“Once, one of his disciples, walking with him in the garden, said:
‘Master, how may I know the Infinite, the Good, and attain to union
with it, as thou hast?’ And he replied: ‘By desiring it utterly,
with all thy heart and with all thy mind.’ And the disciple replied:
‘But that I do.’ ‘Nay, not utterly,’ replied the Master, ‘or thou
wouldst not now ask how thou mayst attain to union with it. But come
with me,’ he added, ‘and I will show thee.’ And he led the way to
a stream, and into the water, and there, by reason of his greater
strength, he seized upon his disciple and immersed him completely,
so that presently he could not breathe but must have suffocated and
drowned had it not been his plan to bring him forth whole. Only when,
by reason of this, the strength of the disciple began to wane and he
would have drowned, the Master drew him forth and stretched him upon
the bank and restored him. And when he was sufficiently restored and
seeing that he was not dead but whole, he exclaimed: ‘But, Master,
why didst thou submerge me in the stream and hold me there until I
was like to die?’ And the Master replied: ‘Didst thou not say that
above all things thou desirest union with the Infinite?’ ‘Yea, true;
but in life, not death.’ ‘That I know,’ answered the Master. ‘But now
tell me: When thou wast thus held in the water what was it that thou
didst most desire?’ ‘To be restored to breath, to life.’ ‘And how much
didst thou desire it?’ ‘As thou sawest—with all my strength and with
all my mind.’ ‘Verily. Then when in life thou desirest union with the
All-Good, the Infinite, as passionately as thou didst life in the
water, it will come. Thou wilt know it then, and not before.’”
_Keshub Chunder Sen._
A friend of mine, a quite celebrated neurologist, psychiatrist, and
interpreter of Freud, and myself were met one night to discuss a very
much talked-of book of his, a book of clinical studies relative to
various obsessions, perversions and inhibitions which had afflicted
various people in their day and which he, as a specialist in these
matters, had investigated and attempted to alleviate. To begin with, I
should say that he had filled many difficult and responsible positions
in hospitals, asylums, and later, as a professor of these matters,
occupied a chair in one of our principal universities. He was kindly,
thoughtful, and intensely curious as to the workings of this formula we
call life, but without lending himself to any—at least to very few—hard
and fast dogmas. More interesting still life appeared to interest
but never to discourage him. He really liked it. Pain, he said, he
accepted as an incentive, an urge to life. Strife he liked because it
hardened all to strength. And he believed in action as the antidote to
too much thought, the way out of brooding and sorrow. Youth passes,
strength passes, life forms pass; but action makes all bearable and
even enjoyable. Also he wanted more labor, not less, more toil, more
exertion, for humanity. And he insisted that through, not round or
outside, life lay the way to happiness, if there was a way. But with
action all the while. So much for his personal point of view.
On the other hand he was always saying of me that I had a touch of
the Hindu in me, the Far East, the Brahmin. I emphasized too much
indifference to life—or, if not that, I quarreled too much with pain,
unhappiness, and did not impress strongly enough the need of action. I
was forever saying that the strain was too great, that there had best
be less of action, less of pain.... As to the need of less pain, I
agreed, but never to the need of less action; in verification of which
I pointed to my own life, the changes I had deliberately courted, the
various activities I had entered upon, the results I had sought for. He
was not to be routed from his contention entirely, nor I from mine.
Following this personal analysis we fell to discussing a third man,
whom we both admired, an eminent physiologist, then connected with
one of the great experimental laboratories of the world, who had made
many deductions and discoveries in connection with the associative
faculty of the brain and the mechanics of associative memory. This
man was a mechanist, not an evolutionist, and of the most convinced
type. To him nowhere in nature was there any serene and directive and
thoughtful conception which brought about, and was still bringing
about continually, all the marvels of structure and form and movement
that so arrest and startle our intelligence at every turn. Nowhere any
constructive or commanding force which had thought out, for instance,
and brought to pass flowers, trees, animals, men—associative order and
community life. On the contrary, the beauty of nature as well as the
order of all living, such as it is, was an accident, and not even a
necessary one, yet unescapable, a condition or link in an accidental
chain. If you would believe him and his experiments, the greatest human
beings that ever lived and the most perfect states of society that ever
were have no more significance in nature than the most minute ephemera.
