Episodes Before Thirty/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV
Next day there was a racing west wind that sent the clouds scudding across a bright blue sky. The doctor was to come at 3 o'clock. Boyde, in very optimistic mood, had gone out early, taking my letter to McCloy. He had a studio sitting; he was going to Patterson too; he would return as early as he could. The shadow of the night before had vanished; I no longer believed in it; I ascribed it to fever and nerves. He sang cheerily while he dressed in my thick brown suit, the only one not in pawn (everything else, now that I was in bed, had gone to Ikey), and his voice sounded delightful. In the afternoon he came back with the news that McCloy had read my letter and said "That's right. Tell him to be good to himself. He can come back." Also he had agreed to use translations of the French stories at five dollars each. Boyde brought a Courier in with him. Two letters from home arrived too. Both my father and mother, though having no idea what was going on, never missed a single week. My own letters were difficult to write. I had come to New York against my father's advice. I wrote home what I thought best.
At 3 o'clock the doctor came. My heart sank as I heard his step. I was in considerable pain. What would he be like? Would an operation be necessary? Would he speak about money again? Mrs. Bernstein, oily and respectful, a little awed as well, announced him. Without a word, without a glance in my direction, he walked over in his slow, deliberate way, and laid hat and bag upon the sofa. Then he turned and looked steadily at himself in the mirror for a period I thought would never end. After that he turned and looked at me.
He was an angel. His face was wreathed in smiles. It beamed with good-nature, kindness, sympathy. He at once said something that was gentle, soothing, like music to me. My heart suddenly expanded in a most uncomfortable way. I believe a lump came up in my throat. This was all so contrary to what I had expected. He was not only an angel, he was a womanly angel. I must have been in a very weak state, for it was all I could do to keep my tears back. The same instant his eye fell on my fiddle case. He looked at it, then at me, then back again at the fiddle.
"You play?" he asked, with a twinkle in his big eyes.
"I ought to pawn it," I said, "but----"
"Don't," he answered with decision. He added an odd sentence: "It's an esgape from self." I remember that I couldn't say a word to this. His kindness melted me. The struggle to keep my eyes from betraying me seemed the most idiotic yet bitter I had ever known. I could have kissed the old man's hand, when he examined me then at once, but with a gentleness, even a tenderness, that both astonished me, yet did not astonish me at all. I felt, too, already the support of his mind and character, of his whole personality, of a rugged power in him, of generosity, true goodness, above all, of sympathy. I think he had made up his mind to treat me for nothing. No reference, in any case, was made to money; nor did I dare even to mention it myself. An operation, moveover, of any big kind, was not necessary; he thought he could save me that; he performed a small one then and there, for he had brought all that was required for it. The pain seemed nothing, his kindness made me indifferent to it. "You are brave," he said, with a smile that seemed to me really beautiful, when it was over. "That hurt, I know." He promised to come daily to drain the wound and so forth; he bandaged me up; a month to six weeks would see me out of bed, he hoped; he packed up his bag, but, instead of leaving the room, he then sat down deliberately and began to talk.
I was too surprised, too happy, to wonder why he stayed. His talk was food and drink to me. He picked up my few books, and sat reading quietly to himself when he saw I was getting tired. De Quincey's "Confessions" interested him especially, and he asked if he might borrow it. He took also "Sartor Resartus." I slipped into German, to his keen delight, and told him about the Moravian Brotherhood School in the Black Forest. A sketch of the recent past I gave him too. He listened with great attention, asking occasional questions, but always with real tact, and never allowing me to tire myself.
Though it was obvious, even to my stupidity, that he regarded me rather as a "specimen" of some sort, there was heart in all he said and did. Otto Huebner poured balm into all my little wounds that afternoon, but about himself he told me hardly anything. While he drew me out, with skill and sympathy, he hid himself behind that impenetrable mystery I had already noted the previous day. I say purposely that of himself he told me "hardly anything," because one detail did escape him inadvertently. An hour later, as he was leaving, he turned his smile on me from the door. "I send you something," he said shortly. "My vife makes goot broth. I cannot do much. I have not got it."
One other thing I noticed about his visit, when towards the end, Boyde came in unexpectedly, bringing a small bunch of the yellow Spanish grapes. In his best, most charming manner he spoke with the doctor. The doctor's face, however, darkened instantly. His features, it seemed to me, froze. His manner was curt. He scarcely replied. And when he left a little later he did not include my friend in his good-bye. It puzzled me. It added to my uneasiness as well.
