meetings of our Society, but I think we have not yet had the pleasure of
seeing you at any of them. We have supposed that we might be indebted
to you for a paper read at the last meeting, and listened to with
much interest. As it was anonymous, we do not wish to be inquisitive
respecting its authorship; but we desire to say that any papers kindly
sent us by the temporary residents of our village will be welcome, and
if adapted to the wants of our Association will be read at one of its
meetings or printed in its records, or perhaps both read and printed.
May we not hope for your presence at the meeting, which is to take place
next Wednesday evening? Respectfully yours,
LURIDA VINCENT, Secretary of the Pansophian Society.
To this note the Secretary received the following reply: MISS LURIDA
VINCENT,
ARROWHEAD VILLAGE, August 4, 18-.
Secretary of the Pansophian Society:
DEAR MISS VINCENT,--I have received the ticket you refer to, and desire
to express my acknowledgments for the polite attention. I regret that I
have not been and I fear shall not be able to attend the meetings of the
Society; but if any subject occurs to me on which I feel an inclination
to write, it will give me pleasure to send a paper, to be disposed of as
the Society may see fit.
Very respectfully yours, MAURICE KIRKWOOD.
“He says nothing about the authorship of the paper that was read the
other evening,” the Secretary said to herself. “No matter,--he wrote
it,--there is no mistaking his handwriting. We know something about him,
now, at any rate. But why doesn't he come to our meetings? What has his
antipathy to do with his staying away? I must find out what his secret
is, and I will. I don't believe it's harder than it was to solve that
prize problem which puzzled so many teachers, or than beating Crakowitz,
the great chess-player.”
To this enigma, then, The Terror determined to bend all the faculties
which had excited the admiration and sometimes the amazement of those
who knew her in her school-days. It was a very delicate piece of
business; for though Lurida was an intrepid woman's rights advocate, and
believed she was entitled to do almost everything that men dared to,
she knew very well there were certain limits which a young woman like
herself must not pass.
In the mean time Maurice had received a visit from the young student
at the University,--the same whom he had rescued from his dangerous
predicament in the lake. With him had called one of the teachers,--an
instructor in modern languages, a native of Italy. Maurice and the
instructor exchanged a few words in Italian. The young man spoke it with
the ease which implied long familiarity with its use.
After they left, the instructor asked many curious questions about
him,--who he was, how long he had been in the village, whether anything
was known of his history,--all these inquiries with an eagerness which
implied some special and peculiar reason for the interest they evinced.
“I feel satisfied,” the instructor said, “that I have met that young man
in my own country. It was a number of years ago, and of course he
has altered in appearance a good deal; but there is a look about him
of--what shall I call it?---apprehension,--as if he were fearing the
approach of something or somebody. I think it is the way a man would
look that was haunted; you know what I mean,--followed by a spirit or
ghost. He does not suggest the idea of a murderer,--very far from it;
but if he did, I should think he was every minute in fear of seeing the
murdered man's spirit.”
The student was curious, in his turn, to know all the instructor could
recall. He had seen him in Rome, he thought, at the Fountain of Trevi,
where so many strangers go before leaving the city. The youth was in
the company of a man who looked like a priest. He could not mistake
the peculiar expression of his countenance, but that was all he now
remembered about his appearance. His attention had been called to this
young man by seeing that some of the bystanders were pointing at him,
and noticing that they were whispering with each other as if with
reference to him. He should say that the youth was at that time fifteen
or sixteen years old, and the time was about ten years ago.
After all, this evidence was of little or no value. Suppose the youth
were Maurice; what then? We know that he had been in Italy, and had been
there a good while,--or at least we infer so much from his familiarity
with the language, and are confirmed in the belief by his having an
Italian servant, whom he probably brought from Italy when he returned.
If he wrote the paper which was read the other evening, that settles it,
for the writer says he had lived by the Tiber. We must put this scrap of
evidence furnished by the Professor with the other scraps; it may
turn out of some consequence, sooner or later. It is like a piece of a
dissected map; it means almost nothing by itself, but when we find the
pieces it joins with we may discover a very important meaning in it.
