The Square Pegs (8 page)

Only two newspapermen in New York were sympathetic. The managing editor of
The New York Times
sent a reporter, who later became a prominent art and music critic, Henri Pene du Bois, to the chancellery. When du Bois returned to his office the editor asked him what he found. Du Bois shook his head. “There is nothing funny in that story,” he said. “It’s pathetic. Both those men are earnest. They are convinced they are being robbed of their rights. Their only fault is that they have imagination, and that the rest of us lack it. That’s the way it struck me, and that’s the way the story should be written.” The editor nodded. “Write it that way.”

The New York Times
published the story on page one, column one, of its August 1 edition. The top headline read: “Trinidad’s Prince Awake.” The second head read: “An Appeal To Washington Against Brazil And Great Britain.”
The Times
played it straight. It reprinted de la Boissière’s entire protest to the Secretary of State. It quoted de la Boissière gently and at length:

“M. le Comte de la Boissière is luxuriously dressed. In white wool, and in white silk striped with pale blue, he bowed affably to the reporter for
The New York Times
.

“‘Do you like my appeal to Washington?’ he asked. ‘I have sent it to all the Ministers Plenipotentiary, Ambassadors, Envoys, and diplomatic agents. Oh, everybody knows about the Principality now. Everybody knew before, for all the newspapers had made its fame resound. They were not all friendly newspapers; some of them treated us in deplorably frivolous manner, but all served to make ignorance of our claim inexcusable. It would be childish for Brazil or for England to plead ignorance of our authority now. Our claim has been admitted by some powers, since they have sent answers to our notifications.’

“‘Of course,’ said the reporter. ‘Then there are your subjects to be considered. Nobody believes that they will indifferently let themselves become Britons or Brazilians.’

“‘Our subjects!’ exclaimed M. de la Boissière. ‘Well, we need not talk about them. The question of population has no bearing in such affairs. There would have been a stock of subjects at Trinidad now, if the English had not seized the land.’”

The very next day
The New York Times
ran a half-column follow-up interview with de la Boissière. The story led off with: “In the State Department at Washington the clerks could not read the signature of Trinidad’s Grand Chancellor. One wonders if they could have read that of Talleyrand. He signed ‘Ch. Mau. Tal.’ with a flourish of flies’ legs on a window pane. He used no capital letters. Those of M. le Comte de la Boissière are fantastic and delicate.”

When at the end of the second interview the
Times
man asked de la Boissière if he’d ever visited Trinidad, he replied: “No, thank you. I have other tigers to comb. We may take an indemnity from Great Britain, you know. It will be millions. You shall have a commission on the amount.”

When these stories reached Harden-Hickey, he proclaimed that
The New York Times
would thereafter be his official news-organ. He awarded Managing Editor Henry Gary and Reporter Henri Pene du Bois each the Cross of Trinidad “destined to reward literature … and the human virtues”), and appointed each a Chevalier of the Court of Trinidad, which entitled them to wear uniforms identical with those of the chamberlains of the court and to receive pensions of 1,000 francs a year once the kingdom again became a going concern.

Richard Harding Davis was the other newspaperman to handle the tottering principality with sympathy. Davis, who had been the model for Charles Dana Gibson’s handsome males, earned $100,000 a year writing first-person foreign news stories, plays, and novels. Many considered him a conceited, prudish clotheshorse. They may have been right. But beneath the chill exterior beat the warm heart of a romantic. To play king when there were no more kingdoms? To have one’s own toy island? Why not? Richard Harding Davis was an admiring vassal long before he reached the brownstone building on Thirty-sixth Street.

“De la Boissière talked to me frankly and fondly of Prince James,” Davis wrote shortly afterwards. “Indeed, I never met any man who knew Harden-Hickey well, who did not speak of him with aggressive loyalty. If at his eccentricities they smiled, it was with the smile of affection. It was easy to see De la Boissière regarded him not only with the affection of a friend, but with the devotion of a true subject. In his manner he himself was courteous, gentle, and so distinguished that I felt as though I were enjoying, on intimate terms, an audience with one of the prime-ministers of Europe. And he, on his part, after the ridicule of the morning papers, to have anyone with outward seriousness accept his high office and his king, was, I believe, not ungrateful.”

