CHAPTER TWENTY
And England, the land of my ancestors! Once I had fancied that my sleep would not be quiet in the grave until I should return, as it were to my home of past ages.…
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man”
THREE YEARS at the Manse, back to Salem and briefly to Boston, where Julian was born; to Salem yet again; to Lenox, West Newton, and Concord. “Then this farther flight to England, where we expect to spend four years, and afterwards another year in Italy—during all which time we shall have no real home,” Hawthorne mused, sitting quietly in a suburb of Liverpool on a showery evening. He half sighed. “I felt that I should never be quite at home here.”
After banishing himself from Salem in 1850, Hawthorne found no peace anywhere, said Julian: “Partly necessity or convenience, but partly, also, his own will, drove him from place to place; always wishing to settle down finally, but never lighting upon the fitting spot.”
Before departure there was much to do: farewell dinners, a three-week stay in Washington to confer with Pierce, the packing, the waiting, the settling of accounts, and of course the correcting of proofs for Tanglewood Tales, a sequel to A Wonder Book. But one must ask why, just at the point when his career was flourishing—he’d written four books and two volumes of children’s stories within the last three years—why Hawthorne was trading the writer’s life for the drudgery of civil service. Hawthorne wouldn’t publish again for seven more years.
In Concord, Moncure Conway, a starstruck Harvard student, recognized Hawthorne—“Who else could have those soft-flashing unsearchable eyes, that beauté du diable at middle age?”—though Hawthorne’s dapper dress surprised him until he recollected that “Prospero had left his isle, temporarily buried his book, and was passing from his masque to his masquerade as consul at Liverpool and man of the world.” Only to romantics like Conway was the consulship in Liverpool a masquerade, an excuse, a temporary and slightly embarrassing deviation on the path of continued literary acclaim. What Conway and others failed to realize was that Hawthorne needed the consulship as much as he needed to write.
For one thing, there was the money. Writing still seemed to Hawthorne the self-absorbed pastime of a monkish patrician who did not have to bother about how to feed, clothe, and educate three children and to provide for a wife in the manner she deserved. For another thing, Hawthorne was not by nature prolific. “A life of much smoulder, but scanty fire,” he would characterize his career with a modicum of truth. The world of publishing, as Fields demonstrated, was a whistle-stop world; and to keep up, Hawthorne had to be a kind of aristocratic huckster, like Hepzibah in The House of the Seven Gables. He preferred the narcotic of government officialdom: reputable, responsible, lucrative, and far easier than writing.
With its solid floors, cigar smoke, and ribald tales, it was also a world, like the Custom House, into which men could escape, pretending they were youthful and unencumbered and successful in whatever ways success mattered or didn’t. Sure, Hawthorne had said Uncle Sam robbed him of his manhood and the ability to stand on his own, but the Custom House had once represented manhood too: a steady income, a definable niche, and the community of seamen, like Hawthorne’s father, formerly at the center of Salem life. Of course, government appointments are ephemeral, and Hawthorne reckoned that an eventual rotation of office would oblige him to return to his writing desk, as if he had no choice but to revert to the vocation he profoundly loved but respected only in fitful doses.
The consulship thus promised to resolve the conflict between the artist and the laborer much as Brook Farm had—but at a better wage and with the premium of prestige due a man of middle age. Hawthorne calculated he might save as much as thirty thousand dollars after four years in office. Since merchandise sailing from the port of Liverpool to America required the consul’s signature, and since each signature paid the consul a two-dollar fee, Hawthorne could “bag” (his term) enough gold to return to America to write unimpeded by financial worry.
And anyway, what to write? After The House of the Seven Gables, history—his own or the nation’s—no longer inspired him, and he’d long ago stopped scribbling small masterpieces like “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” or “The Minister’s Black Veil.” He’d ceased writing stories of twisted love like “The Birth-mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and Coverdale was yet another crafty nincompoop on yet another pilgrimage: no more. When Fields prepared to republish Mosses from an Old Manse under the Ticknor and Fields imprint, Hawthorne reread his tales with dismay. “I am a good deal changed since those times; and to tell you the truth, my past self is not very much to my taste, as I see myself in this book.” But his present self had produced the disappointing Blithedale, and though the campaign biography served him well, it was a one-time occupation.
