Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [6]
Susan Dickinson liked to mix with people of intelligence, and no sooner did she meet Mrs Todd than she took her up and drove her along back roads in the Dickinson carriage. When they’d had their fill of fall colours Mabel obliged her new friend by singing to her for three hours.
Everyone at The Evergreens was entranced, in turn, by the newcomer’s talents: she sang solos in the church choir, played the piano with brilliance, painted flowers with professional skill and published stories and travel pieces in magazines. Her readiness to foster the arts in local society delighted Susan. ‘She admires me extravagantly’, Mabel wrote in her journal, ‘and I love and admire her equally. She is a rare woman, & her home is my haven of pleasure in Amherst.’
After the many courses of Washington dinners, Mabel took to ‘teas’ at The Evergreens. They began at 8 p.m. and, later, light refreshments with oysters would be brought in and placed on little tables beside each guest, a style of entertaining reminiscent of early nineteenth-century England: Emma offering scalloped oysters to her father’s guests in Highbury.
At these teas Mabel and Austin Dickinson were often together, Mabel attentive to what was said, her lower lip (as photos show) a little open and her brown eyes melting. She was eager to share Austin’s love of nature: the misty hills in autumn, the red leaves and the sound of crickets. He hoped, he said, to have crickets chirping about his grave. He spoke clearly but with a note of shyness in his bluff manner. His diffidence was part of a refinement beyond anything she had encountered. ‘He is delicate beyond expression’, she thought. He seemed to live ‘on the heights’, reigning over a New England world of Puritan descendants who respected elevation.
The responsive Mrs Todd seems to act out a familiar plot, the seduction of a man in power, but what differed in this instance was the presence of another and grander form of power, that of a poet who selects her society then shuts the door. To an enthusiast such as Mabel, that shut door, and the elect intelligence behind it, offered another irresistible challenge. So one sunny day, 10 September 1882, a year after the Todds’ arrival in Amherst, Mabel crossed the path, fortified by Austin’s escort. Curious, filled with anticipation, she stepped through the Homestead door and was admitted to the parlour.
In this long room looking towards The Evergreens she seated herself at the poet’s square piano and let loose the trills of her trained voice. It rang out through the big, silent house, and as it did so Mabel became aware ‘that Miss Emily in her weird white dress was outside in the shadow’, while her mother, bedridden for years, was listening upstairs. Mabel records the scene in her journal: ‘When I stopped Emily sent me in a glass of rich sherry & a poem written as I sang.’ Its first stanza acknowledges the lure of a blissful voice - ‘Elysium is as far as to / The very nearest Room’ - but in the second and concluding stanza the poet spells out a presentiment of her own: a step is heard; a door is opening to an oncoming intrusion she must ‘endure’:
What fortitude the Soul contains,
That it can so endure
The accent of a coming Foot—
The opening of a Door—
Sure enough, the very next day Mabel offered Austin her warm, waiting hand outside The Evergreens. She had been invited for the evening, and Austin had called for her at her boarding house. The pair slowed down as they reached The Evergreens and walked past the gate. In his diary for 11 September Austin left a space at the end and then set down a fateful word: ‘Rubicon’. These few steps sufficed to carry them across the barrier of marital fidelity, before they went inside to play a game of whist with the unsuspecting Sue.
It was raining