The Macedonian Alexander is as much at the mercy of fate as the lowest
infusoria. For every germ that shoots up into a tree thousands are
either killed or stunted by unfavorable conditions; and although,
beyond question, many of them—the most—bear within themselves the same
power as the successful ones to be and to do, had they the opportunity,
still they fail—a belief of my own in part, albeit a hard doctrine.
One would have thought, as I said to Professor Z—— at this meeting,
that such a mental conviction would be dulling and destructive to
initiative and force, and I asked him why he thought it had not
operated to blunt and destroy this very great man. “For the very
reasons I am always emphasizing,” he replied. “Pain, necessity, life
stung him into action and profound thought, hence success. He is the
person he is by reason of enforced mental and physical action.”
“But,” I argued, “his philosophy makes him account it all as worthless,
or, if not that, so fleeting and unstable as to make it scarcely
worth the doing, even though he does it. As he sees it, happiness
and tribulation, glory and obscurity, are all an accident. Science,
industry, politics, like races and planets, are accidents. Trivial
conditions cause great characters and geniuses like himself to rest
or to remain inactive, and mediocre ones are occasionally permitted
to execute great deeds or frustrate them in the absence of the chance
that might have produced a master. Circumstances are stronger than
personalities, and the impotence of individuals is the tragedy of
everyday life.”
“Quite so,” agreed my friend, “and there are times when I am inclined
to agree with him, but at most times not. I used to keep hanging in
one of my offices, printed and framed, that famous quotation from
Ecclesiastes: ‘I returned, and saw under the sun that the race is not
to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the
wise, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to
them all.’ But I took it down because it was too discouraging. And
yet,” he added after a time, because we both fell silent at this point,
“although I still think it is true, as time has gone on and I have
experimented with life and with people I have come to believe that
there is something else in nature, some not as yet understood impulse,
which seeks to arrange and right and balance things at times. I know
that this sounds unduly optimistic and vainly cheerful, especially
from me, and many—you, for one, will disagree—but I have sometimes
encountered things in my work which have caused me to feel that nature
isn’t altogether hard or cruel or careless, even though accidents
appear to happen.”
“Accidents?” I said; “holocausts, you mean.” But he continued:
“Of course, I do not believe in absolute good or absolute evil,
although I do believe in relative good and relative evil. Take
tenderness and pity, in some of their results at least. Our friend Z——,
on the contrary, sees all as accident, or blind chance and without much
if any real or effective pity or amelioration, a state that I cannot
reason myself into. Quite adversely, I think there is something that
helps life along or out of its difficulties. I know that you will not
agree with me; still, I believe it, and while I do not think there is
any direct and immediate response, such as the Christian Scientists
and the New Thought devotees would have us believe, I know there is
a response at times, or at least I think there is, and I think I can
prove it. Take dreams, for instance, which, as Freud has demonstrated,
are nature’s way of permitting a man to sleep in the presence of some
mental worry that would tend to keep him awake, or if he had fallen
asleep, and stood in danger to wake him.”
I waived that as a point, but then he referred to medicine and surgery
and all the mechanical developments as well as the ameliorative
efforts of life, such as laws relating to child labor, workingmen’s
compensation and hours, compulsory safety devices and the like, as
specific proofs of a desire on the part of nature, working through
man, to make life easier for man, a wish on her part to provide him,
slowly and stumblingly, mayhap, with things helpful to him in his
condition here. Without interrupting him, I allowed him to call to
mind the Protestant Reformation, how it had ended once and for all
the iniquities of the Inquisition; the rise of Christianity, and
how, temporarily at least, it had modified if not entirely ended the
brutalities of Paganism. Anesthetics, and how they had served to
ameliorate pain. I could have pointed out that life itself was living
on life and always had been, and that as yet no substitute for the
flesh of helpless animals had been furnished man as food. (He could not
hear my thoughts.) The automobile, he went on, had already practically
eliminated the long sufferings of the horse; our anti-slavery rebellion
and humane opposition in other countries had once and for all put
an end to human slavery; also he called to mind the growth of humane
societies of one kind and another, that ministered to many tortured
animals. And humane laws were being constantly passed and enforced to
better if not entirely cure inhuman conditions.
