Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

23

PILLORY, n. – A mechanical device for inflicting personal distinction‌—‌prototype of the modem newspaper conducted by persons of austere virtues and blameless lives.

–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

On Monday morning Bierce was not in his office. The chalky skull gaped at me as I seated myself at my desk. I heard the approaching hard rap of footsteps. It was not Miss Penryn, but a woman in a tweedy, country jacket and skirts, and a tight-fitting cap sporting a pheasant feather curved over her forehead like a sickle. It was Lillie Coit.

“Good morning, Mrs. Coit!” I said, jumping to my feet.

She squinted at me out of her brown, freckled face, frowning, then producing a smile. “Oh, it is Mr. Redmond. Bierce’s not here?”

“He hasn’t arrived yet, Mrs. Coit.”

She moved inside the office to seat herself in the spare chair beside Bierce’s desk. She did not sit with her ankles crossed, but with her feet planted eight inches apart in sturdy brown shoes.

“Are you a friend of Bierce’s, Mr. Redmond?”

She was gazing at me with her mouth pursed and her eyes intent. It was a serious question.

“I think so,” I said.

“I am his friend also. And what a talent he has for quarreling with his friends! What a talent he has for former friends. If I tell him what I have come to tell him, I am afraid that I will become a former friend.”

I had seen Bierce quarreling with a former friend last evening.

“Yesterday I saw Mollie Bierce and the children in the village,” Mrs. Coit said with a sigh. “That is a very unfortunate situation.” She leaned forward toward me.

“Mr. Redmond, Bierce likes to boast that no one, man or woman, has seen him in the buff. Are you aware of this curious source of pride? I know he was wounded in the War. Can you tell me if his wound is such a disfiguring one that he would not want even his wife to see him‌—‌bare?” I thought she had colored slightly, but her face was so sun-browned it was difficult to tell.

“He was wounded in the temple, at Kennesaw Mountain.” It was all I knew.

She tossed her head with a commotion of the pheasant feather. “Might a head wound then explain his difficulties with friends?”

I said, “He takes certain matters very seriously, Mrs. Coit, and is apt to give his opinion seriously. I know he has recently lost a friend by an overly honest review of the poetry of a relation.”

“Ina Coolbrith,” Lillie Coit said, nodding. “How he loves poet-baiting. Let me tell you this, Mr. Redmond. His philanderings are too well known.”

I didn’t say anything to that.

“If one is unfaithful to a spouse,” she went on, “one does everything possible not to advertise the fact so as not to cause unnecessary pain. That is simply decent manners.”

I nodded in agreement.

“I do not take Mollie Bierce’s part, you understand. But if he is so contemptuous of her and her family, why did he marry her? He is causing her unnecessary pain.”

“I know that he has a number of women friends,” I said.

“Young man, those are not friends, those are mistresses. They are a very different thing.”

I felt my own face burn.

“He will lose her,” Lillie Coit said. “Perhaps that is his intention.

There are certain men who like to boast that they are not the marrying kind, as though this makes them a more admirable member of their gender. But he will lose more besides. He will lose his children. I know he loves that girl child, and the older boy‌—‌Day. Mr. Redmond, I see Bierce, if he does not change his ways, losing his friends, losing his wife, losing his children. I shudder to think of his declining years. What can be this inclination he has to destroy every association he has of love or friendship?”

“Mrs. Coit,” I said. “In the quarrel that I spoke of, his former friend spoke of him as a disappointed man.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Do you not understand that, Mr. Redmond? He is a terribly disappointed man. He should be a great personage. He should be a writer of international fame. Instead he is merely a local poet-baiter and Railroad scold. He is mired in satire. This City, the West! has caught satire like a disease! He sees that Mark Twain has broken free of it. Mark Twain has found his heart, but Bierce cannot find his. He is a bitterly disappointed man.”

I said I was sorry to hear her say this.

“I can say it because I consider him my friend, but I wonder how long it will be before there is a quarrel, or a pretext resulting in one.

“This is what I have come to tell him,” she went on. “And I cannot describe how relieved I am that he is not here. I wonder if you would be able to convey my fears to him, Mr. Redmond?”

“I cannot,” I said. “I am only his associate. I cannot presume to advise him. He would not wish to feel he had been judged.”

She batted at the end of the pheasant feather, as though it had interfered with her vision, and rose.

“I’m sure that is true,” she said. “It is a shame, however.” She departed in her sudden manner, with her hard quick steps on the flooring of the hallway.

