not argue with him at all, for I knew be had the advantage of me. I am not an expert in coffins, and, of course, could not meet him upon his own ground. If it had been the purchase of a horse or gun or dog, or a new typewriting machine, it would have been an altogether different thing.
I simply told the undertaker to go ahead and make such a coffin as I had ordered, regardless of expense. I wanted it softly cushioned, and I told him not to make it unnecessarily wide. I wanted them side by side, with their faces turned upward, of course, so that we could all have a fair last look at them, but I wanted them so close together that they would be touching from head to foot. I wanted it so that when they became dust and bone all would be mingled, and that even the hair, which does not decay for some centuries, which grows, you know, after death, would be all twined together.
The undertaker followed my instructions, for undertakers get to be as mechanical as shoemakers or ticket-sellers; but the relations of the Parasangs and close friends at home thought it an odd thing to have done. I overrode them and had things all my own way, for I knew I was right. I knew the Parasangs better than any one else. I knew what they would have me do were communications between us still possible.
There was something so odd about the love story of the Parasangs that it always interested me. It made me laugh, but I was in full sympathy with them, though sympathy was something of which they were not in need. The queer thing about it was their age.
Mr. Parasang and I were cronies. We were cronies despite the number of years which had elapsed since our respective births. He was seventy-eight. Mrs. Parasang was seventy-five. And they had been married but two years. I knew Mr. Parasang before the wedding, and it was because of my close intimacy with him that I came to know the relations between the two and the story of it. I was just forty years his junior.
I can’t understand why the man died so easily. He was such a vigorous-looking person for his age, and seemed in such perfect health. He was one of your apparently strong, gray-mustached old men, and did not look to be more than sixty-five at most. His wife, I think, was really stronger than he, though she did not appear so young. It is often that way with women. The attack of pneumonia which came upon Parasang was not, the doctors told me, vicious enough to overthrow an ordinary man. I suppose it was merely that this man’s life capital had run out. There is a great deal in heredity. Sometimes I think that each child is born with just such a capital and vitality, something which could be represented in figures if we knew how to do it; and that, though it is affected to an extent by ways of living, the amount of capital determines, within certain limits, to a certainty how long its possessor will do business on this round lump of earth. I think Parasang’s time for liquidation had come. That is all. As for Mrs. Parasang, I think she could have stayed a little longer if she had cared to do so, but she went away because he had gone. One can just lie down and die sometimes.
I have drifted away from what I was going to say–this problem of dying always attracts–but I will try to get back to the subject proper. I was going to tell of the odd love story of the Parasangs, or at least what struck me as odd, because, as I have said, of their ages. There is nothing in it particular aside from that.
A little less than fifty years ago–that must have been about when Taylor was President–Parasang was engaged to marry a girl of whom he was very fond, and who was very fond of him. Well, these two, much in love, and just suited to each other, must needs have a difference of the sort known as a lovers’ quarrel. That in itself was nothing to speak of, for most lovers, being young and fools, do the same thing. But it so happened that these two, being also high-spirited, carried the difference farther than is usual with smitten, callow males and females, and let the breach widen until they separated, as they thought, finally. And she married in course of time, and so did he. It’s a way people have; a way more or less good or bad, according to circumstances. She lived with a commonplace husband until he died and left her a widow, aged sixty or thereabout. Mr. Parasang’s wife died about the same time. What sort of a woman she was I do not know. I remember the old gentleman told me once that she was an excellent housekeeper and had the gift of talking late o’ nights. I could not always tell what Parasang meant when he said things. He was one of the sort of old gentlemen who leave much to be inferred.
Parasang had drifted here, and was a reasonably well-to-do man. His old sweetheart had come also because her late husband had made an investment here, and she found it to her interest to live where her income was mostly earned. Neither knew how near the other was, and the years passed by. Eventually the two met by an accident of the sheerest kind. Possibly they had almost forgotten each other, though I don’t think that is so. They met among mutual friends, and–there they were. I have often wondered how it must seem to meet after half a century. There is something about the brain which makes the reminiscences fresh to one sometimes, but of an early love story it must be like a dream to the aged. Something uncertain and vaguely sweet. Just think of it–half a century, more than one generation, had passed since these two had met. Their old love story must have seemed to them something all unreal, something they had but read long ago in a book.
Parasang was a large man, but Mrs. Blood–that was now his old sweetheart’s name–was a small woman. Her hair was nearly white when I met her, but from the color of a few unchanged strands of it, I imagine that it must have been red when she was young. Maybe that was why the lovers’ quarrel of over fifty years ago had been so spirited. She was both spirited and charming, even at seventy-two, and at twenty must have been a fascinating woman. Parasang was doubtless himself a striking person when he was young. I have already said what he was like in his old age. Both the man and woman had retained the personal regard for themselves which is so pleasant in old people, and Mrs. Blood was still as dainty as could be, in her trim gowns, generally of some fluffy black or silvery gray material, and Parasang was as strong and wholesome looking as an ox. I shall always regret that I was not present when they met. A study of their faces then would have been worth while.
Parasang once told me about this second wooing of his wife–and it was droll. There seemed nothing funny about it to him. He said that after being introduced to Mrs. Blood, and recognizing her in an instant after all those years, as she did him, they sat down on a sofa together, being left to entertain each other, as the two oldest people in the room; and that he uttered a few commonplace sentences, and she replied gently in the same vein for a little time; and that then each stopped talking, and that they sat there quietly gazing at each other. And he said that somehow, looking into her eyes, even with the delicate glasses on them, the earth seemed to be slipping away, and there was the girl he had known and loved again beside him; and then the years passed by in another direction, only more slowly. And the girl seemed to get a little older and a little older, and the hair changed and the cheeks fell a little at the sides just below the mouth, you know, and there came crow’s feet at the outer corners of her eyes, and wrinkles across her neck, but that nothing of all this physical happening ever changed one iota the real look of her, the look which is from the heart of a woman when a man has once really known her. And so the years glided over their course, she changing a little with each, yet never really changing at all, until it came again up to the present moment, with her beside him on the sofa, real and tangible, just as he would have her in every way.
“I don’t suppose you can understand it,” he said, “for you are only a boy in such things yet” (those old fellows call everything under fifty a boy); “but I tell you it is a wonderful thing to know what a love is that can come out of the catacombs, so to speak, and be all itself again,” and he said this as jauntily as if I, being so young, couldn’t know anything about the proper article, as far as sentiment was concerned.
They sat there on the sofa, he said, still silent and looking at each other. At last, when he had fully realized it all, he spoke.
“I knew that you were a widow, Jennie, but I did not know that you were living here.”
She explained that she had been in the city for some time and the reason of it, and then the conversation lagged again; and they were very much like two young people at a children’s party, save that they were dreaming rather than embarrassed, and that, I suppose, they felt the dry germ of another age seeking the air and the sunshine of living. You know they have found grains of wheat in the Egyptian mummy cases, which were laid away over three thousand years ago, and that these grains of wheat, under the new conditions, have sprouted and grown and shot up green stalks and borne plump seeds again. And the love of Mr. and Mrs. Parasang has always reminded me of the mummy wheat.
They talked a little of old friends and of old times, but their talk was not all unconstrained, because, you see, they couldn’t refer to those former times and scenes without recalling, involuntarily, some day or some hour when they two were together, and when there seemed a chain between their hearts which nothing in the world could break. It was an awful commentary on the quality of human love and human pledges that things should be as they had been and as they were. It was a reflection, in a sense, on each of them. How hollow had been everything–and it was all their fault.
They both kept looking at each other, and when they parted he asked if he might call upon her, and she assented quietly. He called next day, and found her all alone, for a niece who lived with her had gone away; and they became, he said, a little more at ease. And then began the most delicate of all wooings. I met them sometimes then and guessed at it, though as yet Parasang had not told me the story. He was more considerate, I imagine, than he had been in youth, and she, it may be, less exacting. It was a mellow relationship, yet with a shyness that was amazing. They were drifting together upon soft waves of memory, yet wondering at the happening.
And one day he asked her if she would be his wife. She had known, of course–a woman always knows–but she blushed and looked up at him, and tears came into her eyes.
And he thought of the time, so long ago, when he had asked her the same question. He could not help it. And somehow she did not seem less. He thought only of how foolish they had been to throw away a heritage of belonging to each other; and then he thought of how the man, the protector, the guardian of both, should have taken the broader view and have been above all pettishness and have yielded for the sake of both. She would not have thought more lightly of him. She would have understood some day. For the lost past he blamed himself alone.
She answered him at last, but it was not as she had answered once. She spoke sweetly and bravely of their age and of the uselessness of it all now, and of what people would say, and of other things. But her eyes were just as loving as when his hair was dark.
And when she had said all those things he did what made me like him. There was good stuff in Parasang. He merely took her in his arms. Furthermore, he told her when they would be married. And I was at the wedding on that day.
It was six months later when I got the habit of dining with them pretty regularly and of calling for Parasang on my way down town in the morning. She came into the hall with him, as do young wives, and kissed him good-by, and it pleased and interested me amazingly. The outlines of their mouths were not the same as they were half a century ago, and as he bent over her I thought each time of–
“And their spirits rushed together
At the meeting of the lips”;
and it would occur to me queerly that spirits had but slender causeway there. I was mistaken, though. I learned that later.
There was but this variation between the early wedded life of this aged pair and of what would possibly have happened had they married young. There were no differences and no “makings-up.” It was a pleasant stream–I knew it would be–but the volume of it surprised me.
That is all. There is no plot to the story of what I know of these dear friends of mine whom I cannot see now. And it was but because of what I have told that I had them buried as they were. There was nothing, from the ordinary standpoint, which justified my course in overrunning those other people who would have buried the two apart; but I believe myself that one should, within reason, seek to gratify the fancies of one’s closest friends.
LOVE AND A TRIANGLE
A man came out of a mine, looked about him, inhaled the odor from the stunted spruce trees, looked up at the clear skies, then called to a boy idling in a shed at a little distance from the mine buildings, telling him to bring out the horse and buckboard. The name of the man who had issued from the mine was Julius Corbett, and he was a civil engineer. Furthermore, he was a capitalist.
He was an intelligent looking man of about thirty-five, and a resolute looking one, this Julius Corbett, and as he stood waiting for the buckboard, was rather worth seeing, vigorous of frame, clear of eye and bronzed by a summer’s work in a wild country. The shaft from which he had just emerged was that of a silver mine not five miles distant from Black Bay, one of the inlets of the northern shore of Lake Superior, and was a most valuable property, of which he was chief owner. He had inherited from an uncle in Canada a few hundred acres of land in this region, but had scarcely considered it worthy the payment of its slight taxes until some of the many attempts at mining in the region had proved successful, and it was shown that the famous Silver Islet, worked out years ago in Lake Superior, was not the only repository thereabouts of the precious metal. Then he had abandoned for a time the practice of his profession–he had an office in Chicago–and had visited what he referred to lightly as his “British possessions.” He had found rich indications, had called in mining experts, who confirmed all he had imagined, and had returned to Chicago and organized a company. There was a monotonous success to the undertaking, much at variance with the story of ordinary mining enterprises. Corbett had become a very rich man within two years; he was worth more than a million, and was becoming richer daily. He was, seemingly, a person much to be envied, and would not himself, on the day here referred to, have denied such imputation, for he was in love with an exceedingly sweet and clever girl, and knew that he had won this same charming creature’s heart. They were plighted to each other, but the date of their marriage was not yet fixed. He had closed up his business at the mine for the season, and was now about to hasten to Chicago, where the day of so much importance to him would be fixed upon and the sum of his good fortune soon made complete. This was in September, 1898.