In San Francisco, Baron Harden-Hickey began to show signs of discouragement. His Foreign Minister’s formal protests and the tremendous publicity given these protests brought no response. Great Britain and Brazil continued their diplomatic dispute over Trinidad, and ignored King James I completely. If he read
The Saturday Review
for August 3, as most likely he did, he probably detected there the obituary of his reign. “The guano, the buried treasure, the innocent turtles basking on the sands under the watchful eye of the Zouave with the moustache and imperial, all have been swept abruptly into the rapacious maw of the British Empire.”

In January 1896 the tug of war between Great Britain and Brazil was still raging when suddenly, the British garrison withdrew, surrendering its cable station and Trinidad itself to Brazil. The Brazilians, of course, had no use for the island; they just had not wanted English troops in the vicinity. Now they did not dare, after months of sound and fury, to hand the island over to an American adventurer. They agreed to retain possession of it on paper. It is unlikely that any Brazilian in his right mind was ever induced to spend a night on the island. As in the beginning, Trinidad again belonged to the turtles.

Harden-Hickey had lost. In the past he had always been able to bounce back into some new project. But Trinidad had become an obsession. Letters of solace poured in, crackpot and legitimate, offering him partnership in various schemes. One of the more tempting came in an envelope postmarked San Francisco, from an army veteran named Ralston J. Markowe, who had undertaken to restore Queen Liliuokalani to the Hawaiian throne and failed. Markowe, still representing the Hawaiian royalist party, offered Harden-Hickey a place to hang his crown. “It is the island of Kauai on which I propose to establish you as an independent sovereign,” the letter read. Markowe had a 146-ton vessel and 276 men ready to land in the first and only wave. Harden-Hickey was not interested, though he carried Markowe’s letter around with him for two years.

While he knew he could not recover Trinidad, his obsession now took the form of revenging himself upon Great Britain. His head swam with fantasies, until he clung to one. He would keep his honor unsullied by launching an invasion of England through Ireland. The plan seemed eminently logical, but required vast sums of money. He swallowed his pride and approached John H. Flagler. His father-in-law, holding no grudge against England, thought that he had taken leave of his senses.

He wanted funds desperately now, less for Harden-Hickey than for King James I, deposed. Several money-raising efforts failed. His ace in the hole was a large ranch he owned in Mexico. He wrote his wife, who had leased a home in Riverside, California, that he was on his way to Mexico to dispose of the property to the highest bidder. Early in February 1898 the last prospect backed down. The ranch could not be sold.

Weary and heartsick, he decided to return to his wife and children in California. He crossed over into Texas and rode as far as El Paso. There he went to the Pierson Hotel and signed the register “Harden-Hickey, Paris.” He remained in the hotel a week, avoiding the other guests. He seemed to be waiting for something. Later, someone thought he had heard him remark that he was waiting for money from friends.

On February 9, at 7:30 in the evening, Harden-Hickey retired to his bedroom. He was not seen that evening. At twelve o’clock noon, the day following, February 10, the chambermaids entering to clean discovered him lying rigidly across his bed. It was at once apparent that he was not sleeping. A doctor was summoned. Harden-Hickey had committed suicide by taking an overdose of morphine. Pinned to the chair beside his bed was a letter addressed to his wife:

My Dearest. No news from you, although you have had plenty of time to answer. Hardes has written me that he has no one in view for buying my land at present. Well, I shall have drained the cup of bitterness to the very dregs, but I do not complain. I prefer to be a. dead gentleman to a living blackguard like your father. Goodby. I forgive your conduct toward me and trust you will be able to forgive yourself
.

In his hand trunk, among his personal effects, were found Markowe’s letter offering him a throne in Hawaii, and the crown he had never worn as King James I of Trinidad.

He was on the front pages again. The
New York Tribune
and
New York Times
gave the news prominence, with identical headlines: “Harden-Hickey A Suicide.” John H. Flagler left New York immediately by train for California. The press trapped him in St. Louis. He made a statement to one and all. “Personally, I do not believe that he meant to take his life. He was a man of highly wrought nervous organization, and for years had sought relief from insomnia in the use of sedatives and narcotics. He was an habitual user of chloral in various forms. It appears from statements made to me that he took some of the drug without effect, and later took another dose. Neither dose would have killed him, but the combination was fatal. He had been troubled with a heart affliction for years and could not live in high altitudes. His heart weakness may have aided the drug in causing his death. He was a man of cheerful nature, had all any man can desire plenty of money and a happy home. I never heard of any financial reverses which might have caused despondency.” When Flagler finished his statement a St. Louis reporter asked what he thought of Harden-Hickey’s reference to him as a “blackguard” in the farewell note. Flagler did his best, “with dignity,” the press reported. “I have no personal knowledge that the Baron left any such communication,” said Flagler. “I was a good friend to the Baron, and was ready to go to his assistance. If he left a letter tending to show that he was depressed, that in itself would be no sign that he took his life. Among other eccentricities of his genius he had a tendency to melancholy, which sometimes made him say strange things.”

