Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,104
hearts misleading,
Death cometh after all
Over the brightest scenes are clouds descending;
The flame soars highest ere its deepest fall;
The glorious day has all too swift an ending;
Night cometh after all
O’er bloom or beauty now in our possession
Is seen the shadow of the funeral pall;
Though Love and Life make tearful intercession,
Death cometh after all
ANONYMOUS POEM, UPON THE DEATH OF
PRESIDENT GARFIELD, SEPTEMBER 1881
While Lucretia was forced to watch the slow, cruel approach of death, for Bell it came suddenly, blindsiding him while he was caught up in another man’s tragedy. Although he had returned to Boston to be with Mabel, he continued to work feverishly on the induction balance at his old work space in Charles Williams’s machine shop.
Just a week after Bell returned from Washington, Mabel suddenly went into labor. That day she gave birth to a little boy, whom they named Edward. He was, Mabel would later write wistfully, a “strong and healthy little fellow.” As the baby struggled to breathe, however, it was immediately apparent that he had been born too soon. After Bell had seen his son for the first time, he sent his parents in Washington a telegram with the wrenching news.
LITTLE BOY BORN PREMATURELY THIS AFTERNOON DIED IN THREE HOURS. MABEL DOING AS WELL AS CAN BE EXPECTED. NO NEED TO COME ON.
A GRAHAM BELL
Years later, Alec would admit to Mabel that he had yet to recover from the death of their son, and did not think he ever would. He was haunted by the belief that his selfishness had brought about their tragedy. “Nothing will ever comfort me for the loss,” he wrote, “for I feel at heart that I was the cause.”
Engulfed in his own grief and mourning, Bell responded by plunging even more deeply into his quest for an answer to the president’s suffering. After his son’s funeral, he returned immediately to his work. He devised an attachment to the induction balance, and he wanted Tainter to re-create it in their laboratory in Washington so that he could take it to the White House.
Just three days after Edward’s death, Tainter successfully tested the induction balance’s new attachment for one of Garfield’s surgeons, Frank Hamilton, in the Volta Laboratory in Washington. But with Garfield’s condition deteriorating gravely, and Bell stranded in Boston with his devastated family, unable to force the issue in person, his desperate, single-minded race to save the president came to an end. Bliss refused to let Tainter try the invention on Garfield. The president was too weak, he said. He would not risk the exhaustion that another test might cause.
Unwilling to accept defeat, Bell redoubled his efforts from Boston, still believing that the president’s life could be saved or, failing that, that his invention would prove to have lasting value for others. Perfecting the induction balance was a personal and scientific obligation, and he was not about to abandon it now, whatever the cost. “Heartless science,” he would write years later, “seeks truth, and truth alone, quite apart from any consequences that may arise.”
As a practical matter, however, Bell knew that whatever benefits the induction balance might have, they would come too late for President Garfield. The clock had run out, and there was simply nothing more that Bell could do.
At the White House, the siegelike atmosphere surrounding the stricken president’s sickbed only seemed to worsen with each passing day. Strenuously resisting anything that might further weaken Garfield, Bliss was outraged when, upon entering the sickroom one day, he found a barber cutting the president’s hair. Bliss “stopped the proceedings immediately,” a reporter wrote, “much to the barber’s disgust.” Try as he might, however, Bliss could do nothing to banish the unbearable heat, which was sapping what little strength his patient had left. In the city, it was 90 degrees in the shade. Inside the president’s room, even with the help of the air conditioner the navy had built for him, the temperature was never below 80.
Finally, Garfield had had enough. When Bliss walked into his room on the morning of September 5, the president made it clear that he would be going to the sea, with or without Bliss. “Well,” he said, “is this the last day in the White House?” Bliss tried to calm him, promising that he “might soon be so far recovered as to make the journey.” Garfield, however, was not going to be put off any longer. He was still the president, and he demanded to have some control over whatever was left of his own life.