MURDER!

Sick to the point that I could only read Agatha Christie and then had fever dreams of the mystery's solution.

1876

Emma is to spend the day with John’s sister, visiting the shops
—or stores, as they call them here. Did they always? Or have I
forgotten? It is plain that I am no longer a New Yorker. But then
this New York is no longer the New York that was.
Restless, the article finished and sealed in its envelope and
addressed to Harper? Monthly, I decided to take Bryant at his
word and pay him a breakfast call. He lives now at 24 West
Sixteenth Street.
Without delight, I entrusted myself to the perpendicular rail-
way. “Fine morning, sir. But near to freezing,” said the operator
who looked to be, at the very least, a commodore in full uniform.

#

In no time at all, Bryant returned, fully clothed and the picture
of, as the British say, rude health. Together we descended to the
drafty downstairs dining room furnished with depressingly “sin-
cere” Eastlake furniture.
We breakfasted alone. Bryant’s wife died ten years ago and “my
daughter ]ulia is out of the city. So I am a bachelor.”
The maid served us hominy with milk, brown bread and but-
ter. I waited for tea, for colfee—in vain.
Bryant was greatly affected by Tweed’s escape from prison.
“Of course he paid his gaolers. They’re all alike, you know.” Who
“they” were he did not specify, but I assume that he meant the
lower orders, the Democrats, the Irish, the enemies of the Repub-
lican Evening Post, which supports the Grant Administration re-
gardless of scandal. The radical crusading spirit is now entirely
dead at the Post. But Bryant is old.
Glumly I chewed brown bread whilst Bryant expressed him-
self at length on the hopeless corruption of New York City until,
bored, I diverted him with an inquiry about his forthcoming
history of the United States.

#

What,” I asked, only because it has been preoccupying me
since my arrival yesterday, “has happened to the American
voice?”
“Voice?” Bigelow was startled by the question; his own is
resonant and clear, like Bryant’s.
“Yes, voice. The way Americans speak.”
“You mean the immigrants? Well, it takes time . . .”
“No, I mean the Americans. Like us. When I lived here, people
spoke like you, like me . . .”
“But you had a Dutch accent, Charlie, which you’ve gone and
lost in Paris!”
I don’t know why that should have made me want to blush, but
it did. In my youth, Dutch-ness was a sort of prickly virtue to us
and an occasion for dull mockery to others.
“Certainly I never . . . we never spoke through our noses. Or
made that curious flat whining sound. One hears it everywhere.
And the women! Is there anything more dreadful than an Ameri-
can woman’s laughter?”
Bigelow was amused. After some thought, he agreed that there
has been a change in the way our countrymen speak. He thinks
it might be the influence of those popular fundamentalist church
groups that go in for “canting”—the word for praying aloud in
a whining nasal voice.
I thought that this might make an interesting article for Har-
per’s, but Bigelow thought not. “No one may criticize American
manners, except at a safe distance like Paris. When do you go
back?”

Wolf Hall

There is an obdurate winter ahead. But he feels a force ready to break, as
spring breaks from the dead tree. As the word of God spreads, the peoplgs
eyes are opened to new truths. Until now, like Helen Barre, they knew
Noah and the Flood, but not St. Paul. They could count over the SO1'1‘OW$ of
our Blessed Mother, and say how the damned are carried down to Hell. But
they did not know the manifold miracles and sayings of Christ, nor the
words and deeds of the apostles, simple men who, like the poor of London,
pursued simple wordless trades. The story is much bigger than they ever
thought it was. He says to his ‘nephew Richard, you cannot tell people just
part of the tale and then stop, or just tell them the parts you choose. They
have seen their religion painted on the walls of churches, or carved in stone,
but now God’s pen is poised, and he is ready to write his words in the
books of their hearts.
But in these same streets Chapuys sees the stirrings of sedition, a city
ready to open its gates to the Emperor. He was not at the sack of Rome but
there are nights when he dreams of it as if he had been there: the black guts
spilled on antique pavements, the half-dead draped in the fountains, the
chiming of bells through the marsh fog, and the flames of arsonists’ torches
leaping along the walls. Rome has fallen and everything within it; it was
not invaders but Pope Iulius himself who knocked down old St. Peter’s,
which had stood for twelve hundred years, the site where the Emperor
Constantine himself had dug the first trench, twelve scoops of soil, one for
each of the apostles; where the Christian martyrs, sewn into the skins of
wild beasts, had been torn apart by dogs. Twenty-five feet he dug down to
lay his new foundations, through a necropolis, through twelve centuries of
fish bones and ash, his workmen’s shovels powdering the skulls of saints. In
the place where martyrs had bled, ghost-white boulders stood: marble,
waiting for Michelangelo.
In the street he sees a priest carrying the host, no doubt to a dying
Londoner; the passers—by uncover their heads and kneel, but a boy leans
out of an upper window and jeers, “Show us your Christ—is-Risen. Sh0W
us your Jack-in-the-Box.” He glances up; the boy’s face, before it van-
ishes, is vivid with rage.
He says to Cranmer, these people want a good authority, one they Can
properly obey. For centuries Rome has asked them to believe what 0111)’
children could believe. Surely they will find it more natural to obey an E11‘
glish king, who will exercise his powers under Parliament and under God-
Two days after he sees More shivering at the sermon, he conveys 3
a pardon to Lady Exeter. It comes with some blistering words from the
king, directed to her husband. It is St. Catherine’s Day: in honor of the
saint who was threatened with martyrdom on the wheel- we all walk in circles
 to our destination. At least, that’s the theory. He has never seen any-
one over the age of twelve actually doing it.
 . There’s a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through
the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an ax when you take it into
your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold
back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted
thing.
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