Thorns

If Sophia was alive to speak to us today . . .

About a year and a half after Richard abandoned me, I recovered only enough to return to Maine, where, among my own people, my health was gradually restored and I resumed teaching.^⁠[1] There, in the busy household of my brother Edward and his wife, Mercy K., at my childhood home or visiting Appleton to see my sister Margareta Butler, I began again to live quietly.^⁠[2]

I think, for three years after he left me, Richard did not write under his true name. He wrote chiefly for Harper’s, Scribner’s, the New York Independent, and later the Christian Union. “Carl Spencer” was his nom de plume during that time. I know this only by a poem that appeared in The Independent in the fall of ’66 under that signature — a poem that Richard had composed and read to me before he left for the South.^⁠[3]  I had the impression at the time that he concealed his real name from the Editor. They are like yet unlike his usual style, but I thought they could be and collected them.

In 1873, Edward and Mercy’s daughter, Annie Crie Graves, and I enrolled for a term at the Eastern State Normal School in Castine;^[4] me so that I could fulfill my requirement to teach in Maine's public schools, and Annie because she wanted to be a teacher someday. We packed our bags, both of us giddy with excitement, and Ed took us by carriage to Appleton where we joined Eloise and Arthur Butler before sailing across the bay. I was no longer young, but the thought of school stirred something in me I had feared was lost. There was a grand celebration in Castine for it was the first year the school had their own building and we gathered around it for a commemorative picture.

By summer we were home again. Our term at Castine had been brief, but it left a brightness in memory. There was no question of idleness, but it was a happy time. Edward’s crops required tending, Mercy K’s household was full, and the younger children needed lessons. Annie and I brought home what we had gained and spent it at once in usefulness.

So the season passed with children to mind, garden work, books opened at the table when there was time, haying, moving between households and for a little while the world seemed to hold. Then September came. Just as we were harvesting potatoes, dread news of failures in the cities began to reach even quiet Maine. The panic, born among bankers and railroads, was not a short financial collapse. Margaretta and her husband Oliver Butler left Appleton for Indiana and fertile farmland, taking most of their children with them.

By 1874, Richard began publishing under his rightful name. When his poetry appeared, it was placed before me without a word of comment. I have always endeavored to avoid pity or sympathy for myself, and my general cheerfulness has been such that casual acquaintances often remark, “I believe that Mrs. Realf never had a trouble in her life.”

I said that he was dead to me, and in one sense I meant it. I would not seek him. I would not expose him. I would not trouble his life, nor make my sorrow a public claim upon him. I accepted that whatever had once existed between us was at an end.

He who had once sought my confidence, my affection, and my hand, and afterward could not even give me the poor mercy of an explanation — he could write of grief, remembrance, fidelity, and love for strangers to read, but to me he gave silence. I tried to live as though that silence had settled everything. Perhaps I even persuaded others that it had. But sorrow does not always cry aloud. Sometimes it goes inward and makes its home in the body. I bore mine without a murmur, as I had resolved to do, but I did not bear it without cost.

About 1875, I became too ill to work steadily, and in time went to Massachusetts to live with my nephew Simpson D. Butler, his wife Olive, and their children in Lynn. My niece Cora Butler Pease was living not so far off in Malden with her husband, Curtis, and I had friends there as well. Winter reached into Massachusetts, but it came less sternly than along the Maine coast. It was another family roof, another place where I might be received without question. In a house with children, there is always a garment to mend, a lesson to hear, a cup to fetch, or a question to answer. I was grateful for such claims upon me and had friends in the town.

The autumn of 1878, the year had begun to loosen its hold. The maples had spent themselves in scarlet and gold, and the leaves came down steadily now, skimming the walks and gathering in damp heaps along the fences. The first day of November began like any other. Simpson was off to work, the children off to school. Olive was near at hand, moving about the kitchen with the practiced attention of a young mother, and I sat where the light fell best, with the morning papers opened before me.

