The Home Life of Poe Part 8

In "_A Dream_" he thus again alludes to her:

"That holy dream, that holy dream, When all the world was chiding, Hath cheered me like a lovely beam A lonely spirit guiding.

"What though that light through storm and night Still trembles from afar?

What could there be more purely bright Than truth's day-star?"

About the same time he wrote the lines, "_To My Mother_," the only one of his poems in which he alluded to his wife, concluding with the couplet:

"By that infinitude which made my wife Dearer unto my soul than its own life."

It will be observed that the sentimental things, in both prose and verse, which Poe has written concerning his love for his wife--and they are but two or three at most--were written immediately after his affair with Mrs. Osgood and the universal charge against him that he had deserted a dying wife for her sake. It is impossible that at this remote period of time it could be understood how seriously--from all contemporaneous accounts--Poe's reputation was affected by this unfortunate episode; especially at the North, where it was best known.

When Miss Poe left Fordham, in July, she carried with her a letter from Mrs. Clemm to Mr. John Mackenzie, soliciting pecuniary aid for Edgar on plea of his wretched health. Mr. Mackenzie was at this time married and with a family of his own, but he never lost his interest in his old friend or ceased to a.s.sist him so far as was in his power.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE SHADOW AT THE DOOR.

During the winter and succeeding summer matters did not improve at the cottage. Poe, with health completely shattered and spirits horribly depressed, remained at home with his sick wife for the most part, only occasionally arousing himself to write. A lady, who was at this time a little girl and one of Virginia's visitors, afterward told a reporter of how she would sometimes see Mr. Poe writing at his table in the upstairs room, and how as each sheet was finished he would paste it on to the last one, until it was long enough to reach across the floor. Then she would venture to roll it up for him in a neat cylinder, taking care not to disturb him. Sometimes, when he was not employed, he would tell the children blood-curdling stories of ghouls and goblins, when his eyes would light up in a wonderful manner. "I lost my heart to those beautiful eyes," she said.

Mrs. Clemm continued to make the rounds of the editors' offices with these ma.n.u.scripts, but met with little success. Poe's mind was not at its brightest. He was not in a writing mood; and, as has been since observed, he was reduced to the expedient of rewriting and altering certain smaller articles and offering them to the more obscure papers and journals. Mrs. Clemm, in the midst of her manifold duties, could do but little with her sewing in the way of support for the family. So her furniture went, piece by piece, the furniture which Miss Poe had so often described--the parlor box-lounge upon which she slept; the dining-table, which stood in the midst of the room, ready for the meal which was so seldom placed upon it; the large engraving above the mantelpiece, and the collection of sea-sh.e.l.ls--all disappeared, until the once cosey little apartment presented a bare and poverty-stricken appearance. Mrs. Gove, one of the literary women of the day, described it as being furnished with only a checked matting, a small corner-stand, a hanging-shelf of books and four chairs.

Years afterward, when strangers would visit the cottage at Fordham, they would hear from the neighbors pathetic accounts of the family during this summer of 1846.

"We knew that they were poor," said one, "but they tried to keep it to themselves. Many a time I have wanted to send them things from my garden, but was afraid to do so."

One old dame said to a New York reporter: "I've known when they were out of provisions, for then Mrs. Clemm, who always seemed cheerful, would come out with a basket and a s.h.i.+ning case-knife and go 'round digging greens (dandelions). Once I said to her, says I, 'Greens may be took too frequent.' 'Oh, no,' says she, smiling, 'they cool the blood, and Eddie likes them.'"

Thus poor Mrs. Clemm, with her a.s.sumed cheerfulness, would seek to produce the impression that their dinner of wild herbs was a matter of choice instead of necessity.

Another neighbor said to a visitor: "I never saw checked matting last as theirs did. There was nothing upstairs but an old cot in a little hall-room or closet, where Mrs. Clemm slept, and an old table and chair and bed in the next room, where Mr. Poe wrote. But you could eat your dinner off the two floors."

The testimony of still another was: "In the kitchen she had only a little stove, a pine table and a chair; but the floor was as white as the table, and the tins as bright as silver. I don't think that she had more than a dozen pieces of crockery, all on a little shelf in the kitchen. The only meat I've ever known them to have was a five-cent bone for soup or a few butcher's tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs for a stew; but it seemed Mrs.

Clemm could make a little of anything go twice as far as other people could."

In the early part of this summer Virginia's health appeared better than usual. A neighbor who lived nearest them said to a visitor to Poe's old home: "In fine weather that summer--the summer before she died--we could sometimes see her sitting at her front door, wrapped up, with her husband or mother beside her, Mr. Poe reading a paper and Mrs. Clemm knitting. Most times there would be one or two children along, and Mr.

