Junior had in fact skimmed through the proof sheets, feeling his wounds throb as he took it in. He could not believe how his father could think to roll up the war into a few thousand words, which mostly told anecdotes of dying Rebels in hospital beds and hotel clerks in small towns asking if he was not the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.
"I mean," Junior continued with a cocked grin, "do you really bother calling yourself a member?"
"I beg your pardon, Wendy? What's the meaning of that? What do you know of it?"
"Only that Mr. Lowell says that your voice is heard mostly at the supper table, not in the study. For Mr. Longfellow, that work is life itself; for Lowell, his calling. You see, he acts on his beliefs, doesn't just talk of them, just as he did when he defended slaves as a lawyer. For you, it's just another place to chime glasses."
"Did Lowell say..." Dr. Holmes began. "Now see here, Junior!" Junior reached the top floor, where he shut himself in his room. "How could you know the first thing about our Dante Club!" Dr. Holmes cried.
Holmes wandered the house helplessly before retiring into his study. His voice heard mostly at table? The more he repeated the allegation to himself, the more stinging it was: Lowell was trying to preserve his place at the right hand of Longfellow by showing himself superior at the expense of Holmes.
With Junior's words in Lowell's loud baritone hanging on him, he wrote doggedly over the next weeks, with a sustained progress that did not come to him naturally. The time at which any new thought struck Holmes was his Sibylline moment, but the act of composition usually was attended with a dull, disagreeable sensation about the forehead - interrupted only from time to time by the simultaneous descent of some group of words or unexpected image, which produced a burst of the most insane enthusiasm and self-gratulation and during which he sometimes committed puerile excesses of language and action.
He could not work many hours consecutively, in any case, without deranging his whole system. His feet were apt to get cold, his head hot, his muscles restless, and he would feel as if he must get up. In the evening, he would stop all hard work before eleven o'clock and take a book of light reading to clear his mind of its previous contents. Too much brain work gave him a sense of disgust, like overeating. He attributed this in part to the depleting, nerve-straining qualities of the climate. Brown-Sequard, a fellow medical man from Paris, had said that animals do not bleed so much in America as they did in Europe. Was that not startling to think? Despite this biological shortcoming, Holmes now felt himself writing like a madman.
"You know I should be the one to speak with Professor Ticknor about helping our Dante cause," Holmes said to Fields. He had stopped by Fields's office at the Corner.
"What's that?" Fields was reading three things at once: a manuscript, a contract, and a letter. "Where are those royalty agreements?"
J. R. Osgood handed him another pile of papers.
"Your time is much occupied, Fields, and you have the next number of the Atlantic to think about - you need to rest your tired brain, in any case," argued Holmes. "Professor Ticknor was my teacher, after all. I may well have the most influence over the old fellow, for Longfellow's sake."
Holmes still remembered a time when Boston was known as Ticknorville by the literary set: If you were not invited to Ticknor's library salon, you were nobody. That chamber had once been known as Ticknor's Throne Room; now, more often, Ticknor's Iceberg. The former professor had fallen into disrepute with much of their society as a refined idler and an anti-abolitionist, but his position as one of the city's first literary masters would always remain. His influence could be revived to their benefit.
"My life is worn by more creatures than I can endure, my dear Holmes," Fields said, sighing. "The sight of a manuscript is like a swordfish nowadays - it cuts me in two." He looked Holmes over for a long moment, then agreed to send him in his place to Park Street. "But remember me kindly to him, won't you, Wendell."
Holmes knew that Fields was relieved to pass on the task of speaking with George Ticknor. Professor Ticknor - that title was still insisted upon, though he had taught