From the Life/Benjamin McNeil Murdock
FROM THE LIFE
BENJAMIN McNEIL MURDOCK
1
MURDOCK is not yet in Who's Who, though he ought to be. He has produced a potato as big as a turnip, the "Murdock Manitoba," and a huge peach with a stone no larger than a cherry-pit, the "Cantaloup Alberta." These alone might not entitle him to anything more than honorable mention in a seed-catalogue, but the experiments by which he achieved his potato and his peach have had another issue—they threaten to modify the Darwinian theory of the origin of species.
This is a serious matter—more serious than has been apprehended by the newspaper men who have been head-lining Murdock as the "Burbank of New Jersey." He has obtained his new species not merely by cross-fertilization and encouraging "sports," but by opposing his plants with adversities which they have had to overcome in order to survive. He got the idea, I understand, by observing how flowers will grow a long stalk in order to reach sunlight; but from that beginning he has worked to the point of proving an adaptiveness in plants that amounts almost to unconscious intelligence. Consequently he appears to find the cause of variation—and hence the origin of species—less in the outer pressure of the plant's environment than in the inner effort of the organism to adapt itself to changing conditions.
That, as I say, is a serious matter. It casts a doubt on the whole mechanistic theory of evolution. It brings back into the non-sentient world a long-banished creative intelligence. It permits a pan- psychic view of the universe that is mystical. Unless I am much mistaken, the name of Benjamin McNeil Murdock is likely to be one of the conspicuous names of the century, and his little farm in the Washington Valley may even become the storm-center of a controversy as world-shaking as the one that thundered over Darwin's pigeon-houses fifty years ago. You may care nothing whatever about the mechanistic theory, the origin of species, or the cause of evolution, but before long you will probably be as curious about Murdock as your father was about Darwin—as curious as I have become about Murdock since I found out what he was at.
2
For two years, from my summer windows on the southern slope of Wauchock Hill, I had looked down on the Murdock Farm below us and seen him pottering around, with his "Dago" assistants, among his hothouses and his cold-frames. I had watched him with an intent but idle observation. You know, from your school-days, that when you are trying to write, on a blond June morning, at a task that drags and dawdles in a springing world, there is nothing too insignificant to take your eye and captivate your interest. I had watched Murdock as absorbedly as if he were a red spider making a web on my window-screen. Yet I never intelligently saw what he was doing.
I saw merely a lank, commonplace, and simple-looking farmer, going about his chores in faded blue overalls, a seersucker shirt, and a straw hat of the kind that is called a "cow's breakfast." I was aware that his neighbors thought him crazy. I had heard it said that he talked to his vegetables in order to make them grow in the way he wished. I knew that he could not talk to his vegetables less than he talked to his neighbors; that if it were not for his wife, he would be as much cut off from human intercourse and understanding as one of his own prodigious potatoes. Everything about him—except her—seemed entirely ordinary and bucolic. We had only one question to puzzle ourselves with, "How did he ever come to marry her—or she him?"
Then I learned, from a chance reference in a technical review, that Murdock's experiments were professionally considered as important as those of Hugo de Vries; that Professor Jeddes accepted him as a successful exemplar of "a needed renewal of the rustic point of view," or, more fully, as "a naturalist who grasps not only the mechanical and urban viewpoint, but the rustic and physiological one, theorizing neither in terms of the mere mechano-morphism of the physicists and the chemists nor of the puzzled mysticism of the vitalist philosophers as yet befogged by their urban environment or bewildered by reaction from it"—whatever that may mean.
It meant to Jeddes, and to the reviewer, that "Pasteur was not the last thinking peasant." And the name of Pasteur put me to the blush. Had we been looking down, hi ignorant superiority from Wauchock Hill, upon the profound experiments of a new Pasteur? Apparently we had.
3
I carried the review to Mrs. Murdock. She had already seen it. She was her husband's amanuensis, and kept the daily record of his experiments, and wrote whatever was procured from him for publication. She acted as his interpreter, at our meeting, very gracefully; and what she interpreted was chiefly his silence. In a Mayflower arm-chair beside the open door, with his garden behind him, he sat smiling amiably at us, unembarrassed, but as quiet as a sea-captain, his feet planted firmly on the floor in leather slippers, his hands resting on the chair-arms, his trowel in one hand and his haycock hat in the other, his bony head and shoulders as gravely immovable as a mountain, with an air about him of something elemental, sun-browned, weather-beaten, and placidly but incommunicably wise.
She had been trying to write for him, and she was worried by a sense of her shortcomings. She appealed to me for advice with that respect which you feel for a writer whose works you have never read. He listened to us as indulgently as Emerson contemplating a dancing-lesson, and I was relieved when he rose quietly and stole out.
It appeared that she was a college graduate, educated in modern languages, a studious reader, fond of serious fiction and able to pass judgment on it with cheerful common sense. She seemed to have an idea that there must be in writing, as there is in golf, a proper stance, a correct stroke, a championship method. She had evidently been an athletic young girl. She was now perhaps thirty, neither handsome nor graceful, but interesting and individual. I had seen her walking with a long-armed stride, in low heels, with the powerful shoulder slouch of a tennis-player; now she sat listening intently, leaning forward, with her arms folded on her knees, smiling apologetically at the eagerness and the ignorance of her own questions. Her eyes were spirited. Her face was not. It did not express her. She looked out from behind its too large and immobile features as if knowing that they came between her and your sympathy, and as if straining to hold you to her eyes, which I found frankly magnetic.
