Through the winter Mr. Whitman plodded on with his literary work, and by spring the parlors were once more transformed into a regular printing and mailing establishment. To these over-filled rooms he had added an oil portrait of an ancestor, a life-size bust of Elias Hicks, and a seated statuette of himself. He was very careful of the two latter works of art, and to protect them from dust kept them partially encased in newspapers. When a caller once slyly lifted the paper from the statuette, he found a colony of ants had made the lap of it their home. The bust of Hicks was very conspicuous, and looked spectral in its paper headgear. Mrs. Davis would occasionally remove the yellow and time-worn papers, and replace them with clean ones. The owner no doubt noticed this, but he had ceased to be too observant of some things, and had become more lenient where "Mary" was the offender. And Mary had learned just how far she could go with impunity. In a way their lives had merged together.
It was a custom with Mr. Whitman to have his manuscripts set up in type before sending them away—even his "little bits" of newspaper contributions. This was done in a "quaint little printing office" in town, the proprietor of which was "an old fellow acquaintance" of Walt's. In this matter, as in all others, he was very impatient, for the moment anything was ready for the press he would summon Mrs. Davis, regardless of time, weather or her own occupations, saying: "Take this to the printer's, Mary, and tell him I want it immediately"; and although most of this work was done gratuitously, the "old fellow acquaintance" was decidedly accommodating to his honored patron, and often laid other jobs aside for his "odd bits." He was as well always courteous to Mrs. Davis. It may be that he could not withstand her appeals for haste, and was willing to incommode himself to save her from fruitless trips to the office; for he knew that in an unreasonably short time the poet would demand his printed bit. In fact, so impatient would the writer often become, that to pacify him his good housekeeper would make half a dozen trips to the office. Frequently he would correct the proof and return it for a second, perhaps a third or fourth printing, and frequently he would say: "Don't come back without it, Mary; wait for it."
It would have been inconsistent with Mrs. Davis's natural activity for her to remain sitting in a printing office for an unlimited time, therefore she usually took advantage of these opportunities to do a little shopping, make a friendly call, or even a hasty run to Philadelphia. The corrected copies were never destroyed, but, like everything else, were dropped on the floor. It was no wonder that "to some Walt Whitman's house was a sort of conglomerated dime museum." Strangers who called drew their own inferences and reported accordingly, and in this way contradictory stories were told and sent out into the world. Much that was false was believed, until the prevailing impression was that "he was living in poverty and neglect."
He was extremely non-committal, and his housekeeper never intruded her knowledge upon anyone, so it was natural that errors as to his home life should creep in. It was certainly difficult to credit that from sheer preference any human being could live in and enjoy the state of disorder that was found in the Whitman house, thanks to the poet's peculiarities. But this manner of living suited him, and in it he found true comfort. It must be confessed that things were outwardly so indicative of neglect that mistakes were bound to be made, while little of the actual life was known or understood, except by intimate friends. "The junk shop jumble of those lonesome rooms," writes one; and again: "I found the venerable poet in his garret, living in neglect and want, cooking soup in a yellow bowl on a sheet-iron stove nearby." (S. T. Packard in a magazine article.) (The bowl merely contained clean water for the purpose of moistening the overheated atmosphere of the room.) Still further he writes: "Whenever his strength permitted he rose from his armchair with the rough bear-robe thrown over the back." It was really a white wolf-skin robe, a present to Mr. Whitman and of great service to him.
In truth the elucidation, explanation and straightening out of the various stories concerning the life of Walt Whitman in Mickle Street would require a volume in itself. No fancifulness, however, on the part of more or less observant visitors could rival that of their subject, for "His imagination could and did convert the narrow walls of the house in Camden into boundaries of nations, seas, oceans, mountain-chains, vistas of Eden, forests, cities, palaces, landscapes, hovels, homes of the rich, and art galleries, so that Whitman was thus of the great world while out of it."
"A peculiar feature of Walt Whitman's rooms, those I mean which his housekeeper is not allowed to put into order, is the chaos and confusion in which his papers are coiled. The bump of order does not exist in his cranium." (William Sloane Kennedy.)
But visitors were left to their own impressions, and these were too often unjust to the woman who always did her best to prevent the confusion from growing still worse confounded.