In a small, concentrated community like that which centred in and
immediately around Arrowhead Village, every day must have its local
gossip as well as its general news. The newspaper tells the small
community what is going on in the great world, and the busy tongues of
male and female, especially the latter, fill in with the occurrences
and comments of the ever-stirring microcosm. The fact that the Italian
teacher had, or thought he had, seen Maurice ten years before was
circulated and made the most of,--turned over and over like a cake,
until it was thoroughly done on both sides and all through. It was a
very small cake, but better than nothing. Miss Vincent heard this story,
as others did, and talked about it with her friend, Miss Tower. Here was
one more fact to help along.
The two young ladies who had recently graduated at the Corinna Institute
remained, as they had always been, intimate friends. They were the
natural complements of each other. Euthymia represented a complete,
symmetrical womanhood. Her outward presence was only an index of a
large, wholesome, affluent life. She could not help being courageous,
with such a firm organization. She could not help being generous,
cheerful, active. She had been told often enough that she was fair to
look upon. She knew that she was called The Wonder by the schoolmates
who were dazzled by her singular accomplishments, but she did not
overvalue them. She rather tended to depreciate her own gifts, in
comparison with those of her friend, Miss Lurida Vincent. The two agreed
all the better for differing as they did. The octave makes a perfect
chord, when shorter intervals jar more or less on the ear. Each admired
the other with a heartiness which if they had been less unlike, would
have been impossible.
It was a pleasant thing to observe their dependence on each other.
The Terror of the schoolroom was the oracle in her relations with her
friend. All the freedom of movement which The Wonder showed in her
bodily exercises The Terror manifested in the world of thought. She
would fling open a book, and decide in a swift glance whether it had
any message for her. Her teachers had compared her way of reading to the
taking of an instantaneous photograph. When she took up the first book
on Physiology which Dr. Butts handed her, it seemed to him that if she
only opened at any place, and gave one look, her mind drank its meaning
up, as a moist sponge absorbs water. “What can I do with such a creature
as this?” he said to himself. “There is only one way to deal with her,
treat her as one treats a silkworm: give it its mulberry leaf, and it
will spin its own cocoon. Give her the books, and she will spin her own
web of knowledge.”
“Do you really think of studying medicine?” said Dr. Butts to her.
“I have n't made up my mind about that,” she answered, “but I want to
know a little more about this terrible machinery of life and death we
are all tangled in. I know something about it, but not enough. I find
some very strange beliefs among the women I meet with, and I want to be
able to silence them when they attempt to proselyte me to their whims
and fancies. Besides, I want to know everything.”
“They tell me you do, already,” said Dr. Butts.
“I am the most ignorant little wretch that draws the breath of life!”
exclaimed The Terror.
The doctor smiled. He knew what it meant. She had reached that stage of
education in which the vast domain of the unknown opens its illimitable
expanse before the eyes of the student. We never know the extent of
darkness until it is partially illuminated.
“You did not leave the Institute with the reputation of being the most
ignorant young lady that ever graduated there,” said the doctor. “They
tell me you got the highest marks of any pupil on their record since the
school was founded.”
“What a grand thing it was to be the biggest fish in our small
aquarium, to be sure!” answered The Terror. “He was six inches long, the
monster,--a little too big for bait to catch a pickerel with! What did
you hand me that schoolbook for? Did you think I did n't know anything
about the human body?”
“You said you were such an ignorant creature I thought I would try you
with an easy book, by way of introduction.”
The Terror was not confused by her apparent self-contradiction.
“I meant what I said, and I mean what I say. When I talk about my
ignorance, I don't measure myself with schoolgirls, doctor. I don't
measure myself with my teachers, either. You must talk to me as if I
were a man, a grown man, if you mean to teach me anything. Where is your
hat, doctor? Let me try it on.”
The doctor handed her his wide-awake. The Terror's hair was not
naturally abundant, like Euthymia's, and she kept it cut rather short.
