Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Those Times and These

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:

“‘What is this – and this – and this? What are these delicious things you have given me to eat? And what is this exquisite drink I have swallowed?’

“We told him and he seemed not to believe it at first. He said:

“‘Why, I have handled such things as these often. I have taken them up in my hands a thousand times and I have swallowed them. I should have known what they were by the touch of my fingers – but the taste of them deceived me. Can it be possible that these things are common things – that even poor people can feast upon such meals as this which I am eating? Can it even be possible that there is food within the reach of ordinary mortals which has a finer zest than this?’

“And when his friend, the surgeon, told him ‘Yes’ – told him ‘Yes’ many times and in many ways – still he seemed loath to believe it. When he had finished, to the last scrap of the potato skin and the last morsel of the bread crust and the last drop in the glass, he bowed his head and outspread his hands before him as though returning thanks for a glorious benefaction.

“Perhaps I should have told you that this took place late in the afternoon. We waited a little while after that, and then just before sunset we took him outdoors into a little shabby garden on the asylum grounds; and we freed his eyes and we unmuffled his ears. And then we drew back from him a distance and watched him to see what he would do.

“For a little while he did nothing except stand in his tracks, transfixed and transfigured. He saw the sky and the sunlight and the earth and the grass and the shadows upon the earth and the trees and the flowers that were about him – saw them literally in a celestial vision; and he smelled the good wholesome smells of the earth, and the scents of the struggling, straggling flowers in the ill-kept flower beds, and the scents of the green things growing there too.

“And just then, as though it had known and had been inspired to choose this instant for bringing to him yet another sensation, a thrush – a common brown thrush – began singing in an elm tree almost directly above him. Of course it was merely a coincidence that a thrush should begin singing then and there. Thrushes are plentiful enough about the country in this climate at this season of the year. Central Park is full of them, sometimes. Most of us scarcely notice them, or their singing either. But, you see, with this man it was different. He literally was undergoing re-creation, re-incarnation, resurrection. Call it what you please. It was one of those three things. In a way of speaking it was all three of them.

“At the first note of music from the bird he gave a quick start, and then he threw back his head and uplifted his face; and quite near at hand he saw the little rusty-coloured chap, singing away there, with its speckled throat feathers rising and falling, and he heard the sounds that poured from the thrush’s open beak. And as he looked and listened he put his hands to his breast as though something were hurting him there. He didn’t move until the bird had fluttered away. Nor did we move either.

“Then he turned and came stumbling and reeling toward us, literally drunk with joy. His intoxication of ecstasy thickened his tongue and choked him until he, at first, could not speak to us. After a bit, though, the words came outpouring from his lips.

“‘Did you hear that?’ he cried out. ‘Did you hear it? Do you smell the earth and the flowers? And the sky – I have seen it! I can see it now. Oh, hasn’t God been good to us to give us all this? Oh, hasn’t He been good to me?’

“In an outburst of gratitude he seized the hand of my friend and kissed it again and again. I had meant to take notes of his behaviour as we went along, but I took none. I knew that afterward I could reproduce from memory all that transpired.

“Presently he was calmer, and the surgeon said to him:

“‘My son, there is something yet to be seen – something that you, having so many other things to see, have overlooked. Look yonder!’ And he pointed to the West, where the sun was just going down.

“And, at that, the other man faced about and looked full into his first sunset. Instantly his whole mood changed. It became rapt, reverential – you might say worshipful. His lips moved, but no words came from them at first, and he made as though to shut out the sight with his hands, as though the beauty of the vision was too great for him to endure. I went to him and put my hand on his shoulder. He was quivering from head to foot in an ague of sheer happiness. He seemed hardly to know I was there. He did not look toward me. He kept his eyes fixed upon the West as if he were greedy to miss nothing of the spectacle.

“Until now the sunset had seemed to me less beautiful by far than many another summer sunset I had seen, for the sky was rather overcast and the colours not particularly vivid; but, standing there beside him, in physical contact with him, I caught from him something of what he felt, and I saw that glow in the west as some-thing of indescribable grandeur and unutterable splendour, a miracle too glorious for words to describe or painters to reproduce upon squares of canvas.

“Presently he spoke to me, still without turning his head in my direction.

“‘How often does this – this – come to pass?’ he asked, panting the words out.