I confess I was interested, if not convinced. In spite of life itself
existing on life, there was too much in what he said to permit any
one to pass over it indifferently. But there came to my mind just the
same all the many instances of crass accident and brutish mischance
which are neither prevented nor cured by anything—the thousands who are
annually killed in railroad accidents and industrial plants, despite
protective mechanisms and fortifying laws compelling their use; the
thousands who die yearly from epidemics of influenza, smallpox, yellow
fever, cholera and widespread dissemination of cancer, consumption and
related ills. These I mentioned. He admitted the force of the point but
insisted that man, impelled by nature, not only for his own immediate
protection but by reason of a sympathy aroused through pain endured
by him, was moved to kindly action. Besides if nature loved brutality
and inhumanity and suffering why should any atom of it wish to escape
pain, and why in those atoms should it generate sympathy and tears and
rejoicing at escape from suffering by man, why sorrow and horror at the
accidental or intentional infliction of disaster on man by nature or
man?
After a time, he volunteered: “Let me give you a concrete instance. It
has always interested me and it seems to prove that there is something
to what I say. It concerns a girl I know, a very homely one, who lost
her mind. At the beginning of her mental trouble her father called me
in to see what, if anything, could be done. The parents of this girl
were Catholics. He was a successful contractor and politician, the
father of three children; he provided very well for them materially
but could do little for them mentally. He was not the intellectual
but the religious type. The mother was a cheerful, good-natured and
conventional woman, and had only the welfare of her children and her
husband at heart. When I first came to know this family—I was a young
medical man then—this girl was thirteen or fourteen, the youngest
of the three children. Of these three children, and for that matter
of the entire family, I saw that this girl was decidedly the most
interesting psychically and emotionally. She was intense and receptive,
but inclined to be morbid; and for a very good reason. She was not
good-looking, not in any way attractive physically. Worse, she had
too good a mind, too keen a perception, not to know how severe a
deprivation that was likely to prove and to resent it. As I came to
know through later investigations—all the little neglects and petty
deprivations which, owing to her lack of looks and the exceeding and
of course superior charms of her sister and brother, were throughout
her infancy and youth thrust upon her. Her mouth was not sweet—too
large; her eyes unsatisfactory as to setting, not as to wistfulness;
her nose and chin were unfortunately large, and above her left eye
was a birthmark, a livid scar as large as a penny. In addition her
complexion was sallow and muddy, and she was not possessed of a truly
graceful figure; far from it. After she had reached fifteen or sixteen,
she walked, entirely by reason of mental depression, I am sure, with a
slow and sagging and moody gait; something within, I suppose, always
whispering to her that hope was useless, that there was no good in
trying, that she had been mercilessly and irretrievably handicapped to
begin with.
“On the other hand, as chance would have it, her sister and brother
had been almost especially favored by nature. Celeste Ryan was bright,
vivacious, colorful. She was possessed of a graceful body, a beautiful
face, clear, large and blue eyes, light glossy hair, and a love for
life. She could sing and dance. She was sought after and courted by
all sorts of men and boys. I myself, as a young man, used to wish that
I could interest her in myself, and often went to the house on her
account. Her brother also was smart, well-favored, careful as to his
clothes, vain, and interested in and fascinating to girls of a certain
degree of mind. He and his sister liked to dance, to attend parties, to
play and disport themselves wherever young people were gathered.
“And for the greater part of Marguerite’s youth, or until her sister
and brother were married, this house was a centre for all the casual
and playful goings-on of youth. Girls and boys, all interested in
Celeste and her brother, came and went—girls to see the good-looking
brother, boys to flirt with and dance attendance upon the really
charming Celeste. In winter there was skating; in summer automobiling,
trips to the beach, camping even. In most of these affairs, so long
as it was humanly possible, the favorless sister was included; but,
as we all know, especially where thoughtless and aggressive youth is
concerned, such little courtesies are not always humanly possible.
Youth will be served. In the main it is too intent upon the sorting and
mating process, each for himself, to give the slightest heed or care
for another. Væ Victis.
