Emilius

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Title:     Emilius
Author: Katharine Lee Bates [More Titles by Bates]

"O, I could beat my infinite blockhead."

--Jonson's The Devil is an Ass.

Professor Emily has the kindest heart in the world and is always doing good. Her charities would make a rosary more fragrant than sandal-buds. And yet, perhaps, one time out of a thousand, her intention and her action trip each other up.

One day in early June she met on our village sidewalk, half a mile from the nearest pond or brook, a snapping turtle of formidable proportions, easily weighing his twenty or twenty-five pounds. In characteristic fashion she stopped to consider what she could do for him. Though he was, for his own part, neither cordial nor communicative, she decided that he must have lost his way, since the water, his natural habitat, lay behind him, and by a dexterous application of boot and stick she turned him about, quite against his will, so that his snout pointed toward home. But the turtle, a surly, obstinate fellow, with no respect whatever for academic authority, refused to progress in the appointed path, and for some five minutes they argued it out together, with no manifest result except a distinct access of temper, rather evenly divided.

Your true philanthropist is not easily balked, and Professor Emily, returning the scrutiny of those small, keen, sinister eyes that watched her every movement, skillfully dodged that dark, vicious head which kept lurching forward from the olive-mottled shell in lightning-swift motions, seeking to strike this determined benefactor whom only muddled wits could mistake for an enemy.

"No, you don't," she answered him sternly, retreating before a sudden forward scramble of the broad webbed feet. Regardless of the terrified protests of a group of freshmen, who had gathered on the outskirts of the fray, she executed a rapid rear movement and seized the reptile firmly toward the end of its long, rough tail. Swinging this furious Caliban clear of the ground and holding it well out from her body, she considered what to do next.

The noon had suddenly turned hot. She found herself panting a little. That turtle was surprisingly heavy. He was awkward to handle, too, twisting his neck back over his shell and darting it out left and right to a disconcerting distance. Soothing tones had no effect whatever and there seemed to be no suitable surface to pat. Even if he could and would have told her the exact location of his native creek, it might prove an irksome task to carry him so far, with those powerful jaws snapping most suggestively, only biding their time to get in an effective argument. Our house was close at hand. Why not accomplish two good deeds in one and give this self-willed waif to us for a pet? He would have a happy home and we another of God's creatures to love.

Dear Emily!

A shriek from Mary brought us to the kitchen. There was our household staff and stay mounted on a chair, clasping her skirts tight about her and apparently addressing the ceiling. There was our generous-hearted friend, flushed and weary, but, by a miracle, unbitten. There was our neighbor, Young Audubon, a budding naturalist, who had come to her aid en route and shared the honors of the delivery. And there was an indignant snapping turtle, lying on its back in the middle of the kitchen floor. Notwithstanding the pale yellows of its under-side, shell and legs and tail, its expression was profane.

Joy-of-Life told Mary to be quiet. I poured the philanthropist a glass of water. Then, exchanging eloquent glances, we learned of the new pleasure in store for us.

"They make very nice pets," declared the donor, beaming with benevolence. "Large specimens live for hundreds of years. They are not at all exacting about their food and can be trained to eat from the hand."

"Not from mine," screamed Mary, bouncing up and down on her chair.

"Wasn't it Pierre Loti who had a pet tortoise?" continued Emily. "Its name was Suleima and it used to play with his white kitten. You might name the turtle Suleima, after its literary cousin."

"No. We'll name it Emilius, after you, if it must be named at all."

"But we haven't even a black kitten," protested Joy-of-Life, "and so little time for playing ourselves, that I am really afraid----"

"The dear might be dull. Wouldn't you better take him back to where you found him?"

"And leave him on the road? Lost? For motors to run over? How could he get out of their way? What does he know about motors?"

We admitted that he did not look modern.

"Besides, I must run to catch that next train. I've just remembered that I am due at the Melting Pot conference in town."

