Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

22

WOMAN, n. – An animal usually living in the vicinity of Man, and having a rudimentary susceptibility to domestication.

–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

As the editors of San Francisco’s leading magazine, Charles Warren Stoddard and Ina Coolbrith were powerful in the literary world. Bierce had published occasional pieces in the Overland Monthly, which he referred to as the Warmedoverland, and he had invited me to accompany him to last month’s salon, where I had been introduced to Stoddard, a plump, effeminate man somewhat older than Bierce. Miss Coolbrith was tall and gracious, with a frieze of fair spit curls across her forehead. Although I had no literary aspirations I had been invited to return, which I understood to be because the young lady poets outnumbered the young men who were to provide them company.

The windows of Stoddard’s house on the slopes above North Beach were alight. Inside, the entryway was crowded with guests ridding themselves of coats and hats. Just past them Stoddard stood a host’s post, raising his hands palms flippered back at the wrists to greet each new arrival. He wore a white gardenia in his lapel, and his active eyebrows and moues of pleasure kept his face in constant motion.

Ina Coolbrith met us inside the crowded main room. “It is Mr. Redmond, the journalist! And this is?”

“Miss Brittain,” I said. “And this is Miss Coolbrith, Amelia.”

“I am an admirer of your verse, Miss Coolbrith,” Amelia said with an ease I admired. “And we have spent the day at Mount Tamalpais, which is the scene of many of your poems.”

Smiling at her, Ina Coolbrith said, “It was there that Mr. Miller and I gathered laurels for him to take to Lord Byron’s grave in England.”

Joaquin Miller was holding forth to a cluster of female poets across the room, a big blowhard fraud in my estimation, in his blue flannel miner’s shirt and shiny boots, which he moved forward and back so that the lady poets in their flowered frocks kept in motion evading his advances and compensating for his retreats. He was recently returned from England, where he was reported to have had a grand success. The British welcomed Westerners whom Easterners found ridiculous. Amelia gazed at the Poet of the Sierra with interest.

On the wall was an oil painting of Stoddard in a monk’s cowl, contemplating a skull. I thought the painting silly, and it cast a pall of pretension on Bierce’s desk skull.

Entering from a balcony were two handsome young ladies, one in black with a bouquet of violets pinned to her shoulder, the other in shimmering peach silk. Masses of golden hair were piled on her head. The two were such spectacular personages that the attention of the room was directed towards them, and I noticed one of Joaquin Miller’s acolytes slip away to join the crowd assembling around these two. In other parts of the room were several portly gentlemen who looked literarily important, one with a bald head sporting sprouts of colorless hair, another in a kind of military tunic, with elaborate longhorn mustachios. Standing beside a dark wood chest inlaid with mother-of-pearl was a pair of young male poets who wore the elaborate bow ties popularized by Oscar Wilde on his recent visit to San Francisco.

Amelia looked around her with such interest that I was pleased I had thought of bringing her to the Overland Monthly salon.

“Tom, please inform me who these individuals are!” she whispered, for Ina Coolbrith had turned to greet newcomers.

I didn’t know who many of them were. “That’s Joaquin Miller,” I said.

“Oh, there’s Mr. Bierce,” Amelia said. Bierce, whom I had not seen before, stood near the windows attended by his own band of females.

When I caught his eye we exchanged restrained salutes. I had to explain to him my bargain with Klosters. His glance rested appraisingly on Amelia. For someone who advertised his dislike of the female gender, Bierce did have a weakness for pretty women.

The poetess Emma McLachlan came up to be introduced to Amelia. “Please tell me who is the brilliant young lady with the violets!” Amelia said to her, when greetings and introductory comments had been run through. Miss McLachlan had mousy hair and a prim mouth. I did not find her attractive.

“That is Sibyl Sanderson,” she said. “She is a talented soprano, who wishes to pursue a career as an opera singer. But her father, Judge Sanderson, will have none of it. She is very daring! She has recently returned from Paris and she dresses always in black and wears violets. When asked if that is what the fashionable ladies are wearing in Paris, she said, ‘It is what the demimondaines wear!’ ”

Amelia looked properly shocked.

“And her companion with the magnificent hair?”

“She is Mrs. Atherton. She has recently serialized a very daring novel in Warmedoverland. Those two are often seen together.”

“The Randolphs of Redwoods!” Amelia said. “There was a pseudonym, as I recall.”

“Yes, ‘Asmodeus.’ ”

They were talking about matters I knew nothing about, and I was feeling sulky until Amelia touched my hand reassuringly.

“It is her first novel, I believe.”

“She claims she has written another which is even better,” Miss McLachlan said. “She is married to a ne’er-do-well, they say. George Atherton. She was a Miss Horn.”

“What distinguished company!” Amelia said. She told me that she wished to pay her respects to Mr. Miller and departed to join the bevy around the blue flannel shirt.

I was left with Miss McLachlan, who gave me her tight-lipped smile like a wink.

“Asmodeus was some kind of devil,” I said.

“The destroyer of domestic happiness,” she said. “He destroyed each of Sara’s seven husbands in succession.”

“Think of that,” I said.

“Have you read the novel, Mr. Redmond?”

I admitted that I had not and resolved not to. Amelia was now engaged in conversation with Joaquin Miller. I saw that she stood her ground when he lurched toward her.

When I had detached myself from Miss McLachlan I collected a glass of punch from a Chinese boy in a white shirt and black tie and made my way through conversational twos and threes toward Bierce’s orbit. I was sweating in the heat of the crush of bodies and the gaslights.

