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officials of the various museums and libraries he visited. In applying to
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private families for records thought to be in their possession he made no
concealment of his object, and shared the somewhat amused scepticism with
which the accounts of the old diarists and letter-writers were regarded. He
often expressed a keen wonder as to what really had taken place a century and
a half before at the Pawtuxet farmhouse whose site he vainly tried to find,
and what Joseph Curwen really had been.
When he came across the Smith diary and archives and encountered the letter
from
Jedediah Orne he decided to visit Salem and look up Curwen's early activities
and connexions there, which he did during the Easter vacation of 1919. At the
Essex Institute, which was well known to him from former sojourns in the
glamorous old town of crumbling Puritan gables and clustered gambrel roofs, he
was very kindly received, and unearthed there a considerable amount of Curwen
data. He found that his ancestor was born in Salem-Village, now Danvers, seven
miles from town, on the eighteenth of February (O.S.) 1662-3; and that he had
run away to sea at the age of fifteen, not appearing again for nine years,
when he returned with the speech, dress, and manners of a native Englishman
and settled in Salem proper. At that time he had little to do with his family,
but spent most of his hours with the curious books he had brought from Europe,
and the strange chemicals which came for him on ships from England, France,
and
Holland. Certain trips of his into the country were the objects of much local
inquisitiveness, and were whisperingly associated with vague rumours of fires
on the hills at night.
Curwen's only close friends had been one Edward Hutchinson of Salem-Village
and one Simon Orne of Salem. With these men he was often seen in conference
about the Common, and visits among them were by no means infrequent.
Hutchinson had a
file:///F|/rah/H.%20P.%20Lovecraft/The%20Case...0Dexter%20Ward%20by%20H_%20P_%
20Lovecraft.txt (22 of 67) [5/21/03 1:11:40 AM]
file:///F|/rah/H.%20P.%20Lovecraft/The%20Case%20of%20Charles%20Dexter%20Ward%2
0by%20H_%20P_%20Lovecraft.txt house well out toward the woods, and it was not
altogether liked by sensitive people because of the sounds heard there at
night. He was said to entertain strange visitors, and the lights seen from his
windows were not always of the same colour. The knowledge he displayed
concerning long-dead persons and long-forgotten events was considered
distinctly unwholesome, and he disappeared about the time the witchcraft panic
began, never to be heard from again. At that time Joseph Curwen also departed,
but his settlement in Providence was soon learned of. Simon Orne lived in
Salem until 1720, when his failure to grow visibly old began to excite
attention. He thereafter disappeared, though thirty years later his precise
counterpart and self-styled son turned up to claim his property. The claim was
allowed on the strength of documents in Simon Orne's known hand, and Jedediah
Orne continued to dwell in Salem till 1771, when certain letters from
Providence citizens to the Rev. Thomas Barnard and others brought about his
quiet removal to parts unknown.
Certain documents by and about all of the strange characters were available at
teh Essex Institute, the Court House, and the Registry of Deeds, and included
both harmless commonplaces such as land titles and bills of sale, and furtive
fragments of a more provocative nature. There were four or five unmistakable
allusions to them on the witchcraft trial records; as when one Hepzibah Lawson
swore on July 10, 1692, at the Court of Oyer and Terminer under Judge
Hathorne, that: 'fortie Witches and the Blacke Man were wont to meete in the
Woodes behind
Mr. Hutchinson's house', and one Amity How declared at a session of August 8th
before Judge Gedney that:'Mr. G. B. (Rev. George Burroughs) on that Nighte
putt ye Divell his Marke upon Bridget S., Jonathan A., Simon O., Deliverance
W., Joseph C., Susan P., Mehitable C., and Deborah B.'
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Then there was a catalogue of Hutchinson's uncanny library as found after his [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]