“The American stamp is pretty strong on you,” Ellery Channing observed of Hawthorne, referring to his work. “Could you feel at ease in European circumstances?” he asked. The question was academic. Hawthorne booked staterooms for himself, his family, and two servants on the Cunard paddle-wheel steamer Niagara, bound for Liverpool, and they sailed from Boston on July 6, 1853, two days after Hawthorne’s forty-ninth birthday. The next day, as the vessel chugged out of Halifax, four cannons fired a salute to the new consul. The die was cast.
“I do not like England,” Una Hawthorne moped. Her father didn’t much like it either. “To tell you the truth,” he wrote William Ticknor, “I believe we are all very homesick.”
Liverpool loomed on the shore, warehouses standing like upended coffins in an overcast dawn. It rained constantly, a brown, half-hearted, chilly rain that shook the bones. With William Ticknor as temporary factotum, the Hawthornes disembarked onto the sopping dock, tired and nervous and excited after their ten-day journey. They collected their trunks and carpetbags and piled into a cab, but their rooms weren’t yet ready at Mrs. Blodget’s genteel boardinghouse, a Fields recommendation, so for the next ten days they huddled indoors at the Waterloo Hotel, shrinking from the city’s soiled air. Sophia and the children caught cold.
Liverpool was poor, crowded, soggy, and drab, a city on the edge of Empire. They couldn’t possibly live there. They crossed the Mersey—“the color of a mud-puddle,” Hawthorne griped—for the suburb of Rock Ferry and registered at the Royal Rock Hotel, a fine hostelry, more what they had had in mind, with its broad walks and mannerly flowers and the nearby park where furry donkeys waited politely in a row. “There we shall remain,” Sophia declared, “till we find a house & home.”
Sophia recovered her breathlessness, wooed by English pomp and rural opulence. The coaches of a well-to-do Liverpool merchant whisked the Hawthornes outside the grimy port to a country manor, Poulton Hall, about three miles distant, where a merchant lived among twenty-five bedrooms and two sisters sensible enough to praise The Scarlet Letter as the most moral book they’d ever read. At another manor, they dipped their fingers in bowls of blue Bohemian glass and dined on fish, turkey, and chicken served by elegant footmen in full-court dress who held the shining domes of silver dishes. Hawthorne had already given three speeches at affairs of note, Sophia happily buzzed, including a dinner with His Worship the city mayor at the Town Hall. “People who have not heard of Thackeray here, know Mr. Hawthorne,” Sophia wrote to her father. England had its satisfactions.
Hawthorne stepped into his new life with noticeably less verve. Each morning, he left the Rock Ferry station at half past nine and crossed the Mersey on a little steamer, arriving at his post about a half hour later. Located in the Washington Buildings on Brunswick Street—“the most detestable part of the city”—the consular office consisted of two rooms on the first floor, one for him and an outer chamber for his treasured clerk, Henry J. Wilding, and the indispensable vice-consul, Samuel Pearce, two Englishmen of experience. Hawthorne’s own office, about twelve feet by fifteen, reminded him of an old-fashioned barbershop. On the walls were nondescript pictures and maps as well as two lithographs, one of Zachary Taylor and one of the Tennessee State House. An American eagle skulked over the mantelpiece, and a barometer pointed hopefully to “Fair.” It continued to rain.
Hawthorne’s consular duties included various maritime and mercantile tasks, all related to Liverpool’s strategic position in Anglo-American trade. (It was the port of entry for cotton and sugarcane and American politics.) Mostly, though, the consul interpreted protocol, clarified the finer points of maritime law, paid postage on unclaimed letters from Americans, and provided passage home to stranded seamen. He investigated the numerous complaints about the conditions aboard American ships and took the deposition of a battered sailor in Liverpool’s North Hospital. He placed a young American who’d been wandering about the streets in a hospital for the insane, and he arranged the forlorn funeral of an American sea captain who died in a Liverpool boardinghouse. “The duties of the office,” he noted, “carried me to prisons, police-courts, hospitals, lunatic asylums, coroner’s inquests, death-beds, funerals, and brought me in contact with insane people, criminals, ruined speculators, wild adventurers, diplomatists, brother-consuls, and all manner of simpletons and unfortunates, in greater number and variety than I had ever dreamed of as pertaining to America.”
If anyone came calling for Hawthorne the author (as opposed to the consul), the clerk was to say he was out.
