Those Times and These

“‘Well, pardner,’ says Billy in that whiny way of his’n, ‘you certainly are a slow one when it comes to pickin’ up current gossip ez it flits to and fro about the neighbourhood. Why do you s’pose we’ve all been ridin’ hell-fur-leather in this direction endurin’ of the past few days onlessen it was with that identical notion in mind?’

“‘Never mind that now,’ says the other feller. ‘Circumstances alter cases. Don’t you see that there camp over yonder is a camp of Yankee soldiers?’

“‘Ef my suspicions are correct that’s jest whut it is,’ says Billy very politely. ‘Whut of it?’

“‘Well,’ says the other feller, ‘did it ever occur to you that ef we cross here them Yankees will call on us to lay down the arms which we’ve toted so long? Did it ever occur to you that mebbe they’d even expect us to take their dam’ oath of allegiance?’

“‘Yes,’ says Billy Priest, ‘sence you bring up the subject, it had occurred to me that they mout do jest that. And likewise it has also occurred to me that when them formalities are concluded they mout extend the hospitalities of the occasion by invitin’ us to set down with them to a meal of real human vittles. Why,’ he says, ‘I ain’t tasted a cup of genuwyne coffee in so long that – !’

“The other feller breaks in on him before Billy can git done with whut he’s sayin’.

“‘And you,’ he says, sort of sneerful and insinuatin’, ‘you, here only some three or four months back was a ring-leader and a head-devil in formin’ this here expedition. You was goin’ round makin’ your brags that you’d be the last one to surrender – you! And we’ve been callin’ you Fightin’ Billy! Fightin’ Billy? Hell’s fire!’

“Billy rammed his heels in his hoss’s flanks and shoved over, only reinin’ up when he was touchin’ laigs with the Bland County feller. A shiny little blue light come into his eyes and the veins in his neck all swelled out.

“‘My esteemed friend and feller-country-man,’ says Billy, speakin’ plenty slow and plenty polite, ‘ef any gentleman present is inclined to make a pussonal matter of it, I’ll undertake to endeavour to prove up my right to that there title right here and now. But ef not, I wish to state fur the benefit of all concerned that frum this minute I ain’t figgerin’ on wearin’ the nickname any longer. Frum where I set it looks to me like this is a mighty fitten and appropriate time to go out of the fightin’ business and resume the placid and pleasant ways of peace. Frum now on, to friends ez well ez to strangers, I’m goin’ to be jest plain William Pitman Priest, Esquire, attorney and counsellor-at-law. I ast you all to kindly bear it in mind. And furthermore speakin’ solely and exclusively fur the said William Pitman Priest, I will state it is my intention of gittin’ acrost this here river in time to eat my supper on the soil of my own country. Ef anybody here feels like goin’ along with me I’ll be glad of his company. Ef not, I’ll bid all you good comrades an affectionate farewell and jest jog along over all by my lonesome self.’

“But, of course, when he said that last he was jest funnin’ – talkin’ to hear hisself talk. He knowed good and well we would all go with him. And we did. And ez fur ez I know none of us ever had cause to regret takin’ the step.

“By hurryin’, we did git back home before hog-killin’ time. And then after a spell, when we’d had our disabilities removed, some of us like Billy Priest started runnin’ fur office and bein’ elected with reasonable regularity and some of us, like me, went into business. We lived through bayonet rule and reconstruction and carpet-baggery, and we lived to see all them evils die out and a better feelin’ and a better understandin’ come in. We’ve been livin’ ever since, sech of us ez are still survivin’. I’ve done consider’ble livin’ myself. I’ve lived to see North and South united. I’ve even lived to see my own daughter married to the son of a Northern soldier, with the full consent of the families on both sides. And so that’s how it happens I’ve got a grandson that’s part Yankee and part Confederate in his breedin’. I reckin there ain’t nobody that’s ez plum’ foolish ez I am about that there little, curly-headed sassy tike, without it’s his grandfather on the other side, old Major Ashcroft. We differ radically on politics, the Major bein’ a besotted and hopeless black Republikin; and try ez I will I ain’t never been able to cure him of a delusion of his’n that the Ninth Michigan could a-helt its own ag’inst King’s Hell Hounds ef ever they’d met up on the field of battle; but in other respects he’s a fairly intelligent man; and he certainly does coincide with me that betwixt us we’ve got the smartest four-year-old youngster fur a grandchild that ever was born. There’s hope fur a nation that kin produce sech children ez that one, ef I do say it myself.”