There was something aristocratic about her easy simplicity, yet she seemed not out of place in the homely room of that low-ceilinged farm-house. I guessed that she was responsible for its furnishings and decoration, because it was done in the flat tints and simple fittings of a sophisticated taste. I left with the conviction that she and her husband were a remarkable couple.
4
It was a conviction that did not endure. There was nothing in their past to support it. Imagine: he had been born on that farm some thirty-five years before; he had had no schooling until he was nine; then, a hulking, slow-minded boy, he had joined the infants' class at the Wauchock village school, down the valley, and, in the ordinary course of education, he had progressed to the public school at Centerbrook. When he left school he went to work in a grocery at Centerbrook, and he moved from there to New York City, where he became bookkeeper for the Perry-Felton Company on William Street. During the years that he lived in New York he returned to his home only once—when he came to the funeral of his parents and the trial of the hired man who was found guilty of having murdered them.
At the conclusion of that trial he sold all the farm stock and implements at auction, locked up the house, and returned to New York. Several years later he reappeared, evidently with money, modernized the old place, and settled down to an absurd sort of gardening, raising weeds in hot- houses, and generally behaving like a silent and unapproachable eccentric. Within a month of his return he married Ruth Young, a moneyed girl of Centerbrook whom nobody in the Washington Valley knew he had been courting.
And there was nothing remarkable about her past, either. She was the daughter of a Charles Washington Young who had owned the stone-quarry near Wauchock in Murdock's boyhood days. Young and his family had moved to Centerbrook while Murdock was still at the village school, and Ruth and he had been at the public school together, but it was not known that there had been anything between them. Her father had made a great deal of money, first out of ballast stone, then as a rail-road contractor, and finally as a banker and first citizen of the county-seat. He had sent his daughter to Wellesley. His death brought her home to the pretentious Colonial country house which he had built—after the model of Mount Vernon—on the top of the mountain between Centerbrook and the Washington Valley. From there she married, against her mother's wishes. None of her relatives came to see her as Mrs. Murdock. Her husband, it seemed, was not "accepted" in Centerbrook, New Jersey.
Now I ask you, could anything seem more ordinary than such a history? Could you believe that, beneath the superficies of these incidents, there was hidden one of those romances that life delights to invent, perversely, in order to confound the realities of fiction? No. No more could I. Murdock might be a great naturalist, a peasant genius, another Pasteur, but there was obviously nothing in him to repay prospecting by a short-story writer. I gave him up. And then, unexpectedly, in gossip about the details of that murder trial, I came on traces of fiction's precious metal, followed it, placer-mining, up the course of his history, and located an incredibly rich mother-lode.
5
Take, first, the story of the murder as I dug it out—and found it pay dirt.
In the fall of 1910, during the hunting season, two shots were heard from the Murdock farm about midday. The neighbors thought nothing of it, or supposed that old Murdock was killing rabbits. In the middle of the afternoon the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Heins—a woman who was always "running the road," as they say in the valley—came to the Murdock kitchen door to borrow some mustard, as an emetic for her son, who had been eating "musharoons" that were behaving as if they were toadstools. She got no answer to her knock. In her anxiety about her son she opened the door to call through the house, and she saw old Murdock collapsed in his seat at the table "in a mucks of blood," and Mrs. Murdock lying across an inner threshold of the room "all of a heap an' bleedin' like a pig-killin'." She ran screaming back to her son. He hurried to the Murdock farm, and she went spreading the alarm down the valley.
"By gosh!" he said, afterward, "it cured me, it did. I never knowed I was sick till it was all over—an' then I wasn't."
Murdock's hired man was missing. He was at once suspected. And naturally so. Murdock's hired men were notorious. He had been in the habit of engaging any tramp who came to his kitchen door, and, almost invariably, after working a few weeks, the man disappeared with anything that happened to be unprotected in the valley on the day of his departure. The news "Ol' Murdock's man's moved on" became the signal for a general stock-taking in the vicinity.
The last man had been caught with a stolen shotgun under his mattress before he had time to flee, and he was sent to jail as a vengeance on all those others who had escaped. His successor was a half-witted wanderer who said he was on his way to visit "Roseyvelt." Old Murdock told him that Roosevelt was dead, and the man—with his mainspring broken—seemed unable to go any farther. Murdock hired him for his board and a package of fine-cut a week. Now he had "moved."
Hunting parties with shot-guns started out in all directions to seek his trail. He was found in the Murdock wood-lot, innocently cutting cedar-trees for fence-posts. He had been there since early morning; the shells of four hard-boiled eggs showed where he had eaten his luncheon, and the trees that he had cut and stripped were numerous enough to occupy a day's industry.
Heins said, suspiciously, "That's more wood 'n I ever seen a hired man cut in one day."
The man replied: "I dunno. Some of 'em, mebbe, was yeste'day's cuttin'."
Heins grumbled, "I thought so." And that conversation, related again and again, was Heins's contribution to the solution of the murder mystery.
At first they did not tell the hired man why they were looking for him, and he resented their questions, sulkily continuing his work. But as soon as he heard of the murder he dropped his ax and ran through the woods to the house, and, coming suddenly on the scene in the kitchen, he fell back down the kitchen steps in a sort of fit. When he had been revived with a drink from a hunter's pocket flask his innocence was conceded.
