A MORTAL ANTIPATHY
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
CONTENTS
[ PREFACE. ]
[ INTRODUCTION. ]
[ THE NEW PORTFOLIO: FIRST OPENING. ]
[ A MORTAL ANTIPATHY. ]
[ I. ]GETTING READY.
[ II. ]THE BOAT-RACE.
[ III. ]THE WHITE CANOE.
[ IV. ]THE YOUNG SOLITARY
[ V. ]THE ENIGMA STUDIED.
[ VI. ]STILL AT FAULT.
[ VII. ]A RECORD OF ANTIPATHIES
[ VIII. ]THE PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.
[ IX. ]THE SOCIETY AND ITS NEW SECRETARY.
[ X. ]A NEW ARRIVAL.
[ XI. ]THE INTERVIEWER ATTACKS THE SPHINX.
[ XII. ]MISS VINCENT AS A MEDICAL STUDENT.
[ XIII. ]DR. BUTTS READS A PAPER.
[ XIV. ]MISS VINCENT'S STARTLING DISCOVERY.
[ XV. ]DR. BUTTS CALLS ON EUTHYMIA.
[ XVI. ]MISS VINCENT WRITES A LETTER.
[ XVII. ]Dr. BUTTS'S PATIENT.
[ XVIII. ]MAURICE KIRKWOOD'S STORY OF HIS LIFE.
[ XIX. ]THE REPORT OF THE BIOLOGICAL COMMITTEE.
[ XX. ]DR. BUTTS REFLECTS.
[ XXI. ]AN INTIMATE CONVERSATION.
[ XXII. ]EUTHYMIA.
[ XXIII. ]THE MEETING OF MAURICE AND EUTHYMIA.
[ XXIV. ]THE INEVITABLE.
[ POSTSCRIPT: AFTER-GLIMPSES. ]
[ MISS LURIDA VINCENT TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD. ]
[ DR. BUTTS TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD. ]
[ DR. BUTTS TO MRS. BUTTS. ]
PREFACE.
“A MORTAL ANTIPATHY” was a truly hazardous experiment. A very wise and very distinguished physician who is as much at home in literature as he is in science and the practice of medicine, wrote to me in referring to this story: “I should have been afraid of my subject.” He did not explain himself, but I can easily understand that he felt the improbability of the physiological or pathological occurrence on which the story is founded to be so great that the narrative could hardly be rendered plausible. I felt the difficulty for myself as well as for my readers, and it was only by recalling for our consideration a series of extraordinary but well-authenticated facts of somewhat similar character that I could hope to gain any serious attention to so strange a narrative.
I need not recur to these wonderful stories. There is, however, one, not to be found on record elsewhere, to which I would especially call the reader's attention. It is that of the middle-aged man, who assured me that he could never pass a tall hall clock without an indefinable terror. While an infant in arms the heavy weight of one of these tall clocks had fallen with a loud crash and produced an impression on his nervous system which he had never got over.
The lasting effect of a shock received by the sense of sight or that of hearing is conceivable enough.
But there is another sense, the nerves of which are in close relation with the higher organs of consciousness. The strength of the associations connected with the function of the first pair of nerves, the olfactory, is familiar to most persons in their own experience and as related by others. Now we know that every human being, as well as every other living organism, carries its own distinguishing atmosphere. If a man's friend does not know it, his dog does, and can track him anywhere by it. This personal peculiarity varies with the age and conditions of the individual. It may be agreeable or otherwise, a source of attraction or repulsion, but its influence is not less real, though far less obvious and less dominant, than in the lower animals. It was an atmospheric impression of this nature which associated itself with a terrible shock experienced by the infant which became the subject of this story. The impression could not be outgrown, but it might possibly be broken up by some sudden change in the nervous system effected by a cause as potent as the one which had produced the disordered condition.
This is the best key that I can furnish to a story which must have puzzled some, repelled others, and failed to interest many who did not suspect the true cause of the mysterious antipathy.
BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August, 1891. O. W. H.
A MORTAL ANTIPATHY.
FIRST OPENING OF THE NEW PORTFOLIO.
INTRODUCTION.
“And why the New Portfolio, I would ask?”
Pray, do you remember, when there was an accession to the nursery in which you have a special interest, whether the new-comer was commonly spoken of as a baby? Was it not, on the contrary, invariably, under all conditions, in all companies, by the whole household, spoken of as the baby? And was the small receptacle provided for it commonly spoken of as a cradle; or was it not always called the cradle, as if there were no other in existence?
Now this New Portfolio is the cradle in which I am to rock my new-born thoughts, and from which I am to lift them carefully and show them to callers, namely, to the whole family of readers belonging to my list of intimates, and such other friends as may drop in by accident. And so it shall have the definite article, and not be lost in the mob of its fellows as a portfolio.
There are a few personal and incidental matters of which I wish to say something before reaching the contents of the Portfolio, whatever these may be. I have had other portfolios before this,—two, more especially, and the first thing I beg leave to introduce relates to these.
Do not throw this volume down, or turn to another page, when I tell you that the earliest of them, that of which I now am about to speak, was opened more than fifty years ago. This is a very dangerous confession, for fifty years make everything hopelessly old-fashioned, without giving it the charm of real antiquity. If I could say a hundred years, now, my readers would accept all I had to tell them with a curious interest; but fifty years ago,—there are too many talkative old people who know all about that time, and at best half a century is a half-baked bit of ware. A coin-fancier would say that your fifty-year-old facts have just enough of antiquity to spot them with rust, and not enough to give them—the delicate and durable patina which is time's exquisite enamel.
When the first Portfolio was opened the coin of the realm bore for its legend,—or might have borne if the more devout hero-worshippers could have had their way,—Andreas Jackson, Populi Gratia, Imp. Caesar. Aug. Div., Max., etc., etc. I never happened to see any gold or silver with that legend, but the truth is I was not very familiarly acquainted with the precious metals at that period of my career, and, there might have been a good deal of such coin in circulation without my handling it, or knowing much about it.
Permit me to indulge in a few reminiscences of that far-off time.
In those days the Athenaeum Picture Gallery was a principal centre of attraction to young Boston people and their visitors. Many of us got our first ideas of art, to say nothing of our first lessons in the comparatively innocent flirtations of our city's primitive period, in that agreeable resort of amateurs and artists.
How the pictures on those walls in Pearl Street do keep their places in the mind's gallery! Trumbull's Sortie of Gibraltar, with red enough in it for one of our sunset after-glows; and Neagle's full-length portrait of the blacksmith in his shirt-sleeves; and Copley's long-waistcoated gentlemen and satin-clad ladies,—they looked like gentlemen and ladies, too; and Stuart's florid merchants and high-waisted matrons; and Allston's lovely Italian scenery and dreamy, unimpassioned women, not forgetting Florimel in full flight on her interminable rocking-horse,—you may still see her at the Art Museum; and the rival landscapes of Doughty and Fisher, much talked of and largely praised in those days; and the Murillo,—not from Marshal Soup's collection; and the portrait of Annibale Caracci by himself, which cost the Athenaeum a hundred dollars; and Cole's allegorical pictures, and his immense and dreary canvas, in which the prostrate shepherds and the angel in Joseph's coat of many colors look as if they must have been thrown in for nothing; and West's brawny Lear tearing his clothes to pieces. But why go on with the catalogue, when most of these pictures can be seen either at the Athenaeum building in Beacon Street or at the Art Gallery, and admired or criticised perhaps more justly, certainly not more generously, than in those earlier years when we looked at them through the japanned fish-horns?
If one happened to pass through Atkinson Street on his way to the Athenaeum, he would notice a large, square, painted, brick house, in which lived a leading representative of old-fashioned coleopterous Calvinism, and from which emerged one of the liveliest of literary butterflies. The father was editor of the “Boston Recorder,” a very respectable, but very far from amusing paper, most largely patronized by that class of the community which spoke habitually of the first day of the week as “the Sahbuth.” The son was the editor of several different periodicals in succession, none of them over severe or serious, and of many pleasant books, filled with lively descriptions of society, which he studied on the outside with a quick eye for form and color, and with a certain amount of sentiment, not very deep, but real, though somewhat frothed over by his worldly experiences.
Nathaniel Parker Willis was in full bloom when I opened my first Portfolio. He had made himself known by his religious poetry, published in his father's paper, I think, and signed “Roy.” He had started the “American Magazine,” afterwards merged in the “New York Mirror.” He had then left off writing scripture pieces, and taken to lighter forms of verse. He had just written
“I'm twenty-two, I'm twenty-two,
They idly give me joy,
As if I should be glad to know
That I was less a boy.”
He was young, therefore, and already famous. He came very near being very handsome. He was tall; his hair, of light brown color, waved in luxuriant abundance; his cheek was as rosy as if it had been painted to show behind the footlights; he dressed with artistic elegance. He was something between a remembrance of Count D'Orsay and an anticipation of Oscar Wilde. There used to be in the gallery of the Luxembourg a picture of Hippolytus and Phxdra, in which the beautiful young man, who had kindled a passion in the heart of his wicked step-mother, always reminded me of Willis, in spite of the shortcomings of the living face as compared with the ideal. The painted youth is still blooming on the canvas, but the fresh-cheeked, jaunty young author of the year 1830 has long faded out of human sight. I took the leaves which lie before me at this moment, as I write, from his coffin, as it lay just outside the door of Saint Paul's Church, on a sad, overclouded winter's day, in the year 1867. At that earlier time, Willis was by far the most prominent young American author. Cooper, Irving, Bryant, Dana, Halleck, Drake, had all done their best work. Longfellow was not yet conspicuous. Lowell was a school-boy. Emerson was unheard of. Whittier was beginning to make his way against the writers with better educational advantages whom he was destined to outdo and to outlive. Not one of the great histories, which have done honor to our literature, had appeared. Our school-books depended, so far as American authors were concerned, on extracts from the orations and speeches of Webster and Everett; on Bryant's Thanatopsis, his lines To a Waterfowl, and the Death of the Flowers, Halleck's Marco Bozzaris, Red Jacket, and Burns; on Drake's American Flag, and Percival's Coral Grove, and his Genius Sleeping and Genius Waking,—and not getting very wide awake, either. These could be depended upon. A few other copies of verses might be found, but Dwight's “Columbia, Columbia,” and Pierpont's Airs of Palestine, were already effaced, as many of the favorites of our own day and generation must soon be, by the great wave which the near future will pour over the sands in which they still are legible.
About this time, in the year 1832, came out a small volume entitled “Truth, a Gift for Scribblers,” which made some talk for a while, and is now chiefly valuable as a kind of literary tombstone on which may be read the names of many whose renown has been buried with their bones. The “London Athenaeum” spoke of it as having been described as a “tomahawk sort of satire.” As the author had been a trapper in Missouri, he was familiarly acquainted with that weapon and the warfare of its owners. Born in Boston, in 1804, the son of an army officer, educated at West Point, he came back to his native city about the year 1830. He wrote an article on Bryant's Poems for the “North American Review,” and another on the famous Indian chief, Black Hawk. In this last-mentioned article he tells this story as the great warrior told it himself. It was an incident of a fight with the Osages.
“Standing by my father's side, I saw him kill his antagonist and tear the scalp from his head. Fired with valor and ambition, I rushed furiously upon another, smote him to the earth with my tomahawk, ran my lance through his body, took off his scalp, and returned in triumph to my father. He said nothing, but looked pleased.”
This little red story describes very well Spelling's style of literary warfare. His handling of his most conspicuous victim, Willis, was very much like Black Hawk's way of dealing with the Osage. He tomahawked him in heroics, ran him through in prose, and scalped him in barbarous epigrams. Bryant and Halleck were abundantly praised; hardly any one else escaped.
If the reader wishes to see the bubbles of reputation that were floating, some of them gay with prismatic colors, half a century ago, he will find in the pages of “Truth” a long catalogue of celebrities he never heard of. I recognize only three names, of all which are mentioned in the little book, as belonging to persons still living; but as I have not read the obituaries of all the others, some of them may be still flourishing in spite of Mr. Spelling's exterminating onslaught. Time dealt as hardly with poor Spelling, who was not without talent and instruction, as he had dealt with our authors. I think he found shelter at last under a roof which held numerous inmates, some of whom had seen better and many of whom had known worse days than those which they were passing within its friendly and not exclusive precincts. Such, at least, was the story I heard after he disappeared from general observation.
That was the day of Souvenirs, Tokens, Forget-me-nots, Bijous, and all that class of showy annuals. Short stories, slender poems, steel engravings, on a level with the common fashion-plates of advertising establishments, gilt edges, resplendent binding,—to manifestations of this sort our lighter literature had very largely run for some years. The “Scarlet Letter” was an unhinted possibility. The “Voices of the Night” had not stirred the brooding silence; the Concord seer was still in the lonely desert; most of the contributors to those yearly volumes, which took up such pretentious positions on the centre table, have shrunk into entire oblivion, or, at best, hold their place in literature by a scrap or two in some omnivorous collection.
What dreadful work Spelling made among those slight reputations, floating in swollen tenuity on the surface of the stream, and mirroring each other in reciprocal reflections! Violent, abusive as he was, unjust to any against whom he happened to have a prejudice, his castigation of the small litterateurs of that day was not harmful, but rather of use. His attack on Willis very probably did him good; he needed a little discipline, and though he got it too unsparingly, some cautions came with it which were worth the stripes he had to smart under. One noble writer Spelling treated with rudeness, probably from some accidental pique, or equally insignificant reason. I myself, one of the three survivors before referred to, escaped with a love-pat, as the youngest son of the Muse. Longfellow gets a brief nod of acknowledgment. Bailey, an American writer, “who made long since a happy snatch at fame,” which must have been snatched away from him by envious time, for I cannot identify him; Thatcher, who died early, leaving one poem, The Last Request, not wholly unremembered; Miss Hannah F. Gould, a very bright and agreeable writer of light verse,—all these are commended to the keeping of that venerable public carrier, who finds his scythe and hour-glass such a load that he generally drops the burdens committed to his charge, after making a show of paying every possible attention to them so long as he is kept in sight.
It was a good time to open a portfolio. But my old one had boyhood written on every page. A single passionate outcry when the old warship I had read about in the broadsides that were a part of our kitchen literature, and in the “Naval Monument,” was threatened with demolition; a few verses suggested by the sight of old Major Melville in his cocked hat and breeches, were the best scraps that came out of that first Portfolio, which was soon closed that it should not interfere with the duties of a profession authorized to claim all the time and thought which would have been otherwise expended in filling it.
During a quarter of a century the first Portfolio remained closed for the greater part of the time. Only now and then it would be taken up and opened, and something drawn from it for a special occasion, more particularly for the annual reunions of a certain class of which I was a member.
In the year 1857, towards its close, the “Atlantic Monthly,” which I had the honor of naming, was started by the enterprising firm of Phillips & Sampson, under the editorship of Mr. James Russell Lowell. He thought that I might bring something out of my old Portfolio which would be not unacceptable in the new magazine. I looked at the poor old receptacle, which, partly from use and partly from neglect, had lost its freshness, and seemed hardly presentable to the new company expected to welcome the new-comer in the literary world of Boston, the least provincial of American centres of learning and letters. The gilded covering where the emblems of hope and aspiration had looked so bright had faded; not wholly, perhaps, but how was the gold become dim!—-how was the most fine gold changed! Long devotion to other pursuits had left little time for literature, and the waifs and strays gathered from the old Portfolio had done little more than keep alive the memory that such a source of supply was still in existence. I looked at the old Portfolio, and said to myself, “Too late! too late. This tarnished gold will never brighten, these battered covers will stand no more wear and tear; close them, and leave them to the spider and the book-worm.”
In the mean time the nebula of the first quarter of the century had condensed into the constellation of the middle of the same period. When, a little while after the establishment of the new magazine, the “Saturday Club” gathered about the long table at “Parker's,” such a representation of all that was best in American literature had never been collected within so small a compass. Most of the Americans whom educated foreigners cared to see-leaving out of consideration official dignitaries, whose temporary importance makes them objects of curiosity—were seated at that board. But the club did not yet exist, and the “Atlantic Monthly” was an experiment. There had already been several monthly periodicals, more or less successful and permanent, among which “Putnam's Magazine” was conspicuous, owing its success largely to the contributions of that very accomplished and delightful writer, Mr. George William Curtis. That magazine, after a somewhat prolonged and very honorable existence, had gone where all periodicals go when they die, into the archives of the deaf, dumb, and blind recording angel whose name is Oblivion. It had so well deserved to live that its death was a surprise and a source of regret. Could another monthly take its place and keep it when that, with all its attractions and excellences, had died out, and left a blank in our periodical literature which it would be very hard to fill as well as that had filled it?
This was the experiment which the enterprising publishers ventured upon, and I, who felt myself outside of the charmed circle drawn around the scholars and poets of Cambridge and Concord, having given myself to other studies and duties, wondered somewhat when Mr. Lowell insisted upon my becoming a contributor. And so, yielding to a pressure which I could not understand, and yet found myself unable to resist, I promised to take a part in the new venture, as an occasional writer in the columns of the new magazine.
That was the way in which the second Portfolio found its way to my table, and was there opened in the autumn of the year 1857. I was already at least
'Nel mezzo del cammin di mia, vita,'
when I risked myself, with many misgivings, in little-tried paths of what looked at first like a wilderness, a selva oscura, where, if I did not meet the lion or the wolf, I should be sure to find the critic, the most dangerous of the carnivores, waiting to welcome me after his own fashion.
