Dove and Raven
I
’OF course a woman of thirty wears only gray or black because by then she has either met him or lost him.’ In the American Lady’s Memorial, dated 1840, this is given as the unvarying rule of conduct. Indeed, the words are capitalized to stress the propriety of such behavior, the Quakerish raiment underscored to mark the meekness of adventure. Women of a certain age surrendered quietly their chance of romance. They had nothing further to expect.
Not an irrelevant or flippant matter is it, thus, that the portrait of Mrs. Whitman which hangs in the Athenæum at Providence should first draw attention by the brightness of its color, by the warm blue shawl that droops about a cinctured muslin, by the indecorous pink streamers of the widow’s cap. From the main reading-room below, you cannot see the face quite clearly, but you may catch at once the dainty rebel’s badge. She has, it is true, the sloping shoulders of her time, the crisp and clustered ringlets, the high bosom, the restricted waist. She has its charm, its delicate seduction. She is a lady to be wooed. Yet in her broad, high forehead there is intellect. Her eyes have an eager sidelong glance past what they see, and give a hint of swiftness to her mind. Her jaw is firm before it narrows delicately to her chin. Impossible that such a woman should have dressed in token of meek resignation. There is a flash, a vividness, to her whole face.
I wonder how she kept it, that glad expectancy, that sureness of the richness and the generosity of life. A most indecorous look for one of thirty who had met and lost him, her husband, young John Whitman. A most absurd unreasoning look for one who, after a brief flight, a mere glimpse of freedom and the open spaces, had come back home to fold her wings. Come back, moreover, to spare New England thrift and to the need of it; to a sister and a mother who were to badger her with small precisions; to a little town, stiff and straight-backed with traditions, and to people whose protective coloring was drab. Had she shown discouragement or irritation or resentment, there would have been — as her own townsfolk still so bluntly say — some sense to it. For how could she guess that adventure would ever choose the very streel she lived on for its strolling; that it would come haphazarding along between the prim square rows of houses set so rigidly upon the pavements, and the elms that rose so strait-laced from the curbs? Benefit Street. Why, there was rebuke to any such wild vagrant surely in the sobriety of its quaint Puritan name. Above all, how could Mrs. Whitman know that romance, no matter how unerring in its impulse, would ever find her in her garden; or that passion, no matter how insistent, would ever raise the stubborn knocker at her door? Yet in her portrait, pointed when she was already over thirty, she shows a certainty of life’s adventure still before her, a certainty derived from some instinctive faith.
The women of her time, — ladies of her acquaintance, as undoubtedly they called themselves, — they never helped her to such notions. You may rest assured of that. They took her future quite for granted from the moment that they heard of her young husband’s death. Nor did they, I am afraid, even gift that future consciously with a grave beauty, a twilight radiance cast upon it by the past. Their immediate interest, concerned itself with what was practical for a young widow, with what they might deem circumspect. She had enough to live on — that was God’s own providence. She would return to her own roof— that was entirely proper — and to her mother, whose black-satined and brooched presence would lend the adequate protection for a young woman situated as she was. She would take up small homely duties, attend the Reading Club and Sewing Circle — those were quite suitable diversions. And some day, perhaps, though after a decent interval, that it too might be becoming, she would rewed — a widower of course, who would honor her by offering her the tribute of his cool respect. Few among the number found it necessary to include that freedom both of mind and spirit which was, for Sarah Helen Whitman, the essential breath of life.
How soon did they begin to have their doubts of her? It might well have been the day when, not five years a widow, she laid aside her mourning, and with her gray all turned to iridescent plumage, went flitting down the street. She had, they say, a liking for bright scarves, for veils, for thin gay textures, for all that caught the light and took the breeze. And as she passed the little square-paned windows so close upon the sidewalk, there was more than one, I fancy, who, catching from her shuttered gloom a flash of radiance, professed that she could not believe her eyes.
