The Complete PG Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

O >> Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist) >> The Complete PG Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.


Mr. Bernard kept these strange creatures, and watched all their habits
with a natural curiosity. In any collection of animals the venomous
beasts are looked at with the greatest interest, just as the greatest
villains are most run after by the unknown public. Nobody troubles
himself for a common striped snake or a petty thief, but a cobra or a
wife-killer is a centre of attraction to all eyes. These captives did
very little to earn their living, but, on the other hand, their living
was not expensive, their diet being nothing but air, au naturel. Months
and months these creatures will live and seem to thrive well enough, as
any showman who has then in his menagerie will testify, though they never
touch anything to eat or drink.

In the mean time Mr. Bernard had become very curious about a class of
subjects not treated of in any detail in those text-books accessible in
most country-towns, to the exclusion of the more special treatises, and
especially of the rare and ancient works found on the shelves of the
larger city-libraries. He was on a visit to old Dr. Kittredge one day,
having been asked by him to call in for a few moments as soon as
convenient. The Doctor smiled good-humoredly when he asked him if he had
an extensive collection of medical works.

"Why, no," said the old Doctor, "I haven't got a great many printed
books; and what I have I don't read quite as often as I might, I'm
afraid. I read and studied in the time of it, when I was in the midst of
the young men who were all at work with their books; but it's a mighty
hard matter, when you go off alone into the country, to keep up with all
that's going on in the Societies and the Colleges. I'll tell you, though,
Mr. Langdon, when a man that's once started right lives among sick folks
for five-and-thirty years, as I've done, if he has n't got a library of
five-and-thirty volumes bound up in his head at the end of that time,
he'd better stop driving round and sell his horse and sulky. I know the
bigger part of the families within a dozen miles' ride. I know the
families that have a way of living through everything, and I know the
other set that have the trick of dying without any kind of reason for it.
I know the years when the fevers and dysenteries are in earnest, and when
they're only making believe. I know the folks that think they're dying
as soon as they're sick, and the folks that never find out they 're sick
till they're dead. I don't want to undervalue your science, Mr. Langdon.
There are things I never learned, because they came in after my day, and
I am very glad to send my patients to those that do know them, when I am
at fault; but I know these people about here, fathers and mothers, and
children and grandchildren, so as all the science in the world can't know
them, without it takes time about it, and sees them grow up and grow old,
and how the wear and tear of life comes to them. You can't tell a horse
by driving him once, Mr. Langdon, nor a patient by talking half an hour
with him."

"Do you know much about the Veneer family?" said Mr. Bernard, in a
natural way enough, the Doctor's talk having suggested the question.

The Doctor lifted his head with his accustomed movement, so as to command
the young man through his spectacles.

"I know all the families of this place and its neighborhood," he
answered.

"We have the young lady studying with us at the Institute," said Mr.
Bernard.

"I know it," the Doctor answered. "Is she a good scholar?"

All this time the Doctor's eyes were fixed steadily on Mr. Bernard,
looking through the glasses.

"She is a good scholar enough, but I don't know what to make of her.
Sometimes I think she is a little out of her head. Her father, I
believe, is sensible enough;--what sort of a woman was her mother,
Doctor?--I suppose, of course, you remember all about her?"

"Yes, I knew her mother. She was a very lovely young woman."--The Doctor
put his hand to his forehead and drew a long breath.--"What is there you
notice out of the way about Elsie Venner?"

"A good many things," the master answered. "She shuns all the other
girls. She is getting a strange influence over my fellow-teacher, a
young lady,--you know Miss Helen Darley, perhaps? I am afraid this girl
will kill her. I never saw or heard of anything like it, in prose at
least;--do you remember much of Coleridge's Poems, Doctor?"

The good old Doctor had to plead a negative.

"Well, no matter. Elsie would have been burned for a witch in old times.
I have seen the girl look at Miss Darley when she had not the least idea
of it, and all at once I would see her grow pale and moist, and sigh, and
move round uneasily, and turn towards Elsie, and perhaps get up and go to
her, or else have slight spasmodic movements that looked like
hysterics;--do you believe in the evil eye, Doctor?"

