The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (87 page)

Elliott laughed. “What good will that do? If I am a ghost, I should be able to pass through the walls and come floating across the cemetery to you, shouldn’t, I, Anne?”

“No,” she said steadily. “I won’t let you.”

“No?” he said, and laughed again. “When have you ever said no to me and meant it? You do not mean it now.” He took a step toward her. “Come. We will go together.”

“No!” she said, and whirled, opening and shutting the door behind her in one motion, pulling on the knob with all her strength till she could get the key into the lock and turn it. Elliott’s hand was on the knob on the other side, turning it.

“Stop this foolishness and let me out, Anne,” he said, half laughing, half stern.

“No,” she said.

She put the key in the muff, and then, as if that had
taken all her strength, she walked a few steps into the sanctuary and sank down on a pew. It was the one she had sat in that day of the funeral, and she put her arms down on the pew in front of her and buried her head in them. Inside the muff, her hand still clutched the key.

“Can I be of help, Miss Lawrence?” Reverend Sprague said kindly. He was wearing his heavy black coat and carrying the
Service for the Burial of the Dead.

“Yes,” Anne said, and stood up to go to the cemetery with him.

The coffin was already in the grave. The dirt was heaped around the edges, as dry and pale as the grass. The sky was heavy and gray. It was very cold. Victoria came forward to greet Reverend Sprague and speak to Anne. “I am so glad you came,” she said, taking Anne’s gloved hand. “We have only just
heard,” she said, her gray eyes filling with tears, and Anne thought suddenly, He has already been here.

Victoria’s
father came and put his arm around his daughter. “We have had word from New London,” he said. “My son’s ship was lost in a storm. With all hands.”

“No,” Anne said. “Your brother.”

“We still hope and pray he may not be lost,” Victoria’s father said. “They were very near the coast.”

“He is not lost,” Anne said, almost to herself, “he will come today,” and she did not know of whom she spoke.

“Let us pray,” Reverend Sprague said, and Anne thought, Yes, yes, hurry. They all moved closer to the grave as if that could somehow shelter them from the iron-gray sky. “‘In the midst of life we are in death,’” Reverend Sprague read. “‘Of whom may we seek for succor, but of thee, O Lord?’”

Anne closed her eyes.

“‘For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ.’” It was beginning to snow. Reverend Sprague stopped to look at the flakes falling on the book and lost the page altogether. When he found it, he said, “Pardon me,” and began again. “‘In the midst of life…’”

Hurry Anne thought. Oh, hurry.

Far away, at the other side of the cemetery, across the endless stretch
of grayish-brown grass and gray-black stones, someone was coming. The minister hesitated. Go on, Anne thought. Go on.

“‘That every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad.’”

It was a man in a dark coat. He was carrying his hat in his hand. His hair was reddish-brown. There were flakes of snow on his coat and in his hair. Anne was
afraid to look at him for fear the others would see him. She bowed her head. Reverend Sprague bent and scooped up a handful of dirt from the edge of the grave. “‘Unto the mercy of Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we commend the soul of our brother departed and commit his body to the ground, earth to earth—’” He stopped, still holding the handful of earth.

Anne looked up. The man was much closer,
walking rapidly between the graves. Victoria’s father looked up. His face went gray.

“‘Unto
the mercy of Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother departed,’” Reverend Sprague read, and stopped again, and stared.

Victoria’s father put his arm around Victoria. Victoria looked up. The man began to run toward them, waving his hat in the air.

“No,” Anne said. With the toe of her boot she
kicked at the dirt heaped around the grave. The dislodged clumps of dirt clattered on the coffin. Reverend Sprague looked at her, his face red and angry. He thinks I murdered Elliott, Anne thought despairingly, but I didn’t. She clenched the useless key inside her muff and looked down at the forgotten coffin. I tried, Victoria. For your sake. For all our sakes. I tried to murder Elliott.

Victoria
gave a strangled cry and began to run, her father close behind her. Reverend Sprague closed his book with an angry slap. “Roger!” Victoria cried, and threw her arms around his neck. Anne looked up.

Victoria’s father slapped him on the back again and again. Victoria kissed him and cried. She took his large hand in her small gloved one and led him over to meet Anne. “This is my brother!” she said
happily. “Roger, this is Miss Lawrence, who has been so kind to me.”

