The printing-office had been my school from childhood so largely that I
could almost say I had no other, but the time had come, even before
this, when its opportunities did not satisfy the hunger which was always
in me for knowledge convertible into such beauty as I imagined and
wished to devote my life to. I was willing and glad to do my part in
helping my father, but he recognized my right to help myself forward in
the line of my own longing, and it was early arranged that I should have
a certain measure of work to do, and when it was done I should be free
for the day. My task was finished early in the afternoon, and then my
consuming pleasures began when I had already done a man's work. I was
studying four or five languages, blindly and blunderingly enough, but
with a confidence at which I can even now hardly smile; I was attempting
many things in verse and prose which I seldom carried to a definite
close, and I was reading, reading, reading, right and left, hither and
yon, wherever an author tempted me. I was not meaning to do less than
the greatest things, or to know less than the most, but my criticism
outran my performance and exacted of me an endeavor for the perfection
which I found forever beyond me. Far into the night I clung to my
labored failures in rhyme while I listened for the ticking of the
death-watch in the walls of my little study; or if I had imagined, in my
imitations of others' fiction, some character that the poet had devoted
to an early death, I helplessly identified myself with that character,
and expected his fate. It was the day when this world was much more
intimate with the other world than it is now, and the spiritualism which
had evoked its phenomena through most houses in the village had left
them haunted by dread sounds, if not sights; but it was not yet the day
when nervous prostration had got its name or was known in its nature.
For me this malady came in the hypochondria which was misery not less
real because at the end of the ends I knew it to be the exaggeration of
an apprehension without ground in reality.
I have hesitated to make any record of this episode, but I think it
essential to the study of my very morbid boyhood, and I hope some
knowledge of it may be helpful to others in like suffering. Somehow as a
child I had always had a terror of hydrophobia, perhaps from hearing
talk of that poor man who had died of it in the town where we then
lived, and when years afterward I was, as I have told, bitten by a dog,
my terror was the greater because I happened to find myself alone in the
house when I ran home. I had heard of excising a snake-bite to keep the
venom from spreading, and I would now have cut out the place with my
knife, if I had known how. In the end I did nothing, and when my father
came home he did not have the wound cauterized. He may have believed
that anything which tended to fix my mind upon it would be bad, and
perhaps I forgot it the sooner for his decision. I have not forgotten
the make of the gloomy autumnal afternoon when the thing happened, or
the moment when years afterward certain unguarded words awoke the fear
in me which as many more years were needed to allay. By some chance
there was talk with our village doctor about hydrophobia, and the
capricious way the poison of a dog's bite may work. "Works round in your
system," he said, "for seven years or more, and then it breaks out and
kills you." The words he let heedlessly fall fell into a mind prepared
by ill-health for their deadly potency, and when the summer heat came I
was helpless under it. Somehow I knew what the symptoms of the malady
were, and I began to force it upon myself by watching for them. The
splash of water anywhere was a sound I had to set my teeth against, lest
the dreaded spasms should seize me; my fancy turned the scent of the
forest fires burning round the village into the subjective odor of smoke
which stifles the victim. I had no release from my obsession, except in
the dreamless sleep which I fell into exhausted at night, or that little
instant of waking in the morning, when I had not yet had time to gather
my terrors about me, or to begin the frenzied stress of my effort to
experience the thing I dreaded. There was no longer question of work for
me, with hand or head. I could read, yes, but with the double
consciousness in which my fear haunted every line and word without
barring the sense from my perception. I read many novels, where the
strong plot befriended me and formed a partial refuge, but I did not
attempt escape in the poor boyish inventions, verse or prose, which I
had fondly trusted might be literature. Instinct taught me that some
sort of bodily fatigue was my safety; I spent the horrible days in the
woods with a gun, or in the fields gathering wild berries, and walked
to and from the distant places that I might tire myself the more. My
father reasoned to the same effect for me, and helped me as best he
could; of course I was released from my tasks in the printing-office,
and he took me with him in driving about the country on political and
business errands. We could not have spent many days in this way, when,
as it seems, I woke one morning in a sort of crisis, and having put my
fear to the test of water suddenly dashed from a doorway beside me and
failed of the convulsion which I was always expecting, I began
imperceptibly to get the better of my demon. My father's talk always
distracted me somewhat, and that morning especially his disgust with the
beefsteak fried in lard which the landlady gave us for breakfast at the
country tavern where we had passed the night must even have amused me,
as a touch of the comedy blent with the tragedy in the Shakespearian
drama of life. But no doubt a more real help was his recurrence, as
often as I chose, to his own youthful suffering from hypochondria, and
his constantly repeated assurance that I not only would not and could
not have hydrophobia from that out-dated dog-bite, but that I must also
soon cease to have hypochondria. I understood as well as he that it was
not the fear of that malady which I was suffering, but the fear of the
fear; that I was in no hallucination, no illusion as to the facts, but
was helpless in the nervous prostration which science, or our poor
village medicine, was yet many years from knowing or imagining. I have
heard and read that sometimes people in their apprehension of the
reality can bring on a false hydrophobia and die of it in the agonies
their fancy creates. It may be so; but all that fear could do was done
in me; and I did not die.
I could not absolutely fix the moment when I began to find my way out of
the cloud of misery which lowered on my life, but I think that it was
when I had gathered a little strength in my forced respite from work,
and from the passing of the summer heat. It was as if the frost which
people used to think put an end to the poisonous miasm of the swamps,
but really only killed the insect sources of the malaria, had wrought a
like sanitation in my fancy. My fear when it once lifted never quite
overwhelmed me again, but it was years before I could endure the sight
of the word which embodied it; I shut the book or threw from me the
paper where I found it in print; and even now, after sixty years, I
cannot bring myself to write it or speak it without some such shutting
of the heart as I knew at the sight or sound of it in that dreadful
time. The effect went deeper than I could say without accusing myself of
exaggeration for both good and evil. In self-defense I learnt to
practise a psychological juggle; I came to deal with my own state of
mind as another would deal with it, and to combat my fears as if they
were alien.
I cannot leave this confession without the further confession that
though I am always openly afraid of dogs, secretly I am always fond of
them; and it is only fair to add that they reciprocate my liking with
even exaggerated affection. Dogs, especially of any more ferocious type,
make up to me in spite of my diffidence; and at a hotel where we were
once passing the summer the landlord's bulldog, ugliest and dreadest of
his tribe, used to divine my intention of a drive and climb into my
buggy, where he couched himself on my feet, with a confidence in my
reciprocal tenderness which I was anxious not to dispel by the least
movement.