Accompanied by young Dr. Strafford, I went to California. My physical
illness had been brief. Dr. Brooke had taken matters in his own hands and
ordered an absolute rest, after dwelling at some length on the vicious
pace set by modern business and the lack of consideration and knowledge
shown by men of affairs for their bodies. There was a limit to the wrack
and strain which the human organism could stand. He must of course have
suspected the presence of disturbing and disintegrating factors, but he
confined himself to telling me that only an exceptional constitution had
saved me from a serious illness; he must in a way have comprehended why I
did not wish to go abroad, and have my family join me on the Riviera, as
Tom Peters proposed. California had been my choice, and Dr. Brooke
recommended the climate of Santa Barbara.
High up on the Montecito hills I found a villa beside the gateway of one
of the deep canons that furrow the mountain side, and day after day I lay
in a chair on the sunny terrace, with a continually recurring amazement
at the brilliancy of my surroundings. In the early morning I looked down
on a feathery mist hiding the world, a mist presently to be shot with
silver and sapphire-blue, dissolved by slow enchantment until there lay
revealed the plain and the shimmering ocean with its distant islands
trembling in the haze. At sunset my eyes sought the mountains, mountains
unreal, like glorified scenery of grand opera, with violet shadows in the
wooded canon clefts, and crags of pink tourmaline and ruby against the
skies. All day long in the tempered heat flowers blazed around me,
insects hummed, lizards darted in and out of the terrace wall, birds
flashed among the checkered shadows of the live oaks. That grove of
gnarled oaks summoned up before me visions of some classic villa poised
above Grecian seas, shining amidst dark foliage, the refuge of forgotten
kings. Below me, on the slope, the spaced orange trees were heavy with
golden fruit.
After a while, as I grew stronger, I was driven down and allowed to walk
on the wide beach that stretched in front of the gay houses facing the
sea. Cormorants dived under the long rollers that came crashing in from
the Pacific; gulls wheeled and screamed in the soft wind; alert little
birds darted here and there with incredible swiftness, leaving tiny
footprints across the ribs and furrows of the wet sand. Far to the
southward a dark barrier of mountains rose out of the sea. Sometimes I
sat with my back against the dunes watching the drag of the outgoing
water rolling the pebbles after it, making a gleaming floor for the light
to dance.
At first I could not bear to recall the events that had preceded and
followed my visit to Krebs that Sunday morning. My illness had begun that
night; on the Monday Tom Peters had come to the Club and insisted upon my
being taken to his house.... When I had recovered sufficiently there had
been rather a pathetic renewal of our friendship. Perry came to see me.
Their attitude was one of apprehension not unmixed with wonder; and
though they, knew of the existence of a mental crisis, suspected, in all
probability, some of the causes of it, they refrained carefully from all
comments, contenting themselves with telling me when I was well enough
that Krebs had died quite suddenly that Sunday afternoon; that his
death--occurring at such a crucial moment--had been sufficient to turn
the tide of the election and make Edgar Greenhalge mayor. Thousands who
had failed to understand Hermann Krebs, but whom he had nevertheless
stirred and troubled, suddenly awoke to the fact that he had had elements
of greatness....
My feelings in those first days at Santa Barbara may be likened, indeed,
to those of a man who has passed through a terrible accident that has
deprived him of sight or hearing, and which he wishes to forget. What I
was most conscious of then was an aching sense of loss--an ache that by
degrees became a throbbing pain as life flowed back into me, re-inflaming
once more my being with protest and passion, arousing me to revolt
against the fate that had overtaken me. I even began at moments to feel a
fierce desire to go back and take up again the fight from which I had
been so strangely removed--removed by the agency of things still obscure.
I might get Nancy yet, beat down her resistance, overcome her, if only I
could be near her and see her. But even in the midst of these surges of
passion I was conscious of the birth of a new force I did not understand,
and which I resented, that had arisen to give battle to my passions and
desires. This struggle was not mentally reflected as a debate between
right and wrong, as to whether I should or should not be justified in
taking Nancy if I could get her: it seemed as though some new and small
yet dogged intruder had forced an entrance into me, an insignificant
pigmy who did not hesitate to bar the pathway of the reviving giant of my
desires. These contests sapped my strength. It seemed as though in my
isolation I loved Nancy, I missed her more than ever, and the flavour she
gave to life.
