"The Poe Shadow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pearl Matthew)

17

Dear Sir,-There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan's 4th Ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, amp; he says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance.

A LOCAL PRINTER named Walker had signed this note in an urgent scrawl that had almost sent the pencil through the coarse paper. It was dated 3 October 1849 and addressed to Dr. Joseph Snodgrass, who lived close to Ryan's, which on that election day when Poe was found also served as a polling place for the Congressional and state election.

A few days after Duponte and I occupied the study of Dr. Snodgrass, and Hattie stood dazed as I lay entangled with another woman, the Baron Dupin called on Snodgrass again.

I had been watching the Baron when he suddenly idled at a corner of Baltimore Street as though he had forgotten that he had any cares in the world. I was across the street, remaining inconspicuous among the crowds of people heading to hotels and restaurants for supper and the high baskets balanced on the heads of laborers and slaves. After a seemingly unending time waiting for the Baron to do something, I was distracted by the rumble of a carriage that swerved suddenly to the side near me.

From inside the carriage, I heard a voice:

"What are you doing? Driver! Why are you stopping here?"

Confirming that the Baron had not moved from his position, I decided to investigate the identity of the perturbed passenger. When I was nearing the carriage, I came to a standstill. I knew him instantly as a man I'd first seen at the burial ground on Green and Fayette. He'd stood restlessly that day, shifting from foot to foot, at the funeral of Edgar Poe.

"Do you hear me, driver?" continued his complaint. "Driver?"

Here, by some strange ordering of the universe, the mourner had left that dark dream-land, a place of fog and mud, and had been driven right to me in the clear of day. After my meetings with Neilson Poe and Henry Herring, I was now with the third of the four mourners. Only the fourth remained, Z. Collins Lee-a classmate of Poe's from college who, as I'd recently heard, had been appointed a United States district attorney.

I stepped to the side of the coach. But the man had now wriggled to the other side, shouting out at the driver and fidgeting with the handle to open the door. I was about to speak, to call his attention through the window. Then his door opened.

"Isn't it Dr. Snodgrass!" a voice bellowed.

I wheeled away from the window and hid myself near the horses.

It was the Baron Dupin's voice.

"You again," Snodgrass said contemptuously, stepping down. "What are you doing here?"

"Nothing at all," the Baron said innocently. "You?"

"Sir, I beg your leave. I have another appointment. And this rascal driver-"

Leaning over, I could see the Baron's light-skinned slave Newman on the driver's seat and I understood. The Baron had not been idling across the street; he had been waiting for this very man to be delivered to him. No doubt he had stationed Newman in a place where he had known Snodgrass would look for a hackney coach. The first time I had eavesdropped on Snodgrass with the Baron I had seen Snodgrass's face only obliquely. Now the Baron removed the Walker note from his coat; the few sentences written by Walker the day Poe was found, recorded above. He showed it to Snodgrass.

Snodgrass was astonished. "Who are you?" he asked.

"You were involved that day," said the Baron, "in tending to Mr. Poe's well-being. If I chose, this note could be printed in the papers as proof that you were responsible for him. Some people, not knowing better, will assume you were hiding something both by not coming forward honestly with more details and, worse, by sending Mr. Poe alone to the hospital."

"Balderdash! Why would they assume that?" Snodgrass asked.

The Baron laughed good-naturedly. "Because I shall tell the newspapers just that."

Snodgrass hesitated, wavering between compliance and anger. "Did you enter my house, sir? If you stole this, sir…"

Bonjour now joined the Baron's side.

"You! Tess!" This had been Bonjour's assumed name at the Snodgrass home. "My chambermaid?" Now Snodgrass could not help choosing anger. "I shall call for the police this moment!"

"There may be evidence of a small theft you can present them with. But there is also evidence…well, should I mention?" the Baron said, putting a finger to his lips in restraint. "Yes, should I mention there were other private papers of yours we have happened upon…? Oh, the public and all of your blessed committees and societies and so forth would be most interested if we were to kick up a dust…!Do you not think so…Tess, my dear?"

"Blackmail!" Snodgrass stopped himself again, outraged but also hesitant.

"Unpleasant business, I agree." The Baron waved it away. "Back to Poe. You see, that is what really interests us. If the public knows your story-if they believe you tried to save his life…that would be different. But we must have your story first."

Baron Dupin had a sly talent for shifting effortlessly from badgering to dandling. He had performed the same dance with Dr. Moran, at the hospital where Poe died.

"Come now. Back into the carriage, Doctor-let us visit Ryan's!"

At least that is what I imagined the Baron said next as the defeated Snodgrass contemplated a reply, for I had already started away to find an unobtrusive place to wait at the tavern, knowing that was where they would be headed.

"Once I received that letter from Mr. Walker, I repaired to this drinking-saloon-tavern is too dignified a name-and, sure enough," Snodgrass continued as he escorted the Baron inside, "there he was."

I sat at a table in a sunless corner of the room, obscured and further darkened by the shadow of the stairwell that led up to the rooms available for hire, which were often taken by those customers not sober enough to find their way home.

