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.
“Landscape for background according to season. Plants of each month got
up from botanical calendars.
“I should like much to see the composite novel. Why not apply Mr.
Galton's process, and get thirty-eight stories all in one? All the
Yankees would resolve into one Yankee, all the P----West Britons into
one Patrick, etc., what a saving of time it would be!
“I got along pretty well with my first few stories. I had some
characters around me which, a little disguised, answered well enough.
There was the minister of the parish, and there was an old schoolmaster
either of them served very satisfactorily for grandfathers and
old uncles. All I had to do was to shift some of their leading
peculiarities, keeping the rest. The old minister wore knee-breeches.
I clapped them on to the schoolmaster. The schoolmaster carried a tall
gold-headed cane. I put this in the minister's hands. So with other
things,--I shifted them round, and got a set of characters who, taken
together, reproduced the chief persons of the village where I lived, but
did not copy any individual exactly. Thus it went on for a while; but
by and by my stock company began to be rather too familiarly known,
in spite of their change of costume, and at last some altogether too
sagacious person published what he called a 'key' to several of my
earlier stories, in which I found the names of a number of neighbors
attached to aliases of my own invention. All the 'types,' as he called
them, represented by these personages of my story had come to be
recognized, each as standing for one and the same individual of my
acquaintance. It had been of no use to change the costume. Even changing
the sex did no good. I had a famous old gossip in one of my tales,--a
much-babbling Widow Sertingly. 'Sho!' they all said, that 's old Deacon
Spinner, the same he told about in that other story of his,--only
the deacon's got on a petticoat and a mob-cap,--but it's the same old
sixpence.' So I said to myself, I must have some new characters. I
had no trouble with young characters; they are all pretty much
alike,--dark-haired or light-haired, with the outfits belonging to their
complexion, respectively. I had an old great-aunt, who was a tip-top
eccentric. I had never seen anything just like her in books. So I said,
I will have you, old lady, in one of my stories; and, sure enough, I
fitted her out with a first-rate odd-sounding name, which I got from the
directory, and sent her forth to the world, disguised, as I supposed,
beyond the possibility of recognition. The book sold well, and the
eccentric personage was voted a novelty. A few weeks after it was
published a lawyer called upon me, as the agent of the person in the
directory, whose family name I had used, as he maintained, to his
and all his relatives' great damage, wrong, loss, grief, shame, and
irreparable injury, for which the sum of blank thousand dollars would be
a modest compensation. The story made the book sell, but not enough
to pay blank thousand dollars. In the mean time a cousin of mine had
sniffed out the resemblance between the character in my book and our
great-aunt. We were rivals in her good graces. 'Cousin Pansie' spoke to
her of my book and the trouble it was bringing on me,--she was so sorry
about it! She liked my story,--only those personalities, you know. 'What
personalities?' says old granny-aunt. 'Why, auntie, dear, they do say
that he has brought in everybody we know,--did n't anybody tell you
about--well,--I suppose you ought to know it,--did n't anybody tell you
you were made fun of in that novel?' Somebody--no matter who--happened
to hear all this, and told me. She said granny-aunt's withered old face
had two red spots come to it, as if she had been painting her cheeks
from a pink saucer. No, she said, not a pink saucer, but as if they
were two coals of fire. She sent out and got the book, and made her (the
somebody that I was speaking of) read it to her. When she had heard
as much as she could stand,--for 'Cousin Pansie' explained passages
to her,--explained, you know,--she sent for her lawyer, and that same
somebody had to be a witness to a new will she had drawn up. It was not
to my advantage. 'Cousin Pansie' got the corner lot where the grocery
is, and pretty much everything else. The old woman left me a legacy.
What do you think it was? An old set of my own books, that looked as if
it had been bought out of a bankrupt circulating library.
“After that I grew more careful. I studied my disguises much more
diligently. But after all, what could I do? Here I was, writing stories
for my living and my reputation. I made a pretty sum enough, and worked
hard enough to earn it. No tale, no money. Then every story that went
from my workshop had to come up to the standard of my reputation,
and there was a set of critics,--there is a set of critics now
and everywhere,--that watch as narrowly for the decline of a man's
reputation as ever a village half drowned out by an inundation watched
for the falling of the waters. The fame I had won, such as it was,
seemed to attend me,--not going before me in the shape of a woman with
a trumpet, but rather following me like one of Actaeon's hounds, his
throat open, ready to pull me down and tear me. What a fierce enemy
is that which bays behind us in the voice of our proudest bygone
achievement!
