When I was a boy, there came to our village of Hannibal, on the Mississippi, a young Englishman named John H. DayⒺexplanatory note, and went to work in the shop of old Mr. Stevens the jeweler, in Main street. He excited the usual two or three days’ curiosity due to a new comer in such a place; and after that, as he seemed to prefer to keep to himself, the people bothered themselves no more about him, and he was left to his own devices. It was not difficult to give him his way in this, for he was taciturn, absorbed, and therefore uncompanionable and unattractive. As for looks, he was well enough, though there was nothing striking about him except his eyes, which, when in repose, suggested smouldering fires, and, when the man was stirred, surprised one by their exceeding brilliancy.
Mr. Day slept, cooked for himself, and ate, in the back part of the jewelry shop, and he was not seen outside the place oftener than once in twenty-four hours. He seemed to be nearly always at work, days, nights and Sundays. By and by, one noted this curious thing: he would accost a citizen, go to his house once, apparently study him an hour, then drop the acquaintanceship. You must understand that there were no castes in our society, and the [begin page 28] jeweler’s journeyman was as good as anybody and could go anywhere. At the end of a year he had in this way made and discarded the acquaintanceship of pretty much everybody. So here was a man who might be said to know all the town; and yet if any one were spoken to about him, the reply would have to be, “Well, I have met him—once—but I am not acquainted with him; I don’t know him.” It was odd—Mr. Day really knew everybody, after a fashion, and yet had wrought so quietly and gradually, that the town’s impression was that he didn’t know anybody and didn’t wish to.
He seemed to have but one object in view in contriving his brief acquaintanceships; and that was, to get an opportunity to examine people’s ears to see if they were threatened with deafness. He did not claim that he could cure deafness, or do anything for it at all; he only claimed that if a person had the seeds of future deafness in him he could discover the fact. The physicians said that this was nonsense; nevertheless, as Mr. Day did not charge anything for his examinations, the people were all willing to let him inspect their ears. He had no disposition to keep his theory a secret; but while his explanations of it sounded plausible to the general public, they only confirmed the physicians in their conviction that there was nothing in it. In time the irreverent came to speak of Day as the “Earbug,” and he of course got the reputation of being a monomaniac—if “reputation” is not too large a word to apply to a person who was so little talked about.
By and by, I was apprenticed to the jeweler, and was placed under the tuition of his journeyman. Day was kind to me, and gentle; but during the first week or two he did not speak to me, except in the way of business, although I was with him all day and slept in the same room with him every night. I quickly grew to be fond of my silent comrade, and often staid about him, evenings, when I could have been out at play. He would work diligently at something or other until I went to bed at ten. Then, as the stillness of the night came on and I seemed to be sleeping, (which I wasn’t,) he would presently tilt himself back in his chair and close his eyes—and then the strong interest of the evening began, for me. Smiles would flash across his face; then the signs of sharp mental pain; [begin page 29] then furies of passion. This stirring panorama of emotions would continue for hours, sometimes, and move me, excite me, exhaust me like a stage-play. Now and then he would glance at the clock, mutter the time and the day of the month, and say something like this: “People who think they know him would say the thing is incredible.” Then he would take a fat note-book out of his breast pocket and write something in it. I marveled at these things, but took it out in marveling; I believed that the observing them clandestinely was dishonorable enough without gossiping about them.
One summer night, about midnight, I was watching him through my half closed lids, waiting for him to begin—for he had been reading all the evening, to my disappointment and discontent. Now he put down his book, and for a moment appeared to be doing something with his hands, I could not see what; then he settled himself back in his chair, closed his eyes peacefully, and the next moment sprang out of his seat with his face lit with horror and snatched me from the bed, stood me on my feet, and said:
“Run! don’t stop to dress! young Ratcliff, the crazy one, is going to murder his mother. Don’t tell anybody I said it.”
Before I knew what I was about, I was flying up the deserted street in my shirt; and before I had had time to come to myself and realize what a fool I was to rush after one lunatic at the say-so of another, I had covered the two hundred yards that lay between our shop and the Ratcliff homestead, and was thundering at the ancient knocker of the side door with all my might. Then I came to myself, and felt foolish enough; I turned and looked toward the hut in a corner of the yard where young Ratcliff was kept in confinement; and sure enough, here came young Ratcliff flying across the yard in the moonlight, as naked as I was, and I saw the flash of a butcher knife which he was flourishing in his hand. I shouted “Help!” and “Murder!” and then fled away, still shouting these cries. When I got back to the shop, Day was not there; but in the course of half an hour he came in, and for the first time was talkative. He said a crowd gathered and captured the lunatic after he was inside the house and climbing the stairs toward his mother’s room. He said Mrs. Ratcliff ought to know that I had saved her life, but he would [begin page 30] take it as a great favor if I would keep carefully secret the fact of his own connection with the matter. I said I would, and it seemed to please him; and from that time forward he began to talk with me more or less every day, and I became his one intimate friend. We talked a good deal, that night, and at last I asked him why he hadn’t gone to give the alarm himself instead of sending me, but he did not reply; and by and by when I ventured to ask him how he had divined that a man two hundred yards away was about to murder his mother, he was silent again; so I made up my mind that I would not push him too closely with questions thenceforward, at least until his manner should invite the venture.