But before that day there must have been uneasiness about this lady. Grace she had, and spright liness, and delicacy in her social contacts. She drew and kept a circle of perceptive friends. But there were others who passed judgments only on face values. They liked a stoutness to the stuff, a serviceable pattern to the cut of their New England women. They distrusted an elusive texture, a design that was a subtle thing of glints and gleams. And Mrs. Whitman, had she even had the inclination, could not have made her life of homespun virtues, or have turned her whims of conduct to set figures and to dull repeats. She was no housewife. She was no needlewoman. I believe in the whole house there was no tidy crocheted by her fingers, no antimacassar decorated with her fancies, no hassock brought by her to its round plump conclusion, no embroidered lambrequin. Nor was she what you might call in any proper sense a gardener — a genteel term enough when it concerned itself with clipping off a nosegay or stirring tea-leaves in about the roots of potbound plants. Her little yard, if one may judge, she left a tangle, preferring, so I like to think, the push and stir of wayward growth. Her walks, moreover, that should have been a matter of right angles or a mere down-street and back again, she turned into the open country and went roaming far afield.
A dangerous business then, you understand, to seek that wild rude force called nature, so hostile to the venturing of any female, so generous in the ambushes it offered to lurking, prowling, evil-intentioned men. And just as dangerous was that strange wilderness of speculation where she went often wandering in thought. She dared, it seems, discuss religion, which was after all a matter of acceptance. She had leanings, leanings toward what was neither orthodox nor safe. A Transcendentalist she called herself, as if to be a Baptist was not good enough. And for a snug Heaven, with its real estate all plotted out in little claims and with good walking to its firm paved streets, she wished to substitute some vague and shadowy region which she called the kingdom of the soul. Why, she must realize that even in this kingdom of her choosing she would be lost.
But what, perhaps, was quite as bad, she had a taste for writing poetry. No gift, you notice. With a mild word attempt was made to throw a cloak of decency about her passionate love. A taste, and one only less pernicious than a taste for novel-reading. So at least did her own womenfolk regard it, as an insidious delight to be stifled and subdued. Verse was after all a little different, a neat private gift that deftly turned out an acrostic, and that went no further in its indiscretion than the album of a friend. But poetry! You simply could n’t tell its dangers. It led to waste of time and to extravagance of fancy. It might lead almost anywhere. Mrs. Whitman it led into print!
Think of it — the shamelessness and the barefaced publicity! To have emotions was quite bad enough. But to encourage them and set them down, to send them to an editor whom you had never met, to take pay for them, and then to have them printed with your name below! Yes, their tight, safe world was coming to a pretty pass when a woman gently born and one of them could bring herself to that.
No wonder that strange men began to write her letters and to start a correspondence with her. Since she had made herself quite public, — like an actress, — it was only what she must expect. These men — it did not matter that they were the young George William Curtis just back from Brook Farm and with his head all full of fiddle-faddles, or H. P. Day and Horace Greeley, whose positions after all lent weight to their expressions of respect. Of course they told her that they liked her poems—they had to find some opening. Of course they asked her for advice and criticism — they were only looking for what next. Mrs. Whitman could be made to see no shame and feel none. She answered their impertinences with her gratitude; she answered them without a simper, and with no false consciousness of sex.
II
She was bound, you see, to come to some bad end. There was no question of it. And if her critics had only been less spare in their imagination, more rich and definite in their gift of prophecy, I think they might have seen what end it was to be. La Fontaine, had he been there, could have told them. He would have found a fable ready to his hand. This Dove of theirs, who had so little patience with the placid strut and coo of her own dovecot, who would fly out to try her wings and circle in the open spaces — would you not guess that she would fall a captive to the Raven, that ill-omened savage bird of prey?
Already she was taken by him in imagination. She felt the sweep and power of his strong flight, the rhythm and the beat of his swift pinions, the mystery beneath his jet black wings. Yet when it came to an encounter, she made a struggling effort to escape.
Not. that at this time she really acted from timidity. La Fontaine ran away with me. When Poe in 1845 came to Providence to read his poem at the Lyceum, when Mrs. Whitman did not hear him, I think she acted from a sense of fitness, an innate good taste.
