Reluctant Genius (16 page)

Mabel’s letter convinced Alec he
had
to talk to Mabel himself. He strode back and forth on the Hubbards’ parquet floor as he overruled Mrs. Hubbard’s objections to such an impulsive gesture. “I said I was
ill,”
Alec noted. “Further delay and anxiety would entirely unfit me for anything.” Gertrude tried to persuade him to return to Canada and calm down, but Alec was now fixated on rushing off to Nantucket and pressing his suit personally. “I feel it is my duty to
go to her,
instead of waiting till she returns home. It would be treating her as a
child
to think it was
necessary
for her to be near her mother in order to receive my explanations. The letter which was read to me? was not the production of a girl, but of a true noble-hearted woman, and she should be treated as such.”

Nantucket’s famous whaling fleet.

The Hubbards were not impressed by Alec’s frenzied behavior. “You go against the wishes of Mrs. Hubbard and myself,” Gardiner wrote sternly, “being carried away by the same unmanly feeling which marked your course on a former occasion. You will regret this new burst of passion.”

But the burst of passion overwhelmed Alec, who was now way, way beyond regret. On Saturday, August 7, he stood on the platform at Boston station, waiting for the 11:15 train to Woods Hole, on the southwestern corner of Cape Cod. The tall, unkempt Scotsman, alone and carrying no baggage, must have attracted curious glances from the noisy clans that had emerged from Boston’s tenements to set off with sunhats, spades, and swimwear for a weekend on the cape’s sandy beaches. But he was oblivious to their stares as he tapped his foot on the ground and repeatedly looked at his watch. His mission consumed him: he was going to make the laborious journey toward his beloved by train and two steamers.

Alighting from the train at Woods Hole, he took a steamer to Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard. But when he arrived there in mid-afternoon, he discovered to his chagrin that the next steamer to Nantucket did not leave until evening. For four hours, tense with determination, he paced the wharf, impatiently watching yachts, dinghies, dories, fishing smacks, and pleasure craft mill around in the sheltered waters of Vineyard Sound. By the time he reached Nantucket, it was almost midnight. He checked into the Ocean House Hotel, lay on the bed, and did not sleep a wink all night. “Unfitted for anything,” he scrawled in his diary.

The following day, his spirits sank still further. He discovered that he was trapped. Siasconset, where Mary Blatchford had her cottage, was eight miles away on the other side of the island and there was no public transport on a Sunday to take him there. Moreover, outside his hotel window a fierce summer storm raged, and steamer service to the mainland was canceled. Feeling utterly defeated, Alec sensed the approach of a severe headache. He gloomily imagined what might happen if he
did
manage to see Mabel: “Her eyes would be full of tears and she would not understand what I should say.” His life, he felt, had been full of bad judgments and clumsy blunders. His head throbbed. He risked losing the young woman he loved before he had even talked to her, and at the same time losing the patron, her father, on whom he was desperately dependent for funds.

Alec sat at the end of the bed in the cramped old hotel and stared out of the window at driving rain and lashing branches. There was only one solution, he decided. He must put his feelings on paper.

Dear Miss Mabel,

I have come to Nantucket in hopes that you will see me, and let me tell you all that I long to say.… You [do] not know, Mabel, you [are] utterly unconscious, that I [have] long before learned to respect and to love you. I have loved you with a passionate attachment that you cannot understand and that is to myself new and incomprehensible.… I… wish to make you my wife, if you would let me try to win your love….

As dusk fell and the storm abated, Alec’s pen scratched on and on. He explained that he had spoken to her parents, that they felt she was too young to be confronted with his feelings. He wrote of how he believed that she would be comforted to know there was someone who wanted to devote his life to her happiness, and how he did not think she was too young to handle the situation. He confessed that a year’s wait was impossible because he could no longer suppress his emotions. He feared that Mabel did not altogether trust him, because she did not know what was going on. “You do not know, you cannot guess, how much I love you—how much I desire to have the
right
to shield and protect you. Had I
your
love I feel that you would mould my life into any form you will.” He made no mention in the letter of her deafness, which was utterly immaterial to him.

