第11章 STORY OF AN OBSTINATE CORPSE(1)

VIRGIL HOYT is a photographer's assistant up at St.Paul, and enjoys his work without being consumed by it.He has been in search of the picturesque all over the West and hundreds of miles to the north, in Canada, and can speak three or four Indian dialects and put a canoe through the rapids.That is to say, he is a man of adventure, and no dreamer.

He can fight well and shoot better, and swim so as to put up a winning race with the Ind-ian boys, and he can sit in the saddle all day and not worry about it to-morrow.

Wherever he goes, he carries a camera.

"The world," Hoyt is in the habit of say-ing to those who sit with him when he smokes his pipe, "was created in six days to be pho-tographed.Man -- and particularly woman --was made for the same purpose.Clouds are not made to give moisture nor trees to cast shade.They have been created in order to give the camera obscura something to do."In short, Virgil Hoyt's view of the world is whimsical, and he likes to be bothered neither with the disagreeable nor the mysteri-ous.That is the reason he loathes and detests going to a house of mourning to photograph a corpse.The bad taste of it offends him, but above all, he doesn't like the necessity of shouldering, even for a few moments, a part of the burden of sorrow which belongs to some one else.He dislikes sorrow, and would willingly canoe five hundred miles up the cold Canadian rivers to get rid of it.

Nevertheless, as assistant photographer, it is often his duty to do this very kind of thing.

Not long ago he was sent for by a rich Jew-ish family to photograph the remains of the mother, who had just died.He was put out, but he was only an assistant, and he went.

He was taken to the front parlor, where the dead woman lay in her coffin.It was evident to him that there was some excitement in the household, and that a discussion was going on.

But Hoyt said to himself that it didn't con-cern him, and he therefore paid no attention to it.

The daughter wanted the coffin turned on end in order that the corpse might face the camera properly, but Hoyt said he could over-come the recumbent attitude and make it ap-pear that the face was taken in the position it would naturally hold in life, and so they went out and left him alone with the dead.

The face of the deceased was a strong and positive one, such as may often be seen among Jewish matrons.Hoyt regarded it with some admiration, thinking to himself that she was a woman who had known what she wanted, and who, once having made up her mind, would prove immovable.Such a character appealed to Hoyt.He reflected that he might have married if only he could have found a woman with strength of character sufficient to disagree with him.There was a strand of hair out of place on the dead woman's brow, and he gently pushed it back.A bud lifted its head too high from among the roses on her breast and spoiled the contour of the chin, so he broke it off.He remembered these things later with keen distinctness, and that his hand touched her chill face two or three times in the making of his arrangements.

Then he took the impression, and left the house.