What was this but a public exhibition of the poet? What they wished to look upon, her townsfolk, was a vagabond, a drunkard and a drug fiend, an evil nine days’ wonder, an archangel fallen with his plumes bespattered in the mire. Few enough of them, she knew, would go to hear. It was then no time for her to listen to his magic words, a respite only in the clack and clatter; no place for her to see, beneath the glare, his dark, contemptuous, slightly snarling face. Once he had spoken and the crowd pushed curious about him, was she to smirk and thank him for a pleasant evening, to say she liked his poem, to give him a perfunctory hand? Better by far keep her sense of intimacy more real in unreality, plead indisposition, and stay at home.
But Poe, returning from the bright hot stifle of the public hall to the compression of his small hired bedroom, went out again on the streets. This town so quietly a-dream at midnight — surely there was a friendliness about it, once its people were asleep. Comforting the soar and droop of the great elms and the crisp rustle of their branches as he passed below them, the soft darkness round about him, the cool breath of the night air. The houses, square and angular enough they looked by daylight, but now closed down, shut up, each like a little turtle in its box, they had about them an air of stolid peace. And at the side of one of them he saw the yard dip swiftly to a garden and a drift of roses that came spraying upward toward him with their scent. Flowering currants, grapevines in a tangle, lay all misty in the radiance; and below them with a silver glamour full upon her, he beheld his ‘Helen of a thousand dreams.’
Poe called the meeting, Fate. It may have been. Surely Mrs. Whitman had no business in her garden, for you could not call it business, that desire of hers to see the drenched white beauty of her flowers, to hear the wind with just a quiver to it, to feel the safe and slumbrous warmth of growing things. Poe had no business in the streets, for you could not call it business, that driving need of his to walk off restlessness. But if the arch-agency of human drama had sent these two, of all the world, abroad, it had indeed turned young and prankish and was directing in a sportive mood. The heroine it chose was by this time over forty and to her it gave the sentimental setting of a Juliet. The hero it took from an exotic world of his own sinister creating and gave him romance from the very stuff of his abhorrence, the uncompromising warp of a New England town. The chorus it tricked when all its Arguseyes were drugged with sleeping: cheated it of all the pleasures of nice squinting, explanations, and aspersions. The silent stage and the conduct of the drama it handed over to ‘the leads.’
But for Mrs. Whitman this meeting must have had the suddenness, the sharpness, the unreality, the almost fearful quality of dreams. The echoing steps, their swift arrest, the presence, gray and haunting in the moonlight, the intense and noiseless gaze. Was that really he who stood looking at her in a silence of communication? Was this the same dull street on which she had looked out so many empty nights, so many beggarly days? Was it not rather an enchanted world?
And a dream it must have seemed to her thereafter. Rumors reached her. floating wisps of gossip. Poe, she learned, had recognized her from much hearsay; he had refused to meet her; he knew and praised her verses; he had set his vision of her in a poem of his own. But more than that, she knew that days and weeks went by, and months, and that, though gossip stood at tiptoe, he still sent no word. Was this then all there was to be to the encounter — ache, vague emptiness, and boredom after the swift rise and fall of a dark curtain on a five-minute pantomime?
And a memory it would have been, a recollection put away with potpourri of her June roses, had she learned a proper meekness in adventure, had she been in any sense resigned. But that same glad sense of youth, that same vitality that had made her lay aside the dismal colors of her middle age and mourning, made her rebel against the dull commitment of her spirit to tranquillity and waste. It might be unfeminine, a move on her part, but she would not let the future all slip by her because it was indelicate to clutch. An opportunity was what she wanted.
And when it came, it did not matter that it came ridiculous, as foolish as Malvolio cross-gartered, extravagant in silly trappings, lace frills, and bleeding hearts and mottoes, in all the frippery of sentimental youth. Saint Valentine! Can you imagine him the patron saint of any woman over forty? Can you imagine him the patron saint of Poe? Would you think that such a sophisticated pair of lovers must have the help of this naïve old man? Yet it was his name-day that provided Mrs. Whitman with her chance.
Her friend, Miss Lynch, then living in New York, was well known for her literary gatherings. Her guests were often men of much distinction. Horace Greeley, N. P. Willis, Bayard Taylor, sometimes, though rarely, Poe. For one of these evenings, Miss Lynch asked Mrs. Whitman to send a poem. February fourteenth was the date.
