Van der Kemp

“ Kemp combined shrewdness with his rough humour, and, with a view to extending his reputation and his profits, he announced in 1599 his intention of dancing a morris-dance from London to Norwich. According to a common custom, he ‘put out’ a sum of money before his departure, on condition of receiving thrice the amount on his safe return. He left the lord mayor's dwelling in London on the first Monday in Lent, accompanied by Thomas Slye, ‘taberer,’ William Bee, his servant, and George Sprat, his ‘overseer.’ His route lay through Romford, Chelmsford, Sudbury, Bury, Rockland, and Burford Bridge. ”

“ I lead a merry life:
One day I woo the Muse, the next,
Another fellow's wife!"
I brought this up to the cottage we had now procured, down in West Grove, N.J., where we had gone finally to escape the city, and the swarm of reporters that seemed never to cease pursuing us ... for, when we found out that they did not want propaganda, we sought to hide away from them....
Hildreth had been rather gloomy at breakfast that morning, and I thought she would join in a laugh with me over Tad's horse-play. There is a streak in me that makes me enjoy the grotesque slap-stick of the comic artists. ”

“ She ran lightly up the steps, and as he turned her key in the door for her, she raised a pair of starry eyes to his.
“Dr. Kemp,” she said, “I have had an exceptionally lovely evening. I shall not soon forget it.”
“Nor I,” he returned, raising his hat; holding it in his hand, he gently raised her gloved hand to his lips. Herbert Kemp was a gentleman of the old school in his manner of showing reverence to women.
“My brave young friend!” he said; and the next minute his firm footfall was crunching the gravel of the walk. ”

“ One hath written Kemps farewell to the tune of Kery, mery, Buffe; another, His desperate daungers in his late trauaile; the third, His entertainement to New-Market; which towne I came neuer neere by the length of halfe the heath. Some sweare, in a Trenchmore I haue trode a good way to winne the world; others that guesse righter, affirme, I haue without good help daunst my selfe out of the world; many say many thinges that were neuer thought. ”

“ I'll shoot to kill, and I'll kill everybody I can get, till someone gets me."
"Yes, Mr. Gregory!"
"Mind you, Jim, I've always considered you as my friend. I mean what I say. I'm a householder. I'm in the right ... if the law wants me that's another matter ... but no group of private citizens—"
"Good-bye, Mr. Gregory."
I walked rapidly back to the cottage. I was thinking as rapidly as I walked. For the space of a full minute I thought of packing off ignominiously with my little household.
But before I stepped in at the door something murky had cleared away inside me.
"Oh, Hildreth! Darrie!" ”

“ Now, Will Kempe, if we can intertaine these schollers at a low rate, it wil be well; they haue oftentimes a good conceite in a part.
“Kempe. Its true indeed, honest Dick; but the slaues are somewhat proud, and, besides, it is a good sport, in a part to see them neuer speake in their walke but at the end of the stage, iust as though in walking with a fellow we should neuer speake but at a stile, a gate, or a ditch, where a man can go no further. I was once at a Comedie in Cambridge, and there I saw a parasite make faces and mouths of all sorts on this fashion. ”

“ All of us grew rather hilarious and made a merry joke of the adventure. We poked fun at Penton.
We sallied forth at the front door, Darrie to go to the Martha Washington. "I don't want to be mixed up in the coming uproar and scandal," she exclaimed ... "so far, I'm clear of all blame, and I know only too well what the papers would insinuate."
Hildreth and I took train for New Jersey ... two tickets for—anywhere ... in our excited condition we ran off first to Elizabeth. We had with us exactly one hundred dollars, which I had borrowed of Darrie before we parted on our several ways. ”

“ In 1810, at the Russell Institution, Great Coram Street, Russell Square, London, Kemp began a series of lectures on musical education, in which he advocated the teaching of music in classes and the playing of exercises by pupils in concert. On account of failing health he returned with his wife and family to his native city, and resided there until 1824, with the interruption of a visit to France in 1818–21. He had founded a musical college at Exeter in 1814. A journey to London in April 1824 proved too fatiguing for Kemp, then in a weak state of health, and he died in his lodgings on 22 May. ”