He shook Anne’s hand.

“We heard your ship was lost,” she said.

“It was,” he said, and looked past her at the open grave.

Anne stood outside the door of the choir room with the key in her hand until her fingers became stiff with cold and she could hardly put the key in the lock.

There was
no one in the church. Reverend Sprague
had gone home with Victoria and her father and brother to tea. “Please come,” Victoria had said to Anne. “I do so want you and Roger to be friends.” She had squeezed Anne’s gloved hand and hurried off through the snow. It was nearly dusk. The snow had begun falling heavily by the time they finished burying Elliott’s body. Reverend Sprague had read the service for the burial of the dead straight
through to the end, and then they had stood, heads bowed against the snow, while old Mr. Finn filled in the grave. Then they had gone to tea and Anne had come back here to the church.

She turned the key in the lock. The rattling sound of the key seemed to be followed by an echo of itself, and she thought for a fleeting second of Elliott on the other side of the door, his hand already on the knob,
ready to hurtle past her. Then she opened the door.

There was no one there. She knew it before she lit the candle. There had been no one there all week except herself. Her smallheeled footprints stood out clearly in the dust. The pew where Elliott had sat was thick with undisturbed dust, and in one corner of it lay the comforter she had brought him.

The toe of her foot hit against something
on the floor, half under the pew. She bent to look. The packets of food, untouched in their brown paper wrappings, lay where Elliott had hidden them. A mouse had nibbled the string on one of them, and it lay spilled open, the piece of ham, the russet apple, the crumbling slice of cake she had brought him that first night. A schoolboy’s picnic, Anne thought, and left the parcels where they were for
Reverend Sprague to find and think whatever it was he would think about the footprints, the candle, the scattered food.

Let him think the worst, Anne thought. After all, it’s true. I have murdered Elliott. It was getting very cold in the room. “I must go to tea at Victoria’s,” she said, and blew out the candle. By the dim light from the hall she picked up the comforter and folded it over her
arm. She dropped the key on the floor and left the door open behind her.

“So there I was, all alone,” Roger said, “in the middle of a rough sea, my shirt frozen to my back, not one of my shipmates in sight, when what should I spy but the whaling boat.” He paused expectantly.

Anne pulled the comforter around her shoulders and leaned forward over the fire to warm her hands.

“Would you like some
tea?” Victoria said kindly. “Roger, we’re eager to hear your story, but we must get poor Anne warmed up. I’m afraid she got a dreadful chill at the cemetery.”

“I’m feeling much warmer now, thank you,” Anne said, but she didn’t refuse the tea. She wrapped her hands around the warmth of the thin china cup. Roger left his story to jab clumsily at the fire with the poker.

“Now then,” Victoria said
when the coals had roared up into new flames, “you may tell us the rest of your story, Roger.”

Roger still squatted by the hearth, holding the poker loosely in his rough, windburned hands.

“There’s
nothing else to tell,” he said, looking up at Anne. “The oars were still in the whaling boat. I rowed for shore.” He had gray eyes like Victoria’s. His hair in the firelight was darker than hers and
with a reddish cast to it. Almost as dark as Elliott’s. “I walked to an inn and hired a horse. When I got here, they told me you were at the cemetery. I was afraid you’d given up hope and were burying me.”

His smile was more open than Elliott’s, and his eyes more kind. His windburned hands looked strong and full of life, but he held the poker clumsily, as if his hands were cold and he could not
get a proper grip on it. Anne took the comforter from around her shoulders and put it across her knees.

“You haven’t eaten a thing since you got home,” Victoria said. “And after all that time in an open boat, I’d think you would be starving.”

Roger put the poker down on the hearth and took the cup of tea his sister gave him in both hands. He held it steadily enough, but he did not drink any.
“I ate at the inn where I hired the horse,” he said.

“How did you say you found the horse?” Anne said, as if she had not heard them. She held out a slice of cake to him on a thin china plate.

“I borrowed it from the man at the inn. He gave me some clothes to wear, too. Mine were ruined, and I’d lost my boots in the water. I must have been a sorry sight, knocking at his door late at night. He
looked as though he’d seen a ghost.” He smiled at Anne, and his eyes were kinder than Elliott’s had ever been. “So did all of you,” he said. “I felt for a moment as if I’d come to my own funeral.”