"Isn't there room for Emilius in the pot?" I called after her, but she was gone without waiting to be thanked.

"If ye'll put the baste in a suitcase," proposed Mary, "it's mesilf will take it over to her rooms an' lave it there."

But Young Audubon, who had been lying on the floor, examining Emilius from the tip of his tail to the snub of his snout, was enraptured,--so enraptured that the chelonian, as he called it, was pressed upon him as a free gift, regretfully declined because of certain prejudices on the part of a devoted but unscientific mother.

"I can study him almost as well over here," cheerily said Young Audubon. "Now the first thing to do is to drill a hole in his carapace."

"Carry what?"

"Upper shell, you know."

The boy, a blond, blushed pink at our ignorance and managed, in an offhand way, to touch the lower shell when he lightly referred to it as the plastron.

"The drilling won't hurt him. He won't even know it's happening."

Whatever the darkened spirit, inaccessible in its armor, thought of the subsequent proceedings, it registered no objection. Defenseless in his undignified position, Emilius suffered our well-meant attentions in bitter silence. The hole was drilled, the turtle tipped over, grasped again by his peculiarly unattractive tail and borne triumphantly to the grassy bank behind the house, where, like any domestic animal, he was tethered to a tree.

"What next?" asked Joy-of-Life, who was already losing her heart to the unresponsive monster.

"Water," pronounced Sir Oracle. "Turtles won't feed except under water. They can't swallow if their heads aren't completely immersed. It will take your largest dishpan----"

"It's mesilf that is going home to-morrow--to stay," announced Mary.

"Wouldn't a washtub do?" compromised Joy-of-Life. "There's that old one, you know, Mary, that you never use."

"First-rate. Show me where to find it, Mary. I'll give you a start to that wild cherry."

With a craft beyond the semblance of his open countenance, Young Audubon raced Mary to the cellar, where she arrived panting too hard for protests. They soon returned in amicable companionship, carrying a battered blue tub between them.

Jerking up Emilius by the cord, we plumped him into the tub, poured in abundant water and left him to be happy. Then our troubles began.

In the first place, Emilius absolutely refused to eat, in water or out. Understanding from our one authority that he needed a carnivorous diet, we tempted him, day after day, with every variety of meat brought to our door in the butcher's white-hooded cart with its retinue of hungry dogs, but nothing whatever would our boarder touch. And in the second place, he was, unlike Diogenes, forever scrambling out of his tub and digging himself in at one point or another on the bank. Several times a day one or the other of us might be seen tugging up Emilius by his cord from the bowels of the earth and solicitously dumping him down again into his tub of water, which a shovelful of mud, shreds of meat and other attractions still failed to render homelike. His one object in life was to get out of it.

"If Emilius would only take a nap!" I sighed one warm afternoon, when I had just rescued him from a deep pit of his frenzied digging for the third time that day.

"Read him poetry," advised Joy-of-Life. Magical snatches of Bliss Carman's deep-sea songs ran through my head:--

"When sheering down to the Line
Come polar tides from the North,
Thy silver folk of the brine
Must glimmer and forth;"

* * * * *

"The myriad fins are moving,
The marvelous flanges play."

Chesterton, who chuckled over another grotesque denizen of the deep, would have felt the charm of Emilius:

"Dark the sea was, but I saw him,
One great head with goggle eyes,
Like a diabolic cherub
Flying in those fallen skies.

* * * * *

"For I saw that finny goblin
Hidden in the abyss untrod;
And I knew there can be laughter
On the secret face of God."

But it was almost too early for Chesterton, and quite too early for the fascinating fish poems of Rupert Brooke or for Chauncey Hickox's feeling apostrophe to a tortoise:

"Paludal, glum, with misdirected legs,
You hide your history as you do your eggs,
And offer us an osseous nut to crack
Much harder than the shell upon your back.
No evolutionist has ever guessed
Why your cold shoulder is within your chest--
Why you were discontented with a plan
The vertebrates accept, from fish to man.
For what environment did you provide
By pushing your internal frame outside?
How came your ribs in this abnormal place?
Inside your rubber neck you hide your face
And answer not."