He stood up and shook himself.

“In fact, son,” concluded Sergeant Bagby, “you mout safely say that, takin’ one thing with another, this country is turnin’ out to be quite a success.”

CHAPTER II. AND THERE WAS LIGHT

SO many things that at first seem amazingly complex turn out amazingly simple. The purely elemental has a trick of ambushing itself behind a screen of mystery; but when by deduction and elimination – in short, by the simple processes of subtraction and division – we have stripped away the mask, the fact stands so plainly revealed we marvel that we did not behold it from the beginning. Elemental, you will remember, was a favourite word with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and one much employed by him in the elucidation of problems in criminology for the better enlightenment of his sincere but somewhat obvious-minded friend, the worthy Doctor Watson.

On the other hand, traits and tricks that appear to betray the characters, the inclinations and, most of all, the vocations of their owners may prove misleading clues, and very often do. You see a black man with a rolling gait, who spraddles his legs when he stands and sways his body on his hips when he walks; and, following the formula of the deductionist cult of amateur detectives, you say to yourself that here, beyond peradventure, is a deep-water sailor, used to decks that heave and scuppers that flood. Inquiry but serves to prove to you how wrong you are. The person in question is a veteran dining-car waiter.

Then along comes another – one with a hearty red face, who rears well back and steps out with martial precision. Evidently a retired officer of the regular army, you say to yourself. Not at all; merely the former bass drummer of a military brass band. The bass drummer, as will readily be recalled, leans away from his instrument instead of toward it.

For a typical example of this sort of thing, let us take the man I have in mind for the central figure of this tale. He was a square-built man, round-faced, with a rather small, deep-set grey eye, and a pair of big hands, clumsy-looking but deft. He wore his hair short and his upper lip long. Appraising him upon the occasion of a chance meeting in the street, you would say offhand that this, very probably, was a man who had been reasonably successful in some trade calling for initiative and expertness rather than for technic. He wouldn’t be a theatrical manager – his attire was too formal; or a stockbroker – his attire was not formal enough.

I imagine you in the act of telling yourself that he might be a clever life-insurance solicitor, or a purchasing agent for a trunk line, or a canny judge of real-estate values – a man whose taste in dress would run rather to golf stockings than to spats, rather to soft hats than to hard ones, and whose pet hobby would likely be trout flies and not first editions. In a part of your hypothesis you would have been absolutely correct. This man could do things with a casting rod and with a mid-iron too.

Seeing him now, as we do see him, wearing a loose tweed suit and sitting bareheaded behind a desk in the innermost room of a smart suite of offices on a fashionable side street, surrounded by shelves full of medical books and by wall cases containing medical appliances, you, knowing nothing of him except what your eye told you, would probably hazard a guess that this individual was a friend of the doctor, who, having dropped in for social purposes and having found the doctor out, had removed his hat and taken a seat in the doctor’s chair to await the doctor’s return.

Therein you would have been altogether in error. This man was not the doctor’s friend, but the doctor himself – a practitioner of high repute in his own particular line. He was known as a specialist in neurotic disorders; privately he called himself a specialist in human nature. He was of an orthodox school of medicine, but he had cast overboard most of the ethics of the school and he gave as little as possible of the medicine. Drugs he used sparingly, preferring to prescribe other things for most of his patients – such things, for instance, as fresh air, fresh, vegetables and fresh thoughts. His cures were numerous and his fees were large.

On the other side of a cross wall a woman sat waiting to see him. She was alone, being the first of his callers to arrive this day. A heavy, deep-cushioned town car, with a crest on its doors and a man in fine livery to drive it, had brought her to the doctor’s address five minutes earlier; car and driver were at the curb outside.

