AN ARRIVAL--A PRESENT FROM A CONGRESSMAN--MEDITATIONS UPON
HIS PURPOSE--THE PATENT OFFICE REPORT OF THE FUTURE--A PLAN FOR
REVOLUTIONIZING PUBLIC DOCUMENTS AND OPENING A NEW DEPARTMENT OF
LITERATURE--OUR TRIP TO SALEM--A TRAGICAL INCIDENT--THE LAST OF
LIEUTENANT SMILEY.
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A very mysterious package came to me through the post-office yesterday.
I brought it home unopened, and, as is usual in such cases, we began to
speculate upon the nature of the contents before we broke the seals.
Everybody has a disposition to dally for a while with a letter or a
package from an unknown source. Mrs. Adeler felt the parcel carefully,
and said she was sure it was something from her aunt--something for the
baby, probably. Bob imagined that it was an infernal machine forwarded
by the revengeful Stonebury, and he insisted that I should put it to
soak in a bucket of water for a few hours before removing the wrapper.
The children were hopeful that some benign fairy had adopted this method
of supplying the Adeler family with supernatural confectionery; and for
my part, I had no doubt that some one of my friends among the publishers
had sent me half a dozen of the latest books.
We opened the bundle gradually. When the outside casing was torn away,
another envelope remained, and as this was slowly removed the excitement
and curiosity reached an almost painful degree of intensity. At last all
the papers were taken off, and I lifted from among them a large black
volume. It was only a patent-office report sent to me by that
incorruptible statesman and devoted patriot, the Congressman from our
State.
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I have endeavored to conjecture why he should have selected me as the
object of such a demonstration. Certainly he did not expect me to read
the report. He knows that I, as a man of at least ordinary intelligence,
would endure torture first. I cannot think that he hoped to purchase my
vote by such a cheap expedient. Congressmen do, I believe, still cherish
the theory that the present of a patent-office report to a constituent
secures for the donor the fealty of the recipient; but it is a delusion.
Such a gift fills the soul of an unoffending man with gloomy and
murderous thoughts. Every one feels at times as if he would like to
butcher some of his fellow-men; and my appetite for slaughter only
becomes keen when I meet a Congressman who has sent me a patent-office
report. Neither can I accept the suggestion that my representative was
deceived by the supposition that I would be grateful for such an
intimation that an eminent man, even amid the oppressive cares of State,
has not forgotten so humble a worm as I. He knows me well; and although
I am aware that there is in Washington a prevalent theory that a wild
thrill of exultation agitates the heart of a constituent when he
receives a public document or a flatulent oration from a lawmaker, my
Congressman is better informed. He would not insult me in such a manner.
I can only account for his conduct upon the theory that he misdirected
the volume, which he intended for some one else, or upon the supposition
that he has heard me speak of the necessity for the occasional
bombardment of Cooley's dog at night, and he conceived that he would be
helping a good cause by supplying me with a new and formidable missile.
I have never attacked a dog with a patent-office report, but I can
imagine that the animal might readily be slain with such a weapon. A
projectile should have ponderosity; and a patent-office report has more
of that quality to the cubic inch than any other object with which I am
familiar. Still, I do not care to tax the treasury of the United States
for material with which to assail Cooley's dog. I would rather endure
the nocturnal ululations, and have the money applied to the liquidation
of the national debt.
It is, however, apparent that Congressmen will never surrender the
patent-office report; and if this is admitted, it seems to me that the
man who succeeds in infusing into those volumes such an amount of
interest that people will be induced to read them will have a right to
be regarded as a great public benefactor. I suppose no human being ever
did read one of them. It is tolerably certain that any man who would
deliberately undertake to peruse one from beginning to end would be
regarded as a person who ought not to be at large. His friends would be
justified in placing him in an asylum. I think I can suggest a method by
which a reform can be effected. It is to take the material that comes to
hand each year and to work it up into a continuous story, which may be
filled in with tragedy and sentiment and humor.
For instance, if a man came prowling around the patent-office with an
improvement in hayrakes, I should name that man Alphonso and start him
off in the story as the abandoned villain; Alphonso lying in wait, as it
were, behind a dark corner, for the purpose of scooping his rival with
that improved hay-rake. And then the hero would be a man, suppose we
say, who desired an extension of a patent on accordeons. I should call
such a person Lucullus, and plant him, with a working model of the
accordeon, under the window of the boarding-house where the heroine,
Amelia, who would be a woman who had applied for a patent on a new kind
of red flannel frills, lay sleeping under the soothing influence of the
tunes squeezed from the accordeon of Lucullus.
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In the midst of the serenade, let us suppose, in comes a man who has
just got out some extraordinary kind of a fowling-piece about which he
wants to interview the head of the department. I should make this being
Amelia's father and call him Smith, because that name is full of poetry
and sweetness and wild, unearthly music. Then, while Lucullus was
mashing out delicious strains, I might make Alphonso rush on Smith with
his hay-rake, thinking he was Lucullus, and in the fight which would
perhaps ensue Smith might blow out Alphonso's brains somehow on the spot
by a single discharge, we might assume, of Smith's extraordinary
fowling-piece, while Lucullus could be arrested upon the suit of the
composer who had a copyright on the tune with which he solaced Amelia.
