EVEN now, in the comparative security of a city of seven million people, I sit dreaming of Miss Sellers, the most dangerous woman in the world. For three years Miss Sellers was, in a sense, my employee, although she kept me in a steady panic, and I had neither dignity nor grace in her presence.
At that time, I was the editor of a New England weekly newspaper, dedicated to the social activities of the community, which were repetitious, and the interests of the Republican party, which were corrupt beyond belief. Miss Sellers was my reporter, a heritage from my predecessor, and certainly the most successful practical joke of his negligible career. She was a native New Englander, which, next to being a Jukes, is of course this world’s surest guarantee of great peculiarity. She weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds, and as a rule she wore a rusty red garment, shapeless and without sleeves, like an old-fashioned nightgown. Her face was large and gray and sparsely bearded, and it glistened continually with perspiration. Her eyes protruded and never winked. Her hair was arranged, Japanese fashion, in a tower of diminishing black buns, which sometimes contained an exhausted flower. On the whole, it is impossible to describe her more graphically than to say that she resembled the late William Jennings Bryan, unkindly made up to play Madame Butterfly.
It was Miss Sellers’ simple duty to report to me, in pencil on ruled sheets of yellow paper, the weddings, births, deaths, and other minutiæ of a community of three thousand people. She did this, I am obliged to admit, acceptably enough, being particularly eloquent in her obituaries, which were written more or less from the triumphant point of view of the earthworm. Unsolicited, Miss Sellers also contributed other articles, largely of an editorial nature and directed principally against the Catholic Church, of which she disapproved. These, however, were somewhat controversial in tone, having to do with vast papal conspiracies to take over the county government, and they were not printed. She also contributed poetry, and, country newspapers being what they are, some of this was printed. It, too, was dark and menacing, and, being largely incomprehensible, gained the paper a considerable reputation for profundity among the simple lobstermen. I have lost what copies I ever had of these compositions, but one at least persists in my memory. It was called “Sardak Y Noval,” which Miss Sellers, being pinned down, condescended to explain was the name of a “mythical pool.” It began:
Down through the depths of the depthless,
Narrow and sombre and cool,
Down in the heart of the heartless,
Oh, where is the soul of the pool?
Oh, silence is golden, while silver is sound
As the motto proverbial saith,
But the silence of Sardak, that stillness profound,
The silence of Noval is … DEATH!
I can still remember it all, but this, I think, is enough to convey the essence of Miss Sellers’ gloomy gift.
NONE of these extra activities, of course, had the slightest bearing on Miss Sellers’ value to me as a journalist. It also happened, however, that she was the victim of a series of delusions which made my contacts with her matters of the greatest anxiety and embarrassment. Her paramount idea was that almost all men, not too near the cradle or the grave, had carnal designs upon her person. This is certainly not a novel fixation, and I suppose it has its pathos, but Miss Sellers’ precautions against unavenged rape were so bizarre and elaborate that they deserve to be noted. In the first place, she had procured (in an interview which must have mystified the village doctor) a “certificate of chastity,” stating that Edith Sellers had been examined and found to be a virgin; in the second, she had picked up, God knows where, an enormous old revolver, minus both hammer and ammunition, with which to threaten any wretch too passionate or abandoned to be disarmed by the certificate. Both these articles were kept in the side pocket of her Ford runabout, and both figured freely and forbiddingly in her conversation.
This, too, would have been harmless enough from my point of view, except that, of all men, Miss Sellers was most inclined to suspect the editors who employed her, apparently expecting them to demand a sort of journalistic droit du seigneur in exchange for her salary. The certificate and the revolver, indeed, became commonplaces in our interviews, and I was threatened with them daily, though never directly.
“Just let any of them try their dirty monkey tricks on me,” Miss Sellers would say, staring at me with unmistakable menace.
I learned from the villagers, who were largely exempt from Miss Sellers’ suspicions and therefore inclined to find her diverting, that one previous editor had become so unnerved by these persistent innuendoes that he had resigned and, in his anxiety to get as far as possible from Miss Sellers, had bought a candy store in Austin, Texas.
Eventually it became clear, even to Miss Sellers, that I was unlikely to attack her, and our relationship entered an even more embarrassing phase. She decided that a great, but purely platonic, love had sprung up between us. This spiritual kinship involved the writing (on her part) of a sequence of poems, not primarily designed for publication, and many references, ingeniously but much too thinly disguised, to the dear new bond between us. It was Miss Sellers’ hideous fancy to pretend that she was writing a book, in which the principal characters were designated simply as “the boy” and “the girl.” To make it even easier, “the boy” was the editor of a newspaper, while “the girl,” a poetess of considerable power, worked for him as a reporter. On the slightest provocation, or none, and certainly in any company, Miss Sellers would outline the latest chapter in this work. Once, I remember, “the boy” was dying of pneumonia (almost all the chapters contained a satisfactory amount of sickness and catastrophe) and “the girl” brought him around with a sonnet. As a roman à clef, it had an enormous vogue among the happy villagers.
Our love also involved telepathy. Occasionally, in the newspaper office, I would answer the phone, to hear that unmistakable voice—Miss Sellers always spoke in the tone generally reserved by elderly ladies for children or small animals.
“Hello,” it would say.
“Hello, Miss Sellers.”
“You knew!” There would be a sound which I could picture only as Miss Sellers blowing hard into the mouthpiece. “Isn’t it marvellous!”
“Oh, I ought to know your voice by this time, Miss Sellers.”
“Oh, no!” More blowing. “Oh, it’s much more than that!”
The final confirmation of our psychic tie-up, however, came one evening when I was working late at the office. There was a frosted-glass panel in the door, and a strong light in the hall, so that anybody standing outside cast a sharp shadow on the pane. Looking up suddenly, I saw an outline that, from the triple bun on top to the gigantic waist, could have belonged to only one person in the world.
“Come in, Miss Sellers,” I said hopelessly.
Miss Sellers came in, pale with some delicious blending of fright and rapture.
“It’s uncanny! It frightens me,” she cried. “Why, you felt me out there!”
I looked at the lighted panel, and at Miss Sellers, but I knew it was no use.
“Yes,” I said, “it frightens me too.”
A little after that, I resigned from the paper myself, partly because of Miss Sellers, and partly because I had no real interest in misleading the taxpayers. I left quietly, almost furtively, and I didn’t see Miss Sellers. A few months ago, however, I got a letter from her. Our romance, it appears, has left no scars. Indeed, she didn’t even mention it, being too preoccupied with news. There was a new editor after I left, an extremely disagreeable man, who had tried to take away her pistol and cause her “other troubles.” Miss Sellers didn’t specify just what these “other troubles” were, but I gathered that he’d tried to have her committed. He hadn’t succeeded. In fact, the victory was magnificently with Miss Sellers. The editor had been driving along in a storm when a branch was blown down on his skull, fracturing it. He wasn’t dead, but he was in the hospital, and nobody believed he’d ever be the same. Miss Sellers said that this was obviously the hand of God, and seemed to be somewhat alarmed at her own powers. In the meantime, there is a new editor—“a rather delicate boy.” She hopes that he’s stronger than he looks. So do I.
1935