Delphi complete works of.., p.374
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 374
Some people wanted to organize and get together and hunt the bandits down. But Squire John Bull wouldn’t believe in the stories about bandits. ‘All nonsense,’ he said, ‘and if any such fellows come round my place they’ll get a dose of cold lead.’
Uncle Sam didn’t do anything either. He was a peaceable fellow, never liking to interfere. ‘Keep out of quarrels,’ was his maxim. Yet he had a musket and powderhorn hanging in the store, and they said that when it came to shooting he was the best shot in the section.
Well, one day, late in the afternoon, towards dusk, some of the children came rushing breathless into the store. ‘Mr. Sam, Mr. Sam,’ they called, ‘the bandits have come, the gang of bandits. They’re over at Squire Bull’s place.’
‘What’s that?’ said Uncle Sam, all confused.
‘The bandits, they’re over at Squire Bull’s. We saw them smashing in the gates of the yard. We heard the shots. Oh, Mr. Sam, will they kill Mr. Bull?’
‘Eh, what?’ says Uncle Sam, ‘smashing in the gates?’ — he seemed hesitating— ‘Hold on!11 What’s that? By gosh, that’s gunshots, I heard them plain.’
In ran another child, wide-eyed with fright. ‘Mr. Sam, come quick, they’re over at Mr. Bull’s and they’ve shot some of the help...’
‘Is Squire Bull killed?’
‘No, he ain’t killed. He’s in the yard with his back to the wall — his head’s all cut — but he’s fighting back something joyful.’
‘He is, is he?’ said Uncle Sam, and now he didn’t hesitate at all. ‘Hand me down that powderhorn, Sis.’
He took the musket off the wall, and he took out of a drawer a six-shooter derringer that no one knew he had.
The children watched him stride away across the field faster than another man would run. Presently they heard shooting and more shots, and then there was silence.
It was just about dark when Uncle Sam came back, grim and dusty, his hands blackened with powder. The children stood around while he was hanging up his musket and his powderhorn.
‘Did you get the thieves?’ they ventured timidly.
‘The gol-darned scoundrels,’ the old man muttered, ‘there’s some of them won’t ever steal again, and the rest will be safe in jail for years to come.’ ‘Too bad,’ he added, ‘some of them came of decent folks, too.’
‘Squire Bull; is he killed?’ the frightened children asked.
‘Killed, no, sir!’ laughed Uncle Sam, ‘he’s too tough a piece of hickory for that. His head’s tied up in vinegar but he’s all right. We had a good laugh over it. He allowed I needn’t have come but I allowed I won the whole fight. We had quite an argument. But here, don’t get in my way, children, hand me that clothes brush and reach me down that blue coat off the peg, the one with the long tails — now that hat.’
‘But you ain’t never going out again, Mr. Sam, are you?’
‘Sure, I am. I’m going back over to Squire Bull’s. He’s giving a party. How hand me down those cans off that shelf.’
And with that Uncle Sam began pulling canned salmon and canned peaches off the store shelves. ‘I thought I’d bring them along,’ he said, ‘that darned old fool — why didn’t he say he was getting hard up. I don’t believe the folks in his home have been fed right for months...Pride, I suppose!...Still he’s a fine man, is Squire Bull. My own cousin, you know, children.’
THE TRANSIT OF VENUS - A COLLEGE STORY
‘AND NOW, GENTLEMEN, that is, ladies and gentlemen,’ concluded Professor Kitter with a slight blush, ‘having considered the general nature of the Copernican System and the principles underlying it, we shall in our next lecture pass in review the motions of the individual planets, with especial reference to Kepler’s Law and the mathematical calculation of their orbits.’
Little Mr. Lancelot Kitter, Professor of Mathematical Astronomy at Concordia College, had delivered this elegant sentence in much the same form for sixteen years — that is to say, at the close of each opening lecture of the course — and had never been seen to blush over it. But this time he did so. The pink suffusion of his cheeks was visible even without a spectroscope.
