"Do you want me to write some letters to your relatives?"
"No. I haven't any near kin."
"Well. Haven't you some friends to write to?"
In the three years I had lived at Mr. Perry's I had severed all social
connections. I had not kept up my college friendships. Benson had been
so opposed to my leaving what he called active life that I had lost all
touch with him. My only relations with people had been technical, by
correspondence. I did not want to trouble even Prof. Meer with my
purely personal misfortunes. This seemed utterly impious to Miss
Barton. What? I had lived several years in the city and had no friends?
It was unbelievable! Unfortunately it was true. I could think of no
one to ask in to relieve my loneliness. And there is no loneliness like
the darkness.
The next week was the worst, for the nurses changed and Miss Wright, who
was on day duty, was not companionable. However, Miss Barton, taking
compassion on me, used often to sit with me by the hour at night. How
fragmentary was my contact with her! No one who has not been deprived
of sight can realize how large a part it plays in the relationships of
life. I could only hear. There was always the creak of the rocking
chair beside my bed and her voice, sometimes placid, sometimes tense,
swinging back and forth in the darkness. It did not seem to have any
body to it. Whenever her hands touched me, it startled me.
But from her talk I learned something of the person who owned the voice.
She had been born in a Vermont village, where no one had ever heard of a
professional woman, but as far back as she could remember, she had set
her heart on medicine. Her father she had never known. Her mother, a
fine needlewoman and embroidery designer had brought up the children. A
brother was an engineer and the older sister a school teacher. But
there had not been enough money to send Ann to medical college. Nursing
was as near as she had been able to get towards her ambition. But what
could not be given her she intended to win for herself. She had taken
this position because the night duty was very light and every other week
she could give almost the entire day to study. Her interest had turned
to the new science of bacteriology. Her vague ambition to be a doctor
had changed to the definite ideal of research work.
Somehow the voice, so calmly certain when it dealt of this, gave me an
impression of integrity of purpose, of invincible determination, such as
sight has never given me of anyone. I did not, any more than she, know
how she was to get her research laboratory. But I could not doubt that
she would. She had unquestioning faith in her destiny. I find myself
emphasizing this phase of her. It impressed me most at the time.
But her conversation was by no means limited to her ambition. She had
read a thousand things besides her medicine, and spoke of them more
frequently. She was constantly referring to books, to facts of history
and science, of which I was ignorant. She talked seriously of ethics
and the deeper things of life. It woke again in me all the old
questionings and aspirations of prep. school days--the things I had
hidden away from in my book-filled library. She was the first person I
had met since the doctor at school who showed me what she thought of
these things. Benson had talked copiously about the objective side of
life, but he had never referred to his inner life. The people I had
known wanted to make this world a prayer meeting, a counting house or a
playground. Ann was no more interested in such ideals than I was.
She used a phraseology which was new to me: "Individualism,"
"self-expression," "expansion of personality." She spoke of life as a
crusade against the tyrannies of prejudice and conventions. Her
viewpoint was biologic. All evolutionary progress was based on
variations from the type. Efforts to sustain or conserve the type she
called "reactionary" and "invasive." She insisted on the desirability
of "absolute freedom to vary from the norm." The authority she quoted
with greatest reverence was Spencer. This conversation, much of which I
did not understand, showed me clearly one thing--a soul seeking
passionately for truth. That she told me was her ideal as it had been
the war-cry of Bakounine. "_Je suis un chercheur passionne de la
Verite_."
When any reference was made to my manner of life, she flared up. It
was--and this was her worst denunciation--unnatural.
"I believe in individualism, egoism," she said. "But not in isolation.
Man is naturally as gregarious as the ant. An ant that lived alone
would be a non-ant. You've been a non-man. It's good your eyes went
back on you--if it teaches you sense. Intercourse with one's kind is a
necessary food of human life."
And while it was a God-send for me to find someone to talk to, it must
have been also a pleasure for her. The stories she told me about the
other patients showed that their relations to nurses were barren
enough--when not actually insulting. After listening by the hour to
Mrs. Stickney's endless little troubles, it was a relief for her, I
think, to come to my room and talk of the things which interested her
violently. She gave more and more time to me. During the third week,
when she was again on day duty, she read me Lecky's "History of European
Morals."
*III*
It is hard to write about the next week. I can no longer see it as it
must have looked in those days. I cannot tell the "why" of it. It was.
There was immense loneliness--and fear. The few hundred dollars I had
saved for studying in Oxford would pay the doctor's bill and keep me for
some months. But what was there beyond, if my eyes did not come back?
At best the chances were only even. In any case the one trade I knew
was gone. A bookworm with weak eyes is a sorry thing. Of course I
might have gone home. But I have never had much respect for the
Prodigal Son. He must have been a poor spirited chap.