Bierce introduced me as his associate, which caused some interest. Amelia had abandoned Joaquin Miller and drifted over to join the group around the two daring young ladies.

Ina Coolbrith stood beside me. She seemed to be holding herself very stiffly, hands grasping her forearms. She smelled of rosewater.

In a lull in the conversation she said in a challenging tone, “I see that you have devastated another young poet in Tattle this week, Ambrose.”

Bierce bowed his head to her but did not respond.

“I wonder if she will ever write another verse.”

“If she does, it is probable that she will not send it to me for review,” Bierce said.

There was tittering among the young ladies around him, which I saw that Miss Coolbrith did not like.

“My niece, whom you also cruelly turned into a joke, has sworn she will never write again.”

Bierce said, “I wish that I were able to consider that a tragedy, Ina.”

“I do,” Miss Coolbrith said. “For I consider poetry unwritten to be elevated thought unexpressed, and elevated thought may help to make the world a better place. But of course elevated thought is not your metier, Ambrose.”

“That is of course true, madam,” Bierce said, and I saw from the whitening of his nostrils that he had restrained himself from saying more.

“I told my niece that yours is not the voice of the muse,” Miss Coolbrith continued. “But only of a cruel and disappointed man.”

“Disappointed, madam?”

“Disappointed,” Miss Coolbrith said, and I thought she meant it as cruelly as the cruelty of which she had accused Bierce. It seemed to me that one of them now, dramatically, must storm from the room. But Bierce only turned to address himself to one of his young ladies, and Miss Coolbrith, brushing at a wisp of hair on her forehead and affixing a smile to her face, turned to greet a young man in black broadcloth who looked like a preacher. I eased myself toward where Amelia stood listening to a speech Mrs. Atherton was making, with florid gestures.

When I looked back again Bierce had disappeared.

Amelia congratulated me on my friends as she and I walked over Nob Hill in the blessed cool air toward her home.

I said I could hardly claim they were my friends. I was no literary person.

“Surely there is a place for a journalist in such an accomplished group. Your Mr. Bierce was on a pedestal. And Miss McLachlan is quite interested in you.”

“It is not a mutual interest.”

She held my arm. We walked slowly so as not to arrive at 913 Taylor Street before we had to. She had a way of stretching her gait to match mine. Often our hips brushed.

The mansions of the magnates began to loom around us, facades lit by moonlight.

“What was the trouble between Mr. Bierce and Miss Coolbrith?” Amelia inquired.

“He gave her niece’s poems a savage review.”

“Her niece should not have sent her poetry to him. He is infamous for his savage treatment of poets.”

“A word of praise from him would be important. You remarked how those young ladies flocked around him.”

“Are they all poets?”

“I’m sure a number of them are. Miss McLachlan is a poet.” And I told her that she herself had been the most beautiful woman in that place.

She laughed and squeezed my hand. “You just think that because you like me, Tom. I am so happy that you would think that! But there were two very handsome and very accomplished women there. I am not accomplished at all!”

I said I wasn’t sure she should want to be as accomplished as Gertrude Atherton.

Amelia was silent for a long time, as though considering that. “She is very pleased with herself,” she announced finally. “She is a wife and mother who is contemptuous of women who are wives and mothers.” And she added, “She said a curious thing.”

“What is that?”

“She said California girls are as flavorless as the pistachio. Doesn’t that seem an odd thing to say?”

“Is the pistachio so flavorless?”

“That is not what I mean. She must have known that most of her auditors were California girls. What is the point in telling us we are flavorless?”

“You said she was pleased with herself.”

“Who is herself a California girl. But I am sure she considers herself an uncommon one.”

We walked on.

“I think I would not be that way,” Amelia said.

I did not inquire her meaning. In the moonlit dark, scuds of fog drifted seemingly close enough overhead to reach up and touch. Down a block I could see the hulk of the McNair mansion, a line of first-floor windows alight. Beau must be there, unless he was abroad on his “researches,” the idea of which angered me as much as Joaquin Miller’s pretensions.

To the left the moon gleamed on the high smooth planking of Charles Crocker’s spite-fence, another Railroad outrage, and a project Bierce had assigned me that I hadn’t begun to work on yet. I berated myself that I would think to recoup being scared off of Senator Jennings by scarifying Charles Crocker.

Amelia said, “I would have neither the presumption nor the courage to send verses I have written to Mr. Bierce.”

I said carefully that I would be pleased if she would give me her poems to read. Again she was silent for a time.

“I do not think I will do that, thank you,” she said finally, and it seemed best not to disagree with her. “Tom,” she said, “I think you must be very careful not to become like Mr. Bierce.”

“Yes,” I said, and she gripped my hand in her strong hand. The street steepened beneath our feet. Below and on the right ahead of us were the high gables and the lighted windows of the Brittain house. Amelia halted.

“If you wish to kiss me you must kiss me now!”

I kissed her lips. Embracing her affected my knees, kissing her my breath.

“That was very nice,” she whispered, as we continued our descent to 913 Taylor. When we climbed the stairs a figure rose from a chair on the porch, the constable on duty, raising his helmet in salute to Amelia.

“All safe and quiet on the premises, Miss Brittain,” he said.

He retreated down the porch while I bid Amelia good night. “It was such a lovely day for me, Tom,” she whispered. When she turned away I saw by the light through the window that her face gleamed with tears.