I had long ago learned to read the newspapers cautiously. A mention of his name, or one of his poems once beloved, might lie hidden in a column as a thorn lies hidden in wool.  Still, one cannot forever refuse the world. I read of politics and ships, of deaths, lectures, fires, appointments, and all the public business by which ordinary life announces itself. Just weeks before I had read Richard’s poem “Discord” in Harper’s Weekly.

Outside, the leaves continued to fall.

Then I saw his name.

Col. Richard Realf in bold letters.

For a moment the room, the child’s voice, the rustle of Olive’s dress, even the little ordinary sounds of the morning, withdrew. I do not know whether I cried out. I only know that the printed words seemed to rise from the page and strike me with the force of a hand.

He was dead.

COL. RICHARD REALF,

who, nineteen years ago, was one of John Brown’s associates in the plot which culminated in the Harper’s Ferry affair, committed suicide in California on Oct. 29, by taking morphine. He was the Secretary of State of Brown’s “Provisional Government,” and was an educated man. At the time of the attack he was superintending affairs in the vicinity, and when disaster befel his friend he escaped. Ill health and the fear of becoming a burden to his family and friends probably led to his suicide.^[5]

Each morning after the brief notice of his death, I searched the newspapers for some further account of his life and death. One week later, on November 8, a story appeared in the Boston Globe.

RICHARD REALF.

Marital Misery the Cause of His Suicide.

[San Francisco Chronicle.]^⁠[6]

The funeral of the late Richard Realf, who committed suicide last Monday night in Oakland, will take place next Sunday under the auspices of the Grand Army of the Republic, of which deceased was a member. Domestic unhappiness is believed to have been the motive which led Colonel Realf to destroy himself. On Saturday he tried to obtain a loan of money from some of his associates in the Mint, stating to them that he desired to buy laudanum and chloral-hydrate for the purpose of poisoning himself, and one of them, discrediting his words, loaned him a dime, which he expended in laudanum, but the dose was too small and failed of its intent.

On Saturday a woman, who claims to be the wife of Realf, and who holds a certificate of marriage to him, dated in 1867, arrived in this city from Pittsburg, Penn., and, ascertaining where Realf lived, proceeded to the house and informed the landlady that she was Mrs. Realf. She waited until Realf returned and told him that she had come to him. He replied that his wife would shortly reach this city from the East, and he intended to rent a furnished apartment for her, and that he would live with no other woman.

Catherine Cassidy is the maiden name of the alleged Mrs. Realf, and she asserts that, although he deserted her some four years ago for another woman, now in New York City, and has made an unsuccessful attempt to procure a decree of divorce on the ground of incompatibility of temperament, she (Catherine) is still his only lawfully wedded wife. “My husband had his faults,” said the woman, “but he is dead now, and I desire to bury them with him.” A long and unpublished poem was found among the effects of the deceased, of which the following is an extract:

De mortuis nil nisi bonum. When

For me the end has come and I am dead,

And little voluble, chattering daws of men

Peck at me curiously, let it then be said

By some one brave enough to speak the truth,

Here lies a great soul killed by cruel wrong...

I could not bear to be with my friends while so many terrible revelations were being made known through the press so I came to Springfield, Massachusetts, to an old friend and relative. No one else knew me in Springfield. Browsing through past issues of the Springfield Daily Republican, I found an article written immediately after news of Richard’s death had been announced.

RICHARD REALF’S SUICIDE at San Francisco is one of the most painful events of the sort we could record. We do not need to recall his share in John Brown’s great plans. He was a man who always seemed about to do or become something extraordinary, and yet never filled the expectations of his friends. In himself, however, he was extraordinary; his character was individual, his personal courage was great, his thought audacious,—yet in expression and action he fell short, nor ever impressed himself upon the world to the extent of the abilities which those who knew him felt sure he possessed. He was a brave soldier in our war, a good journalistic writer then and since; and he was an orator and poet. It is probable that liquor-drinking was his bane; that it paralyzed his ambition and depreciated his achievement. Two years ago, when Francis Murphy visited Pittsburgh, Realf, who was then the principal writer on the Commercial of that city, took his pledge and aimed to be faithful to it. It would be more than we have warrant for to say that he could not fulfill his hopeful resolves. His poems during several years have shown an eccentric drift. The latest is in the Atlantic Monthly for November, entitled “Indirection;” it intimates to one who reads between the lines, the tragic significance of his own incomplete, disappointing life. These are the third and the last of its five verses:—

“Back of the canvas that throbs the painter is hinted and hidden;

Into the statue that breathes the soul of the sculptor is bidden;

Under the joy that is felt lie the infinite issues of feeling;

Crowning the glory revealed is the glory that crowns the revealing.”