He could not be persuaded to enter the house. He retreated to the barn, sat down on the wheel of a mowing-machine, and told and retold his story, over and over, to a constantly changing group of men, women, and children. By sundown the whole valley was there, and all the villagers from Wauchock. They wandered around the house, the barn, the front yard, the side garden, the woodpile, and the outhouses like a colony of disturbed ants, gathering in two large clusters around the kitchen and the barn, nodding, shaking hands, conversing in low tones together, exchanging opinions and passing on gossip. By the time the sheriff of the county arrived a complete theory of the crime had been gathered for him. It was this:
Murdock's old hound had died two days before. Poisoned, no doubt. By whom? By the murderer. Who was he? Well, Murdock had heard, in Centerbrook, that the hired man who had stolen the shotgun was out of jail and threatening him. Why? Because, according to the man's story, he had not stolen the gun; Murdock had stolen it and "planted" it on him.
"He's been drunk down there," Murdock told his neighbor, Heins. "If he comes bleatin' around here I'll blow him full o' buckshot."
But the man's threats and the death of the watch-dog alarmed the household. Murdock bolted his doors and windows at night and slept up-stairs on the floor of an unfinished room of the attic, with his gun beside him. And he carried the gun with him when he went to work in the fields.
That gun—a double-barreled shot-gun—was nowhere to be found. He had evidently stood it beside the kitchen door when he sat down to dinner. And the murderer had crept up, under cover of the kitchen weeds, reached the gun unseen, shot Murdock in the back as he sat at the table, and shot Mrs. Murdock point-blank as she ran in from the other room to see what had happened. They had both been dead for hours when Mrs. Heins came on them.
The sheriff drove off at once to send out an alarm for the jailbird. A deputy took charge of the preparations for the inquest and cleared the house of sight-seers. They moved on to the Heinses', and the hired man went with them.
6
In all this there was no thought of Murdock's son, Ben. Or if any one thought of him it was only to wonder where he was and who would notify him. The whole valley knew that he had quarreled with his father, that he had not been home for years, that if his mother heard from him she did not mention it. And no one recognized him when, toward midnight, a tall stranger came to the Heinses' kitchen door with a suit-case in his hand. He stood scrutinizing the group of late-stayers in the lamp-light around the kitchen table, looked from them to the hired man who sat alone smoking beside the range, and asked, abruptly, "Are you Murdock's man?"
They supposed he was a detective. He wore city blacks and a black felt hat and a starched collar. The hired man slowly turned his head—a classical head, the head and bronzed profile of a Cæsar on a Roman coin. And the stranger said to him, "I'm Ben Murdock."
That was all Murdock did say. For the rest of the evening he listened. And he listened in a peculiar way. After the first quick glance at this one or that one with whom he shook hands he looked past them, with a troubled frown, as if dissatisfied, and thereafter he avoided meeting their eyes in a direct gaze.
It turned out to be a habit of manner. He had a trick of looking at the chest of the person that stood talking to him; and when they were all sitting again he looked at their knees or at their feet, with no expression of shyness or self-consciousness. Only the hired man's face he studied thoughtfully, in an absent-minded muse. And the hired man, smoking apart, with his air of distinguished vacancy, remained beside the greasy stove in silence, refusing to answer even when they spoke to him.
"He's sort o' dumb," they explained, in the idiom of the valley, meaning by "dumb" half-witted.
Ben Murdock showed little emotion over the story of the murder. Once, when they were telling about the man who had been sent to jail for stealing the shot-gun, he took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead as if it were wet with perspiration. And a moment later, when they were telling how the other hired men had invariably turned out to be thieves, he suddenly raised to them a bewildered face of suffering. It moved Mrs. Heins to take him away from the visitors by offering to make up a bed for him on the parlor sofa. He accepted the bed without thanks and left the kitchen without saying good night.
No one was offended. They took it as proof that he was still one of them; that, although he had acquired city clothes and a city pallor, he had not descended to any city insincerities of formal politeness.
He was up and out before breakfast, wandering alone around the parental farm. He ate his breakfast silently, and no one intruded upon him with any social expression of sympathy. Mrs. Heins saw that he had food and drink; the others talked around him as if he were not there. They merely made it a point not to speak of the murder. When he had finished he asked where the nearest telephone could be reached, and went out to find it. As soon as he was gone the hired man drifted in from nowhere for his breakfast.
In about an hour Murdock came back with the sheriff and asked for this hired man. He had gravitated naturally to the barn. They went after him. "Come along, Jack," the sheriff said. "We want you to show us where you were workin' when this happened."
His name was not "Jack." He was anonymous. But he accepted "Jack," as he accepted "Bill" or "Bo." indifferently.
He struck out across the fields to Murdock's wood-lot, and they followed him. As they went Murdock pointed out significantly to the sheriff the fence-line between his father's farm and Heins's; it was a thick hedge of small cedars, sassafras, blackberry brambles, and poison ivy, and it ran from the Murdock garden-patch to the edge of the woods toward which they were walking. The sheriff looked at it and nodded.
They entered the wood-lot at a pole gate, came to a brook where cows were pasturing on a little clearing of grass and brambles, crossed the stream on stepping-stones, and followed a cow-path through the underbrush into the taller timber.
The hired man stopped at the first of the cedars that he had cut down. "Yep," the sheriff said. "Where's the rest?"