The woman was exquisitely groomed and exquisitely overdressed. She radiated luxury, wealth and the possession of an assured and enviable position. She radiated something else, too – unhappiness.

Here assuredly the lay mind might make no mistake in its summarising. There are too many like her for any one of us to err in our diagnosis when a typical example is presented. The city is especially prolific of such women. It breeds them. It coddles them and it pampers them, but in payment therefore it besets them with many devils. It gives them everything in reason and out of reason, and then it makes them long for something else – anything else, so long as it be unattainable. Possessed of the nagging demons of unrest and discontent and satiation, they feed on their nerves until their nerves in retaliation begin to feed on them. The result generally is smash. Sanitariums get them, and divorce courts and asylums – and frequently cemeteries.

The woman who waited in the reception room did not have to wait very long, yet she was hard put to it to control herself while she sat there. She bit her under lip until the red marks of her teeth showed in the flesh, and she gripped the arms of her chair so tightly and with such useless expenditure of nervous force that through her gloves the knuckles of her hands exposed themselves in sharp high ridges.

Presently a manservant entered and, bowing, indicated mutely that his master would see her now. She fairly ran past him through the communicating door which he held open for her passage. As she entered the inner room it was as though her coming into it set all its orderliness awry. Only the ruddy-faced specialist, intrenched behind the big table in the middle of the floor, seemed unchanged. She halted on the other side of the table and bent across it toward him, her finger tips drumming a little tattoo upon its smooth surface. He did not speak even the briefest of greetings; perhaps he was minded not to speak. He waited for her to begin.

“Doctor,” she burst out, “you must do something for me; you must give me medicine – drugs – narcotics – anything that will soothe me. I did not sleep at all last night and hardly any the night before that. All night I sat up in bed or walked the floor trying to keep from screaming out – trying to keep from going mad. I have been dressed for hours – I made my maid stay up with me – waiting for your office to open so that I might come to you. Here I am – see me! See the state I am in! Doctor, you must do something for me – and do it now, quickly, before I do something desperate!”

She panted out the last words. She put her clenched hands to her bosom. Her haggard eyes glared into his; their glare made the carefully applied cosmetics upon her face seem a ghastly mask.

“I have already prescribed for you, madam,” the doctor said. “I told you that what you mainly needed was rest – complete and absolute rest.”

“Rest? Rest! How can I rest? What chance is there for me to rest? I can’t rest! If I try to rest I begin to think – and then it is worse than ever. I must keep on the go. Something drives me on – something inside me, here – to go and go, and to keep on going until I drop. Oh, doctor, you don’t know what I suffer – what I have to endure. No one knows what I have to endure. No one understands. My husband doesn’t understand me – my children do not, nor my friends.

“Friends? I have no friends. I can’t get on with any one – I quarrel with every one. I know I am sick, that I am irritable and out-of-sorts sometimes. And I know that I am self-willed and want my own way. But I’ve always been self-willed; it’s a part of my nature. And I’ve always had my own way. They should appreciate that. But they don’t. They cross me. At every turn somebody crosses me. The whole world seems in a conspiracy to deny me what I want.

“It can’t be my fault always that I am forever quarrelling with people – with my own family; with my husband’s family; with every one who crosses my path. I tell you they don’t understand me, doctor. They don’t make allowances for my condition. If they would only make allowances! And they don’t give me any consideration. I can’t stand it, doctor! I can’t go on like this any longer. Please – please, doctor, do something for me!”

Mounting hysteria edged her voice with a sharpened, almost a vulgar shrillness. The austere and studied reserve of her class – a reserve that is part of it poise and the rest of it pose – dropped away from her like a discarded garment, and before her physician she revealed herself nakedly for what she was – a creature with the passions, the forwardness and the selfishness of a spoiled and sickly child; and, on top of these, superimposed and piled up, adult impulses, adult appetites, adult petulance, adult capacity for misery.

“I told you,” he said, “to go away. I thought, until my man brought me your name a bit ago, that you had gone. Weeks ago I told you that travel might help you – not the sort of travel to which you have been used, but a different sort – travel in the quiet places, out of the beaten path, and rest. I told you the same thing again less than a week ago.”