It was not a commonplace girl whom Corbett was to marry. On the contrary, she was exceptionally gifted, and a young woman whose cleverness had been supplemented by an elaborate education. There was, however, running through her character a vein of what might be called emotionalism. The habit of concentration, acquired through study, seemed rather to intensify this quality than otherwise. Perhaps it made even greater her love for Corbett, but it was destined to perplex him.
In September the air is crisp along the route from Black Bay to Duluth, and from that through fair Wisconsin to Chicago, and Corbett’s spirits were high throughout the journey. Was he not to meet Nell Morrison, in his estimation the sweetest girl on earth? Was he not soon to possess her entirely and for a permanency? He made mental pictures of the meeting, and drifted into a lover’s mood of planning. Out of his wealth what a home he would provide for her, and how he would gratify her gentle whims! Even her astronomical fancy, Vassar-born, should become his own, and there should be an observatory to the house. He had a weakness for astronomy himself, and was glad his wife-to-be had the same taste intensified. They would study the heavens together from a heaven of their own. What was wealth good for anyhow, save to make happy those we love?
The train sped on, and Chicago was reached, and very soon thereafter was reached the home of the Morrisons. Corbett could not complain of his reception. The one creature was there, sweet as a woman may be, eager to meet him, and with tenderness and steadfastness shown in every line of her pretty face. They spent a charming day and evening together, and he was content. Once or twice, just for a moment, the young woman seemed abstracted, but it was only for a moment, and the lover thought little of the circumstance. He was happy when he bade her good-night. “To-morrow, dear,” said he, “we will talk of something of greatest importance to me, of importance to us both.” She blushed and made no answer for a second. Then she said that she loved him dearly, and that what affected one must affect the other, and that she would look for him very early in the afternoon. He went to his hotel buoyant. The world was good to him.
When Corbett called at the Morrison mansion the next day he entered without ringing, as was his habit, and went straight to the library, expecting to find Nell there. He was disappointed, but there were traces of her recent presence. There was an astronomical map open upon the table, and books and reviews lay all about, each, open, with a marker indicating a special page. A little glove lay upon the floor, and Corbett picked it up and kissed it.
He summoned a servant and sent upstairs to announce his presence; then turned instinctively to note what branch of her favorite study was now attracting his sweetheart’s attention. He picked up one of the open reviews, an old one by the way, and read a marked passage there. It was as follows:
“It will always be more difficult for us to communicate with the people of Mars than to receive signals from them, because of our position and phases. It is the nocturnal terrestrial hemisphere that is turned toward the planet Mars in the periods when we approach most nearly to it, and it shows us in full its lighted hemisphere. But communication is possible.”
He looked at a map. It was a great chart of the surface of Mars, made by the famous Italian Schiaparelli, and he looked at more of the reviews and found ever the same subject considered in the marked articles. All related to Mars. He was puzzled but delighted. “The dear girl has a hobby,” he thought. “Well, she shall enjoy it to the utmost.”
Nelly entered the room. Her face lighted up with pleasure when she met her fiance, but assumed a more thoughtful look as she saw what he was reading. She welcomed him, though, as kindly as any lover could demand, and he, of course, was joyously content. “Still an astronomer, I see,” he said, “and apparently with a specialty. I see nothing but Mars, all Mars! Have you become infatuated with a single planet, to the neglect of all the others? I like it, though. We will study Mars together.”
Her face brightened. “I am so glad!” she said. “I have studied nothing else for months. It has been so almost from the day you left us. And it is not Mars alone I am studying; it is the great problem of communication with the people there. Oh, Julius, it is possible, and the idea is something wonderful! Just think what would follow! It would be the beginning of an understanding between reasoning creatures of the whole universe!”
He said that it was something wonderful, indeed, maybe only a dream, but a very fascinating one.
“Oh, it is no dream,” she answered. “It is a glorious possibility. Why, just think of it, we know, positively know, that Mars is inhabited. Think of what has been discovered. It was perceived years ago that Mars was intersected by canals, evidently made by human–I suppose that’s the word–human beings. They run from the extremes of ocean bays to the extremes of other ocean bays, and connect, too, the many lakes there. Nature does not make such lines. They are of equal width, those canals, throughout their whole length, and Schiaparelli has even watched them in construction. First there is a dark line, as if the earth had been disturbed, and then it becomes bright when the water is let in. Sometimes, too, double canals are made there close to each other, running side by side, as if one were used for travel and transportation in one direction and one in another. And there are many other things as wonderful. The world of Mars is like our own. There are continents and seas and islands there–it is not a dead, dry surface like the moon–and it has clouds and rains and snows and seasons, just as we have, and of the same intensity as ours. Oh, Julius, we _must_ communicate with them!”
“But, my dear, that implies equal interest on their part. How do we know them to be intelligent enough?”
“Why, there are the canals. They must be reasoners in Mars. Besides, how do we know but that they far surpass us in all learning! Mars is much older in one way than the Earth, far more advanced in its planet life, and why should not its people, through countless ages of advantage, have become wiser than we? Whatever their form, they may be superior to us in every way. We are to them, too, something which must have been studied for thousands of years. The Earth, you know, is to the people on Mars a most brilliant object. It is the most glorious object in their sky, a star of the first magnitude. Oh, be sure their astronomers are watching us with all interest!”
And Corbett, dazed, replied that he was overwhelmed with so much learning in one so fair, that he was very proud of her, but that there was one subject on his mind, compared to which communication with Mars or any other planet was but a trifle. And he wanted to talk with her concerning what was closest to his heart. It was the one great question in the world to him. It was, when should be their wedding day?
The girl looked at him blushingly, then paled. “Let us not talk of that to-day,” she said, at length. “I know it isn’t right; I know that I seem unkind–but–oh, Julius! come to-morrow and we will talk about it.” And she began crying.
He could not understand. Her demeanor was all incomprehensible to him, but he tried to soothe her, and told her she had been studying too hard and that her nerves were not right. She brightened a little, but was still distrait. He left, with something in his heart like a vengeful feeling toward the planets, and toward Mars in particular.
When Corbett returned next day the girl was in the library awaiting him. Her demeanor did not relieve him. He feared something indefinable. She was sad and perplexed of countenance, but more self-possessed than on the day before. She spoke softly: “Now we will talk of what you wished to yesterday.”
He pleaded as a lover will, pleaded for an early day, and gave a hundred reasons why it should be so, and she listened to him, not apathetically, but almost sadly. When he concluded, she said, very quietly:
“Did you ever read that queer story by Edmond About called ‘The Man with the Broken Ear’?”
He answered, wonderingly, in the affirmative.
“Well, dear” she said, “do you remember how absorbed, so that it was a very part of her being, the heroine of that story became in the problem of reviving the splendid mummy? She forgot everything in that, and could not think of marriage until the test was made and its sequel satisfactory. She was not faithless; she was simply helpless under an irresistible influence. I’m afraid, love”–and here the tears came into her eyes–“that I’m like that heroine. I care for you, but I can think only of the people in Mars. Help me. You are rich. You have a million dollars, and will soon have more. Reach those people!”
He was shocked and disheartened. He pleaded the probable utter impracticability of such an enterprise. He might as well have talked to a statue. It all ended with an outburst on her part.
“Talk with the Martians,” said she, “and the next day I will become your wife!”
He left the house a most unhappy man. What could he do? He loved the girl devotedly, but what a task had she given him! Then, later, came other reflections. After all, the end to be attained was a noble one, and he could, in a measure, sympathize with her wild desire. The lover in “The Man With a Broken Ear” had at least occasion for a little jealousy. His own case was not so bad. He could not well be jealous of an entire population of a distant planet. And to what better use could a portion of his wealth be put than in the advancement of science! The idea grew upon him. He would make the trial!
He was rewarded the next day when he told his fiancee what he had decided upon. She was wildly delighted. “I love you more than ever now!” she declared, “and I will work with you and plan with you and aid you all I can. And,” she added, roguishly, “remember that it is not all for my sake. If you succeed you will be famous all over the world, and besides, there’ll come some money back to you. There is the reward of one hundred thousand francs left in 1892 by Madame Guzman to any one who should communicate with the people of another planet.”
He responded, of course, that he was impelled to effort only by the thought of hastening a wedding day, and then he went to his office and wrote various letters to various astronomers. His friend Marston, professor of astronomy in the University of Chicago, he visited in person. He was not a laggard, this Julius Corbett, in anything he undertook.
Then there was much work.
Marston, being an astronomer, believed in vast possibilities. Being a man of sense, he could advise. He related to Corbett all that had been suggested in the past for interstellar communication. He told of the suggested advice of making figures in great white roads upon some of Earth’s vast plains, but dismissed the idea as too costly and not the best. “We have a new agent now,” he said. “There is electricity. We must use that. And the figures must, of course, be geometrical. Geometry is the same throughout all the worlds that are or have been or ever will be.”
And there was much debate and much correspondence and an exhibition of much learning, and one day Corbett left Chicago. His destination was Buenos Ayres, South America.
The Argentine Republic, since its financial troubles early in the decade, had been in a complaisant and conciliating mood toward all the world, and Corbett had little difficulty in his first step–that of securing a concession for stringing wires in any designs which might suit him upon the vast pampas of the interior. It was but stipulated that the wires should be raised at intervals, that herding might not be interfered with. He had already made a contract with one of the great electric companies. The illuminated figures were to be two hundred miles each in their greatest measurement, and were to be as follows:
[Illustration: shapes]
It was found advisable, later, to dispense with the last two, and so, only the square, equilateral triangle, circle and right-angled triangle, it was decided should be made. The work was hurried forward with all the impetus of native energy, practically unlimited money and the power of love. This last is a mighty force.
And great works were erected, with vast generators, and thousands and thousands of miles of sheets of wires were strung close together, until each system, when illuminated, would make a broad band of flame surrounding the defined area. From the darkened surface of the Earth, at the time when the Earth approached Mars most nearly, would blaze out to the Martians the four great geometrical figures. The test was made at last. All that had been hoped for in the way of an effort was attained. All along the lines of those great figures, night in the Argentine Republic was turned into glorious day. From balloons the spectacle was something incomparably magnificent. All was described in a thousand letters. A host of correspondents were there, and accounts of the undertaking and its progress were sent all over the civilized world. Each night the illumination was renewed, and all the world waited. Months passed.
Corbett had returned to Chicago. He could do no more. He could only await the passage of time, and hope. He was not very buoyant now. His sweetheart was full of the tenderest regard, but was in a condition of feverish unrest. He was alarmed regarding her, so great appeared her anxiety and so tense the strain upon her nerves. He could not help her, and prepared to return again to a season at his mine.