The second Portfolio is closed and laid away. Perhaps it was hardly worth while to provide and open a new one; but here it lies before me, and I hope I may find something between its covers which will justify me in coming once more before my old friends. But before I open it I want to claim a little further indulgence.
There is a subject of profound interest to almost every writer, I might say to almost every human being. No matter what his culture or ignorance, no matter what his pursuit, no matter what his character, the subject I refer to is one of which he rarely ceases to think, and, if opportunity is offered, to talk. On this he is eloquent, if on nothing else. The slow of speech becomes fluent; the torpid listener becomes electric with vivacity, and alive all over with interest.
The sagacious reader knows well what is coming after this prelude. He is accustomed to the phrases with which the plausible visitor, who has a subscription book in his pocket, prepares his victim for the depressing disclosure of his real errand. He is not unacquainted with the conversational amenities of the cordial and interesting stranger, who, having had the misfortune of leaving his carpet-bag in the cars, or of having his pocket picked at the station, finds himself without the means of reaching that distant home where affluence waits for him with its luxurious welcome, but to whom for the moment the loan of some five and twenty dollars would be a convenience and a favor for which his heart would ache with gratitude during the brief interval between the loan and its repayment.
I wish to say a few words in my own person relating to some passages in my own history, and more especially to some of the recent experiences through which I have been passing.
What can justify one in addressing himself to the general public as if it were his private correspondent? There are at least three sufficient reasons: first, if he has a story to tell that everybody wants to hear,—if he has been shipwrecked, or has been in a battle, or has witnessed any interesting event, and can tell anything new about it; secondly, if he can put in fitting words any common experiences not already well told, so that readers will say, “Why, yes! I have had that sensation, thought, emotion, a hundred times, but I never heard it spoken of before, and I never saw any mention of it in print;” and thirdly, anything one likes, provided he can so tell it as to make it interesting.
I have no story to tell in this Introduction which can of itself claim any general attention. My first pages relate the effect of a certain literary experience upon myself,—a series of partial metempsychoses of which I have been the subject. Next follows a brief tribute to the memory of a very dear and renowned friend from whom I have recently been parted. The rest of the Introduction will be consecrated to the memory of my birthplace.
I have just finished a Memoir, which will appear soon after this page is written, and will have been the subject of criticism long before it is in the reader's hands. The experience of thinking another man's thoughts continuously for a long time; of living one's self into another man's life for a month, or a year, or more, is a very curious one. No matter how much superior to the biographer his subject may be, the man who writes the life feels himself, in a certain sense, on the level of the person whose life he is writing. One cannot fight over the battles of Marengo or Austerlitz with Napoleon without feeling as if he himself had a fractional claim to the victory, so real seems the transfer of his personality into that of the conqueror while he reads. Still more must this identification of “subject” and “object” take place when one is writing of a person whose studies or occupations are not unlike his own.
Here are some of my metempsychoses: Ten years ago I wrote what I called A Memorial Outline of a remarkable student of nature. He was a born observer, and such are far from common. He was also a man of great enthusiasm and unwearying industry. His quick eye detected what others passed by without notice: the Indian relic, where another would see only pebbles and fragments; the rare mollusk, or reptile, which his companion would poke with his cane, never suspecting that there was a prize at the end of it. Getting his single facts together with marvellous sagacity and long-breathed patience, he arranged them, classified them, described them, studied them in their relations, and before those around him were aware of it the collector was an accomplished naturalist. When—he died his collections remained, and they still remain, as his record in the hieratic language of science. In writing this memoir the spirit of his quiet pursuits, the even temper they bred in him, gained possession of my own mind, so that I seemed to look at nature through his gold-bowed spectacles, and to move about his beautifully ordered museum as if I had myself prepared and arranged its specimens. I felt wise with his wisdom, fair-minded with his calm impartiality; it seemed as if for the time his placid, observant, inquiring, keen-sighted nature “slid into my soul,” and if I had looked at myself in the glass I should almost have expected to see the image of the Hersey professor whose life and character I was sketching.
A few years hater I lived over the life of another friend in writing a Memoir of which he was the subject. I saw him, the beautiful, bright-eyed boy, with dark, waving hair; the youthful scholar, first at Harvard, then at Gottingen and Berlin, the friend and companion of Bismarck; the young author, making a dash for renown as a novelist, and showing the elements which made his failures the promise of success in a larger field of literary labor; the delving historian, burying his fresh young manhood in the dusty alcoves of silent libraries, to come forth in the face of Europe and America as one of the leading historians of the time; the diplomatist, accomplished, of captivating presence and manners, an ardent American, and in the time of trial an impassioned and eloquent advocate of the cause of freedom; reaching at last the summit of his ambition as minister at the Court of Saint James. All this I seemed to share with him as I tracked his career from his birthplace in Dorchester, and the house in Walnut Street where he passed his boyhood, to the palaces of Vienna and London. And then the cruel blow which struck him from the place he adorned; the great sorrow that darkened his later years; the invasion of illness, a threat that warned of danger, and after a period of invalidism, during a part of which I shared his most intimate daily life, the sudden, hardly unwelcome, final summons. Did not my own consciousness migrate, or seem, at least, to transfer itself into this brilliant life history, as I traced its glowing record? I, too, seemed to feel the delight of carrying with me, as if they were my own, the charms of a presence which made its own welcome everywhere. I shared his heroic toils, I partook of his literary and social triumphs, I was honored by the marks of distinction which gathered about him, I was wronged by the indignity from which he suffered, mourned with him in his sorrow, and thus, after I had been living for months with his memory, I felt as if I should carry a part of his being with me so long as my self-consciousness might remain imprisoned in the ponderable elements.
The years passed away, and the influences derived from the companionships I have spoken of had blended intimately with my own current of being. Then there came to me a new experience in my relations with an eminent member of the medical profession, whom I met habitually for a long period, and to whose memory I consecrated a few pages as a prelude to a work of his own, written under very peculiar circumstances. He was the subject of a slow, torturing, malignant, and almost necessarily fatal disease. Knowing well that the mind would feed upon itself if it were not supplied with food from without, he determined to write a treatise on a subject which had greatly interested him, and which would oblige him to bestow much of his time and thought upon it, if indeed he could hold out to finish the work. During the period while he was engaged in writing it, his wife, who had seemed in perfect health, died suddenly of pneumonia. Physical suffering, mental distress, the prospect of death at a near, if uncertain, time always before him, it was hard to conceive a more terrible strain than that which he had to endure. When, in the hour of his greatest need, his faithful companion, the wife of many years of happy union, whose hand had smoothed his pillow, whose voice had consoled and cheered him, was torn from him after a few days of illness, I felt that my friend's trial was such that the cry of the man of many afflictions and temptations might well have escaped from his lips: “I was at ease, but he hath broken me asunder; he hath also taken me by my neck and shaken me to pieces, and set me up for his mark. His archers compass me round about, he cleaveth my reins asunder, and doth not spare; he poureth out my gall upon the ground.”
I had dreaded meeting him for the first time after this crushing blow. What a lesson he gave me of patience under sufferings which the fearful description of the Eastern poet does not picture too vividly! We have been taught to admire the calm philosophy of Haller, watching his faltering pulse as he lay dying; we have heard the words of pious resignation said to have been uttered with his last breath by Addison: but here was a trial, not of hours, or days, or weeks, but of months, even years, of cruel pain, and in the midst of its thick darkness the light of love, which had burned steadily at his bedside, was suddenly extinguished.
There were times in which the thought would force itself upon my consciousness, How long is the universe to look upon this dreadful experiment of a malarious planet, with its unmeasurable freight of suffering, its poisonous atmosphere, so sweet to breathe, so sure to kill in a few scores of years at farthest, and its heart-breaking woes which make even that brief space of time an eternity? There can be but one answer that will meet this terrible question, which must arise in every thinking nature that would fain “justify the ways of God to men.” So must it be until that
“one far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves”
has become a reality, and the anthem in which there is no discordant note shall be joined by a voice from every life made “perfect through sufferings.”
Such was the lesson into which I lived in those sad yet placid years of companionship with my suffering and sorrowing friend, in retracing which I seemed to find another existence mingled with my own.
And now for many months I have been living in daily relations of intimacy with one who seems nearer to me since he has left us than while he was here in living form and feature. I did not know how difficult a task I had undertaken in venturing upon a memoir of a man whom all, or almost all, agree upon as one of the great lights of the New World, and whom very many regard as an unpredicted Messiah. Never before was I so forcibly reminded of Carlyle's description of the work of a newspaper editor,—that threshing of straw already thrice beaten by the flails of other laborers in the same field. What could be said that had not been said of “transcendentalism” and of him who was regarded as its prophet; of the poet whom some admired without understanding, a few understood, or thought they did, without admiring, and many both understood and admired,—among these there being not a small number who went far beyond admiration, and lost themselves in devout worship? While one exalted him as “the greatest man that ever lived,” another, a friend, famous in the world of letters, wrote expressly to caution me against the danger of overrating a writer whom he is content to recognize as an American Montaigne, and nothing more.
After finishing this Memoir, which has but just left my hands, I would gladly have let my brain rest for a while. The wide range of thought which belonged to the subject of the Memoir, the occasional mysticism and the frequent tendency toward it, the sweep of imagination and the sparkle of wit which kept his reader's mind on the stretch, the union of prevailing good sense with exceptional extravagances, the modest audacity of a nature that showed itself in its naked truthfulness and was not ashamed, the feeling that I was in the company of a sibylline intelligence which was discounting the promises of the remote future long before they were due,—all this made the task a grave one. But when I found myself amidst the vortices of uncounted, various, bewildering judgments, Catholic and Protestant, orthodox and liberal, scholarly from under the tree of knowledge and instinctive from over the potato-hill; the passionate enthusiasm of young adorers and the cool, if not cynical, estimate of hardened critics, all intersecting each other as they whirled, each around its own centre, I felt that it was indeed very difficult to keep the faculties clear and the judgment unbiassed.
It is a great privilege to have lived so long in the society of such a man. “He nothing common” said, “or mean.” He was always the same pure and high-souled companion. After being with him virtue seemed as natural to man as its opposite did according to the old theologies. But how to let one's self down from the high level of such a character to one's own poor standard? I trust that the influence of this long intellectual and spiritual companionship never absolutely leaves one who has lived in it. It may come to him in the form of self-reproach that he falls so far short of the superior being who has been so long the object of his contemplation. But it also carries him at times into the other's personality, so that he finds himself thinking thoughts that are not his own, using phrases which he has unconsciously borrowed, writing, it may be, as nearly like his long-studied original as Julio Romano's painting was like Raphael's; and all this with the unquestioning conviction that he is talking from his own consciousness in his own natural way. So far as tones and expressions and habits which belonged to the idiosyncrasy of the original are borrowed by the student of his life, it is a misfortune for the borrower. But to share the inmost consciousness of a noble thinker, to scan one's self in the white light of a pure and radiant soul,—this is indeed the highest form of teaching and discipline.
I have written these few memoirs, and I am grateful for all that they have taught me. But let me write no more. There are but two biographers who can tell the story of a man's or a woman's life. One is the person himself or herself; the other is the Recording Angel. The autobiographer cannot be trusted to tell the whole truth, though he may tell nothing but the truth, and the Recording Angel never lets his book go out of his own hands. As for myself, I would say to my friends, in the Oriental phrase, “Live forever!” Yes, live forever, and I, at least, shall not have to wrong your memories by my imperfect record and unsatisfying commentary.
In connection with these biographies, or memoirs, more properly, in which I have written of my departed friends, I hope my readers will indulge me in another personal reminiscence. I have just lost my dear and honored contemporary of the last century. A hundred years ago this day, December 13, 1784, died the admirable and ever to be remembered Dr. Samuel Johnson. The year 1709 was made ponderous and illustrious in English biography by his birth. My own humble advent to the world of protoplasm was in the year 1809 of the present century. Summer was just ending when those four letters, “son b.” were written under the date of my birth, August 29th. Autumn had just begun when my great pre-contemporary entered this un-Christian universe and was made a member of the Christian church on the same day, for he was born and baptized on the 18th of September.
Thus there was established a close bond of relationship between the great English scholar and writer and myself. Year by year, and almost month by month, my life has kept pace in this century with his life in the last century. I had only to open my Boswell at any time, and I knew just what Johnson at my age, twenty or fifty or seventy, was thinking and doing; what were his feelings about life; what changes the years had wrought in his body, his mind, his feelings, his companionships, his reputation. It was for me a kind of unison between two instruments, both playing that old familiar air, “Life,”—one a bassoon, if you will, and the other an oaten pipe, if you care to find an image for it, but still keeping pace with each other until the players both grew old and gray. At last the thinner thread of sound is heard by itself, and its deep accompaniment rolls out its thunder no more.
I feel lonely now that my great companion and friend of so many years has left me. I felt more intimately acquainted with him than I do with many of my living friends. I can hardly remember when I did not know him. I can see him in his bushy wig, exactly like that of the Reverend Dr. Samuel Cooper (who died in December, 1783) as Copley painted him,—he hangs there on my wall, over the revolving bookcase. His ample coat, too, I see, with its broad flaps and many buttons and generous cuffs, and beneath it the long, still more copiously buttoned waistcoat, arching in front of the fine crescentic, almost semi-lunar Falstaffian prominence, involving no less than a dozen of the above-mentioned buttons, and the strong legs with their sturdy calves, fitting columns of support to the massive body and solid, capacious brain enthroned over it. I can hear him with his heavy tread as he comes in to the Club, and a gap is widened to make room for his portly figure. “A fine day,” says Sir Joshua. “Sir,” he answers, “it seems propitious, but the atmosphere is humid and the skies are nebulous,” at which the great painter smiles, shifts his trumpet, and takes a pinch of snuff.
Dear old massive, deep-voiced dogmatist and hypochondriac of the eighteenth century, how one would like to sit at some ghastly Club, between you and the bony, “mighty-mouthed,” harsh-toned termagant and dyspeptic of the nineteenth! The growl of the English mastiff and the snarl of the Scotch terrier would make a duet which would enliven the shores of Lethe. I wish I could find our “spiritualist's” paper in the Portfolio, in which the two are brought together, but I hardly know what I shall find when it is opened.
Yes, my life is a little less precious to me since I have lost that dear old friend; and when the funeral train moves to Westminster Abbey next Saturday, for I feel as if this were 1784, and not 1884,—I seem to find myself following the hearse, one of the silent mourners.
Among the events which have rendered the past year memorable to me has been the demolition of that venerable and interesting old dwelling-house, precious for its intimate association with the earliest stages of the war of the Revolution, and sacred to me as my birthplace and the home of my boyhood.
The “Old Gambrel-roofed House” exists no longer. I remember saying something, in one of a series of papers published long ago, about the experience of dying out of a house,—of leaving it forever, as the soul dies out of the body. We may die out of many houses, but the house itself can die but once; and so real is the life of a house to one who has dwelt in it, more especially the life of the house which held him in dreamy infancy, in restless boyhood, in passionate youth,—so real, I say, is its life, that it seems as if something like a soul of it must outlast its perishing frame.
The slaughter of the Old Gambrel-roofed House was, I am ready to admit, a case of justifiable domicide. Not the less was it to be deplored by all who love the memories of the past. With its destruction are obliterated some of the footprints of the heroes and martyrs who took the first steps in the long and bloody march which led us through the wilderness to the promised land of independent nationality. Personally, I have a right to mourn for it as a part of my life gone from me. My private grief for its loss would be a matter for my solitary digestion, were it not that the experience through which I have just passed is one so familiar to my fellow-countrymen that, in telling my own reflections and feelings, I am repeating those of great numbers of men and women who have had the misfortune to outlive their birthplace.
It is a great blessing to be born surrounded by a natural horizon. The Old Gambrel-roofed House could not boast an unbroken ring of natural objects encircling it. Northerly it looked upon its own outbuildings and some unpretending two-story houses which had been its neighbors for a century and more. To the south of it the square brick dormitories and the bellfried hall of the university helped to shut out the distant view. But the west windows gave a broad outlook across the common, beyond which the historical “Washington elm” and two companions in line with it, spread their leaves in summer and their networks in winter. And far away rose the hills that bounded the view, with the glimmer here and there of the white walls or the illuminated casements of some embowered, half-hidden villa. Eastwardly also, the prospect was, in my earlier remembrance, widely open, and I have frequently seen the sunlit sails gliding along as if through the level fields, for no water was visible. So there were broad expanses on two sides at least, for my imagination to wander over.
I cannot help thinking that we carry our childhood's horizon with us all our days. Among these western wooded hills my day-dreams built their fairy palaces, and even now, as I look at them from my library window, across the estuary of the Charles, I find myself in the familiar home of my early visions. The “clouds of glory” which we trail with us in after life need not be traced to a pre-natal state. There is enough to account for them in that unconsciously remembered period of existence before we have learned the hard limitations of real life. Those earliest months in which we lived in sensations without words, and ideas not fettered in sentences, have all the freshness of proofs of an engraving “before the letter.” I am very thankful that the first part of my life was not passed shut in between high walls and treading the unimpressible and unsympathetic pavement.