Boyde, who apparently had noticed nothing, explained that he had to go out again to an appointment with Davis about the Rockaway Hunt post; he did not return that night at all.
I listened to the city clocks striking midnight, one, two, three ... he did not come. I listened to the howling wind as well. Imagination tried feebly to construct a happier state, lovelier conditions, a world nearer to the heart's desire. While waiting for midnight to strike, I said to myself, thinking of yesterday and to-morrow, with all the one had meant and the other might mean to me:
"Yesterday is now twenty-four hours away, but in a minute it will be only one minute away."
I treated the hidden to-morrow similarly. I imagined, the world being old and creaky, ill-fitting too, that a crack existed between the two days. Anyone who was thin enough might slip through! I, certainly, was thin enough. I slipped through.... I entered a region out of time, a region where everything came true. And the first thing I saw was a wondrous streaming vision of the wind, the wind that howled outside my filthy windows.... I saw the winds, changing colours as they rose and fell, attached to the trees, in tenuous ribands of gold and blue and scarlet as they swept to and fro.... I little dreamed that these fancies would appear fifteen years later in a book of my own, "The Education of Uncle Paul." That crack, at any rate, became for me, like the fiddle, a means of escape from unkind reality into a state of inner bliss and wonder "where everything came true."...
It was after twelve o'clock next day when Boyde returned--with a black eye, my one thick suit stained and soiled, and a long involved story that utterly confused me. There had been a fight; he had protected a woman; a false charge had been laid against him owing to misunderstanding, owing also to the fact that he had no money to tip the policeman, and he had spent the night in a cell at Jefferson Market police station. In the morning the magistrate had discharged him with many compliments upon his "gallantry and courage." It did not ring true. I knew the Tammany magistrates better than that. He contradicted himself too, in saying that a Mr. Beattie, a friend of his mother's, who occasionally gave him a little money she sent from England, had bailed him out. He had been bailed out, discharged with compliments, had slept in a cell, and not been fined! I smelt spirits too. It all made me miserable.
"You've been drunk and they locked you up," I reproached him. "Why do you lie to me?" The copious explanations that followed I hardly listened to. I lay in bed, saying nothing, but the warning of my visitor came back.
"I went down to the Evening Sun," Boyde said presently, when my silence made his explanations end of their own accord. "I've just come back with this. McCloy asked after you and sent it on account of the French stories." He handed me five dollars, in single bills, which we divided equally then and there.
He had been gone hardly ten minutes when the door opened again, and another visitor came in, an actor out of a job, Grant, an Englishman of perhaps twenty-five, one of the cricket team I had met in Staten Island a few weeks before. He had run across Boyde, he explained, and had heard I was ill. As one Englishman to another "in this awful city" he wanted to see if he could help in any way. He did then a wonderful thing. We had met but once, he scarcely knew me, he might never see me again, but when he realized the state of affairs he said he thought he could get a little money for me, and before I could say a word he vanished from the room. His shyness, his lame manner of speech, something hesitating and awkward about him generally, had embarrassed me as much as, evidently, he was embarrassed himself; and I was convinced his plea of getting money was only an excuse to disappear quickly. I rather hoped it was; certainly I thought it unlikely he would come back--which, nevertheless, he did, in about a quarter of an hour. He came in breathlessly, a shamefaced air about him; flung down some dollar bills on the bed, and vanished the second time. Three dollars lay on the counterpane. It was only a little later, as reflection brought up details, that I remembered he had worn an overcoat when he first came in, and that on his second visit he wore none. He had pawned it. Another detail rose to the surface: that he had called, really, upon quite another errand, and that there was something he wanted to tell me that he had not the courage to put into words. Later he admitted it was true....
Anticipating Otto Huebner's visits was now a keen pleasure; the one event of a long weary day.
During the next fortnight or so, he missed no single afternoon. His moods varied amazingly. One day he seemed an angel, the next a devil. I was completely puzzled.
