The woman who waited in the reception room did not have to wait very long, yet she was hard put to it to control herself while she sat there. She bit her under lip until the red marks of her teeth showed in the flesh, and she gripped the arms of her chair so tightly and with such useless expenditure of nervous force that through her gloves the knuckles of her hands exposed themselves in sharp high ridges.
Presently a manservant entered and, bowing, indicated mutely that his master would see her now. She fairly ran past him through the communicating door which he held open for her passage. As she entered the inner room it was as though her coming into it set all its orderliness awry. Only the ruddy-faced specialist, intrenched behind the big table in the middle of the floor, seemed unchanged. She halted on the other side of the table and bent across it toward him, her finger tips drumming a little tattoo upon its smooth surface. He did not speak even the briefest of greetings; perhaps he was minded not to speak. He waited for her to begin.
Doctor, she burst out, you must do something for me; you must give me medicine drugs narcotics anything that will soothe me. I did not sleep at all last night and hardly any the night before that. All night I sat up in bed or walked the floor trying to keep from screaming out trying to keep from going mad. I have been dressed for hours I made my maid stay up with me waiting for your office to open so that I might come to you. Here I am see me! See the state I am in! Doctor, you must do something for me and do it now, quickly, before I do something desperate!
She panted out the last words. She put her clenched hands to her bosom. Her haggard eyes glared into his; their glare made the carefully applied cosmetics upon her face seem a ghastly mask.
I have already prescribed for you, madam, the doctor said. I told you that what you mainly needed was rest complete and absolute rest.
Rest? Rest! How can I rest? What chance is there for me to rest? I cant rest! If I try to rest I begin to think and then it is worse than ever. I must keep on the go. Something drives me on something inside me, here to go and go, and to keep on going until I drop. Oh, doctor, you dont know what I suffer what I have to endure. No one knows what I have to endure. No one understands. My husband doesnt understand me my children do not, nor my friends.
Friends? I have no friends. I cant get on with any one I quarrel with every one. I know I am sick, that I am irritable and out-of-sorts sometimes. And I know that I am self-willed and want my own way. But Ive always been self-willed; its a part of my nature. And Ive always had my own way. They should appreciate that. But they dont. They cross me. At every turn somebody crosses me. The whole world seems in a conspiracy to deny me what I want.
It cant be my fault always that I am forever quarrelling with people with my own family; with my husbands family; with every one who crosses my path. I tell you they dont understand me, doctor. They dont make allowances for my condition. If they would only make allowances! And they dont give me any consideration. I cant stand it, doctor! I cant go on like this any longer. Please please, doctor, do something for me!
Mounting hysteria edged her voice with a sharpened, almost a vulgar shrillness. The austere and studied reserve of her class a reserve that is part of it poise and the rest of it pose dropped away from her like a discarded garment, and before her physician she revealed herself nakedly for what she was a creature with the passions, the forwardness and the selfishness of a spoiled and sickly child; and, on top of these, superimposed and piled up, adult impulses, adult appetites, adult petulance, adult capacity for misery.
I told you, he said, to go away. I thought, until my man brought me your name a bit ago, that you had gone. Weeks ago I told you that travel might help you not the sort of travel to which you have been used, but a different sort travel in the quiet places, out of the beaten path, and rest. I told you the same thing again less than a week ago.
But where? she demanded. Where am I to go? Tell me that! I have been everywhere I have seen everything. What is there left for me to see in the world? What is there in the world that is worth seeing? You told me before there was nothing organically wrong with me, nothing fundamentally wrong with my body. Then it must be my mind, and travel couldnt cure a mind in the state that mine is in. How can I rest when I am so distracted, when small things upset me so, when
In the midst of this new outburst she broke off. Her eyes, wandering from his as she pumped herself up toward a frenzy, were focused now upon some object behind him. She pointed toward it.
I never saw that before, she said. It wasnt there when I was here last.
He swung about in his chair, its spiral creaking under his weight.
No, he said; you never saw that before. It came into my possession only a day or two ago. It is a
She broke in on him.