“But, as I said above, what could I do? I must write novels, and I must
have characters. 'Then why not invent them?' asks some novice. Oh, yes!
Invent them! You can invent a human being that in certain aspects
of humanity will answer every purpose for which your invention was
intended. A basket of straw, an old coat and pair of breeches, a hat
which has been soaked, sat upon, stuffed a broken window, and had a
brood of chickens raised in it,--these elements, duly adjusted to each
other, will represent humanity so truthfully that the crows will avoid
the cornfield when your scarecrow displays his personality. Do you
think you can make your heroes and heroines,--nay, even your scrappy
supernumeraries,--out of refuse material, as you made your scarecrow?
You can't do it. You must study living people and reproduce them. And
whom do you know so well as your friends? You will show up your friends,
then, one after another. When your friends give out, who is left for
you? Why, nobody but your own family, of course. When you have used
up your family, there is nothing left for you but to write your
autobiography.
“After my experience with my grand-aunt, I be came more cautious, very
naturally. I kept traits of character, but I mixed ages as well as
sexes. In this way I continued to use up a large amount of material,
which looked as if it were as dangerous as dynamite to meddle with.
Who would have expected to meet my maternal uncle in the guise of a
schoolboy? Yet I managed to decant his characteristics as nicely as the
old gentleman would have decanted a bottle of Juno Madeira through that
long siphon which he always used when the most sacred vintages were
summoned from their crypts to render an account of themselves on his
hospitable board. It was a nice business, I confess, but I did it, and I
drink cheerfully to that good uncle's memory in a glass of wine from
his own cellar, which, with many other more important tokens of his good
will, I call my own since his lamented demise.
“I succeeded so well with my uncle that I thought I would try a course
of cousins. I had enough of them to furnish out a whole gallery of
portraits. There was cousin 'Creeshy,' as we called her; Lucretia, more
correctly. She was a cripple. Her left lower limb had had something
happen to it, and she walked with a crutch. Her patience under her trial
was very pathetic and picturesque, so to speak,--I mean adapted to
the tender parts of a story; nothing could work up better in a
melting paragraph. But I could not, of course, describe her particular
infirmity; that would point her out at once. I thought of shifting the
lameness to the right lower limb, but even that would be seen through.
So I gave the young woman that stood for her in my story a lame elbow,
and put her arm in a sling, and made her such a model of uncomplaining
endurance that my grandmother cried over her as if her poor old heart
would break. She cried very easily, my grandmother; in fact, she had
such a gift for tears that I availed myself of it, and if you remember
old Judy, in my novel 'Honi Soit' (Honey Sweet, the booksellers called
it),--old Judy, the black-nurse,--that was my grandmother. She had
various other peculiarities, which I brought out one by one, and
saddled on to different characters. You see she was a perfect mine of
singularities and idiosyncrasies. After I had used her up pretty well,
I came down upon my poor relations. They were perfectly fair game; what
better use could I put them to? I studied them up very carefully, and as
there were a good many of them I helped myself freely. They lasted me,
with occasional intermissions, I should say, three or four years. I had
to be very careful with my poor relations,--they were as touchy as they
could be; and as I felt bound to send a copy of my novel, whatever it
might be, to each one of them,--there were as many as a dozen,--I took
care to mix their characteristic features, so that, though each might
suspect I meant the other, no one should think I meant him or her. I
got through all my relations at last except my father and mother. I had
treated my brothers and sisters pretty fairly, all except Elisha and
Joanna. The truth is they both had lots of odd ways,--family traits,
I suppose, but were just different enough from each other to figure
separately in two different stories. These two novels made me some
little trouble; for Elisha said he felt sure that I meant Joanna in one
of them, and quarrelled with me about it; and Joanna vowed and declared
that Elnathan, in the other, stood for brother 'Lisha, and that it was
a real mean thing to make fun of folks' own flesh and blood, and treated
me to one of her cries. She was n't handsome when she cried, poor, dear
Joanna; in fact, that was one of the personal traits I had made use of
in the story that Elisha found fault with.