Our university town was very much like the real country, in those days of which I am thinking. There were plenty of huckleberries and blueberries within half a mile of the house. Blackberries ripened in the fields, acorns and shagbarks dropped from the trees, squirrels ran among the branches, and not rarely the hen-hawk might be seen circling over the barnyard. Still another rural element was not wanting, in the form of that far-diffused, infragrant effluvium, which, diluted by a good half mile of pure atmosphere, is no longer odious, nay is positively agreeable, to many who have long known it, though its source and centre has an unenviable reputation. I need not name the animal whose Parthian warfare terrifies and puts to flight the mightiest hunter that ever roused the tiger from his jungle or faced the lion of the desert. Strange as it may seem, an aerial hint of his personality in the far distance always awakens in my mind pleasant remembrances and tender reflections. A whole neighborhood rises up before me: the barn, with its haymow, where the hens laid their eggs to hatch, and we boys hid our apples to ripen, both occasionally illustrating the sic vos non vobis; the shed, where the annual Tragedy of the Pig was acted with a realism that made Salvini's Othello seem but a pale counterfeit; the rickety old outhouse, with the “corn-chamber” which the mice knew so well; the paved yard, with its open gutter,—these and how much else come up at the hint of my far-off friend, who is my very near enemy. Nothing is more familiar than the power of smell in reviving old memories. There was that quite different fragrance of the wood-house, the smell of fresh sawdust. It comes back to me now, and with it the hiss of the saw; the tumble of the divorced logs which God put together and man has just put asunder; the coming down of the axe and the hah! that helped it,—the straight-grained stick opening at the first appeal of the implement as if it were a pleasure, and the stick with a knot in the middle of it that mocked the blows and the hahs! until the beetle and wedge made it listen to reason,—there are just such straight-grained and just such knotty men and women. All this passes through my mind while Biddy, whose parlor-name is Angela, contents herself with exclaiming “egh!*******!”
How different distances were in those young days of which I am thinking! From the old house to the old yellow meeting-house, where the head of the family preached and the limbs of the family listened, was not much more than two or three times the width of Commonwealth Avenue. But of a hot summer's afternoon, after having already heard one sermon, which could not in the nature of things have the charm of novelty of presentation to the members of the home circle, and the theology of which was not too clear to tender apprehensions; with three hymns more or less lugubrious, rendered by a village-choir, got into voice by many preliminary snuffles and other expiratory efforts, and accompanied by the snort of a huge bassviol which wallowed through the tune like a hippopotamus, with other exercises of the customary character,—after all this in the forenoon, the afternoon walk to the meeting-house in the hot sun counted for as much, in my childish dead-reckoning, as from old Israel Porter's in Cambridge to the Exchange Coffeehouse in Boston did in after years. It takes a good while to measure the radius of the circle that is about us, for the moon seems at first as near as the watchface. Who knows but that, after a certain number of ages, the planet we live on may seem to us no bigger than our neighbor Venus appeared when she passed before the sun a few months ago, looking as if we could take her between our thumb and finger, like a bullet or a marble? And time, too; how long was it from the serious sunrise to the joyous “sun-down” of an old-fashioned, puritanical, judaical first day of the week, which a pious fraud christened “the Sabbath”? Was it a fortnight, as we now reckon duration, or only a week? Curious entities, or non-entities, space and tithe? When you see a metaphysician trying to wash his hands of them and get rid of these accidents, so as to lay his dry, clean palm on the absolute, does it not remind you of the hopeless task of changing the color of the blackamoor by a similar proceeding? For space is the fluid in which he is washing, and time is the soap which he is using up in the process, and he cannot get free from them until he can wash himself in a mental vacuum.
In my reference to the old house in a former paper, published years ago, I said,
“By and by the stony foot of the great University will plant itself on this whole territory, and the private recollections which clung so tenaciously to the place and its habitations will have died with those who cherished them.”
What strides the great University has taken since those words were written! During all my early years our old Harvard Alma Mater sat still and lifeless as the colossi in the Egyptian desert. Then all at once, like the statue in Don Giovanni, she moved from her pedestal. The fall of that “stony foot” has effected a miracle like the harp that Orpheus played, like the teeth which Cadmus sowed. The plain where the moose and the bear were wandering while Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, where a few plain dormitories and other needed buildings were scattered about in my school-boy days, groans under the weight of the massive edifices which have sprung up all around them, crowned by the tower of that noble structure which stands in full view before me as I lift my eyes from the portfolio on the back of which I am now writing.
For I must be permitted to remind you that I have not yet opened it. I have told you that I have just finished a long memoir, and that it has cost me no little labor to overcome some of its difficulties,—if I have overcome them, which others must decide. And I feel exactly as honest Dobbin feels when his harness is slipped off after a long journey with a good deal of up-hill work. He wants to rest a little, then to feed a little; then, if you will turn him loose in the pasture, he wants to roll. I have left my starry and ethereal companionship,—not for a long time, I hope, for it has lifted me above my common self, but for a while. And now I want, so to speak, to roll in the grass and among the dandelions with the other pachyderms. So I have kept to the outside of the portfolio as yet, and am disporting myself in reminiscences, and fancies, and vagaries, and parentheses.
How well I understand the feeling which led the Pisans to load their vessels with earth from the Holy Land, and fill the area of the Campo Santo with that sacred soil! The old house stood upon about as perverse a little patch of the planet as ever harbored a half-starved earth-worm. It was as sandy as Sahara and as thirsty as Tantalus. The rustic aid-de-camps of the household used to aver that all fertilizing matters “leached” through it. I tried to disprove their assertion by gorging it with the best of terrestrial nourishment, until I became convinced that I was feeding the tea-plants of China, and then I gave over the attempt. And yet I did love, and do love, that arid patch of ground. I wonder if a single flower could not be made to grow in a pot of earth from that Campo Santo of my childhood! One noble product of nature did not refuse to flourish there,—the tall, stately, beautiful, soft-haired, many-jointed, generous maize or Indian corn, which thrives on sand and defies the blaze of our shrivelling summer. What child but loves to wander in its forest-like depths, amidst the rustling leaves and with the lofty tassels tossing their heads high above him! There are two aspects of the cornfield which always impress my imagination: the first when it has reached its full growth, and its ordered ranks look like an army on the march with its plumed and bannered battalions; the second when, after the battle of the harvest, the girdled stacks stand on the field of slaughter like so many ragged Niobes,—say rather like the crazy widows and daughters of the dead soldiery.
Once more let us come back to the old house. It was far along in its second century when the edict went forth that it must stand no longer.
The natural death of a house is very much like that of one of its human tenants. The roof is the first part to show the distinct signs of age. Slates and tiles loosen and at last slide off, and leave bald the boards that supported them; shingles darken and decay, and soon the garret or the attic lets in the rain and the snow; by and by the beams sag, the floors warp, the walls crack, the paper peels away, the ceilings scale off and fall, the windows are crusted with clinging dust, the doors drop from their rusted hinges, the winds come in without knocking and howl their cruel death-songs through the empty rooms and passages, and at last there comes a crash, a great cloud of dust rises, and the home that had been the shelter of generation after generation finds its grave in its own cellar. Only the chimney remains as its monument. Slowly, little by little, the patient solvents that find nothing too hard for their chemistry pick out the mortar from between the bricks; at last a mighty wind roars around it and rushes against it, and the monumental relic crashes down among the wrecks it has long survived. So dies a human habitation left to natural decay, all that was seen above the surface of the soil sinking gradually below it,
Till naught remains the saddening tale to tell
Save home's last wrecks, the cellar and the well.
But if this sight is saddening, what is it to see a human dwelling fall by the hand of violence! The ripping off of the shelter that has kept out a thousand storms, the tearing off of the once ornamental woodwork, the wrench of the inexorable crowbar, the murderous blows of the axe, the progressive ruin, which ends by rending all the joints asunder and flinging the tenoned and mortised timbers into heaps that will be sawed and split to warm some new habitation as firewood,—what a brutal act of destruction it seems!
Why should I go over the old house again, having already described it more than ten years ago? Alas! how many remember anything they read but once, and so long ago as that? How many would find it out if one should say over in the same words that which he said in the last decade? But there is really no need of telling the story a second time, for it can be found by those who are curious enough to look it up in a volume of which it occupies the opening chapter.
In order, however, to save any inquisitive reader that trouble, let me remind him that the old house was General Ward's headquarters at the breaking out of the Revolution; that the plan for fortifying Bunker's Hill was laid, as commonly believed, in the southeast lower room, the floor of which was covered with dents, made, it was alleged, by the butts of the soldiers' muskets. In that house, too, General Warren probably passed the night before the Bunker Hill battle, and over its threshold must the stately figure of Washington have often cast its shadow.
But the house in which one drew his first breath, and where he one day came into the consciousness that he was a personality, an ego, a little universe with a sky over him all his own, with a persistent identity, with the terrible responsibility of a separate, independent, inalienable existence,—that house does not ask for any historical associations to make it the centre of the earth for him.
If there is any person in the world to be envied, it is the one who is born to an ancient estate, with a long line of family traditions and the means in his hands of shaping his mansion and his domain to his own taste, without losing sight of all the characteristic features which surrounded his earliest years. The American is, for the most part, a nomad, who pulls down his house as the Tartar pulls up his tent-poles. If I had an ideal life to plan for him it would be something like this:
His grandfather should be a wise, scholarly, large-brained, large-hearted country minister, from whom he should inherit the temperament that predisposes to cheerfulness and enjoyment, with the finer instincts which direct life to noble aims and make it rich with the gratification of pure and elevated tastes and the carrying out of plans for the good of his neighbors and his fellow-creatures. He should, if possible, have been born, at any rate have passed some of his early years, or a large part of them, under the roof of the good old minister. His father should be, we will say, a business man in one of our great cities,—a generous manipulator of millions, some of which have adhered to his private fortunes, in spite of his liberal use of his means. His heir, our ideally placed American, shall take possession of the old house, the home of his earliest memories, and preserve it sacredly, not exactly like the Santa Casa, but, as nearly as may be, just as he remembers it. He can add as many acres as he will to the narrow house-lot. He can build a grand mansion for himself, if he chooses, in the not distant neighborhood. But the old house, and all immediately round it, shall be as he recollects it when he had to stretch his little arm up to reach the door-handles. Then, having well provided for his own household, himself included, let him become the providence of the village or the town where he finds himself during at least a portion of every year. Its schools, its library, its poor,—and perhaps the new clergyman who has succeeded his grandfather's successor may be one of them,—all its interests, he shall make his own. And from this centre his beneficence shall radiate so far that all who hear of his wealth shall also hear of him as a friend to his race.
Is not this a pleasing programme? Wealth is a steep hill, which the father climbs slowly and the son often tumbles down precipitately; but there is a table-land on a level with it, which may be found by those who do not lose their head in looking down from its sharply cloven summit.—-Our dangerously rich men can make themselves hated, held as enemies of the race, or beloved and recognized as its benefactors. The clouds of discontent are threatening, but if the gold-pointed lightning-rods are rightly distributed the destructive element may be drawn off silently and harmlessly. For it cannot be repeated too often that the safety of great wealth with us lies in obedience to the new version of the Old World axiom, RICHESS oblige.
THE NEW PORTFOLIO: FIRST OPENING.
A MORTAL ANTIPATHY.
I. GETTING READY.
It is impossible to begin a story which must of necessity tax the powers of belief of readers unacquainted with the class of facts to which its central point of interest belongs without some words in the nature of preparation. Readers of Charles Lamb remember that Sarah Battle insisted on a clean-swept hearth before sitting down to her favorite game of whist.
The narrator wishes to sweep the hearth, as it were, in these opening pages, before sitting down to tell his story. He does not intend to frighten the reader away by prolix explanation, but he does mean to warn him against hasty judgments when facts are related which are not within the range of every-day experience. Did he ever see the Siamese twins, or any pair like them? Probably not, yet he feels sure that Chang and Eng really existed; and if he has taken the trouble to inquire, he has satisfied himself that similar cases have been recorded by credible witnesses, though at long intervals and in countries far apart from each other.
This is the first sweep of the brush, to clear the hearth of the skepticism and incredulity which must be got out of the way before we can begin to tell and to listen in peace with ourselves and each other.
One more stroke of the brush is needed before the stage will be ready for the chief characters and the leading circumstances to which the reader's attention is invited. If the principal personages made their entrance at once, the reader would have to create for himself the whole scenery of their surrounding conditions. In point of fact, no matter how a story is begun, many of its readers have already shaped its chief actors out of any hint the author may have dropped, and provided from their own resources a locality and a set of outward conditions to environ these imagined personalities. These are all to be brushed away, and the actual surroundings of the subject of the narrative represented as they were, at the risk of detaining the reader a little while from the events most likely to interest him. The choicest egg that ever was laid was not so big as the nest that held it. If a story were so interesting that a maiden would rather hear it than listen to the praise of her own beauty, or a poet would rather read it than recite his own verses, still it would have to be wrapped in some tissue of circumstance, or it would lose half its effectiveness.
It may not be easy to find the exact locality referred to in this narrative by looking into the first gazetteer that is at hand. Recent experiences have shown that it is unsafe to be too exact in designating places and the people who live in them. There are, it may be added, so many advertisements disguised under the form of stories and other literary productions that one naturally desires to avoid the suspicion of being employed by the enterprising proprietors of this or that celebrated resort to use his gifts for their especial benefit. There are no doubt many persons who remember the old sign and the old tavern and its four chief personages presently to be mentioned. It is to be hoped that they will not furnish the public with a key to this narrative, and perhaps bring trouble to the writer of it, as has happened to other authors. If the real names are a little altered, it need not interfere with the important facts relating to those who bear them. It might not be safe to tell a damaging story about John or James Smythe; but if the slight change is made of spelling the name Smith, the Smythes would never think of bringing an action, as if the allusion related to any of them. The same gulf of family distinction separates the Thompsons with a p from the Thomsons without that letter.
There are few pleasanter places in the Northern States for a summer residence than that known from the first period of its settlement by the name of Arrowhead Village. The Indians had found it out, as the relics they left behind them abundantly testified. The commonest of these were those chipped stones which are the medals of barbarism, and from which the place took its name,—the heads of arrows, of various sizes, material, and patterns: some small enough for killing fish and little birds, some large enough for such game as the moose and the bear, to say nothing of the hostile Indian and the white settler; some of flint, now and then one of white quartz, and others of variously colored jasper. The Indians must have lived here for many generations, and it must have been a kind of factory village of the stone age,—which lasted up to near the present time, if we may judge from the fact that many of these relics are met with close to the surface of the ground.
No wonder they found this a pleasant residence, for it is to-day one of the most attractive of all summer resorts; so inviting, indeed, that those who know it do not like to say too much about it, lest the swarms of tourists should make it unendurable to those who love it for itself, and not as a centre of fashionable display and extramural cockneyism.
There is the lake, in the first place,—Cedar Lake,—about five miles long, and from half a mile to a mile and a half wide, stretching from north to south. Near the northern extremity are the buildings of Stoughton University, a flourishing young college with an ambitious name, but well equipped and promising, the grounds of which reach the water. At the southern end of the lake are the edifices of the Corinna Institute, a favorite school for young ladies, where large numbers of the daughters of America are fitted, so far as education can do it, for all stations in life, from camping out with a husband at the mines in Nevada to acting the part of chief lady of the land in the White House at Washington.
Midway between the two extremities, on the eastern shore of the lake, is a valley between two hills, which come down to the very edge of the lake, leaving only room enough for a road between their base and the water. This valley, half a mile in width, has been long settled, and here for a century or more has stood the old Anchor Tavern. A famous place it was so long as its sign swung at the side of the road: famous for its landlord, portly, paternal, whose welcome to a guest that looked worthy of the attention was like that of a parent to a returning prodigal, and whose parting words were almost as good as a marriage benediction; famous for its landlady, ample in person, motherly, seeing to the whole household with her own eyes, mistress of all culinary secrets that Northern kitchens are most proud of; famous also for its ancient servant, as city people would call her,—help, as she was called in the tavern and would have called herself,—the unchanging, seemingly immortal Miranda, who cared for the guests as if she were their nursing mother, and pressed the specially favorite delicacies on their attention as a connoisseur calls the wandering eyes of an amateur to the beauties of a picture. Who that has ever been at the old Anchor Tavern forgets Miranda's
“A little of this fricassee?-it is ver-y nice;”
or
“Some of these cakes? You will find them ver-y good.”
Nor would it be just to memory to forget that other notable and noted member of the household,—the unsleeping, unresting, omnipresent Pushee, ready for everybody and everything, everywhere within the limits of the establishment at all hours of the day and night. He fed, nobody could say accurately when or where. There were rumors of a “bunk,” in which he lay down with his clothes on, but he seemed to be always wide awake, and at the service of as many guest, at once as if there had been half a dozen of him.
So much for old reminiscences.
