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Dinah’s Mammoth
by
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How I first became acquainted with Miss Groom it is unnecessary to explain. During the last three years of her life I was fortunate to be her guest in the Wiltshire retreat for an aggregate of many months. She took a fancy to me–to my solitariness and moroseness, perhaps–and she not only liked to have me with her, but, after a time, she fell into something of a habit of recalling for my benefit certain passages and experiences of her past life. In doing this, there was no suggestion of confidence; and I am breaking no faith in alluding to them. She was a fine talker–rugged, unpicturesque, but with an instinctive capacity of selection in words. If I quote her, as I wish to do, I cannot reproduce her style; and that, no doubt, would appear bald on paper. But, at least, the matter is all her own.
Now, I must premise that I arrogate to myself no exhibitory rights in this lady. She was familiar with and to many from the foremost ranks of those who “follow knowledge like a sinking star”; those great and restless spirits to whom inaction reads stagnation. To such, in all probability, I tell, in speaking of Dinah Groom, a twice-told tale; and, therefore–inasmuch as I make it my business only to print what is hitherto unrecorded–to them I give the assurance that I do not claim to have “discovered” their friend.
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On a wall of the little embowered sitting-room hung a queer picture, by Ernest Griset, of the “Overwhelming of the Mammoths in the Ice.” From the first this odd conception had engaged my curiosity,–purely for its fanciful side,–and one evening, in alluding to it, I made the not very profound remark that Imagination had no anatomy.
“They are true beasts,” said Dinah.
“They are the mastodons of Cuvier, no doubt; but, then, Cuvier never saw a mastodon, you know.”
“But I have; and I tell you Griset and Cuvier are very nearly right.”
I expressed no surprise.
“In what were they astray?” I asked.
“The mammoth, as I saw it, had a huge hump–like the steam-chest of an enormous engine–over its shoulders.”
“And where did you see it, and when?”
“You are curious to know?”
“Yes, I think I am; and there is a quiet of expectancy abroad. I hear the ghost of my dead brother walking in the corridor, Dinah; and we are all waiting for you to speak.”
She smiled, and said, “Push me over the cigarettes.”
She struck a match, kindled the little crackling tube, and threw the light out into the shrubbery. It traced a tiny arc of flame and vanished. The sky was full of the mewing of lost kittens, it seemed. The sound came from innumerable peewits, that fled and circled above the slopes of the darkening meadows below.
“What an uncomfortable seer you are!” she said, “to people this dear human night with your fancies. No doubt, now, you will read between the lines of that bird speech down there?” (She looked at me curiously, but with none of the mournful speculativeness of a soul struggling against the dimness of its own vision.) “To me it is articulate happiness–nothing more abstruse. Yes, I have seen a mastodon; and I was as glad to happen on the beast as a naturalist is glad to find a missing link in a chain of evidence. From the moment, I knew myself quite clearly to be the recovered heir to this abused planet.”
She paused a moment, and contracted her brows, as if regretfully and in anger. “If I had only seen it sooner!” she cried, low; “before I had, in my pride of strength, tested the poison that has bewildered the brains of my sisters!”