“ Once alone in the room, Hildreth, to my consternation, could talk of nothing else but Penton.
"—to think that he would do such a thing to me, only to think of it!" she cried vehemently, again and again.
"If he believes in freedom for men and women, why was all this necessary? the sordidness of the public clamour? the divorce court?... oh, my poor, dear, sweet, wild poet-boy, you're in for it! Don't you wish you were well out of all this and back in Kansas again?"
"No; I am glad. As long as I am with you I don't care what happens. I love you, Hildreth!" ”

“ Yesterday he was committed for trial. I haven't closed my eyes for over a week."
"So you attended the police-court proceedings?" said Kemp. And when the girl nodded her head he went on, "The more fool you. I suppose it would be too much to expect a woman to keep away even though she knew she could do no good."
"I knew that, Kincher, but I simply had to go. I should have died if I had stayed in that dreadful flat alone. I tried to, but I couldn't. I got so nervous that I had to put my handkerchief into my mouth to prevent myself from screaming aloud." ”

“ Next, old Kemp, the patriarch of the village, came and listened attentively. Wade seemed to have a strange magnetism, a magic tongue.
He was small of stature, but wiry and muscular. His garments were old, soiled, worn. When he removed the wide-brimmed sombrero he exposed a remarkable face. It was smooth except for a drooping mustache, and pallid, with drops of sweat standing out on the high, broad forehead; gaunt and hollow-cheeked, with an enormous nose, and cavernous eyes set deep under shaggy brows. These features, however, were not so striking in themselves. ”

“ I read.
"There again you have an instance, of what I mean ... you are only rhetoricising about love; not partaking of its feelings."
"But I wrote all these poems about a real girl," and I told them the story of my distant passion for Vanna.
"No matter—you're a grown-up man who, as far as knowledge of women is concerned, has the heart of a baby," observed Hildreth.
—"in these days of sex-sophistication a fine thing!" cried Ruth.
"Yes, when out of the mouths of babes and sucklings come quotations from Havelock Ellis and Ellen Key!" cried Darrie.
"Good! Darrie, good!" Hildreth applauded.... ”

“ I wrote Miller to come down, that I had an exclusive interview for him.
He arrived the very night of the day he received my letter.
Darrie stepped out over to the Ronds', not to be herself brought into what she had so far managed to keep out of.
Hildreth consumed the better part of two hours fixing herself up as women do when they want to make an impression....
"Your friend from Kansas must see that you haven't made such a bad choice in picking me," she proclaimed, with that pretty droop of her mouth.
"No, no! be a good boy, don't muss me up now!" ”

“ Then she wrote a savage letter to Tad, letting him know what she thought of his vulgarity.
"There is one thing in you which I shall never quite compass; with my understanding," she almost moaned, "you express the most exquisite thoughts in the loveliest language ... you enter into the very soul of beauty ... and then you come out with some bit of horse-play, some grotesquerie of speech or action that spoils it all."
Nevertheless, it was the humanness in me that brought all the reporters who came to interview us to sympathise with Hildreth and me, instead of with Penton. ”

“ I am somewhat hard of study, and like your honor, but if they well inuent any extemporall meriment, ile put out the small sacke of witte I ha’ left in venture with them.
“S. Ant. They shall not deny ’t. Signior Harlaken, he is content. I pray thee question him.
Whisper.
“Kemp. Now, Signior, how many are you in companie?
“Harl. None but my wife and my selfe, sir.
“Kemp. Your wife! why, hearke you; wil your wife do tricks in publike?
“Harl. My wife can play.
“Kemp. The honest woman, I make no question; but how if we cast a whores part or a courtisan?
“Harl. Oh, my wife is excellent at that ”

“ Gregory, you'll find yourself in some sort of mix-up if you go down to Eden to live with him. You're both too mad and inflammable to be in the same neighbourhood."
Using all his powers of persuasion, Dr. William Hayes Ward tried to explain to me how I owed it both to Mr. Derek and Mr. Mackworth to finish my play.
"Have you no place else to go to, beside Eden?"
"I could run out to Perfection City—and camp out there."
"Now that's a good idea ... why not try that?"
"Johnnie, had your lunch yet?" it was Dr. ”