Her head used to get very hot when she studied hard. She tried to put
the hat on.
“Do you see that?” she said. “I could n't wear it--it would squeeze my
eyes out of my head. The books told me that women's brains were smaller
than men's: perhaps they are,--most of them,--I never measured a
great many. But when they try to settle what women are good for, by
phrenology, I like to have them put their tape round my head. I don't
believe in their nonsense, for all that. You might as well tell me
that if one horse weighs more than another horse he is worth more,--a
cart-horse that weighs twelve or fourteen hundred pounds better than
Eclipse, that may have weighed a thousand. Give me a list of the best
books you can think of, and turn me loose in your library. I can find
what I want, if you have it; and what I don't find there I will get at
the Public Library. I shall want to ask you a question now and then.”
The doctor looked at her with a kind of admiration, but thoughtfully,
as if he feared she was thinking of a task too formidable for her slight
constitutional resource.
She returned, instinctively, to the apparent contradiction in her
statements about herself.
“I am not a fool, if I am ignorant. Yes, doctor, I sail on a wide sea of
ignorance, but I have taken soundings of some of its shallows and
some of its depths. Your profession deals with the facts of life that
interest me most just now, and I want to know something of it. Perhaps I
may find it a calling such as would suit me.”
“Do you seriously think of becoming a practitioner of medicine?” said
the doctor.
“Certainly, I seriously think of it as a possibility, but I want to know
something more about it first. Perhaps I sha'n't believe in medicine
enough to practise it. Perhaps I sha'n't like it well enough. No matter
about that. I wish to study some of your best books on some of the
subjects that most interest me. I know about bones and muscles and all
that, and about digestion and respiration and such things. I want to
study up the nervous system, and learn all about it. I am of the nervous
temperament myself, and perhaps that is the reason. I want to read about
insanity and all that relates to it.”
A curious expression flitted across the doctor's features as The Terror
said this.
“Nervous system. Insanity. She has headaches, I know,--all those
large-headed, hard-thinking girls do, as a matter of course; but what
has set her off about insanity and the nervous system? I wonder if any
of her more remote relatives are subject to mental disorder. Bright
people very often have crazy relations. Perhaps some of her friends are
in that way. I wonder whether”--the doctor did not speak any of these
thoughts, and in fact hardly shaped his “whether,” for The Terror
interrupted his train of reflection, or rather struck into it in a way
which startled him.
“Where is the first volume of this Medical Cyclopaedia?” she asked,
looking at its empty place on the shelf.
“On my table,” the doctor answered. “I have been consulting it.”
Lurida flung it open, in her eager way, and turned the pages rapidly
until she came to the one she wanted. The doctor cast his eye on the
beading of the page, and saw the large letters A N T.
“I thought so,” he said to himself. “We shall know everything there is
in the books about antipathies now, if we never did before. She has a
special object in studying the nervous system, just as I suspected. I
think she does not care to mention it at this time; but if she finds out
anything of interest she will tell me, if she does anybody. Perhaps
she does not mean to tell anybody. It is a rather delicate business,--a
young girl studying the natural history of a young man. Not quite so
safe as botany or palaeontology!”
Lurida, lately The Terror, now Miss Vincent, had her own plans, and
chose to keep them to herself, for the present, at least. Her hands
were full enough, it might seem, without undertaking the solution of
the great Arrowhead Village enigma. But she was in the most perfect
training, so far as her intelligence was concerned; and the summer rest
had restored her bodily vigor, so that her brain was like an overcharged
battery which will find conductors somewhere to carry off its crowded
energy.