Besides, I had no ground for hope that Emilius would be pleased by my reading of poetry or by anything else that I could do for him. He impressed me as intensely preoccupied, a turtle of a fixed idea.

I was standing by the tub at sunset, trying to ingratiate myself with its sulky occupant, whom I had just dragged up from his latest hole in the bank, by tickling his flippers with a playful twig, when Giant Bluff strode over from his adjacent territory and made us a party of three.

"How's your snapper?"

"I don't know. He doesn't tell. But I'm afraid he can't be feeling very fit, for he hasn't eaten anything since he came, a week ago."

"Hasn't, though? Huh! Looked out of my window at three o'clock last night and saw it grazing out there at the length of its rope, munching grass like any old cow."

Previous conversations with Giant Bluff had impaired our faith in his strict veracity.

"I thought turtles ate only animal food."

"If it's fresh and kicking. What you ought to do is to catch it a mess of frogs. 'Twould tear a live frog to pieces fast enough. But you've starved it to grass. That's all right. I raised turtles out on the Mojave desert one spell and fed 'em on nothing but grass. Quite a dainty out there. Sold 'em for five dollars apiece. Turned over a cool thousand----"

"Of turtles?"

"Of dollars. Easy's winking. This snapper of yours wouldn't be bad eating. Might fetch five cents a pound in the market."

I was not exactly fond of Emilius, but I hated to hear him discussed as edible pounds. Moving away a little, I began to stir lightly with my twig the loose earth in his last excavation. Giant Bluff was no favorite in our neighborhood, into which he had intruded, a stranger from the wild west, a year or two before. His little habit of sitting on his back steps, Sunday afternoons, with a rifle across his knees, and shooting with accurate aim every cat and hen that trespassed on his land was in itself enough to account for his unpopularity.

The shooting, however, except when a pet rooster or tabby was the victim, thrilled the children on the hill with a delicious terror. Only that morning I had seen Towhead, crouched behind a clump of syringas, playing sharp-shooter.

"Here!" he was shouting to Rosycheeks, who was approaching very slowly, like a fascinated bird. "Hurry up! You've got to come walking by and be shot."

"I doesn't want to," sobbed poor little Rosycheeks, "but I's tomin',--I's tomin'."

The glory of Giant Bluff, whose boasts were as prodigious as his profession was mysterious, had recently, however, been tarnished by an open discomfiture. One of our oldest and most respected citizens, a Yankee in blood and bone, driver of a depot carriage, had incurred Giant Bluff's deadly displeasure. And this was the way of it. In this beginning of our sleepy summertide, when the campus was as empty of life as a seigniorial park, when the citizens were able to use the sidewalks and the shopkeepers dozed behind their counters, the New York train dropped at our station a sharp-voiced young woman in a flamboyant hat.

Uncle Abram, the only driver to persist in meeting trains through the long vacation, watched from his carriage, with indifferent eyes, her brisk approach.

"Is this a public vehicle?"

"Think likely."

"Do you know where Mr. Benjamin Bluff lives?"

"Maybe."

"Take me there."

On the way the fare, Giant Bluff's daughter by a former marriage, questioned Uncle Abram as to her father's business and position in the town, but she might as well have tried to wring information from Emilius. Arrived at the house, she bade her driver inquire for her if Mr. Bluff was at home, saying that otherwise she would not call.

Mrs. Bluff, whom Uncle Abram had never met before, answered the bell.

"Mr. Bluff in?"

"No. Why?"

"Nothin' partic'lar," and Uncle Abram backed himself away.

"Well?" queried his passenger, as he started up Daniel Webster with a professional crack of the whip.

"Ain't to hum."

"Who came to the door?"

