The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  The archangel also befriended a group of girls who canned pickles for Crosse and Blackwell. Each week they convened for what King called “Sunday school,” during which he claimed to instruct them in a fashion “not quite orthodox, but not so awfully heterodox either.” When he discovered how little they knew of trees and flowers, theology gave way to botany, with outings to Windsor Castle, where they picnicked in the park. On one of these afternoons they poured a cup of their tea for no less a personage than Queen Victoria.

  Or so King said when he boasted of his subterranean forays to the ladies of Belgravia and the gentlemen in the clubs of Pall Mall. Unlike Clover Adams and Henry James, who contemplated the vastness of London poverty and wondered how long the aristocracy could hold out, King did not raise the subject of barmaids and pickle girls because he burned to discuss social reform. He meant to shock, as he had in the days when he told coarse Western stories to the prigs of Washington. The English, however, were not so easily offended, and since King tended to blush as he narrated his adventures, his listeners had trouble believing that he was the rake he made himself out to be. Listening to his stories, the Adamses’ friend Lady Charlotte Clark concluded that King’s “taste for the borders of the demimonde” was pure affectation.

  What Lady Charlotte did not know was that the tales King carried from the murkiest quarters of London were given a good scrubbing before they reached respectable ears. With Frank Mason, King pretended to woo barmaids for the lofty purpose of writing a book. The Crosse and Blackwell girls were mere backdrop for the heroism of a shining knight who carried light and beauty to the darkness of the slums. Such embroideries helped King disguise an uncomfortable truth: he frequented such places because he could not feel sexually attracted to women unless they were, by nineteenth-century bourgeois standards, his social inferiors. Dark skins aroused him, as did servants, laborers, and prostitutes.

  King had come to his predilections by a tortuous route. Growing up without a father, he had been very close to his mother. While his choice of geology as a profession gave him an escape from her physical presence, her economic dependency and emotional fragility enabled her to cling to him. King grumbled that duty to her came between him and “every good thing,” but his conscious resentment did not begin to encompass the complications of their relationship. Discussing peignoirs with Clover Adams, he had had no idea of what was revealed in his wish to clothe his mother in the image of the adventuress he had met on the Overland Express.

  Since 1869, when maternal pressure forced him to break his engagement to Miss Dean, he had stayed away from women of the sort his mother would see as rivals—Constance Fenimore Woolson, for instance. The most telling aspect of Fenimore’s first meeting with King was not her delight but King’s uncharacteristic silence. Fenimore was yet another forbidden woman, declared off-limits by the most forbidden woman of all, his mother. And since King’s upper-class social life offered him nothing but these forbidden women, it was almost inevitable that he would come to loathe them. Rather than confront his mother, he sought sexual satisfaction in secret, among barmaids and servants. They too were proscribed, but they were unlikely to make demands for marriage.

  King’s appetites were hardly unknown among the gentlemen of his day, and like King, many of the gentlemen who took their pleasures in unrefined purlieus imagined that the underclasses enjoyed freer, richer sex. “You burly lovers on the village green, Yours is a lower, and a happier star!” sang George Meredith, the Victorian novelist and poet. But that was a fantasy of minds rebelling against bourgeois notions of propriety; the pleasures of those who looked for love among the lower classes often exacted a terrible price. On one side were the wrongs committed against the powerless—masters who forced themselves upon servants being the prime example. (“Gentlemen is much greater blackguards than what blackguards is,” noted a girl who sold oranges in the streets of London.) On the other side, those who moved secretly between two worlds carried an immense burden. Clarence King, fearing the opprobrium of his friends, had condemned himself to a life of concealment and half-truths of the sort he told at Lady Charlotte’s dinner table.