“ Kempe had been something of a pioneer in this inquest. He had not spared himself. He could not live by faith, it seemed. He must indeed again and again have come uncommonly near dying in pursuit of it. He had fasted moreover, and was now little more than a mere frame of bones within his outlandish clothes. Those boots of his—they kept forcing themselves on the attention: a worse fit than any worn by some poor desperate Tommy clambering 'over the top' in the Great War. ”

“ And I will bet you now,” she added, flushing, “that your old cup is ours.”
“Wait,” said Siward, laughing, “we may not shoot straight.”
“You will! Kemp, I'll wager whatever you dare!”
“Gloves? Stockings?—against a cigarette case?” he suggested.
“Done,” she said disdainfully, moving forward along the skirmish line with a nod and smile for the groups now disintegrating into couples, the Page boys with Eileen Shannon and Rena Bonnesdel, Marion Page followed by Alderdene, Mrs. Vendenning and Major Belwether and the Tassel girl convoyed by Leroy Mortimer. ”

“ He came back calmer.
"Look here, Gregory, I want you to excuse that outburst—but you are a fool. This is real life we're up against now. You're not reading about this in a book."
"We'll see what can be done," I returned.
At the extreme end of the big cage, the end furthest from the entrance door, stood two cells not occupied. The last of these I had chosen for my study, a la Monte Cristo. The sheriff's son had lent me a dozen of Opie Reid's novels, a history of the Civil War from the Southern viewpoint, an arithmetic, and an algebra. Here all day long I studied and wrote assiduously. ”

“ I put my arm around the girl's waist, and she wept on my shoulder.
Finally she straightened up her head, stopping her crying with difficulty.
"We're all so funny, aren't we?"
"Yes, we're a funny bunch, Darrie ... all so mixed up,—the world wouldn't believe it, would they, if we told them?"
"And you could never make them understand, even if you did tell them. You know, my dear, old Southern daddy—he thinks Penton is a limb of the old Nick himself ... with his theories about life, and the freedom of relations between the sexes, and all that ... ”

“ In the early evening time Doctor Kemp was sitting in his study in the belvedere on the hill overlooking Burdock. It was a pleasant little room, with three windows, north, west, and south, and bookshelves covered with books and scientific publications, and a broad writing-table, and, under the north window, a microscope, glass slips, minute instruments, some cultures, and scattered bottles of reagents. Doctor Kemp's solar lamp was lit, albeit the sky was still bright with the sunset light, and his blinds were up because there was no offence of peering outsiders to require them pulled down. ”

“ Kemp was a singularly lovable man, ‘almost culpably modest and diffident.’ His genius appears in his one finished work. A bust by Ritchie and a portrait by his wife's brother, William Bonnar, R.S.A., are in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. Kemp's model of the Scott monument is preserved in the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art. ”

“ She stuck one of the cheap cigarettes daintily into her mouth. "A match, Kincher! Why, the box is filthy! You must have a woman in to look after you, even if I have to find you one myself."
"I don't want any woman in the place," retorted Kemp. "There is no peace for a man when a woman is about. But let us have no more of this idle chatter. What's brought you over here? I suppose it's about Fred."
"Poor Fred!" The girl looked downcast for a moment, then she tossed her head, puffed out some smoke, and exclaimed energetically, "But he's not guilty, Kincher, and we'll get him off, won't we?" ”

“ I have informed the committee that you will read a few of your poems by the camp-fire."
"—the first time I ever heard of it," I replied, concealing my pride in the invitation, under show of being disgruntled....
That was Penton's way, arranging things first, telling you afterward.
"But you will do it? I have said you would!"
"Yes, Penton, if you wish me to!"
Hildreth was always insistent on my strength ... my greyhound length of limb, my huge chest ... she stood up and pounded on my chest once....
"Oh, why do I pick out a poor poet, and not a millionaire, for a lover!" ”

“ I could not sleep ... every little rustle of curtains, every creak or motion in the whole house vibrated through me ... something's going to happen to someone."
"You're only upset because Penton's in jail," I explained.
"No, that's not it ... that's nothing compared to this feeling ... this premonition—"
"Come on, let's make some coffee ... in the percolator."
"You girls sit down and I'll make it. I've been a cook several times in my career."
Someone was knocking about in the dark, upstairs. We heard a match struck....
"There, we've waked Ruth, too." ”