"Mr. Langdon," the Doctor said, solemnly, "there are strange things about
Elsie Veneer,--very strange things. This was what I wanted to speak to
you about. Let me advise you all to be very patient with the girl, but
also very careful. Her love is not to be desired, and "--he spoke in a
lower tone--"her hate is to be dreaded. Do you think she has any special
fancy for anybody else in the school besides Miss Darley?"

Mr. Bernard could not stand the old Doctor's spectacled eyes without
betraying a little of the feeling natural to a young man to whom a home
question involving a possible sentiment is put suddenly.

"I have suspected," he said,--"I have had a kind of feeling--that
she--Well, come, Doctor,--I don't know that there 's any use in
disguising the matter,--I have thought Elsie Veneer had rather a fancy
for somebody else,--I mean myself."

There was something so becoming in the blush with which the young man
made this confession, and so manly, too, in the tone with which he spoke,
so remote from any shallow vanity, such as young men who are incapable of
love are apt to feel, when some loose tendril of a woman's fancy which a
chance wind has blown against them twines about them for the want of
anything better, that the old Doctor looked at him admiringly, and could
not help thinking that it was no wonder any young girl should be pleased
with him.

"You are a man of nerve, Mr. Langdon?" said the Doctor.

"I thought so till very lately," he replied. "I am not easily
frightened, but I don't know but I might be bewitched or magnetized, or
whatever it is when one is tied up and cannot move. I think I can find
nerve enough, however, if there is any special use you want to put it
to."

"Let me ask you one more question, Mr. Langdon. Do you find yourself
disposed to take a special interest in Elsie,--to fall in love with her,
in a word? Pardon me, for I do not ask from curiosity, but a much more
serious motive."

"Elsie interests me," said the young man, "interests me strangely. She
has a wild flavor in her character which is wholly different from that of
any human creature I ever saw. She has marks of genius, poetic or
dramatic,--I hardly know which. She read a passage from Keats's 'Lamia'
the other day, in the schoolroom, in such a way that I declare to you I
thought some of the girls would faint or go into fits. Miss Darley got
up and left the room, trembling all over. Then, I pity her, she is so
lonely. The girls are afraid of her, and she seems to have either a
dislike or a fear of them. They have all sorts of painful stories about
her. They give her a name which no human creature ought to bear. They
say she hides a mark on her neck by always wearing a necklace. She is
very graceful, you know, and they will have it that she can twist herself
into all sorts of shapes, or tie herself in a knot, if she wants to.
There is not one of them that will look her in the eyes. I pity the poor
girl; but, Doctor, I do not love her. I would risk my life for her, if
it would do her any good, but it would be in cold blood. If her hand
touches mine, it is not a thrill of passion I feel running through me,
but a very different emotion. Oh, Doctor! there must be something in
that creature's blood which has killed the humanity in her. God only
knows the cause that has blighted such a soul in so beautiful a body! No,
Doctor, I do not love the girl."

"Mr. Langdon," said the Doctor, "you are young, and I am old. Let me
talk to you with an old man's privilege, as an adviser. You have come to
this country-town without suspicion, and you are moving in the midst of
perils. There are things which I must not tell you now; but I may warn
you. Keep your eyes open and your heart shut. If, through pitying that
girl, you ever come to love her, you are lost. If you deal carelessly
with her, beware! This is not all. There are other eyes on you beside
Elsie Venner's. Do you go armed?"

"I do!" said Mr. Bernard,--and he "put his hands up" in the shape of
fists, in such a way as to show that he was master of the natural weapons
at any rate.

The Doctor could not help smiling. But his face fell in an instant.

"You may want something more than those tools to work with. Come with me
into my sanctum."

The Doctor led Mr. Bernard into a small room opening out of the study.
It was a place such as anybody but a medical man would shiver to enter.
There was the usual tall box with its bleached, rattling tenant; there
were jars in rows where "interesting cases" outlived the grief of widows
and heirs in alcoholic immortality,--for your "preparation-jar" is the
true "monumentum aere perennius;" there were various semi-possibilities
of minute dimensions and unpromising developments; there were shining
instruments of evil aspect, and grim plates on the walls, and on one
shelf by itself, accursed and apart, coiled in a long cylinder of spirit,
a huge crotalus, rough-scaled, flatheaded, variegated with dull bands,
one of which partially encircled the neck like a collar,--an awful wretch
to look upon, with murder written all over him in horrid hieroglyphics.
Mr. Bernard's look was riveted on this creature,--not fascinated
certainly, for its eyes looked like white beads, being clouded by the
action of the spirits in which it had been long kept,--but fixed by some
indefinite sense of the renewal of a previous impression;--everybody
knows the feeling, with its suggestion of some past state of existence.
There was a scrap of paper on the jar, with something written on it. He
was reaching up to read it when the Doctor touched him lightly.

