CHAPTER IX.
"A sleepy land, where under the same wheel,
The same old rut would deepen year by year."
"A life of nothings—nothing worth
From that first nothing ere his birth
To that last nothing under earth."
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The Jamestown people, in making a pariah of Myron Holder, were not urged to the step by any imperative feeling of hurt honor or pained surprise.
Such faults as hers were not uncommon there; but never before had the odium rested upon one only. Besides, there had always been some "goings on" and some "talk" indicative of the affair. In Myron Holder's case, the Jamestown people had been caught napping. In such cases a marriage and reinstatement into public favor was the usual sequel, arrived at after much exhilarating and spicy gossip, much enjoyable speculation, much mediation upon the part of the matrons, and much congratulation that all had ended so well.
For another thing, Myron Holder was an outsider, and there was no danger that a word spoken against her would provoke any one else to anger. The Jamestown people were all the descendants of some half-dozen families, the original settlers of the country. They had stagnated year after year, generation after generation marrying and intermarrying. The Jamestown people of Myron Holder's day bore a strange resemblance to one another. The descendants of the same families, subjected to the same mental influences, the same conditions of life, the same climate, the same religion—it was not to be wondered at that every prominent or individualized feature of mind and body had been obliterated and averaged down to a commonplace uniformity.
Distinct physical types were rare here, very dark or very fair people being seldom seen. The features were coarse and ill-defined, the nostrils merging into the cheeks, the chins into the necks, the pale lips into the dull-colored faces, with no clear line of demarcation, no pure curve to define form.
Certain peculiarities appertained to certain families, however. When one of the few—very few—Jamestown men who had gone forth to the outside world returned, he had not much difficulty in approximating at least the parentage of the children he encountered in the streets; for one had the Deans nose, a pinched-in, miserly, censorious feature, given to the smelling out of scandal; another had the Warner walk, a gait that in a horse would be termed racking; a third might have the Wilson scowl, a peculiar expression that seemed to emanate from sulkiness; a fourth was evidently a scion of the Disney stock, for he gazed out of the Disney eyes, always rheumy and without lashes.
There appeared in Jamestown families every now and then an imbecile, presenting, as in a terrible composite picture, the mental and moral weaknesses of his related ancestors.
Nearly every family counted, in some of its branches, one or more of these unfortunates.
Jamestown's attitude towards these maimed souls was characteristically utilitarian; they were fed and clothed until they arrived at an age when, if they were harmless, they became useful, or if they were violent, their mania became dangerous. In the former case they were given a full quota of work, and kept out of sight so far as possible, toiling early and late, horrible brownies, working unseen, unpaid, unthanked, unpitied. If they were violent, they were sent as paupers to the governmental institutions and forgotten.
Jamestown was stirred by no noble ambition, thrilled by no eager hope, excited by no generous impulse, moved by no patriotic enthusiasm, undisturbed by visions, unmoved by wars,—craved neither glory nor fame—
"Though fame is smoke,
Its fumes are frankincense to human thought."
And how poor a potsherd the human temple is, when savored with no incense of endeavor! Better the bitter breath of failure than the dank vapor of stagnating faculties. The haloes of defeated effort are sweeter than the lotus of inaction.
Jamestown's religion? If the God of whom preachers prate so familiarly really exists, with what awful scorn must He behold such worship! As monkeys, mowing and moping, might mock a pageant, so did these people simulate religion. Old Eliza—Mrs. Wilson's mad cousin—worshipped better when she dabbled her hands in the wayside horse-trough, rejoicing in its coolness; when she smoothed with tender fingers the torn fur of a half-shot rabbit; when she replaced the unfledged birds in the nest from which they had fallen—nay, even when she sped across the sunlit fields, her sodden face irradiate with an inarticulate feeling of the warmth and freedom of the air.
Nature spread about and before these people all her beauties, unfolded to their gaze all the enchantment of her seasons, but in vain; their eyes were darkened, their hearts hardened; the magical mystery of Spring left them ineloquent; Summer came and lingered, and went reluctantly; Autumn browned, and Winter fulfilled its bitterness, and they were unmoved save by the effect upon the crops.
