A Bloodsmoor Romance (79 page)

Had Malvinia thought to fling aside her luxurious covers, and throw herself to her knees on the floor, appealing to Our Heavenly Father for forgiveness, and for counsel, these dark hours might have been transform'd to joy: but the distraught woman was so unaccustom'd to prayer, and so bewitched by the phantasm, that, to her shame be it said, she gave no thought to God; and abandoned herself to violent spasms of sobbing, which wracked her body with as much barbaric force as The Beast itself might wrack it.

“I am so sorry! O dear Mr. Kennicott, forgive me—forgive a heedless child!
I did not know!
”

FIFTY-EIGHT

T
here followed then a period of some heightened days, when, convinced that Mr. Kennicott was dead, Malvinia greedily perused all the Spiritualist publications she could find—
The Theosophist, The Spiritist, The Darkling Tide, The Psychical Letter,
and others, many of them published on cheap pulp paper, and all of them given over to numerous columns of classified advertisements.
Mountain Seeress—Highlander Visionary—Trance Medium of Lake Champlain—Priestess of Amazing Gifts:
the self-proclamations alternately intrigued Malvinia, and disgusted her. Her dread that she would suddenly discover herself reading about “Deirdre of the Shadows” came to naught, for she found not a word in any of these publications, pertaining to her lost sister; and wondered, not without a small thrill of regret, whether Deirdre had given up her peculiar profession, or had somehow failed at it. (Malvinia being unfamiliar with Spiritualist protocol, she could not have known that the most exalted and prestigious mediums never advertised their services: they would not have condescended to do so, and, in any case, being so constantly in demand, despite their high fees, they had no need. And, after the historic investigation at the headquarters of the Society for Psychical Research, Deirdre of the Shadows had so enviable a reputation, she gave but a few sittings a month, and these generally in very private circumstances.)

It was Malvinia's intention to arrange for a private séance, that she might be put in contact with the spirit of the young clergyman whom she had so wantonly mistreated, for she was quite certain he
must
be dead. So she scanned the numerous publications, murmuring, “It is my fault—he did away with himself, for me—because of me—I alone am to blame”: still in a heightened state from that night of tempestuous emotions, and somewhat disoriented, in her ratiocinative powers, as a consequence of the liberal doses of ether and water she daily prescribed for herself. “If we can but greet each other, face-to-face,” she whispered, “surely he will forgive me—surely he cannot help but forgive his little Malvinia, once he grasps the burden of sorrow and repentance I bear!”

Yet in the end she wearied of the pamphlets, her inborn drollery aroused by so many insipid advertisements for “visionaries,” and “seers,” and “miracle-mediums,” and “priestesses.” She gathered the publications in her arms and threw them away, at the very instant the telephone began to ring in the next room.

In a moment her maid would rap gently at her door, to inform her that a gentleman was on the line: and who, Malvinia wondered with a sudden smile, would it be this time?

And poor Malcolm Kennicott became, at that moment, a
shade
indeed!

FIFTY-NINE

I
t was a bitter, yet not an unjust, irony, that The Beast should emerge with especial malevolence, when Malvinia Morloch had at last—after so many months of coquettish retreat!—abandoned herself to the intimate embrace of Mr. Mark Twain; and at a most precarious time in her career, when she was about to tour the Far West in
She Loved Him Dearly
—a trifling romance written for her particular talents.

Having no capability, and, indeed, no desire, so far as graphic descriptions of “love embraces” are concerned, I shall make no attempt to sketch for the repelled reader precisely how The Beast emerged, to make a loathsome mockery of the love declarations, kisses, caresses, and other amorous indulgences, which transpired between Malvinia and Mr. Twain, in Mal­vinia's sumptuously appointed bedchamber in the Hotel Nicklaus, in the late hours of January 13, 1894; I shall make no attempt to record, even for the interest of those employed in the profession of
morbid psychology,
with what suddenness The Beast blazed forth, in the midst of an embrace of extreme intimacy, announcing itself by a chuckling deep in the damsel's throat, and a brash flurry of activity, involving hands, feet, knees, and mouth, of a sort never experienced in his lifetime, we may infer, by the incredulous man of letters. That an interlude of sybaritic dalliance should erupt so violently, and so lewdly, against all normal expectations, plunging mistress and would-be lover into a struggle of brute physicality, the one cursing and grunting, the other crying aloud in alarm and fear, and begging, finally, for help—that a love scene of illicit (and, some would say,
romantic
) proportions should be o'erturned, with such alacrity, to become a spectacle of buffoonery, may indeed strike the Christian contingent amongst my readers as
fit punishment
for such projected wickedness: and, were I not stirred to a vague pity, for Malvinia's extreme degradation (and its attendant effect upon her career), I would surely concur.