The rest were in a bend of the stream at the foot of a raw bank of red shale that confined the creek at flood-time. The sheriff looked them over. "Well?" he said, inquiringly, to Murdock.
Murdock pointed to a large flat stone at the foot of the bank. "Tell him to turn that over."
He spoke to the sheriff, but he was looking at the hired man.
"What for?" the sheriff asked.
"Tell him to do it."
The man apparently had not heard. He was standing aside, gazing strangely at a shrub of scarlet sumac in front of him.
The sheriff ordered: "Here! See that stone? Turn it over."
He got no answer.
"Here, you!" he said. "Look-a-here!" and took him by the shoulder.
He found the man trembling hysterically under his hand, and he cried, "What! What the hell?" looking at Murdock.
Murdock made a vague, unhappy, pitiful gesture, turning away.
The sheriff strode up to the stone and rolled it over. It covered the mouth of a rabbit-burrow and the shining butt-plate of a shot-gun that had been forced into the hole. There was a moment of deadly silence. Then the maniac, falling on his knees before the sumac, made the motions of washing his hands in the reddened foliage. "Blood!" he said, hoarsely. "Blood! He killed Roseyvelt!"
He made no attempt to escape. He let the sheriff take him back to the farm-house, hitch up a team, and drive him to the county jail. To all their questions he only mumbled, "He killed Roseyvelt!"
7
It came out at his trial that in the middle of corn-husking he had heard that Roosevelt was alive. He had wanted to leave at once on his pilgrimage to Oyster Bay. Old Murdock had said: "Alive nuthin'. I killed him myself. His body's hid in the attic over your bedroom." And, haunted insanely by that secret of the attic overhead, he had killed Murdock out of revenge.
What did not come out at the trial—though the whole valley knew it—was this:
The deputy sheriff, searching the hired man's bedroom after his arrest, climbed through the trap in the ceiling of the room and found in a corner of the loft a collection of farm tools, axes, dishes, crowbars, pots, and household articles that had been hidden there under a pile of old sacks. At first he thought that he had simply discovered evidence against the man who had stolen the gun. But when the neighbors were called in to claim their property it appeared that some of the things had been stolen years before. Murdock's words, "The body's hidden in the attic over your bedroom," established Murdock's guilt. He had been a kleptomaniac. He had stolen all the things which his hired men had been accused of stealing. He had been doing it for years, and no one had suspected him.
Except, possibly, his son Ben. Old Heins recalled that once, years before, when Ben was a small boy, a new sickle had disappeared from the Heins tool-house. He was looking for it in his fields when he saw Murdock and his son over the fence, and asked them if they had noticed the sickle lying about. Murdock said, "No," but young Ben said nothing. He, too, was "kind o' dumb" in those days. He went back to his father's barn and reappeared with the sickle. His father demanded where he had found it. He said he had found it under the corn-stalks in the barn. How had he known it was there? He said he hadn't known—he had "just guessed." His father cried: "Guessed! Did you steal that sickle?" And in the end he beat the boy hi a rage, shouting: "I'll teach you to steal! I'll teach you!"
Now, in the account of the murder, there was one detail that had interested and puzzled me. When the sheriff asked Ben Murdock how he had thought of looking for the shot-gun under that particular stone in the wood-lot, Murdock replied that he had "just guessed" that it was there. And when I heard old Heins's story of the finding of the sickle I was struck by the coincidence. I guessed something myself. And I began to verify it by gathering together every anecdote, every reminiscence, every bit of gossip that I could get about Ben Murdock anywhere. When I had enough to establish my theory of him I broached it to Mrs. Murdock one evening, after dinner, and I got it confirmed, first by what she told of him, then by what he admitted—with an odd scientific detachment, as if he were talking of some one else—and at last by what they both related together concerning the incredible incidents that led to their marriage.
8
As far as I can make out, the whole thing began in the autumn of 1893, when Murdock was about nine years old. And it began with the visit of a patent-medicine vender who drove into Wauchock from the direction of Pluckamin, in a gipsy wagon with two pinto ponies, selling an "Indian Herb Remedy" that was guaranteed to cure all known diseases, including baldness. He, in buckskins, and his wife, in a Carmen costume, gave a free entertainment of songs and sleight-of-hand, roping, knife-throwing, and Spanish dancing, at night, by the light of their kerosene-torches, and in the intervals between their acts they sold their Indian Herb Remedy.
Young Ben Murdock had been sent to the village by his mother to get a stone vinegar-jug filled with kerosene for the household lamps. He found the yard in front of the school-house flaring with torchlights, and over the head of a silent audience he saw the long-haired Westerner, with a braided mustache, ballyhooing his medicine. The boy drew nearer. He ended by making his way into the front row, against the little platform on which Carmen was finishing a bored fandango to the castanets, while her husband praised his cure-all.
Nobody was buying. The faker, searching the upturned faces for a customer, saw the boy. Ben had been suffering all day with toothache; his face was swollen, and that may have attracted the man's notice. Mrs. Murdock had tried to ease her son's pain with horse liniment, a few drops of which she had put on the tooth itself; there had probably been some narcotic in the dose, for Ben had been feeling dazed ever since, and his dull-eyed, stupefied look may have struck the faker.
At any rate, he came to the edge of the platform and said: "Well now, here's some one needs this great nosterum. Eh, sonny? Come up here." And taking Ben under the arm, he lifted him to the stage.
