David H. Keller: The Typewriter

“When I married you I thought that I was going to have a husband,” exclaimed Amy Hunting. “But, instead I have found only a living death with an author, a slave to a machine.”

“When I married you I loved you and I still do,” replied her husband.” I do not see why you should complain about my work, as long as I make a living for the two of us,”

“The same old argument!” retorted the wife, “When we married, you were a bond salesman. Your work brought you into contact with living people in the daytime and with your wife at night. We went places and saw things, played bridge, entertained. We had many mutual interests. Now, there are only three interests in your life, reading, thinking and writing. Everything else that you do, such as eating, talking, dressing and sleeping, you do only because it is necessary and not because you want to. You begrudge the time spent at meals and you used to enjoy eating.”

“At least, I am making a better living than I did selling bonds. You have everything you need, and even some luxuries,” John Hunting said with a smile. He knew that it was a hard statement to deny.

“I was happier when we were poor,” his wife cried. “Then, selling bonds was your vacation and your wife your avocation. Now I am just a piece of furniture. Our friends used to call me Amy Hunting! Now they refer to me as the wife of the man who wrote THE PERPETUAL HONEYMOON. And for every person who knows you are a married man there are ten thousand who speak of you as the creator of Angelica Lamereaux, the wonder woman the perfect sweetheart, the modern Lilith, the eternal feminine perfume. Ten million women try to imitate her, twenty million adore her. Her picture is in every home; her image in every man's heart. And, because you created her, fifty million men envy you and as many women feel that because you understood Angelica Lamereaux you understand them. Perfumed letters, requests for your autograph, invitations for the week end, requests for lectures—those are my surroundings.”

John Hunting looked at his wife. It was not the first time that they had talked over the matter of his national popularity, but It was the first time that he had come to a realization of the real psychology of his wife's reaction.

David H. Keller: The Jelly-Fish

“All space is relative. There is no such thing as size. The telescope and the microscope have produced a deadly leveling of great and small, far and near. The only little thing is sin, the only great thing is fear!”

For the hundredth time Professor Queirling repeated his statement, and for the hundredth time we listened in silence, afraid to enter into a controversy with him. It was not the fact that he knew more than we did that kept us quiet, but the haunting fear that filled us when we listened to him or watched him at work.

Working at an unsolved problem, he seemed a soul detached, a spirit separated from its earthly home, a being living only in the realm of thought. His body sat motionless, his eyes catatonic, unwinking stared until his mind, satisfied, deigned to return to bone-bound cell. Then in magnificent condescension he would talk freely in limpid phrases of the things he had considered and the conclusions he had deduced. We, chosen

scientists, university graduates, hailed him as our master and hated him for admitting his mastery.

We hoped some evil might befall him, and yet we admitted that the success of the expedition depended upon his continued leadership. It was vitally necessary for our future: we were struggling young men with all life ahead of us, and if we failed in our first effort there would be no other opportunities for

fame granted us.

In a specially constructed yacht, a veritable floating laboratory, we were south of Borneo, making a detailed study of microscopic sea life. In deep-sea nets we gathered the tiny organisms and then, with microscope, photography, and the cinema we observed them for the future instruction of the human race. There were hundreds of species, thousands of varieties, each to be identified, classified, described, studied, and photographed. We gathered in the morning, studied until midnight and slept restlessly until morning. The only thing in which we were agreed was ambition, our sole united emotion was hatred of the professor.

He knew how we felt and enjoyed taunting us: “I am your leader because I willed it so,” he would say, speaking in a low restrained voice. “With me the will to attain is synonymous with accomplishment. I believe in myself and through this irreducible faith I succeed. There is nothing a strong man cannot do if he wills to do it and believes in his strength. Our ideas of space, size, and time are but the fanciful dreams of

children. I am fifty-nine inches tall and fully clothed, weigh one hundred and ten pounds. If I desired I could make myself a colossus and swallow the earth as a child swallows a pill. If I willed it I could fly through space like a comet or hang suspended in the ether like the morning star. My will is greater than any other physical force, because I believe in it: I have confidence inmy ability to dowhatever Iwish. So far I have conducted myself like an average man because I desire to so behave and not because of any limitations: Man has a soul and that ethereal force is greater than any law of nature that man ever thought of or any God ever created. He is purely and totally supreme—if he so desires.”

David H. Keller: Tiger-cat

The man tried his best to sell me the house. He was confident that I would like it. Repeatedly he called my attention to the view.

There was something in what he said about the view. The villa on the top of a mountain commanded a vision of the valley, vine-clad and cottage-studded. It was an irregular bowl of green, dotted with stone houses which were whitewashed to almost painful brilliancy.

The valley was three and a third miles at its greatest width. Standing at the front door of the house, an expert marksman with telescopic sight could have placed a rifle bullet in each of the white marks of cottages. They nestled like little pearls amid a sea of green grape-vines.

"A wonderful view, Signor," the real-estate agent repeated. "That scene, at any time of the year, is worth twice what I am asking for the villa."

"But I can see all this without buying," I argued.

"Not without trespassing."

"But the place is old. It has no running water."

"Wrong!" and he smiled expansively, showing a row of gold-filled teeth. "Listen."

We were silent.

There came to us the sound of bubbling water. Turning, I traced the sound. I found a marble Cupid spurting water in a most peculiar way into a wall basin. I smiled and commented.

David H. Keller: The Thing in the Cellar

It was a large cellar, entirely out of proportion to the house above it. The owner admitted that it was probably built for a distinctly different kind of structure from the one which rose above it. Probably the first house had been burned, and poverty had caused a diminution of the dwelling erected to take its place.

     A winding stone stairway connected the cellar with the kitchen. Around the base of this series of steps successive owners of the house had placed their firewood, winter vegetables and junk. The junk had gradually been pushed back till it rose, head high, in a barricade of uselessness. What was back of that barricade no one knew and no one cared. For some hundreds of years no one had crossed it to penetrate to the black reaches of the cellar behind it.

     At the top of the steps, separating the kitchen from the cellar, was a stout oaken door. This door was, in a way, as peculiar and out of relation to the rest of the house as the cellar. It was a strange kind of door to find in a modern house, and certainly a most unusual door to find in the inside of the house—thick, stoutly built, dexterously rabbeted together with huge wrought-iron hinges, and a lock that looked as though it came from Castle Despair. Separating a house from the outside world, such a door would be excusable; swinging between kitchen and cellar it seemed peculiarly inappropriate.