Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [82]
To Emily herself Lord’s love was ‘Improbable’. It would have been unthinkable in Mr Dickinson’s lifetime: his carefully protected daughter permitting such licence, and with his old friend. The voice of judgement, ‘I SAY UNTO YOU’ thundering through the startled air at morning prayers, had cleansed impurities from the minds of Mr Dickinson’s listeners. As Emily put it humorously, ‘Fumigation ceased when Father died’. Now, four years on, that voice no longer ruled. In her late forties and early fifties she found herself free to partake of the forbidden tree.
Lord, too, appeared to have relinquished his public character. Emily perceived, as she put it, Calvary and May struggling for supremacy. In his courtroom he was ‘merciless’ against fraud and dishonesty, and did not hide his contempt for legal technicalities that obstructed justice. ‘His dynamite was all in his eye’, according to colleagues on the bench. He could detect a fallacy at a glance and strip a case of irrelevant matter. A witness rarely left the stand with any fact concealed. To search out ‘the secret springs of action’ was more demanding, more subtle, he considered, than the mysteries of science: ‘he that becomes master of the human mind and human passions has achieved a greater triumph than he who has discovered a planet’. Susan thought him ‘a perfect figure-head for the Supreme Court, from his stiff stock to his toes’. His individuality, she said, was ‘so bristling, his conviction that he alone was the embodiment of the law, as given on Sinai, so entire, his suspicion of all but himself, so deeply founded on the rock bed of old conservative Whig tenacities, not to say obstinacies’ that he could not ‘coalesce’ with others at The Evergreens. Here was a man disposed to entertain the Dickinsons at table by reciting a hymn beginning ‘My thoughts on awful subjects roll / Damnation, and the dead’, accompanied by nervous laughter from his listeners.
With Lord, Emily was unafraid to speak up, inviting a glint of humour she called ‘the Judge Lord brand’. A smile broke when she teased him with the solemnities of courtroom language. ‘Crime’, ‘confess’, ‘punish’, ‘penalty’, ‘incarcerate’ were the words she applied to his supposed trial of her as a wanting lover. ‘I confess that I love him,’ she has to admit, but cannot pay the ‘debt’ she owes him. Can her ‘involuntary Bankruptcy’ be a crime? Will he ‘punish’ her? ‘Incarcerate me in yourself - that will punish me,’ she makes bold to suggest. The prospect of this ‘rosy penalty’ elates her: ‘the exultation floods me’, she confides, ‘I can not find my channel - The Creek turned Sea at thoughts of thee . . .’.
Flashing repartee of this sort exploded into intimacy within months of Mrs Lord’s death. That year, 1878, there’s immediate talk of consummation. She’s expressive about ‘hunger’. Restraint, she’s aware, fans desire.
Dont you know that you are happiest while I withhold and not confer - dont you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language?
You do, for you know all things - [top of sheet cut off] . . .
The ‘Stile’ is God’s - My Sweet One - for your great sake - not mine - I will not let you cross - but it is all your’s, and when it is right I will lift the Bars, and lay you in the Moss - You showed me the word.
I hope it has no different guise when my fingers make it. It is Anguish I long conceal from you to let you leave me, hungry, but you ask the divine Crust and that would doom the Bread.
Her letter reports to him her nephew’s curiosity, reflecting something of the family’s astonishment: such a figure of rectitude, such a paragon of the law, to be consorting so unconventionally with his aunt.
‘Aunt Emily,’ Ned asked, ‘does Judge Lord belong to the Church?’
‘I think not, Ned, technically.’
‘Why I thought he was one of those Boston fellers who thought it the respectable thing to do.’
‘I think he does nothing ostensible, Ned.’
‘Well, my father says if there were another Judge in the Commonwealth