It was, perhaps, the undigested horror of those days, as also their
unsatisfied yearnings after beauty, that tried to find expression
fifteen years later in writing. Once they were over I hid them away,
those dreadful weeks, trying to forget them. But nothing is ever
forgotten, nor is anything finally suppressed in the sense that it
is done with. Expression, sooner or later, in one form or another,
inevitably crops up.
“Writing,” declared the old doctor, after a talk about De Quincey, “is
functional.” He had many pet theories or hobbies on which he loved to
expatiate. “Writing is as much a function of the system as breathing
or excretion. What the body takes in and cannot use, it discards.
What the mind takes in and cannot use, it, similarly, excretes. A
sensitive, impressionable mind receives an incessant bombardment, often
an intense, terrific bombardment of impressions. Two-thirds of such
impressions are never digested, much less used. The artist-temperament
whose sensitiveness accumulates a vast store, uses them; the real
artist, of course, shapes them at the same time. The ordinary man, the
_Dutzend Mensch_, made in bundles by the dozen, gets few impressions,
and needs, naturally, no outlet.... Writing is purely functional....”
It was one of his numerous pet theories.
I went to his house now every night; he gave me his professional care,
he gave me sympathy, he gave me food. Pathetic, wonderful old German!
His tenderness was a woman’s, his temper a demon’s. I felt a giant in
him somewhere. At close daily quarters his alternate moods perplexed me
utterly. He had an Irish wife, a kind, motherly, but quite uneducated
woman of about forty-five, and a little girl of eight or nine, whose
white face looked as old as her mother’s, and whose diminutive figure
seemed to me unusual somewhere. Was it not stunted? Her intelligence,
her odd ways, her brilliant eyes captivated me. She called me “Uncle
Diedel.” She talked, like her mother, broken German. Supper, an
extremely simple meal, but a feast to me, was always in the basement
kitchen.
The tiny wooden house, owning something akin to squatter’s rights
which prevented its demolition, stood in the next block to my own,
hemmed in by “brownstone fronts,” but with a miniature garden. New
York, that burns anthracite coal, has no blacks and smuts; the trees
and shrubs were really green; the earth smelt sweet. The little house,
standing back from the road, was a paradise to me. Its one ground-floor
apartment was divided by folding doors into consulting- and
waiting-rooms. But no patients came, or came so rarely that it was an
event when the door-bell rang. The doctor had the greatest difficulty
in keeping himself and family alive. At supper I used to eat as little
as possible. He seemed a competent physician. I wondered greatly. As
well as real human kindness, there was courage in that little building;
there was also a great tragedy I sensed long before I discovered its
solution. The strange innocence and ignorance of my up-bringing still
clung to me.
The establishment, the poverty, the alternating moods, as I said,
puzzled me; I was aware of a whole life hidden away from my
observation. They were so poor that dinner was the meal of a workman,
they could not even keep a servant. There were worrying debts as well.
Often the doctor was so bearish and irritable that I dared not say a
word, his wife got curses and abuse, he would almost kick the child,
finding fault with such sneers and rudeness that I vowed to myself I
would never eat his food again. Then, after a momentary absence in his
workshop upstairs, where he kept a lathe and made beautiful chessmen,
he would come slowly stumbling down again, and the door would open to a
wholly different being. Bent, as always, but well poised and vigorous,
with bright smiling eyes, benevolent yet rugged face, every gesture
full of gentle kindness, he would pat his old wife on the shoulder and
take the child upon his knee, and beg me to play the fiddle to him or
to draw my chair up for an intimate talk. He would light his great
meerschaum pipe and beam upon the world through the blue smoke like
some old jolly idol. The change seemed miraculous.
His talk seemed, at the time, wonderful to me. He would discourse
on Kant, Novalis, Heine, on music, science, astronomy--“when your
troubles seem at their worst,” he would say, “look up at the stars
for half an hour, _with imagination_, and you’ll see your troubles
in a new perspective”--on religion, literature and life, on anything
and everything, while downstairs his kindly old wife prepared the
Frankfurters and sauerkraut and coffee.