By now, darkness had fallen, the rain had stopped, and the lights of the boats in the harbor were twinkling. Still Alec continued to write, with blots and crossings-out littering the pages, explaining how he respected Mabel’s parents but felt they were wrong to try and keep him away from her. “I know you are surrounded [here] by young companions who would ridicule and annoy you did they know I was here. Believe me, I have not come to Nantucket to wound and pain you. I respect and honour you too much for that.”

Finally, as the first hint of dawn touched the sky, Alec signed off: “Whatever may be the result of this visit, believe me, now and ever, Yours affectionately, A. Graham Bell.”

Early the following morning, Alec set off to deliver his letter. The gentle Nantucket landscape had no charm for him as he bounced along the sandy track to Siasconset in an uncomfortable pony cart driven by a local boy. He scarcely noted the occasional glimpses of gleaming white sand, or a summer sea now slumbering in the hazy August light. “Long dreary drive. Flat country. No trees,” he noted. When he arrived at Siasconset, he found a hotel and wrote a note to Mary Blatchford announcing his arrival. He told her he would remain at the hotel all day in the hope that he might call on Mabel but would leave if she preferred not to reply. He did not have to wait long for a summons to arrive.

What did Mary Blatchford make of Alec, who had the wild-eyed look of someone who had not slept for several nights? She certainly gave him little cause for hope, as she coldly informed him that Mabel was extremely distressed at the mere idea of seeing him. Alec meekly acknowledged that he could scarcely expect to see Mabel, given the circumstances. He simply handed Mary an envelope thick with his literary outburst of the previous night to give Mabel, then turned to take his leave.

Even Mary was taken aback at Alec’s whipped-dog manner. It is possible that, being the busybody she was, she had not mentioned to Mabel that her suitor was here. Now she relented a little and told Alec that he could spend the afternoon on the beach with Mabel and her cousins. But this sounded worse than the moonlit evening five weeks earlier in Cambridge—mischievous young women smirking at the sight of “poor Mabel” with her awkward old Scottish teacher. Alec declined the invitation: “Miss Blatchford looked very much surprised at my being willing to go without seeing Mabel.” Now that he had fulfilled his mission, however, he couldn’t get out of there fast enough. He was back at the steamer dock to catch the 1:15 p.m. boat direct to Woods Hole, and he reached Boston at 7:45 p.m. That night, he confided to his diary, he “[s]lept for the first time for
ten days.
Not rested since July 29th when I first heard of Mabel’s dislike.”

Alec’s assessment of his sweetheart’s character was accurate. A few days later, he received a graceful note from her:

Dear Mr. Bell:

Thank you very much for the honourable and generous way in which you have treated me. Indeed you have both my respect and esteem. I shall be glad to see you in Cambridge and become better acquainted with you.

I am sure that even if my feelings remain unchanged by another year it will always be a pleasure to look back upon your visits and friendship.

I thank you for your promise not to approach this subject again until I have had more time to know you and myself, and for the delicate regard for me that prompted it, as well as for your assurance that you are no longer suffering on my account….

Believe me, Gratefully your friend, Mabel G. Hubbard.

Despite her inexperience, Mabel was already a woman of dignity and judgment—and with a steadier temperament than Alec.

At the end of August, Mabel returned to Cambridge, ready to receive her suitor. When he arrived one evening at Brattle Street, she quietly invited him to accompany her into the greenhouse, where there was no danger of being overheard by her parents and sisters. There the clear-headed seventeen-year-old told her teacher that she liked him but as yet she did not love him. She did not, however, extinguish his hopes that such a love might develop. She watched Alec’s lips quietly and sympathetically as he poured out his own anguish of the previous two months. That evening, as Alec took the streetcar back into Boston and then the last train to Salem, he felt his heart almost burst with joy. As soon as he reached home, he sat down and reached for a pen. “This evening is the happiest of my life,” he scribbled to “Miss Mabel.” “The clouds that have long been hanging round my heart are all
dispelled.
I feel that I may speak to you as freely as I
think
—and you will hear me.” He was almost certain that Mabel would learn to love him.