“To make matters worse, and possibly because her several deficiencies
early acquainted her with the fact that all boys and girls found her
sister and brother so much more attractive, Marguerite grew reticent
and recessive—so much so that when I first saw her she was already
slipping about with the air of one who appeared to feel that she was
not as ingratiating and acceptable as she might be, even though, as I
saw, her mother and father sought to make her feel that she was. Her
father, a stodgy and silent man, too involved in the absurdities of
politics and religion and the difficulties of his position to give very
much attention to the intricacies and subtleties of his children’s
personalities, never did guess the real pain that was Marguerite’s.
He was a narrow and determined religionist, one who saw in religious
abstention, a guarded and reserved life, the only keys to peace and
salvation. In fact before he died an altar was built in his house and
mass was read there for his especial spiritual benefit every morning.
What he thought of the gayeties of his two eldest children at this
time I do not know, but since these were harmless and in both cases
led to happy and enduring marriages, he had nothing to quarrel with.
As for his youngest child, I doubt if he ever sensed in any way the
moods and torturous broodings that were hers, the horrors that attend
the disappointed love life. He had not been disappointed in his love
life, and was therefore not able to understand. He was not sensitive
enough to have suffered greatly if he had been, I am sure. But his
wife, a soft, pliable, affectionate, gracious woman, early sensed that
her daughter must pay heavily for her looks, and in consequence sought
in every way to woo her into an unruffled complacence with life and
herself.
“But how little the arts of man can do toward making up for the
niggardliness of nature! I am certain that always, from her earliest
years, this ugly girl loved her considerate mother and was grateful
to her; but she was a girl of insight, if not hard practical sense or
fortitude, and loved life too much to be content with the love of her
mother only. She realized all too keenly the crass, if accidental,
injustice which had been done her by nature and was unhappy, terribly
so. To be sure, she tried to interest herself in books, the theatre,
going about with a homely girl or two like herself. But before her ever
must have been the spectacle of the happiness of others, their dreams
and their fulfilments. Indeed, for the greater part of these years,
and for several years after, until both her sister and brother had
married and gone away, she was very much alone, and, as I reasoned it
out afterwards, imagining and dreaming about all the things she would
like to be and do. But without any power to compel them. Finally she
took to reading persistently, to attending theatres, lectures and what
not—to establish some contact, I presume, with the gay life scenes she
saw about her. But I fancy that these were not of much help, for life
may not be lived by proxy. And besides, her father, if not her mother,
resented a too liberal thought life. He believed that his faith and
its teachings were the only proper solution to life.
“One of the things that interested me in connection with this case—and
this I gathered as chief medical counsel of the family between
Marguerite’s fifteenth and twenty-fifth year—was that because of the
lack of beauty that so tortured her in her youth she had come to take
refuge in books, and then, because of these, the facts which they
revealed in regard to a mere worthwhile life than she could have,
to draw away from all religion as worthless, or at least not very
important as a relief from pain. And yet there must have been many
things in these books which tortured her quite as much as reality, for
she selected, as her father once told me afterward—not her mother,
who could read little or nothing—only such books as she should not
read; books, I presume, that painted life as she wished it to be for
herself. They were by Anatole France, George Moore, de Maupassant and
Dostoyevsky. Also she went to plays her father disapproved of and
brooded in libraries. And she followed, as she herself explained to me,
one lecturer and another, one personality and another, more, I am sure,
because by this method she hoped to contact, although she never seemed
to, men who were interesting to her, than because she was interested in
the things they themselves set forth.
“In connection with all this I can tell you of only one love incident
which befell her. Somewhere around the time when she was twenty-one
or -two she came in contact with a young teacher, himself not very
attractive or promising and whose prospects, as her father saw them,
were not very much. But since she was not pretty and rather lonely
and he seemed to find companionship, and mayhap solace in her, no
great objection was made to him. In fact as time went on, and she and
the teacher became more and more intimate, both she and her parents
assumed that in the course of time they would most certainly marry. For
instance, at the end of his school-teaching year here in New York, and
although he left the city he kept up a long correspondence with her.
In addition, he spent at least some of his vacation near New York, at
times returning and going about with her and seeming to feel that she
was of some value to him in some way.
“How much of this was due to the fact that she was provided with
spending money of her own and could take him here and there, to places
to which he could not possibly have afforded to go alone I cannot say.
