The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, and Other Stories
shortening toward the six-months' night at that time. We kept up the
festivities many hours; then, at last, the guests departed and the rest
of us distributed ourselves along the walls on sleeping-benches, and
soon all were steeped in dreams but me. I was too happy, too excited, to
sleep. After I had lain quiet a long, long time, a dim form passed by me
and was swallowed up in the gloom that pervaded the farther end of the
house. I could not make out who it was, or whether it was man or woman.
Presently that figure or another one passed me going the other way. I
wondered what it all meant, but wondering did no good; and while I was
still wondering I fell asleep.
'I do not know how long I slept, but at last I came suddenly broad awake
and heard my father say in a terrible voice, “By the great Snow God,
there's a fish-hook gone!” Something told me that that meant sorrow
for me, and the blood in my veins turned cold. The presentiment was
confirmed in the same instant: my father shouted, “Up, everybody, and
seize the stranger!” Then there was an outburst of cries and curses from
all sides, and a wild rush of dim forms through the obscurity. I flew to
my beloved's help, but what could I do but wait and wring my hands?--he
was already fenced away from me by a living wall, he was being bound
hand and foot. Not until he was secured would they let me get to him. I
flung myself upon his poor insulted form and cried my grief out upon
his breast while my father and all my family scoffed at me and heaped
threats and shameful epithets upon him. He bore his ill usage with a
tranquil dignity which endeared him to me more than ever, and made me
proud and happy to suffer with him and for him. I heard my father order
that the elders of the tribe be called together to try my Kalula for his
life.
'“What!” I said, “before any search has been made for the lost hook?”
'“Lost hook!” they all shouted, in derision; and my father added,
mockingly, “Stand back, everybody, and be properly serious--she is going
to hunt up that lost hook: oh, without doubt she will find it!”--whereat
they all laughed again.
'I was not disturbed--I had no fears, no doubts. I said:
'“It is for you to laugh now; it is your turn. But ours is coming; wait
and see.”
'I got a rag lamp. I thought I should find that miserable thing in one
little moment; and I set about that matter with such confidence that
those people grew grave, beginning to suspect that perhaps they had been
too hasty. But alas and alas!--oh, the bitterness of that search! There
was deep silence while one might count his fingers ten or twelve times,
then my heart began to sink, and around me the mockings began again, and
grew steadily louder and more assured, until at last, when I gave up,
they burst into volley after volley of cruel laughter.
'None will ever know what I suffered then. But my love was my support
and my strength, and I took my rightful place at my Kalula's side, and
put my arm about his neck, and whispered in his ear, saying:
'“You are innocent, my own--that I know; but say it to me yourself, for
my comfort, then I can bear whatever is in store for us.”
'He answered:
'“As surely as I stand upon the brink of death at this moment, I am
innocent. Be comforted, then, O bruised heart; be at peace, O thou
breath of my nostrils, life of my life!”
'“Now, then, let the elders come!”--and as I said the words there was a
gathering sound of crunching snow outside, and then a vision of stooping
forms filing in at the door--the elders.
'My father formally accused the prisoner, and detailed the happenings of
the night. He said that the watchman was outside the door, and that in
the house were none but the family and the stranger. “Would the family
steal their own property?” He paused. The elders sat silent many
minutes; at last, one after another said to his neighbour, “This looks
bad for the stranger”--sorrowful words for me to hear. Then my father
sat down. O miserable, miserable me! At that very moment I could have
proved my darling innocent, but I did not know it!
'The chief of the court asked:
'“Is there any here to defend the prisoner?”
'I rose and said:
'“Why should he steal that hook, or any or all of them? In another day
he would have been heir to the whole!”
I stood waiting. There was a long silence, the steam from the many
breaths rising about me like a fog. At last one elder after another
nodded his head slowly several times, and muttered, “There is force
in what the child has said.” Oh, the heart-lift that was in those
words!--so transient, but, oh, so precious! I sat down.
'“If any would say further, let him speak now, or after hold his peace,”
said the chief of the court.
'My father rose and said:
'“In the night a form passed by me in the gloom, going toward the
treasury and presently returned. I think, now, it was the stranger.”
'Oh, I was like to swoon! I had supposed that that was my secret; not
the grip of the great Ice God himself could have dragged it out of my
heart. The chief of the court said sternly to my poor Kalula:
'“Speak!”
'Kalula hesitated, then answered:
'“It was I. I could not sleep for thinking of the beautiful hooks. I
went there and kissed them and fondled them, to appease my spirit and
drown it in a harmless joy, then I put them back. I may have dropped
one, but I stole none.”
'Oh, a fatal admission to make in such a place! There was an awful hush.
I knew he had pronounced his own doom, and that all was over. On every
face you could see the words hieroglyphed: “It is a confession!--and
paltry, lame, and thin.”
'I sat drawing in my breath in faint gasps--and waiting. Presently, I
heard the solemn words I knew were coming; and each word, as it came,
was a knife in my heart:
'“It is the command of the court that the accused be subjected to the
trial by water.”