The landlord of the Anchor Tavern had taken down his sign. He had had the house thoroughly renovated and furnished it anew, and kept it open in summer for a few boarders. It happened more than once that the summer boarders were so much pleased with the place that they stayed on through the autumn, and some of them through the winter. The attractions of the village were really remarkable. Boating in summer, and skating in winter; ice-boats, too, which the wild ducks could hardly keep up with; fishing, for which the lake was renowned; varied and beautiful walks through the valley and up the hillsides; houses sheltered from the north and northeasterly winds, and refreshed in the hot summer days by the breeze which came over the water,—all this made the frame for a pleasing picture of rest and happiness. But there was a great deal more than this. There was a fine library in the little village, presented and richly endowed by a wealthy native of the place. There was a small permanent population of a superior character to that of an everyday country town; there was a pretty little Episcopal church, with a good-hearted rector, broad enough for the Bishop of the diocese to be a little afraid of, and hospitable to all outsiders, of whom, in the summer season, there were always some who wanted a place of worship to keep their religion from dying out during the heathen months, while the shepherds of the flocks to which they belonged were away from their empty folds.
What most helped to keep the place alive all through the year was the frequent coming together of the members of a certain literary association. Some time before the tavern took down its sign the landlord had built a hall, where many a ball had been held, to which the young folks of all the country round had resorted. It was still sometimes used for similar occasions, but it was especially notable as being the place of meeting of the famous PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.
This association, the name of which might be invidiously interpreted as signifying that its members knew everything, had no such pretensions, but, as its Constitution said very plainly and modestly, held itself open to accept knowledge on any and all subjects from such as had knowledge to impart. Its President was the rector of the little chapel, a man who, in spite of the Thirty-Nine Articles, could stand fire from the widest-mouthed heretical blunderbuss without flinching or losing his temper. The hall of the old Anchor Tavern was a convenient place of meeting for the students and instructors of the University and the Institute. Sometimes in boat-loads, sometimes in carriage-loads, sometimes in processions of skaters, they came to the meetings in Pansophian Hall, as it was now commonly called.
These meetings had grown to be occasions of great interest. It was customary to have papers written by members of the Society, for the most part, but now and then by friends of the members, sometimes by the students of the College or the Institute, and in rarer instances by anonymous personages, whose papers, having been looked over and discussed by the Committee appointed for that purpose, were thought worth listening to. The variety of topics considered was very great. The young ladies of the village and the Institute had their favorite subjects, the young gentlemen a different set of topics, and the occasional outside contributors their own; so that one who happened to be admitted to a meeting never knew whether he was going to hear an account of recent arctic discoveries, or an essay on the freedom of the will, or a psychological experience, or a story, or even a poem.
Of late there had been a tendency to discuss the questions relating to the true status and the legitimate social functions of woman. The most conflicting views were held on the subject. Many of the young ladies and some of the University students were strong in defence of all the “woman's rights” doctrines. Some of these young people were extreme in their views. They had read about Semiramis and Boadicea and Queen Elizabeth, until they were ready, if they could get the chance, to vote for a woman as President of the United States or as General of the United States Army. They were even disposed to assert the physical equality of woman to man, on the strength of the rather questionable history of the Amazons, and especially of the story, believed to be authentic, of the female body-guard of the King of Dahomey,—females frightful enough to need no other weapon than their looks to scare off an army of Cossacks.
Miss Lurida Vincent, gold medallist of her year at the Corinna Institute, was the leader of these advocates of virile womanhood. It was rather singular that she should have elected to be the apostle of this extreme doctrine, for she was herself far better equipped with brain than muscles. In fact, she was a large-headed, large-eyed, long-eyelashed, slender-necked, slightly developed young woman; looking almost like a child at an age when many of the girls had reached their full stature and proportions. In her studies she was so far in advance of her different classes that there was always a wide gap between her and the second scholar. So fatal to all rivalry had she proved herself that she passed under the school name of The Terror. She learned so easily that she undervalued her own extraordinary gifts, and felt the deepest admiration for those of her friends endowed with faculties of an entirely different and almost opposite nature. After sitting at her desk until her head was hot and her feet were like ice, she would go and look at the blooming young girls exercising in the gymnasium of the school, and feel as if she would give all her knowledge, all her mathematics and strange tongues and history, all those accomplishments that made her the encyclopaedia of every class she belonged to, if she could go through the series of difficult and graceful exercises in which she saw her schoolmates delighting.
One among them, especially, was the object of her admiration, as she was of all who knew her exceptional powers in the line for which nature had specially organized her. All the physical perfections which Miss Lurida had missed had been united in Miss Euthymia Tower, whose school name was The Wonder. Though of full womanly stature, there were several taller girls of her age. While all her contours and all her movements betrayed a fine muscular development, there was no lack of proportion, and her finely shaped hands and feet showed that her organization was one of those carefully finished masterpieces of nature which sculptors are always in search of, and find it hard to detect among the imperfect products of the living laboratory.
This girl of eighteen was more famous than she cared to be for her performances in the gymnasium. She commonly contented herself with the same exercises that her companions were accustomed to. Only her dumb-bells, with which she exercised easily and gracefully, were too heavy for most of the girls to do more with than lift them from the floor. She was fond of daring feats on the trapeze, and had to be checked in her indulgence in them. The Professor of gymnastics at the University came over to the Institute now and then, and it was a source of great excitement to watch some of the athletic exercises in which the young lady showed her remarkable muscular strength and skill in managing herself in the accomplishment of feats which looked impossible at first sight. How often The Terror had thought to herself that she would gladly give up all her knowledge of Greek and the differential and integral calculus if she could only perform the least of those feats which were mere play to The Wonder! Miss Euthymia was not behind the rest in her attainments in classical or mathematical knowledge, and she was one of the very best students in the out-door branches,—botany, mineralogy, sketching from nature,—to be found among the scholars of the Institute.
There was an eight-oared boat rowed by a crew of the young ladies, of which Miss Euthymia was the captain and pulled the bow oar. Poor little Lurida could not pull an oar, but on great occasions, when there were many boats out, she was wanted as coxswain, being a mere feather-weight, and quick-witted enough to serve well in the important office where brains are more needed than muscle.
There was also an eight-oared boat belonging to the University, and rowed by a picked crew of stalwart young fellows. The bow oar and captain of the University crew was a powerful young man, who, like the captain of the girls' boat, was a noted gymnast. He had had one or two quiet trials with Miss Euthymia, in which, according to the ultras of the woman's rights party, he had not vindicated the superiority of his sex in the way which might have been expected. Indeed, it was claimed that he let a cannon-ball drop when he ought to have caught it, and it was not disputed that he had been ingloriously knocked over by a sand-bag projected by the strong arms of the young maiden. This was of course a story that was widely told and laughingly listened to, and the captain of the University crew had become a little sensitive on the subject. When there was a talk, therefore, about a race between the champion boats of the two institutions there was immense excitement in both of them, as well as among the members of the Pansophian Society and all the good people of the village.
There were many objections to be overcome. Some thought it unladylike for the young maidens to take part in a competition which must attract many lookers-on, and which it seemed to them very hoidenish to venture upon. Some said it was a shame to let a crew of girls try their strength against an equal number of powerful young men. These objections were offset by the advocates of the race by the following arguments. They maintained that it was no more hoidenish to row a boat than it was to take a part in the calisthenic exercises, and that the girls had nothing to do with the young men's boat, except to keep as much ahead of it as possible. As to strength, the woman's righters believed that, weight for weight, their crew was as strong as the other, and of course due allowance would be made for the difference of weight and all other accidental hindrances. It was time to test the boasted superiority of masculine muscle. Here was a chance. If the girls beat, the whole country would know it, and after that female suffrage would be only a question of time. Such was the conclusion, from rather insufficient premises, it must be confessed; but if nature does nothing per saltum,—by jumps,—as the old adage has it, youth is very apt to take long leaps from a fact to a possible sequel or consequence. So it had come about that a contest between the two boat-crews was looked forward to with an interest almost equal to that with which the combat between the Horatii and Curiatii was regarded.
The terms had been at last arranged between the two crews, after cautious protocols and many diplomatic discussions. It was so novel in its character that it naturally took a good deal of time to adjust it in such a way as to be fair to both parties. The course must not be too long for the lighter and weaker crew, for the staying power of the young persons who made it up could not be safely reckoned upon. A certain advantage must be allowed them at the start, and this was a delicate matter to settle. The weather was another important consideration. June would be early enough, in all probability, and if the lake should be tolerably smooth the grand affair might come off some time in that month. Any roughness of the water would be unfavorable to the weaker crew. The rowing-course was on the eastern side of the lake, the starting-point being opposite the Anchor Tavern; from that three quarters of a mile to the south, where the turning-stake was fixed, so that the whole course of one mile and a half would bring the boats back to their starting-point.
The race was to be between the Algonquin, eight-oared boat with outriggers, rowed by young men, students of Stoughton University, and the Atalanta, also eight-oared and outrigger boat, by young ladies from the Corinna Institute. Their boat was three inches wider than the other, for various sufficient reasons, one of which was to make it a little less likely to go over and throw its crew into the water, which was a sound precaution, though all the girls could swim, and one at least, the bow oar, was a famous swimmer, who had pulled a drowning man out of the water after a hard struggle to keep him from carrying her down with him.
Though the coming trial had not been advertised in the papers, so as to draw together a rabble of betting men and ill-conditioned lookers-on, there was a considerable gathering, made up chiefly of the villagers and the students of the two institutions. Among them were a few who were disposed to add to their interest in the trial by small wagers. The bets were rather in favor of the “Quins,” as the University boat was commonly called, except where the natural sympathy of the young ladies or the gallantry of some of the young men led them to risk their gloves or cigars, or whatever it might be, on the Atalantas. The elements of judgment were these: average weight of the Algonquins one hundred and sixty-five pounds; average weight of the Atalantas, one hundred and forty-eight pounds; skill in practice about equal; advantage of the narrow boat equal to three lengths; whole distance allowed the Atalantas eight lengths,—a long stretch to be made up in a mile and a half. And so both crews began practising for the grand trial.
II. THE BOAT-RACE.
The 10th of June was a delicious summer day, rather warm, but still and bright. The water was smooth, and the crews were in the best possible condition. All was expectation, and for some time nothing but expectation. No boat-race or regatta ever began at the time appointed for the start. Somebody breaks an oar, or somebody fails to appear in season, or something is the matter with a seat or an outrigger; or if there is no such excuse, the crew of one or both or all the boats to take part in the race must paddle about to get themselves ready for work, to the infinite weariness of all the spectators, who naturally ask why all this getting ready is not attended to beforehand. The Algonquins wore plain gray flannel suits and white caps. The young ladies were all in dark blue dresses, touched up with a red ribbon here and there, and wore light straw hats. The little coxswain of the Atalanta was the last to step on board. As she took her place she carefully deposited at her feet a white handkerchief wrapped about something or other, perhaps a sponge, in case the boat should take in water.
At last the Algonquin shot out from the little nook where she lay, —long, narrow, shining, swift as a pickerel when he darts from the reedy shore. It was a beautiful sight to see the eight young fellows in their close-fitting suits, their brown muscular arms bare, bending their backs for the stroke and recovering, as if they were parts of a single machine.
“The gals can't stan' it agin them fellers,” said the old blacksmith from the village.
“You wait till the gals get a-goin',” said the carpenter, who had often worked in the gymnasium of the Corinna Institute, and knew something of their muscular accomplishments. “Y' ought to see 'em climb ropes, and swing dumb-bells, and pull in them rowin'-machines. Ask Jake there whether they can't row a mild in double-quick time,—he knows all abaout it.”
Jake was by profession a fisherman, and a freshwater fisherman in a country village is inspector-general of all that goes on out-of-doors, being a lazy, wandering sort of fellow, whose study of the habits and habitats of fishes gives him a kind of shrewdness of observation, just as dealing in horses is an education of certain faculties, and breeds a race of men peculiarly cunning, suspicious, wary, and wide awake, with a rhetoric of appreciation and depreciation all its own.
Jake made his usual preliminary signal, and delivered himself to the following effect:
“Wahl, I don' know jest what to say. I've seed 'em both often enough when they was practisin', an' I tell ye the' wa'n't no slouch abaout neither on 'em. But them bats is all-fired long, 'n' eight on 'em stretched in a straight line eendways makes a consid'able piece aout 'f a mile 'n' a haaf. I'd bate on them gals if it wa'n't that them fellers is naterally longer winded, as the gals 'll find aout by the time they git raound the stake 'n' over agin the big ellum. I'll go ye a quarter on the pahnts agin the petticoats.”
The fresh-water fisherman had expressed the prevailing belief that the young ladies were overmatched. Still there were not wanting those who thought the advantage allowed the “Lantas,” as they called the Corinna boatcrew, was too great, and that it would be impossible for the “Quins” to make it up and go by them.
The Algonquins rowed up and down a few times before the spectators. They appeared in perfect training, neither too fat nor too fine, mettlesome as colts, steady as draught-horses, deep-breathed as oxen, disciplined to work together as symmetrically as a single sculler pulls his pair of oars. The fisherman offered to make his quarter fifty cents. No takers.
Five minutes passed, and all eyes were strained to the south, looking for the Atalanta. A clump of trees hid the edge of the lake along which the Corinna's boat was stealing towards the starting-point. Presently the long shell swept into view, with its blooming rowers, who, with their ample dresses, seemed to fill it almost as full as Raphael fills his skiff on the edge of the Lake of Galilee. But how steadily the Atalanta came on!—-no rocking, no splashing, no apparent strain; the bow oar turning to look ahead every now and then, and watching her course, which seemed to be straight as an arrow, the beat of the strokes as true and regular as the pulse of the healthiest rower among them all. And if the sight of the other boat and its crew was beautiful, how lovely was the look of this! Eight young girls,—young ladies, for those who prefer that more dignified and less attractive expression,—all in the flush of youth, all in vigorous health; every muscle taught its duty; each rower alert, not to be a tenth of a second out of time, or let her oar dally with the water so as to lose an ounce of its propelling virtue; every eye kindling with the hope of victory. Each of the boats was cheered as it came in sight, but the cheers for the Atalanta were naturally the loudest, as the gallantry of one sex and the clear, high voices of the other gave it life and vigor.
“Take your places!” shouted the umpire, five minutes before the half hour. The two boats felt their way slowly and cautiously to their positions, which had been determined by careful measurement. After a little backing and filling they got into line, at the proper distance from each other, and sat motionless, their bodies bent forward, their arms outstretched, their oars in the water, waiting for the word.
“Go!” shouted the umpire.
Away sprang the Atalanta, and far behind her leaped the Algonquin, her oars bending like so many long Indian bows as their blades flashed through the water.
“A stern chase is a long chase,” especially when one craft is a great distance behind the other. It looked as if it would be impossible for the rear boat to overcome the odds against it. Of course the Algonquin kept gaining, but could it possibly gain enough? That was the question. As the boats got farther and farther away, it became more and more difficult to determine what change there was in the interval between them. But when they came to rounding the stake it was easier to guess at the amount of space which had been gained. It was clear that something like half the distance, four lengths, as nearly as could be estimated, had been made up in rowing the first three quarters of a mile. Could the Algonquins do a little better than this in the second half of the race-course, they would be sure of winning.
The boats had turned the stake, and were coming in rapidly. Every minute the University boat was getting nearer the other.
“Go it, Quins!” shouted the students.
“Pull away, Lantas!” screamed the girls, who were crowding down to the edge of the water.
Nearer,—nearer,—the rear boat is pressing the other more and more closely,—a few more strokes, and they will be even, for there is but one length between them, and thirty rods will carry them to the line. It looks desperate for the Atalantas. The bow oar of the Algonquin turns his head. He sees the little coxswain leaning forward at every stroke, as if her trivial weight were of such mighty consequence,—but a few ounces might turn the scale of victory. As he turned he got a glimpse of the stroke oar of the Atalanta. What a flash of loveliness it was! Her face was like the reddest of June roses, with the heat and the strain and the passion of expected triumph. The upper button of her close-fitting flannel suit had strangled her as her bosom heaved with exertion, and it had given way before the fierce clutch she made at it. The bow oar was a staunch and steady rower, but he was human. The blade of his oar lingered in the water; a little more and he would have caught a crab, and perhaps lost the race by his momentary bewilderment.
The boat, which seemed as if it had all the life and nervousness of a Derby three-year-old, felt the slight check, and all her men bent more vigorously to their oars. The Atalantas saw the movement, and made a spurt to keep their lead and gain upon it if they could. It was of no use. The strong arms of the young men were too much for the young maidens; only a few lengths remained to be rowed, and they would certainly pass the Atalanta before she could reach the line.
The little coxswain saw that it was all up with the girls' crew if she could not save them by some strategic device.
“Dolus an virtus quis in hoste requirat?”
she whispered to herself,—for The Terror remembered her Virgil as she did everything else she ever studied. As she stooped, she lifted the handkerchief at her feet, and took from it a flaming bouquet. “Look!” she cried, and flung it just forward of the track of the Algonquin. The captain of the University boat turned his head, and there was the lovely vision which had a moment before bewitched him. The owner of all that loveliness must, he thought, have flung the bouquet. It was a challenge: how could he be such a coward as to decline accepting it.
He was sure he could win the race now, and he would sweep past the line in triumph with the great bunch of flowers at the stem of his boat, proud as Van Tromp in the British channel with the broom at his mast-head.
He turned the boat's head a little by backing water. He came up with the floating flowers, and near enough to reach them. He stooped and snatched them up, with the loss perhaps of a second in all,—no more. He felt sure of his victory.
