptiness of life — a buzzing and unnecessary annoyance — outlined against the sharp drop-curtain of death. Nothing remained for him but death, and he had been thinking of it more and more during these last idle years in Washington. How futile and misspent and absurd his life now seemed! A little fame, a little useless and annoying notoriety, and then this awful fatuous existence in an apartment house! It was better when Sherman was marching to Georgia or when Grant was surprised at Shiloh: a life of wild, exciting and dramatic action. How long, Lord, how long? He was “suffering only from life and that would bring its own cure”; “nothin’ doin’ here — same old dreary round of religious duties tempered by temptations to murder my fool fellow citizens.” It was at this time, too, that he wrote Mrs. McCrackin that “fear of death is the invention of a humorist,” recalling Beddoes’ lines:
“For Death is more a ‘jest’ than life: you see
Contempt grows quick from familiarity.
I owe this wisdom to Anatomy.”
Bierce owed his wisdom to a slightly different experience than that of a German medical school, but it was anatomical in its way. There was material enough for the students of anatomy at Shiloh.
Two letters to Howes of about this time are suggestive of his desire to run away from an engulfing boredom and ennui. In one letter he said: “In your place I’d go west — to Arizona, New Mexico — anywhere west — and do any old thing I could get to do. Even if you should not ‘succeed,’ it is no hardship to be poor in the west; and you’ll not know the joy of living till you ‘cut’ cities. Sell the books and just go, relying on luck. Nobody suffers real privations in a new country.” For Bierce this impatient eagerness for life in the “rough” and a return to nature via Rousseau, was strange indeed. He was, again, transposing ideas in his imagination. It was not that he desired a new experience, or a new land, but that he wanted to find the key that would lead him back to the vital current of existence. Another letter to Howes contains a revealing passage: “In the west is room enow to expand the mind and heart.... Even at my age I feel the ‘call of it,’ and it is among the probabilities that I shall not ‘return to civilization’ when I again get out of the reek of it.” The letter is dated April 26, 1912. His plan of escape was already completed in his mind. There is no questioning the ominous ring of the passages in quotations marks, particularly that phrase, “return to civilization.” How often has it been used with reference to him since 1913!
During the spring of 1912 he made a trip to Richmond in company with Mr. Neale and Miss Christiansen. The south was for him always a land peopled with strange figures of dreams and stalked by spectres. “Richmond,” how that name had sounded when whispered or shouted in 1865! Now it seemed quiet and indolent and full of sleep. Could it be possible? It made him question the veracity of his senses. And he wrote to Sterling: “I went to Richmond, a city whose tragic and pathetic history, of which one is reminded by everything that one sees there, always gets on my nerves with a particular dejection. True, the history is some fifty years old, but it is always with me when I’m there, making solemn eyes at me.” The fifty years seemed but a slight cæsura: what mattered were the accented moments when life was lifted by chance to the level of great poetry.
He was no sooner back from Richmond than he left for California. How many times had he made this circuit? How many times had hope alternated with despair, and despair with hope, as he journeyed back and forth across this continent! It was a dreary and tedious business, but this was to be his last trip. He was resolved to say farewell. It was really one trip too often for he found that the scenes had changed. He went to Lake Tahoe and met one evening a lady he had known in Oakland. They were driven into her cabin by a harsh and biting wind and they drank to San Francisco as they tried to forget the disagreeable and deserted lake resort. But San Francsico was no better. Like his second trip to the battlefields, this return visit to California was disappointing. He should have known the psychological inevitability of disappointment under these circumstances. A sensation may be recaptured by visiting old scenes that once have been memorable by mere association. But the experience will not recur a second or a third time.
Moreover, there had actually been quite a change in California since 1910. During his absence, Christian Science had bitten old friends like a pestilence. He would greet people with the salutation: “Well, are you also a believer in white magic?” The Hall of Truth in Oakland, conducted by Mrs. Lillitz, had taken in many an old pupil, admirer, and friend. One evening when Mrs. Lillitz was asking for names to be made the subject of prayer an unidentified voice suggested “Ambrose Bierce,” and a prayer was offered for his soul. By 1912 several of Bierce’s favorites were practitioners and even his daughter had joined the circle. He smiled when she remonstrated with him about his skepticism. “Bib” (his name for her), he would say, “has the greatest gift of all: the gift of happiness.”