'Oh, curses be upon the head of him who brought “trial by water” to our
land! It came, generations ago, from some far country that lies none
knows where. Before that our fathers used augury and other unsure
methods of trial, and doubtless some poor guilty creatures escaped with
their lives sometimes; but it is not so with trial by water, which is
an invention by wiser men than we poor ignorant savages are. By it the
innocent are proved innocent, without doubt or question, for they drown;
and the guilty are proven guilty with the same certainty, for they
do not drown. My heart was breaking in my bosom, for I said, “He is
innocent, and he will go down under the waves and I shall never see him
more.”
'I never left his side after that. I mourned in his arms all the
precious hours, and he poured out the deep stream of his love upon me,
and oh, I was so miserable and so happy! At last, they tore him from
me, and I followed sobbing after them, and saw them fling him into the
sea--then I covered my face with my hands. Agony? Oh, I know the deepest
deeps of that word!
'The next moment the people burst into a shout of malicious joy, and
I took away my hands, startled. Oh, bitter sight--he was swimming! My
heart turned instantly to stone, to ice. I said, “He was guilty, and he
lied to me!” I turned my back in scorn and went my way homeward.
'They took him far out to sea and set him on an iceberg that was
drifting southward in the great waters. Then my family came home, and my
father said to me:
'“Your thief sent his dying message to you, saying, 'Tell her I am
innocent, and that all the days and all the hours and all the minutes
while I starve and perish I shall love her and think of her and bless
the day that gave me sight of her sweet face.'” Quite pretty, even
poetical!
'I said, “He is dirt--let me never hear mention of him again.” And oh,
to think--he was innocent all the time!
'Nine months--nine dull, sad months--went by, and at last came the day
of the Great Annual Sacrifice, when all the maidens of the tribe wash
their faces and comb their hair. With the first sweep of my comb
out came the fatal fish-hook from where it had been all those months
nestling, and I fell fainting into the arms of my remorseful father!
Groaning, he said, “We murdered him, and I shall never smile again!”
He has kept his word. Listen; from that day to this not a month goes by
that I do not comb my hair. But oh, where is the good of it all now!'
So ended the poor maid's humble little tale--whereby we learn that since
a hundred million dollars in New York and twenty-two fish-hooks on the
border of the Arctic Circle represent the same financial supremacy, a
man in straitened circumstances is a fool to stay in New York when he
can buy ten cents' worth of fish-hooks and emigrate.
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND THE BOOK OF MRS. EDDY
'It is the first time since the dawn-days of Creation that a Voice
has gone crashing through space with such placid and complacent
confidence and command.'
I
This last summer, when I was on my way back to Vienna from the
Appetite-Cure in the mountains, I fell over a cliff in the twilight and
broke some arms and legs and one thing or another, and by good luck was
found by some peasants who had lost an ass, and they carried me to the
nearest habitation, which was one of those large, low, thatch-roofed
farm-houses, with apartments in the garret for the family, and a
cunning little porch under the deep gable decorated with boxes of
bright-coloured flowers and cats; on the ground floor a large and light
sitting-room, separated from the milch-cattle apartment by a partition;
and in the front yard rose stately and fine the wealth and pride of the
house, the manure-pile. That sentence is Germanic, and shows that I am
acquiring that sort of mastery of the art and spirit of the language
which enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing
cars.
There was a village a mile away, and a horse-doctor lived there, but
there was no surgeon. It seemed a bad outlook; mine was distinctly
a surgery case. Then it was remembered that a lady from Boston was
summering in that village, and she was a Christian Science doctor and
could cure anything. So she was sent for. It was night by this time, and
she could not conveniently come, but sent word that it was no matter,
there was no hurry, she would give me 'absent treatment' now, and come
in the morning; meantime she begged me to make myself tranquil and
comfortable and remember that there was nothing the matter with me. I
thought there must be some mistake.
'Did you tell her I walked off a cliff seventy-five feet high?'
'Yes.'
'And struck a boulder at the bottom and bounced?'
'Yes.'
'And struck another one and bounced again?'
'Yes.'
'And struck another one and bounced yet again?'
'Yes.'
'And broke the boulders?'
'Yes.'
'That accounts for it; she is thinking of the boulders. Why didn't you
tell her I got hurt, too?'
'I did. I told her what you told me to tell her: that you were now
but an incoherent series of compound fractures extending from your
scalp-lock to your heels, and that the comminuted projections caused you
to look like a hat-rack.'
'And it was after this that she wished me to remember that there was
nothing the matter with me?'
'Those were her words.'
'I do not understand it. I believe she has not diagnosed the case with
sufficient care. Did she look like a person who was theorising, or did
she look like one who has fallen off precipices herself and brings to
the aid of abstract science the confirmation of personal experience?'
'Bitte?'
It was too large a contract for the Stubenmadchen's vocabulary; she
couldn't call the hand. I allowed the subject to rest there, and asked
for something to eat and smoke, and something hot to drink, and a basket