Mr. Poe offered us coffee and cognac. The raven, whose name was Reynolds, served the coffee on the pretty china, grumbling all the while at having to be the maid. He didn’t do too badly, considering he didn’t have hands, but he seemed to find this task demeaning and was upset about it. “Never again!” he complained. “No! Nevermore!”
Don Quijote and Sancho proved to be very good interviewers. They asked meaningful questions and none was left unanswered. I learned a lot about Mr. Poe that night. I won’t write down everything we learned, but I will some, because we did learn something no one else really knows about Mr. Poe.
Mr. Poe was born in 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. About his childhood I will only say that his parents belonged to the theatre world, how his father had early abandoned him, his mother and his sister and how his mother had died shortly afterwards from tuberculosis. This last event was to mark him all his life, and more was to be said about it later.
Now orphans, he and his sister were taken in by different families, Edgar by a Mr. Allan, who gave the boy his middle name but never formally adopted him.
Mr. Allan was rich and he had Mr.Eddy educated in fine schools both in Europe and America. We learned how Mr. Eddy was always interested in the supernatural and played practical jokes on people like pretending to be a ghost and frightening them when he was a lad.
Also when he was young, Mr. Poe had a sweetheart that is important for the story I am about to tell. Her name was Sarah Elmira Royster and her parents forced her to marry someone else because they didn’t think Mr. Poe was good enough for her. He was having trouble with Mr. Allan, who wanted him to be a different kind of person than the one he was.
Eventually, Mr. Allan turned Mr. Poe out into the snow. The penniless Mr. Poe was determined to earn a living only as a writer, which was as difficult then as it still is for most people. Unable to do so despite his talent, he joined the army and did well there. Mr. Allan approved of a military career and when he heard about this, gave Mr. Eddy money so he could go to West Point and become an officer. But this military academy was full of spoiled rich kids and Edgar wanted to have the same things they did. He got into trouble and had to drop out. He was on his own again.
Two women came to Mr. Poe’s rescue. One was an aunt of his. She was very poor, but she took him in. With her also lived his cousin, a girl called Virginia. She fell in love with him and they married when she became thirteen. Marrying that young was something usual back then, and not as scandalous as it is today among mortals.
I would like to say they lived happily ever after, but, sadly, also usual back then was dying very young. Virginia had tuberculosis and she had very little time left. They both knew this. Mr. Poe, who remembered how he had lost his mother, was obsessed with the notion of beautiful women dying young. Some of his best poems and stories are about this.
Possibly the most famous of these writings is a poem called “The Raven.” It is about a man who has lost the woman he loves.While he is grieving for her, a raven enters his room and perches on a bust of the goddess Pallas Athena there is just above his chamber door. The raven speaks, but only to repeat and repeat the word “Nevermore!”
Mr. Poe told us that in his despair he had promised his wife never to marry again. He had sworn this before a bust of the great goddess Pallas Athena.
“It’s true!” interrupted Reynolds. While Mr. Eddy was telling his life’s story the raven had been perching quietly on the said bust, just above the chamber door. But now he spoke out. “I heard him. I was witness.”
After Virginia’s death Mr. Poe continued writing poems, books and stories that have made a lot of money for other people today but made very little for him back then. He seems to have always had a problem with alcohol, but only at irregular intervals.Considering how depressed he must have been, it is understandable.
One day something happened that could have made life more pleasant for him. Sarah Elmira, the girl he had loved in his youth, reappeared. And she wanted to marry him. And she was in a good position to do it and make life comfortable for them both. But...here is where Mr. Poe’s story becomes as dark a mystery as any he wrote about.
“Your death is one of the most mysterious in the history of literature. Nobody knows exactly what happened. May we ask what did?.”
“One day I was found delirious in the streets of Baltimore. The clothes I was wearing were not mine. They didn’t fit me at all. Some people from a tavern recognized me and I was taken lying on a plank to a hospital where I died some days later.”
“You have probably heard rumors that I drank. Some say I was an alcoholic. Others say I was a dipsomaniac. The difference is that alcoholics drink all the time whereas dipsomaniacs only drink on certain occasions but lose all control. Often, after a bout, they cannot remember why they drank or what happened after they started drinking. But I hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol before my death and doctors know that I certainly didn’t die of delirium tremens.Alcohol was certainly not the cause of my death.”
“I have read that you were kidnapped by corrupt politicians,” suggested Sancho. It was election day and they were dragging men from poll to poll forcing them to vote fraudulently several times for the same candidate. I believe this practice is called cooping.”
“I was too well known to be employed in that way. That had nothing to do with my death either.”
“Was it a cerebral tumor then? This has also been suggested.”
“I had just returned from Richmond where I had been visiting my childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira. She was a widow now, and I was a widower. We were both free to marry again and even named a day for it.”
“But you were not free,” interrupted the raven.
Mr. Eddy nodded and raised his dark eyebrows in a gesture that indicated the raven would now tell the rest of the story.
Reynolds fluttered his wings and flew off the bust of Pallas, where he had been perching. He now perched on the window sill.
“I’m a personal friend of Nictymene, the goddess Pallas Athena’s pet owl, with whom I have the honor to collaborate. Nictymene is very shy and can’t bring herself to fetch and carry all the messages the goddess Athena needs her to. So I was called on to help her. Thus it was I who appeared to take note of Eddy’s vow to his dying wife. He had promised her never to marry again. And let me tell you that when you swear before a bust of Pallas Athens you had better keep your vow. And here was Eddy, ready to break it.”
As Reynolds spoke, I noticed we were not the only ones listening to him. The attic window behind Mr. Poe, resembled a fully occupied theatre box. Despite the dark, and perhaps with the help of the light of the lantern outside, I could discern a group of bats pressing against the glass that looked as if they were hanging on to every one of Reynolds’ words.
“So I had to see to it he never did,” continued the raven, “and he died of rabies.”
“But birds don’t transmit rabies, I think,” ventured Don Quijote.
“Did I mention I am godfather to a litter of bats?”
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