The most devoted Cantabrigian, after Lowell, whom I knew, would perhaps
have contended that if he had stayed with us Willson might have lived;
for John Holmes affirmed a faith in the virtues of the place which
ascribed almost an aseptic character to its air, and when he once
listened to my own complaints of an obstinate cold, he cheered himself,
if not me, with the declaration, “Well, one thing, Mr. Howells, Cambridge
never let a man keep a cold yet!”
If he had said it was better to live in Cambridge with a cold than
elsewhere without one I should have believed him; as it was, Cambridge
bore him out in his assertion, though she took her own time to do it.
Lowell had talked to me of him before I met him, celebrating his peculiar
humor with that affection which was not always so discriminating, and
Holmes was one of the first Cambridge men I knew. I knew him first in
the charming old Colonial house in which his famous brother and he were
born. It was demolished long before I left Cambridge, but in memory it
still stands on the ground since occupied by the Hemenway Gymnasium, and
shows for me through that bulk a phantom frame of Continental buff in the
shadow of elms that are shadows themselves. The ‘genius loci’ was
limping about the pleasant mansion with the rheumatism which then
expressed itself to his friends in a resolute smile, but which now
insists upon being an essential trait of the full-length presence to my
mind: a short stout figure, helped out with a cane, and a grizzled head
with features formed to win the heart rather than the eye of the
beholder.
In one of his own eyes there was a cast of such winning humor and
geniality that it took the liking more than any beauty could have done,
and the sweetest, shy laugh in the world went with this cast.
I long wished to get him to write something for the Magazine, and at last
I prevailed with him to review a history of Cambridge which had come out.
He did it charmingly of course, for he loved more to speak of Cambridge
than anything else. He held his native town in an idolatry which was not
blind, but which was none the less devoted because he was aware of her
droll points and her weak points. He always celebrated these as so many
virtues, and I think it was my own passion for her that first commended
me to him. I was not her son, but he felt that this was my misfortune
more than my fault, and he seemed more and more to forgive it. After we
had got upon the terms of editor and contributor, we met oftener than
before, though I do not now remember that I ever persuaded him to write
again for me. Once he gave me something, and then took it back, with a
self-distrust of it which I could not overcome.
When the Holmes house was taken down, he went to live with an old
domestic in a small house on the street amusingly called Appian Way. He
had certain rooms of her, and his own table, but he would not allow that
he was ever anything but a lodger in the place, where he continued till
he died. In the process of time he came so far to trust his experience
of me, that he formed the habit of giving me an annual supper. Some days
before this event, he would appear in my study, and with divers delicate
and tentative approaches, nearly always of the same tenor, he would say
that he should like to ask my family to an oyster supper with him. “But
you know,” he would explain, “I haven’t a house of my own to ask you to,
and I should like to give you the supper here.” When I had agreed to
this suggestion with due gravity, he would inquire our engagements, and
then say, as if a great load were off his mind, “Well, then, I will send
up a few oysters to-morrow,” or whatever day we had fixed on; and after a
little more talk to take the strangeness out of the affair, would go his
way. On the day appointed the fish-man would come with several gallons
of oysters, which he reported Mr. Holmes had asked him to bring, and in
the evening the giver of the feast would reappear, with a lank oil-cloth
bag, sagged by some bottles of wine. There was always a bottle of red
wine, and sometimes a bottle of champagne, and he had taken the
precaution to send some crackers beforehand, so that the supper should be
as entirely of his own giving as possible. He was forced to let us do
the cooking and to supply the cold-slaw, and perhaps he indemnified
himself for putting us to these charges and for the use of our linen and
silver, by the vast superfluity of his oysters, with which we remained
inundated for days. He did not care to eat many himself, but seemed
content to fancy doing us a pleasure; and I have known few greater ones
in life, than in the hospitality that so oddly played the host to us at
our own table.