Poe would play ball with them while his wife laughingly looked on. She looked like a child herself, hardly taller than they were. Well--no; she wasn't exactly pretty. She looked _too spooky_, with her white face and big, black eyes; but she was interesting looking, and we felt sorry for her--and for them all, for that matter. You could see they had known better days."

As the summer wore on, and the first autumn breezes shook the leaves from the cherry tree, a change came over Virginia. Mrs. Clemm wrote to Miss Poe that unless she could go to her relations at the South--a thing not to be thought of--she would not live through the winter. Eddie's health was completely broken, and unless she herself remained strong enough to take care of them both, all would have to go to the poor-house. These letters were generally indirect appeals for pecuniary aid. Through similar pathetic accounts given by Mrs. Clemm to editors to whom she offered ma.n.u.scripts, the condition of the poet and his family became known and was commented upon by the public papers, to Poe's great indignation, who took occasion in an anonymous communication to deny its truth. But that it was no time for pride to stand in the way of dire necessity is evident from the account of Mrs. Gove on her first visit to the cottage late in that fall. One can hardly realize a condition of things such as she described--the bare and fireless room, the bed with its thin, white covering and the military cloak--a relic of the West Point days--spread over it, and the sick woman, "whose only means of warmth was as her husband held her hands and her mother her feet, while she herself hugged a large tortoise-sh.e.l.l cat to her bosom." And the thin, haggard man, suffering like his wife from cold and the lack of nouris.h.i.+ng food, but who yet received his visitor with such courtly elegance of manner, was the author of _The Raven_, with which the world was even then being thrilled!

It was a blessed day for the distressed family that on which, about the last of October, Mrs. Shew came to the now bleak little cottage on the hill and, like a ministering angel, devoted herself to caring for and comforting them--not only as regarded their material wants but with kind and encouraging words as well. With a sufficient competence and the medical education given her by her father, she was enabled thus to devote herself to the service of those who could not afford the attendance of a regular physician.

Not only did she supply them with medicine, but with careful nursing and proper food prepared by her own hands in Mrs. Clemm's little kitchen.

Mrs. Gove collected sixty dollars, with which their other wants were supplied; so that during the months of November and December the family were more comfortably situated than was usual with them. But meantime Virginia rapidly declined, until it became evident that her frail life was very near its close.

On the day before her death Poe, in mortal dread of that awful _shadow_ which had been so long in its approach and now stood upon their threshold, wrote urgently to Mrs. Shew to come and pa.s.s the night with them. "My poor Virginia still lives, though failing fast." She came, in time to take leave of the dying wife.

One of Poe's biographers[7] has stated that on the day previous to Mrs.

Poe's death she requested Mrs. Shew to read two letters from the second Mrs. Allen exonerating Poe from having ever caused a difficulty in her house. To those who knew Mrs. Allan and had heard from herself and her family the frequent accounts of that occurrence--accounts never retracted by her to her dying day--this statement is not worth a moment's consideration. The only question is, Who wrote those letters, and how is it that they were never made public or again heard of? And who could have imposed upon the dying woman a task such as this, instead of themselves taking the responsibility?

[7] Ingraham.

From this incident, if the account be true, it would appear that Virginia was gentle, obedient and submissive to the last. On the day following--January 3, 1847--her innocent, childlike spirit pa.s.sed away from earth.

She was in the twenty-sixth year of her age.

CHAPTER XXIII.

MRS. SHEW.

With the death of his wife a great horror and gloom fell upon Poe. The blow which he had for years dreaded had at length fallen. That which he had feared and loathed above all things--the monster, Death--had entered his home and made it desolate. As a poet, he could delight in writing about the death of the young and lovely, but from the dread reality he shrank with an almost superst.i.tious horror and loathing. It was said, on Mrs. Clemm's authority, that he refused to look upon the face of his dead wife. He desired to have no remembrance of the features touched by the transforming fingers of death.

Mrs. Shew still kindly ministered to him, endeavoring also to arouse him from his gloom and encourage him to renewed effort. But it seemed at first useless. He had no hope or cheering beyond the grave, and it was at this time that he might appropriately have written:

"A voice from out of the future cries 'On! on!' but o'er the past-- Dim gulf--my spirit hovering lies, Mute, motionless, aghast."

Mrs. Shew, a thoroughly practical woman of sound, good sense and judgment, and with so little of the aesthetic that she confessed to Poe that she had never read his poems, nevertheless took a friendly interest in him and felt for him in his loneliness. To afford him the benefit of a change, she took him as her patient to her own home and commissioned him to furnish her dining-room and library according to his own taste.