The man was sitting in his room one night in a gloomy frame of mind. What a fool he had been! He had but yielded to a fancy of a dreaming girl, and put her even farther away from him while wasting half a fortune! He would be better on the rugged shore of Lake Superior, where the moods of men were healthy, and where were pure air and the fragrance of the pines. There was a strong pull at his bell.
A telegraph boy entered, and this was on the message he bore:
Come to the observatory at once. Important. MARSTON.
To seek a cab, to be whirled away at a gallop to the university, to burst into Marston in his citadel, required but little time. The professor was walking up and down excitedly.
“It has come! All the world knows it!” he shouted as Corbett entered, and he grasped him by the hand and wrung it hardly.
“What has come?” gasped the visitor.
“What has come, man! All we had hoped for or dreamed of–and more! Why, look! Look for yourself!”
He dragged Corbett to the eye-piece of the great telescope and made him look. What the man saw made him stagger back, overcome with an emotion which for the moment did not allow him speech. What he saw upon the surface of the planet Mars was a duplication of the glittering figures on the pampas of the South American Republic. They were in lines of glorious light, between what appeared bands of a darker hue, provided, apparently, to make them more distinct, and even at such vast distance, their effect was beautiful. And there was something more, a figure he could not comprehend at first, one not in the line of the others, but above. “What is it–that added outline?” he cried.
“What is it! Look again. You’ll determine quickly enough! Study it!” roared out Marston, and Corbett did as he was commanded. Its meaning flashed upon him.
There, just above the representation of the right-angled triangle, shone out, clearly and distinctly, this striking figure:
[Illustration: diagram]
What could it mean? Ah, it required no profound mathematician, no veteran astronomer, to answer such a question! A schoolboy would be equal to the task. The man of Mars might have no physical resemblance to the man of Earth, the people of Mars might resemble our elephants or have wings, but the eternal laws of mathematics and of logic must be the same throughout all space. Two and two make four, and a straight line is the shortest distance between two points throughout the universe. And by adding this figure to the others represented, the Martians had said to the people of Earth as plainly as could have been done in written words of one of our own languages:
Yes, we understand. We know that you are trying to communicate with us, or with those upon some other world. We reply to you, and we show to you that we can reason by indicating that the square of the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle is equivalent to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Hope to hear from you further.
There was the right-angled triangle, its lines reproduced in unbroken brilliancy, and there were the added lines used in the familiar demonstration, broken at intervals to indicate their use. The famous _pons asinorum_ had become the bridge between two worlds.
Corbett could scarcely speak as yet. Telegraph messengers came rushing in with dispatches from all quarters–from the universities of Michigan and California, and Yale and Harvard, and from Rochester and all over the United States. Cablegrams from England, France, Germany and Italy and other regions of the world but repeated the same wonderful observation, the same conclusion: “They have answered! We have talked with them!”
Corbett returned to his home in a semi-delirium. He had the wisdom, though it was midnight, to send to Nelly the brief message, “Good news,” to prepare her in a degree for what the morning papers would reveal. He slept but fitfully. And it was at an early hour when he called upon his fiancee and found her awaiting him in the library.
She said nothing as he entered, but he had scarcely crossed the threshold when he found his arms full of something very tangible and warm, and pulsing with all love. It has been declared by thoughtful and learned people that there is no sensation in the world more delightful than may be produced by just this means, and Corbett’s demeanor under the circumstances was such as to indicate the soundness of the assertion. He was a very happy man.
And she, as soon as she could speak at all, broke out, impulsively:
“Oh, dear, isn’t it glorious! I knew you would succeed. And aren’t you glad I imposed the hard condition? It was hard, I know, and I seemed unloving, but I believed, and I could not have given you up even if you had failed. I should have told you so very soon. I may confess that now. And–I will marry you any day you wish.”
She blushed magnificently as she concluded, and the face of a pretty women, so suffused, is a pleasing thing to see.
Of course, within a week the name of Corbett became familiar in every corner of the civilized globe, the incentive which had spurred him on became somehow known, and the romance of it but added to his fame, and a few days later, when his wedding occurred, it was chronicled as never had a wedding been before. They made two columns of it even in the far-away Tokio _Gazette_, the Bombay _Times_ and the Novgorod _News_. But the social feature was nothing; the scientific world was all aflame.
We had talked with Mars indeed, but of what avail was it if we could not resume the conversation? What next step should be taken in the grand march of knowledge, in the scientific conquest of the universe? Never in all history had there been such a commotion among the learned. Corbett and his gifted wife were early ranked among the eager, for he soon became as much of an enthusiast as she–in fact, since the baby, he is even more so–and derived much happiness from their mutual study and speculation. All theories were advanced from all countries, and suggestions, wise and otherwise, came from thousands of sources. And so in the year 1900 the thing remains. As inscrutable to us have been the curious symbols appearing upon Mars of late as have apparently been to them a sign language attempted on the pampas. It is now proposed to show to them the outline of a gigantic man, and if Providence has seen fit to make reasoning beings in all worlds something alike, this may prove another bit of progress in the intercourse, but all is in doubt.
Given, the problem of two worlds, millions of miles apart, the people of which are seeking to establish a regular communication with each other, each already acknowledging the efforts of the other, how shall the great feat be accomplished? Will the solution of the vast problem come from a greater utilization of electricity and a further knowledge of what is astral magnetism? There have been, of late, some wonderful revelations along that line. Or will the sign language be worked out upon the planets’ surfaces? Who can tell? Certainly all effort has been stimulated, in one world at least. The rewards offered by various governments and individuals now aggregate over five million dollars, and all this money is as nothing to the fame awaiting some one. Who will gain the mighty prize? Who will solve the new problem of the ages?
AN EASTER ADMISSION
This is not, strictly speaking, an Easter tale, nor a love story. It is merely the truthful account of certain incidents of a love affair culminating one Easter Day. It may be relied upon. I am familiar with the facts, and I want to say here that if there be any one who thinks he could relate similar facts more exactly–I will admit that he might do the relation in much better form–he is either mistaken or else an envious person with a bad conscience. I am going to tell that which I know simply as it occurred.
There is a friend of mine who is somewhat more than ordinarily well-to-do, who is about thirty years of age, and who lives ordinarily in the city of Chicago. Furthermore, he is a gentleman of education, not merely of the school and university, but of the field and wood. He knows the birds and beasts, and delights in what is wild. Four or five years ago he purchased a tract of land studded closely with hardwood trees, chiefly the beech and hard maple, and criss-crossed by swift-flowing creeks of cold water. This tract of land was not far from the northern apex of the southern peninsula of the State of Michigan. There were ruffed grouse in the woods, in the creeks were speckled trout in abundance, and my friend rioted among them. He had built him a house in the wilderness; a great house of logs, forty or fifty feet long and thirty wide, with chambers above, with a great fireplace in it, with bunks in one great room for men, and with an apartment better furnished for ladies, should any ever be brought into the wilderness to learn the ways of nature.
Two years ago my friend gave his first house party, and the duration of it included Easter Day, and so was, necessarily, in a happy season. It is pleasant for us in this northern temperate zone that the day, with all its glorious promises, in a spiritual sense, is as full of promise also in the physical sense, in that it corresponds with the awakening of nature and the renewed life of that which so makes humanity. It is a good thing, too, that since the date of Easter Day is among those known as “movable,” it means the real spring, but a little farther north or farther south, as the years come and go. So it chanced that the Easter Day referred to came in the northern peninsula of Lower Michigan just when the buds upon the trees showed well defined against one of the bluest skies of all the world, when the teeming currents of the creeks were lifting the ice, and the waters were becoming turbulent to the eye; when the sapsuckers and creeping birds were jubilant, and the honk of the wild goose was a passing thing; when, with the upspring of the rest of nature, the trees threw off their lethargy, and through the rugged maples the sap began to course again. It was only a few days before Easter that my friend–his name was Hayes, “Jack” Hayes, we called him, though his name, of course, was John–had an inspiration.
Jack knew that so far as his own domain was concerned the time had arrived for the making of maple sugar, and there was promise in the making there, for the wilderness was still virgin. He decided that he would have a regular “sugar-camp” in the midst of his “sugar-bush,” and that there should be much making of maple syrup and sugar, with all the attendant festivities common formerly to areas farther south–and here comes an explanation.
Not many months before, this friend of mine had done what men had done often–that is, he fell in love, and with great violence. He fell in love with a stately young woman from St. Louis, a Miss Lennox, who was visiting in Chicago; a girl from the city where what is known as “society” is old and generally clean; where the water which is drunk leaves a clayey substance all round the glass when you partake of it, and which is about the best water in the world; where the colonels who drink whisky are such expert judges of the quality of what they consume that they live far longer than do steady drinkers in other regions; where the word of the business man is good, and where the women are fair to look upon. To a sugar-making Jack had decided to invite this young woman, with a party made up from both cities.
The party as composed was an admirable one of a dozen people, men and women who could endure a wholesome though somewhat rugged change, and of varying fancies and ages. There were as many men as women, but four were oldsters and married people, and of these two were a rector and his wife. It was an eminently proper but cheerful group, and the rector was the greatest boy of all. We tried to teach him how to shoot white rabbits, but abandoned the task finally, out of awful apprehension for ourselves. Had the reverend gentleman’s weapon been a bell-mouth, some of us would assuredly have been slain. We were having a jolly time, our host furnishing, possibly, the one exception.
Of the wooing of Hayes it cannot be said that it had prospered altogether to his liking. Possibly he had been too reticent. He was a languid fellow in speech, anyhow, and, excellent woodsman as he was, generally languid in his movements. There was vigor enough underneath this exterior, but only his intimates knew that. The lady had been gracious, certainly, and she must have seen in his eyes, as women can see so well, that he was in love with her, and that a proposal was impending; but she had not given him the encouragement he wanted. Now he was determined to stake his chances. There was to be a visit one forenoon to the place where the sugar-making was in progress, and he asked her to go with him ahead of the others, that he might show her how full the forest was of life at all times. He had resolved. He was going to ask her to be his wife.
There was written upon the white sheet of freshly fallen snow the story of the night and morning, of the comedies and tragedies and adventures of the wild things. Their tracks were all about. Here the grouped paws of the rabbits had left their distinct markings as the animals had fed and frolicked among the underwood; and there, over by the group of evergreens, a little mass of leaves and fur showed where the number of the frolickers had been decreased by one when the great owl of the north dropped fiercely upon his prey; there showed the neat tracks of the fox beside the coverts. The twin pads of the mink were clearly defined upon the snow-covered ice which bordered the tumbling creek, and at times the tracks diverged in exploration of the recesses of some brush heap. Little difference made it to the mink whether his prey were bird or woodmouse. Far into the morning, evidently, his hunting had extended, for his track in one place was along that of the ruffed grouse; and the signs showed that he had almost reached his prey, for a single brown black-banded tail-feather lay upon the wing-swept snow, where it could be seen the bird had risen almost as the leap came. The sun was shining, and squirrel tracks were along the whitened crest of every log, and the traces of jay and snowbird were quite as numerous. There was clamor in the tree-tops. The musical and merry “chickadee-dee-dee” of the tamest of the birds of winter and the somewhat sadder note of the wood pewee mingled with the occasional caw of a crow, the shrill cry of a jay, or the tapping of woodpeckers upon the boles of dead trees. A flock of snow-bunting fluttered and fed in a patch of dry seed-laden weeds. Even the creek was full of life, for there could be seen the movements of creeping things upon its bottom, while through the clear waters trout and minnow flashed brilliantly. There were odors in the air. There was evidence everywhere that spring was real; and it occurred to Jack, as the two walked along and he read aloud to her the night’s tale told upon the snow, that the poet who insisted that in the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love quite understood his business; not that it really required spring in his own case, but the season seemed at least to accentuate his emotions. He wondered if young women were affected the same way. He hoped so. At present his courage failed him.