"Lady."

"What lady?"

"Dunno."

"Was it his wife?"

"Dunno as 'twas his wife."

His exasperated fare, afterwards tracking down her parent in Boston, made use of this incident for the slander of her stepmother.

"A nice impression she makes, to be sure! Even that numskull of a driver doubted whether she was your wife or not."

Giant Bluff came back that evening breathing out threats of slaughter. Before midnight it was noised all about our village that he had sworn to shoot Uncle Abram on sight. The old driver was warned by a group of excited boys who found him serenely smoking over a game of checkers and were quite unable to interest him in their tidings. But the next day, when the station platform was well filled with our business men waiting for the eight o'clock into town, Uncle Abram drove up to the depot and reined in Daniel Webster just against the spot where Giant Bluff was standing, a little aloof for the reason that nobody cared to stand with him.

Taken by surprise as Uncle Abram coolly looked him over, Giant Bluff, unexpectedly to himself, said:

"Good morning."

"Ez good a mornin' ez God ever made."

Giant Bluff, who prided himself on his atheism, began to swagger.

"That's stuff and nonsense. Only babies and fools believe such rubbish nowadays."

"Thet so? Ain't no God, eh, and he never made no mornin's? Wal! Maybe ye'll put me in the way of findin' out about quite a few little things like that. I've hearn tell thet ye're goin' to shoot me, an' my rheumatiz is so bad this summer thet I'd be obleeged if ye'd shoot me right now an' hev it over."

"You--you insulted my wife," gasped Giant Bluff.

"Not a nary," protested Uncle Abram, with a touch of indignant color in his weather-beaten cheeks. "I said I didn't know whether the lady thet come to the door was your wife or not, an' no more I didn't. I hedn't never seen her afore. But even s'posin' thet your morals didn't hurt you none, do ye think I'd let it out to a stranger? No, siree; I'd a kep my mouth shet, for the credit o' the town. An' now thet I've had my say on thet little misunderstandin', ye kin shoot me ez soon ez ye like."

The crowded platform roared for joy, the opportune train came in, and Giant Bluff, the first to swing aboard, was not seen in the village again for a fortnight. So it came to pass that he was but newly acquainted with Emilius.

As I was aimlessly poking about with my twig in the last of those mysterious holes which Emilius had been so desperately resolved on digging, a number of small, round, white objects came to view.

"Why, what are those?" was my imbecile exclamation, stooping to see them better in the half light. Forthwith Giant Bluff was stooping at my shoulder.

"Eggs. Didn't you ever see turtles' eggs before? It beats me what you learned ladies don't know."

I went abruptly in to Joy-of-Life, and there we sat in the dusk, overwhelmed with contrition. Poor, dear, misunderstood, ill-treated Emilius! All he wanted was a chance to get away from the water and lay her eggs in some warm, deep chamber, where he could lie hidden for days, and they for weeks, in comfort and security. And how we had worried her with our continual upjerkings and immersions, how we had kept him digging one forbidden nursery after another, how arrogantly we had set ourselves against the unpersuadable urge of instinct!

Before breakfast the next morning we hurried out together to set Emilius free. There was no Emilius. The tub stood empty, from the tree dangled a bit of cut cord, the loose earth that marked the holes had been neatly raked over, there were no small, white, round objects to be found. Had Emilius gone for good and taken his eggs with her?

As we searched the ground in vain, Giant Bluff sauntered out of his back door, smiling an inscrutable smile.

"Saw that snapper of yours walking off an hour since. It went under the back fence out into the woods. Reckon you can't catch it, though it was traveling rather slow; couldn't hurry much, for it had a dozen little turtles trotting along on each side. Quite a handsome family!"

Joy-of-Life and I, turning our backs on that stupendous liar, stared at each other with horror dawning in our eyes.

Had he----? Would he----? Could he----?

Emilius!

[The end]
Katharine Lee Bates's short story: Emilius

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