"Poe!" interjected the Baron.

Snodgrass stopped at a dingy armchair. "Yes, he was sitting over here with his head dropped forward. He was in a condition that had been but too faithfully depicted by Mr. Walker's note-which, by the bye, you have had no business to read."

The Baron only grinned at the reproof. Snodgrass continued dejectedly.

"He was so altered from the neatly dressed, vivacious gentleman I knew, that I hardly would have distinguished him from the crowd of intoxicated men, whom the occasion of an election had called together here."

"This whole room was a polling place that night?" the Baron asked.

"Yes, for the local ward. I remember the whole sight well. Poe's face was haggard, not to say bloated," said Snodgrass, unbothered by the contradictory adjectives. "And unwashed, his hair unkempt, and his whole physique repulsive. His forehead, with its wonderful breadth, and that full-orbed and mellow yet soulful eye-lusterless and vacant now."

"Did you have a good look at his clothing?" The Baron was scribbling at a railroad pace in his notebook.

Snodgrass seemed to be dazed by his own memory. "There was nothing good to see, I'm afraid. He wore a rusty, almost brimless, tattered and ribbonless palm-leaf hat. A sack-coat of thin and sleazy black alpaca, ripped at several of the seams, and faded and soiled, and pants of a steel-mixed pattern of cassinette, half worn and badly fitting. He had on neither vest nor neck-cloth, while the bosom of his shirt was both crumpled and badly soiled. On his feet, if I remember aright, there were boots of coarse material, with no sign of having been blacked for a long time."

"How did you proceed, Dr. Snodgrass?"

"I knew Poe had several relatives in Baltimore. So I ordered a room for him at once. I accompanied a waiter upstairs and, after selecting a sufficient apartment, was returning to the bar-room to have the guest conveyed to his chamber so he could be comfortable until I got word to his relatives."

They stepped toward the stairwell, Snodgrass pointing up to the chamber he had selected for Poe on the other side of the stairs. At my table, I tried my best to lose myself in the darkness.

"So you selected Mr. Poe's room, and then sent for his relations?" asked the Baron.

"That is the peculiar thing. I did not need to. When I reached the bottom of the stairway again, I was met by Mr. Henry Herring, a relative of Poe's by marriage."

"Before you had called for him?" the Baron asked. I thought the detail strange, too, and strained to hear Snodgrass's reply.

"That's right. He was at the spot-perhaps with another one of Poe's relatives; I cannot recall."

This was another peculiarity. Neilson Poe had told me he first heard of Edgar Poe's condition when the latter was in the hospital. If there was another relative with Henry Herring, and it was not Neilson, who was it?

Snodgrass continued. "I asked Mr. Herring whether he wished to take his relation to his house, but he strongly declined. ‘Poe has been very abusive and ungrateful on former occasions, when drunk,' Mr. Herring explained to me. He suggested a hospital as a better place for him than the hotel. We sent a messenger to procure a carriage to the Washington College Hospital."

"Who accompanied Mr. Poe to the hospital?"

Snodgrass looked down uncomfortably.

"You did send your friend there alone, then," the Baron said.

"He could not sit up, you see, and there was no room in the carriage once he was lying flat on the seats. He was past locomotion! We carried him as if he were a corpse, lifted him into the coach. He resisted us, muttering, but nothing intelligible. We did not think he was fatally ill then. He was stupefied with drink, alas. That was his final demon." Snodgrass sighed.

I had known already what the doctor felt of Poe's purported drinking. Among the papers in his study, Duponte had come across a few verses on the subject of Poe's death. "Oh! 'twas a saddening scene to find," read Snodgrass's refrains,

"So much for the death of Edgar Poe," Snodgrass now remarked sullenly to the Baron. "I should hope you are satisfied and do not aim to put further light onto Poe's sin. His failings have been mourned enough in public, and I have done everything I can not to say more of it for the time."

"In that, Doctor, you have nothing to worry about," said the Baron. "Poe took nothing to drink."

"Why, what do you mean? I have no doubt. It was a debauch, sir, that killed Poe. His disease was mania a potu, even as the papers reported. I am a possessor of the facts."

"I am afraid you witnessed facts," said the Baron with a grin, "and may even possess them, but you fail to possess the truth." The Baron Dupin put up his hand to silence Snodgrass's protest. "You need not trouble to defend yourself, Dr. Snodgrass. You did your best. But it was not you, sir, nor was it any manner of alcohol that brought Edgar Poe low. There were forces quite more devilish turned against the poet that day. He shall yet be vindicated." The Baron's speech was now more to himself than to Snodgrass.

But Snodgrass still shook his hand in the air as though he had been meanly insulted. "Sir, I am expert in this area. I am an officer with standing of the Baltimore temperance committees! I know a…a…drunken sot, don't I, when coming face to face with one? What are you attempting to do? You may as well try to outstorm the sky!"

The Baron repeated his words slowly, turning around in a circle, his nostrils flaring like a warhorse's. "Edgar Poe shall be vindicated."