There is one more of Henry James’s remarks about Mrs. Fields that must be quoted, “All her implications,” he says, “were gay, since no one so finely sentimental could be noted as so humorous; just as no feminine humor was perhaps ever so unmistakingly directed, and no state of amusement, amid quantities of reminiscence, perhaps ever so merciful.” Mirth and mercy do not always, like righteousness and peace, kiss each other. In Mrs. Fields the capacity for incapacitating laughter was such that I cannot help recalling one occasion, near the end of her life, when an attempt to tell a certain story—of which I remember nothing but that it had to do with a horse—involved her in such merriment that after repeated efforts to reach its “point,” she was forced to abandon the endeavor. What I cannot recall in a single instance, in the excellent telling of innumerable anecdotes, is unkindness, in word or suggestion, toward the persons involved in them. Mr. James did well to include this item in his enumeration of Mrs. Fields’s qualities.

Through all his lenses of memory and phrase he brought so vividly to one’s own vision the Mrs. Fields a younger generation had known that, on reading what he had written, I wrote to him in England, then nearly ending its first year in the war, and must have said that his pages would help me, at some future day, to deal with these of my own, now at last taking form. Thus, in part, he replied:—

July 20th, 1915

Your appreciation reached me, alas, but through the most muffling and deadening thickness of our unspeakable actuality here. It was to try and get out of that a little that I wrote my paper—in the most difficult and defeating conditions, which seemed to me to make it, with my heart so utterly elsewhere, a deplorably make-believe attempt. Therefore if it had any virtue, there must still be some in my poor old stump of a pen. Yes, the pipe of peace is a thing one has, amid our storm and stress, to listen very hard for when it twitters, from afar, outside; and when you shall pipe it over your exhibition of dear Mrs. Fields’s relics and documents I shall respond to your doing so with whatever attention may then be possible to me. We are not detached here, in your enviable way—but just exactly so must we therefore make some small effort to escape, even into whatever fatuity of illusion, to keep our heads above water at all. That in short is the history of my “Cornhill” scrap.

A Note of Acceptance

The time into which Henry James escaped by “piping” of Mrs. Fields has now grown far more remote than the added span of the last seven years, merely as years, could have made it. Remote enough it seemed to him when, at the end of his reminiscences of the Fieldses, he recalled a small “feast” in the Charles Street dining-room at which Mrs. Julia Ward Howe—it must have been about 1906—rose and declaimed, “a little quaveringly, but ever so gallantly, that ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ which she caused to be chanted half a century before and still could accompany with a real breadth of gesture, her great clap of hands and indication of the complementary step, on the triumphant line, ‘Be swift my hands to welcome him, be jubilant my feet!’”

Now it fell to my lot that night, as perhaps the youngest of the party, to convoy Mrs. Howe across two wintry bits of sidewalk into the carriage which bore her to and from the memorable dinner-party, and to accompany her on each of the little journeys. Quite as clear in my memory as her recitation of the “Battle Hymn” was the note of finality in her voice, quite free from unkindness, as she settled down for the return drive to her house in Beacon Street, far from a towering figure, and announced in the darkness: “Annie Fields has shrunk.” The hostess we were leaving and the guest some fifteen years her senior, and nearing ninety with what seemed an immortally youthful spirit, appear, when those words are recalled, as they must have been before either was touched by the diminishing hand of age; and the house whose door had just closed upon us—a house more recently obliterated to make room for a monstrous garage—came back as the scene of many a gathering of which the little feast described by Henry James was but a type.

Early in January of 1915 this door, which through a period of sixty years had opened upon extraordinary hospitality, was finally closed. Since 1866 it had borne the number 148. Ten years earlier, in 1856, when the house was first occupied by James T. Fields, afterwards identified with the publishing firms of Ticknor and Fields, and Fields, Osgood and Company, it was numbered 37, Charles Street. This Boston man of books and friendships, who before his death in 1881 was to become widely known as publisher, editor, lecturer, and writer, had married, in 1850, Eliza Josephine Willard, a daughter of Simon Willard, Jr., of the name still honorably associated with the even passage of time. She died within a few months, and in November of 1854 he married her cousin, Annie Adams, not yet twenty years old, the beautiful daughter of Dr. Zabdiel Boylston Adams. For those who knew Mrs. Fields toward the end of her four score and more years, it was far easier to see in her charming face and presence the exquisite, eager young woman of the mid-nineteenth century than to detect in the Charles Street of 1915, of which she was the last inhabitant of her own kind, any resemblance to the delightful street of family dwellings, many of them looking out over the then unfilled “Back Bay,” to which she had come about sixty years before. The Fieldses had lived here but a few years when, in 1859, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes—with the “Autocrat” a year behind him and the “Professor” a year ahead—became their neighbor at 21, subsequently 164, Charles Street. On the other side of them, nearer Beacon Street, John A. Andrew, the great war governor of Massachusetts, was a friend and neighbor. Across the way, for a time, lived Thomas Bailey Aldrich. In hillside streets near by dwelt many persons of congenial tastes, whose work and character contributed greatly to making Boston what it was through the second half of the last century.