None the less, it was assumed, because of their companionship and the
fact that she would have some money of her own after marriage, that
he would propose. But he did not. Instead, he came year after year,
visited about with her, took up her time, as the family saw it (her
worthless time!), and then departed for his duties elsewhere as free as
when he had come. Finally this having irritated if not infuriated the
several members of her family, they took her to task about it, saying
that she was a fool for trifling with him. But she, although perhaps
depressed by all this, was still not willing to give him up; he was her
one hope. Her explanation to the family was that because he was poor he
was too proud to marry until he had established himself. Thus several
more years came and went, and he returned or wrote, but still he did
not propose. And then of a sudden he stopped writing entirely for a
time, and still later on wrote that he had fallen in love and was about
to be married.
“This blow appeared to be the crowning one in her life. For in the face
of the opposition, and to a certain degree contempt, of her father,
who was a practical and fairly successful man, she had devoted herself
to this man who was neither successful nor very attractive for almost
seven years. And then after so long a period, in which apparently he
had used her to make life a little easier for himself, even he had
walked away and left her for another. She fell to brooding more and
more to herself, reading not so much now, as I personally know, as just
thinking. She walked a great deal, as her father told me, and then
later began to interest herself, or so she pretended, in a course of
history and philosophy at one of the great universities of the city.
But as suddenly, thereafter, she appeared to swing between exaggerated
periods of study or play or lecture-listening and a form of recessive
despair, under the influence of which she retired to her room and
stayed there for days, wishing neither to see nor hear from any one—not
even to eat. On the other hand again, she turned abruptly to shopping,
dressmaking and the niceties which concerned her personal appearance;
although even in this latter phase there were times when she did
nothing at all, seemed to relax toward her old listlessness and sense
of inconsequence and remained in her room to brood.
“About this time, as I was told afterwards, her mother died and, her
sister and brother having married, she was left in charge of the house
and of her father. It was soon evident that she had no particular
qualifications for or interest in housekeeping, and a maiden sister
of her father came to look after things. This did not necessarily
darken the scene, but it did not seem to lighten it any. She liked this
aunt well enough, although they had very little in common mentally.
Marguerite went on as before. Parallel with all this, however, had run
certain things which I have forgotten to mention. Her father had been
growing more and more narrowly religious. As a matter of fact he had
never had any sympathy for the shrewd mental development toward which
her lack of beauty had driven her. Before she was twenty-three as I
have already explained, her father had noted that she was indifferent
to her church duties. She had to be urged to go to mass on Sunday, to
confession and communion once a month. Also as he told me afterward,
as something to be deplored, her reading had caused her to believe
that her faith was by no means infallible, its ritual important; there
were bigger and more interesting things in life. This had caused her
father not only to mistrust but to detest the character of her reading,
as well as her tendencies in general. From having some sympathy with
her at first, as did her mother always, as the ugly duckling of the
family, he had come to have a cold and stand-offish feeling. She was,
as he saw it, an unnatural child. She did not obey him in respect to
religion. He began, as I have hinted, to look into her books, those
in the English tongue at least, and from a casual inspection came
to feel that they were not fit books for any one to read. They were
irreligious, immoral. They pictured life as it actually was, scenes
and needs and gayeties and conflicts, which, whether they existed or
not, were not supposed to exist; and most certainly they were not to be
introduced into his home, her own starved disposition to the contrary
notwithstanding. They conflicted with the natural chill and peace of
his religion and temperament. He forbade her to read such stuff, to
bring such books into his home. When he found some of them later he
burned them. He also began to urge the claims of his religion more and
more upon her.
“Reduced by this calamity and her financial dependence, which had
always remained complete, she hid her books away and read them only
outside or in the privacy of her locked room—but she read them.
The subsequent discovery by him that she was still doing this, and
his rage, caused her to think of leaving home. But she was without
training, without any place to go, really. If she should go she would
have to prepare herself for it by teaching, perhaps, and this she now
decided to take up.