It was a date that took her back no doubt to rapped knockers and to paper missives, to glimpses of black boyish forms that sped around the corner, and to mad scampers in her pattens and frilled pantalettes out into the frosty air. Well, it had still its use. It made it possible for her to bare her heart as though in jest. ‘To the Raven.’ Slim and spidery the title as she sat at her black walnut desk and wrote it; but the act, if you consider it, was bold. It took a swift audacity to set down the verses that came crowding. It took a dash of recklessness to drop them in the post.
Poe as it happened was then out of favor. He was not among the guests. But his tribute was sent him, as was only kindly, by Miss Lynch. ‘Judge then,’he wrote later to Mrs. Whitman, ‘in what wondering unbelieving joy I received your well-known manuscript. The idea of what men call Fate then for the first time in my eyes lost its character of futility.’ His answer at the time, however, was to send to her the loveliest of all his lyrics, that which had been written to the Helen of his youth. Quite frankly, he afterward admitted, he had made it do a double duty; but so exactly did it now express a new memory of beauty, that it contained all that he would have said.
For some time, Mrs. Whitman did not answer. ‘The glory that was Greece’ was certainly a heady tribute. But at last her courage had the best of her; she wrote.
And suddenly — for Mrs. Whitman — Poe was there; she saw him coming. A sinister black figure in a long dark cloak, he challenged observation. She saw him cross the street and give a swift look at the garden. Boldly where all eyes might see him, he stood before her door. She had known that he would come. She had wanted him to come; but not into this room, with its stiff furniture hat cramped and stifled, its empty odor of disuse. His place was in the wild free air. Here in the uncompromising rigor of her parlor, she felt his power and missed his sweep. She knew only terror of the force she had let loose. Warned, moreover, by some strange prevision that he must seize her quickly, Poe made no attempt at wooing. In three days he had asked her to become his wife, and suddenly life had justified itself for its long torpid dozing. It had become a feverish aching business in which, she felt, she might lose sight of love. Not lose sight of it, perhaps, save as it overwhelmed her by its nearness. But see it no longer as glamorous and romantic, with all the beauty of a far horizon. It was overhead, a storm that broke.
What was it that Poe asked of her? To brave the gusts of calumny and anger which he himself so often faced? Had she herself not flown against the wind? To share his own scant means of livelihood? Her own had not been plenty. To endure his exaltations and despairs? She had a poet’s understanding surely of all black and glorious moods. To have faith in him in whom save for his genius not a soul had faith? She knew she felt the beauty of his tortured soul. But how could she trust this love for her, this passion that went rocketing, this feverish slaking flame? It seared, it withered, it consumed her. For the first time, before its close approach, she must have felt the weariness of her accumulated years. And, above all, how could she make such desperate departure from her old associations? Those stiff New England rules of gray and black: she had rebelled against them. But confronted with Poe’s intensity of fervor, they now seemed to her dear, and comforting, and safe. Frankly she let Poe know her feeling for him, she assured him of her love. But when it came to passionate fulfillments, she could no longer trust to her clear impulse. She grew cautious of her own emotions and sought advice of friends.
Disaster from that moment lay ahead. It was one thing to love Poe, to marry him, and for the sake of ecstasy, however brief, to risk the price. It was another to advise so doing. That took a counselor more hardy than in her prim little city she was like to find. Her mother, I am sure, was not the one to give her courage in such mad adventure. Approached about the matter, she would not discuss it; and by a grim silence she determined that she would bring her daughter to her wits. As for those other judgments which might have been less biased, they too were passed, I fear, according to the tribal laws. Desire was nothing, safety everything, in marriage. You made your choice just to avoid whatever seemed unsure. Love and its fulfillment— those were indeed poor arguments, when placed beside the story of Poe’s life. Mrs. Whitman must use her common sense, it seemed, upon a question to be settled only by her instinct. She must look at the hard facts.