On February 12 the El Paso police physician reaffirmed that Harden-Hickey’s death came “from drugs taken with suicidal intent.” The same day his personal effects, including the royal crown, were forwarded to his wife in Riverside, California. His remains were shipped at his wife’s request to his mother, Mrs. E. C. Hickey, in San Francisco.

The New York press, in the three days following his death, gave considerable space to his Parisian and Trinidad adventures. But in all the columns of copy, no New York paper was enterprising or sentimental enough to refer to the foreword of Harden-Hickey’s last book,
Euthanasia
; the
Aesthetics of Suicide
:

“Away with darkness where ignorance creeps in slimy filth, let Truth show herself in her splendid nudity, in her ideal beauty. I now see thy face, it illumines my way. I sought for thee during many weary years and under many bitter difficulties; and when thou knewest that I would never renounce the hope of finding thee and that I would pursue thee, not only in this life, but through a thousand incarnations, thou earnest to me saying:

“‘Here am I, what wilt thou?’

“‘Disclose to me the enigma, the remedy to the evils of life?’ was my prayer; and thine answer was:

“‘Death.’”

III

The Man Who Was Phileas Fogg

“Remember Jules Verne’s ‘Around The World In Eighty Days’? He stole my thunder. I’m Phileas Fogg.”

GEORGE FRANCIS TRAIN

The inspiration for the most popular novel Jules Verne was to write came to him one day late in 1871 while he sat in his favorite café in Amiens absently leafing through a French periodical.

For months the press had been filled with the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War. Verne had followed the short, bitter conflict closely. He had read about Worth and Metz, about the capture of Napoleon III at Sedan, about the besieged citizens of Paris forced to partake of their beloved elephants in the Zoological Gardens for sustenance, about the Prussians encamped two days on the shuttered Champs-Elysées. Verne sighed with relief when Adolphe Thiers put his pen to the peace, even though it meant conceding much of Alsace-Lorraine and a one-billion-dollar indemnity to Bismarck.

But though the war was over, the press promised no relief from violence. A savage civil strife was under way. Leon Gambetta, the one-eyed French-Italian deputy from Marseilles who had fled Paris in a balloon, rallied the new republic to suppress the Communards, a fanatical uprising of ordinary laborers, National Guardsmen, and communists who had the blessings of Karl Marx from his headquarters in the British Museum.

For Jules Verne, whose growing reputation at forty-three was based on novels of the future inspired by events of the moment, the periodical he held in his hands, with its painful political reportage, held little hope of either inspiration or escape.

And then, suddenly, as he remembered years later, his gaze fell upon a curious account from abroad.

An eccentric American millionaire had circled the globe in eighty days, an incredible accomplishment in that era of carriages, sailing vessels, and erratic iron horses. It was this new record for speed against countless obstacles that struck Verne at once, this “new possibility of making the circuit in eighty days.”

Hastily Verne read on, devouring every detail of the American traveler’s difficulties and adventures. The American, a Bostonian named George Francis Train, had sped from New York to San Francisco through red-Indian country in seven days aboard the new Union Pacific train. He had left California on August 1, 1870, and arrived in Japan a mere twenty-five days later. In Tokyo he had astonished the Mikado’s subjects by joining them, in the nude, in a public bath. After putting Hong Kong, Saigon, and Singapore behind him, Train passed through the recently opened Suez Canal in the Mediterranean, and thence to Marseilles. In Marseilles he became a leader of the Commune, was jailed for two weeks in Lyons, met Gambetta in Tours, then hired a private
wagons-lits
coach and raced across France to the Channel. From Liverpool he caught a ship for America, and returned to his destination after eighty days of almost perpetual motion.