It was not altogether the “white magic” that annoyed him. A Radical Club had been formed at Piedmont, and even George Sterling was flirting with the fatal heresy of socialism. As far as Bierce was concerned, they were all “anarchists.” Even his nephew and niece talked dangerously of “conditions” and he told them, with calm but definite certainty, that if they became “anarchists” they would lose a patient uncle and he a beloved nephew and niece. He was out of tune with things: he was actually relegated to the armchair in the lobby of his hotel in Oakland. Sterling added to socialism a harum-scarum theory about “free love” which disgusted Bierce, who wrote: “I’m thinking of cutting Sterling — he gets on my nerves.” George sent him a poem from Carmel with the request that he show it to a mutual friend. Bierce returned it with an angry note, in which he said that he would not think of showing such a poem to a lady! It was too fleshly for Bierce. This was followed by the famous swimming-pool episode in which Bierce threatened Sterling if he dared go swimming in the nude. He should have been more tolerant: George was something of a jester and had an insatiable mania for nakedness. He once created an international sensation by a midnight plunge in Golden Gate Park after a lily, and he scandalized several masked balls in San Francisco by appearing in a leopard’s skin. However amusing this might have been to Sterling, it grated on Bierce’s nerves. He could not tolerate sensationalism. He visited Sterling at Carmel for a few hours, and wrote in George’s guest book: “Nothing to say.” It was literally true.
His friends observed that he had aged noticeably since his last visit. In two years he had become an “old man.” One lady remarked that even on his second visit he seemed as alert and manly as ever when he called. But the next day she saw him crossing a street in town, when he was unaware of her presence. She was shocked by his appearance, for he was bent, walked stiffly, and carried a cane. His voice sounded “old” for the first time. He told Eva Crawford that he was “sleepy for death” and that he “was going away.” His su
mmer was taken up with one visit after another in which he repeated this message. The details varied to some extent, but generally the message was the same and it was definitely “farewell.” He was determined to make this visit the last and he wanted to leave this impression. All his friends seemed to realize that he walked in a constant shadow, but nothing definitely was said about his plans.
One evening he invited Mr and Mrs. Roosevelt Johnson to his hotel for dinner. They had a very pleasant evening. When they left, Bierce, said “good-by” in a manner that impressed them both with its tone of finality. As they were crossing the street in front of the hotel, they turned and gazed back at Bierce. He was standing in the doorway, the light streaming from behind. His figure, clad in black, with a suggestion of white about the cuffs and collar, appeared as sharply outlined as though it were set in a frame. As they turned, he lifted his hand in a gesture that said “farewell” even more definitely than his last words.
By October he was again in Washington. The journey had been almost disastrous. He was stricken with asthma while en route, and had been forced to make short stop-overs in order to complete the journey. It had been a bad summer, and he returned to his apartment more determined than ever that he must leave Washington and never return. He had made his usual pilgrimage up the Napa Valley to St. Helena. It had been warm and sultry out in that barren cemetery as old “Charley” Jackson had shown him about the ground. The “Bierce” lot had been removed, as he had instructed two years previously. It was now a square plot of raised earth marked with four palm trees. There were no inscriptions, monuments, or stones. Day, Leigh, and Mollie Bierce... St. Helena... Howell Mountain... shadows and echoes. It really had ceased to matter. He was quiet and gray and sad, but he no longer felt the anguish that he had once thought unforgettable. He left hurriedly for Oakland, telling the sexton that he was “going into Mexico” and that the graves were to be attended with the money that he left for their care. There was a finality about this last trip. Every task had been attended; his affairs were in order. The few old friends had been told farewell, and there was nothing more to say or do. He no longer had a single interest in California. The first visit had been pleasant and amusing, but the second was quite disappointing. It was ever the case with Bierce. He was shambling across the continent again, but he knew with the unquestionable certainty of all great determinations, that this would be the last trip. If he was to be deceived by alluring vistas again, it would be in the South, where there was “something new under an old sun.”
In Washington, again, he had resumed the same round of puerile tasks. The “Collected Works” were “out of my system” and he took some satisfaction in knowing that the edition was completed before he “passed on.” There were spurts of activity, on occasion, as when he wrote to a friend that he had recovered from the “wobbles” and that there was “life in the old dog yet.” There was life enough to write several sharp letters about the new régime in Washington. This fellow Wilson wrote better than the others, but he sounded specious at times. As for Walter Hines Page: “He has done some of the loftiest and hardiest lying that has been heard on this orb in many a year anent pensions.” He felt restless and read the papers about the situation in Mexico with interest. It looked like a real fight might ensue. It was about time. Every generation had its baptism of fire, and his shadow had stretched far into the second generation. He corresponded with Carranza and announced to friends that he “liked the fellow.” He could not believe all the talk that he heard about Mexico. He decided to go down below Juarez and view the scene for himself. The news of war was broken, however, with amusing incidents as when George Harvey invited him to attend a dinner in honor of William Dean Howells. It seemed like a post-mortem laurel for Bierce, who had always been, as Robert Barr observed, “too full of original hell to succeed in a Presbyterian world,” and the world was going Presbyterian just then.