Neither mother nor child, I noticed, paid much attention to his
attacks. The little girl, who called her father “Otto,” sat up with
us night after night till two in the morning, and hated going to bed.
She listened spellbound to the stream of talk. I still see the dingy,
lamp-lit room in the heart of the roaring city, the white-haired old
doctor, pipe in mouth, the operating chair in the middle of the floor,
the little pale-faced child with her odd expression of maturity as she
looked from him to me, then led me by the hand to our late meal in the
gloomy basement. I often waited achingly for that meal, having eaten
nothing since breakfast. Would he never stop talking...?
We talked of Boyde--his face. The doctor’s reading of Boyde’s face was
that it was a bad, deceitful, clever face, evil, brutal and cruel. I
mentioned the man’s various acts of kindness. “Bait,” he exclaimed,
with a scornful snort, “mere bait! He wanted a free lodging. He had
plenty of money all along, but the free bed gave him more--to spend on
himself while you starved.”
He talked on about faces.... Handsome ones he either disliked or
distrusted, handsome features like Boyde’s were too often a cloak that
helped to hide and deceive. Behind such faces, as a rule, lay either
badness or vacuity; good looks were the most misleading thing in the
world. Expression rarely accompanied good looks, good features. He was
off on a pet hobby, he waxed eloquent. Beautiful women--he spoke of
good features chiefly--were almost invariably wicked, or else empty. Of
“Society Beauties” he was particularly contemptuous. “Regular features,
fine eyes, perfect skin, but no expression--no soul within. The
deer-like eyes, the calm, proud loveliness people rave about is mere
vacancy. Pfui!”
His habit of staring into the mirror came back to me, and I ventured a
question. He hesitated a moment, then got up and led me to the glass,
where, without a word, he began to gaze at his own reflection, making
the familiar grimaces, smiling, screwing up his eyes, stretching his
lips, raising his eyebrows, pulling his moustache about until, at last,
I burst into laughter I could control no longer.
He turned in astonishment. He examined my own face closely for some
time. “You are too young still,” he said. “You have no lines. In my
face, you see, lies all my past, layer below layer, skin behind skin,
my face of middle age, of early manhood, of youth, of childhood. It
carries me right back.”
He began showing me again, pointing to his reflection as he did so.
“That’s middle age ... that’s youth.... Ach! and there’s the boy’s
face, look!”
I did not dare to look, for explosions of laughter were in my throat,
and I should have hurt his feelings dreadfully. I understood what he
meant, however.
“With the face of each period,” he explained, “rise the memories,
feelings and emotions of that particular period, its point of view, its
fears, ambitions--_hopes_. I live again momentarily in it. I am a young
man again, a boy, a child. I am, at any rate, no longer myself--_as
I now am_.” The way he spoke these four words was very grave and
sad. “Now,” he went on with a sigh, “you understand the charm of the
mirror. It means escape from self. This is the ultimate teaching of
all religion--to escape from Self.” He chuckled. “The mirror is my
Religion.”
During this odd little scene I felt closer to his secret than ever
before. There was something fine and lovely in him, something big,
but it lay in ruins. Had my attitude been a little different, had I
not laughed for instance, I think he would have taken me into his
confidence there and then. But the opportunity was lost this time.
He asked, instead, for music, old, simple German songs being what he
liked most. He would lean back in his big chair, puff his great pipe,
close his eyes, and hum the melodies softly to himself while I played.
It was easy to vamp a sort of accompaniment with double stopping.
He dreamed of old days, I suppose; it was a variant of the mirror
game. Tschaikowsky, Meyer-Helmund, Massenet he also liked, but it was
Schubert, Schumann, even Mendelssohn he always hummed to. Of “_Ich
grolle-nicht, auch wenn das Herz mir bricht_,” he never tired. The
little child would dart up from the basement at the first sound of the
fiddle, show her old, white face at the door, then creep in, sit in a
corner, and never take her eyes from “the orchestra.” When it stopped
playing, she was off again in a second.
