The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/The Great Good Place/Chapter 3
III
'Well,' said George Dane, 'it was a young man I had never seen—a man, at any rate, much younger than myself—who had written to me and sent me some article, some book. I read the stuff, was much struck with it, told him so and thanked him—on which, of course, I heard from him again. He asked me things—his questions were interesting; but to save time and writing I said to him: "Come to see me—we can talk a little; but all I can give you is half an hour at breakfast." He turned up at the hour on a day when, more than ever in my life before, I seemed, as it happened, in the endless press and stress, to have lost possession of my soul and to be surrounded only with the affairs of other people and the irrelevant, destructive, brutalising sides of life. It made me literally ill—made me feel as I had never felt that if I should once really, for an hour, lose hold of the thing itself, the thing I was trying for, I should never recover it again. The wild waters would close over me, and I should drop straight to the bottom where the vanquished dead lie.'
'I follow you every step of your way,' said the friendly Brother. 'The wild waters, you mean, of our horrible time.'
'Of our horrible time—precisely. Not, of course—as we sometimes dream—of any other,'
'Yes, any other is only a dream. We really know none but our own.'
'No, thank God—that's enough,' Dane said. 'Well, my young man turned up, and I hadn't been a minute in his presence before making out that practically it would be in him somehow or other to help me. He came to me with envy, envy extravagant—really passionate. I was, heaven save us, the great "success" for him; he himself was broken and beaten. How can I say what passed between us?—it was so strange, so swift, so much a matter, from one to the other, of instant perception and agreement. He was so clever and haggard and hungry!'
'Hungry?' the Brother asked.
'I don't mean for bread, though he had none too much, I think, even of that. I mean for—well, what I had and what I was a monument of to him as I stood there up to my neck in preposterous evidence. He, poor chap, had been for ten years serenading closed windows and had never yet caused a shutter to show that it stirred. My dim blind was the first to be raised an inch; my reading of his book, my impression of it, my note and my invitation, formed literally the only response ever dropped into his dark street. He saw in my littered room, my shattered day, my bored face and spoiled temper—it's embarrassing, but I must tell you—the very blaze of my glory. And he saw in the blaze of my glory—deluded innocent!—what he had yearned for in vain.'
'What he had yearned for was to be you, said the Brother. Then he added: 'I see where you're coming out.'
'At my saying to him by the end of five minutes: "My dear fellow, I wish you'd just try it—wish you'd, for a while, just be me!" You go straight to the mark, and that was exactly what occurred—extraordinary though it was that we should both have understood. I saw what he could give, and he did too. He saw moreover what I could take; in fact what he saw was wonderful.'
'He must be very remarkable!' the Brother laughed.
'There's no doubt of it whatever—far more remarkable than I. That's just the reason why what I put to him in joke—with a fantastic, desperate irony—became, on his hands, with his vision of his chance, the blessed guarantee of my sitting on this spot in your company. "Oh, if I could just shift it all—make it straight over for an hour to other shoulders! If there only were a pair!"—that's the way I put it to him. And then at something in his face, "Would you, by a miracle, undertake it?" I asked. I let him know all it meant—how it meant that he should at that very moment step in. It meant that he should finish my work and open my letters and keep my engagements and be subject, for better or worse, to my contacts and complications. It meant that he should live with my life, and think with my brain, and write with my hand, and speak with my voice. It meant, above all, that I should get off. He accepted with magnificence—rose to it like a hero. Only he said: "What will become of you?"'
'There was the hitch!' the Brother admitted.
'Ah, but only for a minute. He came to my help again,' Dane pursued, 'when he saw I couldn't quite meet that, could at least only say that I wanted to think, wanted to cease, wanted to do the thing itself—the thing I was trying for, miserable me, and that thing only—and therefore wanted first of all really to see it again, planted out, crowded out, frozen out as it now so long had been. "I know what you want," he after a moment quietly remarked to me. "Ah, what I want doesn't exist!" "I know what you want," he repeated. At that I began to believe him.'
'Had you any idea yourself?' the Brother asked.
'Oh, yes,' said Dane, 'and it was just my idea that made me despair. There it was as sharp as possible in my imagination and my longing—there it was so utterly not in fact. We were sitting together on my sofa as we waited for breakfast. He presently laid his hand on my knee—showed me a face that the sudden great light in it had made, for me, indescribably beautiful. "It exists—it exists," he at last said. And so, I remember, we sat awhile and looked at each other, with the final effect of my finding that I absolutely believed him. I remember we weren't at all solemn—we smiled with the joy of discoverers. He was as glad as I—he was tremendously glad. That came out in the whole manner of his reply to the appeal that broke from me: "Where is it, then, in God's name? Tell me without delay where it is!"'
The Brother had attended with a sympathy! 'He gave you the address?'
'He was thinking it out—feeling for it, catching it. He has a wonderful head of his own and must be making of the whole thing, while we sit here gossiping, something much better than ever I did. The mere sight of his face, the sense of his hand on my knee, made me, after a little, feel that he not only knew what I wanted, but was getting nearer to it than I could have got in ten years. He suddenly sprang up and went over to my study-table—sat straight down there as if to write me my passport. Then it was—at the mere sight of his back, which was turned to me—that I felt the spell work. I simply sat and watched him with the queerest, deepest, sweetest sense in the world—the sense of an ache that had stopped. All life was lifted; I myself at least was somehow off the ground. He was already where I had been.'
'And where were you?' the Brother amusedly inquired.
'Just on the sofa always, leaning back on the cushion and feeling a delicious ease. He was already me.'
'And who were you?' the Brother continued.
'Nobody. That was the fun.'
'That is the fun,' said the Brother, with a sigh like soft music.
Dane echoed the sigh, and, as nobody talking with nobody, they sat there together still and watched the sweet wide picture darken into tepid night.