AN INTRACTABLE PATIENT.
When we were settled down to our pipes, I said, "Is this the way you treat the friends of your youth, when they entrust life and limb to your hospitality?"
"I give 'em the best I've got: sorry if it doesn't suit. There's no Delmonico's round the corner, here. What's the matter with you, old man?"
"O, it's not your housekeeping: that's all right. But why did you lead me such a dance, and get me lost in that unconscionable doghole of a wilderness?"
"Did you ever take so many fish out of a brook in one day before? No, of course you didn't. Well, that's why. I told you it would be a rough expedition; but I thought you came here to rough it. You didn't expect balls and a casino, did you? You were here last May."
"Last May I saw nothing as bad as this to-day. You haven't been playing it on me, I hope? Jim, have you got any grudge against me?"
"What should I have? You're deucedly suspicious and sensitive—far more so than I was with you. I believe I let you play on me to your heart's content, and never complained—did I?"
[150] "Jim, I don't like this. There's a change in you: Hodge said so, and I didn't believe him. You're not the same man."
"O, we all change—from year to year, and from day to day. But I ought never to have left these woods, Bob, and that's the truth. You should have let me stay here as I was."
"I meant it in all kindness, for your good, Jim. Surely you'll do me the justice to acknowledge that."
"No doubt. But your philanthropic experiments are apt to be damnably expensive to the patient."
"You couldn't be much worse than you were, according to your own account. Any change ought to have been for the better."
"That was your assumption. Do I strike you as being changed for the better?"
"Well, no, you don't—not to put too fine a point upon it."
He certainly does not. His whole manner is altered. His former gentleness has given way to rough harshness. You have seen how he treats me. It may be his best, as he says; if so, his best is far from good. His bitterness used to be, if I may say so, in the abstract, and leveled against abstractions; now it seems to have a painfully concrete character and aim. His estrangement from the scheme of things, or from his kind at least, was purely intellectual, leaving his heart no more affected than the heart usually is by brain-disorders; now it is moral. He is like a man tormented by remorse, or regrets as savage. But I think I know a cure for his complaint.
After a pause he said, "I don't want to blame you, Bob, and I don't propose to whine. Nor was it any great matter what came to me, wherever it might come from. I thought I was done with the world, and had nothing to fear from it, except being bored and disgusted. There was only one thing I cared about, and that I supposed I could keep. I was mistaken. [151] It was my little ewe lamb—all I had; and they took it from me."
"I thought your live stock was confined to dogs, and a cow, and the tomcat—by the way, I don't see him any more. I didn't know you went into sheep. Was Tommy the ewe-lamb, and did the dogs play Nathan and David with him?"
This I said, thinking to cheer him up a bit; but he only scowled. Really, I must remember Mabel's caution about telling the wrong stories and laughing in the wrong places. "Well, Jim, what was 'it' that you valued so, and who were 'they' who took it away?"
"The prince of the power of the air; the spirit that walks in darkness, and rules in the children thereof. The beautiful order of things generally, and their incurable depravity. All these are one, and the name doesn't matter. If you urged me to it, I might say that you had played a very passable David to my Uriah."
"Who—I? I'm not a sheep-stealer. What would I want to hurt you for? Jim, you're joking, and it's a joke of doubtful taste."
"Do I look like it? You might find a joke in this: you can find them everywhere. I can't."
"As I told you, you take Life too seriously. If you will be more specific, and tell me what you have lost, perhaps I can help you to find it."
"Some losses are irrecoverable. You'd better let it alone, Bob; you'd better have let me alone before, as I've said. You mean well enough; but it's ill meddling with another man's life. You don't know what responsibility you take, or what effect you may produce. I don't say that it's the worst of all possible worlds, but it is such that each of us had best go his own way, and keep clear of the others. When one forgets that safe rule, and mixes with his kind, only harm seems to come of it."
"If that is so, I might better have staid at [152] home now. Methinks your written hand is different from your spoken. I mean—"
"O yes, when I write I try to come out of myself and be decently civil; and so I should to a chance visitor for five minutes, or an hour maybe. But I can't keep it up all day—not to say for a week. You'll have to see the facts, and bear with them. I don't want to be rough on you; but I'm not myself—or not what I was before, or supposed myself to be. It's all in the plan, no doubt; we are fulfilling the beneficent intentions of Nature. Perhaps I'm breaking down, and the end is not so far off as we thought. If so, so much the better: we'll escape that sad old age you prophesied."
Now I am not lacking in humanity, but it does not afflict me as it did six months ago to hear Jim go on in this way. I know what is the matter with him now, and what he is driving at, though I must assume ignorance for a while yet. The patient must tell his symptoms, and then the doctor will give him the physic he needs, and proceed to make a new man of him. That is what I am after now, and the good work must not be spoiled by undue haste. So I put on a decorous air of sympathy, and said,
"That's all bosh, you know. If anything is the matter with you physically, I ought to hear about it; but I don't believe there is. As for the mind, we are all subject to gloomy moods and periods of depression; but they pass, Jim—they pass. You believed in friendship before; hadn't you better tell me what you think ails you?"
"I can't talk about it, except in this roundabout way: what's the use? Best keep to broad principles: the particular case only illustrates the general law. I knew it of old: what business had I to expose myself again? What would you do with a child who will keep on playing about moving cars, or mill machinery? Let him fall under the wheels, and rid the earth of an idiot."