One item, while speaking of the music, stands out--chanting to the
fiddle a certain passage from De Quincey. The “Confessions” fascinated
him; the description of the privations in London, the scenes with
Anne when she first brought him out of her scanty money the reviving
glass of port, her abrupt disappearance finally and his pathetic
faithful search, the lonely hours in the empty house in Greek Street,
but particularly his prolonged fight against the drug. It was the
Invocation to Opium, a passage of haunting beauty, however, he loved
so much that he chanted it over and over to himself. The first time he
did this I invented a soft running accompaniment on the lower strings,
using double stopping. The mute was on. My voice added the bass. It
was a curious composition of which he never tired; it moved him very
deeply; I have even seen tears trickling down his cheeks when it was
over. He always left his chair for this performance, walking slowly to
and fro while he chanted the rhythmical, sonorous sentences:
“O just, subtle and mighty opium! that, to the hearts of rich and
poor alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for the pangs
of grief that tempt the spirit to rebel, bringest an assuaging
balm;--eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away
the purposes of wrath.... Thou buildest upon the bosom of darkness,
out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples,
beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles, beyond the splendours
of Babylon and Hekatompylos; ... and hast the keys of Paradise, O
just, subtle and mighty opium...!”
“_Ach! wie prachtvoll!_” he would cry a moment later, “_wie
wunderschoen!_” and then would recite a translation he had made into
his own tongue, and a very fine one too. Quite delighted, he would
repeat the passage over and over again, pausing to compare the two
versions, fixing me with his big eyes in order to increase his own
pleasure in the music by witnessing the evidence of my own.
Truly he was a Jekyll and Hyde.
It was only during the Jekyll mood this kind of scene took place; in
the Jekyll happy humour, too, that I had told him about my strange
up-bringing. “Now I understand better,” he said, “why you are still so
young and know so little of life, and why you are so foolishly good to
Boyde”--which annoyed me, because I considered myself now quite old and
a thorough man of the world as well.
It was in this mood, too, that we discussed my own theories and beliefs
... a life in the woods as well. Kay, himself and his family, Boyde
and I were to settle in the backwoods ... perhaps I was as eloquent
as I was earnest; he listened attentively; sometimes he seemed almost
ready to consent; he understood, at any rate, the deep spell that
Nature had for me. But he only smiled when I said I was a failure and
an outcast. My life had hardly begun yet! No man was a failure who had
an object and worked for it, even though he never got within miles of
accomplishment. “A life for a man is a life _among_ men,” he would say
with emphasis. “The woods are all right as an interlude, but not as a
career.” He was very sympathetic, but he shook his head violently. “In
action lies a man’s safety in life,” he growled at me. “The world needs
men of action, not dreamers,” he repeated and repeated, “and Buddhism
has never yet produced a man of action. Do _something_, even if it
prove the wrong thing. Dreaming, without action, is the quickest way
of self-corruption I know.” And he would then urge me again to become
a doctor, after which he would proceed to dream himself for an hour or
two ... showing that all his life he had been far more of a dreamer
than a man of action....
It was chance that suddenly led me into the doctor’s secret. He became
for me, from that moment, the most pathetic and tragic of human beings.
My own troubles seemed insignificant.
One afternoon early in December, gloomy, very cold, a studio
appointment failed, and I decided to go to the wooden house. It was
that or the public library, but I wanted a talk, I wanted also to get
really warm. I had no overcoat; the doctor’s room was always like an
oven. The vermin I had grown accustomed to and hardly noticed them. An
idea of food, too, was in my mind, for the free lunch glass of beer and
salt chip-potatoes was all I had eaten since breakfast. Seven o’clock,
however, was my usual hour of visit, I had never been in the afternoon
before. A memorable visit; we were alone; he told me his secret very
quietly.