They reached the “sugar-bush” proper, and wandered about among the big maples. They drank the sweet sap from the troughs, and finally settled themselves down comfortably upon one of the rude benches which had been placed about the fire, over which the kettles boiled steadily, under the watchful eye of an old sugar-maker, whose chief occupation was to lower into the bubbling surface a piece of raw pork attached by a string to a rod whenever the sap showed signs of boiling over. Others of the house party soon joined them. The sun had come out brightly now, and luncheon, brought from the house, was eaten and enjoyed. Then followed more rambling about the wood. The ground showed bare where the snow had melted on an occasional sandy knoll, and there was a search for wintergreen leaves. It was announced that all must be at the house again in time for an early dinner, since the great work of “sugaring-off” was to be the event of the night. It was then that Jack suggested to Miss Lennox that they go by another path of which he knew, but which he had not lately tried. The remainder of the party took the old route, and so the two made the journey once more alone. The man was resolved again. It was three o’clock in the afternoon now, and about as pleasant a day as any upon which man ever made a proposal. Jack took his fate in his hands.
He was simple and straightforward about it, and certainly made a rather neat job of the affair. He showed his intensity and earnestness; and it seemed rather hard that when he concluded he was not at once accepted by the handsome girl, who stood there blushing, but with a certain firmly regretful expression about the mouth.
Her voice trembled a little as she spoke. She said that she liked Mr. Hayes, liked him very much, and he knew it, but that it was only a great friendship. She had her ideal, and he did not fulfill it. “I cannot help it,” she said, earnestly; “I have ambitions for the man whom I marry. I could really love only a man of action, of physical bravery, one who could not be content with a life of ease, however cultivated such a life. What have you done? You but enjoy existence! I want some one rugged. Why, even your physical movements are languid! I’d rather marry the roughest viking that ever sailed the seas than the most accomplished _faineant_. I–“
The sentence was completed with one of the most piercing and agonizing screams that ever issued from the throat of a fair young woman. At the same instant she disappeared from sight.
Jack stood for a single second utterly appalled, but he was recalled to life by a second scream, equaling the first in every way, and issuing from a hole in the snow beside him. He could see in the depths the top of a very pretty hat. He realized the situation in a moment. They had just rounded the upturned roots of a monster fallen pine, and Miss Lennox had broken through the crusted snow and dropped into the cavity beneath. He threw himself on the ground, reached down his arms, and finally calmed the fair prisoner sufficiently to enable her to do her part. She reached up her hands; he caught a firm hold of her wrists and began pulling her out. He lifted her thus until her head and shoulders were in the sunlight, then sought to put an arm around her waist to complete the task. He was not grumbling at the good the gods had sent him. He was not at first in a hurry. With one arm at last fairly encircling that plump person, with that soft breath upon his cheek, he was not going to be violent. He was going to lift slowly and intelligently until the goddess should be upon her feet again. Then, from beneath, came a growl which was almost a roar; there was another wild shriek from Miss Lennox, there was the sound of brushwood being torn away, and as Jack, with a mighty effort, lifted the girl to her feet beside him, there appeared at the hole the blazing eyes and red mouth of a bear, furious at having been aroused from its winter sleep.
A fragment of limb lay at Jack’s feet. With the unconscious instinct of preservation for both, he seized it and struck the beast fairly on the snout. It fell back, but uprose again, growling horribly. The girl stood, too dazed to move, but Jack grasped her roughly by the shoulder, turned her about and shouted, hoarsely, “Run!” then made another blow at the scrambling animal. She reeled for a moment, then gathered herself together and ran like a scared doe. As she ran she screamed–about one scream to each five yards, as carefully estimated by the young man at a future period.
Despite her terror, the girl turned at a distance of a hundred yards, stopped and looked backward for an instant, and saw what was certainly an interesting spectacle, but which made her turn again and flee even more swiftly down the pathway, renewing her cries as she sped.
Affairs were becoming more than interesting for Mr. Jack Hayes. It may be said fairly and honestly of him, left facing that bear, gaunt and ugly and flesh-clamoring from the winter’s sleep, though still muscular and enduring–as bears are made–that he demeaned himself as should become a modern gentleman. He could not or would not run away. He knew that the beast must not be released, and knew that unless faced it would clamber in a moment to the level surface.
I have read somewhere, as doubtless have you, because it has wandered throughout the newspapers of the world, the story of a famous Russian officer, famous, too, as a great swordsman, who once faced a brown bear robbed of her young, and beat her into insensibility, since his blows were swifter and more adroit than those delivered by her great forearms. In the midst of the battle, some thought of this hard Russian tale drifted through the mind of Hayes, as he dealt blow after blow upon the muzzle of the brute seeking daylight and vengeance upon its opponent. Each time as the bear upreared, the stout limb descended, but apparently with slight effect, and with each rush and tearing down of matted snow and twigs, the angle of ascent was lessening perceptibly. To say that Jack was exceedingly earnest and anxious would not be to exaggerate a particle. Furthermore, he was becoming warm and scant of breath. A portion of the breath which remained to him he utilized in whooping most lustily.
The girl burst into the great front room of the log house, where the preparations for Easter were in progress. Most of the guests had not yet reached the house, but there were the rector and two ladies. She staggered into the room, but partially recovered from the effect of her wild flight, and could only gasp out, “Jack!–a bear!–a little way up the eastern path!” and then fell promptly in a heap upon the furs of a great lounge.
The rector stood astonished for a moment, then realized the situation. Upon the wall hung a double-barreled gun, which he knew was loaded with buckshot, intended for the vagrant wild geese still seeking northern habitats. He leaped for the gun, and asked a question hurriedly:
“The east path?” he cried.
“Yes,” the girl contrived to say, and the rector, gun in hand, dashed out of the doorway and to the eastern path, which he knew well, for he had been a guest the preceding autumn; and then over the snow of that pathway gave such an exhibition of clerical sprinting as probably never before occurred since Jonah fled for Tarsish. He reached the scene of an exceeding lively exchange of confidences in about two minutes, and saw what alarmed and at the same time inspirited him most mightily. He rushed up close to the fencing Hayes, and as the beast in the pit upreared himself head and shoulders, managed to discharge one barrel of the shotgun. The shot was well intended but ill-aimed. It was but a dispensation of Providence that Jack and not the bear was killed. The beast sank back for another rush, and at the same instant Jack tore the gun from the reverend gentleman’s hands, and as the thing rose again poured the contents of the second barrel fairly into the middle of his throat. The episode was ended. Meanwhile, rushing and shouting along the pathway, came the full contingent of male guests. They arrived only in time to hear the story and to assist in heaving out the body of the bear, which was dragged down the pathway and to the house amid much clamor and gratulation. Jack, in a violent perspiration and extremely shaky, entered the house, where much was said, all of which he took modestly, and then everybody prepared for dinner. The feast and later the “sugaring-off” were occasions of much joyousness, but Jack and Miss Lennox conversed but little, save in a courteous and casual way. There was a fine time generally, and all slept the sleep of the more or less just. Easter morning broke fair and clear. It was good that morning to hear sounding out over the snow and in the sunlight the farewell notes of the flitting birds of the north and the greetings of the coming birds of the spring. It was certainly spring now, and all was life and hope and happiness. The Easter services were to begin at ten. It was nine o’clock, or maybe it was nine fifteen–it is well to be accurate about such important matters as this–that Jack and Miss Lennox met apart from the others, who were assisting in some arrangement of the greenery. There was something of the quality which is known as “melting” in her eyes when she looked at him, and the villain felt encouraged.
“It is Easter morning,” he said. “Are you glad? Everything seems better.”
She looked up into his face, and only smiled and blushed.
“Are you all right?” said he. “I’ve been troubled over you.”
She said nothing at first, but the old critical and defiant look came into her face again. It had now, however, in it a trace of the gently judicial. “I was mistaken,” she said; “you are a man of action.”
“Will you be my wife, then?” said Jack.
“Yes,” said she.
Well, they are married, as people so frequently are, and Jack is not going to the log-house in Michigan this spring, because that St. Louis-Chicago baby is too young to be abandoned. I like Easter and I like Jack and his wife, and I like babies, but I don’t like being robbed of an outing in a region where spring comes in so suddenly and gloriously. How wise was the old pessimist who declared that “a man married is a man marred”–but, then, who will agree with me!
PROFESSOR MORGAN’S MOON
I am aware that attention has already been called in the daily newspapers to certain curious features of the astronomical discussion between Professor Macadam of Joplin University and Professor Morgan of the same institution; but newspaper comment has related only to the scientific aspects of the case, lacking all references to the origin of the debate and to the inevitable woman and the romance. As a matter of fact, the discussion which has set the scientific world, or at least the astronomical part of it, by the ears, had its inception in a love affair, and terminated with that affair’s symmetrical development. It has seemed to me that something more than the dry husks of the story should be given to the public, and that a great many people might be quite as much interested in the romance as in the mathematical conclusions reached. That is why I tell the tale in full.
Had Professor Macadam never owned a daughter, or had the one appertaining to him been plain instead of charming, young Professor Morgan would never have broken a metaphorical lance with the crusty senior educator. But Professor Macadam did have a daughter, Lee–odd name for a girl–and she was about as pretty as a girl may grow to be, and sometimes they grow that way amazingly. She was clever, too, and good, and Professor Morgan had not known her for half a year when it was all up with him. It became essential for his permanent welfare, mental, moral and physical, that this particular young woman should be his, to have and to hold, and he did not deny the fact to himself at all. Without going into detail, it may be added that he did not deny the fact to her, either, and so exerted himself and improved his opportunities that before much time elapsed he had secured a strong ally in his designs. This ally was the young lady herself, and it will be admitted that Professor Morgan had thus made a fair beginning. But all was not to be easy for the pair, however faithful or resolved they were.
College professors generally are not much addicted to either the accumulation or the love of money, but Professor Macadam was rather an exception to the rule. Sixty years of age, noted as a great mathematician and astronomer, he had long had a good income from his teaching and his books, and had hoarded and made good investments, and was a rich man. Lee, being an only child, was in fair way some day of coming into a fortune, and her father was resolved that it should not go to any poor man. He had often expressed his opinion on this subject; it was well known to the lovers, but this did not prevent Professor Morgan, who was just beginning and had only a fair salary with no surplus, from asking the old man for his daughter.
The interview was not a long one, but there was a good deal of low barometer and high temperature to it, meteorologically speaking. Professor Macadam fumed, and flatly declined to consider the subject of such an alliance. “It is absurd!” he said. “What would you live on?”
Professor Morgan intimated that two people might sustain themselves in a modest way on the salary he was getting.