“Space is as nothing to spirit, the deed is outdone by the doing;

The heart of the wooer is warm, but warmer the heart of the wooing;

And up from the pits where these shiver, and up from the hights where those shine,

Twin voices and shadows swim starward, and the essence of life is divine.”

A friend of Realf’s, writing to the New York Tribune (one Alexander Clark), draws a beautiful picture of his father and mother. Realf was English, and not over 44 years old at his death. He published a volume of poetry at Brighton when he was 16, and was a protégé of Frederic W. Robertson. This for preface to Mr. Clark’s visit, who says of Realf’s parents:—

“I found them alone in a little cottage surrounded by a blooming hedge and in a paradise of flowers, for the old man is a gardener. When I handed my letter of introduction from their long-absent son, the father’s eyes flooded with tears, and he went out among his roses and wept like a child. The mother joined him, as if to share the joy of good news; and was there ever a more beautiful scene in any garden than that? The two bowed old people crying for gladness, and the air all fragrant with blossoms! When the tears were wiped away, the mother hastened to remove the somber dress she wore when the stranger entered the lowly door, and appeared in light-colored apparel, as if to be in harmony with the exultation of the hour. She rummaged in an old drawer and brought out Richard’s first volume of poems, a treasure to her more precious than gold.”^⁠[7]

I did not know Mr. Clark, but I knew of him as a reverend and literary man, near enough to Richard to have visited his parents. I decided to write him. My chief object in writing was, if possible, to receive a refutation of these seeming scandals: that a wife had followed him to California, another wife and children were in New York, while still another in Springfield, Massachusetts.

I had nearly concluded that these “newspaper wives” were all mythical beings. I addressed the good reverend under the name of Emery, simply stating that I had known Realf during the war, and that I found it hard to believe he had led such a reckless life as the newspapers implied. I gave him no particulars about my marriage.

He responded, and I learned through him that a wife and child did exist. He encouraged me to write Richard Hinton who was collecting Richard’s poems and intending to write his biography.

When I wrote again, I made myself known, on his promise of confidence. I determined that for the sake of Richard’s children and his aged parents I would not be publicly known as his wife. He wrote and confirmed my suspicions that, with the second woman, no legal ceremony had been performed. When in another letter I asked for every detail he knew, he fell silent; yet some weeks later a letter arrived from Col. Richard Hinton.

NOTES

¹ Sophia Realf to her sister-in-law Sarah Realf Whapham, March 31, 1879—“And I have been quite unable to attend to teaching for three years or more, but there is a promise of better health now and I do not fear for myself.”

² In autumn of 1869, Winifred “Winnie” Furness, Sophia’s niece of Furnessville, Indiana was sent to Maine to get to know her Maine kin. Charged with keeping a journal the year away from home, periodically she  mentions Sophia or “Aunt Sophie”.

Sunday April 24. 1870

Ollie and I had just got our work done and commenced to bathe when we heard a team drive up to the door. Ollie peeked out and said Why the whole of St. George had come. Uncle Ed had hired a coach and brought his whole family and Aunt Sophie up here. They went away at four and took Edna with them and left Annie. Annie and I took a walk over to the grave yard.

³ Sophia to R. Hinton, March 8, 1879

⁴ Catalogue of the Eastern State Normal School, at Castine, Maine, 1873, p. 10

⁵ Boston Post, (Boston, Massachusetts), November 1, 1878

⁶ Republished from the San Francisco Chronicle in the Boston Globe, November 8, 1878.

⁷ Springfield Daily Republican, November 2, 1878, p. 4.