“About this time she began to develop those characteristics or
aberrations which brought me into the case. As I have said, she began
to manifest a most exaggerated and extraordinary interest in her facial
appearance and physical well-being, an interest not at all borne
out rationally by her looks. Much to her father’s and his sister’s
astonishment, she began to paint and primp in front of her mirror
nearly all day long. Lip sticks, rouge, eyebrow pencils, perfumes,
rings, pins, combs, and what not else, were suddenly introduced—very
expensive and disconcerting lingerie, for one thing.
“The family had always maintained a charge account at at least two
of the larger stores of the city, and to these she had recently
repaired, as it was discovered afterwards, and indulged herself,
without a by-your-leave, in all these things. High-heeled slippers,
bright-colored silk stockings, hats, blouses, gloves, furs, to say
nothing of accentuated and even shocking street costumes, began to
arrive in bundles. Since the father was out most of the day and the
elderly aunt busy with household affairs, nothing much of all this was
noted, until later she began to adorn herself in this finery and to
walk the streets in it. And then the due bills, sixty days late; most
disturbing but not to be avoided. And so came the storm.
“The father and aunt, who had been wondering where these things were
coming from, became very active and opposed. For previous to this,
especially in the period of her greatest depression, Marguerite
had apparently dressed with no thought of anything, save a kind of
resigned willingness to remain inconspicuous, as much as to say: ‘What
difference does it make. No one is interested in me.’ Now, however,
all this had gone—quite. She had supplied herself with hats so wide
and ‘fancy’ or ‘fixy,’ as her father said, that they were a disgrace.
And clothing so noticeable or ‘loud’—I forget his exact word—that any
one anywhere would be ashamed of her. There were, as I myself saw
when I was eventually called in as specialist in the case, too many
flowers, too much lace, too many rings, pins and belts and gewgaws
connected with all this, which neither he nor his sister was ever
quite able to persuade her to lay aside. And the colors! Unless she
were almost forcibly restrained, these were likely to be terrifying,
even laughter-provoking, especially to those accustomed to think of
unobtrusiveness as the first criterion of taste—a green or red or light
blue broad-trimmed hat, for instance, with no such color of costume
to harmonize with it. And, whether it became her or not, a white or
tan or green dress in summertime, or one with too much red or too many
bright colors in winter. And very tight, worn with a dashing manner,
mayhap. Even high-heeled slippers and thin lacy dresses in bitter windy
weather. And the perfumes with which she saturated herself were, as her
father said, impossible—of a high rate of velocity, I presume.
“So arrayed, then, she would go forth, whenever she could contrive
it, to attend a theatre, a lecture, a moving picture, or to walk
the streets. And yet, strangely enough, and this was as curious a
phase of the case as any, she never appeared to wish to thrust her
personal charms, such as they were, on any one. On the contrary, as it
developed, there had generated in her the sudden hallucination that she
possessed so powerful and self-troubling a fascination for men that she
was in danger of bewildering them, enticing them against themselves
to their moral destruction, as well as bringing untold annoyance upon
herself. A single glance, one look at her lovely face, and presto!
they were enslaved. She needed but to walk, and lo! beauty—her beauty,
dazzling, searing, destroying—was implied by every motion, gesture. No
man, be he what he might, could withstand it. He turned, he stared,
he dreamed, he followed her and sought to force his attention on her.
Her father explained to me that when he met her on the street one day
he was shocked to the point of collapse. A daughter of his so dressed,
and on the street! With the assistance of the maiden sister a number
of modifications was at once brought about. All charge accounts were
cancelled. Dealers were informed that no purchases of hers would be
honored unless with the previous consent of her father. The worst of
her sartorial offenses were unobtrusively removed from her room and
burnt or given away, and plainer and more becoming things substituted.
“But now, suddenly, there developed a new and equally interesting stage
of the case. Debarred from dressing as she would, she began to imagine,
as these two discovered, that she was being followed and admired and
addressed and annoyed by men, and that at her very door. Eager and
dangerous admirers lurked about the place. As the maiden aunt once
informed me, having wormed her way into Marguerite’s confidence, she
had been told that men ‘were wild’ about her and that go where she
would, and conduct herself however modestly and inconspicuously, still
they were inflamed.
