At Richard’s suggestion Walter moved into the older man’s stateroom. There the two men spent many hours together. Walter was glad enough not to have to appear among the others, and Richard wished to study the boy. It was not entirely a humanitarian interest. Here was a mental puzzle to study out, and just at the time when such studies were being made in the treatment of neurotics. Certain midnight talks with a good chum in the faculty of Columbia University were remembered; a lot of desultory reading of the Freudians came rushing into memory; and Roman bronzes fell to the background.
Walter’s antipathy to the mother underwent no change, except perhaps to increase in intensity. It hurt her pride to have to give up her position of influence and she did not do so without a struggle.
No one else save Richard, or perhaps a professor of the science of mind, could have talked with her on the science of abdication. As delicately as needful, for she had not yet recovered from the shock of Walter’s sudden attack, he made clear the psychological necessity of resigning if only temporarily.
“You arouse opposition. You make him strong to oppose you,” he said to her one late afternoon as they chatted on the upper deck. “No one knows why these mental storms arise, but it is always wise to guard against stirring them up. He is in earnest about doing away with himself if you try to control him again. He and I have talked it over and on that one point he is unshaken. You must frankly face the fact that your boy is a neurotic. Back of that is always the danger of self-destruction if thwarted. Fortunately, there is the possibility of sudden cure. In fact, there is more hope nowadays for mental ills than for physical ones. You can’t grow a new leg or a new lung, but you can completely remake the mind. Of course I don’t have to tell all this to you.”
“Are you a psychologist?” she asked. “I have never thought to ask about your occupation.”
“I?” he laughed. “Oh, no; not at all. I’m not anything.”
“You talk so well on so many subjects,” she speculated, “ceramics, Roman bronzes, psychology——”
“I’m a potterer,” he explained. “I just dabble here and there. One year I’m daft on old printing, or the growing of white blackberries, or multiple personality—oh, I’m jack of a dozen things. But I have one real accomplishment. I kept at it once until I could read an Assyrian cuneiform brick in the Metropolitan Museum! There’s an untranslated Assyrian dream-book in the British Museum that I am just itching to get at.”
“You mean that you just try a thing for a while and——”
“Not exactly. I keep a great number of things going. For instance, I’m tremendously interested in primitive religions, Shinto and ghost dances and sun worshippers and all that sort of thing; but I don’t keep at it all the time. I drop one interest and take up another; give them each a turn. Just now I’ve grown interested in your boy, but that’s an old interest: I’ve been thrown a lot with twisted-minded people, over in the West Side, New York, where I often live. There’s a little settlement of social workers, Legal Aid Society folks, socialists, new poets—oh, a delightful group. That district has some pretty odd cases, too; and I’ve been up all night with some of them.”