What Hawthorne liked best was tallying fees. “The autograph of a living author has seldom been so much in request at so respectable a price,” he chortled, constantly aware how little authors were valued at home. It was with pride that he repaid George Hillard the money Hillard had raised after Hawthorne lost his job at the Salem Custom House, and he loaned Horatio Bridge three thousand dollars.
In September the Hawthornes moved to Rock Park, the affluent housing project near the waterfront, a kind of suburban fortress protected by police guards to keep out the riffraff. Their place was a large stone semidetached structure, three stories high and surrounded by dense hedges, originally renting for two hundred pounds. The landlady lowered the price when she discovered the United States consul had his eye on it, “instead of Mr. Nobody,” said Sophia, “so much influence has rank & title in dear old England.”
The Hawthornes counted pennies. Tea alone cost a dollar a pound (four-shilling tea was tasteless) and potatoes sold at thirty cents a peck. Though he and Sophia had always hired someone to help with chores or cooking—except during their poorest Manse days—Sophia said their new rank demanded a staff of at least housemaid, nursemaid, cook, and a gardener to tend the rare roses. “We do not live in ‘great style,’ ” Sophia hastily explained to her father, “—neither do we intend to have much company. We really could not afford it.” When Elizabeth put Hawthorne’s income at forty thousand dollars, Sophia quickly trimmed her sister’s sails. “So very far from this is the truth that it really is funny & melancholy at the same time,” she scolded. “And Mr. Hawthorne must lay aside a good part of this income, or we should return ruined.” To Mary she explained that “we live as economically as we possibly can—no carriage—no 24 dinners (dinner of 24) no liveried footmen.” Living in the backwoods of Ohio with her children and Horace, now president of Antioch College, Mary must have raised an eyebrow.
Hawthorne relied on Ticknor to invest Hawthorne’s earnings as he saw fit. In fact, if not for the money, Hawthorne professed he’d “kick the office to the devil, and come home again. I am sick of it,” he wrote in December, “and long for my hillside, and—what I thought I never should long for—my pen!”
True, he had little time to write stories, but he had no real intention of trying. Instead he recorded long accounts of English life. Hawthorne shivered in revulsion, fear, and stupefaction as he walked the Liverpool streets. Winter came on, cold. He saw the raw feet of scantily clad children, a beggar without arms or legs pleading for a sixpence, a woman in a hand wagon (good subject for a romance), and a half-starved, half-frozen boy trying to sell dirty newspapers. Smudged young girls furtively grabbed the coal that fell from carts and hid the precious cargo in their aprons. A man stood barelegged playing a fife hoping for a halfpenny. Hawthorne looked in the apple stalls, fruit not fit for a pig. Appalled and fascinated, he returned home to his warm sitting room fire and wrote, certain he’d “got hold of something real, which I do not find in the better streets of the city.”
He supposed he might one day transform his casual impressions into fiction since his notebooks had always been a source of stray facts capable of sparking a tale. It was no different now, except that Hawthorne was trying to match his fantasy of England against what he saw. The déjà vu of rural churches came from his reading about them, he told himself. “Or perhaps the image of them, impressed into the minds of my long-ago forefathers, was so deep that I have inherited it; and it answers to the reality.”
His forefathers were constantly present, sometimes closer than the streetpeople of Liverpool. “My ancestor left England in 1630,” Hawthorne ruminated, “I return in 1853. I sometimes feel as if I myself had been absent these two hundred and eighteen years—leaving England just emerging from the feudal system, and finding it on the verge of Republicanism. It brings the two far separated points of time very closely together, to view the matter thus.” England was the root, he the branch.
Yet the country was resolutely itself, its gay pageantry repulsive to him, a democrat. And it was strangely soothing too. “How comfortable Englishmen know how to make themselves,” Hawthorne observed, “locating their dwellings far within private grounds, with secure gateways and porter’s lodges, and the smoothest roads, and trimmest paths, and shaven lawns, and clumps of tress, and every bit of the ground, every hill and dell, made the most of for convenience and beauty, and so well kept that even winter cannot disarray it—.” But the puritan in him could never condone smug luxury. “… I doubt whether anybody is entitled to a home in so full a sense, in this world.” To Ticknor, he wailed, “I HATE England.”