“So as there was nobody left but my father and mother, you see for
yourself I had no choice. There was one great advantage in dealing with
them,--I knew them so thoroughly. One naturally feels a certain delicacy
it handling from a purely artistic point of view persons who have been
so near to him. One's mother, for instance: suppose some of her little
ways were so peculiar that the accurate delineation of them would
furnish amusement to great numbers of readers; it would not be without
hesitation that a writer of delicate sensibility would draw her
portrait, with all its whimsicalities, so plainly that it should be
generally recognized. One's father is commonly of tougher fibre than
one's mother, and one would not feel the same scruples, perhaps, in
using him professionally as material in a novel; still, while you are
employing him as bait,--you see I am honest and plain-spoken, for your
characters are baits to catch readers with,--I would follow kind
Izaak Walton's humane counsel about the frog you are fastening to your
fish-hook: fix him artistically, as he directs, but in so doing I use
him as though you loved him.'
“I have at length shown up, in one form and another, all my townsmen
who have anything effective in their bodily or mental make-up, all
my friends, all my relatives; that is, all my blood relatives. It has
occurred to me that I might open a new field in the family connection of
my father-in-law and mother-in-law. We have been thinking of paying them
a visit, and I shall have an admirable opportunity of studying them
and their relatives and visitors. I have long wanted a good chance for
getting acquainted with the social sphere several grades below that to
which I am accustomed, and I have no doubt that I shall find matter for
half a dozen new stories among those connections of mine. Besides, they
live in a Western city, and one doesn't mind much how he cuts up the
people of places he does n't himself live in. I suppose there is not
really so much difference in people's feelings, whether they live in
Bangor or Omaha, but one's nerves can't be expected to stretch across
the continent. It is all a matter of greater or less distance. I read
this morning that a Chinese fleet was sunk, but I did n't think half
so much about it as I did about losing my sleeve button, confound
it! People have accused me of want of feeling; they misunderstand the
artist-nature,--that is all. I obey that implicitly; I am sorry if
people don't like my descriptions, but I have done my best. I have
pulled to pieces all the persons I am acquainted with, and put them
together again in my characters. The quills I write with come from live
geese, I would have you know. I expect to get some first-rate pluckings
from those people I was speaking of, and I mean to begin my thirty-ninth
novel as soon as I have got through my visit.”
IX. THE SOCIETY AND ITS NEW SECRETARY.
There is no use in trying to hurry the natural course of events, in a
narrative like this. June passed away, and July, and August had come,
and as yet the enigma which had completely puzzled Arrowhead Village and
its visitors remained unsolved. The white canoe still wandered over the
lake, alone, ghostly, always avoiding the near approach of the boats
which seemed to be coming in its direction. Now and then a circumstance
would happen which helped to keep inquiry alive. Good horsemanship was
not so common among the young men of the place and its neighborhood that
Maurice's accomplishment in that way could be overlooked. If there was
a wicked horse or a wild colt whose owner was afraid of him, he would
be commended to Maurice's attention. Paolo would lead him to his master
with all due precaution,--for he had no idea of risking his neck on the
back of any ill-conditioned beast,--and Maurice would fasten on his long
spurs, spring into the saddle, and very speedily teach the creature good
behavior. There soon got about a story that he was what the fresh-water
fisherman called “one o' them whisperers.” It is a common legend enough,
coming from the Old World, but known in American horse-talking circles,
that some persons will whisper certain words in a horse's ear which
will tame him if he is as wild and furious as ever Cruiser was. All this
added to the mystery which surrounded the young man. A single improbable
or absurd story amounts to very little, but when half a dozen such
stories are told about the same individual or the same event, they begin
to produce the effect of credible evidence. If the year had been 1692
and the place had been Salem Village, Maurice Kirkwood would have run
the risk of being treated like the Reverend George Burroughs.
Miss Lurida Vincent's curiosity had been intensely excited with
reference to the young man of whom so many stories were told. She had
pretty nearly convinced herself that he was the author of the paper on
Ocean, Lake, and River, which had been read at one of the meetings of
the Pansophian Society. She was very desirous of meeting him, if it
were possible. It seemed as if she might, as Secretary of the Society,
request the cooperation of any of the visitors, without impropriety.
So, after much deliberation, she wrote a careful note, of which the
following is an exact copy. Her hand was bold, almost masculine, a
curious contrast to that of Euthymia, which was delicately feminine.
PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.
ARROWHEAD VILLAGE, August 3, 18-. MAURICE KIRKWOOD, ESQ.