Now, there is nothing in the Copernican System to cause a scientist, in these enlightened days, even if he is a bachelor and close on forty, to blush for it. Therefore it must have been something in the class itself.
There were only six students in the class. There was one on the professor’s right with a pale face and a head shaped like a bulb, who held a scholarship and had been covering sheet after sheet with mathematical formulae. Professor Kitter had taught him for four years, so the blush couldn’t have been for him. There were two students with ruddy faces and long ears who took Astronomy as a ‘conditioned subject’ and wrote notes in diligent despair like distressed mariners working to keep a boat afloat. The blush was evidently not for them. Then there was Mr. Bill Johnson, otherwise known as ‘Buck’ Johnson, who took Astronomy. It was considered almost as big a ‘cinch’ as the Old Testament, or the President’s lectures on Primitive Civilization. All these were recommended by the trainer. Hence Buck Johnson had joined the class and had sat looking at Professor Kitter with the hard, irredeemable look of a semi-professional half-back, wondering if he had been wise to take the stuff. But the blush was not for him.
The reason of it was that for the first time in sixteen years there were women in the class. Professor Kitter had never lectured to women before. He did not even know whether to refer to them as ‘women,’ ‘girls’ or ‘ladies.’
To the debonair Professor of English Literature, who wore a different tie every week, college girls were as familiar as flowers are to the bees. To the elderly Dean of the Faculty they appeared as if merely high-school girls. But into the calm precincts of mathematical astronomy no women had ever wandered before. Yet there they were, two of them, sitting on the front bench, writing notes and making diagrams of the planets. How daintily their little fingers seemed to draw! From his desk Professor Kitter could see that when Mr. Johnson drew the moon, he drew it in a great, rough circle that even a carpenter would be ashamed of. But when Miss Irene Taylor, the girl with the blue serge suit and the golden hair, drew it, it came out as the cutest little moon that ever looked coquettishly across its orbit at the neat earth.
By the way. Miss Marty, the plain, short girl in brown — either brown or scarlet. Professor Kitter hadn’t noticed which — may have drawn the moon, too. Very likely she had. It is not part of a Professor’s duty to observe the figures drawn by the students of the class.
Professor Kitter gave a final bow, gathered up his books, and the class dismissed.
How did you like it, Maggie?’ said Mr. Johnson to Miss Marty. He called her ‘Maggie’ because they came from the same ‘home town.’
‘Fierce, isn’t it!’ said Miss Marty.
‘I almost wish I had taken the Old Testament,’ said Mr. Johnson dubiously.
‘Oh, you can’t tell,’ said Miss Marty, and then she added: ‘Irene, I don’t think you know Mr. Johnson. Let me introduce Mr. Johnson, Miss Taylor.’
Mr. Johnson looked at Miss Taylor, and Miss Taylor looked at Mr. Johnson.
‘How do you do,’ they both said, All of this, however, was happening after Professor Kitter had left the room and he neither saw nor heard it.
A little while after this, the great bell of Concordia College began to toll for afternoon prayers in the college chapel. Whereupon all the population of the college went trooping down the elm avenue without waiting for the prayers, their day’s work being done, except, of course, the Professor of Comparative Religion, three students who were officials of the Y.M.C.A. and the two Japanese students of the second-year class who were studying Christianity with a view to introducing it into Japan.
Down the avenue walked Miss Taylor in her blue serge suit, and Miss Marty, either in brown or scarlet, and beside them was Professor Kitter, who had joined them at the college door, walking sideways and talking as he went, and bumping into the passers-by, and apologizing.
‘I trust. Miss Taylor,’ he said, ‘that you were able to understand from to-day’s lecture the general outlines of the Copernican System?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Miss Taylor, ‘quite nicely.’ The Professor didn’t ask whether Miss Marty had understood. Miss Marty was short and plain. She could take her chance.