Well, in my utmost misery, Ann comforted me--as women have comforted men
since the world began. In some inexplicable way, for some inexplicable
causes, she loved me.
I try to arrange my memories of those days in orderly sequence. But it
is all a blur. Day by day my need grew and day by day she met the need.
The patients in that hospital did not require much attention, except in
the day. Most of them slept well. They rarely rang for her after
midnight. She gave me more and more of her time.
The stress between us grew rapidly, but by gradual steps, almost
imperceptibly. Her hand rested in mine a trifle longer. The hand clasp
became a caress--then a kiss. The kiss lingered....
So the voice took on a body. Touch came to the aid of hearing as a
means of contact with this dear person of the darkness. It is strange
in what a fragmentary way she took shape in my consciousness as
something more than a paid nurse, more close and intimate than any
friend I had known in the light.
In the darkness every other thing seemed strange. What I discovered by
touch to be a table, did not fit into the old category of "tables."
Even the pipe which I had smoked since college seemed to have undergone
some fundamental change in its nature. Ann was the only thing which
seemed natural. I had had no intimacy with woman of the light by which
I could judge this experience. Coming to me as it did, it did not seem
strange--it made subsequent things seem strange. When at last my eyes
were opened, I blushed before Ann as before a stranger.
It all seemed so inevitable.
"It's late," she said one night, "I must go. If you want me, ring."
"Of course I want you."
"But you ought to sleep. I mean, ring if anything happens."
"It don't matter whether anything happens or not. I----"
"Don't ring unless you need me."
The door closed behind her. I lay there debating with myself whether or
not I needed her. The bell was in reach of my hand. I got out of bed
to be further from temptation. With awkward trembling hands, I filled
and lit my pipe and sat down by the open window. My head ached with
loneliness and desolation. Off somewhere in the night a church bell
struck two, some belated footsteps rang sharp and clear on the sidewalk
below me. I tried to interest myself in speculating whither or to whom
the person was hurrying. But my thoughts swung back to my own
loneliness. In all the world there was no one who knew of my blindness
and cared except the tin-can merchant who was cursing that he must have
the trouble to find someone to finish my work. No. There was Ann.
Quite suddenly a vision of my childhood came back to me, of the time I
had been sick at Mary Dutton's, when she had taken me into the warm
comfort of her bed. The vision brought quick resolution. I rang the
bell. I stood up against the wall and waited--breathless. The door
opened and from the darkness came her voice.
"Do you really want me?"
I do not think I spoke, but I remember reaching out my hands to her. My
strained ears caught a faint rustle--then came touch--and my arms were
about her.
So I was comforted.
*IV*
For the night there was rich forgetfulness. But the new day called me
back from the Elysian Fields to the cold reality of this ordinary world
of ours.
My familiarity with the frank openness of my good friend Chaucer and the
early English writers had cleansed my mind of much nastiness. I never
had any feeling of Biblical sin in regard to my sudden passion for Ann.
It was too entirely sweet and natural to be anything so wrong. But
conflicting with this early Renaissance attitude was a modern sense of
personal responsibility. The implications of the thing troubled me
desperately.
As I sat there in the darkness, thinking it out--with now and then Miss
Wright coming in on the routine business of the day--I realized for the
first time the difference between love and passion. There was no doubt
that Ann loved me. But I did not love her.
She was as far removed from cheap sentimentality as any woman I have
known. She was strangely unromantic. There was an impressive
definiteness about everything she did. I knew from the first that the
love she gave me was for always. It was to be the big human factor of
her life, but it was not to be mutual. In my misery I wanted her
comfort, in my loneliness I had need of her affection. I had grown
greatly fond of her, dependent on her, but I knew from the first that
she was not to be the center of my life.
Nevertheless my course seemed very clear. "The Woman Who Did" had not
been written in those days. The idea, now so commonly expressed in
literature, that sex life outside of marriage might be beautiful and
dignified, was not familiar. Although I had no longing for a perpetual
mating, no desire to marry her, my conscience told me very clearly that
I ought to. I did not think that I could, with anything like decency, do
less.
Since Margot had receded, I had not been given to romantic dreams. I
was not counting on the grand passion, as a necessary part of life, so
there was no especial self-sacrifice in closing the door on that
possibility by marrying a woman I did not wholly love. Yet, threatened
with blindness without money or a trade, what had I to offer her? The
more I thought of these things the more humble I became. However her
"fair name" seemed more important to me than any of these
considerations. It was regrettable that I could not assure her ease and
comfort. It was regrettable that I could not give her the love which
should be the kernel of marriage, but all this seemed no reason not to
offer her the husk.