Poverty, so her advisers pointed out, was one of them; not, you understand, genteel and quiet poverty that could be concealed by making both ends meet. But poverty, so it was said, that had gone often hungry and as often homeless, too wretched and too gaunt to make pretense. Her own frail health, her incapacity, her age were other facts to think upon. She had no strength for hardships and no gift at managing. How could she hope to hold a poet patterned by the common superstition then on a Byronic model, a creature of Satanic charm and roving eye?
But, above all, there was Poe himself, his very personality a threat to her security. They could not even judge him by nice standards. They had to drop the Voice in speaking of his habits — and they stopped at drink. Even his genius was against him. It was too lawless, reckless, contemptuous of all that went to make a safe and ordered world. She was not even running risks; she was plunging breakneck into certainties. Fortunately there was still time to pause and flutter to her perch. Yet it was less consideration for her own security, I think, that made her write to Poe of her temerity, than the dangers which beset their love.
Not even when Poe came again to Providence were all her fears forgotten. There must have been intoxicated moments when she was conscious only of his presence, when she belonged to him so absolutely that the future seemed quite magically hers. And at such times to walk straight out to meet it must have seemed as easy and as simple as to close the door upon her mother’s disapproval, and to take their love beyond the reach of slur and criticism to the calm acceptance of the open fields. The need to walk by sight and by community judgment was only in the city. Once outside its strictures, they might walk more safely, their spirits shining and their heads held in the clouds.
Moments, too, there must have been, of a rare peace. These two — they had so much in common: a deep sharing of all beauty; the felt magic of the word for its expression; the rhythms that it set a-stirring when just for a fleeting moment it let itself be held in mind. And of such moments memories linger still about the garden of their first strange meeting, about the streets where they walked careless of all comment, about the Athenæum in whose little dusky alcoves they sought sure refuge with the books.
But there were other times, we know, when, even dominated by Poe’s personality, Mrs. Whitman felt only weariness and doubt. It had come too late, this call for the despisal of all glad and giddy dangers. To sustain their love she must go unconscious of its perils; and at last she knew herself betrayed by the traditions of her flock. The custom of her kind held her to her dovecot. She, too, had the habit of low flight.
III
Sensitive in all his apprehensions, Poe was quick to take her indecision as personal distrust. Security to love. Was that then what she wanted? The very word was mockery of passion that drew exhilaration from the height and depth of risks. It was no promise of a settled calm that he had offered her. Nor had it been tranquillity that she had longed for, when she had written her first daring, breathless note.
She had no answer to his charges. What had looked like bravery she now admitted had been rashness, since she had been wrong in thinking that she had sufficient courage to follow to the end. But if she had erred in impulse, she was now right in judgment. The future held no peace for them together. Too many and too strong were the forces which assailed it. Let them keep what they had in all the beauty of its unfulfillment, unmarred by cruel test.
Sentimentalism if you like. But it was also the pathetic inhibition of the Puritan which, long after he had ceased to give to God his great possessions, urged him for very thrift to put away in dark safe-keeping whatever gave him most delight. To have, but not to use; above all, not to use ‘for common.’ This prompting is an old New England instinct. To lock up, to fold and put away whatsoever things are frail and delicate and lovely. Not to risk them. To get satisfaction only from the knowledge of one’s ownership, not from the feel and touch, the wear and tear of daily use. And somewhat as if it were a priceless piece of lace, Mrs. Whitman wished to put away her love.
It was not to be expected that Poe should see the beauty of such preservation. As she faced him with entreaties, he must have bent upon her figure, slight and supplicating in its thin, sprigged muslin, a contemptuous face.
Perhaps, with her high spirit gone, she lost her radiance and annoyed him by a dullness as chastened and subdued, as remote from actual brightness, as the sedately darkened parlor in which they had ‘high words.’ None the less he argued with her in a low, rapid voice. In an attitude of wistfulness, a pose of resignation! With a sneer he must have told her that it was not so he saw himself. Nor would he choose to think of her with her resistance turned to mawkishness like any female in a sampler, languishing beneath a weeping willow that drooped above the tombstone of departed love. A silly posture, one not demanded of her save by those who did not matter. No, her desire to make of love so prodigal a gift to prudence was cowardice and nothing else.