Still, the poets entombed among dim stones in Westminster Abbey had been old friends, and Hawthorne stopped for a night in Lichfield to visit the birthplace of Dr. Johnson. “I set my foot on the worn steps, and laid my hand on the wall of the house, because Johnson’s hand and foot might have been in those same places.” This England, his England, is the place where he came alive so many years ago; this England, his England, is the magic green Forest of Arden, best home of all.
The English had heard stories. They had read Frederika Bremer’s impressions of the good-looking American author, his nose fine, his eyes clear as the Stockbridge Bowl, and the bitter smile on his lips spoiling the lower part of his face. Others had heard tales of his shyness. William Story told Elizabeth Barrett Browning that Hawthorne spoke only through his pen, and James Fields told his friend Mary Russell Mitford that Hawthorne was so thin-skinned Fields dared not criticize his writing lest he toss it in the flames. And how well Fields remembered those awful days—only four years ago—when the Hawthornes were starving, until, that is, Fields discovered The Scarlet Letter. “Was Hawthorne aware of his Columbus,” Story asked James Lowell. “Browning seemed somewhat to have suspected a rat.”
In Liverpool, Hawthorne gained a reputation for refusing invitations although he did develop a close friendship with Henry Arthur Bright, the precocious twenty-two-year-old who’d met the author in Concord in the fall of 1852. Then, Hawthorne had hardly talked to him, but once in Liverpool he was grateful for his company and all his kindnesses, great and small. “Bright was the illumination of my dusky little apartment, as often as he made his appearance there!” Hawthorne would write. Bright took Hawthorne to the theater, accompanied him on his rambles, brought him magazines, oddments, and gossip, and conveyed to Sophia invitations to country houses. She responded gratefully, sprinkling him with adjectives: “interesting, sincere, earnest, independent, warm and generous hearted; not at all dogmatic, and with ready answers.”
He liked pre-Raphaelite poetry, Balzac, and flowers, and though he wrote an occasional piece for the Westminster Review—later for the Examiner and Athenaeum—Bright had no pretensions of a literary career. Instead he was the cream of the Liverpool merchant class, educated at Trinity, a Liberal, a Unitarian, and in 1857 a partner in the family shipping business, Gibbs, Bright, & Company. He was also a humanitarian. He published a pamphlet, Cruelties on High Seas, to try to protect sailors from physical and emotional abuse on board ship, and he shared Hawthorne’s interest in politics, particularly as they were unfolding in America. Another of his pamphlets, Free Blacks and Slaves: Would American Abolition be a Blessing?, answered its own question with a definite no.
Buffering the consul from Liverpool society, Bright looked to Hawthorne as to a father, and Hawthorne responded, tenderly cuffing him when he wrote a milk-warm review of De Quincey, that “poor old man of genius,” Hawthorne cried in sympathy, “to whom the world is in arrears for half-a-century’s revenue of fame!” Bright hadn’t served the old man at all. “You examine his title-deeds, find them authentic, and send him away with the benefaction of half-a-crown!”
The callow youth made Hawthorne feel spry himself. He and Sophia had begun to shave a couple of years from their ages, and when Elizabeth Peabody sent congratulations on Sophia’s birthday, Sophia erupted. Never refer to her age, nor to Hawthorne’s. “He wants to know nothing about the birth days you are so fond of.”
Hawthorne put the matter somewhat differently. “I have had enough of progress,” he wrote Longfellow; “—now I want to stand stock still; or rather, to go back twenty years.”
By and large, Hawthorne was a diligent consul, attending to affairs of office with dispatch and decorum. During his first two years in office he hardly left his post, so scrupulous was he about any imputation of impropriety; he did not travel or sightsee beyond the boundaries of Liverpool, and each day spent almost eight hours at his dingy desk. In the summer of 1854, when Sophia and the children went to the Isle of Man for two weeks to recover from whooping cough, Hawthorne joined them only on weekends. His desires were simple: perform well, avoid attention, count his money.
Nothing is perfect, particularly in government service, and even the most conscientious consul is not above reproach. About two hundred soldiers, shipwrecked from the United States vessel San Francisco, landed in Liverpool in need of passage home, but since they were soldiers, not sailors, they did not fall under the jurisdiction of the consul, who didn’t quite know what to do with them. According to Hawthorne, when the ship’s officers requisitioned two thousand dollars to furnish provisions, he supplied the items himself, dispatching his clerk to make the purchases, and he found temporary lodging for the soldiers, which, according to Sophia, he paid out of pocket.