How can one tell the story of the finish in cold-blooded preterites? Are we not there ourselves? Are not our muscles straining with those of these sixteen young creatures, full of hot, fresh blood, their nerves all tingling like so many tight-strained harp-strings, all their life concentrating itself in this passionate moment of supreme effort? No! We are seeing, not telling about what somebody else once saw!
—The bow of the Algonquin passes the stern of the Atalanta!
—The bow of the Algonquin is on a level with the middle of the Atalanta!
—Three more lengths' rowing and the college crew will pass the girls!
—“Hurrah for the Quins!” The Algonquin ranges up alongside of the Atalanta!
“Through with her!” shouts the captain of the Algonquin.
“Now, girls!” shrieks the captain of the Atalanta.
They near the line, every rower straining desperately, almost madly.
—Crack goes the oar of the Atalanta's captain, and up flash its splintered fragments, as the stem of her boat springs past the line, eighteen inches at least ahead of the Algonquin.
Hooraw for the Lantas! Hooraw for the Girls! Hooraw for the Institoot! shout a hundred voices.
“Hurrah for woman's rights and female suffrage!” pipes the small voice of The Terror, and there is loud laughing and cheering all round.
She had not studied her classical dictionary and her mythology for nothing. “I have paid off one old score,” she said. “Set down my damask roses against the golden apples of Hippomenes!”
It was that one second lost in snatching up the bouquet which gave the race to the Atalantas.
III. THE WHITE CANOE.
While the two boats were racing, other boats with lookers-on in them were rowing or sailing in the neighborhood of the race-course. The scene on the water was a gay one, for the young people in the boats were, many of them, acquainted with each other. There was a good deal of lively talk until the race became too exciting. Then many fell silent, until, as the boats neared the line, and still more as they crossed it, the shouts burst forth which showed how a cramp of attention finds its natural relief in a fit of convulsive exclamation.
But far away, on the other side of the lake, a birchbark canoe was to be seen, in which sat a young man, who paddled it skillfully and swiftly. It was evident enough that he was watching the race intently, but the spectators could see little more than that. One of them, however, who sat upon the stand, had a powerful spy-glass, and could distinguish his motions very minutely and exactly. It was seen by this curious observer that the young man had an opera-glass with him, which he used a good deal at intervals. The spectator thought he kept it directed to the girls' boat, chiefly, if not exclusively. He thought also that the opera-glass was more particularly pointed towards the bow of the boat, and came to the natural conclusion that the bow oar, Miss Euthymia Tower, captain of the Atalantas, “The Wonder” of the Corinna Institute, was the attraction which determined the direction of the instrument.
“Who is that in the canoe over there?” asked the owner of the spy-glass.
“That's just what we should like to know,” answered the old landlord's wife. “He and his man boarded with us when they first came, but we could never find out anything about him only just his name and his ways of living. His name is Kirkwood, Maurice Kirkwood, Esq., it used to come on his letters. As for his ways of living, he was the solitariest human being that I ever came across. His man carried his meals up to him. He used to stay in his room pretty much all day, but at night he would be off, walking, or riding on horseback, or paddling about in the lake, sometimes till nigh morning. There's something very strange about that Mr. Kirkwood. But there don't seem to be any harm in him. Only nobody can guess what his business is. They got up a story about him at one time. What do you think? They said he was a counterfeiter! And so they went one night to his room, when he was out, and that man of his was away too, and they carried keys, and opened pretty much everything; and they found—well, they found just nothing at all except writings and letters,—letters from places in America and in England, and some with Italian postmarks: that was all. Since that time the sheriff and his folks have let him alone and minded their own business. He was a gentleman,—anybody ought to have known that; and anybody that knew about his nice ways of living and behaving, and knew the kind of wear he had for his underclothing, might have known it. I could have told those officers that they had better not bother him. I know the ways of real gentlemen and real ladies, and I know those fellows in store clothes that look a little too fine,—outside. Wait till washing-day comes!”
The good lady had her own standards for testing humanity, and they were not wholly unworthy of consideration; they were quite as much to be relied on as the judgments of the travelling phrenologist, who sent his accomplice on before him to study out the principal personages in the village, and in the light of these revelations interpreted the bumps, with very little regard to Gall and Spurzheim, or any other authorities.
Even with the small amount of information obtained by the search among his papers and effects, the gossips of the village had constructed several distinct histories for the mysterious stranger. He was an agent of a great publishing house; a leading contributor to several important periodicals; the author of that anonymously published novel which had made so much talk; the poet of a large clothing establishment; a spy of the Italian, some said the Russian, some said the British, Government; a proscribed refugee from some country where he had been plotting; a school-master without a school, a minister without a pulpit, an actor without an engagement; in short, there was no end to the perfectly senseless stories that were told about him, from that which made him out an escaped convict to the whispered suggestion that he was the eccentric heir to a great English title and estate.
The one unquestionable fact was that of his extraordinary seclusion. Nobody in the village, no student in the University, knew his history. No young lady in the Corinna Institute had ever had a word from him. Sometimes, as the boats of the University or the Institute were returning at dusk, their rowers would see the canoe stealing into the shadows as they drew near it. Sometimes on a moonlight night, when a party of the young ladies were out upon the lake, they would see the white canoe gliding ghost-like in the distance. And it had happened more than once that when a boat's crew had been out with singers among them, while they were in the midst of a song, the white canoe would suddenly appear and rest upon the water,—not very near them, but within hearing distance,—and so remain until the singing was over, when it would steal away and be lost sight of in some inlet or behind some jutting rock.
Naturally enough, there was intense curiosity about this young man. The landlady had told her story, which explained nothing. There was nobody to be questioned about him except his servant, an Italian, whose name was Paolo, but who to the village was known as Mr. Paul.
Mr. Paul would have seemed the easiest person in the world to worm a secret out of. He was good-natured, child-like as a Heathen Chinee, talked freely with everybody in such English as he had at command, knew all the little people of the village, and was followed round by them partly from his personal attraction for them, and partly because he was apt to have a stick of candy or a handful of peanuts or other desirable luxury in his pocket for any of his little friends he met with. He had that wholesome, happy look, so uncommon in our arid countrymen,—a look hardly to be found except where figs and oranges ripen in the open air. A kindly climate to grow up in, a religion which takes your money and gives you a stamped ticket good at Saint Peter's box office, a roomy chest and a good pair of lungs in it, an honest digestive apparatus, a lively temperament, a cheerful acceptance of the place in life assigned to one by nature and circumstance,—these are conditions under which life may be quite comfortable to endure, and certainly is very pleasant to contemplate. All these conditions were united in Paolo. He was the easiest; pleasantest creature to talk with that one could ask for a companion. His southern vivacity, his amusing English, his simplicity and openness, made him friends everywhere.
It seemed as if it would be a very simple matter to get the history of his master out of this guileless and unsophisticated being. He had been tried by all the village experts. The rector had put a number of well-studied careless questions, which failed of their purpose. The old librarian of the town library had taken note of all the books he carried to his master, and asked about his studies and pursuits. Paolo found it hard to understand his English, apparently, and answered in the most irrelevant way. The leading gossip of the village tried her skill in pumping him for information. It was all in vain.
His master's way of life was peculiar,—in fact, eccentric. He had hired rooms in an old-fashioned three-story house. He had two rooms in the second and third stories of this old wooden building: his study in the second, his sleeping-room in the one above it. Paolo lived in the basement, where he had all the conveniences for cooking, and played the part of chef for his master and himself. This was only a part of his duty, for he was a man-of-all-work, purveyor, steward, chambermaid,—as universal in his services for one man as Pushee at the Anchor Tavern used to be for everybody.
It so happened that Paolo took a severe cold one winter's day, and had such threatening symptoms that he asked the baker, when he called, to send the village physician to see him. In the course of his visit the doctor naturally inquired about the health of Paolo's master.
“Signor Kirkwood well,—molto bene,” said Paolo. “Why does he keep out of sight as he does?” asked the doctor.
“He always so,” replied Paolo. “Una antipatia.”
Whether Paolo was off his guard with the doctor, whether he revealed it to him as to a father confessor, or whether he thought it time that the reason of his master's seclusion should be known, the doctor did not feel sure. At any rate, Paolo was not disposed to make any further revelations. Una antipatia,—an antipathy,—that was all the doctor learned. He thought the matter over, and the more he reflected the more he was puzzled. What could an antipathy be that made a young man a recluse! Was it a dread of blue sky and open air, of the smell of flowers, or some electrical impression to which he was unnaturally sensitive?
Dr. Butts carried these questions home with him. His wife was a sensible, discreet woman, whom he could trust with many professional secrets. He told her of Paolo's revelation, and talked it over with her in the light of his experience and her own; for she had known some curious cases of constitutional likes and aversions.
Mrs. Butts buried the information in the grave of her memory, where it lay for nearly a week. At the end of that time it emerged in a confidential whisper to her favorite sister-in-law, a perfectly safe person. Twenty-four hours later the story was all over the village that Maurice Kirkwood was the subject of a strange, mysterious, unheard-of antipathy to something, nobody knew what; and the whole neighborhood naturally resolved itself into an unorganized committee of investigation.
IV. THE YOUNG SOLITARY
What is a country village without its mysterious personage? Few are now living who can remember the advent of the handsome young man who was the mystery of our great university town “sixty years since,”—long enough ago for a romance to grow out of a narrative, as Waverley may remind us. The writer of this narrative remembers him well, and is not sure that he has not told the strange story in some form or other to the last generation, or to the one before the last. No matter: if he has told it they have forgotten it,—that is, if they have ever read it; and whether they have or have not, the story is singular enough to justify running the risk of repetition.
This young man, with a curious name of Scandinavian origin, appeared unheralded in the town, as it was then, of Cantabridge. He wanted employment, and soon found it in the shape of manual labor, which he undertook and performed cheerfully. But his whole appearance showed plainly enough that he was bred to occupations of a very different nature, if, in deed, he had been accustomed to any kind of toil for his living. His aspect was that of one of gentle birth. His hands were not those of a laborer, and his features were delicate and refined, as well as of remarkable beauty. Who he was, where he came from, why he had come to Cantabridge, was never clearly explained. He was alone, without friends, except among the acquaintances he had made in his new residence. If he had any correspondents, they were not known to the neighborhood where he was living. But if he had neither friends nor correspondents, there was some reason for believing that he had enemies. Strange circumstances occurred which connected themselves with him in an ominous and unaccountable way. A threatening letter was slipped under the door of a house where he was visiting. He had a sudden attack of illness, which was thought to look very much like the effect of poison. At one time he disappeared, and was found wandering, bewildered, in a town many miles from that where he was residing. When questioned how he came there; he told a coherent story that he had been got, under some pretext, or in some not incredible way, into a boat, from which, at a certain landing-place, he had escaped and fled for his life, which he believed was in danger from his kidnappers.
Whoever his enemies may have been,—if they really existed,—he did not fall a victim to their plots, so far as known to or remembered by this witness.
Various interpretations were put upon his story. Conjectures were as abundant as they were in the case of Kaspar Hauser. That he was of good family seemed probable; that he was of distinguished birth, not impossible; that he was the dangerous rival of a candidate for a greatly coveted position in one of the northern states of Europe was a favorite speculation of some of the more romantic young persons. There was no dramatic ending to this story,—at least none is remembered by the present writer.
“He left a name,” like the royal Swede, of whose lineage he may have been for aught that the village people knew, but not a name at which anybody “grew pale;” for he had swindled no one, and broken no woman's heart with false vows. Possibly some withered cheeks may flush faintly as they recall the handsome young man who came before the Cantabridge maidens fully equipped for a hero of romance when the century was in its first quarter.
The writer has been reminded of the handsome Swede by the incidents attending the advent of the unknown and interesting stranger who had made his appearance at Arrowhead Village.
It was a very insufficient and unsatisfactory reason to assign for the young man's solitary habits that he was the subject of an antipathy. For what do we understand by that word? When a young lady screams at the sight of a spider, we accept her explanation that she has a natural antipathy to the creature. When a person expresses a repugnance to some wholesome article of food, agreeable to most people, we are satisfied if he gives the same reason. And so of various odors, which are pleasing to some persons and repulsive to others. We do not pretend to go behind the fact. It is an individual, and it may be a family, peculiarity. Even between different personalities there is an instinctive elective dislike as well as an elective affinity. We are not bound to give a reason why Dr. Fell is odious to us any more than the prisoner who peremptorily challenges a juryman is bound to say why he does it; it is enough that he “does not like his looks.”
There was nothing strange, then, that Maurice Kirkwood should have his special antipathy; a great many other people have odd likes and dislikes. But it was a very curious thing that this antipathy should be alleged as the reason for his singular mode of life. All sorts of explanations were suggested, not one of them in the least satisfactory, but serving to keep the curiosity of inquirers active until they were superseded by a new theory. One story was that Maurice had a great fear of dogs. It grew at last to a connected narrative, in which a fright in childhood from a rabid mongrel was said to have given him such a sensitiveness to the near presence of dogs that he was liable to convulsions if one came close to him.
This hypothesis had some plausibility. No other creature would be so likely to trouble a person who had an antipathy to it. Dogs are very apt to make the acquaintance of strangers, in a free and easy way. They are met with everywhere,—in one's daily walk, at the thresholds of the doors one enters, in the gentleman's library, on the rug of my lady's sitting-room and on the cushion of her carriage. It is true that there are few persons who have an instinctive repugnance to this “friend of man.” But what if this so-called antipathy were only a fear, a terror, which borrowed the less unmanly name? It was a fair question, if, indeed, the curiosity of the public had a right to ask any questions at all about a harmless individual who gave no offence, and seemed entitled to the right of choosing his way of living to suit himself, without being submitted to espionage.
There was no positive evidence bearing on the point as yet. But one of the village people had a large Newfoundland dog, of a very sociable disposition, with which he determined to test the question. He watched for the time when Maurice should leave his house for the woods or the lake, and started with his dog to meet him. The animal walked up to the stranger in a very sociable fashion, and began making his acquaintance, after the usual manner of well-bred dogs; that is, with the courtesies and blandishments by which the canine Chesterfield is distinguished from the ill-conditioned cur. Maurice patted him in a friendly way, and spoke to him as one who was used to the fellowship of such companions. That idle question and foolish story were disposed of, therefore, and some other solution must be found, if possible.
A much more common antipathy is that which is entertained with regard to cats. This has never been explained. It is not mere aversion to the look of the creature, or to any sensible quality known to the common observer. The cat is pleasing in aspect, graceful in movement, nice in personal habits, and of amiable disposition. No cause of offence is obvious, and yet there are many persons who cannot abide the presence of the most innocent little kitten. They can tell, in some mysterious way, that there is a cat in the room when they can neither see nor hear the creature. Whether it is an electrical or quasi-magnetic phenomenon, or whatever it may be, of the fact of this strange influence there are too many well-authenticated instances to allow its being questioned. But suppose Maurice Kirkwood to be the subject of this antipathy in its extremest degree, it would in no manner account for the isolation to which he had condemned himself. He might shun the firesides of the old women whose tabbies were purring by their footstools, but these worthy dames do not make up the whole population.
These two antipathies having been disposed of, a new suggestion was started, and was talked over with a curious sort of half belief, very much as ghost stories are told in a circle of moderately instructed and inquiring persons. This was that Maurice was endowed with the unenviable gift of the evil eye. He was in frequent communication with Italy, as his letters showed, and had recently been residing in that country, as was learned from Paolo. Now everybody knows that the evil eye is not rarely met with in Italy. Everybody who has ever read Mr. Story's “Roba di Roma” knows what a terrible power it is which the owner of the evil eye exercises. It can blight and destroy whatever it falls upon. No person's life or limb is safe if the jettatura, the withering glance of the deadly organ, falls upon him. It must be observed that this malign effect may follow a look from the holiest personages, that is, if we may assume that a monk is such as a matter of course. Certainly we have a right to take it for granted that the late Pope, Pius Ninth, was an eminently holy man, and yet he had the name of dispensing the mystic and dreaded jettatura as well as his blessing. If Maurice Kirkwood carried that destructive influence, so that his clear blue eyes were more to be feared than the fascinations of the deadliest serpent, it could easily be understood why he kept his look away from all around him whom he feared he might harm.
No sensible person in Arrowhead Village really believed in the evil eye, but it served the purpose of a temporary hypothesis, as do many suppositions which we take as a nucleus for our observations without putting any real confidence in them. It was just suited to the romantic notions of the more flighty persons in the village, who had meddled more or less with Spiritualism, and were ready for any new fancy, if it were only wild enough.
The riddle of the young stranger's peculiarity did not seem likely to find any very speedy solution. Every new suggestion furnished talk for the gossips of the village and the babble of the many tongues in the two educational institutions. Naturally, the discussion was liveliest among the young ladies. Here is an extract from a letter of one of these young ladies, who, having received at her birth the ever-pleasing name of Mary, saw fit to have herself called Mollie in the catalogue and in her letters. The old postmaster of the town to which her letter was directed took it up to stamp, and read on the envelope the direction to “Miss Lulu Pinrow.” He brought the stamp down with a vicious emphasis, coming very near blotting out the nursery name, instead of cancelling the postage-stamp. “Lulu!” he exclaimed. “I should like to know if that great strapping girl isn't out of her cradle yet! I suppose Miss Louisa will think that belongs to her, but I saw her christened and I heard the name the minister gave her, and it was n't 'Lulu,' or any such baby nonsense.” And so saying, he gave it a fling to the box marked P, as if it burned his fingers. Why a grown-up young woman allowed herself to be cheapened in the way so many of them do by the use of names which become them as well as the frock of a ten-year-old schoolgirl would become a graduate of the Corinna Institute, the old postmaster could not guess. He was a queer old man.
