Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

“Hello, hello, hello?” said James, feeling rather idiotic.

When he and Mr. Twill had both identified themselves again, James said, “I understand that someone at your store receives and conveys messages to Mr. Sherlock Holmes. It is absolutely imperative . . . urgently imperative . . . that I get in touch with him at once. Or speak to him telephonically if he is there now.”

“Mr. Sherlock Holmes, sir?” squawked Twill’s voice through the rumble and scratching of the phone lines.

“Yes.”

“English gentleman, sir?”

“That’s him!”

“No, he hasn’t been around the store, sir, since the day he paid me for this little service of sending along messages. He has a boy come check two or three times a day.”

James sighed. If he didn’t feel so . . . light . . . at the moment, he realized that his chest would be aching with anxiety at giving Holmes the extraordinary news of what he had seen and heard that afternoon.

“All right,” he said. “Could you please take down this message and get it to Mr. Holmes as quickly as possible?”

“As soon as his boy stops by, sir.”

“All right. The message reads . . . have you paper and pen ready?”

“Pencil poised, sir.”

“The message reads . . .” James had to pause a second to frame it. “ ‘I followed Professor Moriarty to a meeting here in Washington today. I overheard’ . . . yes, yes, I’ll slow down.”

“You can go ahead now, sir. You overheard . . .”

“ ‘I overheard Moriarty sharing his plans about May first with several . . . groups. It’s absolutely imperative that you contact me at once. I leave by train tomorrow . . . that’s Sunday, nine April . . . afternoon. Absolutely urgent that we speak before then. Signed, James’. Can you read that back to me, please?”

Twill did so, James corrected a couple of minor infelicities in the cigar-store keeper’s notes, and then the line was dead and the author was fumbling to hang the hearing apparatus onto the speaking stem and then to get the whole contraption back on its shelf.

Perhaps it was the morphine—if it had been morphine—but the evening’s dinner party was one of the most enjoyable Henry James could ever recall. James could not stop laughing. The day’s events should have been hanging over him like a black shroud, but instead the sharp memories of hiding on the high beam, of Moriarty, of the criminals and anarchists, and of the street confrontation with the ruffians (a bloody confrontation of which neither Teddy Roosevelt nor Clarence King showed the slightest signs either in manner or spatters of this or that on their formal clothing) seemed to buoy James up with a joy and energy he’d not felt for years. He was wearing a fresh shirt and dinner jacket.

Hay sat at one end of the table again, overseeing the conversation and stimulating it when it lagged—which it almost never did with this all-male group. James was given pride of place to the right of their host and to his right was his old acquaintance Rudyard Kipling. James had given away the bride, Miss Carrie Balestier, at Kipling’s 1892 wedding in London and, to complete the bonds of affection, the two men were mutual literary admirers. Why Kipling—who represented so much about Britain, proud and shameful, in his writing—chose to live in America was beyond James’s comprehension.

Henry Adams sat next to Kipling and beyond him was Teddy Roosevelt. This night, Augustus Saint-Gaudens took the chair at the opposite end of the table from John Hay. James admired Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture almost beyond words with which to praise it—he thought the sculpture at Clover Adams’s grave site showed not only consummate skill but tremendous courage, stirring as it did no sense of hope or an afterlife or surcease of sorrow, as James remembered that hack Poe had once phrased it, but only the infinite depths of sorrow and loss.

To Saint-Gaudens’s right on the other side of the table were Clarence King, Dr. Granger, and Henry Cabot Lodge to Hay’s left.

All the men at the table seemed extraordinarily witty this night, but Kipling and Roosevelt stole the show as far as James’s adrenaline- and morphine-muddled perceptions could judge such things. The 27-year-old Kipling, who’d been wintering at their home in snowy Vermont and whose wife Carrie had just had a baby on December 29, was the object of much congratulating and back-slapping. James would someday write—“Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.”

“It was very considerate of Josephine to choose twenty-nine December as her birth date,” the young writer was saying, “since my birthday is on the thirtieth and Carrie’s on the thirty-first. Keeps thing tidy, as it were.”

Dr. Granger—his nose already reddening with drink but his enunciation still perfect—asked if the addition of the baby helped them stay warm up in what the Kiplings had named Bliss Cottage near Brattleboro.

“The dear babe is not big enough to offer much in the way of supportive body heat,” laughed Kipling, “but the exercise of walking back and forth with her on the nights she cries has been very helpful in keeping warm.”

The conversation kept shifting but James could not stop his mind from wandering back to the incredible events of the day and his still urgent need to get in touch with Sherlock Holmes.

Kipling and Roosevelt were queried about their beloved Cosmos Club that sat right across Lafayette Park from Hay’s home, combining the Tayloe House with the Dolley Madison home. Both Kipling and Roosevelt were fanatical about the out-of-doors, and the Cosmos Club, besides being perhaps the most elite and influential men’s club in America, reflected their passions.

“We did start this little organization called the National Geographic Society there five years ago,” said Teddy Roosevelt.

Kipling began laughing himself and when queried, said, “Forgive me, but I remember when friend Theodore first presented himself to the Club with thoughts of joining. Twenty of the older members set out several hundred random fossil-bones on a table in the main dining room and asked Theodore to identify any of them if he could.”

“Could he?” asked Clarence King, obviously very well knowing the answer and already grinning.

Kipling laughed again. James thought it was a pleasant laugh, manly and rich but never caustic at anyone else’s expense. “For the next several hours, Theodore proceeded not only to identify the fossil bones but to separate them into the various living and extinct animals they each represented—he did everything but wire them together, gentlemen—all the while giving a running commentary on the eating, grazing, predatory, and breeding habits of each animal.”

“Teedie’s been a star member of the Cosmos Club ever since,” said Hay, ignoring Roosevelt’s scowl at the use of his childhood name.

Others offered various anecdotes on various topics, even James, but before they’d opened the fourth bottle for the table, Kipling was begging Roosevelt to tell his story about “the grizzly in the bushes out in Dakota.”

Roosevelt grinned and did so. He kept the story short, with just the right amount of detail, but Henry James found it especially humorous. The huge grizzly, it seemed, was old and myopic—almost blind. Roosevelt had lost his glasses during a fast descent on a steep, wooded hillside, so he ended up almost as blind as the bear. His first shot missed. “I missed the heart but caught him in the backside,” said Roosevelt, following the true raconteur’s prime rule of never smiling or laughing at his own tale. “The bear went into a thick mass of high willow bushes, almost too close together for me to push into, and—especially without my glasses—I found myself none too eager to force my way into those bushes where Mr. Grizzly and I could have met up in an instant, long before I could raise my rifle. And the animal was not in the best of moods that morning . . .”