“I know not what has happened, or why—save that it is not my fault—it is not my doing!” the shamed woman cried, her eyes gleaming a lurid black, and her hair disheveled, and the widow's peak prominent above her furrowed brow:
“It is not my doing, and I own it not! I am innocent!”

 

LEST YOU PITY
the grappling lovers, being moved to sympathy by the embarrassment of the distinguished author (who, having dined royally that evening, on oysters, tripe, roast suckling pig, and crêpes suzette, was perhaps not in prime condition), I should remind you that there could hardly have been any genuine love between the principals, and but a modicum of meretricious sentiment. Doubtless, yes, Miss Malvinia Morloch and Mr. Mark Twain liked each other well enough, or at any rate admired each other, beneath the stylized carapace of their “romance,” for over a period of months they did have, it seems, an occasional serious conversation. (You may well imagine with what astonishment Malvinia greeted Mr. Twain's casual remark that
his
father, John Clemens, had spent a great deal of his time laboring on a perpetual-motion machine, back in Hannibal, Missouri!)

But both were celebrities, jaded with the proffered adoration of strangers, which, coming so freely, could not escape being valued as cheap. They were magnificently self-absorbed, and blithe in their common intercourse with others; they made clever speeches, and did not listen; and were always glancing about, in public rooms, to take note of who took note of
them.
No, they could not have felt any tenderness toward each other, and one would be misguided to pity them. Only a queer “mental telegraphy”—a coinage of Mr. Twain's—drew them together; and this tenuous connection was blasted forever by the brute emergence of
The Beast.

 

LIKE ANY SEASONED
courtesan, Malvinia professed to admire her admirer. Upon the occasion of their first late-night supper together, after an evening performance of
She Loved Him Dearly,
Malvinia confessed that, a decade previously, she had been “o'erwhelmed, and struck to the heart” by his personage, as he had stood on the stage to make his “wondrously witty” speech, on the opening night of
Ah Sin.
His mastery of the English language—his aristocratic, yet unassuming manner—his generosity toward
her:
all were quite remarkable.

All this Mr. Twain appeared to absorb with a bemused, even skeptical, smile, beneath his prominent mustache: but he did not stint, upon the morn, in the quantity of red roses he caused to be delivered to Miss Malvinia Morloch's suite at the Nicklaus!

How attentively Malvinia appeared to listen, as her white-suited admirer, a carnation in his buttonhole, a whisky-slurred drawl to his words, spoke in lengthy monologues, in which melancholy and drollery contended, of his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, where he oft saw men shot and stabbed in the streets, and “niggers” sorely abused, and where his father had gone bankrupt, before a premature death; with what amused sympathy she attended to his speechifying on the “good, rough, man's world” of Nevada and California, in the old days; and the “unparalleled ambrosia” of the riverboat world. Florid-faced from a substantial dinner at Sherry's, consisting of claret, champagne, bourbon, brandy, and rum punch, among the liquid refreshments alone, he recounted loving anecdotes of General Grant, “the iron man,” and recited, for Malvinia's benefit, and for the benefit of diners at nearby tables, a speech evidently given some years ago, by one Colonel Robert Ingersoll:
“Blood was water, money was leaves, and life was only common air until one flag floated over a Republic without a master and without a slave!”
—the climax to a masterpiece of oratory that brought five hundred Union veterans to their feet in clamorous applause. And Mark Twain had himself given so wickedly amusing a speech, in ostensible honor of General Grant, that he had broken that giant into pieces with laughter: “I did it! I licked him! And I
knew
I could lick him!” Mr. Twain mused, filling his glass again with more claret. “My dear, if only you might have been there!—or, ladies not allowed, if only you might have
eavesdropped!
For once in Grant's life he had been knocked out of his iron serenity, and it was little Sam who did the job—shook him up like dynamite—racked all the bones of his body apart. And the audience
saw
that I had done it: five hundred witnesses. Ah, what a night! The house came crashing down! These Broadway ovations are piddle. Not to insult you, my dear:
everything
else is piddle. Shall I tell you, Miss Morloch,” he said, leaning uncomfortably close, as if in confidence, but with his voice still raised, “
everything else is piddle.
But we must keep the lid on our secret, eh?”