The letter thus scornfully treated runs over with a young girl's written loquacity:
“Oh, Lulu, there is such a sensation as you never saw or heard of 'in all your born days,' as mamma used to say. He has been at the village for some time, but lately we have had—oh, the weirdest stories about him! 'The Mysterious Stranger is the name some give him, but we girls call him the Sachem, because he paddles about in an Indian canoe. If I should tell you all the things that are said about him I should use up all my paper ten times over. He has never made a visit to the Institute, and none of the girls have ever spoken to him, but the people at the village say he is very, very handsome. We are dying to get a look at him, of course—though there is a horrid story about him—that he has the evil eye did you ever hear about the evil eye? If a person who is born with it looks at you, you die, or something happens—awful—is n't it?
“The rector says he never goes to church, but then you know a good many of the people that pass the summer at the village never do—they think their religion must have vacations—that's what I've heard they say—vacations, just like other hard work—it ought not to be hard work, I'm sure, but I suppose they feel so about it. Should you feel afraid to have him look at you? Some of the girls say they would n't have him for the whole world, but I shouldn't mind it—especially if I had on my eyeglasses. Do you suppose if there is anything in the evil eye it would go through glass? I don't believe it. Do you think blue eye-glasses would be better than common ones? Don't laugh at me—they tell such weird stories! The Terror—Lurida Vincent, you know-makes fun of all they say about it, but then she 'knows everything and doesn't believe anything,' the girls say—Well, I should be awfully scared, I know, if anybody that had the evil eye should look at me—but—oh, I don't know—but if it was a young man—and if he was very—very good-looking—I think—perhaps I would run the risk—but don't tell anybody I said any such horrid thing—and burn this letter right up—there 's a dear good girl.”
It is to be hoped that no reader will doubt the genuineness of this letter. There are not quite so many “awfuls” and “awfullys” as one expects to find in young ladies' letters, but there are two “weirds,” which may be considered a fair allowance. How it happened that “jolly” did not show itself can hardly be accounted for; no doubt it turns up two or three times at least in the postscript.
Here is an extract from another letter. This was from one of the students of Stoughton University to a friend whose name as it was written on the envelope was Mr. Frank Mayfield. The old postmaster who found fault with Miss “Lulu's” designation would probably have quarrelled with this address, if it had come under his eye. “Frank” is a very pretty, pleasant-sounding name, and it is not strange that many persons use it in common conversation all their days when speaking of a friend. Were they really christened by that name, any of these numerous Franks? Perhaps they were, and if so there is nothing to be said. But if not, was the baptismal name Francis or Franklin? The mind is apt to fasten in a very perverse and unpleasant way upon this question, which too often there is no possible way of settling. One might hope, if he outlived the bearer of the appellation, to get at the fact; but since even gravestones have learned to use the names belonging to childhood and infancy in their solemn record, the generation which docks its Christian names in such an un-Christian way will bequeath whole churchyards full of riddles to posterity. How it will puzzle and distress the historians and antiquarians of a coming generation to settle what was the real name of Dan and Bert and Billy, which last is legible on a white marble slab, raised in memory of a grown person, in a certain burial-ground in a town in Essex County, Massachusetts!
But in the mean time we are forgetting the letter directed to Mr. Frank Mayfield.
“DEAR FRANK,—Hooray! Hurrah! Rah!
“I have made the acquaintance of 'The Mysterious Stranger'! It happened by a queer sort of accident, which came pretty near relieving you of the duty of replying to this letter. I was out in my little boat, which carries a sail too big for her, as I know and ought to have remembered. One of those fitful flaws of wind to which the lake is so liable struck the sail suddenly, and over went my boat. My feet got tangled in the sheet somehow, and I could not get free. I had hard work to keep my head above water, and I struggled desperately to escape from my toils; for if the boat were to go down I should be dragged down with her. I thought of a good many things in the course of some four or five minutes, I can tell you, and I got a lesson about time better than anything Kant and all the rest of them have to say of it. After I had been there about an ordinary lifetime, I saw a white canoe making toward me, and I knew that our shy young gentleman was coming to help me, and that we should become acquainted without an introduction. So it was, sure enough. He saw what the trouble was, managed to disentangle my feet without drowning me in the process or upsetting his little flimsy craft, and, as I was somewhat tired with my struggle, took me in tow and carried me to the landing where he kept his canoe. I can't say that there is anything odd about his manners or his way of talk. I judge him to be a native of one of our Northern States,—perhaps a New Englander. He has lived abroad during some parts of his life. He is not an artist, as it was at one time thought he might be. He is a good-looking fellow, well developed, manly in appearance, with nothing to excite special remark unless it be a certain look of anxiety or apprehension which comes over him from time to time. You remember our old friend Squire B., whose companion was killed by lightning when he was standing close to him. You know the look he had whenever anything like a thundercloud came up in the sky. Well, I should say there was a look like that came over this Maurice Kirkwood's face every now and then. I noticed that he looked round once or twice as if to see whether some object or other was in sight. There was a little rustling in the grass as if of footsteps, and this look came over his features. A rabbit ran by us, and I watched to see if he showed any sign of that antipathy we have heard so much of, but he seemed to be pleased watching the creature.
“If you ask me what my opinion is about this Maurice Kirkwood, I think he is eccentric in his habit of life, but not what they call a 'crank' exactly. He talked well enough about such matters as we spoke of,—the lake, the scenery in general, the climate. I asked him to come over and take a look at the college. He did n't promise, but I should not be surprised if I should get him over there some day. I asked him why he did n't go to the Pansophian meetings. He did n't give any reason, but he shook his head in a very peculiar way, as much as to say that it was impossible.
“On the whole, I think it is nothing more than the same feeling of dread of human society, or dislike for it, which under the name of religion used to drive men into caves and deserts. What a pity that Protestantism does not make special provision for all the freaks of individual character! If we had a little more faith and a few more caverns, or convenient places for making them, we should have hermits in these holes as thick as woodchucks or prairie dogs. I should like to know if you never had the feeling,
“'Oh, that the desert were my dwelling-place!'
“I know what your answer will be, of course. You will say, 'Certainly,
“'With one fair spirit for my minister;'”
“but I mean alone,—all alone. Don't you ever feel as if you should like to have been a pillar-saint in the days when faith was as strong as lye (spelt with a y), instead of being as weak as dish-water? (Jerry is looking over my shoulder, and says this pun is too bad to send, and a disgrace to the University—but never mind.) I often feel as if I should like to roost on a pillar a hundred feet high,—yes, and have it soaped from top to bottom. Wouldn't it be fun to look down at the bores and the duns? Let us get up a pillar-roosters' association. (Jerry—still looking over says there is an absurd contradiction in the idea.)
“What a matter-of-fact idiot Jerry is!
“How do you like looking over, Mr. Inspector general?”
The reader will not get much information out of this lively young fellow's letter, but he may get a little. It is something to know that the mysterious resident of Arrowhead Village did not look nor talk like a crazy person; that he was of agreeable aspect and address, helpful when occasion offered, and had nothing about him, so far as yet appeared, to prevent his being an acceptable member of society.
Of course the people in the village could never be contented without learning everything there was to be learned about their visitor. All the city papers were examined for advertisements. If a cashier had absconded, if a broker had disappeared, if a railroad president was missing, some of the old stories would wake up and get a fresh currency, until some new circumstance gave rise to a new hypothesis. Unconscious of all these inquiries and fictions, Maurice Kirkwood lived on in his inoffensive and unexplained solitude, and seemed likely to remain an unsolved enigma. The “Sachem” of the boating girls became the “Sphinx” of the village ramblers, and it was agreed on all hands that Egypt did not hold any hieroglyphics harder to make out than the meaning of this young man's odd way of living.
V. THE ENIGMA STUDIED.
It was a curious, if it was not a suspicious, circumstance that a young man, seemingly in good health, of comely aspect, looking as if made for companionship, should keep himself apart from all the world around him in a place where there was a general feeling of good neighborhood and a pleasant social atmosphere. The Public Library was a central point which brought people together. The Pansophian Society did a great deal to make them acquainted with each other for many of the meetings were open to outside visitors, and the subjects discussed in the meetings furnished the material for conversation in their intervals. A card of invitation had been sent by the Secretary to Maurice, in answer to which Paolo carried back a polite note of regret. The paper had a narrow rim of black, implying apparently some loss of relative or friend, but not any very recent and crushing bereavement. This refusal to come to the meetings of the society was only what was expected. It was proper to ask him, but his declining the invitation showed that he did not wish for attentions or courtesies. There was nothing further to be done to bring him out of his shell, and seemingly nothing more to be learned about him at present.
In this state of things it was natural that all which had been previously gathered by the few who had seen or known anything of him should be worked over again. When there is no new ore to be dug, the old refuse heaps are looked over for what may still be found in them. The landlord of the Anchor Tavern, now the head of the boarding-house, talked about Maurice, as everybody in the village did at one time or another. He had not much to say, but he added a fact or two.
The young gentleman was good pay,—so they all said. Sometimes he paid in gold; sometimes in fresh bills, just out of the bank. He trusted his man, Mr. Paul, with the money to pay his bills. He knew something about horses; he showed that by the way he handled that colt,—the one that threw the hostler and broke his collar-bone. “Mr. Paul come down to the stable. 'Let me see that cult you all 'fraid of,' says he. 'My master, he ride any hoss,' says Paul. 'You saddle him,' says he; and so they did, and Paul, he led that colt—the kickinest and ugliest young beast you ever see in your life—up to the place where his master, as he calls him, and he lives. What does that Kirkwood do but clap on a couple of long spurs and jump on to that colt's back, and off the beast goes, tail up, heels flying, standing up on end, trying all sorts of capers, and at last going it full run for a couple of miles, till he'd got about enough of it. That colt went off as ferce as a wild-cat, and come back as quiet as a cosset lamb. A man that pays his bills reg'lar, in good money, and knows how to handle a hoss is three quarters of a gentleman, if he is n't a whole one,—and most likely he is a whole one.”
So spake the patriarch of the Anchor Tavern. His wife had already given her favorable opinion of her former guest. She now added something to her description as a sequel to her husband's remarks.
“I call him,” she said, “about as likely a young gentleman as ever I clapped my eyes on. He is rather slighter than I like to see a young man of his age; if he was my son, I should like to see him a little more fleshy. I don't believe he weighs more than a hundred and thirty or forty pounds. Did y' ever look at those eyes of his, M'randy? Just as blue as succory flowers. I do like those light-complected young fellows, with their fresh cheeks and their curly hair; somehow, curly hair doos set off anybody's face. He is n't any foreigner, for all that he talks Italian with that Mr. Paul that's his help. He looks just like our kind of folks, the college kind, that's brought up among books, and is handling 'em, and reading of 'em, and making of 'em, as like as not, all their lives. All that you say about his riding the mad colt is just what I should think he was up to, for he's as spry as a squirrel; you ought to see him go over that fence, as I did once. I don't believe there's any harm in that young gentleman,—I don't care what people say. I suppose he likes this place just as other people like it, and cares more for walking in the woods and paddling about in the water than he doos for company; and if he doos, whose business is it, I should like to know?”
The third of the speakers was Miranda, who had her own way of judging people.
“I never see him but two or three times,” Miranda said. “I should like to have waited on him, and got a chance to look stiddy at him when he was eatin' his vittles. That 's the time to watch folks, when their jaws get a-goin' and their eyes are on what's afore 'em. Do you remember that chap the sheriff come and took away when we kep' tahvern? Eleven year ago it was, come nex' Thanksgivin' time. A mighty grand gentleman from the City he set up for. I watched him, and I watched him. Says I, I don't believe you're no gentleman, says I. He eat with his knife, and that ain't the way city folks eats. Every time I handed him anything I looked closeter and closeter. Them whiskers never grooved on them cheeks, says I to myself. Them 's paper collars, says I. That dimun in your shirt-front hain't got no life to it, says I. I don't believe it's nothin' more 'n a bit o' winderglass. So says I to Pushee, 'You jes' step out and get the sheriff to come in and take a look at that chap.' I knowed he was after a fellah. He come right in, an' he goes up to the chap. 'Why, Bill,' says he, 'I'm mighty glad to see yer. We've had the hole in the wall you got out of mended, and I want your company to come and look at the old place,' says he, and he pulls out a couple of handcuffs and has 'em on his wrists in less than no time, an' off they goes together! I know one thing about that young gentleman, anyhow,—there ain't no better judge of what's good eatin' than he is. I cooked him some maccaroni myself one day, and he sends word to me by that Mr. Paul, 'Tell Miss Miranda,' says he, I that the Pope o' Rome don't have no better cooked maccaroni than what she sent up to me yesterday,' says he. I don' know much about the Pope o' Rome except that he's a Roman Catholic, and I don' know who cooks for him, whether it's a man or a woman; but when it comes to a dish o' maccaroni, I ain't afeard of their shefs, as they call 'em,—them he-cooks that can't serve up a cold potater without callin' it by some name nobody can say after 'em. But this gentleman knows good cookin', and that's as good a sign of a gentleman as I want to tell 'em by.”
VI. STILL AT FAULT.
The house in which Maurice Kirkwood had taken up his abode was not a very inviting one. It was old, and had been left in a somewhat dilapidated and disorderly condition by the tenants who had lived in the part which Maurice now occupied. They had piled their packing-boxes in the cellar, with broken chairs, broken china, and other household wrecks. A cracked mirror lay on an old straw mattress, the contents of which were airing themselves through wide rips and rents. A lame clothes-horse was saddled with an old rug fringed with a ragged border, out of which all the colors had been completely trodden. No woman would have gone into a house in such a condition. But the young man did not trouble himself much about such matters, and was satisfied when the rooms which were to be occupied by himself and his servant were made decent and tolerably comfortable. During the fine season all this was not of much consequence, and if Maurice made up his mind to stay through the winter he would have his choice among many more eligible places.
The summer vacation of the Corinna Institute had now arrived, and the young ladies had scattered to their homes. Among the graduates of the year were Miss Euthymia Tower and Miss Lurida Vincent, who had now returned to their homes in Arrowhead Village. They were both glad to rest after the long final examinations and the exercises of the closing day, in which each of them had borne a conspicuous part. It was a pleasant life they led in the village, which was lively enough at this season. Walking, riding, driving, boating, visits to the Library, meetings of the Pansophian Society, hops, and picnics made the time pass very cheerfully, and soon showed their restoring influences. The Terror's large eyes did not wear the dull, glazed look by which they had too often betrayed the after effects of over-excitement of the strong and active brain behind them. The Wonder gained a fresher bloom, and looked full enough of life to radiate vitality into a statue of ice. They had a boat of their own, in which they passed many delightful hours on the lake, rowing, drifting, reading, telling of what had been, dreaming of what might be.
The Library was one of the chief centres of the fixed population, and visited often by strangers. The old Librarian was a peculiar character, as these officials are apt to be. They have a curious kind of knowledge, sometimes immense in its way. They know the backs of books, their title-pages, their popularity or want of it, the class of readers who call for particular works, the value of different editions, and a good deal besides. Their minds catch up hints from all manner of works on all kinds of subjects. They will give a visitor a fact and a reference which they are surprised to find they remember and which the visitor might have hunted for a year. Every good librarian, every private book-owner, who has grown into his library, finds he has a bunch of nerves going to every bookcase, a branch to every shelf, and a twig to every book. These nerves get very sensitive in old librarians, sometimes, and they do not like to have a volume meddled with any more than they would like to have their naked eyes handled. They come to feel at last that the books of a great collection are a part, not merely of their own property, though they are only the agents for their distribution, but that they are, as it were, outlying portions of their own organization. The old Librarian was getting a miserly feeling about his books, as he called them. Fortunately, he had a young lady for his assistant, who was never so happy as when she could find the work any visitor wanted and put it in his hands,—or her hands, for there were more readers among the wives and—daughters, and especially among the aunts, than there were among their male relatives. The old Librarian knew the books, but the books seemed to know the young assistant; so it looked, at least, to the impatient young people who wanted their services.
Maurice had a good many volumes of his own,—a great many, according to Paolo's account; but Paolo's ideas were limited, and a few well-filled shelves seemed a very large collection to him. His master frequently sent him to the Public Library for books, which somewhat enlarged his notions; still, the Signor was a very learned man, he was certain, and some of his white books (bound in vellum and richly gilt) were more splendid, according to Paolo, than anything in the Library.
