(From _Broom_)
During the course of some psychological investigations I was making,
I found it necessary to visit an insane asylum near New York. The
building was no more than an ill-smelling barracks, very desolate;
but the young interne, who guided me through the place, finally took
me to a series of private rooms, which were homelike and pleasant
and had windows facing the fields and the hills. He told me by the
way that I must above all things see Dr. Farraday. Dr. Farraday, he
explained, knew a great deal about the human soul; so much so that
the young doctors often consulted him about puzzling and unusual
cases.
“He is the most interesting man here,” he told me.
“And what is he suffering from?” I asked.
He smiled. “You’ll have to get his own diagnosis,” he said.
“Between you and me, I think he has a high regard for our free
board and lodging. He has the sort of insanity of the hobo, of the
I-Won’t-Works. But he came to it too late in life to make freight
cars and hay-lofts at all attractive. He was too settled down to
wander the world, and too--well, insane to work.”
“Well!” I laughed, “I daresay there are many like him--only they are
quartered on relatives, or wives, or friends.... In ancient days that
form of insanity was highly honorable. It is, isn’t it, the insanity
of the artist?”
His answer was to knock at a door, and a deep and rather pleasing
voice cried, “Come in.” So we went in.
The light flooded brightly through the tall wide window, so that
at first I only saw a dark bulk coming toward us. But I noticed
the walls hung with many strange and brilliant drawings, all of a
symbolical nature, mythic animals and gods, stars and moons, and
landscapes that never were. When I was through blinking, and had my
man on the darker side of me, I saw him quite plainly. He was rather
bulky and large, swarthy and something about his face resembling the
face of a turtle.
His manner was very courteous, but a little absent. The young interne
excused himself, with a private wink at me, as much as to say: “I
won’t interfere”; and so we were left alone.
I offered him a cigar, which pleased him, and we sat in comfortable
armchairs by the window, and were soon plunged in scientific
discussion.... But I saw he was restless. I noticed, too, now, that
his clothes were ill-fitting, worn out, patched and rather dirty;
that his nails and fingers were sooted up with crayon and stained
with ink; that his cheeks and chin needed a shave and his hair was
rather longer than we wear it.
His restlessness increased. He rubbed his chin, gazed about
abstractedly, swung his leg back and forth in a too obvious rhythm.
And at last he spoke in a voice which did not seem his at all--a
voice which appeared to me to belong to some other person. The voice
he had used was quiet and cool, although sympathetic. This new voice
was personal, hot, and almost bitter.
“What is the use of all this talk?” he cried out. “It gets us
nowhere. Intellect! science! theory! brain-spinning! Young man, that
is our modern Devil. Kill him ... strangle him out of your soul. He
is the Devil of the ice, of the cold polar regions. Better a hundred
times the old Devil of the burning hell, for in fire there is also
God!”
For a moment I thought I was coming to psychic fisticuffs with him;
but I reflected, and at once swallowed my pride.
“I see,” I said, looking him in the eyes, “you knew this modern Devil
very well; perhaps intimately.”
He glanced at me.
“You sit there,” he cried, “a bit of ice yourself. I feel no warmth
from you; I am not a human being to you, but just another case.
Everywhere I look for Christ and find a Devil. But you scientists
will never save the world without love--yea, and hate, too. Fire
cleanses and resurrects, but the ice freezes and slays. You would
embalm me too in your waste places; and there is no healing in it.
Feel this asylum--chilly and cold and full of living death--and the
blasted crowd waiting for a great lover to cast out their demons. He
is late in coming; He is late in coming.”
The something that was strange in his voice, his manner and in his
words troubled me deeply.
“You are quite right,” I said simply. “Forgive me for my attitude.”
He looked at me attentively and spoke more softly.
“There is some hope for you, then,” he murmured. “Look,” and he
reached and brought a sheet of drawing paper from the little table
beside him.
He had drawn a picture in crayon, and done it very well. There was
a powerful man, with arms crossed on his chest, standing like a
Napoleon on an ice-sheathed rock, and out of the sky a lightning in
the form of a great serpent had leaped down and was about to fasten
his fangs into the man’s eyes.
“Wonderful!” I cried. “And it means?”
“You tell me what it means,” he commanded.
It flashed intuitively across my mind that it meant: “He who sees too
much must be struck blind.” I told him and he was highly pleased: he
regarded me affectionately.
“This is the first human contact I have had in a long time,” he said.
“Except, of course, some of the lunatics....”
“But how,” I asked, “can a man see too much, and why is such a man
like Napoleon?”
“Ah,” he said, “when Christ was shown the kingdoms of the world
from a high mountain, he chose then between Cæsar and the Galilean.
Seeing, man--to see, to know--knowledge, they say, is power.... But
when one is blind then one sees truly ... sees inwardly. ‘They have
eyes, but they see not’....”
I felt his meaning, though, to use the word in his sense, I did not
see it.
“And what is the serpent?” I asked.
“The gods.”
“Then you believe in the gods?”
“I have always believed in them,” he said in his strange voice again,
“but I laughed at them. The great Dr. Farraday laughed at the gods.
Believed? Of course. The fool says in his heart, There is no God. And
the intellectual says in his heart, There are gods, and I laugh at
them.”
We sat in silence, smoking, and now and then I felt him trying to
pierce me with a look. At last he said:
“You are troubled, my friend.”
“Yes, I am troubled,” I admitted. “We are all troubled in these days.”
“The days of the great ice,” he murmured. “The second Glacial
Period.” He paused, then spoke abruptly. “I have a strange feeling
for you, very unusual. I am going to tell you something. You may
forget it as soon as you have heard it. You may say to yourself: ‘It
is the phantasy of an insane man.’ Or you may find it material for
analysis and so enrich your science. Or perhaps if I am not wholly
demented, you may take it into your being and find it a gift of the
gods.... It is a story--one of the few that have meaning for me. And
it is about a man I knew--oh, knew very well. Most intimately....
Perhaps it is the story of our age. Who knows?”