"Look here, Mr. Langdon!" he said, with a certain vivacity of manner, as
if wishing to call away his attention,--"this is my armory."

The Doctor threw open the door of a small cabinet, where were disposed in
artistic patterns various weapons of offence and defence,--for he was a
virtuoso in his way, and by the side of the implements of the art of
healing had pleased himself with displaying a collection of those other
instruments, the use of which renders the first necessary.

"See which of these weapons you would like best to carry about you," said
the Doctor.

Mr. Bernard laughed, and looked at the Doctor as if he half doubted
whether he was in earnest.

"This looks dangerous enough," he said,--"for the man who carries it, at
least."

He took down one of the prohibited Spanish daggers or knives which a
traveller may, occasionally get hold of and smuggle out of the country.
The blade was broad, trowel-like, but the point drawn out several inches,
so as to look like a skewer.

"This must be a jealous bull-fighter's weapon," he said, and put it back
in its place.

Then he took down an ancient-looking broad-bladed dagger, with a complex
aspect about it, as if it had some kind of mechanism connected with it.

"Take care!" said the Doctor; "there is a trick to that dagger."

He took it and touched a spring. The dagger split suddenly into three
blades, as when one separates the forefinger and the ring-finger from the
middle one. The outside blades were sharp on their outer edge. The stab
was to be made with the dagger shut, then the spring touched and the
split blades withdrawn.

Mr. Bernard replaced it, saying, that it would have served for sidearm to
old Suwarrow, who told his men to work their bayonets back and forward
when they pinned a Turk, but to wriggle them about in the wound when they
stabbed a Frenchman.

"Here," said the Doctor, "this is the thing you want."

He took down a much more modern and familiar implement,--a small,
beautifully finished revolver.

"I want you to carry this," he said; "and more than that, I want you to
practise with it often, as for amusement, but so that it maybe seen and
understood that you are apt to have a pistol about you. Pistol-shooting
is pleasant sport enough, and there is no reason why you should not
practise it like other young fellows. And now," the Doctor said, "I have
one other, weapon to give you."

He took a small piece of parchment and shook a white powder into it from
one of his medicine-jars. The jar was marked with the name of a mineral
salt, of a nature to have been serviceable in case of sudden illness in
the time of the Borgias. The Doctor folded the parchment carefully, and
marked the Latin name of the powder upon it.

"Here," he said, handing it to Mr. Bernard, "you see what it is, and you
know what service it can render. Keep these two protectors about your
person day and night; they will not harm you, and you may want one or the
other or both before you think of it."

Mr. Bernard thought it was very odd, and not very old-gentlemanlike, to
be fitting him out for treason, stratagem, and spoils, in this way.
There was no harm, however, in carrying a doctor's powder in his pocket,
or in amusing himself with shooting at a mark, as he had often done
before. If the old gentleman had these fancies, it was as well to humor
him.

So he thanked old Doctor Kittredge, and shook his hand warmly as he left
him.

"The fellow's hand did not tremble, nor his color change," the Doctor
said, as he watched him walking away. "He is one of the right sort."




CHAPTER XVI

EPISTOLARY.

Mr. Langdon to the Professor.

MY DEAR PROFESSOR, You were kind enough to promise me that you would
assist me in any professional or scientific investigations in which I
might become engaged. I have of late become deeply interested in a class
of subjects which present peculiar difficulty, and I must exercise the
privilege of questioning you on some points upon which I desire
information I cannot otherwise obtain. I would not trouble you, if I
could find any person or books competent to enlighten me on some of these
singular matters which have so excited me. The leading doctor here is a
shrewd, sensible man, but not versed in the curiosities of medical
literature.

I proceed, with your leave, to ask a considerable number of
questions,--hoping to get answers to some of them, at least.