‘I was afraid, perhaps, that I hadn’t made it quite clear that the sidereal day’ — here he bumped into someone else on the other side— ‘that the sidereal day differs from the solar day merely in the ratio of its fraction of the earth’s orbit.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Miss Taylor, and Professor Kitter couldn’t but notice what a receptive mind the girl had.
‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘we are for the moment hampered by our lack of mathematical formulae,’
The thought that he and Miss Taylor were hampered — both of them together — gave a new resilience to his step. Miss Marty may have been hampered too. If so, let her look out for herself.
‘But later,’ he said, ‘we shall call in the calculus to our aid.’ No knight ever offered help to a lady with a more chivalrous air.
‘Oh, shall we?’ said Miss Taylor. At the foot of the avenue, where it joins the street, the two girls turned off sideways toward the women’s residence, and Professor Kitter left them with such a sweeping bow and such Spanish courtesy that an express cart nearly ran over him as he did it. But a mind accustomed to the collisions of the asteroids thinks nothing of these things.
‘We shall resume our discussions on Monday,’ he said. Being a Professor, he knew no other form of farewell.
The girls turned a moment and watched him as he disappeared.
‘Isn’t he the hangedest?’ said Miss Marty.
And they both laughed.
That evening, at supper with his maiden sister. Professor Kitter talked so much and so continuously that she wondered what had come over him. And that night, in the college observatory, where Professor Kitter on a revolving stool gazed at the heavens through a huge telescope, the stars appeared of a brilliance and a magnitude never before witnessed, and Astronomy itself seemed more than ever the noblest and grandest of sciences, and there was such a sweep to the celestial orbit of the moving earth that you could almost hear the heavens humming in glad unison to the rushing movement of it.
So thought and felt Professor Kitter, and with all his science was not aware of the simple thing that had happened to transform the heavens. Yet happened it had, and that swiftly.
For when a man of thirty-eight, who has spent his years since he was seventeen in gazing into the deep blue spaces of the heavens, falls in love, he falls swiftly and far. No lost asteroid seeking in cold space its parent planet falls faster than fell Professor Kitter.
And that same night, while the Professor gazed into the sky, Mr. Bill Johnson, of the college football team, took Miss Marty and Miss Taylor to a fifty-cent vaudeville show.
During the months of the college session which followed his opening discourse on astronomy. Professor Kitter — though he was unaware of the fact — lectured to, at and for Miss Irene Taylor. For her sake he swung the planets round in sweeping orbits. For her sake he projected beams of light into space at the rate of 186,000 miles a second and brought them back to her feet. And for her sake he drew upon the blackboard an equation as long as a snake, seized a bit of chalk, and solved it with the rapidity of a conjurer.
We are told by those who know about such things that the male human being when in love likes to ‘show off.’ It appears that this tendency has been evoluted in him through the countless ages of his ascent from the earthworm to the scientist. The male bird displays his brilliant feathers. The nightingale sings. The savage displays his strength. The athlete jumps over a tape.
So what more natural than that a professor of astronomy should call in the heavens to his aid? Professor Kitter practically annexed the whole stellar system to make it show what a man he was.
‘You may be surprised to learn,’ he told the class (he meant that Miss Taylor might be surprised to learn), ‘that although a ray of light moves 186,000 miles every second, nevertheless, so vast is the distance of open space, the light from our nearest neighbour, Arcturus, takes no less than three years to reach us.’
The class were not really surprised. College students never are. They have lost the art of it. They merely wrote down ‘186,000’ and ‘three years’ and let it go at that.
‘But what shall we say to this fact,’ continued the professor, ‘that the light from one of the great spiral nebulae with which we shall become more familiar after Christmas requires for its passage to the earth at this same appalling rate of speed no less than a million years?’
The professor had the right to feel that any girl ought to be impressed by such a fact as this, even though the edge of the effect was taken off by Mr. Johnson looking up from his notes to ask, without any malice, whether the professor had said a million or a billion years. To him it was all the same as long as he got it down right.