“No,” Anne said, and smiled back at him, but she watched him steadily as he took the slice of cake, and waited for him to eat it.

Invasion and Repulsion:
A Chronological Reinterpretation Of Two of Emily
Dickinson’s Poems:
A Wellsian Perspective

Until recently
it was
thought that Emily Dickinson’s poetic output ended in 1886, the year she died. Poems 186B and 272?, however, suggest that not only did she write poems at a later date, but that she was involved in the “great and terrible events”
¹
at the turn of the century.

The poems in question originally came to light in 1991,
²
while Nathan Fleece was working on his doctorate. Fleece, who found the poems
³
under a hedge in the Dickinsons’ backyard, classified the poems as belonging to Dickinson’s Early or Only Slightly Eccentric Period, but a recent examination of the works
⁴
has yielded up an entirely different interpretation of the
circumstances under which the poems were written.

The sheets of paper on which the poems were written are charred around the edges, and that of Number 272? has a large round hole burnt in it. Martha Hodge-Banks claims that said charring and hole were caused by “a pathetic attempt to age the paper and forgetting to watch the oven,”
^5
*
but the large number of dashes makes it clear they were written
by Dickinson, as well as the fact that the poems are almost totally indecipherable. Dickinson’s unreadable handwriting has been authenticated by any number of scholars, including Elmo Spencer in
Emily Dickinson: Handwriting or Hieroglyphics
, and M. P. Cursive, who wrote, “Her a’s look like c’s, her e’s look like 2’s, and the whole thing looks like chicken scratches.”
⁶
The charring seemed to indicate
either that the poems had been written while smoking
⁷
or in the midst of some catastrophe, and I began examining the text for clues.

Fleece
had deciphered Number 272? as beginning, “I never saw a friend—/I never saw a moom—,” which made no sense at all,
⁸
and on closer examination I saw that the stanza actually read:

a much more authentic translation, particularly in regard to the rhyme scheme. “Moom” and “tomb” actually rhyme, which is something Dickinson hardly ever did, preferring near-rhymes such as “mat/gate,” “tune/sun,” and “balm/hermaphrodite.”

The second stanza was more difficult, as it occupied the area of the round hole, and the only readable
portion was a group of four letters farther down that read “ulla.”
⁹

This was assumed by Fleece to be part of a longer word such as “bullary” (a convocation of popes),
¹⁰
or possibly “dullard” or “hullabaloo.
¹¹

I, however,
immediately recognized “ulla” as the word H. G. Wells had reported hearing the dying Martians utter, a sound he described as “a sobbing alternation of two notesu
¹²
…a desolating
cry.”

“Ulla” was a clear reference to the 1900 invasion by the Martians, previously thought to have been confined to England, Missouri, and the University of Paris.
¹³
The poem fragment, along with 186B, clearly indicated that the Martians had landed in Amherst and that they had met Emily Dickinson.

At first glance, this seems an improbable scenario due to both the Martians’ and Emily Dickinson’s
dispositions. Dickinson was a recluse who didn’t meet anybody, preferring to hide upstairs when neighbors came to call and to float notes down on them.
¹⁴
Various theories have been advanced for her self-imposed hermitude, including Bright’s Disease, an unhappy love affair, eye trouble, and bad skin. T. L. Mensa suggests the simpler theory that all the rest of the Amherstonians were morons.
¹⁵

None of these explanations would have made it likely that she would like Martians any better than Amherstates, and there is the added difficulty that, having died in 1886, she would also have been badly decomposed.

The Martians present additional difficulties. The opposite of recluses, they were in the habit of arriving noisily, attracting reporters, and blasting at everybody in the vicinity.
There is no record of their having landed in Amherst, though several inhabitants mention unusually loud thunderstorms in their diaries,
¹⁶
and Louisa May Alcott, in nearby Concord, wrote in her journal, “Wakened suddenly last night by a loud noise to the west. Couldn’t get back to sleep for worrying. Should have had Jo marry Laurie. To Do: Write sequel in which Amy dies. Serve her right for burning
manuscript.”