ONE OF CATTERMOLE'S EXPERIMENTS
AFTER middle life one can usually assign people one meets to their typical pigeon-holes; but I cannot classify Cattermole. I am human, and he is phantasmal.
In the twenty years since we used to be together he has changed. So do we all, of course, between thirty and fifty; we grow older, get lines on the face, gray in the hair, a stoop in the shoulders, or a paunch, or a drag in the step. But Cattermole, from a lithe, quick, graceful, handsome youth, has become ghastly and phantasmal—I recur to that adjective.
His hair falls, as thick and straight as ever, on either side his long face, and is cut short off at the level of the lobes of his ears; but from jet black it has become perfectly white. Singularly white, too, is his complexion; it seems luminous or phosphorescent almost, like punk wood in the dark; some disease, perhaps, has taken the red from his blood. Amidst this spectral colorlessness his eyes, seemingly twice as big and black as before, glow forth; they no longer sparkle, but glow, as if a deep fire burned within them.
There is no lessening of his intellectual power; on the contrary, he has a look of preternatural intelligence, saved from being embarrassing or disagreeable only by his exceeding courteousness. Perfect manners, indeed, he always had, subtle, refined; a soothing, fascinating, winning style of accost; but now they seem uncanny—this tact, polish, suavity, accuracy of touch and softness. They are irresistible while you are in his presence, perhaps because you feel obscurely flattered and allured by intercourse with that great brain lurking behind these outward manifestations. How skilfully and enchantingly it handles you! Nevertheless, when you are apart from his spell you feel uneasy.
I must confess, though, that nothing could be, apparently, more easy, simple and frank than Cattermole's communion with me during the twenty-four hours that I have been his guest. Is it only a fancy of mine—this perception of a gulf between us, impassable and unspeakable? I am human and he seems phantasmal. I can get no nearer to it, at present, than that; and I don't quite comprehend what I mean.
Of his history since University days I know the outline only. It was then a foregone conclusion that he could make himself what he pleased, and we assumed that he was to be a statesman; not the President—that did not seem great enough—but one of the superb Warwicks of history—the king makers and unmakers. He studied law, and was admitted to the bar; later, sat a term or two in Congress. At this time he was poor. Then came the great event. Jim Mahone, the wild Irishman, whom he had saved from the scaffold by his famous address to the jury in the Pawling murder case, died in Colorado, where he had become a lucky miner, bequeathing Cattermole twelve million dollars.
Most millionaires become public characters at once, but Cattermole disappeared; he used the resources of his wealth to conceal himself. No political assessor could find him, no tax gatherer locate his estates, no