I found him in his most awful mood, rude, his nerves unbearably on
edge. He said he had not expected me, but when I tried to go, he became
angry and begged me to stay, saying that I helped him more than I could
ever know. Had I brought the fiddle? I said I would run up the street
and get it. “No,” he implored, “don’t go now. You can go later--before
supper. _Please_ do not leave me--_please_!” He then said he would tell
me something no one else knew, no one except his wife. I wondered
what was coming, and felt strangely touched and moved at his treating
me with such confidence. His manner was so pathetic, and he seemed
suddenly to have become weak and helpless, and somehow or other it was
in my power to do him a service. I was thrilled and full of expectation.
But, before he began to tell me, he went up to a little cabinet with a
glass door and took out a small bottle full of a white powder, bearing
the word, the magical word “Majendie”--a word I can never forget as
long as I live--and took some of the powder and made a solution and
then sucked some of it up with a needle and turned to me. His face was
swollen and looked terrible, for the eyes glowed so hotly, and the skin
was so red and white in patches. Then he began to open his waistcoat
and shirt till his chest was bare. “Look,” he said, for I half moved
aside, and when I looked I saw he was covered with hundreds of small
red sores.
Evidently my face betrayed shrinking and horror, for the old man
laughed and said “Oh, I’m not a leper. They’re only blisters,” and then
finding a little clear space on his skin, put the needle of his syringe
through the flesh and injected the fluid into his body. He next quickly
put his finger over the spot and rubbed to and fro for about a minute,
staring steadily at me while he did so.
“That’s morphine,” he said in a dead voice, “and the rubbing is
necessary to prevent a blister forming.”
I knew nothing about morphine except the name, and I was disappointed
rather than thrilled, but the next minute he gave me all the thrill I
wanted, and more besides:
“I’ve been fighting it for two years,” he said quietly in German, still
rubbing the spot and staring hard at me, “and I am slowly getting the
better of it. If I don’t succeed, it means I die.” A cold grim smile
that made me shudder stole over his swollen face. “_Death_,” he added.
I felt his despair, the despair of doubt, as he said this, and in his
eyes blazed suddenly all the suppressed depths of suffering and emotion
that he usually kept hidden. Such a flood of sympathy for the old man
rose in me that I did not know what to say. Of drugs and their power I
knew nothing. I stood and stared in silence, but his voice and manner
made me realize one thing: that here was an awful battle, a struggle
between human courage, will and endurance, on the one hand, and some
tremendous power on the other--a struggle to the death. The word
“morphine” seemed to me some sort of demon.
He sat down in his armchair, lit his pipe, pulled up the operating
chair for me to lie on beside him, and then told me very quietly why he
took it. Already his face looked different, as the morphine circulated
through the blood, and he smiled and wore a genial happy air of
benevolence that made him at once a different man.
“I shall have peace now for several hours,” he said, “but I don’t take
morphine for pleasure. I take it because it is the only way to keep
myself alive and to keep my wife and child from starving. If I can
gradually wean myself from it I shall live for years. If not, and I
cannot make the dose less and less, it will kill me very soon. I am
old, you see.”
He told me very simply, but very graphically, speaking in German
as he loved to do, that three years ago he had enjoyed a good and
lucrative practice. But he had embarked upon some experiments in his
leg--I never understood exactly what and did not dare to ask--and to
observe these properly he was obliged to use the knife without taking
any anæsthetic. His wife stood beside him and staunched the blood,
but the pain and shock proved more than he was equal to, being an old
man, and a collapse followed. All his patients left him, for he could
not attend to them, and in order to be in a fit condition to see even
chance callers he had to inject morphine. Thus the habit began, and
before he knew where he was the thing had him by the throat. He was a
man of great natural strength of will and he began to stop it, but the
fight was far harder than he had imagined, and his nerves seemed to
have gone to pieces. Unless he had the support of a dose, he was so
brutal, irritable and rude that no one could stay in his presence, and
no patient would come near him. He never got his practice back again,
and whenever a stray patient called now he had to take an injection, or
he would be sure to behave in such a way that the man or woman would
never return. He used atropine to mix with his morphine, and thus tried
gradually to cure himself, and lately had succeeded in reducing the
quantity very considerably, but it was an awful fight, and he admitted
the end was uncertain. He said I helped him to bear the strain. My
presence, he said, the music too, gave him some sort of comfort and
strength, and he was always glad to see me. When I was there he could
hold out longer than when he was alone, and one reason he was telling
me all this intimate history--telling it to a comparative stranger--was
because he wished me to try and help him more.