The crowd laughed. Benjamin McNeil Murdock was then an overgrown young dolt, shock-haired and open-mouthed, in a torn shirt and a pair of his father's patched overalls, and nothing else. He had no hat. He was barefooted. The medicine man held him by the shoulder and he hung his head sheepishly. He was supposed to be half-witted, and he looked it.
"What's the matter, bub?" the man asked. "Sick?"
Ben did not answer. The man put a firm, cool hand under his chin, tilted his head back, and studied him.
"Toothache, eh?" he said. "Fine! This here's a suverin remedy for toothache. Also fer trouble with the eyes. This boy," he told the audience, "is near dead with toothache, an' it's afflictin' his eyes."
Ben began to blink. He was held facing a kerosene-torch that shone directly in his eyes.
"He can't look at a light without feelin' sleepy. He can't keep his eyes open. This here pain has worn him out. He's dog-tired. His eyes is tired."
Ben's eyes had closed.
"Bring me a chair here, Mirey." His wife brought the chair. "There! Sit down on that. You're dog-tired."
Ben sank weakly into the seat.
"Now," he said, "first we'll cure them eyes." And, pretending to pour some of his remedy into the palm of his hand, he began to stroke the boy into a mesmeric sleep. "This boy," he kept saying, "is worn out with pain. It's passin'. It's passin'. Just like he was fallin' asleep an' fergettin' it. That's it. Just like you was fallin' asleep, sonny. Fallin' asleep."
When he saw from Ben's regular breathing that he was unconscious he announced, "We'll now cure the toothache." And he proceeded to rub Ben's swollen cheek very gently with an application of the Indian Herb Remedy. "The results," he said, "is almost instantous. The sufferin' begins to stop. Like you'd slep' it off. Feelin' better?"
He bent down. Ben's lips moved inaudibly.
"Yes. He says he's feelin' better."
His wife was standing beside him, holding the bottle of medicine, watching anxiously, alarmed because the boy had "gone under" so quickly. She poured out a spoonful of the remedy and offered it to her husband.
"All right, now," he said. "This 'll do the trick. This '11 fix it. Open yer mouth."
Ben opened it, with his eyes shut.
"That's right. Open yer eyes, too. They're all right. They're better. That's the way. Now swallow this down. Tastes good, eh?"
Ben nodded.
"Good. Now you feel better. Don't you? Yes? Well, tell 'em how you feel."
And Ben said in a strange, high voice, "I feel a hull lot better."
"Good. Toothache gone, too?"
Ben nodded.
"Good. Now, to show you people this 's no fake—" He took the boy's swollen cheek between thumb and forefinger and pinched it till the spot showed white. Ben did not flinch. "Couldn't 'a' done that five minutes ago, eh? He'd 'a' howled. That swellin'—that 'll go down in about an hour er so. Now." He corked the bottle. "You take this, sonny, an' run home to yer mom, an' tell her if she ever has a toothache what to do with it. Go right to sleep as soon 's you get home, an' you'll wake up in the mornin' feelin' like a nest o' young robins, an' ready to start right off to school. Run along." He was helping Ben from the platform. "Right home. Get in out o' the night air. I don't want no neuraligy to strike into that jaw o' yourn. I want you at school as a proof to the great Indian Herb Remedy. Now, my Christian frien's, the price o' this suverin cure fer sufferin' is fifty cents, but on this occasion—"
He watched Ben making his way through the crowd with the bottle of medicine clasped to his bosom.
"The price o' this mirac'lous med'cine to-night is a quarter of a dollar. Thank you, partner. Here we are. Who's next?"
And Ben stumbled off down the road toward his home in the dark, like a sleep-walker, while all Wauchock behind him reached out its hands for that mirac'lous Herb Remedy.
It was a very dazed-looking boy who returned to the Murdock kitchen, carrying a bottle of patent medicine instead of a jug of kerosene. And at his mother's cry of, "What you got there? Where's the coal-oil?" he put the bottle on the kitchen table, sat down unsteadily, and dropped forward, his head on his arms, in a sleep from which she could not wake him. She put him to bed, scolding him distractedly.
He woke up in the morning clear-minded, but with no recollection of what had happened after the man had offered to cure his toothache. No one suspected that he had been hypnotized. When Wauchock found that its Herb Remedy was no cure for anything—not even for thirst—they supposed that Ben, being a "plum' idiot," had allowed the faker to persuade him that his toothache was better when it wasn't. Moreover, the toothache returned, and his mother had to take him to the dentist in Centerbrook to have the tooth out. His reputation as the village idiot was entirely established by the incident. He supported it in confirmatory silence.
9
And yet something had changed in him. As soon as he woke up that morning he said to his mother, "I want to go to school." She took him to the dentist instead. A few days later he went to his father and said, sulkily, "I want to go to school."
He had never been sent to school—and the authorities had not insisted that he should be sent—because it was understood that he was too "dumb" to learn. His father had given him that reputation; he wanted the boy at home to watch the cows; there were no secure fences on the Murdock farm, and Ben spent his days in the wood and pasture-lot as stupidly as a watch-dog. The father himself was "queer." He had not been quite right since he had fallen from a load of hay, struck his head, and been unconscious for three days "right smack in the middle o' the best hayin' weather."