The site of Jamestown and the country surrounding it was historic ground. Here men had fought and bled and died. The fathers and mothers of the present generation told how, when children, they had been hurried off to the woods, to hide there whilst the soldiers ransacked the deserted houses, eating and appropriating all they fancied, and spitefully spilling milk, wantonly cutting holes in the cheeses, and throwing the frying-pans and flatirons down the wells for mischief. These leisurely warriors were not, however, the ones whose blood had darkened the soil in so many adjacent spots. The Jamestown people had no personal reminiscences or knowledge of these sterner fighters, but evidences of their existence and warfare were plentiful.
Year by year, the neighboring farmers, in tilling their land, found bullets, broken bayonets, portions of old-fashioned guns, military buttons, and Indian arrow heads of flint. These latter relics were often defaced, pointless, and chipped, but sometimes they had preserved in perfection their venomous pointed form, sharp to sting to the death when hurled through the air from a hostile bow. Year after year, these tokens of conflict were found in the fresh furrows; the supply seemed inexhaustible. It was as though the earth was determined to cast forth from her bosom those deadly fragments whose mission had been to maim and slay her children. Yet Mother Earth is but a cruel stepdame to some of us, less kindly than the bullet, more cruel than the flint arrowhead.
The people in Jamestown thought little enough of these relics, though in springtime they were to be found in the pockets of every ploughman; but little Bing White had a collection of some hundreds of them. They had a strange fascination for the little elfish boy. People said he had just escaped being an idiot: that was far from the truth.
A keen and acute intelligence shone from his eyes, but perverted by morbid and horrible cravings. He was of a Newtonian and speculative turn of mind also, and was perpetually pondering upon problems of weighty import, suggested to him by the simplest manifestations of every-day life: Why dogs barked at bakers? Why blacksmith-shops were never new? Why buttered bread falls butter-side down? were questions that he strove with. The wonder of the arrowheads appearing year after year in the furrows was to him a source of never-ceasing thought. How was it they came to the surface? What strange grinding went on below the grain and the grass, to produce that flinty grist each springtime? He brooded much over the matter, turning his many specimens over and over with lingering, affectionate touches.
Bing kept his treasures in the space between the lath and plaster of the second story and the roof of his father's house. There was no room for garrets there—but there was a space in which Bing's diminutive figure could stand erect. The ingress to this long, low, dark chamber was through a tiny trap-door, in the ceiling of one of the back rooms. Through this, he would wriggle swiftly, replace the trap-door (in reality only a broad board), speed like a cat from joist to joist across the whole length of the house to where, through the round panes of the little gable window, the light fell full upon his collection, laid out in rows upon boards placed across the joists.
Each arrowhead of the lot had an individuality for this boy; every misshapen fragment a story. Indeed he dwelt longer over the pointless and defaced specimens than over the others, for more fascinating than any perfection of curve or point was the speculation as to where the fragments of the broken ones rested. Could it be possible that the long tapering point of the arrowhead he held in his hand had pierced some red-clad bosom, some dusky naked breast brought low, some helmeted head, some feather-decked crown, and won a costly coffin for itself to be buried in? Those notches on the side of the heavy white flint one, were they the scars of a conflict between the arrow and armor?
Bing White was not an imbecile, but he had strange fancies in that dusky treasure chamber of his, gloating over his arrowheads, whispering to himself of bloody deeds wrought and cruel blows dealt by these flints he held in his palms.
There was one long, narrow arrowhead, sharp and keen-edged, that he had a great affection for. He used to take it up lovingly and, baring his forearm, draw it lightly—lightly—close to the skin, his eyes dilating, his nostrils quivering; now and then, his hand faltering, he let it touch the flesh, and the keen edge swiftly brought blood.
At the pain he would drop the flint, but at the crimson drops which showed its bite he would gaze hungrily, delightedly, tracing them out in tiny red lines upon the white flesh of his meagre arm until the last vestige had disappeared; and then he would start and tremble, his fingers twitching strangely, his eyes peering here and there through the dusky perspective of his refuge, as if hoping to see some blur of the crimson fluid he loved. Then he would kiss the vicious arrowhead, and fondle it, until, hearing his mother's call, he would lay it down gently and flee across the joists, surefooted and nimble, to the trap-door.