Later in the year, Bierce left for a visit with his daughter who was then living in Bloomington, Illinois. When she had first announced to her father that she lived in this city, he sent her a telegram: “Why Bloomington!” He brought with him a box of letters, papers and documents, and left a trunkful of unassorted papers. It was a pleasant visit over a period of about two weeks. The daughter was impressed with his excellent health; in fact, he told her that he had never felt better. But, despite his good health, he seemed vaguely uneasy and was determined that he would “go away.” Just at dusk one evening they were sitting on the veranda of Mrs. Cowden’s home. An old man walked along the street in front of the house: bent, shambling, forlorn. An involuntary grimace passed over Bierce’s face. There was a prolonged pause in their conversation, as she noticed that he was disturbed. Then, after a moment, he said: “Bib, did you notice that old man? I’ll never be like that! It is not merely the personal humiliation of age that I resent but the fact that it discommodes others. Old people are cranky and fussy and infernal bores.” Both Mr and Mrs. Cowden remonstrated and assured him that he could come and live with them in Bloomington, but he only smiled enigmatically and began to talk of other things. His insouciance did not, however, deceive his daughter.
She had several long chats with her father during this visit. One evening they were discussing some former acquaintance who had disappointed all his friends by his rather contemptible conduct. Mrs. Cowden chided her father about his indignation. Why should he, who was so “cynical,” care about what another did, particularly when “nothing matters”? Moreover, she volunteered, the man in question could scarcely have kept from doing what he did. Bierce was immediately serious. “That’s all rot! Why, Bib, a long time ago I came to realize that a man could be a gentleman if he once made up his mind. As a youngster before and immediately after the war, I did many things that I would not approve of to-day. But there came a time when I determined that to be a gentleman was one of the few worthy ambitions in a man’s life, and I found that it could be done.”
He also told her of his plans. “Why should I remain in a country that is on the eve of woman’s suffrage and prohibition? You are well provided for and my proofreading stunt — four years of it — is over. In America you can’t go east or west any more, or north, the only avenue of escape is south. I’m going back to Washington and make preparations to leave. I’ll take some letters along with me and strike the border near El Paso. It will be easy enough to get along. I’m going to buy a donkey and hire a peon. I can see what’s doing; perhaps write a few articles about the situation; and then pass to the west coast of Mexico. From there I can go to South America, cross the Andes and ship to England. This fighting in Mexico interests me. I want to go down and see if these Mexicans shoot straight.”
There were questions which he did not answer. He seemed to prefer a vague understanding of his plans to any forthright explanation. His daughter knew him well enough not to remonstrate or to argue. She was worried and alarmed, but, as was always the case, she did not, or could not, change his determination. She could see that there was more to his determination to leave than a mere desire to see Mexico. But he was not morbid or pessimistic. He seemed quite cheerful, as though he were humming to himself. And well he might, for he was excited and enchanted with life once more.
One thing she did ask him about. Had he not been happy in Washington? Why should he want to leave? Washington, he announced, was the city of bores and fools. He was sick of the place. It palled on him. For thirteen years he had been a spectator, watching the idle game of politicians masquerading as statesmen. He was thoroughly disgusted with the scene and eager to leave. New York offered no greater divertissement. Why, he had walked the streets in New York, after Leigh’s death, gazing at buildings, counting objects, doing anything to keep from thinking about his own personal sorrow. He avoided seeing even his few friends on these occasions, as they were “shameless” about their happiness and reveled “indecently” in their bliss in his presence. No, he had not been particularly happy in Washington.
While in Bloomington, he
took a keen interest in Mrs. Cowden’s two step-sons, Henry and Victor. One of the boys was interested in drawing and used to show his sketches to Bierce. Bierce was delighted, commented upon them, and, when he returned to Washington, sent the boy a sketchbook and some Japanese prints. He wrote that the prints were in excellent taste: they were simple, full of health, and saw reality as it should be seen, — from a distance.
The visit was at an end. He told his daughter “good-by” in a smiling and cheerful manner and said that he would write from Mexico. When he told his daughter good-by, the period of leave-taking and adieus was at an end. Was it not better that he should leave in this manner? Nothing is ever irrelevant, as one of Mr. Huxley’s characters has announced, and that is a great mystery and a paradox.
CHAPTER XIX. “THE GOOD, GOOD DARKNESS”
BY THE spring of 1913, Bierce began to prepare for his journey. His letters from May, 1913, throughout the summer, reveal a definite determination to go into Mexico, although not all of them are as explicit as the note to Mr. Roosevelt Johnson which closes with the phrase that he was “dressed for death.” The trip had been a matter of much thought; he had toyed with the idea of running away from old age as early as 1899. Troubled and annoyed by the thought of a general and gradual atrophy, he resented the casual deadening of the faculties which age used as an opiate. He wanted to meet death while he was sentient. Having rebelled so long against life, he could scarcely have been expected to acquiesce in what is rather facetiously known as a “natural” death.
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 372