Мэтью Перл - The Dante Chamber

“Hold on there,” Browning interrupted. “Did you say Holmes? Oliver Wendell, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table? ”

“That makes sense, doesn’t it?” Christina replied, looking back over her brother’s shoulder at the material. “I remember it was said he was one of the writers in Longfellow’s little translation circle. Do you think there’s a reason to doubt it, Mr. Browning?”

“You confuse my excitement for doubt — I believe I recently came across the name of Dr. Holmes.”

Christina and William followed as Browning hurried to the drawing room, where he reached for the stacks of newspapers they had combed through for mentions and details about Morton before his death — when he had been reelected, for the twenty-third time, to the House of Commons — and in its aftermath. Christina had carefully organized the newspapers based on their publication date and their quality of information.

“It was here...,” Browning said with frustration, tearing them open and perusing the columns. “Somewhere!” As he tossed papers aside after unsuccessful searches, Christina picked them back up and sorted them again. “An announcement about a speech or a lecture... I know I saw it... Ah!”

Christina felt her impatience about to burst. “Mr. Browning?”

Browning held up the newspaper. “We’ll get the story from Dr. Holmes himself!”

Having come with his daughter from Boston and after visiting other stops in Europe, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the American medical professor at Harvard, author of the Breakfast Table satires and many memorable poems, has received the academic tribute of an honorary degree at Oxford. He will visit Cambridge after that. It has been nearly thirty-five years since the celebrated New Englander last sailed to Europe, and his return is most welcome.

Wearing the academic gown with the square-topped cap and dangling tassel transmitted a thrilling sensation to a man. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes stood in front of a sea of young faces watching as he was presented with his doctor of letters degree, an honor insisted upon by the university authorities who’d heard Holmes would be sightseeing in town. A chorus of voices grew. Some called for him to recite the John Howard Payne lyrics “home, sweet home!” in tribute to his name; others wished more generally that the American poet would deliver a “speech! speech!” Gregarious, garrulous Dr. Holmes on this morning instead stepped away from the platform with just a fleeting smile and wave.

Holmes’s tour through Europe, starting with Switzerland and Holland, then Scotland and England, had brought him pleasures, including honorary degrees from Edinburgh, Oxford, and now Cambridge. He especially liked Cambridge, even in the wet weather. He delighted in walking through the quadrangles, along the riverbanks, beneath the giant trees which bordered it. The other Cambridge — that is, New England’s Cambridge — was his mother town, and since she was the daughter of Old England’s Cambridge, by his calculations that made the town he visited his grandmother town.

Being in Europe for the first time in decades, though, brought with it a kind of unexpected dread. Holmes tried not to reflect on the events four years prior that he and his friends labored to keep secret. Back home in Boston and Cambridge, the safe familiarity of Holmes’s carefully maintained routines mostly kept the dark memories at bay. When possible, he would avoid walking or riding by the places that would remind him of the occurrences. But now, so far from home and unmoored from routines, his brain found a way of sauntering right where he didn’t want it to — through the unassuming byways and crevices of Boston where the gates of Dante’s Hell opened before his eyes.

Those visions invaded Holmes’s waking hours and his dreams alike. It had come to this: even the admiration of enthusiastic English students seemed to be a demand for him not just to speak but remember . After all, one of those young men suddenly, momentarily transformed into an eerie double of one of the victims of that violent spree in the other Cambridge, the one whose demise brought Holmes more pain than any other, while another began to resemble the perpetrator, and more members of the audience took on the forms of the other people who had become mixed up in those blood-drenched days.

Holmes’s daughter, Amelia, who had arranged their European journey together, knew something was amiss. She had asked after his health often during their voyage, and ran into his staterooms and hotel rooms when he shouted during nightmares. It was a passing nervousness always brought on by long trips, nothing more, he reassured her.

The perpetual round of social engagements — breakfasts, luncheons, dinners, teas, receptions with spread tables, two, three, and four deep each evening — usually came as welcome distractions. Holmes was his entertaining self, reciting poems, leaving guests awestruck with his much-loved anecdotes — one favorite was the time he climbed a mountain in the Berkshires with Hawthorne and Melville, when Hawthorne couldn’t stop talking about his new Scarlet Letter and Melville argued vehemently against Holmes’s proposition that the English would always be superior to Americans.

He slept better while in Cambridge than he had on most of their previous stops. Their rooms in Nevile’s Court at Trinity College were decorated with the imposing family ensigns of those who had lived there. Taking a stroll in the evening through the hoary library of Trinity College, he studied the marble busts. Holmes paused to look at the stern likeness of Alfred Tennyson, dated thirteen years earlier, showing a fresh-faced but already imposing poet.

The morning after Holmes received his doctor of letters, he found himself in a sufficiently tranquil mood to write — first a few verses, then a valedictory address on what a young physician should aspire to do. The best a physician can give is never too good for the patient. These exercises helped him. In younger years, he’d wonder whether he was more doctor or writer. Since the dark period back home, he questioned if he was really either — witnessing death all around him had robbed him of both.

He wanted to advise his imagined listeners...

I warn you against all ambitious aspirations outside of your profession. Medicine is the most difficult of sciences and the most laborious of arts. It will ask all your powers of body and mind. Do not dabble in the muddy sewer of politics, nor linger by the enchanted streams of literature. The great practitioners are generally those who concentrate all their powers on their business.

... if only it didn’t seem hypocritical. Here he was, supposed master of so many arts, not just doctor but — as the titles of his three Breakfast Table books identified him — autocrat, professor, poet.

He was still in his dressing gown when the door shook with knocking.

Expecting Amelia or the college porter leaving his breakfast, Holmes bounded over. Nobody was there. He found a telegram that had been laid at his doorstep. It was from Robert Browning in London, and at first Holmes assumed it was another invitation to a literary gathering in the city — feeling a tickle of pride that the famous Browning, a poet who was even more respected than read, would be anxious to see him. Instead, the telegram contained a verse in Italian—

Maestro mio, che via faremo?

— which he swiftly translated as:

My master, what way shall we take?

Holmes, who was famous for his rapid step, never moved faster than he did to feed that telegram into the fire.

It was six days earlier, moments after the forlorn pair of Christina Rossetti and Robert Browning had exited Scotland Yard into the unwelcoming fog, that Inspector Dolly Williamson, who so studiously ignored the frustrated literary callers, paused with a thoughtful expression at the desk of the constable first class, Tom Branagan. He put a hand on the brawny shoulder of the younger policeman, who’d conducted the interview, and waved him into his office.