As I have said, he liked his fences, or at least liked you to respect
them, or to be sensible of them. As often as I went to see him I was
made to wait in the little reception-room below, and never shown at once
to his study. My name would be carried up, and I would hear him
verifying my presence from the maid through the opened door; then there
came a cheery cry of wellcome: “Is that you? Come up, come up!” and I
found him sometimes half-way down the stairs to meet me. He would make
an excuse for having kept me below a moment, and say something about the
rule he had to observe in all cases, as if he would not have me feel his
fence a personal thing. I was aware how thoroughly his gentle spirit
pervaded the whole house; the Irish maid who opened the door had the
effect of being a neighbor too, and of being in the joke of the little
formality; she apologized in her turn for the reception-room; there was
certainly nothing trampled upon in her manner, but affection and
reverence for him whose gate she guarded, with something like the
sentiment she would have cherished for a dignitary of the Church, but
nicely differenced and adjusted to the Autocrat’s peculiar merits.
The last time I was in that place, a visitant who had lately knocked at
my own door was about to enter. I met the master of the house on the
landing of the stairs outside his study, and he led me in for the few
moments we could spend together. He spoke of the shadow so near, and
said he supposed there could be no hope, but he did not refuse the cheer
I offered him from my ignorance against his knowledge, and at something
that was thought or said he smiled, with even a breath of laughter, so
potent is the wont of a lifetime, though his eyes were full of tears, and
his voice broke with his words. Those who have sorrowed deepest will
understand this best.
It was during the few years of our Beacon Street neighborhood that he
spent those hundred days abroad in his last visit to England and France.
He was full of their delight when he came back, and my propinquity gave
me the advantage of hearing him speak of them at first hand. He
whimsically pleased himself most with his Derby-day experiences, and
enjoyed contrasting the crowd and occasion with that of forty or fifty
years earlier, when he had seen some famous race of the Derby won;
nothing else in England seemed to have moved him so much, though all that
royalties, dignities, and celebrities could well do for him had been
done. Of certain things that happened to him, characteristic of the
English, and interesting to him in their relation to himself through his
character of universally interested man, he spoke freely; but he has said
what he chose to the public about them, and I have no right to say more.
The thing that most vexed him during his sojourn apparently was to have
been described in one of the London papers as quite deaf; and I could
truly say to him that I had never imagined him at all deaf, or heard him
accused of it before. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I am a little hard of hearing
on one side. But it isn’t deafness.”
He had, indeed, few or none of the infirmities of age that make
themselves painfully or inconveniently evident. He carried his slight
figure erect, and until his latest years his step was quick and sure.
Once he spoke of the lessened height of old people, apropos of something
that was said, and “They will shrink, you know,” he added, as if he were
not at all concerned in the fact himself. If you met him in the street,
you encountered a spare, carefully dressed old gentleman, with a
clean-shaven face and a friendly smile, qualified by the involuntary
frown of his thick, senile brows; well coated, lustrously shod, well
gloved, in a silk hat, latterly wound with a mourning-weed. Sometimes he
did not know you when he knew you quite well, and at such times I think
it was kind to spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity; at
any rate, I am glad of the times when I did so. In society he had the
same vagueness, the same dimness; but after the moment he needed to make
sure of you, he was as vivid as ever in his life. He made me think of a
bed of embers on which the ashes have thinly gathered, and which, when
these are breathed away, sparkles and tinkles keenly up with all the
freshness of a newly kindled fire. He did not mind talking about his
age, and I fancied rather enjoyed doing so. Its approaches interested
him; if he was going, he liked to know just how and when he was going.
Once he spoke of his lasting strength in terms of imaginative humor: he
was still so intensely interested in nature, the universe, that it seemed
to him he was not like an old man so much as a lusty infant which
struggles against having the breast snatched from it. He laughed at the
notion of this, with that impersonal relish which seemed to me singularly
characteristic of the self-consciousness so marked in him. I never heard
one lugubrious word from him in regard to his years. He liked your
sympathy on all grounds where he could have it self-respectfully, but he
was a most manly spirit, and he would not have had it even as a type of
the universal decay. Possibly he would have been interested to have you
share in that analysis of himself which he was always making, if such a
thing could have been.
He had not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy in others,
and chiefly in our literary craft, which is somewhat ignobly given to it,
though he was patient, after all. He used to say, and I believe he has
said it in print,--[Holmes said it in print many times, in his three
novels and scattered through the “Breakfast Table” series. D.W.]--that
unless a man could show a good reason for writing verse, it was rather
against him, and a proof of weakness. I suppose this severe conclusion
was something he had reached after dealing with innumerable small poets
who sought the light in him with verses that no editor would admit to
print. Yet of morbidness he was often very tender; he knew it to be
disease, something that must be scientifically rather than ethically
treated. He was in the same degree kind to any sensitiveness, for he was
himself as sensitive as he was manly, and he was most delicately
sensitive to any rightful social claim upon him. I was once at a dinner
with him, where he was in some sort my host, in a company of people whom
he had not seen me with before, and he made a point of acquainting me
with each of them. It did not matter that I knew most of them already;
the proof of his thoughtfulness was precious, and I was sorry when I had
to disappoint it by confessing a previous knowledge.