The soldiers’ transportation to America was more ticklish. Hawthorne telegraphed James Buchanan, American minister to Great Britain, to ask if Buchanan would take over the matter. Replying that the troops fell outside his purview, Buchanan passed the buck back to Hawthorne, suggesting he open an account at Baring Brothers for the soldiers’ relief. Furious, the captain of the San Francisco went to see Buchanan, and someone leaked to the American press that Hawthorne had avoided all responsibility for the soldiers, having referred everything to his clerk, an Englishman, no less. Moreover, if the San Francisco’s captain hadn’t traveled to London to importune Buchanan, no action on behalf of the shipwrecked soldiers would have been taken at all.
Hawthorne himself was furious. But he knew that to exonerate himself he would have to shift responsibility back onto Buchanan—not a good political move—so he sent exculpatory letters to Bridge and Ticknor, instructing them to publish them if, and only if, necessary. Ticknor and Bridge knew what to do. They leaked Hawthorne’s letters to the press in just the right proportions, and the affair soon passed over, leaving Hawthorne’s reputation and his cordial relations with Buchanan intact.
The affair left Hawthorne slightly shaken. He did not want to repeat the Salem Custom House debacle. This was a “devilish good office,” he told Ticknor again and again. He’d netted ten thousand dollars in almost a year, a tidy sum, and could salt away even more—if “those Jackasses at Washington (of course I do not include the President under this polite phrase) will but let it alone.”
They would not. A new agreement between Britain and America allowing merchandise to travel to Canada without the consul’s signature reduced Hawthorne’s fees by one-quarter. And John O’Sullivan, the American chargé d’affaires in Portugal, brought Hawthorne word of change slated for the diplomatic corps. If passed by Congress, new consular laws would direct the American consul in Liverpool to hand over all fees to the government and then to subsist on a fixed salary of seventy-five hundred dollars, not nearly enough, declared Sophia, for a family of five—and a consul’s family at that. “For God’s sake, bestir yourself,” Hawthorne wrote to Ticknor, “and get everybody to bestir themselves, to restore matters to the former footing. I am not half ready to begin scribbling romances again, yet.”
Hoping Pierce might forestall passage of the bill so that he could come home flush, he really didn’t want to alter his situation: the money was good; the work, though boring, wasn’t difficult; he didn’t miss writing. Bridge and Ticknor lobbied on Hawthorne’s behalf, but the bill slouched toward passage regardless.
As far as Bridge was concerned, Hawthorne’s talents were buried in Liverpool. He asked Ticknor to mobilize Hawthorne’s literary friends, like Longfellow, to encourage him to get back to work, real work. “H. ought to go to Italy, and write.”
An American claimant searches for patrimony and permanence, much like the many claimants Hawthorne met in the consul’s office. They were mostly deluded individuals, convinced of their kinship to British nobility on the basis of an old mug or an illegible document. But if their absurd claims seemed pathetic, Hawthorne recognized in them the tag end of a comparable wish.
“The American shall be a person of high rank, who has reached eminence early: a Governor; a congressman; a gentleman; give him the characteristics and imperfections of an American gentleman,” Hawthorne mused. The threat of the consular bill sent Hawthorne back to fiction, his subject the American abroad, a comparison of New World and Old. “He shall, I think, be unmarried,” Hawthorne continued his ruminations. “He searches for relatives, burrows in books of records, consults heralds; for there is a misty idea, as in so many cases, that a great estate and perhaps title is due to him.”
Hawthorne would endow the American with a secret powerful enough to destroy the English branch of the family, but he didn’t know what the secret was or how it could be used: family misdeeds, centuries old, to demonstrate the bankruptcy of aristocratic institutions? But were these institutions so bad? Sometimes he trembled at the thought of a place “where no change comes for centuries, and where a peasant does but step into his father’s shoes, and lead just his father’s life, going in and out over the old threshold, and finally being buried close by his father’s grave, time without end.” And then he added, “Yet it is rather pleasant to know that such things are.”
“Royalty,” he observed on another occasion, “has its glorious side.”