When at last Ann came, she laughed at me. What? Get married? Nothing
was further from her mind. She had her own work mapped out for her. Set
up a home? Why as soon as she had saved a hundred and fifty dollars
more she was going to Paris to study with Pasteur. People might laugh
at his germs and cultures and serums. Let them laugh! The future was
to bacteriology. Marry? Of course she loved me, but where did I get
those two ideas mixed up?
She gave me a lecture on free love. It is hard to write about a theory
to which I am so strongly opposed. Yet Ann's attitude in this matter is
an integral part of my story.
The longer I live the more remarkable it seems to me, how limited is the
field in which any of us does original thinking. One of my friends is
an exceedingly able physician. Within his specialty he has been
startlingly radical. His cures, however, are so amazing that his
colleagues are accepting his methods. But in all other departments of
thought he is hopelessly conservative. Another acquaintance, a painter,
is a daring innovator in his use of colors, but has unquestioningly
accepted all those beliefs which Max Nordau has called "The Conventional
Lies of our Civilization." To one subject we seem to give all our
mental energy, all our powers of original thinking, in other matters we
believe what we are taught. It was so with Ann. Her specialty was
bacteriology, her ideas on marriage she had inherited.
Her mother, whom I afterwards came to know and respect, was a remarkable
woman. Mr. Barton, after a fairly upright younger life, had deserted
her at thirty-five. Although neither Ann nor Mrs. Barton, ever spoke
much of him, I learned that he had died, a hopeless drunkard. At first
the mother had supported the children by nursing and sewing among the
families of her Vermont neighbors. And everywhere, once she had entered
the privacy of a household, she found the same repellent pretense, a
carefully preserved outward show of harmony and affection, an inside
reality of petty quarrels and discord. Often she found situations of
more abhorrent tragedy, jealousy, hatred and strange passions, women
heartbroken for lack of love, bodily broken from an excess of
child-bearing. From considering her own misfortunes a horrible
exception, she came to believe such sorrows were pitifully common. And
everywhere women seemed to be the victims. However unhappy a man's
married life might be, he found release in his work. To the woman, home
was everything, if it went wrong, all life was awry.
By chance apparently, but I suppose inevitably, she had come in contact
with some of the leaders of the early "Woman's Rights Movement." She
corresponded with them ardently and at length came west to Cincinnati,
having decided that she needed education. She supported herself and her
children by needle-work and spent half the nights, after they were abed,
over schoolbooks. She had to begin at the beginning. By herself, in
her garret, she followed the grammar school course, crowding the work
which takes a child two or three years, into the half nights of one.
Gradually she worked her way up to the position of forewoman in a large
embroidery establishment and so was able to send her children through
high school, the older ones to college. But her health had given out
before Ann's turn came.
Her interest in the Woman's Movement had brought her into touch with all
sorts of radicals and shortly after her arrival in Cincinnati she had
met Herr Grun, a German Anarchist refugee. The friendship had grown
into a beautiful love relationship which had lasted until his death.
Ann had accepted all the libertarian dogmas of her foster father. It
seemed very wonderful to me to hear her speak about her "home." It was
a barren enough word to me. But to her it meant a wealth of affection,
a place of sure sympathy. I listened with sad and bitter envy to her
stories of childhood. The loving kindness, the happy harmony which she
had known at home, she had been taught to believe resulted from the free
relationship between her mother and her lover. Ann had grown up in an
atmosphere where free love was the conventional thing.
Persecution is the surest way of convincing a heretic that he is right.
I have known a good many Anarchists and the most striking thing about
them is their community interest. Whether or not they are seriously
offensive towards society, they are all in a close defensive alliance
against it. The hostility they meet on every hand forces them to
associate with their own kind. Ann had grown up among the children of
comrades.
To them love is an entirely personal, individual matter. The
interference of the Church or State they regard as impertinent and
indecent. They take this whole business of sex more seriously, and in
some respects more sanely, than most of us. Their households, as far as
I have seen them, are very little different, no better nor worse than
the average home. Their advantage lies in the fact that most Anarchists
are of kindly nature and that they are seldom cursed with money grubbing
materialism. But this is a difference in the people, not in their
institutions.
Marriage, for Ann, would have been a repudiation of her up-bringing and
the people she loved, comparable to that of a daughter of a Baptist
minister who became a Catholic nun or the third wife of a Mormon Elder.
But Protestant women sometimes do marry Mormons or take the veil. And
Anarchists are no wiser in bending the twig so it will stay bent than
Baptists. If Ann had been this type of a woman, she might have kicked
over the traces, and have left her people to marry me, as carefully
reared daughters have done in similar crises since the world was young.