By the time he descended his face would have lost the wild irradiation of his hidden joy; but his eyes followed any small creature, the cats, the chickens, the self-satisfied ducks. He whispered to himself in his dreams of a day when he would not deny his desire for blood.
A strange impish development of character was his: dangerous by reason of the stubbornness of his race, and strangely blended and nurtured with and by a love of vivid and bright color. This latter characteristic was instilled into the White blood, when one of the far-back Whites, who had been to the war, returned, bringing with him a gypsy camp-follower as his wife, making her the great-grandmother of this boy, who cherished the flint arrowheads for the pain they could inflict, and who dreamt long dreams, the atmosphere of which was crimsoned with blood and vocal with cries of pain.
This unhealthy mental state found for itself plenty of sustenance, as all vile plants and animals do, sucking the virus of its unhealthy existence from every phase of nature, every homely incident in village life. He let no chance escape him to enjoy his ghoulish pleasure; the killing of the poultry twice a week for market was a festival he never missed.
At the village shambles he was a frequent guest; at a pig-sticking he was always on hand, interested, helpful; no scientist in a clinic ever watched with greater enthusiasm the performance of a new experiment than did Bing White the bleeding of a horse—of all these events he had accurate information. If all these failed him, he sped far down the margin of the lake, to where the gillnets were, and appeased his craving by watching the slow, turgid drops that fell when they prepared the fish.
In autumn, when the paths through the ample woods were overhung with crimson canopies of leaves, which the winds brought down like blots of blood to be trodden under foot; when the brambles clung red about the fences or trailed scarlet along the ground; when the bitter-sweet hung in vermilion clusters from its bare stems, and the Virginian creeper clothed the cedars in a fiery mantle—at this time Bing White's eyes were ever gleaming with unholy happiness, only no one ever noticed it.
It is from such material as this boy that those morbid murderers are evolved who do murder for murder's sake. Just where in his ante-natal history the love of color flamed into a love of blood, who shall say? But it burned within him, a consuming fire; if quenched, to be quenched only by the annihilation of the being that embodied it. If left to burn? ...
He had much knowledge of and liking for animals, but it was the liking of the instinctive vivisector. Inexplicable cases of maimed and killed animals attested his devotion to the gratification of his curiosity. The sudden elongation and apparent telescoping of a cat's paw was a subject that for hours had kept him sleepless.
He had solved the riddle first by putting it down to some trick of his eyesight, but the keenness of his vision was proverbial in Jamestown, and that did not long content him. Then he took a tape-line and measured a paw, and waited for the stretching process. It came. The huge Maltese stretched out his forepaws in languorous indolence. Bing promptly caught one and began to measure; the cat instantly contracted its muscles. Bing strove to hold the paw out by force, with the result that the cat (which was of the giant order, and no degenerate descendant of its wild progenitors) fixed its teeth through the fleshy part of his thumb, from which it was with difficulty disengaged. The wound inflamed and festered, but the symptoms disappeared in a week or two. Shortly after the cat died in a fit.
The dilation and contraction of the eyes of animals was a source of continual speculation to Bing; a matter he strove in horrid ways to elucidate. There was something hideously repulsive in this boy's secret cruelties, horrible to relate, sickening to contemplate. But the creatures he tormented, maimed, killed, knew neither anticipation nor remembrance; the "corporeal pang" was all.
There was a strange and horrible parallel between his nature and the nature of the women who tortured so ceaselessly the woman whom fate had made their victim; a little difference in method, a little divergence of application, a slight change from the physical to the mental world—that was all save a dreadful difference in the victim; but the instinct of cruelty was the same.
There is an organized society in one of our great cities for putting dumb animals out of pain—out of existence. It had been well for Myron Holder had she been one of those creatures to which a merciful death is vouchsafed. The lilied purity of her womanhood might be gone, but we do not rend the petals of even spent flowers. It is hard to tread upon even a crushed blossom, and painful to see a broken lily flung to smother in a sewer.