“Nonsense, sir! Nonsense!” was the retort. “My daughter has been accustomed to a better style of living than you could afford her, and I decline to consider the proposition for a moment. You’re in no condition to support a wife, sir! Figures do not lie, sir! Figures do not lie!”
Professor Morgan suggested that figures sometimes did give a wrong impression.
“Then it is because they are used by an incompetent person. I am surprised that you, sir, assistant professor of astronomy in a great institution of learning, should assert that any mathematical fact is not an actual one. Prove to me that figures lie, and you can have my daughter! But this is only nonsense. You are presumptuous and something of an ass, sir. Good day, sir!”
When Professor Morgan imparted to his sweetheart the result of this interesting interview, they were both somewhat cast down. It was she who first recovered.
“And so papa said you could have me, did he, if you could prove to him that figures ever lied?”
“Yes, he said that, though I don’t suppose he meant it. It was simply a sort of defiance he blurted out in his anger. But what difference does it make? How could I prove an impossibility in any event, even if such a grotesque challenge were accepted in earnest? When I said to him that figures might give wrong impressions, it was only to convey the idea that people who cared very much for each other might get along with very little money, and that the ordinary estimates for necessary income did not apply.”
“You don’t know papa! He’ll keep his word, even one uttered in excitement. He has almost a superstition regarding the literal observance of any promise made, though it might be accidental and really meaning nothing. You are very clever–as great a mathematician as papa is. You must prove to him that figures sometimes really lie, even where computations are all correct. Surely, there must be some way of doing that.”
“I’m afraid not, dear. The moon isn’t made of green cheese.”
“But there must be some way, and you must find it. You shall be like a knight of old, who is to gain a maiden’s hand by the accomplishment of some great deed of derring-do. Am I not worth it, sir?” And she stood before him jauntily, with her pretty elbows out.
He looked down into a face so fair and so full of all fealty and promise of sweet wifehood that he resolved in an instant that if it lay in human power to meet the terms of the old man’s challenge the thing should be accomplished. He said as much, and what he said was punctuated labially. Being a professor, it would never have done for him to neglect his punctuation.
It was not three months after the stormy Macadam-Morgan interview that Professor Morgan’s great book on “Eclipses Past and to Come” made its appearance. And it was not three weeks after that great work’s appearance when all the scientific world was in a turmoil.
Professor Macadam had, for a season after the interview between him and Professor Morgan, maintained a cold and formal air in all his intercourse with the latter gentleman, but after a time this wore away, and the old relations, never very familiar, were resumed. Indeed, it seemed at length that Professor Macadam had forgotten all about the affair, or if he remembered it at all, did so only as of an exhibition of foolishness which his own force and wisdom had checked forever. When therefore Professor Morgan’s book appeared it was read at once with interest, as the work of a scientist, who, though not a veteran, was of undeniable ability and good repute.
But when the book had been considered there was a literary earthquake! Professor Macadam reviewed it, and sought to tear it, figuratively, limb from limb! He was ably supported by other pundits everywhere. The point upon which the debate hinged was a remarkable one.
As already indicated, Professor Morgan’s standing as an astronomer was undisputed, and Professor Macadam did not question the accuracy of his reasoning, so far as mere computations went. It is known, even to the non-scientific, that eclipses of the moon can be foretold with the utmost accuracy; and not only this, but that astronomers can readily determine, by the same methods reversed, when eclipses of the moon have occurred at any time in the past. It was to one of Professor Morgan’s past eclipses that Professor Macadam objected.
In a long-ago issue of a great foreign review, M. Camille Flammarion, the French astronomer, advanced the view that this globe has been inhabited twenty-two millions of years, which is accepted by other scientists as a fair estimate. It is also admitted that the moon was at one time part of the earth, and was hurled off into space before the crust upon this body had fairly cooled. Of course, there is no way of fixing the exact date of this interesting event, but for the sake of convenience it is put at about one hundred millions of years ago. It may have been a little earlier or a little later. But that does not matter.
In the table of dates of past eclipses in Professor Morgan’s book he referred to a certain eclipse of the moon which occurred about two hundred millions of years before Christ, and not a flaw could be discovered in his figuring. But Professor Macadam did not hesitate to make a charge. He asserted with great vehemence that as there was no moon two hundred millions of years before Christ, there could have been no eclipse of the moon. Had there been an eclipse of the moon then, he admitted that the eclipse would have taken place at just the time Professor Morgan’s table indicated; but as the case was, he referred to such an event contemptuously as “an Irish eclipse,” and was extremely scathing in his language. His review closed with an expression of regret that an educator connected with the great Joplin University could have been guilty of such an error, not of figures, but of logic.
Professor Morgan replied to all his critics, Professor Macadam included, in a masterly article, in which he declared that he was responsible only for his mathematics, not for the degree of cohesion of the earth’s mucky mass hundreds of millions of years ago, and that the eclipse he had calculated must stand.
Professor Macadam came to the charge once more, briefly but savagely. He again admitted the correctness of the computation, but ridiculed Professor Morgan’s attitude on the subject. “His figures,” he concluded, “simply lie.”
The day following the appearance of Professor Macadam’s final article, he was called upon in his study by Professor Morgan. The younger man did not present the appearance of a crushed controversialist. On the contrary, his air was pleasantly expectant. “I called,” said he, “to learn how soon you expected my marriage with your daughter to take place?”
The older man started in his seat, “What do you mean, sir?” he demanded.
“Why, I called simply to discuss my marriage with your daughter. On the occasion when you refused my first proposition you said that if I proved that figures would lie your consent would be forthcoming. I have proved to you that figures sometimes lie. I have not only your own admission, but your assertion to that effect, made public in the columns of a great quarterly. I know you to be a man of your word. I have come to talk about my marriage.”
Professor Macadam did not at once reply. His face became very red. “I must talk with my daughter,” he said finally.
That afternoon Professor Macadam and his daughter had an interview. The young lady proved very firm. She would listen to no equivocation and no protest. She had thought her father to be a man of honor–that was all she had to say. She touched the old gentleman upon his weak point. He yielded, not gracefully, but that was of no moment. She and Professor Morgan, just then, had grace enough for an entire family–in their hearts.
And so they were married. And so, too, you know the origin of one of the most exciting scientific discussions of the period.
RED DOG’S SHOW WINDOW
The snow lay deep beside the Black River of the Northwest Territory, and upon its surface, where the ice was yet thick, for it was February and weeks must pass before in the semi-arctic climate there would be signs of spring. In the forests, which at intervals approach the river, the snow was as deep as elsewhere, but there was not the desolation of the plains, for in the wood were many wild creatures, and man was there as well; not man of a very advanced type, it is true, but man rugged and dirty, and philosophic. In the shadow of the evergreens, upon a point extending far into the water, stood the tepees of a group of Indians, hardy hunters and dependents in a vague sort of way of the great fur company which took its name from Hudson’s Bay.
Squatted beside the fire of pine knots and smoking silently in one of the tepees was Red Dog, a man of no mean quality among the little tribe. He had faculties. He had also various idiosyncrasies. He was undeniably the best hunter and trapper and trainer of dogs to sledge, as well as the most expert upon snowshoes of all the Indians living upon the point, and he was, furthermore, one of the dirtiest of them and the biggest drunkard whenever opportunity afforded. Fortunately for him and for his squaw, Bigbeam, as she had been facetiously named by an agent of the company, the opportunities for getting drunk were rare, for the company is conservative in the distribution of that which makes bad hunters. Given an abundance of firewater and tobacco, Red Dog was the happiest Indian between the northern boundary of the United States and Lake Gary; deprived of them both he hunted vigorously, thinking all the while of the coming hour when, after a long journey and much travail, he should be in what was his idea of heaven again. To-day, though, the rifle bought from the company stood idle beside the ridge-pole, the sledge dogs snarled and fought upon the snow outside, and Bigbeam, squat and broad as became her name, looked askance at her lord as she prepared the moose meat, uncertain of his temper, for his face was cloudy. Red Dog was, in fact, perplexed, and was planning deeply.
Good reason was there for Red Dog’s thought. Events of the immediate future were of moment to him and all his fellows, among whom, though no chief was formally acknowledged, he was recognized as leader; for had he not at one time been with the company as a hired hunter? Had he not once gone with a fur-carrying party even to Hudson’s Bay, and thence to the far south and even to Quebec? And did he not know the ways of the company, and could not he talk a French patois which enabled him to be understood at the stations? Now, as fitting representative of himself and of his clan, a great responsibility had come upon him, and he was lost in as anxious thought as could come to a biped of his quality.
Like a more or less benevolent devil-fish, the Hudson Bay Company has ever reached out its tentacles for new territory where furs abound. Such a region once discovered, a great log house is built there, and furs are bought from the Indians who hunt within the adjacent region. This is, of course, a vast convenience for the Indians, who are thus enabled to exchange their winter catch of peltries for what they need, without a journey of sometimes hundreds of miles to the nearest trading post. Hence, under the wise treatment of Indians by the British, there has long been competition between separate Indian bands to secure the location of a new post within their own territory. Thus came the strait of Red Dog. A new post had been decided upon, but there was doubt at company headquarters as to whether it should be at Red Dog’s point or a hundred miles to the westward, where, it was asserted by Little Peter, head man of a tribe there, the creeks were fairly clogged with otter, the woods were swarming with silver foxes and sable, and as for moose, they were thick as were once the buffalo to the south. Red Dog had told his own story as well, but the factor at the post toward Fort Defiance was still undecided. He had told Red Dog and his rival that he would decide the matter the coming spring when they came down the river with their furs for the spring trading. The best fur region was what he sought. He would decide the matter from the relative quality of the catch.
So Red Dog had hunted and trapped vigorously, and would ordinarily have been satisfied with the outcome, for his band had found one of the best fur-bearing regions of the river valley, and the new post was deserved there upon its merits. This, however, the factor did not know. The issue depended upon the relatively good showing made by Red Dog and Little Peter. Despite his name, Little Peter was a full-blooded Indian and like Red Dog, he was shrewd.
Red Dog smoked long, and the lines upon his forehead grew deeper as he thought and schemed. At times his glance, bent most of the time upon the fire before him, would be raised to seek the great bale of furs, the product of his winter’s catch. The meal was eaten, the hours passed, and then, with a grunt, he ordered Bigbeam to open the package, which work she performed with great deftness, for who but she had cleaned the skins and bound them most compactly? They were spread upon the dirt floor, a rich and luxurious display. No Russian princess, no Tartar king, no monarch of the south, ever saw anything finer for consideration. There were the smooth, silken skins of the cross fox, of the blue fox, that strange, deeply silken-furred creature, the blend of which is a puzzle to the naturalists; of the silver fox, which ranges so far southward that the farmers and the farmers’ sons of the northern tier of the United States follow him fiercely with dog and gun because of the value of his coating; of the otter, most graceful of all creatures of land or water, and in the far north with fur which is a poem; of the sable, which creeps farther south than many people know of; of the grim wolverine, black and yellow-white and thickly and densely furred, and of the great gray wolf of nearly the Arctic circle, a wolf so grizzly and so long and high and gaunt and strong of limb that he tears sometimes from the sledge ranges the best dog of all their pack and leaps easily away into the forest with him; a beast who transcends in real being even the old looming gray wolf of mediaeval story who once haunted northern Germany and the British Isles and the Scandinavian forests, and who made such impress upon men’s minds that the legend of the werewolf had its birth. There were thick skins of the moose and there was much dried meat. All these, save the meat, contributed to make expansive the display which Bigbeam, utilizing all the floor space, laid before the eyes of Red Dog.