[153] "O no: pull him out in time, and he'll learn better. Well, Jim, you might at least tell me what hand I had in this catastrophe."
"O, none, none whatever: how should you? You never laid any plots for me, and used me for your mirth. You never devised an elaborately concealed ambush, and smoothed it over till I was in the snare. That would be foreign to your open and candid nature. It is very good fun to practice on unsuspecting innocence; but you are far above that."
"See here, Hartman: you talk as if my house were a den of iniquity. If so, I was not aware of it till now. Your ill opinion has not thus far been reciprocated. We entertain none but kind feelings toward you: we all regretted your hasty departure. You were received as a friend, and treated as such, I believe. My wife and sister often speak of you: you could command their fullest sympathy in this, or any trouble, real or imaginary."
"That I never doubted: I owe them nothing but pleasant memories, and thankful good will.—You need not stare at me so: I make no charges, and imply none.—Well, if you must have it, I can say that every member of your family has my absolute respect,—down to the twins; do you understand? If I have any grudge, it is toward you alone."
It was plain that he forced himself to say this—or some of it—as if it were coming perilously near a name he could not utter. He is having his bad time now, as I had mine last week. It is his own fault: he has no need to be so censorious. He had to say what he did, or there would be trouble: some things a man cannot stand, and my best friend would be my friend no longer, if he ventured to reflect upon the Princess.
"I'm glad to hear you say so: the difficulty is simple then, and easily settled. You've got no pistols, of course, and I didn't bring mine. I'll take your rifle, and you can borrow Hodge's [154] old shotgun: if it bursts, it won't be much loss—only you mustn't come too near me with it. There's no danger of interference from the police up here, I judge? But I say, what shall we do for a surgeon?"
"There you go again, turning everything into a jest. Can you never be serious, man?"
"Try to say something original, James: that is stale. Jane asks me that about six times a day, and Mabel frequently, and—and the others. I was serious with you just now, or nearly: had I been entirely so, I might have knocked the top of your head off, and then they would have blamed me at home. You see, they think you are more of a man than you show yourself. To be serious all the time is the most serious mistake one can make in life; and I want no worse example than you. When I go back to town I shall write the Decline and Fall of an Alleged Seeker after Truth, who missed it by taking things too seriously. You are too stiff and narrow and rigid and dogmatic: you take one point of view and stick to it like grim death. You can't get at Truth in that way."
"I suppose you would stand on your head and look at it upside down, and then turn a back somersault and view it from between your legs."
"You express it inelegantly, but you have caught the idea. Truth is not a half pound package done up in brown paper and permanently deposited in one corner of the pantry shelf; she is big and various and active. While you have your head fixed in the iron grip and are staring at the sign 'Terms Cash,' she is off to the other side of the room—and you don't make a good picture at all in that constrained attitude. Your mind has got to be nimble and unbiassed if you want to overtake her, because she is always changing: that is, she appears in new and—to you—unexpected places. I gave you a hint of this in May, and another last summer, but you seem to have forgotten it. O, [155] I could sit here all night and explain it to you, if you were in the right frame of mind."
"No doubt: happily I am not. What has this to do with your defence of buffoonery, and apotheosis of clowns and pantomimes?"
"A pantomime is a very good thing in its way. But that is your illustration; I would rather say opera bouffe, which is probably the truest copy of Life—if we were limited to one kind. But we are not: I tell you, we must have all sorts. There is tragedy in Life, and comedy—that more especially; a little of the other goes a long way. But they are always mixed—not kept apart, and one alone taken in large and frequent doses, after your fashion. Shakespeare understood his business pretty well; though, if I had been he, I would have put in more of those light and graceful touches which hit us where we live, and make the whole world kin."
"Like the Dromios, or the Carriers in Henry Fourth."
"Or the Gravediggers; they are more to your purpose. I want you to see that Humor is the general solvent and reconciler, the key that opens most locks: a feeling for it, well developed, would be money in your pocket. Things don't go to suit you, and you think your powers of the air are frowning, the universe a vault, and the canopy a funeral pall: perhaps the powers are only laughing at you, and want you to smile with them. If you could do that, it would let in light on your darkness. Any situation, properly viewed, has its amusing elements: if you ignore them, you fail to understand the whole. What did Heine say about his irregular Latin nouns? That his knowledge of them, in many a gloomy hour, supplied much inward consolation and delight. You ought to read him more, Jim."
"And Josh Billings, and Bill Nye. Well, that's enough of your wisdom for to-night. [156] We must arrange for to-morrow. Are you up to another scramble?"
"Not like to-day's. Let's take in some decent scenery along with the trout."
"There is a wild gorge ten miles off, with a brook in it. We can take Hodge's mare, put up at a house, and work down the ravine. It's not so bad as the last place, nor so good for fish." I agreed, and we went to bed.
You may think I am humoring Hartman too much, and letting him shirk the subject. But I have a week—more if necessary—and I don't want to be too hard on him. He'll thaw out by degrees: so long as he doesn't blame Clarice, it is all right. He has got my idea about the way to discover Truth now, and it will work in his brain, and soften him. I know Jim: he never seems to take hold at first, but he comes round in time. You just wait, and you will see whether I know what I am about.