I stammered some words in broken German about being eager and willing
to help, and he smiled and said he thanked me and “we would make the
fight together.”
“The charm is very powerful,” he went on, “especially to a nature like
mine, for when I take this stuff the world becomes full of wonder
and mystery again, just as it was for me sixty years ago when I was
a boy with burning hopes and high dreams. But far more than that, I
_believe in people_ again. That makes more difference in your life than
anything else, for to lose faith in men makes life unbearable. Bitter
experiences have shaken my trust and belief in my fellow creatures. But
with this stuff in me I find it again and feel at peace with the world.”
“That is why you sometimes approve and at other times disapprove of my
attitude towards Boyde?”
“Yes,” he said, with a most benign and delightful expression in his
eyes. “Give him every chance. There’s lots of good in him. He feels, no
doubt, that everyone who knows about him distrusts him. Weak men will
always try more or less to live up to what is expected of them, for
they are easily hypnotised. If they feel every one expects only evil
from them their chief incentive is lost.”
“Then I ought never to let him think I’ve lost belief in him?”
“Never. Frighten him, kick him, urge him along with violence, anything
to make him move of himself towards being decent; but never suggest he
_cannot_ be, and _is not_, decent and straight.”
How we talked that night--and how I suffered from hunger, for when
morphine was in him the old doctor ate little, and this time he was
full of ideas and ideals, and had so sympathetic a listener, that he
forgot I might want food, and it was not till after one in the morning
that he began to flag and thought of coffee. We went down into the
kitchen, and there we found the patient wife dozing on the wooden
chair, and the child reading a book--“Undine”--on the deal table, with
her eyes so bright I thought they were going to shoot out flame. She
looked up and stared at us for a long time before she got herself back
from that enchanted region of woods and pools and moonlight.... Strange
supper parties they were, in that quiet, basement-kitchen between one
and two of the winter mornings of December, 1892....
Otto Huebner, having broken the ice, told me much of his own life then.
Owing to family disputes he left the manufacturing town in Northern
Germany where he was born and brought up, and came to New York as a
young man. He never saw his parents again, and took out naturalization
papers at once. For years he was employed by Steinway’s piano factory,
as a common workman at first, then as a skilled man. He was unmarried,
he saved money, he began to study at night; the passion for medicine
was so strong in him that he made up his mind to become a doctor. He
attended lectures when he could. It was a life of slavery, of incessant
toil both day and night. He was over forty when he began studying for
the examinations, and it took him seven years to attain his end. His
health had suffered during this strenuous time. He had married well
after fifty....
Dear, lovable, much-to-be-pitied old man, my heart went out to him; I
was determined to do everything I could to help. I owed him much for
counsel, sympathy and kindness, to say nothing of medical attendance
and food besides, at a time, too, when I believed myself a complete
failure and thought my life was ruined. England, my family, all that I
had been accustomed to seemed utterly remote; I had cut myself off; I
had tumbled into quite another world, and the only friend I had, the
only being I trusted, even loved as well, was the old German morphine
victim.
Meanwhile, it had been very wonderful to me to see an irritable, savage
old man change in a few minutes into a kindly, genial, tender-hearted
being, and I began to feel an absorbing curiosity about this fine
white powder labelled “Majendie.” I invariably now rubbed in the dose,
finding with increasing difficulty a clear space of skin in the poor
worn old body. I watched the change steal over him. It seemed to me
pure magic. It began more and more to fascinate me.