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If any ingenious undertaker should haunt the patent-office at this
crisis of the story with a species of metallic coffin, I might lay
Alphonso away comfortably in one of them and have a funeral, or I might
add a thrill of interest to the narrative by resuscitating him with
vegetable pills, in case any benefactor of the race should call to
secure his rights as the sole manufacturer of such articles. In the mean
time, Lucullus, languishing in jail, could very readily burst his
fetters and regain his liberty, provided some man of inventive talent
called on the commissioner to take out searches, say, on some kind of a
revertible crowbar.
Then the interest of the story would be sustained, and a few more
machines of various kinds could be worked in, if, for instance, I should
cause this escaped convict of mine to ascertain that the musical
composer had won the heart of Amelia, in the absence of her lover, by
offering to bring her flannel frills into market, and to allow her a
royalty, we will assume, of ten cents a frill. When Lucullus hears of
this, I should induce him to try to obtain the influence of Amelia's
parents in his behalf by propitiating old Mr. Smith with the latest
variety of bunion plaster for which a patent was wanted, while Mrs.
Smith could be appeased either with a gingham umbrella with an
improvement of six or seven extra ribs, or else a lot of galvanized gum
rings, if any inventor brought such things around, for her
grandchildren.
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Then, for the sake of breaking the monotony of these intrigues, we could
have a little more of the revivified Alphonso. I could very readily fill
the heart of that reanimated corpse with baffled rage, and cause him to
sell to old Smith one of McBride's improved hydraulic rams. Smith could
be depicted as an infatuated being who placed that ram down in the
meadow and caused it to force water up to his house. And Alphonso, of
course, with malignant hatred in his soul, would meddle with the
machine, and fumble around until he spoiled it, so that Smith could not
stop it, and it would continue to pump until the Smiths had a cascade
flowing from their attic window. Mrs. Smith, in her despair, might
impale herself on a variety of reversible toasting-fork, and die
mingling the inventor's name with maledictions and groans, while Smith,
in the anguish of his soul, could live in the barn, from whence he could
use an ingenious kind of breech-loading gun--patent applied for--to
perforate artists who came around to sketch the falls.
In the mean time, Lucullus might come to the rescue with a suction pump
and save the Smith mansion, only to find that Amelia had flown with the
composer, and had gone to sea in a ship with a patent copper bottom, and
a kind of a binnacle for which an extension had been granted by Congress
on the 26th of February. It would then be well, perhaps, to have that
copper-bottomed ship attacked by pirates, and after a bloody
hand-to-hand contest, in which the composer could sink the pirate craft
with the model of a gunpowder pile-driver which he has in the cabin, the
enraged corsairs should swarm upon the deck of the other ship for the
purpose of putting the whole party to the sword. And, of course, at this
painful crisis it would be singularly happy to cause it to turn out that
the chief pirate is our old friend Alphonso, who had sold out his
interest in his hay-rake, discontinued his speculations in hydraulic
rams and become a rover upon the seas.
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The composer, it would seem, would then be in a particularly tight
place; and if the commissioner of patents had any romance in his soul,
he would permit me to cause that pirate to toss the musician overboard.
Amelia would then tear herself from the pirate's loathsome embrace and
plunge in after him. The two would float ashore on a liferaft, if any
applications of that kind happened to be presented to the department.
When they got to land, Amelia would shiver with cold until her jaws
rattled, and the painful truth would be disclosed to her lover that she
wore teeth which were attached to one of the gutta-percha plates about
which there was a controversy in the courts.
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Then, if we seemed to be approaching the end of the report, I think I
would cause the composer to shriek "False! false!" or to use some
exciting language of that kind, and to tear out his hair and wring his
nose and fly off with a broken heart and a blasted life to join the
pirates and to play melancholy airs in a minor key, expressive of
delusive dreams, for ever and for ever, upon some kind of a
double-barreled flute with a copyright on it.
Thus even the prosaic material of which the patent-office reports are
constructed could be made to yield entertainment and instruction, and
afford a basis of succulent and suggestive fact for a superstructure of
pathetic and blood-curdling fiction. The advantages of adopting such a
method in constructing these documents would be especially marked in the
case of Congressmen. The member who now sends a patent-office report to
one of his constituents is regarded by that man as a kind of moral ruin
who ought to be put in some place where it would be impossible for him
to destroy the happiness and poison the peace of unoffending families.
But when a competent novelist prepares those reports, when he throws
over them the glamour of his fancy, when he adorns them with his
graceful rhetoric, and gives a certain intense human interest to all the
hay-rakes and gum rings and suction pumps which now fill the leaden
pages, these reports will be sought after; their tone will be changed;
children will cry for them; Sunday-schools will offer them as rewards,
and the intelligent American voter whose mind craves healthy literature
will elect to Congress the man who will promise to send him the greatest
number of copies.