“A little later both father and sister began to notice that on leaving
the house or returning to it she would invariably pause, if going out,
to look about first; if returning, to look back as though she were
expecting to see some one outside whom she either did or did not wish
to see. Not infrequently her comings-in were accompanied by something
like flight, so great a need to escape some presumably dangerous or
at least impetuous pursuer as to cause astonishment and even fear
for her. There would be a feverish, fumbled insertion of the key
from without, after which she would fairly jump in, at the same time
looking back with a nervous, perturbed glance. Once in she would almost
invariably pause and look back as though, having succeeded in eluding
her pursuer, she was still interested to see what he was like or what
he was doing, often going to the curtained windows of the front room to
peer out. And to her then confidante, this same aunt, she explained on
several occasions that she had ‘just been followed again’ all the way
from Broadway or Central Park West or somewhere, sometimes by a most
wonderful-looking gentleman, sometimes by a most loathsome brute. He
had seen her somewhere and had pursued her to her very room. Yet, brute
or gentleman, she was always interested to look back.
“When her father and aunt first noted this manifestation they had
troubled to inquire into it, looking into the street or even going so
far as to go to the door and look for the man, but there was no one, or
perchance some passing pedestrian or neighbor who most certainly did
not answer to the description of either handsome gentleman or brute.
Then sensibly they began to gather that this was an illusion. But by
now the thing had reached a stage where they began to feel genuine
alarm. Guests of the family were accused by her of attempting to flirt
with her, of making appealing remarks to her as they entered, and
neighbors of known polarity and conventional rigidity of presuming to
waylay her and forcing her to listen to their pleas. Thus her father
and aunt became convinced that it was no longer safe for her to be at
large. The family’s reputation was at stake; its record for freedom
from insanity about to be questioned.
“In due time, therefore, I was sent for, and regardless of how much
they dreaded a confession of hallucination here the confession was
made to me. I was asked to say what if anything could be done for
her, and if nothing, what was to be done with her. After that I was
permitted to talk to Marguerite whom of course I had long known, but
not as a specialist or as one called in for advice. Rather, I was
presented to her as visiting again as of yore, having dropped in after
a considerable absence. She seemed pleased to see me, only as I noticed
on this, as on all subsequent occasions, she seemed to wish, first,
not to stay long in my presence and more interesting still, as I soon
noted, to wish to keep her face, and even her profile, averted from me,
most especially her eyes and her glances. Anywhere, everywhere, save at
me she looked, and always with the purpose, as I could see, of averting
her glances.
“After she had left the room I found that this development was new
to the family. They had not noticed it before, and then it struck me
as odd. I suspected at once that there was some connections between
this and her disappointed love life. The devastating effect of lack of
success in love in youth had been too much for her. So this averted
glance appeared to me to have something to do with that. Fearing to
disturb or frighten her, and so alienate her, I chose to say nothing
but instead came again and again in order to familiarize her with my
presence, to cause her once more to take it as a matter of course.
And to enlist her interest and sympathy, I pretended that there was a
matter of taxes and some involved property that her father was helping
me to solve.
“And in order to insure her presence I came as a rule just before
dinner, staying some little time and talking with her. To guarantee
being alone with her I had her father and his sister remain out for a
few minutes after I arrived, so as to permit me to seem to wait. And
on these occasions I invented all sorts of excuses for coming into
conversation with her. On all of these visits I noticed that she still
kept her face from me. Having discussed various things with her, I
finally observed: ‘I notice, Marguerite, that whenever I come here now
you never look at me. Don’t you like me? You used to look at me, and
now you keep your face turned away. Why is that?’
“‘Oh, of course I like you, doctor, of course,’ she replied, ‘only,’
she paused, ‘well, I’ll tell you how it is: I don’t want to have the
same effect on you that I do on other men.’”
“She paused and I stared, much interested. ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite
understand, Marguerite,’ I said.
“‘Well, you see, it’s this way,’ she went on, ‘it’s my beauty. All
you men are alike you see: you can’t stand it. You would be just the
same as the rest. You would be wanting to flirt with me, too, and it
wouldn’t be your fault, but mine. You can’t help it. I know that now.
But I don’t want you to be following me like the rest of them, and you
would be if I looked at you as I do at the others.’ She had on at the
time a large hat, which evidently she had been trying on before I came,
and now she pulled it most coquettishly low over her face and then
sidled, laughingly, out of the room.
