Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [120]
From the late summer of 1886 and through the spring of 1887 Mabel was occupied with building and furnishing her nest on the Dickinson meadow. She continued to satisfy the giver of this bounty. But her renewed whisperings to Austin suggest that to satisfy him does not satisfy her, and is secondary to an ambition she can’t define, inflated with a delusion it can join with God.
‘. . . I feel that there are, within me, divine possibilities which can only blossom through you’, were her parting words to Austin when she and David left for Japan in June 1887. She followed this up three days later on a train to Montreal: ‘I have a sort of of-course feeling, that pretty soon we shall be inseparably together . . . - a presentiment for this world, I mean, as well as Heaven, dear.’
A more forceful scenario grew on Mabel on the long journey across Canada and the Pacific to Tokyo. They took a new route from Vancouver, more direct than the route from San Francisco, but this far north it proved stormy even in summer: giant waves rose above the ship and broke over the deck. Mabel alone stayed on deck, in a hatchway, to witness the wildness. Unlike the other passengers, prone in their bunks below, she had the stomach for upheavals of the seas. The captain commended her appearance at meals. Even his seasoned wife couldn’t make it.
As part of David’s expedition, Mabel gamely climbed Mount Fuji (the first woman permitted to go beyond the sixth level) and then slept on the floor under mosquito netting in a Japanese inn in Shirakawa, where David was preparing to photograph a total eclipse of the sun. Here, far from Amherst, Mabel’s mind was fixed on The Evergreens, awaiting the bolt from on high, the ‘divine visitation’ about to hit her ‘enemies’. It’s not escaped notice that if Austin was her ‘God’ he was particularly well placed to act on her behalf. A charitable view is that this was ‘unconscious’ on Mabel’s part, but that’s unlikely given her conviction that the obstacle had to go.
From Shirakawa, on 31 July 1887 Mabel sent a renewed death threat to Austin: he must intervene to secure her public position and subdue the ‘bigoted spite’ she experienced as his mistress.
‘You have, as far as the outward circumstances go, the great advantage of me. You can rule & compel some things which I cannot . . . they make your outward life much more bearable than mine. I do not want my life to end so soon. I have capabilities which will grow in time into larger accomplishment, sometime. I mean to do something worth while.’
Up to now, Mabel’s ambition had not shown full face to Austin. Where David supported ambition, Austin may not have known that New Women existed. He did do Mabel the favour of sending a manuscript to a contact at Harper’s magazine when she went so far as to ask, but there’s no sign Austin himself read it or saw her future in professional terms. It was well enough for Mabel sing in church or drawing rooms, but he’d not have liked her on the stage. What he wanted was Mabel’s resounding echo of his love-calls. For Mabel to reveal her separate ambition at this point shows how near the edge she was.
Ambition, she confessed, was eroded by ‘morbid’ fears over ‘the terrible hatred of my three enemies. I can feel it pursuing me here on the other side of the world - the positive hatred & persecution, as well as the negative disgust. I feel it every moment, & it is killing me. Perhaps I am nervous, but I certainly do feel as if it would ultimately be my death. I do not know but that something is being done by them now, for my destruction - at all events, I have been most horribly conscious of their malignity for more than a week, so that some days I have hardly been able to speak for the crushing power of it.’
Before she left Shirakawa, on the afternoon of Sunday 21 August, she asked Austin to meet her ship when it docked if what she expected were accomplished. ‘. . . If any divine visitation occurs to the big black Moghul, you will come to Vancouver &