Malvinia was pleased to learn that Mr. Twain's “billion-dollar baby,” a typesetting machine patented by a genius-inventor named Paige, was being manufactured—or was it
not
being manufactured, owing to difficulties?—in a factory at Eighteenth Street and Broadway. Paige was not simply an inventor of surpassing genius, but a poet—a most great and genuine poet—“the Shakespeare of mechanical invention.” There were certain difficulties with the machine, at the present time, Mr. Twain conceded, and there
were
financial snarls; but once the Paige typesetter was manufactured in quantity, and on the competitive market, why, its boon to mankind would translate into hundreds of millions of dollars—solid cash—solid
gold:
and Mr. Mark Twain would be “up there in the Parthenon” with Vanderbilt, Astor, Car­negie, and the rest. “I hope we shall have
sustained,
if not to say
deepened,
our acquaintance by that time, Miss Morloch,” he said. “For it is but a matter of time!—piddling time.”

“You are very compassionate, Mr. Twain,” Malvinia said. “But tell me, please, about the miracle-machine: for tho' my ear is untutor'd, I have some small interest in the great inventions of our century.” A stratagem on the courtesan's part to keep her admirer talking, and talking, and talking, and drinking, so that, for this night at least, his importunate invitations that she join him in his modest suite at the Players' Club, in order that they watch, together, the sun's first slant rays penetrating the lacework of the great elms of Gramercy Park, might be bypassed.

So Mr. Twain talked, his twangy bumpkin's voice oft rearing to an impassioned height, as he spoke in unabash'd adulation of the Inventor, who was but second to God Himself: for was he not, after God, the “creator of the world”? Where the Old World pimped for its tiresome hodgepodge of castles, and cathedrals, and worn-out anemic Czars, and so many madonnas, you could pile them to the moon, the New World had the right idea: Hadn't the Connecticut Yankee opened a patent office right in King Arthur's England, to get things going? Didn't every Yankee with a head on his shoulders do the same kind of thing, in his own life? “Now a writer like myself may be acclaimed, Miss Morloch, as those in your profession are frequently acclaimed, but we are but entertainers for the masses. At best, we can hope to be teachers and moralists, and other such tedious bearers of wisdom. But the inventor, ah, the inventor!—the great American inventor!—he is the poet—the
true
poet—and nothing in any degree less than the poet. If I could trade in my feeble scribbling for a patent on a brilliant mechanism like the cotton gin, let us say, or that new contraption for executing criminals, the ‘electric chair,' is it called?—or my own James W. Paige's jewel of a machine, why,
that
would be true redemption, and let the suet-headed missionaries have the other!”

Malvinia listened; and, with many a nod of her lovely head, appeared to concur, whilst her eyes roved the festive interior, seeking to observe who might be observing her, and her illustrious escort. She was not disappointed: for it was a rare diner, in this sybaritic enclave, who did not recognize Miss Malvinia Morloch—and even those wealthy foreign visitors, dining with robust appetites, and queer continental manners, knew at sight the great man of letters Mark Twain.

She listened; she sympathized; she encouraged her suitor to tell her more; and, at the conclusion of a long and particularly impassioned speech on the “exquisite and fastidious and altogether beautiful miracle” of the Paige machine, she roused herself to some thoughtful commentary, to indicate the depth of her attention. Nay, she acquitted herself admirably, fetching out of some dim reservoir of memory—one of her theatrical speeches, perhaps?—these stirring words: “To my amateur's ear, Mr. Twain, it sounds very much as if this machine is indeed extraordinary, and will do you proud. Not merely to supply wealth, which you, as our greatest American author, scorn by instinct; and still less to supply fame, which you already possess in vertiginous abundance: but to hasten the progress of our great century, and promote all that is rare, and good, and wondrous, in Democracy itself! Why, it may be, Mr. Twain, that, owing to your prescience, future generations of mankind will be irreparably
altered—enhanced—revolutionized.
I am but a woman, and consequently hesitate to make such judgments, but it sounds very much to me as if this machine is no tinkerer's dream, but a device that will
revolutionize the continent.
And you are to be applauded, my dear sir, for not only having recognized this fact, but for doing all you can to bring it to fruition.” A speech of such boldness, and such contagious enthusiasm, that the aging gentleman's susceptibility to Miss Morloch's female charms can be well understood.