He replied, now: "School nuthin'. Might 's well send those calfs to school. Go 'n' do yer chores."
The boy went back to his work, and nothing more was said about school. But the incident of Heins and the sickle followed; and that night, milking in the stable, Ben took up a pitchfork and said, menacingly, to his father, "You lemme go to school er I'll tell 'at you're stealin' things an' hidin' 'em in the hayloft."
He has explained, relating the incident: "I don't know what had come over me. I don't know how I knew what he'd been doing. I just said it—and then I felt as if I'd known it all along. I remember he looked at me as though I'd tried to stab him with the fork, and he dropped the milk-pail and ran out of the stable."
He was allowed to go to school. And very little good it seemed to do him. He was incurably dull at his books, although he was permitted to labor over them at home as much as he pleased. His father never interfered with him in any way; they hardly spoke. What his mother thought of it I do not know. Murdock has never talked of her. To the neighbors she seems to have been merely a lean, hard-faced, meager woman who struggled through a life of unceasing but inefficient drudgery, handicapped by the stupidity and shiftlessness of her "men-folk."
10
Of Ben Murdock in the village school I have found only one anecdote, and I got that from Sheriff Steiner in talking with him about the murder case. It appears that Steiner was rather a bully in his school-days, and he "picked on Benny" as a proper butt, until one day in the winter Ben said to him, "You hit me again an' I'll tell 'em you're wearin' yer sister's made-over underclothes."
As the sheriff says: "It knocked me all of a heap. I'd 'a' died rather 'n have any one know it. You know the way a boy feels 'bout things like that. Well, I let Benny alone after that, you bet."
And of this incident I could get no explanation. Murdock did not remember it. He did not remember that Sterner had "picked" on him. He believed that the sheriff was confusing him with some other boy.
What he did remember was this: When he began to study arithmetic he was unknowingly a "mathematical prodigy," like the famous Gauss and the more famous Ampère. He used to do a problem by first putting down the answer and then working back to the solution. How he knew the answers he cannot now explain. "I lost the trick after a while," he says. "At first I could do it sometimes, and then sometimes I couldn't. And then I lost it altogether. I can still add up a column of figures by running my eye up it and keeping my mind a blank. The figures add themselves for me if I don't interfere with them. That's how I came to be a book-keeper."
He lost, for a time, even that small remnant of his ability as a "calculating boy" during his years at the Centerbrook school. And he lost it as a result of a whipping which the teacher gave him.
It seems that the class had been set an unusually difficult problem to do at home, and Ben arrived with the correct answer for it. He was sent to the blackboard to write out his solution, and there was nothing correct in his demonstration except the final line. The teacher accused him of having found the example and its answer in some book of arithmetic, and Ben in self-defense had to explain that he had "just guessed" it.
"Well," the teacher said, sarcastically, "let us see you guessing. Turn your back to the board. Now tell me what are the three figures I've written on it."
Ben stood a moment, staring at the grinning class. The sympathetic face of a little girl in a back row caught his eye. And suddenly he gave the figures correctly.
"You're cheating!" the teacher cried. "You saw them reflected somewhere."
"No, I didn't," Ben pleaded. "I guessed them."
"Very good," the teacher said. "Keep your eyes on the floor and guess these!"
But by this time the boy was so bewildered and the class was in such an uproar that he could not have guessed his own name. He named three figures at random. Not one of them was right. "Hold out your hand," the teacher ordered.
When school was dismissed and Ben started, swollen-eyed, on his walk over the mountain to Wauchock, he was waylaid by the little girl from the back row. "I'm sorry," she said. "I got scared."
That did not mean anything to him. He hurried away, shamefaced, without answering her.
And for the rest of his career in school he avoided "guessing."
11
As a career it was neither long nor brilliant. At the end of his second term he went to work in Simpson's grocery, because he had no money to buy clothes that were fit to wear to school. He never got back to a class-room. Neither did he ever return to his home. He was given a bedroom over the shop, and he ate with the grocer's family, but he lived very much to himself, taking long walks in the evenings and spending his Sundays alone on the country roads. He was a slow, silent, methodical young man. At first he worked as a delivery-boy and general help. Then he was taken behind the counter, and there he found himself a "lightning calculator" again, and he was given the accounts to keep.
He remained in that position more than a year. And he does not seem to have visited his home at all during that time. I do not know why. He does not speak of his relations with his people. But it is apparent that he was pursued by a guilty consciousness of his father's kleptomania, and that the thought of it made him morbid, solitary, and afraid of impending disgrace. I infer this from the fact that he admits he left Centerbrook because of a dream in which his father, having been arrested for stealing, was tried in the school-house yard, after dark, on a platform under the flare of innumerable grinning kerosene-torches. Before all the evidence was in it was Ben himself who was being tried, by the mathematical teacher; he was condemned to have his teeth pulled out; and he woke in a clammy fright, haunted by the fear that his father's thefts would be discovered and he would be discharged from the grocery.
He left Centerbrook in answer to a want advertisement for a bookkeeper in a New York news- paper. He went to work for the Perry-Felton Company. And for ten years nothing happened to him more exciting than a raise of salary. He made no friends. He had no companions. For a time he lived in a boarding-house, and then, in answer to another advertisement, he took a room in a flat with a childless German couple who spoke almost no English. He remained with them as long as he remained in New York. He talked to no one. He says he had an unpleasant feeling that people were never sincere; they said all sorts of things that they did not really think; you could see it in their eyes. He preferred to read, and he read chiefly newspapers. Then he developed a curious hobby that led him to read science.
