"Rhodes, William Henry - The Case of Summerfield" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rhodes William Henry)

With an Introduction by Geraldine Bonner




The Introduction



The greatest master of the short story our country has known found his
inspiration and produced his best work in California. It is now nearly
forty years since "The Luck of Roaring Camp" appeared, and a line of
successors, more or less worthy, have been following along the trail
blazed by Bret Harte. They have given us matter of many kinds,
realistic, romantic, tragic, humorous, weird. In this mass of material
much that was good has been lost. The columns of newspapers swallowed
some; weeklies, that lived for a brief day, carried others to the grave
with them. Now and then chance or design interposed, and some fragment
of value was not allowed to perish. It is matter for congratulation that
the story in this volume was one of those saved from oblivion.

In 1871 a San Francisco paper published a tale entitled The Case of
Summerfield. The author concealed himself under the name of "Caxton," a
pseudonym unknown at the time. The story made an immediate impression,
and the remote little world by the Golden Gate was shaken into startled
and enquiring astonishment. Wherever people met, The Case of Summerfield
was on men's tongues. Was Caxton's contention possible? Was it true
that, by the use of potassium, water could be set on fire, and that any
one possessing this baneful secret could destroy the world? The
plausibility with which the idea was presented, the bare directness of
the style, added to its convincing power. It sounded too real to be
invention, was told with too frank a simplicity to be all imagination.
People could not decide where truth and fiction blended, and the name of
Caxton leaped into local fame.

The author of the tale was a lawyer, W. H. Rhodes, a man of standing and
ability, interested in scientific research. He had written little; what
time he had been able to spare from his work, had been given to studies
in chemistry whence he had drawn the inspiration for such stories as The
Case of Summerfield. With him the writing of fiction was a pastime, not
a profession. He wrote because he wanted to, from the urgence of an idea
pressing for utterance, not from the more imperious necessity of keeping
the pot boiling and of there being a roof against the rain. Literary
creation was to him a rest, a matter of holiday in the daily round of a
man's labor to provide for his own.

His output was small. One slender volume contains all he wrote: a few
poems, half a dozen stories. In all of these we can feel the spell