She also encouraged him to write, placing pen and paper before him and bidding him to try; and in this way, it is claimed by one account, "_The Bells_" came to be written, or at least begun. Under the influence of cheerful society, comfort and good cheer, Poe's health and spirits improved, and on his return home he again commenced writing. Soon, however, a relapse occurred, and his kind friend and physician found it necessary to resume her visits to Fordham. For all this Poe was grateful, but, unfortunately, he was more; and at length on a certain day he so far betrayed his feelings that Mrs. Shew then and there informed him that her visits to him must cease. On the day following she wrote a farewell letter, in which she gave him advice and directions in regard to his health, warning him of its precarious state, and of the necessity of his abandoning the habits which were making a wreck of him mentally and physically. She advised him as the only thing that could save him to marry some good woman possessed of sufficient means to support him in comfort, and who would love him well enough to spare him the necessity of mental overwork, for which he was not now fitted.

It may be here remarked that of all the women that we know of to whom Poe offered his platonic devotion, Mrs. Shew was the only one by whom it was promptly and decidedly rejected.

CHAPTER XXIV.

QUIET LIFE AT FORDHAM.

The beginning of this year was a dreary time at the cottage at Fordham.

The resources of the family, which had been generously contributed to, mostly by strangers and anonymously, were now exhausted, and Poe, still ill and in wretched spirits, was not capable of the exertion necessary to replenish them. In the preceding summer he had by a severe criticism of Thomas Dunn English aroused the ire of that gentleman, who revenged himself in an article for which Poe brought a suit of libel, recovering damages to the amount of two hundred and fifty dollars--a welcome boon in a time of need. He remained at home, applying himself to his writing, and, mindful of Mrs. Shew's advice, abstained from stimulants and took regular exercise on the country roads about Fordham. His frequent companion in these walks was a priest of St. John's College, near Fordham, who, being an educated and intellectual man, must have proven a most congenial and welcome acquaintance. This priest, who seems to have known Poe well, declares that he "made a superhuman struggle against starvation," and speaks of him as a gentle and amiable man, easily influenced by a kind word or act.

Most of his time, said Mrs. Clemm, was pa.s.sed out of doors. He did not like the loneliness of the house, and would not remain alone in the room in which Virginia had died. When he chose to write at night, as was sometimes the case, and was particularly absorbed in his subject, he would have his devoted mother-in-law sit beside him, "dozing in her chair" and at intervals supplying him with hot coffee, or Catalina, his wife's old pet, perched upon his knee or shoulder, cheering him with her gentle purring. Virginia's death seemed to have drawn these three more closely together. They could thenceforth often be seen walking up and down the garden-walk, Poe and his mother, arm-in-arm, or with their arms about each other's waists, and Catalina staidly keeping pace with them, rubbing and purring. Mrs. Clemm told Stoddard how, when Poe was about this time writing "_Eureka_," he would walk at night up and down the veranda explaining his views and dragging her along with him, "until her teeth chattered and she was nearly frozen." It is to be feared that he was not always sufficiently considerate of his indulgent mother-in-law.

Poe soon experienced the benefits of his restful and temperate life.

Health and spirits improved, and he began to take an interest in the everyday things about him. As spring advanced, he and Mrs. Clemm laid out some flower beds in the front garden and planted them with flowers and vines given by the neighbors, until when in May the cherry tree again blossomed the little abode a.s.sumed quite an attractive appearance.

Upon an old "settle" left by a former tenant, and which Mrs. Clemm's skillful hands had mended and scrubbed and stained into respectability and placed beneath the cherry tree as a garden-seat, Poe might now often be seen reclining; gazing up into the branches, where birds and bees flitted in and out, or talking and whistling to his own pets, a parrot and bobolink, whose cages hung in the branches. A pa.s.ser-by was impressed by the picture presented quite early one summer morning of the poet and his mother standing together on the green turf, smilingly looking up and talking to these pets. Here, on the convenient _settle_, on returning from one of his long sunrise rambles, he would rest until summoned by his mother to his frugal breakfast.

I have at various times heard persons remark that in reading the life of a distinguished man they have desired to know some of the lesser details of his daily life--as, how did he dress? what did he eat? We have all been interested in learning that General Was.h.i.+ngton liked corn bread and fried bacon for breakfast; that Sir Walter Scott was fond of "oaten grills with milk," and that Wordsworth's favorite lunch was bread and raisins. As regards Poe, we must go back to his sister's account of what his morning meal consisted of while she was at Fordham--"a pretzel and two cups of strong coffee;" or, when there was no pretzel, the crusty part of a loaf with a bit of salt herring as a relish. Poe had the reputation of being a very moderate eater and of preferring simple viands, even at the luxurious tables of his friends. He was fond of fruit, and his sister said of b.u.t.termilk and curds, which they obtained from their rural neighbors. But we recall his enjoyment of the "elegant"

tea-cakes at the Morrisons on Greenwich street and the fried eggs for breakfast.