One of the clerks at Perry-Felton's brought a popular "wire puzzle" to the office, and after every one else had failed to do it Murdock solved it almost at a glance. The clerk, piqued, brought another next day. It was more difficult, but Murdock unraveled it quickly enough. All the clerks joined in the game, and Murdock began to buy puzzles in order to study them secretly in his rooms so as to be ready if the clerks produced them. It developed into a hobby with him. He became so expert that the whole staff gossiped about it. One day the office manager, having watched him do a Chinese puzzle that was supposed to be practically insoluble, said: "Well, I know one puzzle you'll never find an answer to. I'll bring it to you." And next morning he arrived with a book called The Sphinx's Riddle and laid it on Murdock's desk.
It was a volume from a popular-science series that stated, in a simple way, the mystery of the origin of life in terms of evolution. It gave Benjamin McNeil Murdock his start. Scientific books began to take the place of puzzles on his bureau. In a few months he was buying bookcases. He carried books to his office and read at his luncheon. He read till all hours of the night. Even on his Sunday walking-trips up the Hudson he carried a volume in his pocket and read under the trees. And between walking miles to his work every morning and miles back at night, and reading insatiably whenever he was not asleep, his time out of office hours was so occupied that during all those years in New York he never entered a theater, or heard a concert, or even dropped into a moving-picture show.
The funeral of his parents, and the murder trial that followed, made only a momentary interruption in his routine. After it was all over he returned to his office tragically depressed, but freer in his mind because the apprehension of disgrace had been removed by his father's death. He had saved twenty-one hundred dollars. He owned a farm. He began to figure on how much it would cost him to live in the country; what was the best rate of interest he could get on a safe investment if he withdrew his money from the savings-bank and bought bonds; and what were the possibilities of scientific farming if he took it up.
12
Turning these things over in his mind, he was walking back from his office one August evening about half past six, when he passed the restaurant windows of a Fifth Avenue hotel and saw a young woman dining there with an elderly man behind the flowers of the window-sill boxes. The window was open, and she looked up as Murdock glanced at her. Their eyes met. His was an absent-minded glance, and he had passed on before it occurred to him that she had seemed to recognize him. He decided that she had been looking at some one else on the street. Nevertheless, at the corner, instead of continuing on his way to his room, he turned quite automatically down the side street and walked along that front of the hotel to the side entrance.
He believes, now, that he had unconsciously recognized her, and that this recognition drew him into the hotel. He admits that nothing of the sort was in his conscious thoughts. It was a warm evening, and he was tired walking. He had planned to have his dinner in the cheap restaurant near his room, where he always dined; but that restaurant was small and smelly, and the hotel dining-room had looked invitingly airy and cool. He bought a newspaper and entered the hotel.
He was not as shabby as usual; he had just bought himself a summer suit—at a reduced price because it was late in the season. But the head waiter was not to be deceived by new ready-made clothes. He seated Murdock at the least desirable table in the room, far from the windows, near the pantry door, with his back to the girl whom be had seen from the street. And Murdock did not turn round for a second look at her. He occupied himself with his newspaper, and particularly with the stock reports, which he had begun to study in his search for a good investment.
He remembers that when his beefsteak arrived he was convinced that he ought to buy Bethlehem Steel. He does not remember when he got the idea.
The girl from the window, leaving the dining-room, paused at the door to look back at him, but he did not see her. She even returned, on the pretext of having forgotten her gloves, and stared at him as she came in, and glanced back over her shoulder as she went out; but he continued absorbed in his newspaper. After she had disappeared he looked up quickly, as if some one had spoken to him; and he gazed around him bewildered at the tables near. No one was even noticing him. He paid his check and wandered out. And next day he drew two thousand dollars of his savings from the bank and bought Bethlehem Steel.
Throughout that fall and winter the war orders from abroad kept his steel stocks rising, and he followed them cautiously, gambling on a margin, halving his winnings, and adding a thousand dollars at a time to his savings account. By the following May he had thirty thousand dollars in sight, and this, he figured, was enough for him to live on. He sold all his stocks. He resigned his position at Perry-Felton's. He packed his books in barrels and all his clothes in his suit-case. And, telling his landlady that he was going on a holiday, he walked out of the apartment-house at eight o'clock at night—empty-handed, but with five hundred dollars in his pocket—and turned toward the Hudson River and the Jersey ferry.
13
By ten o'clock he was passing the City Hall in Newark. By midnight he was lying under a tree beside the Seven Bridges Road, as happy as a country dog that had escaped to the open fields. He sat up to see the dawn, and he remained gazing about him for at least an hour, his knees drawn up to his chin and his arms clasped about them in the attitude in which he used to sit in his father's pasture-lot watching the cows. He had a curious feeling. He felt as if he had been imprisoned among people for all these years, and had at last escaped to the trees and weeds and grasses that were his proper equals and companions.
He made his breakfast of rolls and milk in Springfield, and, swinging along the road to the Washington Valley, with his hat in his hand and his coat over his shoulder—about half past eight—he saw a large automobile approaching. It slowed down. It stopped before him. He saw that the girl who was driving it was smiling at him. "You don't remember me," she said.
No, he didn't. But he continued to look at her, without surprise, feeling friendly and unpuzzled.