There was, though, one loose end that Alec knew he had to tie up. He must tell his parents about the new state of his relationship with Mabel.

He had unburdened himself of his passion for Mabel in a letter to his parents on June 30. He had described her as beautiful, accomplished, and affectionate, and as belonging “to one of the best families in the States.” But he acknowledged that his parents might have reservations about her: “Her deafness I felt to be a great bar.… I felt that such an attachment would grieve you very much when you should discover how sadly she had been afflicted.” Recalling the sarcasm with which Melville dismissed earlier confidences (his affection for Marie Eccleston in London, his decision to learn sign language), he begged his father to treat his emotions gently.

Each day, Alec looked for a letter postmarked Canada; each day, as nothing arrived, his emotional turmoil increased. The silence convinced him that his parents disapproved of the match. Then he received a brief note from his mother that shook him to the core: “You are of course the best judge of the sort of person calculated to make you happy, but if she is a congenital deaf mute, I should have great fears for your children.”

Why did Eliza, who was deaf herself, react like this? In particular, why did she use the derogatory label “deaf-mute”? Was she jealous of the new woman in Alec’s life? Perhaps she was only trying to sound a note of caution because she knew Alec’s inclination to be impulsive. As her own hearing had deteriorated, she was increasingly entombed within her disability; she had never learned to read lips or to use sign language. Alec had not mentioned that Mabel’s hearing loss was the result of a childhood infection, and Eliza knew that women who were congenitally deaf were likely to have deaf children. Her son’s suggestion the previous June that Mabel’s “affliction” might be considered a “great bar” must have set off alarm bells. But Eliza was more than keen for Alec to find a woman who would make him happy and give some stability to his life. “Remember,” she had written in April, “we had much rather you would marry a woman than science.”

Eliza’s comments, particularly the phrase “deaf-mute,” wounded her son deeply, and he exploded with wrath. “You would be justly hurt and indignant were any one to allude to
you
in that way,” he replied to Eliza, “and certainly so would she.” His fathers lack of response had enraged him even more: “He has treated it with
entire silence
as if the matter was not worth alluding to at all.… You and he
should
know that such a subject as that is, to a young man, of the deepest and most vital importance. The step I proposed taking was to affect my
whole after life,
and I feel that my communication deserved to be treated with more consideration than has been shown it.”

Melville and Eliza’s silence had so upset Alec that in late August he confided his dismay to Mabel’s mother. He announced that he had no intention of writing again to his parents, or of visiting them, until they had properly acknowledged his June letter. By now, Gertrude Hubbard knew that Alec was a highly emotional young man rather than the staid middle-aged Scot the Hubbards had first taken him for. She also may have suspected that Alec’s doting mother feared she would lose her one remaining son should he marry. She urged Alec to write again to his parents. He did, but it was a grudging letter: “Should this also be received with the same shameful neglect as my last I feel that there is danger of a complete alienation of my affections from home.”

In fact, there was a simpler explanation for the Bells’ apparent neglect. Melville’s brother David and his family had immigrated to Canada and joined them in Brantford, so their social life had become even more frenetic. David’s arrival had meant that Eliza and Melville could entrust the farm to his care, and in early July they had departed on a trip to the Adirondacks. “We took the steamboat for a cruise on Lake George and spent two nights on a rugged Scotland-like hillside in a tiny hotel,” Eliza wrote in late July, blithely unaware of her son’s feelings. When Alec’s grudging letter finally arrived in Brantford, the misunderstanding and his tone of resentment horrified his parents.