But she had a very definite theory that love should not be allowed to
interfere with life. Each of us, she held, has been given a distinct
personality, a special job to do in the world, and the development of
this personality, the performance of this individual task, is the great
aim of life. Love should not distract one from the race to the
appointed goal. Love is an adornment of life. She spoke with biting
scorn of a man she knew who "wore too many rings on his fingers." His
taste was bad, he tried to over-decorate his life and so missed the
reality of life. The goal she had set before her was bacteriology and
she had not the faintest doubt that she had chosen it rightly. This was
to be her life. If the fates granted her such joys as she called her
love for me, it was something to be thankful for. But it must be
subservient to--never allowed to interfere with--her career.
Certainly this is not the ordinary attitude of women towards love. But
Ann was an exceptional woman, one of those unaccountable exceptions,
which we label with the vague word "Genius."
A few months ago I picked up an illustrated French paper and opening it
at random came upon a page containing photographs of half a dozen
celebrated women. Ann's face was among them. There was an article by
an eminent psychologist on "Women of Genius." His conclusions did not
especially interest me, but I had never before seen so concise a
statement of Ann's accomplishments, the learned societies to which she
belongs, the scientific reviews she helps to edit, the brochures she has
written, the noted discoveries she had made. It startled me to see on
half a page so impressive a record of achievement.
It helps me now to a better understanding of the young woman, who
puzzled me sorely twenty odd years ago. In those days I saw no special
promise of distinction. I smile with a wry twist to my mouth when I
recall my presumption in thinking that it was necessary for her to hide
herself under the shadow of my name. I suppose that if she had consented
to marry me, we would have somehow found a way to gain a livelihood. In
my crippled condition I could not have done much--I have no knack for
money making. The burden of supporting the home would have fallen
considerably on her. Perhaps it would have been "better" for both of
us, if her strange upbringing had not made marriage distasteful to her.
She and I might possibly have been "happier" if she had not been filled
by the consuming ambition which drove her to put love in a lesser place.
Perhaps. But the race would have been poorer, would have lost her very
real contributions to the elimination of disease.
I could not argue with her then about these things. My knowledge was so
much less than hers. But although it was a relief to find that she
would not marry me, there was still a feeling of deep injustice. There
seemed a despicable cheat in taking from her so much more than I could
give. It seemed ultimately unfair to accept a love I could not wholly
return. But she brushed aside any efforts to explain. She ran to her
room, and bringing a copy of the Rubaiyat, preached me quite a sermon on
the quatrain about Omar's astronomy, how he had revised the calendar,
struck off dead yesterday and the unborn tomorrow. Love, she said, was
subjective, its joy came from loving, rather than from being loved.
Then suddenly she became timorous. Perhaps she was being "invasive,"
perhaps I did not want her to love me....
My scruples went by the board with a rush. I surely did want her. And
I was able to convince her of it.
*V*
Our relations having been for the time determined, Ann set about to
reform me. She was really horrified at the isolated life I had been
leading. That I took little interest in humanity, none at all in public
life and only by chance knew who was mayor of the city, shocked her.
Every evening, after her other patients had been settled for the night,
she brought me the papers. There was no love-making--only one
kiss--until she had read to me for half an hour. It bored me to
extinction, but she insisted that it was good for me. I had to listen,
because each evening she examined me on what she had read the night
before. So I acquired a certain amount of unrelated information about
millionaire divorces, murders and municipal politics.
Her next step was to make me associate with the other patients.
"Bored?" she scolded. "It's a sin to be bored. They're people--human
beings--just as good as you are. You're not interested in Mrs.
Stickney's husband? You're not interested in Mr. Blake's business
worries? Those are the two great facts of life. The woman half of the
world is thinking about men. The man half is thinking about business.
They are the two things which are really most interesting."
She took my reformation so much to heart that I began to be interested
in it myself. I familiarized myself with all the symptoms of a
husband's dyspepsia. Mrs. Stickney's eye trouble seemed to have been
caused by a too close application to cook books--in search for a dish
her husband could digest. From Mr. Blake's peevish discourse I got a
new insight into business and the big and little dishonesties which go
to make it up. I sometimes wonder if he really was robbed during his
illness as much as he expected to be. He was convinced that his chief
competitor would buy his trade secrets from his head book-keeper. He
did not seem angry at his rival nor at his employee for seizing this
opportunity to cheat him, but at the fates which, by his sickness,
offered them so great a temptation. He complained bitterly because no
such lucky chances had ever come to him.
But it was through the newspapers that I gained most.
"Want to hear about a millionaire socialist, who says that all judges
and policemen ought to serve a year in jail before being eligible for
office?"
"It sounds more hopeful than campaign speeches," I said submissively.
It was Norman Benson. I recognized his quaint way of expressing things,
before she came to his name.
"I know him," I laughed.