“But where?” she demanded. “Where am I to go? Tell me that! I have been everywhere – I have seen everything. What is there left for me to see in the world? What is there in the world that is worth seeing? You told me before there was nothing organically wrong with me, nothing fundamentally wrong with my body. Then it must be my mind, and travel couldn’t cure a mind in the state that mine is in. How can I rest when I am so distracted, when small things upset me so, when – ”

In the midst of this new outburst she broke off. Her eyes, wandering from his as she pumped herself up toward a frenzy, were focused now upon some object behind him. She pointed toward it.

“I never saw that before,” she said. “It wasn’t there when I was here last.”

He swung about in his chair, its spiral creaking under his weight.

“No,” he said; “you never saw that before. It came into my possession only a day or two ago. It is a – ”

She broke in on him.

“What a wonderful face!” she said. “What beauty there is in it – what peace! I think that is what made me notice it – the peace that is in it. Oh, if I could only be like that! Doctor, the being to whom that face belonged must have had everything worth having. And to think there can be such beings in this world – beings so blessed, so happy – while I – I – ”

Tears of self-pity came into her eyes. She was slipping back again into her former mood. With his gaze he caught and held hers, exerting all his will to hold it. A brother psychologist seeing him in that moment would have said that to this man a possible way out of a dilemma had come – would have said that an inspiration suddenly had visited him.

“Perhaps you would like to see it at closer range,” he said, still steadfastly regarding her. “There is a story regarding it – a story that might interest you, madam.”

He rose from his place, crossed the room and, reaching up, took down a plaster cast of a face that rested upright against the broad low moulding that ran along his walls on two sides.

As he brought it to her he saw that she had taken a chair. Her figure was relaxed from its recent rigidness. Her elbows were upon the tabletop. He put the cast into her gloved hands and reseated himself. She held it before her at arm’s length, and one gloved hand went over its surface almost caressingly.

“It is wonderful!” she said. “I never saw such an expression on any human face – why, it is soothing to me just to look at it. Doctor, where did you get it? Who was the original of it – or don’t you know? What living creature sat for the artist who made it?”

“No living creature sat for it,” he said slowly.

“Oh!” she said disappointedly. “Well, then, what artist had the imagination to conjure up such a conception?”

“No artist conjured it up,” he told her.

“Then how-”

“That, madam,” he said, “is a death mask.”

“A death mask!” Her tone was incredulous. “A death mask, doctor?”

“Yes, madam – a death mask. See, the eyes are closed – are half closed, anyway.”

“Do you mean to tell me that death can leave such an expression on any face? How could – ”

She broke off, staring incredulously at the thing.

“That is what makes the story I mean to tell you,” he said – “if you care to hear it?”

“Of course I want to hear it.” Her manner was insistent, impatient, demanding almost. “Please go on.”

He kept her in suspense a moment or two; and so they both sat, he squinting up at the ceiling as though marshalling a narrative in its proper sequence in his mind, she holding fast to the disked shape of white plaster. At length he began, speaking slowly.

“Here is the story,” he said: “A few weeks ago an acquaintance of mine – a fellow physician – told me of a case he thought might interest me. Primarily it was a surgical case, and I, as perhaps you know, do not practise surgery; but there was another aspect of it that did have a direct and personal appeal for me.

“It seems that some weeks before there had been put into his hands for treatment a man – a young man – who was stone-deaf and stone-blind, and whose senses of taste and of smell were greatly affected – perhaps I should say impaired. He could speak, more or less imperfectly, and his sense of touch was good; in fact, better than with ordinary mortals. These two faculties alone remained to him. He had been afflicted so from childhood; the attack, or the disease, which left him in this state had come upon him very early, before his mind had registered very many sensible impressions.

“Speech and feeling – these really were what remained intact. Yet his intelligence, considering these handicaps, was above the average, and his body was healthy, and his temperament, in the main, sanguine. Practically all his life he had been in an asylum – a charity institution. Until chance brought him to the attention of this acquaintance of mine it had seemed highly probable that he would spend the rest of his life in this institution.

