The Transcendental Murder Read Online Free Page B

her long neck. He sneered at her belief in animal magnetism and mesmerism. He pictured her reclining on a sofa and crying, “Let women be sea-captains if they will!” Then he stopped being funny and began to talk about her study of Goethe, the influence of her periodical The Dial on American letters, and the mutual inspiration she and Emerson had been to each other. Grudgingly Mary had to admit that he knew what he was talking about. But she hated him. He was one of those condescending professors who will amuse a class any time by destroying the dignity of some illustrious name with gleeful exposés of old privacies, old scandals and senilities. Homer Kelly finished by returning to the attack. With a pyrotechnical flashing of his snickersnee he skewered old Margaret to the wall. Then he sat down, while his audience tittered and clapped. (It was all right. After all, Margaret Fuller wasn’t really Concord .)
    Howard Swan called for questions. Alice Herpitude asked one timidly. Homer Kelly answered it carefully. Then Mary heard herself speaking up. “Don’t you think it’s a little unfair to judge the manners of one time by the standards of another?” Everyone turned to look at her, and she hurried on, explaining. “I mean, what might be neurotic or even psychotic now doesn’t seem to have bothered her contemporaries at all. She was courageous, really, and a sympathetic friend to younger people, and of course she was one of the first to speak up for women’s rights. It’s easy to laugh at p-prophets …” Now she was stuttering like Teddy. She stopped. Homer Kelly looked at her with a broad smile, a kindly delighted look (as though a pet dog had rolled over or a horse talked.) Everyone was looking at her the same way. “Dear Mary,” she knew they were thinking, “such a sweet girl.”
    Homer Kelly opened his mouth to speak. But before he could get a word out, Ernest Goss was on his feet. He got up off the sofa so quickly he bounced old Mr. Pusey, who snorted and rolled his head about. Ernest was waving some papers over his head. “I have something,” he said, “of the most profound …” He brushed importantly past Alice Herpitude and then tripped on the braided rug and lunged against the piano, smashing his way up the keyboard in a series of accidental arpeggios. The papers in his hand spilled all over the floor. Mary leaned forward to pick up one that had drifted under her chair. It was an old letter, the paper thin and yellow, the ink brown and faded, the writing bold. Across the top there was a crude drawing of a daisy. Then Ernest Goss snatched the letter from her. He gathered the rest hastily and stood up in the small crowded parlor right in front of Homer Kelly, who had no choice but to sit down.
    Howard Swan frowned. “The Chair recognizes you, Ernest,” he said.
    Ernest had collected himself. He lifted his papers and began to make a speech. “Here in my hand I have the most amazing transcendental documents that have come to light since the death of Emerson. The only word to describe them is sensational. After they have been published, not one shred of present-day scholarship, no matter how eminent its authorship, will remain valid.” He gave a meaningful glance at Homer Kelly, who politely looked stupid. “These letters, which I intend to call the Ernest Goss Collection, will demand a completely new look at the nature of transcendental friendship and the relations between the sexes in what we used to regard as proper and puritanical New England …”
    Mrs. Hand looked big-eyed at Mary and whispered at her. “Did he say the relations between the sexes ?”
    Teddy Staples leaned forward, bursting a seam across the back of his coat. “What in God’s name are you g-g-getting at, Ernie?”
    â€œJust listen to this,” said Ernest Goss. He put on his glasses and began to read, hemming and