* * * * *
Here is the story of a tragical event of which I was a witness, and
which has created a profound impression upon the people of this
community.
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An aunt of Bessie Magruder's lives at Salem; and as she had never seen
Bob, she invited him and his betrothed to visit her one day last week,
coupling the invitation with a request that we and the elder Magruders
would come at the same time and take dinner with her. When the boat from
up the river arrived at New Castle, the entire party of us went aboard.
As the steamer shot across the water to Delaware City, Bob and Bessie
wandered away by themselves, while the rest of us passed the time
pleasantly in conversation. At Delaware City we came out of the cabin to
watch the people as they passed over the gangway. To our surprise and
vexation, Lieutenant Smiley appeared among them. As he pressed forward
in the throng some one jostled him roughly, when he uttered a fierce
oath and aimed a blow at the offender. It missed the mark, and he
plunged forward heavily. He would have fallen had not one of the boat's
crew caught him in his arms. We saw then that he was intoxicated.
I watched Bob as he looked at the wretched man. His face flushed with
indignation as he recalled the injury done to him by Smiley, and he
looked as if he would have found intense satisfaction in an attempt to
give the lieutenant a thrashing on the spot. But he did not contemplate
such a performance, and Bessie clung tightly to his arm, half afraid
that he might have a sudden and irresistible impulse to revenge, and
half afraid lest Smiley might make some shocking demonstration against
the party in that public place. As he staggered past us he recognized
us; and, brutalized as he was with liquor, he seemed to feel the shame
of his condition and the infamy of his past conduct. He went away to the
other side of the boat and concealed himself from view.
When the vessel left the wharf and proceeded down the bay, past the
fort, we walked about the lower deck, looking at the scenery and at the
shipping which thronged the water. No one of us perceived Smiley or knew
that he was near us. We had, indeed, suffered ourselves to forget the
scene we had just witnessed, and we were speaking of other matters. As I
stood by the railing with my wife and the Magruders, Bob and Bessie came
out from the cabin, and Bob had just spoken one word, when a man came
with a hurried and uneven step to the gangway. It was Smiley. He had
been sitting in the corner behind one of the beams of the boat, with his
hat pulled over his eyes. The rail at the gangway swings aside to admit
of passage to and from the wharf. Now it opened out upon the water.
Smiley paused for one moment, with his fingers clenched upon it; then he
flung it wide open, and leaped forward into the sea.
A cry of horror came from the lips of those who saw him make the plunge,
and instantly the steamer resounded with screams for help. Before any of
us could recover from the paralysis of terror occasioned by the act,
Smiley rose to the surface far away from the boat, and with a shriek so
awful, so full of agony and despair, that it chilled the blood of those
who heard it, he threw up his arms and sank. In a second Bob tossed off
his coat, and before I could restrain him he leaped into the water. He
rose instantly, and struck out boldly in the direction in which Smiley
had been seen.
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Bessie almost fainted in her father's arms, and Mrs. Adeler was white
with fear. The next moment the steamer stopped, and an attempt was made
to lower the boat. The operation required time; and meanwhile, Bob, who
is a good swimmer, gallantly cleft his way through the waves. I think
Smiley never rose again. For as I entered the lifeboat I could see
Bob turning about and endeavoring to swim toward the steamer. He was a
long way from us, for the vessel had gone far before her headway could
be overcome. Our boatmen pulled with desperate energy lest the brave
fellow should be unable to sustain himself; and as I stood in the stern
and watched him with eager eyes, I could see that he gave signs of being
in distress. It was heavy work in the water, with his clothing on, and
the sea was rough. We were within a hundred yards of him when he sank,
and I felt my heart grow sick as I saw him dragged beneath the waves.
But as we reached the spot one of the men, who was leaning over the
side, uttered an exclamation; and extending his arms, he pulled the
lad's head and shoulders above the surface. A moment later he was in the
boat, but insensible. As we turned about to seek the steamer, we rubbed
his hands and his temples and strove to bring him back to life, and we
seemed to have partial success.
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But when we reached the vessel and placed him upon the cushions in the
cabin, we committed him to better hands than ours. Mrs. Magruder's
medical skill then was of the highest service. She cared for the poor
lad with a motherly tenderness which was as admirable as her art. In a
brief while he revived; and though suffering greatly, he seemed sure of
life. It would have made him blush, even in his weakness, to have heard
the praises heaped upon him for his splendid courage; we rejoiced at
them, but we rejoiced more to think how he had avenged himself upon his
enemy by an act of sublime self-sacrifice.
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And so, as he came back to consciousness, we neared our journey's end;
and while we carried Bob from the boat to the carriage and placed him
among his loving friends, we shuddered to think how the wretched man who
had wrought so much evil was even now sweeping past us in the embrace of
that swift current to burial beneath the rolling billows of the sea.
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