Poe was surely not to blame for his impatience. Mrs. Whitman did not wish to marry him; but with the future bleak and chill before her, she did not wish to lose her hold on love and all its warmth. But since he was to fight against her stubborn caution and halfmeasures, he was to blame for the stupid means he took. He wished no weak capitulation of her fears, but their swift conquest. And yet he tried a swift, tumultuous storming, not the slow persuasion of a siege. With violence and angry words he railed against the meddling of officious friendships, he railed against her mother’s natural solicitude. As a catchall for gossip and malicious hearsay, he railed against her love. He was, in short, the Raven; and now that she had transformed herself to prey by her attitude of flight, he swooped down with a savage pounce.
For a time it seemed likely that he might win by his sheer violence. To succumb to this strange antagonist, who had so lately been her lover, had its terror. But still more terrifying was it to resist. She knew, for resistance she had tried. And before she could recover from the scorn that overwhelmed her, Poe had left her, he had taken poison in his desperation, he had recovered and, swift in his renewed resolve, he had returned from Boston and stood insistent at her door. Again she had nerved herself to a repulse. Again he had left in anger, but this time for a barroom where he sought forgetfulness in drink. The next day he returned after a drunken and disheveling night.
Of his behavior at this time it is best to give her own account. ‘He came alone to my mother’s house in a state of wild and delirious excitement, calling upon me to save him from some terrible, impending doom. The tones of his voice were appalling and rang through the house. Never have I heard anything more awful, awful even to sublimity. It was long before I could nerve myself to see him. My mother was so moved by his suffering that she urged me to soothe him by promising all that he might require of me. After he had been in the house two hours I entered the room. He hailed me as an angel sent from heaven to save him from perdition, and clung to my dress so frantically as to tear away a piece of the muslin that I wore.’ So it was that Mrs. Whitman promised to become his wife.
It is easy to imagine that the news spread quickly through the city, and that it was spurred on by each who felt that it proved his judgment right. Neighbors undoubtedly had seen Poe come — and in those weeks with what grimness and what eager fascination they must have watched for his swift passage by their doors. This time they had undoubtedly detected, too — well, something just a little strange in his demeanor and in the piteousness of his white face. He had looked wild — they could not bring themselves to use so coarse a word as drunk. They had seen him go into the house, and then for hours they had learned nothing further, though those who had gone by upon some trifling timely errand returned to say that they had heard strange terrifying cries. Was it not natural, once Poe had taken leave, that they should go over to make sure that nothing was the matter, and that in return for their solicitude they should discover just how much the matter was?
I think that Mrs. Whitman did not tell them. Exhausted by the scene and by her forced commitment, she must have sought the peace of her own room. Yet she was not too far to hear her mother’s overtones. ‘Yes, Helen at last has given Edgar her consent.’ For all her shame at his loose habits, I am sure that the old lady liked a patronizing intimacy with his name. It was something after all to have her daughter desperately loved and sought by the maddest genius of his time. ‘Yes, Helen has given Edgar her consent. What else was there to do about it?’ For the way to soothe a lunatic was to humor him, and defenseless women as they were, they had been forced to yield. Fortunately, however, she had seen that Helen had proposed a difficult condition. Let Poe once again yield to his vice, let them even hear a rumor of his drinking, and there was to be an end to the engagement. There was a loophole, and on that, she acknowledged, she had fixed her eyes.
Did Mrs. Whitman also so regard it? Certainly there were no auguries of happiness. Pressure was being brought to bear upon her from all sides, pressure to convince her that there was no need of loyalty to a forced bond. Her family, her friends were playing on her nerves and on her scruples, sometimes with cant and specious arguments, more often with moralities and wise old saws. Undoubtedly she learned that she had picked up a crooked stick. Even Poe could give her faith but scant assurance. He wrote her that he was pursued by dread and that he placed the weight of his regeneration on her frail shoulders. Yet at this time Mrs. Whitman seems to have developed a soft stoicism. Sure that she alone could save Poe from his dissipations and so restore a dignity and beauty to their love, she had apparently lost all her self-concern. She was secure at last from gossip, from all save Poe’s failure to sustain her faith.