There was no little curiosity to know what were the books that Maurice was in the habit of taking out, and the Librarian's record was carefully searched by some of the more inquisitive investigators. The list proved to be a long and varied one. It would imply a considerable knowledge of modern languages and of the classics; a liking for mathematics and physics, especially all that related to electricity and magnetism; a fancy for the occult sciences, if there is any propriety in coupling these words; and a whim for odd and obsolete literature, like the Parthenologia of Fortunius Licetus, the quaint treatise 'De Sternutatione,' books about alchemy, and witchcraft, apparitions, and modern works relating to Spiritualism. With these were the titles of novels and now and then of books of poems; but it may be taken for granted that his own shelves held the works he was most frequently in the habit of reading or consulting. Not much was to be made out of this beyond the fact of wide scholarship,—more or less deep it might be, but at any rate implying no small mental activity; for he appeared to read very rapidly, at any rate exchanged the books he had taken out for new ones very frequently. To judge by his reading, he was a man of letters. But so wide-reading a man of letters must have an object, a literary purpose in all probability. Why should not he be writing a novel? Not a novel of society, assuredly, for a hermit is not the person to report the talk and manners of a world which he has nothing to do with. Novelists and lawyers understand the art of “cramming” better than any other persons in the world. Why should not this young man be working up the picturesque in this romantic region to serve as a background for some story with magic, perhaps, and mysticism, and hints borrowed from science, and all sorts of out-of-the-way knowledge which his odd and miscellaneous selection of books furnished him? That might be, or possibly he was only reading for amusement. Who could say?
The funds of the Public Library of Arrowhead Village allowed the managers to purchase many books out of the common range of reading. The two learned people of the village were the rector and the doctor. These two worthies kept up the old controversy between the professions, which grows out of the fact that one studies nature from below upwards, and the other from above downwards. The rector maintained that physicians contracted a squint which turns their eyes inwardly, while the muscles which roll their eyes upward become palsied. The doctor retorted that theological students developed a third eyelid,—the nictitating membrane, which is so well known in birds, and which serves to shut out, not all light, but all the light they do not want. Their little skirmishes did not prevent their being very good friends, who had a common interest in many things and many persons. Both were on the committee which had the care of the Library and attended to the purchase of books. Each was scholar enough to know the wants of scholars, and disposed to trust the judgment of the other as to what books should be purchased. Consequently, the clergyman secured the addition to the Library of a good many old theological works which the physician would have called brimstone divinity, and held to be just the thing to kindle fires with,—good books still for those who know how to use them, oftentimes as awful examples of the extreme of disorganization the whole moral system may undergo when a barbarous belief has strangled the natural human instincts. The physician, in the mean time, acquired for the collection some of those medical works where one may find recorded various rare and almost incredible cases, which may not have their like for a whole century, and then repeat themselves, so as to give a new lease of credibility to stories which had come to be looked upon as fables.
Both the clergyman and the physician took a very natural interest in the young man who had come to reside in their neighborhood for the present, perhaps for a long period. The rector would have been glad to see him at church. He would have liked more especially to have had him hear his sermon on the Duties of Young Men to Society. The doctor, meanwhile, was meditating on the duties of society to young men, and wishing that he could gain the young man's confidence, so as to help him out of any false habit of mind or any delusion to which he might be subject, if he had the power of being useful to him.
Dr. Butts was the leading medical practitioner, not only of Arrowhead Village, but of all the surrounding region. He was an excellent specimen of the country doctor, self-reliant, self-sacrificing, working a great deal harder for his living than most of those who call themselves the laboring classes,—as if none but those whose hands were hardened by the use of farming or mechanical implements had any work to do. He had that sagacity without which learning is a mere incumbrance, and he had also a fair share of that learning without which sagacity is like a traveller with a good horse, but who cannot read the directions on the guideboards. He was not a man to be taken in by names. He well knew that oftentimes very innocent-sounding words mean very grave disorders; that all, degrees of disease and disorder are frequently confounded under the same term; that “run down” may stand for a fatigue of mind or body from which a week or a month of rest will completely restore the over-worked patient, or an advanced stage of a mortal illness; that “seedy” may signify the morning's state of feeling, after an evening's over-indulgence, which calls for a glass of soda-water and a cup of coffee, or a dangerous malady which will pack off the subject of it, at the shortest notice, to the south of France. He knew too well that what is spoken lightly of as a “nervous disturbance” may imply that the whole machinery of life is in a deranged condition, and that every individual organ would groan aloud if it had any other language than the terrible inarticulate one of pain by which to communicate with the consciousness.
When, therefore, Dr. Butts heard the word antipatia he did not smile, and say to himself that this was an idle whim, a foolish fancy, which the young man had got into his head. Neither was he satisfied to set down everything to the account of insanity, plausible as that supposition might seem. He was prepared to believe in some exceptional, perhaps anomalous, form of exaggerated sensibility, relating to what class of objects he could not at present conjecture, but which was as vital to the subject of it as the insulating arrangement to a piece of electrical machinery. With this feeling he began to look into the history of antipathies as recorded in all the books and journals on which he could lay his hands.
———————————————
The holder of the Portfolio asks leave to close it for a brief interval. He wishes to say a few words to his readers, before offering them some verses which have no connection with the narrative now in progress.
If one could have before him a set of photographs taken annually, representing the same person as he or she appeared for thirty or forty or fifty years, it would be interesting to watch the gradual changes of aspect from the age of twenty, or even of thirty or forty, to that of threescore and ten. The face might be an uninteresting one; still, as sharing the inevitable changes wrought by time, it would be worth looking at as it passed through the curve of life,—the vital parabola, which betrays itself in the symbolic changes of the features. An inscription is the same thing, whether we read it on slate-stone, or granite, or marble. To watch the lights and shades, the reliefs and hollows, of a countenance through a lifetime, or a large part of it, by the aid of a continuous series of photographs would not only be curious; it would teach us much more about the laws of physiognomy than we could get from casual and unconnected observations.
The same kind of interest, without any assumption of merit to be found in them, I would claim for a series of annual poems, beginning in middle life and continued to what many of my correspondents are pleased to remind me—as if I required to have the fact brought to my knowledge—is no longer youth. Here is the latest of a series of annual poems read during the last thirty-four years. There seems to have been one interruption, but there may have been other poems not recorded or remembered. This, the latest poem of the series, was listened to by the scanty remnant of what was a large and brilliant circle of classmates and friends when the first of the long series was read before them, then in the flush of ardent manhood:—
THE OLD SONG.
The minstrel of the classic lay
Of love and wine who sings
Still found the fingers run astray
That touched the rebel strings.
Of Cadmus he would fair have sung,
Of Atreus and his line;
But all the jocund echoes rung
With songs of love and wine.
Ah, brothers! I would fair have caught
Some fresher fancy's gleam;
My truant accents find, unsought,
The old familiar theme.
Love, Love! but not the sportive child
With shaft and twanging bow,
Whose random arrows drove us wild
Some threescore years ago;
Not Eros, with his joyous laugh,
The urchin blind and bare,
But Love, with spectacles and staff,
And scanty, silvered hair.
Our heads with frosted locks are white,
Our roofs are thatched with snow,
But red, in chilling winter's spite,
Our hearts and hearthstones glow.
Our old acquaintance, Time, drops in,
And while the running sands
Their golden thread unheeded spin,
He warms his frozen hands.
Stay, winged hours, too swift, too sweet,
And waft this message o'er
To all we miss, from all we meet
On life's fast-crumbling shore:
Say that to old affection true
We hug the narrowing chain
That binds our hearts,—alas, how few
The links that yet remain!
The fatal touch awaits them all
That turns the rocks to dust;
From year to year they break and fall,
They break, but never rust.
Say if one note of happier strain
This worn-out harp afford,
—One throb that trembles, not in vain,
Their memory lent its chord.
Say that when Fancy closed her wings
And Passion quenched his fire,
Love, Love, still echoed from the strings
As from Anacreon's lyre!
January 8, 1885.
VII. A RECORD OF ANTIPATHIES
In thinking the whole matter over, Dr. Butts felt convinced that, with care and patience and watching his opportunity, he should get at the secret, which so far had yielded nothing but a single word. It might be asked why he was so anxious to learn what, from all appearances, the young stranger was unwilling to explain. He may have been to some extent infected by the general curiosity of the persons around him, in which good Mrs. Butts shared, and which she had helped to intensify by revealing the word dropped by Paolo. But this was not really his chief motive. He could not look upon this young man, living a life of unwholesome solitude, without a natural desire to do all that his science and his knowledge of human nature could help him to do towards bringing him into healthy relations with the world about him. Still, he would not intrude upon him in any way. He would only make certain general investigations, which might prove serviceable in case circumstances should give him the right to counsel the young man as to his course of life. The first thing to be done was to study systematically the whole subject of antipathies. Then, if any further occasion offered itself, he would be ready to take advantage of it. The resources of the Public Library of the place and his own private collection were put in requisition to furnish him the singular and widely scattered facts of which he was in search.
It is not every reader who will care to follow Dr. Butts in his study of the natural history of antipathies. The stories told about them are, however, very curious; and if some of them may be questioned, there is no doubt that many of the strangest are true, and consequently take away from the improbability of others which we are disposed to doubt.
But in the first place, what do we mean by an antipathy? It is an aversion to some object, which may vary in degree from mere dislike to mortal horror. What the cause of this aversion is we cannot say. It acts sometimes through the senses, sometimes through the imagination, sometimes through an unknown channel. The relations which exist between the human being and all that surrounds him vary in consequence of some adjustment peculiar to each individual. The brute fact is expressed in the phrase “One man's meat is another man's poison.”
In studying the history of antipathies the doctor began with those referable to the sense of taste, which are among the most common. In any collection of a hundred persons there will be found those who cannot make use of certain articles of food generally acceptable. This may be from the disgust they occasion or the effects they have been found to produce. Every one knows individuals who cannot venture on honey, or cheese, or veal, with impunity. Carlyle, for example, complains of having veal set before him,—a meat he could not endure. There is a whole family connection in New England, and that a very famous one, to many of whose members, in different generations, all the products of the dairy are the subjects of a congenital antipathy. Montaigne says there are persons who dread the smell of apples more than they would dread being exposed to a fire of musketry. The readers of the charming story “A Week in a French Country-House” will remember poor Monsieur Jacque's piteous cry in the night: “Ursula, art thou asleep? Oh, Ursula, thou sleepest, but I cannot close my eyes. Dearest Ursula, there is such a dreadful smell! Oh, Ursula, it is such a smell! I do so wish thou couldst smell it! Good-night, my angel!——Dearest! I have found them! They are apples!” The smell of roses, of peonies, of lilies, has been known to cause faintness. The sight of various objects has had singular effects on some persons. A boar's head was a favorite dish at the table of great people in Marshal d'Albret's time; yet he used to faint at the sight of one. It is not uncommon to meet with persons who faint at the sight of blood. One of the most inveterately pugnacious of Dr. Butts's college-mates confessed that he had this infirmity. Stranger and far more awkward than this is the case mentioned in an ancient collection, where the subject of the antipathy fainted at the sight of any object of a red color. There are sounds, also, which have strange effects on some individuals. Among the obnoxious noises are the crumpling of silk stuffs, the sound of sweeping, the croaking of frogs. The effects in different cases have been spasms, a sense of strangling, profuse sweating,—all showing a profound disturbance of the nervous system.
All these effects were produced by impressions on the organs of sense, seemingly by direct agency on certain nerve centres. But there is another series of cases in which the imagination plays a larger part in the phenomena. Two notable examples are afforded in the lives of two very distinguished personages.
Peter the Great was frightened, when an infant, by falling from a bridge into the water. Long afterward, when he had reached manhood, this hardy and resolute man was so affected by the sound of wheels rattling over a bridge that he had to discipline himself by listening to the sound, in spite of his dread of it, in order to overcome his antipathy. The story told by Abbe Boileau of Pascal is very similar to that related of Peter. As he was driving in his coach and four over the bridge at Neuilly, his horses took fright and ran away, and the leaders broke from their harness and sprang into the river, leaving the wheel-horses and the carriage on the bridge. Ever after this fright it is said that Pascal had the terrifying sense that he was just on the edge of an abyss, ready to fall over.
What strange early impression was it which led a certain lady always to shriek aloud if she ventured to enter a church, as it is recorded? The old and simple way of accounting for it would be the scriptural one, that it was an unclean spirit who dwelt in her, and who, when she entered the holy place and brought her spiritual tenant into the presence of the sacred symbols, “cried with a loud voice, and came out of” her. A very singular case, the doctor himself had recorded, and which the reader may accept as authentic, is the following: At the head of the doctor's front stairs stood, and still stands, a tall clock, of early date and stately presence. A middle-aged visitor, noticing it as he entered the front door, remarked that he should feel a great unwillingness to pass that clock. He could not go near one of those tall timepieces without a profound agitation, which he dreaded to undergo. This very singular idiosyncrasy he attributed to a fright when he was an infant in the arms of his nurse.
She was standing near one of those tall clocks, when the cord which supported one of its heavy leaden weights broke, and the weight came crashing down to the bottom of the case. Some effect must have been produced upon the pulpy nerve centres from which they never recovered. Why should not this happen, when we know that a sudden mental shock may be the cause of insanity? The doctor remembered the verse of “The Ancient Mariner:”
“I moved my lips; the pilot shrieked
And fell down in a fit;
The holy hermit raised his eyes
And prayed where he did sit.
I took the oars; the pilot's boy,
Who now doth crazy go,
Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro.”
This is only poetry, it is true, but the poet borrowed the description from nature, and the records of our asylums could furnish many cases where insanity was caused by a sudden fright.
More than this, hardly a year passes that we do not read of some person, a child commonly, killed outright by terror,—scared to death, literally. Sad cases they often are, in which, nothing but a surprise being intended, the shock has instantly arrested the movements on which life depends. If a mere instantaneous impression can produce effects like these, such an impression might of course be followed by consequences less fatal or formidable, but yet serious in their nature. If here and there a person is killed, as if by lightning, by a sudden startling sight or sound, there must be more numerous cases in which a terrible shock is produced by similar apparently insignificant causes,—a shock which falls short of overthrowing the reason and does not destroy life, yet leaves a lasting effect upon the subject of it.
This point, then, was settled in the mind of Dr. Butts, namely, that, as a violent emotion caused by a sudden shock can kill or craze a human being, there is no perversion of the faculties, no prejudice, no change of taste or temper, no eccentricity, no antipathy, which such a cause may not rationally account for. He would not be surprised, he said to himself, to find that some early alarm, like that which was experienced by Peter the Great or that which happened to Pascal, had broken some spring in this young man's nature, or so changed its mode of action as to account for the exceptional remoteness of his way of life. But how could any conceivable antipathy be so comprehensive as to keep a young man aloof from all the world, and make a hermit of him? He did not hate the human race; that was clear enough. He treated Paolo with great kindness, and the Italian was evidently much attached to him. He had talked naturally and pleasantly with the young man he had helped out of his dangerous situation when his boat was upset. Dr. Butts heard that he had once made a short visit to this young man, at his rooms in the University. It was not misanthropy, therefore, which kept him solitary. What could be broad enough to cover the facts of the case? Nothing that the doctor could think of, unless it were some color, the sight of which acted on him as it did on the individual before mentioned, who could not look at anything red without fainting. Suppose this were a case of the same antipathy. How very careful it would make the subject of it as to where he went and with whom he consorted! Time and patience would be pretty sure to bring out new developments, and physicians, of all men in the world, know how to wait as well as how to labor.
Such were some of the crude facts as Dr. Butts found them in books or gathered them from his own experience. He soon discovered that the story had got about the village that Maurice Kirkwood was the victim of an “antipathy,” whatever that word might mean in the vocabulary of the people of the place. If he suspected the channel through which it had reached the little community, and, spreading from that centre, the country round, he did not see fit to make out of his suspicions a domestic casus belli. Paolo might have mentioned it to others as well as to himself. Maurice might have told some friend, who had divulged it. But to accuse Mrs. Butts, good Mrs. Butts, of petit treason in telling one of her husband's professional secrets was too serious a matter to be thought of. He would be a little more careful, he promised himself, the next time, at any rate; for he had to concede, in spite of every wish to be charitable in his judgment, that it was among the possibilities that the worthy lady had forgotten the rule that a doctor's patients must put their tongues out, and a doctor's wife must keep her tongue in.
VIII. THE PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.
The Secretary of this association was getting somewhat tired of the office, and the office was getting somewhat tired of him. It occurred to the members of the Society that a little fresh blood infused into it might stir up the general vitality of the organization. The woman suffragists saw no reason why the place of Secretary need as a matter of course be filled by a person of the male sex. They agitated, they made domiciliary visits, they wrote notes to influential citizens, and finally announced as their candidate the young lady who had won and worn the school name of “The Terror,” who was elected. She was just the person for the place: wide awake, with all her wits about her, full of every kind of knowledge, and, above all, strong on points of order and details of management, so that she could prompt the presiding officer, to do which is often the most essential duty of a Secretary. The President, the worthy rector, was good at plain sailing in the track of the common moralities and proprieties, but was liable to get muddled if anything came up requiring swift decision and off-hand speech. The Terror had schooled herself in the debating societies of the Institute, and would set up the President, when he was floored by an awkward question, as easily as if he were a ninepin which had been bowled over.
It has been already mentioned that the Pansophian Society received communications from time to time from writers outside of its own organization. Of late these had been becoming more frequent. Many of them were sent in anonymously, and as there were numerous visitors to the village, and two institutions not far removed from it, both full of ambitious and intelligent young persons, it was often impossible to trace the papers to their authors. The new Secretary was alive with curiosity, and as sagacious a little body as one might find if in want of a detective. She could make a pretty shrewd guess whether a paper was written by a young or old person, by one of her own sex or the other, by an experienced hand or a novice.