The showing made Red Dog even more anxiously contemplative. He thought of the long, weary way to the present trading post, and of how it would be equally long and weary were a new post to be located in the hunting grounds of Little Peter. He knew how soft was the snow when it began to melt in early spring, how the snow shoes sank deeply and became a burden to lift, how the sledge runners no longer slid along the surface, and the floundering dogs tired after half a day’s journey; he thought how full the river was of jagged ice cakes in the spring, and how perilous was the passage of a deeply-laden canoe. Surely the new post must not go to Little Peter. And Red Dog was most crafty.
There must have been, however attenuated, a fiber of French blood throughout the being of Red Dog. It would have been odd, indeed, had the case been otherwise, for the half-breeds penetrated long ago through the far northwest, and the blood underneath does not always show itself through the copper skin. Anyhow, Red Dog gazed interestedly and fixedly upon the gloriously soft carpet before him, and there came to his brain a sense of the wonderfully contrasting coloring. He rose to his feet and arranged and rearranged the pelts to please his fancy. At last he secured a combination which made him pause. He returned to his seat and gazed long and earnestly upon the picture before him; then he turned his eyes downward and thought as long again. Bigbeam came to him and muttered words regarding some affair of the teepee. He did not answer her, but, as she passed silently toward the doorway, he raised his eyes and noted her broad expanse of back in the doorway to which the far distant blue sky gave a distinct and striking outline. He shouted to her gutturally and hoarsely to stand there as she was, and the woman stopped herself in the doorway; then Red Dog bent his head and thought again. He thought of a window he had seen in far Quebec, where soft and brilliant furs were shown upon a flat surface to the most advantage. Why could he not with such display most impress McGlenn, the Scotch factor, with the importance of his hunting ground, and where could better display be made than upon the broad back of his squat squaw Bigbeam? He would make her sew the furs together in a mighty cloak, and she should ride the river with him when the ice broke and the spring tides bore them down in their great canoe to the factor’s place toward Fort Reliance.
And the cloak was made. Talk of the wrappings of your princesses, of the shallow-ermine-girded trappings of your queens–they were but yearning things, but imitations, as compared with this great cloak of the bounteous Bigbeam.
In the center of the field of this wondrous cloak lay white as snow the skin of an ermine of the far north, and about it were arranged sables so deep in color that the contrast was almost blackness, but for the play of light and shade upon the shining fur. About the sables came contrast again of the skins of silver fox, alternating with those of the otter, and about all this glorious center piece, set at right angles, were arranged the skins of the marten, the blue fox, the mink, the otter and the beaver. It was a magnificent combination, bizarre in its contrasts but wonderfully striking, and with a richness which can scarcely be described, for the knowing Red Dog selected only the thickest and glossiest and most valuable of his furs. He gazed upon the display with a grunt of satisfaction.
Red Dog rose to his feet and called sharply to his squaw, who entered the tent again with a celerity remarkable in one of her construction. The Indian glanced meaningly at the dog whip which hung upon the center pole, and there was rapid conversation. For days afterward Bigbeam was busy sewing together the furs, as Red Dog had arranged them, and attaching thongs of buckskin so that the wonderful garment could be tied at her neck and waist.
Spring came at last, and Red Dog and Bigbeam set off upon their journey to the factor’s, as did other Indians from other localities for five hundred miles about. It was a dreadful journey, the hardships of which were undergone with characteristic Indian stoicism. There were break-downs of the sledges, there were blizzards in which the travelers almost perished, there was sickness among the dogs; and when finally the point was reached where the river was fairly open, and where the big canoe, _cached_ from the preceding season, could be launched and the load bestowed within it, there followed miserable adventures and misadventures, until, limping and pinched of face, the Indian and his squaw drew their boat to land upon the shore beside the trading post.
The trading posts of the Northwest Territory vary little in their manner of construction. They are built of logs as long as can be conveniently obtained, and consist of three divisions, the front a store with a rude counter, behind this the living-rooms of the factor and his assistants, and in the rear the great storeroom for the year’s supplies. The front or trading room is usually well lighted by windows set in the side, for it is well to have good light when fine furs are to be passed upon. The trading room of McGlenn offered no exception to the rule, and his window seats were good resting places for the casual barterer.
Indians were thronging about and in the post as Red Dog and Bigbeam lugged their bale of furs up the bank and into the big room. There was jabbering among the bucks, while the squaws stood silently about, and among the most violent of the jabberers was Little Peter, who had already talked with the factor and by magnificent lying had almost convinced him that his own territory was the best for a new post. Unfortunately, though, for Little Peter, his efforts and those of his band had been somewhat lax during the winter, and the catch they brought did not in all respects sustain his story. Red Dog and Bigbeam mingled with the other Indians, and Red Dog was soon engaged in a violent controversy with his rival, while Bigbeam stood silent among the squaws. But Bigbeam was very tired; she had wielded the paddle for many days, she had lost sleep and her eyelids were heavy; nature was too strong; she edged away from the line of squaws, settled down into one of the window seats, her broad back filling completely its lower half, and drifted away into such dreamland as comes to the burdened and uncomplaining Indian women of the Northwest.
Down a pathway leading beside the storehouse came McGlenn, the factor, and his assistant, Johnson. They reached the window wherein Bigbeam was reposing and stopped in their tracks! They could not believe their eyes! Were they in Bond or Regent Street again! Never had they seen such magnificent display of costly furs before, never one so barbaric, unique and striking, and, withal, so honest in its richness! They did not hesitate a moment. They rushed around to the main entrance, tore their way profanely through the dense groups of Indians, and reached the window wherein they had seen displayed the marvel. Then they started back appalled! The interior appearance of that window afforded, perhaps, as vivid and complaining contrast to its exterior as had ever been presented since views had rivalry. The thongs about the neck of the swart Bigbeam had become undone, and her normal front filled all the window’s broad interior. That front, to put it mildly, though picturesque, was not attractive. It afforded an area of greasy and dirty brown cuticle and of moose skin, if possible dirtier and greasier still. The two white men could not understand themselves. Was there witchcraft about; had they been drinking too much of the Scotch whisky in the stores? They forced their way outside and looked at the window again, and discovered that they were sane. There, pressed closely against the window by the weight of the sleeping Bigbeam, still extended in all its glory the wonderful robe of furs. Again they entered the post and unceremoniously pulled from her pleasant resting place the helpmate of Red Dog, the hunter. The cloak was seized upon and the two men hurried with it to the inner apartments, where it was studied carefully and with vigorous expressions of admiration.
“He’s got it!” exclaimed McGlenn. “He’s got it, the foxy rascal! It’s only a trick of Red Dog’s; but the buck who knows furs as well as that and who lives in a region where such furs can be found, and who’s been sharp enough to utilize his squaw for a scheme like this, deserves the new post anyhow. You’ll have to go up there, Johnson, and take some of the voyageurs with you, as soon as the river is open to the head, and establish a new post there. There’ll be profit in it.” Then Red Dog was ordered to come in.
How, recognizing the effect already produced upon the factor by Bigbeam’s cloak, Red Dog waxed eloquent in description of the fur producing facilities of his region cannot here be described at length. From the picture he drew vehemently in bad French-Canadian language it would appear that the otter and the beaver fought together for mere breathing places in the streams, that the sable and the marten and the ermine were household pets, and that as for the foxes, blue and silver gray, they were so numerous that the spruce grouse had learned to build their nests in trees! Turning his regard from his own country, he referred to that of Little Peter. He described Little Peter as a desperate character with a black heart and with no skill at all in the capture of wild things. As to Little Peter’s country, it was absurd to talk about it! It was a desolate waste of rocks and shrub, whereon even the little snowbirds could not live, and where the few bad Indians who found a home there subsisted upon roots alone. It was a great oration.
The factor and his assistant listened and laughed and made allowances, but did not alter the decision reached. Red Dog was told that the new post would be established in his own hunting grounds. As a special favor, he was given a quart bottle of whisky and ordered sternly to conduct himself as well as he could under the circumstances. Never was prouder Indian than Red Dog when he emerged from the storeroom. Before the day had ended, his furs were all disposed of, including the marvelous cloak, and in his big canoe were stored away quantities of powder and bullets and tobacco, and other things appertaining to the comfort of the North-western Indian. In place of her cloak of furs Bigbeam wore a blanket so gorgeous of coloring that even the brilliantly hued wood ducks envied her as they swept by overhead. In the bottom of the canoe lay Red Dog. He had secured more whisky, and was as the dead who know not. He would awake on the morrow with a headache, perhaps, but with a proud consciousness that he had accomplished the feat of a statesman for himself and for his band. Bigbeam rowed steadily toward home, crooning some barbarous old half-song of her race. She was very happy.
MARKHAM’S EXPERIENCE
Markham awoke late for the simple reason that it had been nearly morning when he went to bed. He awoke lying flat upon his back, and looked up dreamily at the pattern on the ceiling It was unfamiliar and that set his mind at work, and gradually he recognized where he was and why he was there. He reasoned idly that it must be as late as ten o’clock in the forenoon, and knew that by reaching out his arm he could open the shutter of the hotel window, admitting the sunlight and affording a view over the park and the blue lake, but he was laggard about it. There was a pleasure in debating the matter with himself. He could hear bells, the whistling of steamers and locomotives, the rumble of carriages and the murmur which comes from many distant voices. He recognized that another day in a great city was fairly on, and that the thousands were in motion while he lay listless.
He forgot the sounds and thought about himself. He acknowledged, though with a certain lenience of judgment, the absurdity of being where he was. He should have shown more resolve, he admitted, at 2 A.M., and have gone to his lodgings, a mile or so away. But he had been doing good work the night before; that, at least, should, he felt, be counted to his credit. Payne had come on from Washington with a duty of moment to perform, and had called upon Markham to assist him. Years had passed since they had worked together and it was a pleasure to renew the combination. How well they understood each other’s methods, and how easily confident they felt united! They had been dilatory with what they had to accomplish, so self-conscious of their force were they, and had justified themselves gracefully in the event. They had strolled forth after their labor, the last dispatch sent, had smoked and become reminiscent, and had been soaked by a summer rain. They had been boys again. Of the two, Markham had been the more buoyant and more reckless. He had been a sick man, though still upon his legs and among his fellows, when Payne had found him. Things had been going wrong with Markham. His equation with Her had been disturbed.