At this time Arrowhead Village was enjoying the most successful season
it had ever known. The Pansophian Society flourished to an extraordinary
degree under the fostering care of the new Secretary. The rector was
a good figure-head as President, but the Secretary was the life of the
Society. Communications came in abundantly: some from the village and
its neighborhood, some from the University and the Institute, some from
distant and unknown sources. The new Secretary was very busy with the
work of examining these papers. After a forenoon so employed, the carpet
of her room looked like a barn floor after a husking-match. A glance at
the manuscripts strewed about, or lying in heaps, would have frightened
any young writer away from the thought of authorship as a business. If
the candidate for that fearful calling had seen the process of selection
and elimination, he would have felt still more desperately. A paper of
twenty pages would come in, with an underscored request to please read
through, carefully. That request alone is commonly sufficient to condemn
any paper, and prevent its having any chance of a hearing; but the
Secretary was not hardened enough yet for that kind of martial law in
dealing with manuscripts. The looker-on might have seen her take up the
paper, cast one flashing glance at its title, read the first sentence
and the last, dip at a venture into two or three pages, and decide as
swiftly as the lightning calculator would add up a column of figures
what was to be its destination. If rejected, it went into the heap
on the left; if approved, it was laid apart, to be submitted to the
Committee for their judgment. The foolish writers who insist on one's
reading through their manuscript poems and stories ought to know how
fatal the request is to their prospects. It provokes the reader, to
begin with. The reading of manuscript is frightful work, at the best;
the reading of worthless manuscript--and most of that which one is
requested to read through is worthless--would add to the terrors of
Tartarus, if any infernal deity were ingenious enough to suggest it as a
punishment.
If a paper was rejected by the Secretary, it did not come before the
Committee, but was returned to the author, if he sent for it, which he
commonly did. Its natural course was to try for admission into some one
of the popular magazines: into “The Sifter,” the most fastidious of them
all; if that declined it, into “The Second Best;” and if that returned
it, into “The Omnivorous.” If it was refused admittance at the doors of
all the magazines, it might at length find shelter in the corner of a
newspaper, where a good deal of very readable verse is to be met with
nowadays, some of which has been, no doubt, presented to the Pansophian
Society, but was not considered up to its standard.
X. A NEW ARRIVAL.
There was a recent accession to the transient population of the village
which gave rise to some speculation. The new-comer was a young fellow,
rather careless in his exterior, but apparently as much at home as if he
owned Arrowhead Village and everything in it. He commonly had a cigar
in his mouth, carried a pocket pistol, of the non-explosive sort, and
a stick with a bulldog's head for its knob; wore a soft hat, a
coarse check suit, a little baggy, and gaiterboots which had been
half-soled,--a Bohemian-looking personage, altogether.
This individual began making explorations in every direction. He was
very curious about the place and all the people in it. He was especially
interested in the Pansophian Society, concerning which he made all
sorts of inquiries. This led him to form a summer acquaintance with the
Secretary, who was pleased to give him whatever information he asked
for; being proud of the Society, as she had a right to be, and knowing
more about it than anybody else.
The visitor could not have been long in the village without hearing
something of Maurice Kirkwood, and the stories, true and false,
connected with his name. He questioned everybody who could tell him
anything about Maurice, and set down the answers in a little note-book
he always had with him.
All this naturally excited the curiosity of the village about this
new visitor. Among the rest, Miss Vincent, not wanting in an attribute
thought to belong more especially to her sex, became somewhat interested
to know more exactly who this inquiring, note-taking personage, who
seemed to be everywhere and to know everybody, might himself be. Meeting
him at the Public Library at a fortunate moment, when there was nobody
but the old Librarian, who was hard of hearing, to interfere with their
conversation, the little Secretary had a chance to try to find out
something about him.
“This is a very remarkable library for a small village to possess,” he
remarked to Miss Lurida.
“It is, indeed,” she said. “Have you found it well furnished with the
books you most want?”
“Oh, yes,--books enough. I don't care so much for the books as I do for
the Newspapers. I like a Review well enough,--it tells you all there
is in a book; but a good abstract of the Review in a Newspaper saves a
fellow the trouble of reading it.”
“You find the papers you want, here, I hope,” said the young lady.
“Oh, I get along pretty well. It's my off-time, and I don't do much
reading or writing. Who is the city correspondent of this place?”
“I don't think we have any one who writes regularly. Now and then, there
is a letter, with the gossip of the place in it, or an account of some
of the doings at our Society. The city papers are always glad to get the
reports of our meetings, and to know what is going on in the village.”