She asked, "Did you buy Bethlehem Steel?"
He dropped his coat and hat and came to the side of the machine, gazing at her with a deep-eyed, hypnotized interest. "How did you know about that?"
She continued to smile down at him. "Don't you remember? You saw me dining at the window, and you came into the hotel, but you didn't look at me."
Some recollection of the incident returned to him dimly while he studied her. She was bare-headed, and the morning sun shone full in her face. It seemed to him that he had known her—somewhere. "Of course," he said. "I didn't recognize you."
"You don't recognize me yet," she replied.
No. He couldn't really say that he did.
She explained, "I don't think you ever knew my name."
"No." He could not place her.
"Do you remember," she helped him, "once when you were whipped, hi school, for guessing the figures on the blackboard?"
He blinked at her. She waited confidently. "Was that you?" he asked. "At the back of the room?"
She nodded, enjoying it, as soberly mischievous as a child with some little mystification of its own. "And I spoke to you, afterward, on your way home."
"I remember." His own expression had become boyish and frank and friendly. "Did you tell me what the figures were—the first time?"
"Yes. And then I got frightened and couldn't tell you what the second ones were. That's what I tried to explain to you—afterward."
"I remember," he said. "I didn't understand. I thought I'd just guessed them." And then, after a long smiling pause of thoughtful silence, he added, "And that's where I got the idea of buying Bethlehem Steel, is it?"
He was talking to her, now, as if their meeting were quite natural and commonplace—as if they were in a dream in which the impossible could happen as a matter of course.
She had that air herself. "I tried awfully hard in the hotel to make you turn around and look at me," she confessed. "I even came back into the dining-room, but you never noticed. Father had been buying steel, and when I saw that you were looking at the stock quotations I tried to give you a tip."
"I made thirty thousand dollars on it."
"And you're coming back to Wauchock?"
"Yes. Did you suggest that to me, too?"
"No." She opened the car door to him. "But when I woke this morning I had a funny feeling that you were on your way. I thought I might meet you."
He climbed in quite unconsciously and sat beside her. "I've left the city. I'm coming out here to farm."
"On the old place?"
"Yes. It's queer," he said, "that I don't remember your name."
"No," she assured him. "I don't think you ever knew it. The first time I saw you you were having your toothache cured by that Buffalo Bill man who sold the patent medicine. Then you came to school at Wauchock, but I don't think you ever noticed me. And then we moved to Centerbrook, and I didn't see you again till you came to school there. I'm Ruth Young."
He did not remember ever having heard the name before. "It doesn't matter," he said.
He was gazing at her in a way that he had never looked at any one in his life before. During all those years of silence and solitariness at Wauchock, at Centerbrook, in New York, he had never spoken to any one as he was speaking to her or found any one who could meet his eyes in complete and friendly sincerity as she met them. And the strange thing was that now it seemed as if she had shared in all those years as an invisible companion, who had suddenly appeared to him, who was sitting beside him and smiling at him as she had in some way been watching him and smiling at him, unseen, always, even from his boyhood.
Perhaps it was the thought of what had kept him solitary that made him ask, "Did you know about my father?"
And it was certainly the tone in which he asked it that made her, for the first time, glance away from him as she replied: "Yes. There was a lot of gossip about it."
He said, "I'm glad."
She understood; he was glad that there was not even this secret concealed from her; that she knew it and was not ashamed of him. She put out her hand to him blindly, to reassure him. He took it as simply as she gave it.
She settled back in the seat with a little trembling sigh. There were tears in her eyes, but she gazed through them, smiling, at the long empty road and the long empty past. "I've motored by your house," she said, "but it was always closed."
He had lifted her hand and bent down to it and put his cheek against it, with his face averted. She slipped her fingers out of his and turned his head to her and held him so, looking at him, all smiling tears and tenderness, with eyes that at once searched him and accepted him and surrendered to him. Suddenly, as if he were unable to bear it, he bowed forward, with his face in his hands. She patted his head, weeping happily, and distractedly stroking his hair.
"Isn't it strange?" she said. "The first time I saw you, alone, on that platform, under the torchlight, I had almost the same feeling for you. And I told you those figures on the blackboard just as if I were talking to myself, and I knew you'd hear. And then they sent me away to school and I lost you, but somehow I always knew you'd come back. Even when—there was some one else that— I don't know. I think it was only because he seemed like you. And the moment I saw you passing the restaurant window I knew I had been cheating myself. And I brought you into the hotel and told you to buy the stock. And then I began to worry because I hadn't been able to make you look around. And father's dead. And I've been so lonely. I began to be afraid. I was so happy when I woke this morning and knew you were coming." She even laughed brokenly. "Get your coat and hat. I want to see our— I want to see the house."
14
And that is their story. I don't know what to make of it, any more than I know what to make of Murdock's disproof of the mechanistic theory and his belief that the plants themselves have a creative intelligence and some sort of dumb world-soul of their own. But I know this: hearing those two, watching them, seeing the deep and smiling trust of their way of looking at each other while they spoke and listened and remembering that weedy life of poverty and ignorance and murder and kleptomania from which he came—I felt that I could believe any miracle of the immortal spirit, any mysticism of the creative intelligence, any hope of the transcending soul. Science may say what it pleases of Benjamin McNeil Murdock. He is, to me, his own disproof of a dead mechanical world and the philosophy of the microscope.