Then suddenly she knew the paralyzing truth. Poe had returned to Providence to lecture, but this time with the intention of compelling an immediate marriage. Desperately he wanted to make sure. And almost before she was aware of his determination, the license had been taken out, the banns were all but published, plans for a simple ceremony had been made. It looked, indeed, as if she were to break with her old standards and associations and put her courage to the final proof. And then, at the eleventh hour, the afternoon before her wedding, she had come in to find the parlor outraged by the stale, sweet reek of wine and by a wildly pacing figure whose voice in greeting her was dulled and thick. The exhilaration of certainty so near at hand had been too much for him. This time it was happiness which Poe had drowned in drink.
The next day he was remorseful, panic-stricken. It was atrocious, abominable, this affront which he had put upon her trust. But he assured her that this was something quite apart from his love and from his need of her. If only he were sure of her, it was a craving which together they could still.
But Mrs. Whitman knew that she had failed. She was free, free save of the flood of memories that broke upon her; the brief and unexpected glamour of the first encounter, the impatience of the silent months of waiting, the frank delight in a companionship which had known no silly reticence, and which, if it took its charm from their mutual attractions, took its vigor from their minds. There was, too, the recollection of her first glad pride in this man’s recognition of her little talent and her still greater pride in his wish to identify her future with his own. And above all, if there had been terror, there had been intensity. In the dull years ahead, with gratitude she would remember that. Yet she could not at that moment, when reality was gone. The old laws now met with vindication. She had met him; she had lost him. She was ready for her gray and black.
But there was still before her the ceremony of renunciation, the full Victorian close. She must see Poe, she must return his letters and all that he had given her. A rude break was unseemly, and it was required of her that she should say farewell. Apparently, however, she felt that she could not bear the torture; for before she came into the room where Poe was waiting with entreaties, she had drenched her handkerchief with ether, a wise precaution against the moment when the pain should grow too great. What happened thus she never clearly knew — not in all those after years of recollection. But as she lay half fainting on the couch, she must have felt the background of the stiff familiar room, a strangeness in its chill composure. She must have seen at times a white, a piteous face that bent above her own. Certainly she heard at last a bitter agonizing cry that rent and tore her consciousness. For to Poe’s appeal she knew that she had given a reply.
‘“I love you,”’ she stated wistfully, ‘were the last words I said.’
How much she loved him she had later chance to prove. For Poe, indignant at her mother’s interference and at her own failure to reply to his one broken-hearted letter, expressed his resentment to her friends and spoke of Mrs. Whitman with a deep contempt. Henceforth he had determined, so he said with the quaint stiffness of his time, ‘to flee the pestilential society of intellectual females.’
But if Mrs. Whitman had been vacillating in their days of courtship, she now showed herself as gallant under the attack. Some eager and pathetic efforts she did make— not to win him back, but to bring about an understanding. Her poems she knew that Poe from curiosity would read, and read perhaps with intimate interpretation. But to these she got no answer save what she herself professed to find in ‘Annabel Lee,’ the highborn lady of whom Poe found himself bereft by the machinations of her heartless kinsmen. With no surer sign of peace between them, she met Poe’s bitterness with a proud silence and with a devotion that was to last her all her life.
When, moreover, Poe had died and she was free to act, she became his open champion in the lists. Nor was there affectation, posing, or self-consciousness to her defense. She, surely, was equipped with knowledge both of the author and the man; and no sooner did she hear of an attack than for combat she flew bravely out. Her mother and her friends, did they speak of him with condescension or contempt, she drove quickly back discomfited.
In her book, Edgar Poe and His Critics, she defended Poe from a malicious charge; she beat off the calumnies and lies of his chief enemy, Griswold. No one, in fact, could treat of him with less than praise unless he wished to meet her challenge. And Poe — if he had known, I think he must have recognized at last a dauntlessness about his Dove. I think he must have lost his sneer a little in his smile at the fierce loyalty of her defense for her lost Raven.