  December in Paris was “sour and nasty,” Hay thought, and just before Christmas of 1882 he moved his family south to Cannes. Lonely for King, unimproved by the mineral-spring baths Charcot had prescribed, Hay found Cannes “a madness of toad-eating gaiety.” The one redeeming feature was the presence of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, who was loudly singing the praises of a novel called Democracy. “[H]e says it is the first American book he has read which seems true all round,” Hay reported to Adams. Hay himself, who had just reread it, considered it “far better than these sacres rosbifs Englishmen can possibly know,” though he disputed Henry’s belief that corruption was the deepest evil in American politics. In Hay’s view, the American congressman was “not an especially strong or wicked man. He is—nine times out of ten, simply very ignorant and incapable of wise legislative action.” Even more debilitating to the national good was the requirement that a congressman live in the district he represented. “We have 321 districts,” Hay said. “In 200 of them there is nobody fit for Congress.”

  Inspired by the success of Democracy, Hay had dashed off an anonymous political novel of his own before sailing to Europe. A tale of the conflict between capital and labor, The Bread-Winners had its origins in a wave of railroad strikes that swept the United States in the summer of 1877. In Cleveland Hay had watched with alarm as mobs of “foreign workingmen, mostly Irish” intimidated federal troops, state militias, and politicians, who would not stand up to the strikers for fear of losing their votes.

  Hay set his novel in Buffland, an industrial city not unlike Buffalo or Cleveland, and he populated the town with a host of unappealing characters, including a carpenter’s daughter who spent her days in the library reading about Rothschilds, Astors, and the Polo Club—and went home “loathing her lineage.” Poor Maud Matchin had no way to attract the millionaires she read about and no interest in the common laborers who called on her. “I can’t put my hand in a hand that smells so strong of sawdust,” she said of Sam Sleeny, a would-be suitor who worked for her father.

  A good-hearted dolt, Sam Sleeny was easy prey for Hay’s chief villain, Andrew Jackson Offitt, head of a unionlike brotherhood called the Bread-Winners. When Sam asked how the Bread-Winners would spend his two-dollar initiation fee, Offitt told him it went for “room rent and lights” and for “propagatin’ our ideas, and especially for influencin’ the press.” Even the slow-witted Sleeny suspected that Offitt pocketed the money.

  While Sleeny puzzled over the Bread-Winners, Maud fixed her sights on Captain Arthur Farnham, owner of a new house on Algonquin Avenue, the most elegant thoroughfare in Buffland. Maud went to Farnham for help in winning a job at the library, after which she planned to win Farnham himself. Guessing as much, Farnham tested her with a kiss. Her obvious pleasure led to accusations of larger ambitions, and Maud fled in humiliation. The unprincipled Offitt had been calling on her, and she confided that she would “owe a good deal” to the man who gave Farnham a beating.

  Farnham is beaten but survives, a strike breaks out but stops short of violence, Offitt is murdered, Farnham proposes to the girl next door, and Maud Matchin begins to see the virtues of Sam Sleeny.

  But all this happiness was misleading, the author lectured. Buffland, which refused to engage itself with the issues raised by the strike, was headed for doom. “The rich and prosperous people, as their manner is, congratulated themselves on their escape, and gave no thought to the questions which had come so near to an issue of fire and blood.” They “kept on making money and bringing up children to hate politics as they did, and in fine to fatten themselves as sheep which should be mutton whenever the butcher was ready. There was hardly a millionaire on Algonquin Avenue who knew where the ward meetings of his party were held. There was not an Irish laborer in the city but knew his way to his ward club as well as to mass.”

  By desig
n, Democracy had appeared while Henry and Clover Adams were abroad, and Hay undoubtedly intended to pursue the same strategy with The Bread-Winners. But by February 1883, when the Hays left Cannes for Florence, publication was still months away. The Bread-Winners would run as a serial in the Century magazine, with the first installment to appear in August.

  Florence was wet and gray. Sending a “cordial throb” to Lafayette Square, Hay grumbled that Clara worked him “rather hard,” dragging him to “churches by the dozen.” Hay much preferred the railroad stations, where he invariably spotted the Italian edition of Democracy on the newsstands. In low spirits and uncertain health, Hay was further depressed by word of another blow to the fortunes of his father-in-law. Years before, Amasa Stone had lent his brother $800,000 to start an iron and steel mill, which was now on the verge of collapse. “I cannot say what is best for you to do,” the old man wrote to Hay; “while I am well enough to attend to business all is well but should I get sick it would be well if you were here.” In early March, Stone forwarded $2,000, which he thought might help if Hay decided to come home early. Surrounded by his family but isolated by the need to conceal Stone’s troubles from Clara, Hay felt miserably alone.