It had been a test, there was no doubt of that, especially of the woman, the relations between Markham and her who had come to be more to him than he had ever before known or imagined one human being could be to another. She loved him; she had confessed that in a sweet, womanly way, but there was an obstacle between them. Before she could become his, there was something for him to accomplish; something hard, perplexing, and difficult in every way. He had not been idle. He had laid the foundations for his structure of happiness, but foundations do not reveal themselves as do upper stories, and she could not see the careful stonework. The domes and minarets of the castle for which she may have longed were not in sight. He alone knew what had been his work, but she was hardly satisfied. And, then, suddenly, because of a disturbing fancy, founded on a fact which was yet not a fact in its relations, she had become another being. One thing, meaning much, she had done, which took from the man his strength. It was as if his heart had been drained of its blood. He was not himself. He groped mentally. Was there no faithful love in woman; no love like his, which could not help itself and was without alternative? Were women less than men, and was calculation or instability a possibility with the sweetest and the noblest of them? No boy was this; he had known very many women very well, but he was helpless as a babe in the new world he had found when he met this one who had become so much. She had changed him mentally and morally, and even physically, for he had been a careless liver, and she had turned him from his drifting into a better course. She had made him, and now, had he been a weaker man, she would have unmade him. And he had become ill because of it, and almost desperate. Then came the evidence that she was a woman, as good women are dreamed of, after all; and they understood, and had come close together to hope again. It gave him life once more. There was, and would be, the memory of the lapse, but scars do not cripple. He was himself again. He was thinking of it all, as he lay late in bed this summer morning. He was a sluggard, he said to himself. He must go forth and do things–for Her. He raised his arm to throw open the shutter.
Ah! The arm would not rise! At least the man could not extend it far enough to open the shutter. There was a twinge of pain and a strange stiffness of the elbow. The other arm was raised–nothing the matter with that. The man tried to move his legs. The left responded, but the right was as useless as the arm. There was a pain, too, across the loins as Markham sought to turn himself in bed. He was astonished. There had been no pain until he moved. “What’s the matter with me?” he muttered. “I’m crippled; but how, and why?”
There was quietude for a few moments and then more deliberate effort. With his unaffected leg and arm, the victim of physical circumstances he could not explain worked himself around as if upon a pivot until the preponderance of his weight was outside the bed. Then, with vast caution, he tilted himself upward gently until he found himself sitting upon the bed’s edge, his feet just touching the floor, and the crippled member refusing to bear weight. Markham bore down upon the right foot. It was stiff and seemed as if it would break before it bent, while the pain was exquisite, but the man could not stay where he was. He got down upon the floor and crawled toward his clothing. He contrived, somehow, to dress himself, but the task accomplished, his face was pallid and he was wet with perspiration. He tilted himself to his feet and creeping along by the wall, reached the elevator and so finally the office floor.
There was a tinkle of glasses in the hotel saloon, and through the open door came the fragrance of mint and pineapple. There was a white-clad, wax-mustached man behind the bar in there, who, as Markham knew, could make a morning cocktail “to raise the dead,” and not to raise them stark and rigid, like the bodies in Dora’s “Judgment Day,” but flexile and full of life. “Jack could mix me something that would help,” he thought, and turned instinctively, but checked himself. More than a year had passed since he had tasted a morning cocktail. There had been a promise in the way. He looked down at his knee and foot. “Let them twist,” he said, and then called for a cab.
He did not like to do it; it was a confession of weakness, but in his own apartments again, and in bed as the only restful place, Markham sent for a doctor. The doctor came, not the ponderous old practitioner of the conventional type called for by a knowing man, but one of the better modern type, educated, a man of the world, canny with Scotch blood, but progressive and with the experimental tendency progressive men exhibit. Markham told what manner of cup had been put to his lips. “What’s the matter with me!” he demanded.
“Muscular rheumatism.”
“And what are you going to do about it?”
“Oh, I’ll follow the custom of the profession and make you a prescription.”
“And about the effect?”
“Possibly it will help you.”
“Just at a casual estimate, how long am I to be crippled?”
“That depends.”
“Depends on what?”
The doctor laughed. “There’s a difference in rheumatism–and in men. If you don’t mind, I’ll reserve my answer for a day or two.”
Markham growled. The doctor went away after writing upon a bit of paper these hieroglyphics:
[Handwriting: illegible prescription]
The prescription came, a powder of about the color of a pulverized Rameses II, and with what Markham thought might be very nearly the flavor of that defunct but estimable monarch. Night came also at length, and with it came an experience, new even to this man who had been knocked about somewhat, and who thought he knew his world. A man with a pain and isolation can make a great study of the former, and Markham had certainly all facilities in such uncanny direction. The day passed drearily, but without much suffering to the man in the bed. He could read, holding his book in his left hand, and he read far into the night. Then he was formally introduced–he couldn’t help it–to Our Lady of Rheumatism. He was destined to become as well acquainted with her as was Antony with Cleopatra, or Pericles with Aspasia. Not extended, but violent, was to be the flirtation between these two.
Markham was tired and inclined to sleep, despite the obstacle intervening with each movement. Exhaustion forces a man to sleep sometimes when the pain which racks him is such that sleep would, under other circumstances, be impossible. When sleeping, come dreams of whatever object is nearest the heart, but the dreams are ever fantastic and distorted. There may be pleasant phases to the imagined happenings–this must be when the pain has for the moment ceased–but the dream is usually most perplexing, and its culmination most grotesque. At first Markham could not sleep at all. He was experiencing new sensations. From the affected leg and arm the nerves telegraphed to the brain certain interesting information. It was to the effect that a little pot was boiling on–or under–one leg and one arm. It was in the hollow underneath the knee, and that opposite the elbow joint that the boiling was–hardly a boil at first. The pain was not a twinge, it was not an ache, it was just a faintly simmering, vaguely hurting thing, enough to keep a man awake. Move but a trifle and the simmer became a boil. So the man lay still and suffered, not intensely, but irritatingly. And at last, despite the simmering, he slept.
“What dreams may come!” Markham slept, and, sleeping, he was with his love again, or at least trying to be. And what a season of it he had! It appeared late evening to him–it might be nine o’clock–but there was moonlight, while close to the ground was a white fog. He knew that She was waiting on a street only a block away from him, but he must pass through a park, a square rather densely wooded, with an iron fence about it and gates at the center on each side. From one gate to another a path led straight across through the thick shrubbery. In the queer combination of moon and fog all seemed uncanny, but he was going to meet Her and nothing mattered. He entered the little park jauntily, and went a few yards up the graveled walk between the trees and bushes, when there arose before him a startling figure. It was that of a man, or rather monster, with a huge chest, but narrow loins and oddly spindle legs, and with a white, dead face malignant of expression. The monster barred the passage and gestured menacingly, but uttered not a word. Markham did not care much. He was simply on his way to meet Her, and as for monsters and _outre_ things in general, what did they amount to! He was going to meet Her! He advanced a little and studied the creature. “I can lick him,” he soliloquized. “He’s a whale about the chest but he’s weak about the small of the back, and his legs are nothing, and I’ll break him in two–him! I’ve got to meet Her!”
He plunged ahead, and suddenly the monster drifted aside into the bushes and out of sight. Markham went on to the gate opening upon the opposite street. He emerged upon the sidewalk and looked about for the woman he loved. She was not there. A most matter-of-fact looking man came along, and Markham asked him who or what it was that barred the passage in the park. “That?” said the wayfarer, “Oh, he’s nothing! He’s only The Mechanical Arbor Man!”
The explanation was enough for Markham. Any explanation is enough for any one in a dream. He went down the sidewalk fully satisfied with what was said, and intent only upon his errand. He must find his love. Maybe she had walked along to the next block. A group of bicyclists were careering by as he crossed the street. One of them passed so close that he ran over Markham’s foot. Talk of sudden agony! It came then. The man awoke. It was three o’clock in the morning, and his rheumatism had developed suddenly into an agony. He said he would be practical. Surely, medical science, if it could not do away with a disease all at once, could alleviate extraordinary pain. Why should a man suffer needlessly? He sent for the doctor, and there was another brush of words between them. A degree of fun as well, for the doctor was not enduring anything, and was making a study of the case, and Markham was, between the ebullitions of agony, amused to an extent with his own strange physical condition. It seemed like prestidigitation to him. Here is what the doctor gave for his relief:
[Handwriting: illegible prescription]
The dose was taken as directed, and the man, suffering, set his teeth and awaited results. They did not come. The dose was repeated, duplicated and triplicated recklessly, but without result. The pain had grown to such proportions that the nerves had become hysterical, and would be stilled by no physician’s potion. They were beyond all reason. This is but a simple, brief account of a man and a woman and some rheumatism. It has no plot, and is but the record of events. The immediate sequence just at this stage of happenings was an analysis by Markham of what it was he was enduring–that is, an attempt at analysis. He was, necessarily, not at his best in a discriminating way. The account may aid the doctors, though. Those of them who have not had rheumatism must labor under disadvantages in a diagnosis.
There are certain great holes in great rocks by the sea into which the water enters through submarine channels and creeps up and up, increasing its bubbling and its seething, as the flood fills the natural well until when the top is reached there is a boiling caldron. This is flood tide. So it seemed to him, came the pain to Markham. There would be no suffering, and then would come the faint perception that something unpleasant was about to happen in a certain locality, it might be almost anywhere, for the rheumatism was no longer confining itself to the right leg and the right arm, but rioted through all the man’s limbs and about his back and shoulders. It went about like a vulture after food, alighting where it found prey to suit its fancy.
There would be the bubble and trickle beneath the knee and in the calf of the leg, and then would come the increase of turbulence as the flood rose, and then the boiling and the torture culminating throughout a long hour and a half. Then the new murmur somewhere else and the same event. Even in a finger or a toe definitely would the thing at times occur, the pain being, if possible, more intense in such event, because, seemingly, more contracted.
Pains may be said to have colors; in fact, this can be recognized even by the less imaginative. A burn, a cut, you have a scarlet pain. A slap might produce a pink pain, something less intense. But the pain of rheumatism is of another sort; there is no glitter to it. It is always blue, light at first, and gradually deepening until it becomes the very blue-blackness of all misery. This is the muscular stage; when it reaches the inflammatory there is a new sensation, something almost grinding. This latter feature Markham had to learn, for when morning broke, a single toe and all of one hand were swollen and unbendable. He was becoming an expert on sensations. He had formed his own idea of the Spanish Inquisition. It had never invented anything worth while, after all!
At 11 A.M. all pain suddenly ceased–even Our Lady of Rheumatism tires temporarily of caressing–and the exhausted man slept. What a sleep it was–glorious, but not dreamless. He was wandering through the halls of the greatest fair the world has ever seen, and he had a purse! The exhibitors were selling things, and what marvels he bought for Her! There were Russian sables fit for her slender shoulders, and he took them. Robes of the silver fox as soft as eider-down, and a cloak of royal ermine; he secured them, too. She was fond of rubies, and he purchased the most glorious of them all. For himself he bought but a single thing, a picture of a woman with a neck like hers. And then, wandering about seeking more gifts, he came to where they were melting a silver statue of an actress and stepped into a pan of the molten metal! He awoke then. Our Lady was caressing him again.
The doctor came and heard the story, and to say that Markham exhibited a great command of language in the telling, would be to do him but mild justice. The doctor, accustomed to his kind changed into wild animals by pain, only laughed. And then that Hagenback of his profession wrote upon a piece of paper this:
[Handwriting: illegible prescription]
There is no definiteness to this account. There is no relevance between time and occurrences, save in a vague, general way. A month would cover all the tale, but there are lapses. Markham suffered steadily, but not so patiently as would have done another man. The doctor visited him regularly, and they had difficulties such as will occur between men learning to understand each other pretty well, and so risking all debate. Two other prescriptions the doctor made, and these were all, not counting repetitions at the druggists. These two prescriptions, one, another ineffectual sedative, so great was the man’s suffering, and the other but a segment of the medical program looking toward a cure, may be dropped into the matter casually.