“‘Many times a year,’ I told him. ‘At this season nearly every evening.’

“‘And is it ever so beautiful as this?’ he said.

“‘Often more beautiful,’ I said. ‘Often the colours are richer and deeper.’

“‘Why are there not more of us here to look upon it?’ he asked. ‘Surely at this hour all mankind must cease from its tasks – from whatever it is doing – to see this miracle – this free gift of the Creator!’

“I tried to tell him that mankind had grown accustomed to the daily repetition of the sunset, but he seemed unable to comprehend. As the last flattened ray of sunshine faded upon the grass, and the afterglow began to spread across the heavens, I thought he was about to faint; and I put both my arms round him to steady him. But he did not faint, though he trembled all over and took his breath into his lungs in great sobbing gulps. I showed him the evening star where it shone in the sky, and he watched it brighten, saying nothing at all.

“Suddenly he turned to me and said:

“‘At last I have lived, and I have found that life is sweet. Life is sweeter than I ever dared to hope it might be.’

“Then he said:

“‘I have a home. Will you show me where it is? While I was blind I could feel my way to it; but, now that I can see, I feel lost – all things are so changed to me. Please lead me there – I want to see with my own eyes what a home is like.’

“So I took his hand in mine and we went toward it, and the three others who were there followed after us.

“Madam, his home – the only home he had, for so far as we knew, he had no living kinspeople – was a room in that big barn of an asylum. I led him to the door of it. It was a barren enough room – you know how these institutions are apt to be furnished, and this room was no exception to the rule. Bare walls, a bare floor, bare uncurtained windows, a bed, a chair or two, a bare table – a sort of hygienic and sanitary brutality governed all its appointments.

“I imagine the lowest servant in your employ has a more attractively furnished room than this was. Now, though, it was flooded with the afterglow, which poured in at the windows; that soft light alone redeemed its hideousness of outline and its poverty of furnishings.

“He halted at the threshold. We know what home means to most of us. How much must it have meant, then, to him! He could see the walls closing round to encompass him in their friendly companionship; he could see the roof coming down to protect him.

“‘Home!’ he said to himself in a half whisper, under his breath. ‘What a beautiful word home is! And what a beautiful place my home is!’

“Nobody gave the signal, none of us made the suggestion by word or gesture; but with one accord we four, governed by the same impulse, left him and went away. We felt in an inarticulate way that he was entitled to be alone; that no curious eye had any right to study his emotions in this supreme moment.

“In an hour we went back. He was lying where he had fallen – across the threshold of his room. On his face was a beatific peace, a content unutterable – and he was dead. Joy I think had burst his heart. That bit of plaster you hold in your hand is his death mask.”

The doctor finished his tale. He bent forward in his chair to see the look upon his caller’s face. She stood up; and she was a creature transformed and radiant!

“Doctor,” she said – and even her voice was altered – “I am going home – home to my husband and my children and my friends. I believe I have found a cure for my – my trouble. Rather, you have found it for me here to-day. You have taught me a lesson. You have made me see things I could not see before – hear things I could not hear before. For I have been blind and deaf, as blind and as deaf as this man was – yes, blinder than he ever was. But now” – she cried out the words in a burst of revelation – “but now – why, doctor, I have everything to live for – haven’t I?”

“Yes, madam,” he said gravely; “you have everything to live for. If only we knew it, if only we could realise it, all of us in this world have everything to live for.”

She nodded, smiling across the table at him. “Doctor,” she said, “I do not believe I shall ever come back here to see you – as a patient of yours.”

“No,” he affirmed; “I do not believe you will ever come back – as a patient of mine.”

“But, if I may, I should like to come sometimes, just to look at that face – that dead face with its living message for me.”

“Madam,” he told her, “you may have it on two conditions – namely, that you keep it in your own room, and that you do not tell its story – the story I have just told you – to any other person. I have reasons of my own for making those conditions.”

“In my own room is exactly where I would keep it,” she said. “I promise to do as you ask. I shall never part with it. But how can you part with it?”

“Oh, I think I know where I can get another copy,” he said, “The original mould has not been destroyed. I am sure my – my friend – has it. This one will be delivered at your home before night. My servant shall take it to you.”

“No,” she said. “If you do not mind, I shall take it with me now – in my own hands.”