  Between churches, he distracted himself with the company of W. D. Howells and the peripatetic Constance Fenimore Woolson. She had reread Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada after meeting King and now suspected that he and Hay had jointly written Democracy. By writing the book together, clever scamps, they had hit upon a strategy that allowed each of them to claim innocence when the question of authorship arose. Hay’s denials failed to persuade her otherwise.

  Hay’s Florentine afternoons with Fenimore were passed mainly in conversation about Henry James. Fenimore, whose novels and stories of the Great Lakes and the American South underwent one painstaking revision after another, had felt awe and despair in equal measure when she learned that the Master did not rewrite. Hay delighted Fenimore by saying that he had as little patience with James’s detractors as with the Boston financiers who dared to question the honor of Clarence King. When American readers complained that James’s short story “The Point of View” was anti-American, Hay acidly noted that no eyebrows would have been raised if James made his home in Chicago instead of London. “Of all vices I hold patriotism the worst when it meddles with matters of taste,” Hay fumed.

  All of this was music to Fenimore, who could hardly wait to share it with the Master. Did he know the depth of Hay’s feelings? she asked James. “I did not, until one day in the Boboli Gardens, when he said—among other things—‘If anyone speaks against James’ writings in my presence, I consign him to contempt. And if anyone speaks against James himself, I immediately hate him.’” And when the lonely Hay confided that wherever King was, “there is my true country, my real home,” Fenimore quickly appropriated the remark to advance her cause with James. “Well,” she wrote him, “that is my feeling with regard to your writings; they are my true country, my real home.”

  Once Clara finished with the churches of Florence, the Hays returned to Cannes, drifting north to Paris and London in the spring. When Henry Adams inquired after Hay’s health, Hay gamely replied that since he had none, he did not talk about it. The Hays would sail home May 10 on the White Star liner Germanic. King talked of going with them, and Hay hoped Henry and Clover would seize the moment for a Five of Hearts reunion at Delmonico’s.

  The Adamses sent their regrets. Henry had no faith that King would come home with the Hays just because he had said he would.

  “[Y]our prophetic soul was right,” Hay admitted at the end of April. Once more the mining negotiations had stopped short of a sale. The geologist had been “harassed beyond measure” and was “far from well,” Hay told Adams. “I am sorry to leave him.”

  Ten months in Europe had done nothing to cure Hay, and he worried deeply about King, but he no longer felt concerned about Amasa Stone. As Clara staged one last raid on the shops of London, Hay paid a visit to the house where Thomas Carlyle had lived. “At your age he suffered precisely as you do—deep nervous depression, persistent indigestion and loss of sleep,” Hay wrote his father-in-law. “Yet he lived to be 86 years of age and the last 25 years of his life were comparatively healthy and free from pain.” Hay had also chanced to meet a hardy octogenarian with a similar history, the misery of his sixties followed by robust health and gay spirits. Sharing these stories with Stone, Hay predicted that his father-in-law’s case would run the same course. “You have so much to live for,” Hay added, “to enjoy the result of good you have done and to continue your career of usefulness and honor.”

  Hay’s encouragement came too late. The day after the Germanic slipped her moorings in Liverpool, Amasa Stone locked himself in his bathroom, climbed into the tub, and fired a bullet into his heart. John and Clara Hay would not get the news until they landed in New York. Imagining their shock, Mark Twain marveled at how “odd and strange and weird all this is. Apparently nothing pleases the Almighty like the picturesque.”

  Henry and Clover read the newspaper accounts of Stone’s sad end but saw no reason to be on the pier when their friends came down the gangway. Perhaps the Adamses concluded that their presence would do more to delay than comfort, or perhaps they shrank from offering the inevitably paltry gift of consolation. The Hays hurried home alone to bury Amasa Stone.