“I suppose you write about the Society to the papers, as you are the
Secretary.”
This was a point-blank shot. She meant to question the young man about
his business, and here she was on the witness-stand. She ducked her
head, and let the question go over her.
“Oh, there are plenty of members who are willing enough to write,
--especially to give an account of their own papers. I think they like
to have me put in the applause, when they get any. I do that sometimes.”
(How much more, she did not say.)
“I have seen some very well written articles, which, from what they
tell me of the Secretary, I should have thought she might have written
herself.”
He looked her straight in the eyes.
“I have transmitted some good papers,” she said, without winking, or
swallowing, or changing color, precious little color she had to change;
her brain wanted all the blood it could borrow or steal, and more too.
“You spoke of Newspapers,” she said, without any change of tone or
manner: “do you not frequently write for them yourself?”
“I should think I did,” answered the young man. “I am a regular
correspondent of 'The People's Perennial and Household Inquisitor.'”
“The regular correspondent from where?”
“Where! Oh, anywhere,--the place does not make much difference. I have
been writing chiefly from Naples and St. Petersburg, and now and then
from Constantinople.”
“How long since your return to this country, may I ask?”
“My return? I have never been out of this country. I travel with a
gazetteer and some guide-books. It is the cheapest way, and you can get
the facts much better from them than by trusting your own observation. I
have made the tour of Europe by the help of them and the newspapers.
But of late I have taken to interviewing. I find that a very pleasant
specialty. It is about as good sport as trout-tickling, and much the
same kind of business. I should like to send the Society an account of
one of my interviews. Don't you think they would like to hear it?”
“I have no doubt they would. Send it to me, and I will look it over; and
if the Committee approve it, we will have it at the next meeting. You
know everything has to be examined and voted on by the Committee,” said
the cautious Secretary.
“Very well,--I will risk it. After it is read, if it is read, please
send it back to me, as I want to sell it to 'The Sifter,' or 'The Second
Best,' or some of the paying magazines.”
This is the paper, which was read at the next meeting of the Pansophian
Society.
“I was ordered by the editor of the newspaper to which I am attached,
'The People's Perennial and Household Inquisitor,' to make a visit to
a certain well-known writer, and obtain all the particulars I could
concerning him and all that related to him. I have interviewed a good
many politicians, who I thought rather liked the process; but I had
never tried any of these literary people, and I was not quite sure
how this one would feel about it. I said as much to the chief, but he
pooh-poohed my scruples. 'It is n't our business whether they like it
or not,' said he; 'the public wants it, and what the public wants it's
bound to have, and we are bound to furnish it. Don't be afraid of your
man; he 's used to it,--he's been pumped often enough to take it
easy, and what you've got to do is to pump him dry. You need n't be
modest,--ask him what you like; he is n't bound to answer, you know.'
“As he lived in a rather nice quarter of the town, I smarted myself up a
little, put on a fresh collar and cuffs, and got a five-cent shine on
my best high-lows. I said to myself, as I was walking towards the house
where he lived, that I would keep very shady for a while and pass for a
visitor from a distance; one of those 'admiring strangers' who call in
to pay their respects, to get an autograph, and go home and say that
they have met the distinguished So and So, which gives them a certain
distinction in the village circle to which they belong.
“My man, the celebrated writer, received me in what was evidently his
reception-room. I observed that he managed to get the light full on my
face, while his own was in the shade. I had meant to have his face in
the light, but he knew the localities, and had arranged things so as
to give him that advantage. It was like two frigates manoeuvring,--each
trying to get to windward of the other. I never take out my
note-book until I and my man have got engaged in artless and earnest
conversation,--always about himself and his works, of course, if he is
an author.
“I began by saying that he must receive a good many callers. Those who
had read his books were naturally curious to see the writer of them.
“He assented, emphatically, to this statement. He had, he said, a great
many callers.
“I remarked that there was a quality in his books which made his readers
feel as if they knew him personally, and caused them to cherish a
certain attachment to him.