Is there any evidence that human beings can be infected or wrought upon
by poisons, or otherwise, so that they shall manifest any of the
peculiarities belonging to beings of a lower nature? Can such
peculiarities--be transmitted by inheritance? Is there anything to
countenance the stories, long and widely current, about the "evil eye"?
or is it a mere fancy that such a power belongs to any human being? Have
you any personal experience as to the power of fascination said to be
exercised by certain animals? What can you make of those circumstantial
statements we have seen in the papers, of children forming mysterious
friendships with ophidians of different species, sharing their food with
them, and seeming to be under some subtile influence exercised by those
creatures? Have you read, critically, Coleridge's poem of "Christabel,"
and Keats's "Lamia"?--If so, can you understand them, or find any
physiological foundation for the story of either?

There is another set of questions of a different nature I should like to
ask, but it is hardly fair to put so many on a single sheet. There is
one, however, you must answer. Do you think there may be
predispositions, inherited or ingrafted, but at any rate constitutional,
which shall take out certain apparently voluntary determinations from the
control of the will, and leave them as free from moral responsibility as
the instincts of the lower animals? Do you not think there may be a
crime which is not a sin?

Pardon me, my dear Sir, for troubling you with such a list of notes of
interrogation. There are some very strange things going on here in this
place, country-town as it is. Country-life is apt to be dull; but when
it once gets going, it beats the city hollow, because it gives its whole
mind to what it is about. These rural sinners make terrible work with
the middle of the Decalogue, when they get started. However, I hope I
shall live through my year's school-keeping without catastrophes, though
there are queer doings about me which puzzle me and might scare some
people. If anything should happen, you will be one of the first to hear
of it, no doubt. But I trust not to help out the editors of the
"Rockland Weekly Universe" with an obituary of the late lamented, who
signed himself in life--

Your friend and pupil,
BERNARD C. LANGDON.


The Professor to Mr. Langdon.

MY DEAR MR. LANGDON, I do not wonder that you find no answer from your
country friends to the curious questions you put. They belong to that
middle region between science and poetry which sensible men, as they are
called, are very shy of meddling with. Some people think that truth and
gold are always to be washed for; but the wiser sort are of opinion,
that, unless there are so many grains to the peck of sand or nonsense
respectively, it does not pay to wash for either, so long as one can find
anything else to do. I don't doubt there is some truth in the phenomena
of animal magnetism, for instance; but when you ask me to cradle for it,
I tell you that the hysteric girls cheat so, and the professionals are
such a set of pickpockets, that I can do something better than hunt for
the grains of truth among their tricks and lies. Do you remember what I
used to say in my lectures?--or were you asleep just then, or cutting
your initials on the rail? (You see I can ask questions, my young
friend.) Leverage is everything,--was what I used to say;--don't begin to
pry till you have got the long arm on your side.

To please you, and satisfy your doubts as far as possible, I have looked
into the old books,--into Schenckius and Turner and Kenelm. Digby and the
rest, where I have found plenty of curious stories which you must take
for what they are worth.

Your first question I can answer in the affirmative upon pretty good
authority. Mizaldus tells, in his "Memorabilia," the well-known story of
the girl fed on poisons, who was sent by the king of the Indies to
Alexander the Great. "When Aristotle saw her eyes sparkling and snapping
like those of serpents, he said, 'Look out for yourself, Alexander! this
is a dangerous companion for you!'"--and sure enough, the young lady
proved to be a very unsafe person to her friends. Cardanus gets a story
from Avicenna, of a certain man bit by a serpent, who recovered of his
bite, the snake dying therefrom. This man afterwards had a daughter whom
venomous serpents could not harm, though she had a fatal power over them.

I suppose you may remember the statements of old authors about
Zycanthropy, the disease in which men took on the nature and aspect of
wolves. Actius and Paulus, both men of authority, describe it. Altomaris
gives a horrid case; and Fincelius mentions one occurring as late as
1541, the subject of which was captured, still insisting that he was a
wolf, only that the hair of his hide was turned in! Versipelles, it may
be remembered, was the Latin name for these "were-wolves."

As for the cases where rabid persons have barked and bit like dogs, there
are plenty of such on record.

More singular, or at least more rare, is the account given by Andreas
Baccius, of a man who was struck in the hand by a cock, with his beak,
and who died on the third day thereafter, looking for all the world like
a fighting-cock, to the great horror of the spectators.