  With family and friends, Henry Adams had always fled from grief, and Stone’s death was no exception. Hastening through his condolences in his next letter to Hay, he made nervous small talk about the manuscript of his history, plans for the summer at Beverly Farms, and Don and Lizzie Cameron. Hay did not seem to mind, probably because he too was feeling evasive. “[I]nexpressible” was the most he would tell the Adamses of his and Clara’s feelings. Nor did he wish to discuss the painful matter of Stone’s ambivalent letters to Europe, cries for help that the proud old man had muffled and Hay had not heard.

  Hay managed to bear the strain for a few weeks, long enough to help the lawyers start sorting through Stone’s affairs. But after a summer of feeling alternately exhausted and inebriated “without hilarity or rum,” he headed to the Colorado Rockies with his old friend George Nicolay. The brisk air at nine thousand feet and the prospect of resuming work on the Lincoln biography filled Hay with a sense of well-being he had not enjoyed for years. He jauntily carved the Five of Hearts emblem on a sandstone boulder beside the names of his “thousand brother idiots,” and he looked forward to entertaining the Adamses when he returned to Cleveland in the fall. Euclid Avenue was not Lafayette Square, but they could wear their new enamel Five of Hearts pins, keepsakes Hay had brought from Europe. Perhaps the gorgeous Rex would be home in time to join them.

  On August 23, 1883, the newly chartered Anglo-Mexican Mining Company of London purchased the Yedras for $1.4 million. Elated, Clarence King decided to postpone his return to America. As managing director of the new enterprise, King would earn $3,000 a year—more than he needed to support his mother’s household. With his profits from the sale and his shares in the new company, King believed that he had at last secured his fortune. The long years in the blistering sun and merciless rains of Mexico were behind him. He could enjoy the “first long dream” of his life, he said, and surrender at last to the impulses of his “art-loving mind.” King treated himself to German and Italian primitives, Dutch oils, and English watercolors. Like Henry and Clover Adams, King particularly admired the rich color and shimmering light of J. M. W. Turner, whose works he had known since his youthful reading of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters. Prowling art galleries in 1883, King happened across the elderly Ruskin, who was selling his own collection of Turners in order to raise money for social causes. As Hay told Howells, Ruskin “poured lyric toffey all over” King and invited the geologist to his home in the Lake District. Two Turners still hung on Ruskin’s walls. When the critic offered his guest a choice, King allowed that “One good Turner deserves another” and bought them both.

  King’s art-lovi
ng mind also entertained fancies of writing political fictions in the manner of Henry Adams and John Hay. With mounting impatience, King had listened to the swells of London laugh at the vulgarity and corruption of the society portrayed by Democracy. Whatever the flaws of the New World, King felt that they were dwarfed by the inequalities of England, where society was “sharply divided into a little heaven of exclusive people” and “a big hopeless hell of common people to whom all doors are shut save the grave and America.” King conceded that Democracy was clever but thought its moral “untrue.” In his eyes, the protagonist, Madeleine Lee, was even more provincial than the Midwestern politicians whom she and her creator deplored. “The real moral,” King told Hay, “is that in a Democracy, all good, bad, and indifferent are thrown together in the circling eddy of political society and the person within the whole field of view who has the least perception, who most sadly flaunts her lack of instinct, her inability to judge of people without the labels of old society” was Madeleine Lee.

  Proposing to write a sequel called Monarchy or Aristocracy, King envisioned sending Mrs. Lee to London “in search of the fine old English code of society, morals, and statesmanship.” His cast would include a member of Parliament as corrupt as Henry’s Senator Ratcliffe; a married lord who poured vast sums into a theater for his mistress, a ballerina; and the Prince of Sharks, whose title was a labored pun on a labored pun—the Prince of “Whales.” Mrs. Lee would find London as disillusioning as Washington.

  A week after laying out this grand scheme, King retreated. “I take back all I said about writing a pendant for Democracy,” he told Hay. “I won’t do it. I am not clever enough, and I feel too deeply to write well on a national novel.” The harp of Henry Adams, King seemed to suggest, was not so finely tuned. Months later, talking about the book as if he had never dropped it, King reported that he had not yet written a line of Aristocracy, but it was “getting into fair shape.”