Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

Eventually he was at the second-story window and he bounced far over the upper glass pane—not wanting to have to explain how his own bedroom window was broken in the night—and, after tapping his crepe soles on the lower windowsill, swung himself far enough into his own room to grab the headboard of the heavy brass bed and steady himself.

First setting the photograph of Irene Adler and Lucan Adler carefully on his bedside table, Holmes went back to the open window and pulled the long length of rappel rope down, taking care that it did not strike a lower window when it dangled. Then he pulled it up, coiled it carefully, and set it back in his black burglar bag. The well-tied short length of anchor rope would remain up there.

The night air was cool and he left the window open until the sheen of perspiration he’d worked up in all the climbing, jumping, and rappelling dried off.

Then Holmes took off his burglar clothes—folding them away neatly—washed himself at the basin, got into his nightclothes, and set his watch to tap its small rod against the open cover at nine a.m. He and Henry James were leaving for New York City on the 10:42 a.m. train.

Holmes had left his palm-torch out on the table next to his bed and before falling asleep he activated it and played its narrow beam one last time on the photo marked by Henry Adams as “Old Sweet Springs, June, 1885, Rebecca Lorne and Cousin—Standing in meadow with house in background.”

Staring most intensely at the young man’s face, Holmes thought at him— Why did you kill your mother?

So I had stopped by the office of the Century on a whim after our ship docked and was sitting there on their horsehair sofa reading over some early galleys for my new book, Pudd’nhead Wilson ,” said Clemens, “and what do I discover but that some pragmatical son of a bitch had been mucking about with my punctuation. My punctuation, gentlemen! The punctuation which I had so carefully thought out and laboriously perfected! I sat there seeing more of this vandalism until my hot fury turned itself loose and I had a comment for every publisher, editor, secretary, and errand boy in the Century ’s office. I found as I shouted that the fury had turned itself into a volcano and the words I was using . . . well, they were not suited to any Sunday school.”

“So what happened to the edited copy?” asked Howells.

Clemens lowered his head and peered out from under his bushy eyebrows. “It was explained to me, as one would explain the lower multiplication tables to a drooling idiot, that the culprit proofreader was peerless, imported from no less than Oxford University, and that his word around the Century was considered, and I quote, ‘sacred, final, and immutable’.”

Howells was smiling openly. James showed a hint of a smile and had lowered his chin to his bosom. Holmes sat with his head cocked at a slight angle of polite anticipation.

“So did you have a chat with this just-down-from-Oxford don whose copyedits are ‘sacred, final, and immutable’?” asked Howells, who obviously had played straight man to Clemens many times before this.

They were between courses and Clemens was puffing away at a cigar, his brow was furrowed, his bushy eyebrows almost coming together in his anger, his chin firmly set, and upper body imitating that of a bull ready to charge the toreador. He removed the cigar from beneath a full mustache that was turning white.

“I did,” said Clemens. “I confronted him in the publisher’s office, using the poor man as a witness should an actual homicide occur. I was a volcano. And such an angry volcano that not a single poor wretch in the Century ’s offices escaped without being scorched. The publisher and his Oxford proofreader were Pompeii and Herculaneum to my Vesuvius.”

“What did you say to your punctuation culprit?” Henry James asked in soft tones.

Clemens shifted his fierce stare to the other writer.

“I told both men that I didn’t care a fig leaf in Hell if the Oxford Marvel was an Archangel imported directly from heaven, he still could not puke his ignorant impudence over my punctuation. I said I wouldn’t allow it for a moment. I said I couldn’t stand or sit in the same room, in the presence of a single proofreader sheet where that brainless blatherskite had left his chicken-manured tracks. By this time, both Herculaneum and Pompeii had backed up all the way to the windows and I had a hunch they were ready to throw themselves out those twelve-story-high portals. So I literally buttonholed the Archangel before he attempted to fly and explained that all this . . . stuff . . . must be set up again and my punctuation restored exactly as I had typed it. Then I promised to return there tomorrow, that is today, precisely at noon to read the deodorized proof.”

Howells was laughing loudly now. James was smiling as broadly as Holmes had ever seen him. Holmes allowed himself a thin smile.

When the laughter at the table subsided—nearby diners looking over at the table and then murmuring amongst themselves, obviously the curly-haired author now burying his teeth into the Cuban cigar—Howells said, “When did you leave Europe, Sam? And from which port?”

“From Genoa,” said Clemens. “On the steamship Lahn . Got in, as I said, yesterday morning.”

“That was a very rapid crossing,” said James.

“The captain said that he knew of a short cut,” said Clemens, exhaling rich smoke. “And—by dander—so he did!”

Howells, usually a serious man, Henry James knew, was still laughing and still eager to play the straight man.

“A short cut across the North Atlantic,” laughed Howells. “Can you tell us what secret route your captain of the Lahn took?”

Clemens leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “I fear that I cannot. A small group of perspicacious passengers—with me as their leader, of course—plotted to steal an officer’s sextant and thus learn our latitude and longitude.”

“Did you carry out your plot?” asked Holmes.

“Indeed we did, sir,” answered Clemens. “We simply forgot that none of us knew how to use the device. So after several hours of messing with the clumsy thing, we had succeeded only in pinpointing our precise location either in central Africa or, equally improbable, Saskatchewan.”

Howells was howling now, but Clemens never relinquished his bushy-browed scowl.

“There were no clues as to the nature or direction of this trans-Atlantic short cut?” asked James, allowing himself a quick glance at Holmes when he said the word “clues”.

“None,” said Clemens. “None, I should say, save for the time my fellow passengers and I noticed penguins dancing and frolicking in the ice floes that the Lahn was bullying her way through.”

“Penguins!” cried Howells and laughed all the harder. Henry James suddenly understood that the serious and often melancholy author, deadly serious editor, and mature citizen who was William Dean Howells used Samuel Clemens’s presence as an excuse to become a boy again.

“Naturally we assumed that the penguins were the ship’s waiters and doormen, still in their formal attire,” said Clemens, “allowed out by the captain for a short period to frolic on the ice.”

“No!” cried Howells with tears running down his cheeks. The loud negative seemed more related to an earnest request that Clemens give him a moment to catch his breath.

“Alas, the knowledge of their penguintude was too late,” Clemens said in a remorseful tone. “I had given generous tips to three of them. At least one of them had the decency to hide his face under his upper flipper, or wing, or whatever that thing is called.”