As to impressions transmitted at a very early period of existence, every
one knows the story of King James's fear of a naked sword, and the way it
is accounted for. Sir Kenelm Digby says,--"I remember when he dubbed me
Knight, in the ceremony of putting the point of a naked sword upon my
shoulder, he could not endure to look upon it, but turned his face
another way, insomuch, that, in lieu of touching my shoulder, he had
almost thrust the point into my eyes, had not the Duke of Buckingham
guided his hand aright." It is he, too, who tells the story of the
mulberry mark upon the neck of a certain lady of high condition, which
"every year, to mulberry season, did swell, grow big, and itch." And
Gaffarel mentions the case of a girl born with the figure of a fish on
one of her limbs, of which the wonder was, that, when the girl did eat
fish, this mark put her to sensible pain. But there is no end to cases
of this kind, and I could give some of recent date, if necessary, lending
a certain plausibility at least to the doctrine of transmitted
impressions.

I never saw a distinct case of evil eye, though I have seen eyes so bad
that they might produce strange effects on very sensitive natures. But
the belief in it under various names, fascination, jettcztura, etc., is
so permanent and universal, from Egypt to Italy, and from the days of
Solomon to those of Ferdinand of Naples, that there must be some
peculiarity, to say the least, on which the opinion is based. There is
very strong evidence that some such power is exercised by certain of the
lower animals. Thus, it is stated on good authority that "almost every
animal becomes panic-struck at the sight of the rattlesnake, and seems at
once deprived of the power of motion, or the exercise of its usual
instinct of self-preservation." Other serpents seem to share this power
of fascination, as the Cobra and the Buccephalus Capensis.

Some think that it is nothing but fright; others attribute it to the

"strange powers that lie
Within the magic circle of the eye,"--

as Churchill said, speaking of Garrick.

You ask me about those mysterious and frightful intimacies between
children and serpents, of which so many instances have been recorded. I
am sure I cannot tell what to make of them. I have seen several such
accounts in recent papers, but here is one published in the seventeenth
century, which is as striking as any of the more modern ones:

"Mr. Herbert Tones of Monmouth, when he was a little Boy, was used to eat
his Milk in a Garden in the Morning, and was no sooner there, but a large
Snake always came, and eat out of the Dish with him, and did so for a
considerable time, till one Morning, he striking the Snake on the Head,
it hissed at him. Upon which he told his Mother that the Baby (for so he
call'd it) cry'd Hiss at him. His Mother had it kill'd, which occasioned
him a great Fit of Sickness, and 'twas thought would have dy'd, but did
recover."

There was likewise one "William Writtle, condemned at Maidston Assizes
for a double murder, told a Minister that was with him after he was
condemned, that his mother told him, that when he was a Child, there
crept always to him a Snake, wherever she laid him. Sometimes she would
convey him up Stairs, and leave him never so little, she should be sure
to find a Snake in the Cradle with him, but never perceived it did him
any harm."

One of the most striking alleged facts connected with the mysterious
relation existing between the serpent and-the human species is the
influence which the poison of the Crotulus, taken internally, seemed to
produce over the moral faculties, in the experiments instituted by Dr.
Hering at Surinam. There is something frightful in the disposition of
certain ophidians, as the whipsnake, which darts at the eyes of cattle
without any apparent provocation or other motive. It is natural enough
that the evil principle should have been represented in the form of a
serpent, but it is strange to think of introducing it into a human being
like cow-pox by vaccination.

You know all about the Psylli, or ancient serpent tamers, I suppose.
Savary gives an account of the modern serpent-tamers in his "Letters on
Egypt." These modern jugglers are in the habit of making the venomous
Naja counterfeit death, lying out straight and stiff, changing it into a
rod, as the ancient magicians did with their serpents, (probably the same
animal,) in the time of Moses.

I am afraid I cannot throw much light on "Christabel" or "Lamia" by any
criticism I can offer. Geraldine, in the former, seems to be simply a
malignant witch-woman with the evil eye, but with no absolute ophidian
relationship. Lamia is a serpent transformed by magic into a woman. The
idea of both is mythological, and not in any sense physiological. Some
women unquestionably suggest the image of serpents; men rarely or never.
I have been struck, like many others, with the ophidian head and eye of
the famous Rachel.