Then Hermann Krebs began to press himself on me. I use the word as
expressive of those early resentful feelings,--I rather pictured him then
as the personification of an hostile element in the universe that had
brought about my miseries and accomplished my downfall; I attributed the
disagreeable thwarting of my impulses to his agency; I did not wish to
think of him, for he stood somehow for a vague future I feared to
contemplate. Yet the illusion of his presence, once begun, continued to
grow upon me, and I find myself utterly unable to describe that struggle
in which he seemed to be fighting as against myself for my confidence;
that process whereby he gradually grew as real to me as though he still
lived--until I could almost hear his voice and see his smile. At moments
I resisted wildly, as though my survival depended on it; at other moments
he seemed to bring me peace. One day I recalled as vividly as though it
were taking place again that last time I had been with him; I seemed once
more to be listening to the calm yet earnest talk ranging over so many
topics, politics and government, economics and science and religion. I
did not yet grasp the synthesis he had made of them all, but I saw them
now all focussed in him elements he had drawn from human lives and human
experiences. I think it was then I first felt the quickenings of a new
life to be born in travail and pain.... Wearied, yet exalted, I sank down
on a stone bench and gazed out at the little island of Santa Cruz afloat
on the shimmering sea.
I have mentioned my inability to depict the terrible struggle that went
on in my soul. It seems strange that Nietzsche--that most ruthless of
philosophers to the romantic mind!--should express it for me. "The genius
of the heart, from contact with which every man goes away richer, not
'blessed' and overcome,....but richer himself, fresher to himself than
before, opened up, breathed upon and sounded by a thawing wind; more
uncertain, perhaps, more delicate, more bruised; but full of hopes which
as yet lack names, full of a new will and striving, full of a new
unwillingness and counterstriving."....
Such was my experience with Hermann Krebs. How keenly I remember that new
unwillingness and counter-striving! In spite of the years it has not
wholly died down, even to-day....
Almost coincident with these quickenings of which I have spoken was the
consciousness of a hunger stronger than the craving for bread and meat,
and I began to meditate on my ignorance, on the utter inadequacy and
insufficiency of my early education, on my neglect of the new learning
during the years that had passed since I left Harvard. And I remembered
Krebs's words--that we must "reeducate ourselves." What did I know? A
system of law, inherited from another social order, that was utterly
unable to cope with the complexities and miseries and injustices of a
modern industrial world. I had spent my days in mastering an inadequate
and archaic code--why? in order that I might learn how to evade it? This
in itself condemned it. What did I know of life? of the shining universe
that surrounded me? What did I know of the insect and the flower, of the
laws that moved the planets and made incandescent the suns? of the human
body, of the human soul and its instincts? Was this knowledge acquired at
such cost of labour and life and love by my fellow-men of so little worth
to me that I could ignore it? declare that it had no significance for me?
no bearing on my life and conduct? If I were to rise and go forward--and
I now felt something like a continued impulse, in spite of relaxations
and revolts--I must master this knowledge, it must be my guide, form the
basis of my creed. I--who never had had a creed, never felt the need of
one! For lack of one I had been rudely jolted out of the frail shell I
had thought so secure, and stood, as it were, naked and shivering to the
storms, staring at a world that was no function of me, after all. My
problem, indeed, was how to become a function of it....
I resolved upon a course of reading, but it was a question what books to
get. Krebs could have told me, if he had lived. I even thought once of
writing Perry Blackwood to ask him to make a list of the volumes in
Krebs's little library; but I was ashamed to do this.
Dr. Strafford still remained with me. Not many years out of the medical
school, he had inspired me with a liking for him and a respect for his
profession, and when he informed me one day that he could no longer
conscientiously accept the sum I was paying him, I begged him to stay on.
He was a big and wholesome young man, companionable, yet quiet and
unobtrusive, watchful without appearing to be so, with the innate as well
as the cultivated knowledge of psychology characteristic of the best
modern physicians. When I grew better I came to feel that he had given
his whole mind to the study of my case, though he never betrayed it in
his conversation.
"Strafford," I said to him one morning with such an air of unconcern as I
could muster, "I've an idea I'd like to read a little science. Could you
recommend a work on biology?"