Among the anonymous papers she received was one which exercised her curiosity to an extraordinary degree. She felt a strong suspicion that “the Sachem,” as the boat-crews used to call him, “the Recluse,” “the Night-Hawk,” “the Sphinx,” as others named him, must be the author of it. It appeared to her the production of a young person of a reflective, poetical turn of mind. It was not a woman's way of writing; at least, so thought the Secretary. The writer had travelled much; had resided in Italy, among other places. But so had many of the summer visitors and residents of Arrowhead Village. The handwriting was not decisive; it had some points of resemblance with the pencilled orders for books which Maurice sent to the Library, but there were certain differences, intentional or accidental, which weakened this evidence. There was an undertone in the essay which was in keeping with the mode of life of the solitary stranger. It might be disappointment, melancholy, or only the dreamy sadness of a young person who sees the future he is to climb, not as a smooth ascent, but as overhanging him like a cliff, ready to crush him, with all his hopes and prospects. This interpretation may have been too imaginative, but here is the paper, and the reader can form his own opinion:
MY THREE COMPANIONS.
“I have been from my youth upwards a wanderer. I do not mean constantly flitting from one place to another, for my residence has often been fixed for considerable periods. From time to time I have put down in a notebook the impressions made upon me by the scenes through which I have passed. I have long hesitated whether to let any of my notes appear before the public. My fear has been that they were too subjective, to use the metaphysician's term,—that I have seen myself reflected in Nature, and not the true aspects of Nature as she was meant to be understood. One who should visit the Harz Mountains would see—might see, rather his own colossal image shape itself on the morning mist. But if in every mist that rises from the meadows, in every cloud that hangs upon the mountain, he always finds his own reflection, we cannot accept him as an interpreter of the landscape.
“There must be many persons present at the meetings of the Society to which this paper is offered who have had experiences like that of its author. They have visited the same localities, they have had many of the same thoughts and feelings. Many, I have no doubt. Not all,—no, not all. Others have sought the companionship of Nature; I have been driven to it. Much of my life has been passed in that communion. These pages record some of the intimacies I have formed with her under some of her various manifestations.
“I have lived on the shore of the great ocean, where its waves broke wildest and its voice rose loudest.
“I have passed whole seasons on the banks of mighty and famous rivers.
“I have dwelt on the margin of a tranquil lake, and floated through many a long, long summer day on its clear waters.
“I have learned the 'various language' of Nature, of which poetry has spoken,—at least, I have learned some words and phrases of it. I will translate some of these as I best may into common speech.
“The OCEAN says to the dweller on its shores:—
“You are neither welcome nor unwelcome. I do not trouble myself with the living tribes that come down to my waters. I have my own people, of an older race than yours, that grow to mightier dimensions than your mastodons and elephants; more numerous than all the swarms that fill the air or move over the thin crust of the earth. Who are you that build your palaces on my margin? I see your white faces as I saw the dark faces of the tribes that came before you, as I shall look upon the unknown family of mankind that will come after you. And what is your whole human family but a parenthesis in a single page of my history? The raindrops stereotyped themselves on my beaches before a living creature left his footprints there. This horseshoe-crab I fling at your feet is of older lineage than your Adam,—perhaps, indeed, you count your Adam as one of his descendants. What feeling have I for you? Not scorn, not hatred,—not love,—not loathing. No!—-indifference,—blank indifference to you and your affairs that is my feeling, say rather absence of feeling, as regards you.—-Oh yes, I will lap your feet, I will cool you in the hot summer days, I will bear you up in my strong arms, I will rock you on my rolling undulations, like a babe in his cradle. Am I not gentle? Am I not kind? Am I not harmless? But hark! The wind is rising, and the wind and I are rough playmates! What do you say to my voice now? Do you see my foaming lips? Do you feel the rocks tremble as my huge billows crash against them? Is not my anger terrible as I dash your argosy, your thunder-bearing frigate, into fragments, as you would crack an eggshell?—No, not anger; deaf, blind, unheeding indifference,—that is all. Out of me all things arose; sooner or later, into me all things subside. All changes around me; I change not. I look not at you, vain man, and your frail transitory concerns, save in momentary glimpses: I look on the white face of my dead mistress, whom I follow as the bridegroom follows the bier of her who has changed her nuptial raiment for the shroud.
“Ye whose thoughts are of eternity, come dwell at my side. Continents and islands grow old, and waste and disappear. The hardest rock crumbles; vegetable and animal kingdoms come into being, wax great, decline, and perish, to give way to others, even as human dynasties and nations and races come and go. Look on me! 'Time writes no wrinkle' on my forehead. Listen to me! All tongues are spoken on my shores, but I have only one language: the winds taught me their vowels the crags and the sands schooled me in my rough or smooth consonants. Few words are mine but I have whispered them and sung them and shouted them to men of all tribes from the time when the first wild wanderer strayed into my awful presence. Have you a grief that gnaws at your heart-strings? Come with it to my shore, as of old the priest of far-darting Apollo carried his rage and anguish to the margin of the loud-roaring sea. There, if anywhere you will forget your private and short-lived woe, for my voice speaks to the infinite and the eternal in your consciousness.
“To him who loves the pages of human history, who listens to the voices of the world about him, who frequents the market and the thoroughfare, who lives in the study of time and its accidents rather than in the deeper emotions, in abstract speculation and spiritual contemplation, the RIVER addresses itself as his natural companion.
“Come live with me. I am active, cheerful, communicative, a natural talker and story-teller. I am not noisy, like the ocean, except occasionally when I am rudely interrupted, or when I stumble and get a fall. When I am silent you can still have pleasure in watching my changing features. My idlest babble, when I am toying with the trifles that fall in my way, if not very full of meaning, is at least musical. I am not a dangerous friend, like the ocean; no highway is absolutely safe, but my nature is harmless, and the storms that strew the beaches with wrecks cast no ruins upon my flowery borders. Abide with me, and you shall not die of thirst, like the forlorn wretches left to the mercies of the pitiless salt waves. Trust yourself to me, and I will carry you far on your journey, if we are travelling to the same point of the compass. If I sometimes run riot and overflow your meadows, I leave fertility behind me when I withdraw to my natural channel. Walk by my side toward the place of my destination. I will keep pace with you, and you shall feel my presence with you as that of a self-conscious being like yourself. You will find it hard to be miserable in my company; I drain you of ill-conditioned thoughts as I carry away the refuse of your dwelling and its grounds.”
But to him whom the ocean chills and crushes with its sullen indifference, and the river disturbs with its never-pausing and never-ending story, the silent LAKE shall be a refuge and a place of rest for his soul.
“'Vex not yourself with thoughts too vast for your limited faculties,' it says; 'yield not yourself to the babble of the running stream. Leave the ocean, which cares nothing for you or any living thing that walks the solid earth; leave the river, too busy with its own errand, too talkative about its own affairs, and find peace with me, whose smile will cheer you, whose whisper will soothe you. Come to me when the morning sun blazes across my bosom like a golden baldric; come to me in the still midnight, when I hold the inverted firmament like a cup brimming with jewels, nor spill one star of all the constellations that float in my ebon goblet. Do you know the charm of melancholy? Where will you find a sympathy like mine in your hours of sadness? Does the ocean share your grief? Does the river listen to your sighs? The salt wave, that called to you from under last month's full moon, to-day is dashing on the rocks of Labrador; the stream, that ran by you pure and sparkling, has swallowed the poisonous refuse of a great city, and is creeping to its grave in the wide cemetery that buries all things in its tomb of liquid crystal. It is true that my waters exhale and are renewed from one season to another; but are your features the same, absolutely the same, from year to year? We both change, but we know each other through all changes. Am I not mirrored in those eyes of yours? And does not Nature plant me as an eye to behold her beauties while she is dressed in the glories of leaf and flower, and draw the icy lid over my shining surface when she stands naked and ashamed in the poverty of winter?'
“I have had strange experiences and sad thoughts in the course of a life not very long, but with a record which much longer lives could not match in incident. Oftentimes the temptation has come over me with dangerous urgency to try a change of existence, if such change is a part of human destiny,—to seek rest, if that is what we gain by laying down the burden of life. I have asked who would be the friend to whom I should appeal for the last service I should have need of. Ocean was there, all ready, asking no questions, answering none. What strange voyages, downward through its glaucous depths, upwards to its boiling and frothing surface, wafted by tides, driven by tempests, disparted by rude agencies; one remnant whitening on the sands of a northern beach, one perhaps built into the circle of a coral reef in the Pacific, one settling to the floor of the vast laboratory where continents are built, to emerge in far-off ages! What strange companions for my pall-bearers! Unwieldy sea-monsters, the stories of which are counted fables by the spectacled collectors who think their catalogues have exhausted nature; naked-eyed creatures, staring, glaring, nightmare-like spectres of the ghastly-green abysses; pulpy islands, with life in gelatinous immensity,—what a company of hungry heirs at every ocean funeral! No! No! Ocean claims great multitudes, but does not invite the solitary who would fain be rid of himself.
“Shall I seek a deeper slumber at the bottom of the lake I love than I have ever found when drifting idly over its surface? No, again. I do not want the sweet, clear waters to know me in the disgrace of nature, when life, the faithful body-servant, has ceased caring for me. That must not be. The mirror which has pictured me so often shall never know me as an unwelcome object.
“If I must ask the all-subduing element to be my last friend, and lead me out of my prison, it shall be the busy, whispering, not unfriendly, pleasantly companionable river.
“But Ocean and River and Lake have certain relations to the periods of human life which they who are choosing their places of abode should consider. Let the child play upon the seashore. The wide horizon gives his imagination room to grow in, untrammelled. That background of mystery, without which life is a poor mechanical arrangement, is shaped and colored, so far as it can have outline, or any hue but shadow, on a vast canvas, the contemplation of which enlarges and enriches the sphere of consciousness. The mighty ocean is not too huge to symbolize the aspirations and ambitions of the yet untried soul of the adolescent.
“The time will come when his indefinite mental horizon has found a solid limit, which shuts his prospect in narrower bounds than he would have thought could content him in the years of undefined possibilities. Then he will find the river a more natural intimate than the ocean. It is individual, which the ocean, with all its gulfs and inlets and multitudinous shores, hardly seems to be. It does not love you very dearly, and will not miss you much when you disappear from its margin; but it means well to you, bids you good-morning with its coming waves, and good-evening with those which are leaving. It will lead your thoughts pleasantly away, upwards to its source, downwards to the stream to which it is tributary, or the wide waters in which it is to lose itself. A river, by choice, to live by in middle age.
“In hours of melancholy reflection, in those last years of life which have little left but tender memories, the still companionship of the lake, embosomed in woods, sheltered, fed by sweet mountain brooks and hidden springs, commends itself to the wearied and saddened spirit. I am not thinking of those great inland seas, which have many of the features and much of the danger that belong to the ocean, but of those 'ponds,' as our countrymen used to call them until they were rechristened by summer visitors; beautiful sheets of water from a hundred to a few thousand acres in extent, scattered like raindrops over the map of our Northern sovereignties. The loneliness of contemplative old age finds its natural home in the near neighborhood of one of these tranquil basins.”
Nature does not always plant her poets where they belong, but if we look carefully their affinities betray themselves. The youth will carry his Byron to the rock which overlooks the ocean the poet loved so well. The man of maturer years will remember that the sonorous couplets of Pope which ring in his ears were written on the banks of the Thames. The old man, as he nods over the solemn verse of Wordsworth, will recognize the affinity between the singer and the calm sheet that lay before him as he wrote,—the stainless and sleepy Windermere.
“The dwellers by Cedar Lake may find it an amusement to compare their own feelings with those of one who has lived by the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, by the Nile and the Tiber, by Lake Leman and by one of the fairest sheets of water that our own North America embosoms in its forests.”
Miss Lurida Vincent, Secretary of the Pansophian Society, read this paper, and pondered long upon it. She was thinking very seriously of studying medicine, and had been for some time in frequent communication with Dr. Butts, under whose direction she had begun reading certain treatises, which added to such knowledge of the laws of life in health and in disease as she had brought with her from the Corinna Institute. Naturally enough, she carried the anonymous paper to the doctor, to get his opinion about it, and compare it with her own. They both agreed that it was probably, they would not say certainly, the work of the solitary visitor. There was room for doubt, for there were visitors who might well have travelled to all the places mentioned, and resided long enough on the shores of the waters the writer spoke of to have had all the experiences mentioned in the paper. The Terror remembered a young lady, a former schoolmate, who belonged to one of those nomadic families common in this generation, the heads of which, especially the female heads, can never be easy where they are, but keep going between America and Europe, like so many pith-balls in the electrical experiment, alternately attracted and repelled, never in contented equilibrium. Every few years they pull their families up by the roots, and by the time they have begun to take hold a little with their radicles in the spots to which they have been successively transplanted up they come again, so that they never get a tap-root anywhere. The Terror suspected the daughter of one of these families of sending certain anonymous articles of not dissimilar character to the one she had just received. But she knew the style of composition common among the young girls, and she could hardly believe that it was one of them who had sent this paper. Could a brother of this young lady have written it? Possibly; she knew nothing more than that the young lady had a brother, then a student at the University. All the chances were that Mr. Maurice Kirkwood was the author. So thought Lurida, and so thought Dr. Butts.
Whatever faults there were in this essay, it interested them both. There was nothing which gave the least reason to suspect insanity on the part of the writer, whoever he or she might be. There were references to suicide, it is true, but they were of a purely speculative nature, and did not look to any practical purpose in that direction. Besides, if the stranger were the author of the paper, he certainly would not choose a sheet of water like Cedar Lake to perform the last offices for him, in case he seriously meditated taking unceremonious leave of life and its accidents. He could find a river easily enough, to say nothing of other methods of effecting his purpose; but he had committed himself as to the impropriety of selecting a lake, so they need not be anxious about the white canoe and its occupant, as they watched it skimming the surface of the deep waters.
The holder of the Portfolio would never have ventured to come before the public if he had not counted among his resources certain papers belonging to the records of the Pansophian Society, which he can make free use of, either for the illustration of the narrative, or for a diversion during those intervals in which the flow of events is languid, or even ceases for the time to manifest any progress. The reader can hardly have failed to notice that the old Anchor Tavern had become the focal point where a good deal of mental activity converged. There were the village people, including a number of cultivated families; there were the visitors, among them many accomplished and widely travelled persons; there was the University, with its learned teachers and aspiring young men; there was the Corinna Institute, with its eager, ambitious, hungry-souled young women, crowding on, class after class coming forward on the broad stream of liberal culture, and rounding the point which, once passed, the boundless possibilities of womanhood opened before them. All this furnished material enough and to spare for the records and the archives of the society.
The new Secretary infused fresh life into the meetings. It may be remembered that the girls had said of her, when she was The Terror, that “she knew everything and didn't believe anything.” That was just the kind of person for a secretary of such an association. Properly interpreted, the saying meant that she knew a great deal, and wanted to know a great deal more, and was consequently always on the lookout for information; that she believed nothing without sufficient proof that it was true, and therefore was perpetually asking for evidence where, others took assertions on trust.
It was astonishing to see what one little creature like The Terror could accomplish in the course of a single season. She found out what each member could do and wanted to do. She wrote to the outside visitors whom she suspected of capacity, and urged them to speak at the meetings, or send written papers to be read. As an official, with the printed title at the head of her notes, PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY, she was a privileged personage. She begged the young persons who had travelled to tell something of their experiences. She had contemplated getting up a discussion on the woman's rights question, but being a wary little body, and knowing that the debate would become a dispute and divide the members into two hostile camps, she deferred this project indefinitely. It would be time enough after she had her team well in hand, she said to herself,—had felt their mouths and tried their paces. This expression, as she used it in her thoughts, seems rather foreign to her habits, but there was room in her large brain for a wide range of illustrations and an ample vocabulary. She could not do much with her own muscles, but she had known the passionate delight of being whirled furiously over the road behind four scampering horses, in a rocking stage-coach, and thought of herself in the Secretary's chair as not unlike the driver on his box. A few weeks of rest had allowed her nervous energy to store itself up, and the same powers which had distanced competition in the classes of her school had of necessity to expend themselves in vigorous action in her new office.
Her appeals had their effect. A number of papers were very soon sent in; some with names, some anonymously. She looked these papers over, and marked those which she thought would be worth reading and listening to at the meetings. One of them has just been presented to the reader. As to the authorship of the following one there were many conjectures. A well-known writer, who had spent some weeks at Arrowhead Village, was generally suspected of being its author. Some, however, questioned whether it was not the work of a new hand, who wrote, not from experience, but from his or her ideas of the condition to which a story-teller, a novelist, must in all probability be sooner or later reduced. The reader must judge for himself whether this first paper is the work of an old hand or a novice.
SOME EXPERIENCES OF A NOVELIST.
“I have written a frightful number of stories, forty or more, I think. Let me see. For twelve years two novels a year regularly: that makes twenty-four. In three different years I have written three stories annually: that makes thirty-three. In five years one a year,—thirty-eight. That is all, is n't it? Yes. Thirty-eight, not forty. I wish I could make them all into one composite story, as Mr. Galton does his faces.
“Hero—heroine—mamma—papa—uncle—sister, and so on. Love —obstacles—misery—tears—despair—glimmer of hope—unexpected solution of difficulties—happy finale.