Almost every day, now, my curiosity was laid on the rack. For instance, we would be sitting at work, and I would chance to mention some man or woman; whereupon Day would take up the person as a preacher would a text, and proceed in the placidest way to delineate his character in the most elaborate, searching and detailed way—and in nine cases out of ten his delineation would contain one and sometimes a couple of most absurd blunders, though otherwise perfect. I would point these out to him, but it never made any difference, he said he was right, and stuck calmly to his position. Then I would say, “Do you know this man personally?” And he would answer, in all cases, “No, not what you would call personally; I have met him once, for an hour.” And when I retorted, “Why, I’ve known him all my life,” he would simply say, as sufficient answer, “No matter; I know him as he is, you merely know him as he seems to be.” On one occasion something brought up the name of G——, who had killed B——, over on the SnyⒺexplanatory note, four years before, in a quarrel over some birds—the gentlemen being out shooting together at the time. Straightway Mr. Day began to paint G——’s character, according to his custom; and it was beautiful to hear him; you couldn’t help saying to yourself all the time, “How true that is; how well he does it; how perfectly he knows this man, inside and out.” But all at once, as usual, he spoilt it all, by remarking upon G——’s remorse on account of the homicide.
“Remorse!” I said. “What an idea that is. Why, the thing that [begin page 31] G——is mainly hated for, in this town, is that he can be so perpetually and unchangeably cheerful, day in and day out, with that thing in his memory.”
Day looked at me gravely and said:
“I tell you the man has never had one good, full, restful, peaceful hour in all these four years. He thinks of that crime with every breath he draws, and all his days are days of torture.”
I said I didn’t believe it and couldn’t believe it. Day said:
“He has wanted to commit suicide, this long time.”
I said that that statement would make the public laugh if they could hear it.
“No matter. He is his mother’s idol, and is resolved to live while she lives; but he is also resolved to release himself when she dies. You will see; he will kill himself when she is taken away, and people will think grief for her loss moved him to it. She has been very sick for a week or two, now. If she should die, then you will see.”
She did die, two or three days after that; and G—— killed himself the same night.
My days were full of interest, passed, as they were, in the presence of this fascinating and awful power. Now and then came an incident which one could smile at. One day old Mr. E——, a miserly person but of honorable reputation came into the shop and said to Mr. Day:
“Here is a bill on a broken Indiana bank which you gave me last Thursday in change. I ought to have brought it back sooner, but I was called away to PalmyraⒺexplanatory note.”
Day gave him a good bill for it, and E—— thanked him and went away. Then Day stood there with the bad bill in his hand, thinking, and presently said, as if to himself:
“There must be some mistake; I couldn’t pay out a ten dollar bill and not remember it.”
Then he did a thing which I had often seen him do before. He took a metal box out of his pocket, searched in it, put it back, and the next moment he said, in a surprised voice:
“Why, the man is a pitiful rascal.”
[begin page 32]“What has he done?” I asked.
“He has brought me a bad bill which he knew he did not get here.”
I wanted to ask how he knew; but I restrained that impulse, and merely said it was a pity the shop had to lose all that money.
“It isn’t lost,” said Day; “he is on his way back, now, to get his bad bill again.”
A minute or two later Mr. E—— bustled in, and said he had been mistaken about getting that bill in our shop, and he couldn’t see how he happened to make such a—and there he stopped. Day was looking him placidly in the face, and just there E—— looked up, caught his eye, stopped speaking, turned red, re-exchanged the bills, and went away without another word, looking very crestfallen.
I was prodigiously surprised, and said so; but Day said that if he had thought a moment he would have suspected E—— in the first place.
“He was the first man in whose parlor I sat in this town. I spent an hour or two there, talking; and he had it in his mind to forge T. R. Selmes’s name to a check, for he was in money difficulties at the time.”
“He—forge a check! Impossible. Did he say he was going to?”
“Nonsense—of course he didn’t. But he had it in his mind to do it. I made a memorandum of it at the time.”
He got out his note-book, and said:
“No, it wasn’t Selmes—it was Brittingham he was going to forge it on.”