It is curious how the human mind works—curious and terrible. Seven months after my wife’s death, when we had put aside the mourning and had resumed our ordinary course of life, I suddenly began to think of her as I was shaving. “I wonder what brought her into my mind?” said I to myself, and I decided that my face with the white stubble on its ridges had suggested my familiar black devil—“the end.” But one day several months later, as I was driving from my office to lunch at a directors’ meeting, I happened to notice the lower part of my face in the small mirror in the brougham.
My attention became riveted upon the line of my mouth, thin and firm and straight—with a queer sudden downward dip at the left corner.
“Strange!” said I to myself; “I never noticed that before.”
Then I remembered I had noticed it before, once before and only once—the morning when I was shaving and thought of my wife and “the end.” I had noticed it then and—had I noticed it no morning since because it had disappeared? Or had it been there all along, and had my mind seen it and hidden the fact from me? When one has a well-trained, obedient mind, it can and will hide from him almost anything he would find disagreeable or inconvenient to know.
I tried to straighten that line, but, no matter how I twisted my mouth, the drop at the left corner remained. I caught sight of my eyes in the mirror and found myself staring into the depth of a Something which had thus trapped me into letting it mock me. When my carriage stopped at the Postal Telegraph Building, I was so weak that I could hardly drag myself across the sidewalk and into the elevator. As I was shaving the next morning I dared not look myself in the eyes. But there was the droop, and—yes—a droop of the left eyelid! I gave an involuntary cry—the razor cut me, and dropped to the floor. My valet rushed in. “I—I only cut myself,” I stammered, apologetically. For the first time in my life I was afraid of a human being, from pure terror of what he might see and think.
How I have suffered in the three weeks that have passed since then! Day and night, moment by moment, almost second by second, I find myself listening for a footstep. Now I fancy I hear it, and the icy sweat bursts from every pore; now I realise that I only imagined those stealthy, shuffling, hideously creeping sounds coming along the floor toward me from behind, and I give a gasp of relief.
What a mockery it all is! What a fool’s life I have led! When I am not listening, I am fiercely hating these people round me. They are listening, too—listening eagerly—yes, even my own children. I can see from their furtive glances into my face that they, too, have seen the droop in the line that was straight, the growing weakness in the eye that never quailed. It is frightful, this being gently waited on and soothingly spoken to and patiently borne with—as his gaolers treat a man who is to be shot or hanged next sunrise.
Yet I dare not resent it. I can only cower and suffer.
My crown is slipping from me. No, worse—it is I that am slipping from it. It remains; I, its master, must go. I—its master? How it has tricked me! I have been its slave; it is weary of me; it is about to cast me off.
It has been years since any one has said “must” to me. I had forgotten what a hideous word it is. And if one cannot resent it, cannot resist it! All to whom I have said “must” are revenged.