What a wonderful face! she said. What beauty there is in it what peace! I think that is what made me notice it the peace that is in it. Oh, if I could only be like that! Doctor, the being to whom that face belonged must have had everything worth having. And to think there can be such beings in this world beings so blessed, so happy while I I
Tears of self-pity came into her eyes. She was slipping back again into her former mood. With his gaze he caught and held hers, exerting all his will to hold it. A brother psychologist seeing him in that moment would have said that to this man a possible way out of a dilemma had come would have said that an inspiration suddenly had visited him.
Perhaps you would like to see it at closer range, he said, still steadfastly regarding her. There is a story regarding it a story that might interest you, madam.
He rose from his place, crossed the room and, reaching up, took down a plaster cast of a face that rested upright against the broad low moulding that ran along his walls on two sides.
As he brought it to her he saw that she had taken a chair. Her figure was relaxed from its recent rigidness. Her elbows were upon the tabletop. He put the cast into her gloved hands and reseated himself. She held it before her at arms length, and one gloved hand went over its surface almost caressingly.
It is wonderful! she said. I never saw such an expression on any human face why, it is soothing to me just to look at it. Doctor, where did you get it? Who was the original of it or dont you know? What living creature sat for the artist who made it?
No living creature sat for it, he said slowly.
Oh! she said disappointedly. Well, then, what artist had the imagination to conjure up such a conception?
No artist conjured it up, he told her.
Then how-
That, madam, he said, is a death mask.
A death mask! Her tone was incredulous. A death mask, doctor?
Yes, madam a death mask. See, the eyes are closed are half closed, anyway.
Do you mean to tell me that death can leave such an expression on any face? How could
She broke off, staring incredulously at the thing.
That is what makes the story I mean to tell you, he said if you care to hear it?
Of course I want to hear it. Her manner was insistent, impatient, demanding almost. Please go on.
He kept her in suspense a moment or two; and so they both sat, he squinting up at the ceiling as though marshalling a narrative in its proper sequence in his mind, she holding fast to the disked shape of white plaster. At length he began, speaking slowly.
That is what makes the story I mean to tell you, he said if you care to hear it?
Of course I want to hear it. Her manner was insistent, impatient, demanding almost. Please go on.
He kept her in suspense a moment or two; and so they both sat, he squinting up at the ceiling as though marshalling a narrative in its proper sequence in his mind, she holding fast to the disked shape of white plaster. At length he began, speaking slowly.
Here is the story, he said: A few weeks ago an acquaintance of mine a fellow physician told me of a case he thought might interest me. Primarily it was a surgical case, and I, as perhaps you know, do not practise surgery; but there was another aspect of it that did have a direct and personal appeal for me.
It seems that some weeks before there had been put into his hands for treatment a man a young man who was stone-deaf and stone-blind, and whose senses of taste and of smell were greatly affected perhaps I should say impaired. He could speak, more or less imperfectly, and his sense of touch was good; in fact, better than with ordinary mortals. These two faculties alone remained to him. He had been afflicted so from childhood; the attack, or the disease, which left him in this state had come upon him very early, before his mind had registered very many sensible impressions.
Speech and feeling these really were what remained intact. Yet his intelligence, considering these handicaps, was above the average, and his body was healthy, and his temperament, in the main, sanguine. Practically all his life he had been in an asylum a charity institution. Until chance brought him to the attention of this acquaintance of mine it had seemed highly probable that he would spend the rest of his life in this institution.
The physicians there regarded his case as hopeless. They were conscientious men these physicians and they were not lacking in sympathy, I think; but their hands and their thoughts were concerned with their duties, and perhaps mind you, I say perhaps perhaps an individual case more or less did not mean to them what it means to the physician in private practice. You understand? So this young man, who was well formed physically, who was normal in his mental aspects, seemed to be doomed to serve a life sentence inside walls of utter darkness and utter silence.