So the man sick with what makes strong men yield, struggled and suffered, until there came to him one day a man of color. Black as the conventional ace of spades was this man, and most impudent of expression, but he bore a note from Her. She had known him formerly but as a serving man in a boarding-house, but he had told to another servant, in her hearing, of how he had been engaged for years in a Turkish bath, and how he had cured a certain great man of rheumatism. She had remembered it, and had summoned this person of deep color that she might send him to the man she loved. There are a number of men in the world who can imagine what this messenger was to Markham under such circumstances! What to any healthy and healthful man is evidence of thinking about and for him from the one woman!
He questioned the visitor. He learned that he was at present a professional prize-fighter, most of the time out of an engagement. His appearance tended to establish his veracity in this particular instance. He looked like a thug and looked like a person out of employment for a long time.
What could he do? was demanded of the messenger. Well, he could “cure de rheumatism, shuah.” How would he do it? He would “take de gemman to a Turkish bath and rub him and put some stuff on him.”
Of course Markham was going to try the remedy. He would have tried a prescription of sleeping all night on wet grass under a upas tree, if such a remedy for rheumatism had come from Her. But he was fair about it all. He sent for the doctor. It was on this occasion that occurred their first controversy.
The doctor did not object to the Turkish bath nor the manipulation by the prize-fighter. “Be careful,” he said, “when you come out–don’t get a chill–and it may help you. What he rubs you with won’t hurt you, and the rubbing is good in itself.”
[Handwriting: illegible prescription]
“But why haven’t your prescriptions made me well?” demanded Markham.
The doctor was placid. “Because we don’t know enough about rheumatism yet,” he answered.
“Well, what excuse has your profession? You’ve been fooling about for thousands of years and don’t know yet the real cause of a common ailment. What is rheumatism, anyhow?”
The doctor was conservative in his expression.
“It’s a microbe,” blurted out Markham. “I tell you it’s a microbe! They are holding congresses and town meetings and pink teas all over me! There’s a Browning Society meeting in my left knee just now, and that’s what makes the agony. How could there be such a skipping about from one place to another, neither place diseased in itself, if there were not an active, living agency at work? Tell me that!”
The doctor admitted that microbes might cause the trouble. But he had a word or two to say about this individual case. There had been but a little over three weeks of the agony. The case was a particularly bad one, and he didn’t mind admitting that the patient was particularly intractable and doubting. Optimism had much to do with a recovery in most cases of illness, and optimism was here lacking. But he would wager a box of cigars that the patient was on his feet again within two weeks. The wager was taken with great promptness, and then the patient was loaded into a cab and sent off with the black prize-fighter.
What happened in that Turkish bath will never be told with all its proper lurid coloring. The prize-fighter stopped at a drug store and bought a mixture of cocoanut oil and alcohol. Markham took a bath in the usual way, and then was taken by the demon controlling him into the apartment for soaping and all cleansing and manipulation. Here occurred the tragedy. One leg had become stiffened, and the prize-fighter suddenly jumped upon it and broke it down, and Markham rolled off the marble slab, almost fainting from the pain. Then he recovered and tried to fight, but could do nothing, being a weak cripple, and was literally beaten into limberness. Then, using awful language, but helpless, he was carried to the cooling room and there rubbed with the alcohol and oil. He was taken to the cab more dead than alive. That night he had a little rest, and dreamed of Her, and how she had sent him a black angel with white wings. The next day he went with the prize-fighter again, but informed him that when well he should kill him. For three days this continued. The fourth day the prize-fighter got drunk and was arrested, and was sent to jail for thirty days. Meanwhile Markham had continued the physician’s prescriptions faithfully. A week later he was practically well.
The man, walking again, went to Her. He said, “You have been my salvation, as usual.”
“I don’t know,” she answered, thoughtfully. “I do know this, though, dear, that with you away from me and ill, I realized somehow more fully what you are to me. I wanted to do things. I have read often about a mother and a child. I think I had something of that feeling. I know now about us; we must never misunderstand again. I don’t think the colored man helped you much, and I understand he is a most disreputable person.”
He looked into her eyes, but uttered only a sentence of two words, “Little Mother.”
Markham visited the doctor, proud on his way of the swing of his legs again. “It was a pretty swift cure,” he said, “and I suppose you ought to have some of the credit for it.”
[Handwriting: illegible prescription]
The doctor advanced the proposition that he ought to have, with nature, not some, but all of the credit.
“There’s a difference in patients,” he remarked, “and when you began to improve you ‘hustled.’ But my treatment, those prescriptions, offset the poison–call it microbes, if you wish–in your blood and gave your physique and constitution and general health a chance. The darky does not figure.”
There was a good-natured debate, Markham being now reasonable, but no conclusion. What did cure Markham? Was it the physician’s treatment, the course with the prize-fighter, or the effect upon Markham’s mind of the fact that the latter was all from Her? Will some one say?
A week or two after his complete recovery, Markham asked the doctor what course to follow to avoid a possible recurrence at any time of what he had endured. The physician was very much in earnest in his answer. “Be careful of what you eat and drink,” he said, “and careful of yourself in a general way aside from that. Do not take risks of colds. Be, in short, a man of sense regarding your physical welfare.”
“But I’m going into the woods of Northern Michigan on a shooting and fishing trip,” was the answer, “and we’ve got to sleep on the ground, and to a certainty, we’ll fall into some creek or lake on an average of once a day; and, old man, we’ve room for another in the party.”
“I’ll come!” said the doctor.
But what cured Markham?
THE RED REVENGER
To build a really good jumper you must first find a couple of young iron-wood trees, say three inches in thickness and with a clean length of about twelve feet, clear of knots or limbs. If you chance to stumble upon a couple with a natural bend, so that each curls up properly like a sled runner, so much the better. But it isn’t likely you’ll find a pair of just that sort. Young iron-wood trees do not ordinarily grow that way, and the chances are you’ll have to bend them artificially, cutting notches with an ax on the upper side of each to allow the curvature. With strong cross-pieces, stout oak reams, and the general construction of a rude sled rudely imitated, you will have made what will carry a ponderous load. The bottom of the iron-woods must, of course, be shaved off evenly with a draw-shave and some people would nail on each a shoe of strap-iron, but that is really needless. Iron-wood wears smooth against the snow and ice and makes a noble runner anyhow. Only an auger and sense and hickory pegs and an eye for business need be utilized in the making, and in fact this economical construction is the best. That “the dearest is the cheapest” is a tolerably good maxim, but does not apply forever in regions where nature’s heart and man’s heart and the man’s hands are all tangled up together. The hickory creaks and yields, but it is tough and does not break. Such means of conveyance as that outlined, in angles chiefly, is equal to a sled for many things, and better for many others.
There may be people of the ignorant sort who have always lived in towns, who do not know what a jumper is. A jumper is a sort of sled, a part of the twist and wrench of a new world and new devices of living, and is used in newly-settled regions. It doesn’t cost much, and you can drive with it over anything that fails to offer a stern check to horses or a yoke of oxen. It is great for “coasting,” as they call it in some part of the country; “sliding down hill” in others. It was a big jumper of the sort described which was the pride of the boys in the Leavitt district school. They had nailed boards across it to make a floor, and the load that jumper carried on occasions was something wonderful. It would sustain as many boys and girls as could be packed upon it. Sometimes there came a need for strange devices as to getting on, and then the mass of boys would make the journey with its perils, laid criss-cross in layers, like cord-wood, four deep and very much alive and apprehensive.
The Leavitt school was situated in the country, ten miles from the nearest town, and those who attended it were the farmers’ sons and daughters. In winter the well-grown ones, those who had work to do in summer, would appear among the pupils, and this winter Jack Burrows, aged eighteen, was among the older boys. He was there, strong, hard working at his books, a fine young animal, and it may be added of him that he was there, in love, deeply and almost hopelessly. Among the girls in attendance was one who was different from the rest, just as an Alderney is different from a group of Devon heifers. She was no better, but she was different, that was all. She had come from a town, Miss Jennie Orton, aged seventeen, and she was spending the winter with the family of her uncle. Her own people were neither better off nor counted superior in any way to those she was now among, but she had a town way with her, a certain something, and was to the boys a most attractive creature. There was nothing wonderful about her–that is, there wouldn’t be to you or me–but she was a bright girl and a good one, and she awed Jack Burrows. A girl of seventeen is ten years older than a boy of eighteen, and in this case the added fact that the girl had lived in town and the boy had not, but added to the natural disparity. Jack had made some sturdy but shy advances which had been well enough received–in her heart Jennie thought him an excessively fine fellow–but being a male, and young, and lacking the sight which sees, he failed to take this graciousness at its full value. He had ventured to become her escort on the occasion of this sleigh ride or of that, but when all were crowded together by twos in the big straw-carpeted box, on the red bob-sleds, and the bells were jangling and the woods were slipping by and the bright stars overhead seemed laughing at something going on beneath them, his arm–to its shame be it said–had failed to steal about her waist, nor had he dared to touch his lips to hers, beneath the hooded shelter of the great buffalo robe which curled protectingly around them. He would as soon have dared such familiarity with the minister’s maiden sister, aged forty-two and prim as a Bible book-mark. Yet Jennie was just the sort of girl whom a cold-blooded expert must have declared as really meriting a kiss, when prudent and fairly practicable for the kisser and kissee, and as possessing just the sort of waist to be fitted handsomely by a good, strong arm. Jack, full of fun and ordinarily plucky enough–he had kissed other girls and had licked Jim Bigelow for saying Jennie Orton put on town airs–was simply in a funk. He could not bring himself to a manly wooing point. He was not without a resolve in the matter, for he was a determined youth, but in this callow strait of his, he was weakling enough to resort to devious methods. He wore no willow; he lost no weight. But the spell of love which warps us was upon him, and he swerved from the straight line, though bent upon his conquest. He was resolved to have that arm of his about sweet Jennie’s waist somehow, if he died for it, but with discretion. He would not offend her for the world. So he fell to plotting.
There had come a deep snow, and then the heavens had opened and there had followed a great rain. The schoolhouse stood on the crest of a hill and by it the highway ran down a steep slope and right across the flats, and the road, raised three feet higher than the low lands which it crossed, showed darkly just above the water. Then came snow again, and the road showed next a straight white band across the water. And now had come some colder weather, and ice had formed above the waiting waters which spread out so in all directions. What skating there would be! The boys had tried the ice, but it was coy and threatening, not yet quite safe to venture forth upon. It was what the boys called “India-rubber ice”; ice which would bend beneath their tread, but would not quite support them when they stopped. It would be all right, they said, in just a day or two. To venture recklessly upon its surface now was but to drop through two feet deep of water. And water beneath the ice in early March is cold upon the flats. In the interval there would be, at recess and at noontime, great sport in sliding down the hill.
The jumper, which, as already said, was a marvel of stoutness and