His attitude toward England was ambivalent, hotly so. Perhaps therein lies the claimant’s secret, an insatiable yearning for another place that left him perpetually homeless. But since Hawthorne could not consciously reconcile his conflicted sense of England—his sense of belonging, his sense of displacement—the secret remained unnamed.
In April of 1855, he was playing with yet another idea for a story, having heard the legend of a bloody footstep in the entrance of Smithells Hall. “The tradition is that a certain martyr, in Bloody Mary’s time, being examined before the then occupant of the Hall, and committed to prison, stamped his foot in earnest protest against the injustice with which he was treated,” Hawthorne jotted the tale in his notebooks. “Blood issued from his foot, which slid along the stone pavement of the hall, leaving a long footmark printed in blood; and there it has remained ever since, in spite of the scrubbings of all after generations.”
The image was tailor-made for Hawthorne, who’d considered the idea of a footstep soaked in blood in the early 1840s as a possible starting point for a story. Now its appeal was amplified by the image of a man stamping his foot in anger and frustration, like Rumpelstiltskin. For Hawthorne was frustrated. He’d been happy of late, he noted querulously—“more content to enjoy what I had; less anxious for anything beyond it, in this life”—but he couldn’t shake loose a recurrent dream. He was at school, realizing he’d been there far too long and had “quite failed to make such progress in life as my contemporaries have; and I seem to meet some of them with a feeling of shame and depression that broods over me, when I think of it, even at this moment.”
Hawthorne had begun to weary of town life, as he’d said of Robin Molineux, wondering if he’d sold his soul for immunity, or easy cash. Then he learned the provisions of the new consular bill wouldn’t take effect for a while because Pierce considered parts of it unconstitutional.
Hawthorne set down his pen. He decided not to quit his post just yet.
To economize, he gave up the Rock Park house and dismissed all the servants save Fanny Wrigley, Rose’s nursemaid. From now on his family could live more cheaply in boardinghouses and rented rooms. Trunkloads of household goods were shipped back to America. Sophia was crestfallen. “Now we are fixtures in Liverpool till next spring at least,” Sophia moaned. Italy drifted away into an amorphous future. Having endured the death of her father at a distance, she endured Liverpool beyond all sufferance, despising the Mersey, the fog, the smut, the noxious fumes that rose from the putrid streets. She refused to go outdoors. Night air filled her lungs with peril. She immersed herself in cold water, drank cod-liver oil, and complained that the racking cough that killed her mother had crept into her lungs.
In June the Hawthornes went to the Royal Leamington Spa in Warwickshire, where they rented a house at 13 Lansdowne Crescent, hoping Sophia might recuperate. (Hawthorne estimated the lodgings would cost only seven guineas a week.) Surrounded by lissome trees, she was calmer, and soon she and Hawthorne began to act like tourists, visiting Warwick, Stratford, Coventry, and the Lake District in July. “I have a right to some recreation,” he defended himself nervously. “I shall be within reach of telegraphic notices, and can always make my appearance at the consulate within a few hours.”
But Sophia’s cough deepened in Leamington, and when the family returned to Rock Ferry in August, neither she nor Hawthorne was happy. Sarah Clarke visited and took Hawthorne aside to tell him his wife was sicker than he knew; he should not subject her to another winter of clammy damp. It was decided. Sophia should accept O’Sullivan’s offer and go to sunny Lisbon. Hawthorne asked Pierce for a leave of absence.
As Pierce’s unofficial envoy, Bridge replied to Hawthorne’s request. Pierce would consider giving O’Sullivan’s post to Hawthorne. O’Sullivan had tired of it. Hawthorne rejected the offer. He knew nothing about diplomatic protocol, didn’t speak Portuguese; and he couldn’t afford it in any case.
Sophia sailed to Portugal without him. “The doctors said I must leave England this winter, if I would escape destruction,” she guiltily told her sister Mary. “So I had no choice, you see—& I tried to behave well—as my life is very important to some persons.” Una and Rose accompanied her, and Julian stayed in England with his father.
The five of them hugged one another in early October, standing on the wooden deck as the ship’s whistle blew. Hawthorne and Julian walked off the gangplank to the shore, Julian’s little hand in his father’s. “This is the first great parting that Sophia and I have ever had,” Hawthorne acknowledged to himself in bewilderment. Father and son boarded the Southampton train, Hawthorne glimpsing through the window a fragment of rainbow. Then it dropped to darkness.