The talks we had on his good days were an enjoyment I can hardly describe. I realized how much I depended on them, as well as on the man who made them possible. I realized also how much I depended on my other friend--on Boyde. The latter's curious and unsatisfactory behaviour, mysterious still to my blind ignorant eyes, made no difference to my feelings for him, but, if anything, tended to strengthen the attachment. My affection deepened. There lay now a certain pity in me too, an odd feeling that he was in my charge, and that, for all his greater knowledge and experience of life, his seniority as well, I could--I must--somehow help him. Upon the German doctor and Boyde, at any rate, Kay being far away, my mind rested with security, if of different degrees. To lose either of them in my lonely situation would have been catastrophic.
The old German would settle himself on the sofa, drawn up close to the bed, and talk. He was saturated in his native philosophy, but Hegel was his king.... "Sartor Resartus" enthralled him. Of De Quincey's struggle against opium he was never tired. Of Vedantic and Hindu philosophy, too, he was understanding and tolerant, though not enamoured. Regarding me still as a "specimen" evidently, he also treated me as though I were a boy, discerning of course at once my emptiness of mind and experience.
How patiently he listened to my eager exposition of life's mysteries, my chaotic theories, my fanciful speculations.... "We know--nothing, you must remember. Nothing," he would say with emphasis. "Nor can we know anything, ever. We label, classify, examine certain results--that's all. Of causes we remain completely ignorant. Speculation is not proof. The fact that a theory fits all the facts gets us no further."
He smiled, but with close attention, while I plunged again into a description of my beliefs. The tobacco smoke curled up about his genial face. I had no fear of him in this mood. I could say all my thoughts without shyness. I made full confession.
"Interesting, logical, possibly true," he replied, "and most certainly as good an explanation as any other, better even than most, but"--he shrugged his shoulders--"always a theory only, and nothing else. There is no proof of anything. The higher states of consciousness you mention are nebulous, probably pathogenic. Those who experience them cannot, in any case, report their content intelligibly to us who have not experienced them--because no words exist. They are of no value to the race, and that condemns them. Men of action, not dreamers, are what the world needs."
"Men of action only carry out what has first been dreamed," I ventured.
"True," replied the old man, "true very often. Men of action rarely have much vision. The poet is the highest type.... I am with you in this too--that the only real knowledge is the knowledge of man, the study of consciousness. Gnothi seauton is still the shortest, as well as the most pregnant, sermon in the world. Before we can get new knowledge, different knowledge--yes, there I am with you--consciousness itself must change and become different first ... but ... the people who get that different knowledge cannot describe it to us because there is no language." Wise, thoughtful things the old man said, while I listened eagerly. "One thing is certain," he declared with his usual emphasis: "If there is another state after the destruction of the body, it cannot be merely an extension, an idealization, of the one we know. That is excluded. Without senses, without brain or nerves, without physical reactions of any kind--since there is no body--how shall we be aware of things about us? Another state can only be--different, yet so different that it is useless to talk of it. The Heaven of the spiritualists, the elaborate constructions of a Swedenborg, are nothing but coloured idealizations of the state we already know ..."--he snorted contemptuously--"obviously self-created. A different state of consciousness would show us a universe so totally different from anything we know that it must be--indescribable."
Of my own future, too, he liked to talk. The newspaper reporting he disapproved; it could lead to little; it was "unersprechlich gemein"; the New York press was a cesspool; it might serve a temporary purpose, but no self-respecting man should stay too long in it. He urged me to become a doctor, saying I should be a success, advising me to specialize in nerves and mental cases. Being an Englishman would help very much; in time I should have an enormous practice; he would assist me in all manner of ways, so that my course need not be longer than two years, or three at the most. He would coach me, rush me through in half the normal time. Later I could get a foreign degree, which would be an additional asset.... He never tired of this topic, and his enthusiasm was certainly sincere.
Of stars, too, he loved to talk, of space, of possible other dimensions even. His exposition of a fourth dimension always delighted me. That the universe, indeed, was really four-dimensional, and that all we perceived of it was that sectional aspect, a portion as it were, that is projected into our three-dimensional world, was a theme that positively made him red in the face, as his big eyes focused on me, his concentrated mind working vehemently behind them.... Certainly, my knowledge of German improved considerably.
Then, as Boyde came in, the light would die out of his eyes, his face would harden and grow dark--he had a way of making it seem frozen--and with a stiff bow to Boyde that only just acknowledged his presence, he would get up and leave the room.
Meanwhile, I sold two more French stories, and Boyde bought back the ten dollars paid for them; three others were "not suitable," according to McCloy. I told the doctor all I earned. "Later," he said, "you pay me, if you want to. I take nothing—now."