Well, this man came under the attention of the surgeon I have mentioned. Possibly because it seemed so hopeless, the case interested the surgeon. He made up his mind that the affliction afflictions rather were not congenital, not incurable. He made up his mind that a tumorous growth on the brain was responsible for the present state of the victim. And he made up his mind that an operation a delicate and a risky and a difficult operation might bring about a cure. If the operation failed the subject would pass from the silence and the blackness he now endured into a silence and a blackness which many of us, similarly placed, would find preferable. He would die quickly and painlessly. If the operation succeeded he probably would have back all his faculties he would begin really to live. The surgeon was willing to take the chance, to assume the responsibility.
The other man was willing to take his chance too. Both of them took it. The operation was performed and it was a success. The man lived through it, and when he was lifted off the table my friend had every reason to believe in fact, to know as surely as a man whose business is tampering with the human organism can know anything that before very long this man, who had walked all his days in darkness, lacking taste and smell, and hearing no sound, would have back all that his afflictions had denied him.
To my friend, the surgeon, it seemed likely that I, as a person concerned to a degree in psychologic manifestations and psychologic phenomena, would be glad of the opportunity to be present at the hour when this man, through his eyes, his ears, his tongue and his palate, first registered intelligible and actual impressions. And I was glad of the opportunity. Almost it would be like witnessing the rebirth of a human being; certainly it would be witnessing the mental awakening, through physical mediums, of a human soul.
At first hand I would see what this world, to which you and I are accustomed and of which some of us have grown weary, meant to one who had been so completely, so utterly shut out from that world through all the more impressionable years of his life. Naturally I was enormously interested to hear what he might say, to see what he might do in the hour of his reawakening and re-creation.
So I went with the surgeon on the day appointed by him for testing the success of his operation. Only five of us were present the man himself, the surgeon who had cured him, two others and myself. Until that hour and for every hour since he had come out from under the ether, the patients eyes had been bandaged to shut out light, and his ears had been muffled to shut out sounds, and he had been fed on liquid mixtures administered artificially.
Why? asked the woman, interrupting for the first time.
For a moment the doctor hesitated. Then he went on smoothly to explain:
You see, they feared the sudden shock to senses and to organs made sensitive by long disuse until he had completely rallied from the operation. So they had hooded his eyes and his ears.
But food why couldnt he have eaten solid food before this? she insisted. That is what I mean.
Oh, that? he said, and again he halted for an instant. That was done largely on my account. I think the surgeon wanted the test to be complete at one time and not developed in parts. You understand, dont you?
She nodded. And he continued, watching her face intently as he proceeded:
So, first of all, we led him into a partly darkened room and sat him down at a table; and we gave him food very simple food a glass of cold water; a piece of bread, buttered; a baked Irish potato, with butter and salt upon it that was all. We stood about him watching him as he tasted of the things we put before him for it was really the first time he had ever properly tasted anything.
Madam, if I live to be a hundred years old, I shall never forget the look that came into his face then. Even though he lacked the words to express himself, as you and I with our greater vocabularies might conceivably have expressed ourselves had such an experience come to us, I knew that to him the bread was ambrosia and the water was nectar.
He didnt wolf the food down as I had rather expected he might. He ate it slowly, extracting the flavour from every crumb of it. And the water he took in sips, allowing it to trickle down his throat, drop by drop almost. And then he spoke to us, touching the bread and the potato and the water glass. Mind you, I am reproducing the sense of what he said rather than his exact words. He said:
What is this and this and this? What are these delicious things you have given me to eat? And what is this exquisite drink I have swallowed?
We told him and he seemed not to believe it at first. He said:
Why, I have handled such things as these often. I have taken them up in my hands a thousand times and I have swallowed them. I should have known what they were by the touch of my fingers but the taste of them deceived me. Can it be possible that these things are common things that even poor people can feast upon such meals as this which I am eating? Can it even be possible that there is food within the reach of ordinary mortals which has a finer zest than this?
And when his friend, the surgeon, told him Yes told him Yes many times and in many ways still he seemed loath to believe it. When he had finished, to the last scrap of the potato skin and the last morsel of the bread crust and the last drop in the glass, he bowed his head and outspread his hands before him as though returning thanks for a glorious benefaction.