“When I saw and heard this,” he went on, “I was deeply moved instead
of being amused as some might imagine, for I recognized that this
was an instance of one of those kindly compensations in nature about
which I have been talking, some deep inherent wish on the part of some
overruling Providence perhaps to make life more reasonably endurable
for all of us. Here was this girl, sensitive and seeking, who had been
denied everything—or, rather, the one thing she most craved in life;
love. For years she had been compelled to sit by and see others have
all the attention and pleasures, while she had nothing—no pleasures,
no lovers. And because she had been denied them their import had been
exaggerated by her; their color and splendor intensified. She had
been crucified, after a fashion, until beauty and attention were all
that her mind cried for. And then, behold the mercy of the forces
about which we are talking! They diverted her mind in order to save
her from herself. They appeared at last to preserve her from complete
immolation, or so I see it. Life does not wish to crucify people, of
that I am sure. It lives on itself—as we see,—is “red of beak and claw”
as the phrase has it—and yet, in the deep, who knows there may be some
satisfactory explanation for that too—who can tell? At any rate, as
I see it basically, fundamentally, it is well-intentioned. Useless,
pointless torture had no real place in it; or at least so I think.” He
paused and stared, as though he had clinched his argument.
“Just the same, as you say,” I insisted, “it does live on itself, the
slaughter houses, the stockyards, the butcher shops, the germs that
live and fatten as people die. If you can get much comfort out of these
you are welcome.”
He paid no attention to me. Instead, he went on: “This is only a theory
of mine, but we know, for instance, that there is no such thing as
absolute evil, any more than there is absolute good. There is only
relative evil and relative good. What is good for or to me may be evil
to you, and vice versa, like a man who may be evil to you and good to
me.
“In the case of this girl I cannot believe that so vast a thing as
life, involving as it does, all the enormous forces and complexities,
would single out one little mite such as she deliberately and specially
for torture. On the contrary, I have faith to believe that the thing
is too wise and grand for that. But, according to my theory, the
machinery for creating things may not always run true. A spinner of
plans or fabrics wishes them to come forth perfect of course, arranges
a design and gathers all the colors and threads for a flawless result.
The machine may be well oiled. The engine perfectly geared. Every
precaution taken, and yet in the spinning here and there a thread will
snap, the strands become entangled, bits, sometimes whole segments
spoiled by one accident and another, but not intentionally. On the
other hand, there are these flaws, which come from where I know not,
of course, but are accidental, I am sure, not intended by the spinner.
At least I think so. They cause great pain. They cause the worst
disasters. Yet our great mother, Nature, the greatest spinner of all,
does what she can to right things—or so I wish to believe. Like the
spinner himself, she stops the machine, unites the broken strands, uses
all her ability to make things run smoothly once more. It is my wish
to believe that in this case, where a homely girl could not be made
into a beautiful one and youth could not be substituted for maturity,
still nature brought about what I look upon as a beneficent illusion,
a providential hallucination. Via insanity, Marguerite attained to all
the lovely things she had ever longed for. In her unreason she had her
beautiful face, her adoring cavaliers—they turned and followed her in
the streets. She was beautiful to all, to herself, and must hide her
loveliness in order to avert pain and disaster to others. How would you
explain that? As reasoned and malicious cruelty on the part of nature.
Or as a kindly intervention, a change of heart, a wish on the part of
nature or something to make amends to her for all that she suffered,
not to treat her or any of us too brutally or too unfairly? Or just
accident? How?”
He paused once more and gazed at me, as much as to say: “Explain
that, if you can.” I, in turn, stared, lost for the time being in
thoughts of this girl, for I was greatly impressed. This picture of
her, trying, in her deranged imaginings as to her beauty, to protect
others from herself, turning her face away from those who might suffer
because of her indifference, because she in her day had suffered from
the indifference of others, finding in hallucination, in her jumbled
fancies, the fulfilment of all her hopes, her dreams, was too sad. I
was too sad. I could not judge, and did not. Truly, truly, I thought, I
wish I might believe.
* * * * *
“Master, how may I know the Infinite, the Good, and attain to union
with it, as thou hast?” And the Master replied: “By desiring it
utterly.”