“The physicians there regarded his case as hopeless. They were conscientious men – these physicians – and they were not lacking in sympathy, I think; but their hands and their thoughts were concerned with their duties, and perhaps – mind you, I say perhaps – perhaps an individual case more or less did not mean to them what it means to the physician in private practice. You understand? So this young man, who was well formed physically, who was normal in his mental aspects, seemed to be doomed to serve a life sentence inside walls of utter darkness and utter silence.

“Well, this man came under the attention of the surgeon I have mentioned. Possibly because it seemed so hopeless, the case interested the surgeon. He made up his mind that the affliction – afflictions rather – were not congenital, not incurable. He made up his mind that a tumorous growth on the brain was responsible for the present state of the victim. And he made up his mind that an operation – a delicate and a risky and a difficult operation – might bring about a cure. If the operation failed the subject would pass from the silence and the blackness he now endured into a silence and a blackness which many of us, similarly placed, would find preferable. He would die – quickly and painlessly. If the operation succeeded he probably would have back all his faculties – he would begin really to live. The surgeon was willing to take the chance, to assume the responsibility.

“The other man was willing to take his chance too. Both of them took it. The operation was performed – and it was a success. The man lived through it, and when he was lifted off the table my friend had every reason to believe – in fact, to know as surely as a man whose business is tampering with the human organism can know anything – that before very long this man, who had walked all his days in darkness, lacking taste and smell, and hearing no sound, would have back all that his afflictions had denied him.

“To my friend, the surgeon, it seemed likely that I, as a person concerned to a degree in psychologic manifestations and psychologic phenomena, would be glad of the opportunity to be present at the hour when this man, through his eyes, his ears, his tongue and his palate, first registered intelligible and actual impressions. And I was glad of the opportunity. Almost it would be like witnessing the rebirth of a human being; certainly it would be witnessing the mental awakening, through physical mediums, of a human soul.

“At first hand I would see what this world, to which you and I are accustomed and of which some of us have grown weary, meant to one who had been so completely, so utterly shut out from that world through all the more impressionable years of his life. Naturally I was enormously interested to hear what he might say, to see what he might do in the hour of his reawakening and re-creation.

“So I went with the surgeon on the day appointed by him for testing the success of his operation. Only five of us were present – the man himself, the surgeon who had cured him, two others and myself. Until that hour and for every hour since he had come out from under the ether, the patient’s eyes had been bandaged to shut out light, and his ears had been muffled to shut out sounds, and he had been fed on liquid mixtures administered artificially.”

“Why?” asked the woman, interrupting for the first time.

For a moment the doctor hesitated. Then he went on smoothly to explain:

“You see, they feared the sudden shock to senses and to organs made sensitive by long disuse until he had completely rallied from the operation. So they had hooded his eyes and his ears.”

“But food – why couldn’t he have eaten solid food before this?” she insisted. “That is what I mean.”

“Oh, that?” he said, and again he halted for an instant. “That was done largely on my account. I think the surgeon wanted the test to be complete at one time and not developed in parts. You understand, don’t you?”

She nodded. And he continued, watching her face intently as he proceeded:

“So, first of all, we led him into a partly darkened room and sat him down at a table; and we gave him food – very simple food – a glass of cold water; a piece of bread, buttered; a baked Irish potato, with butter and salt upon it – that was all. We stood about him watching him as he tasted of the things we put before him – for it was really the first time he had ever properly tasted anything.

“Madam, if I live to be a hundred years old, I shall never forget the look that came into his face then. Even though he lacked the words to express himself, as you and I with our greater vocabularies might conceivably have expressed ourselves had such an experience come to us, I knew that to him the bread was ambrosia and the water was nectar.

“He didn’t wolf the food down as I had rather expected he might. He ate it slowly, extracting the flavour from every crumb of it. And the water he took in sips, allowing it to trickle down his throat, drop by drop almost. And then he spoke to us, touching the bread and the potato and the water glass. Mind you, I am reproducing the sense of what he said rather than his exact words. He said: