Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

King whipped off the oversized beret and handed it to the waiting servant. James noticed that Clarence King’s hairline had receded considerably since the writer had seen him last, leaving only the graying hint of what had once been long golden locks. King still wore a beard clipped closely in the U. S. Grant manner that had long since gone out of style for younger men. Combined with the velvet-corduroy suit, thought James, the beard and added weight made the explorer look not a little like paintings of Henry VIII. Then again, realized James, some had almost certainly made the same comment about him .

James and Holmes stood and watched Clara Hay hug and kiss their old family friend with an almost girlish enthusiasm that struck both men as very un-Clara-Hayish.

“Clara, my dear!” cried King. “You remain the truest and brightest ray of sunshine in this old man’s too-clouded life. You have, as you know”—and here King shot an almost boyishly mischievous glance at John Hay—“ruined for me all other members of your sex. I must now remain a bachelor for all my few remaining days, looking forward only to cremation since that alone guarantees to be a new experience.”

“Ohhh!” cried Clara Hay and slapped King on his green-velvet-corduroy sleeve.

“Harry, by God!” cried King, shaking Henry James’s hand with great animation. “Adams has so far won the race to baldness amongst our band, but I see that you and I are finally giving old Henry a run for his money. What brings you out of the London fog and back to the States, my friend?”

“First and foremost,” James said softly, retrieving his hand and resisting the urge to rub circulation back into it, “this chance to see old friends. May I introduce a traveling companion and fellow guest . . . Mr. Jan Sigerson? Mr. Sigerson, I present to you the original and inimitable Clarence King. Mr. King, Mr. Sigerson.”

King shook hands but then took a step back in the huge foyer as if needing to give Holmes a second inspection. “Sigerson? Jan Sigerson? The Norwegian explorer? The fellow who just a couple of years ago penetrated deeper into the Himalayas than any white man has been known to go? That Jan Sigerson?”

Holmes bowed modestly.

“By God, sir,” boomed King, “it is a pleasure and honor to meet you. I have a thousand questions for you regarding the Himalayan Mountains and the Forbidden Land you managed to penetrate. While I misspent my youth clambering up this continent’s molehills, you, sir, have gone to real mountains.”

“Only to their most modest passes, Mr. King,” said Holmes in his Norwegian accent. His dark mustache seemed thicker this evening and James actively wondered if he’d touched it up somehow. “And even then on the backs of ponies.”

“Come into the parlor, King,” cried John Hay, obviously delighted to see his friend. But there was something else that James was picking up from their host . . . embarrassment at the way their friend was dressed? Some unfinished and probably unnameable business between the two? Money borrowing, perhaps? As portly and ruddy as King appeared upon first glance, a closer inspection suggested that he had recently passed through an illness . . . perhaps a serious one.

“It is tea time!” exclaimed Clara Hay.

Clarence King smiled almost sadly. “Ah, those were the days, Clara. John leaving the State Department early—choosing to leave the nation to unintended wars and misdirection rather than miss our five o’clock tea. And Adams poking his pale dome out of his study precisely at five—nothing else would have separated him from his lamprey-like attachment to his moldy green books. And Clover . . . Clover laughing and leading us into the fireplace room where the little red-leather chairs awaited.”

King seemed to notice the effect his eulogy was having on the company and immediately lightened his tone and expression. “Actually, John, I was hoping that we might substitute some of your sherry for tea this one afternoon.”

“And so we shall,” said Hay, putting his arm around King and leading the way into the fireplace-dominated parlor. “And so we shall.”

Sitting sipping his tea—they had poured sherry, but he would have it after the tea—Henry James was reminded of how small all five of the Five of Hearts had been. Clarence King, at five foot six, had been the tallest of all of them.

After some friendly chatter—Hay probing as to whether King was off that week for a diamond mine in the Andes or a gold mine in the Alaskan Rockies (to which Clarence King had replied only, “Neither! A silver mine in Mexico!”)—King asked Holmes a few questions about the Himalayan peaks. Holmes seemed to answer, albeit vaguely, but then the two men began discussing exploration in earnest. James waited for the inevitable revelation that Sherlock Holmes could not tell the difference between a Himalayan peak and a Herefordshire hillside.

“I read your book,” ‘Jan Sigerson’ said almost diffidently to King. “ Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada . I enjoyed it immensely.”

“That old tome,” laughed King. “It’s more than twenty years out of date. And half the chapters are about my Early Pleistocene period around the summer and fall of eighteen sixty-four. But tell me, Mr. Sigerson . . . did you enjoy the section where I described conquering Mount Whitney?”

Sherlock Holmes only smiled.

John Hay said, “Now, Clarence . . .”

“I used two chapters to describe clambering up Mount Tyndall,” boomed King. “Half the book to describe hiking all over other peaks around Yosemite. But only two subordinate clauses to describe my triumph atop the mighty Mount Whitney.”

“Not all peaks are ascendable upon one’s first attempt,” Holmes said softly.

King laughed and nodded. To Henry James he said, “Here were my two subordinate clauses in toto, Harry—and I quote: ‘After trying hard to climb Mt. Whitney without success, and having returned to the plains . . . ’ ”

King was the only one in the room laughing, but that did not seem to inhibit his mirth. James watched him closely, seeing the deeper bitterness that had settled into the old friend of his old friends—no, more a damp rising from within than something settling from without, as Dickens used to describe the damp rising from tombs under an old church until it chilled the entire congregation.

“Young, fit, outfitted, motivated to greatness,” said King, “and not only could I not get within four hundred feet of that summit on the first attempt, but when I finally returned and climbed it, it was the wrong mountain . Somehow, in the exertion of the climbing, I’d managed to misplace an entire mountain . . . all fourteen thousand five hundred feet of it.”

“But you did return again and make the summit,” John Hay said softly.

“Yes,” said King, “but only after other white men had joined the Indians who’d made the summit before I did. And I named the mountain!”

“And you have one named for you,” said Holmes. “Mount Clarence King . . . northwest of Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevada range, I believe.”

“Our exploration group was keen on naming mountains after one another,” said King, holding out his sherry glass so the silent but ever-present male servant could refill it. “It’s called ‘Mount Clarence King’ because there was already a peak in the Yosemite named after a preacher called Thomas Starr King. My hill is twelve thousand nine hundred and five feet tall. Somehow I always manage to be the runt of the litter. How high was that pass you crossed to get into Tibet from Sikkim, Mr. Sigerson?”

“Jelep La?” said Holmes. “Thirteen thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine feet at the pass’s summit.”