Nor was this the only way in which Professor Kitter, unknown to himself, sought to impress the mind of Miss Irene Taylor. His dress during the college session underwent a notable change. Professors as a rule dress queerly. They take no heed of the variations of seasons and of fashions, and their costume knows nothing of the harmony and symmetry of those of the stockbroker or the real-estate man.
A professor of poetry presents perhaps a more flowing appearance, and a professor of comparative religion maintains a certain sombre dignity in his dress. But the rank and file of professors of Concordia College wore straw hats in October, morning coats in the afternoon, and Sunday suits on Wednesday with complete indifference.
From this unconsciousness Professor Kitter awoke at the touch of love. His dress, article by article, was transformed. He appeared in a grey suit, brand-new, three-quarters ready, which fitted him admirably so long as the man in the shop gathered up in his hand all the part of it behind the neck and held it. To this was added a brown overcoat that had a red check wandering through it. It was exactly one size too big, but Professor Kitter had been thinking of something else when they tried it on him. He had also bought a new Derby hat that was nearly as shallow as a soup plate, and as a finish to his costume he wore a neat little tartan tie in four colours that must have been designed by its maker for a boy scout at a Scottish picnic. Altered like this the professor felt himself distinctly saucy.
On the first day of this completed costume Professor Kitter met Mr. Johnson and the two girls of the class in the college avenue, and he bowed to them with a sweeping flourish of his hat such as Christopher Columbus used to Queen Isabella.
After he had passed, the three turned and looked at him.
‘Ain’t he the queer little guy?’ said Mr. Johnson.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Miss Marty.
Miss Taylor said nothing.
During this same period of time the professor, by a process of rejuvenation similar to his change of dress, had appeared at various college functions at which he had not been present since he was a junior lecturer fifteen years before and had to attend everything that happened. He had sat half-frozen at a hockey match looking at Miss Taylor (seated beside Mr. Johnson) across the rink. He had attended a college play, at which he had also observed Mr. Johnson seated between Miss Taylor and Miss Marty, and he had handed round tea at a perpendicular reception at the President’s house, from which he had the pleasure of escorting Miss Marty to the women’s dormitory while Mr. Johnson walked beside Miss Taylor. From all of which things Professor Kitter, who prided himself on being an observant man, concluded that Mr. Johnson was greatly improved from what he had been in the lower years, and showed a commendable desire to mingle in society.
Nor was social intercourse the professor’s only outlet of expression. He wrote to Miss Taylor during this period no less than three separate letters. In point of the sentiment that was behind them they were love letters — the first and the last that ever came into the life of the little man — but in form they were far from it.
The first of these letters read:
DEAR MISS TAYLOR, — I fear that I made a rather ridiculous slip in my lecture of this morning in speaking of the proper motion of the sun. I implied that there was a drift of the solar system toward the star Arcturus. I trust that you did not gather from this that there was the least fear of a collision. Let me hasten to correct this error in case it has led to any misunderstanding on your part. — Yours faithfully,
‘ARTHUR LANCELOT KITTER.’
To this reassuring letter the professor received next morning an answer which he opened and read as he sat at breakfast with Miss Catherine Kitter, his maiden sister.
‘DEAR PROFESSOR KITTER, — I was so much obliged to get your letter about the sun. It was very kind of you to send it, and I am very glad to know that there is not any danger of colliding with a star. — Very sincerely,
‘IRENE TAYLOR.’
On reading which the little professor sat lost in bliss — enraptured at the thought that Miss Taylor and he were drifting together through stellar space, while he guarded her against an astronomical disaster.
‘Who is your letter from?’ asked his sister.
‘A note from Miss Taylor,’ he said, ‘in regard to the motion of the sun.’
On which his sister looked at him through her spectacles with a fixed look in which wonder gradually faded into certainty.
The second letter, which arose in a similar way, dealt with the retrograde movement of the satellites of Jupiter. The third was concerned with the precession of the equinoxes. To the second Miss Taylor answered, ‘I was so glad to know about the satellites of Jupiter,’ and to the third she answered, ‘I was so glad to know about the precession of the equinoxes.’