When Bierce came in, walking briskly, he slapped his hands together and insisted that I accompany him to the Palace Hotel for oysters and eggs. I told him that Mrs. Coit had stopped in to see him.

“Ah,” he said. “I am sorry I missed that lady. There was a lady last night I wish I had missed.” It was all he was to say about the quarrel at the Overland Monthly salon.

The Palace Hotel breakfast specialty was served from a sideboard in a mahogany-paneled room illuminated by skylights. Bierce and I sat at a marble-topped table with our yellow mix of oysters and scrambled eggs that I was not sure my bruised stomach was equal to. Bierce pitched right in. I had a sense that he did consider me a friend, as though being coshed, threatened and beaten up by a Railroad gang had proved my value to him. But not a friend who could advise him on the conduct of his life.

I told him of my bargain with Klosters, and the reasons for it.

“I told you once that I had never been intimidated by the Railroad,” he said coldly.

It would be easy to find a pretext to quarrel with him, as Mrs. Coit had told me.

“I think your researches into Senator Jennings’s past may have served their purpose,” he said, relenting.

“Maybe so.”

“So Klosters understood that you would not shoot him,” he said. “His advantage is that one does not know whether he would or would not shoot.”

I had Bierce’s revolver in my pocket, as though it had attached itself to me, and I was presently to have employment for it.

Revolvers had played their part in San Francisco hard feelings. A man named Kalloch who was running for mayor on the Workingman’s Party ticket was the target of Charles De Young’s invective in the Chronicle. In a fracas with De Young, Kalloch was wounded. Later on his son shot De Young dead. And Bierce had acquired his own weapon when the husband of an actress he devastated in Tattle threatened him with violence.

All this crossed my mind when I recognized Senator Jennings from Fats Chubb’s caricatures in The Hornet. He marched across the room toward us, a round-faced man with a cropped reddish-graying beard and a sweat-gleaming bald head. He was preceded by a belly so large he appeared to be carrying a bass drum under his vest. Trotting anxiously behind him, in a frock coat, was a hotel functionary.

Jennings had a booming senatorial voice and he halted ten feet away from our table to shout, “You are a liar and a calumniator, Bierce!”

I rose with my napkin in my hand, but Bierce remained seated behind his plate of oysters and eggs, his napkin tucked into his collar and a nettled frown on his face.

“You are a Goddamned liar and calumniator!” Jennings boomed.

Bierce said calmly, “And you, sir, are a footboy of rogues, a menial of thieves, a lackey and lickspittle, a knave, a blackguard, a sneak, a coward. And a murderer!”

“Now, Senator,” the hotelman said. “Now, Mr. Bierce.”

“Damned liar!” the Senator shouted.

Bierce shoveled in eggs and chewed. He said to the hotelman, “This murderer’s adiposity is casting a shadow on my eggs that I fear will turn them rancid. Will you remove him?”

“Oh, Mr. Bierce,” the hotelman said.

Senator Jennings produced a derringer from his pocket and leveled it at Bierce.

“Oh, Senator Jennings,” the hotelman said. “Please, not in here, sir.”

I took Bierce’s revolver from my pocket, where its presence had asserted itself.

Bierce pushed his plate aside as though it had indeed been fouled. “You have produced a firearm. Senator Jennings. Is that the argument with which you presume to assert your innocence?”

I made sure that Senator Jennings saw the revolver pointed at his big belly. “Are you aware of the Concealed Weapon Ordinance, sir?” I said.

His hot eyes fixed on mine. “And who are you, my man?”

“My name is Redmond.”

“You are Clete Redmond’s son, who has written a scurrilous piece about me.”

“Yes, sir.” I did not see any reason to tell him that I had been intimidated by Klosters. Perhaps he already knew of it.

The hotelman interposed himself between Jennings and Bierce. He pushed Jennings’s hand holding the pistol down, muttering soothing exclamations. I returned Bierce’s revolver to my pocket.

“Bierce, I have the means to make your life miserable, and short,” Jennings said calmly. “And I intend to use them.”

He lumbered off. Bierce motioned to the waiter to remove his plate as I seated myself again.

“We will send these away as they are quite cold,” Bierce said. He rose to stride to the sideboard and load another plate with eggs and oysters from the gleaming steamer there.

I had a sense of layers of menace laid over us like blankets on a bed.

“Apparently he is not yet aware of your capitulation to Klosters,” Bierce said.

When we had left the Palace after our repast, he said grimly, “I would give the devil his dues if he would provide me with the evidence I need to bring that podgy homicide to the bench of justice.”