The boy, conveniently named Oolah, led Hopkins some way back of the settlement to a tupick of considerable size, and covered with canvas (usually walrus hide or skins form these roofings) which was, it so happened, Gohara’s storehouse, stocked with trading material. Hopkins restrained his guide’s impatience, and finding a convenient aperture for the inspection of the interior peered within. To his delighted astonishment there was the Professor, with notebook and pencil, and near him in placid wonderment, which occasionally broke in smiles or deepened into terror, was the last and, with reservations for taste, most attractive wife of the head trader of Indian Point, Ting-wah by name. The Professor’s performances were immoderately extravagant. Seen in their incongruous environment, combined with their novelty, they compelled Hopkins to retire at intervals and roll on the ground, in order to control the violence of his merriment, another proceeding which strengthened Oolah’s conviction in the immanence of the devil among these strangers.
When Hopkins first descried the Professor, he was standing erect with his arms raised high above his head, close together, the hands in contact, flapping and clapping them in an indescribably funny way, while at intervals he shrank and cowered over as if seized with the insupportable pains of colic. To these antics the woman returned a perplexed stare, as the Professor resumed his normal manner, took up his pad and pencil, and waited apparently for her response, while she, equally expectant, stood stock still and waited for more explicit communications.
Then the Professor suddenly extended his arms in front of him, and wheeled round on his heels, with such commendable agility, that as he spun, his expansive ears seemed almost obliterated. It was then that Hopkins resorted to the refuge of the ground to conceal his feelings. Still the woman was mute, but her face showed a rising fear, and her hands rose to her neck as if to seize something from the skin pouch made in her upper garment.
The Professor left off his physical maneuvers and began a series of grimaces which, as Hopkins expressed it, “would have dimmed the luster of the best vaudeville star he had ever seen.” They expressed almost everything, beginning with something that might be called suffering, to a terrible excruciation of joy, when the Professor exerted his features to a degree that Hopkins called “the limit of facial agony.” And yet the girl was silent, but her eyes never left the Professor, and Hopkins, and Oolah too, saw her quietly draw a knife from her “bread basket.” Hopkins might not have observed this if Oolah had not grunted, “Stick ’im.”
He felt then it was time to intervene, but his interest and curiosity—“better’n a show” he repeated over and over again—had up to this point prevented him.
Suddenly the Professor desisted from his rapid play of expression, and began to moan diabolically, rolling towards the woman with supplicating arms. The knife flashed, it was upraised, and the girl crouched, her face darkening with either rage or terror. The next moment she had sprung at the now observant and terror-stricken Professor, who executed a flank movement—“side-stepped” Hopkins put it—and was out of the door and—into the protecting embrace of Hopkins’ arms, while Oolah with precocious intelligence intercepted Ting-wah. The girl’s pent-up emotions spent themselves in screams and fervent but barbarous complaints that brought Gohara and his other spouses to her rescue. Hopkins, utterly mystified by the Professor’s exhibition, resorted to the very plausible explanation, suggested by Oolah in the first place, that the Professor had gone crazy, which indeed he most apostolically believed himself. This answered the purpose, though it did not repress Gohara and his family from uttering a string of uncomplimentary epithets which might have provoked a serious disturbance had it not been for Hopkins’ tact and the celerity of our retreat. Gohara’s rage followed our boat with stridulous recriminations.
The Professor was noticeably crestfallen and almost sullenly indifferent to our questions as to what had happened. It was only a few days later, when his spirits had become thoroughly restored, that he spoke about it, with a sudden assumption of confidence that delighted us.
“My friends,” the Professor began one cold, radiant afternoon as we were ranged round the naphtha launch admiring its adaptation, strength, the happy conception of structural ice runners let into her keel, the easily unshipped tiller and screw; “My friends, the theories of the origin of language have been various; there are the views of Geiger as to its inception in movement and action, those of Noire as to the importance of sound, onomatopoetic or imitative, and the value of expression, as with Darwin.”
“You see,” he continued with a fine indirection of reference, which we appreciated, “I was before an untutored child of nature. I attempted, along these various lines of non-verbal intercourse to secure an illuminative response that might throw some light upon theory. Under the circumstances, the subject, vitiated I think by contact with European culture—Ah—”
“Shied” suggested Hopkins.