There were no immediate family ties to interfere with the carrying-out of what seemed to his friends to be rather quixotic ideas. There may have been some youthful romance, but, if so, no one ever succeeded in learning anything of it from him.
“It is all perfectly simple,” he once good-naturedly replied to a persistent relative. “The girls I was willing to marry would not have me, and those who would have me I was not willing to marry. I used to think that I would become more attractive as I grew older, but I have given up that idea now. Once I tried to rub a freckle off with sand-paper and pumice-stone and found blood under the skin; but the freckle—the same old freckle—is there to this day.”
His devotion to women in the composite was consistent and sincere; the fondness which existed between himself and his brother’s family was such that his departure had left a distinct void, and his visits home were events circled with red ink in the family calendar. He enjoyed these visits no less than they; but with never more than a day or two of warning he would announce his intention of leaving for Egypt or India or some spot more or less remote in his quest for the unexpected. To the reproaches which were levelled at him, he replied, with a smile which defied controversy:
“I am just as sorry not to be with you all as you can possibly be to have me away; but I have educated myself to the separation, and have thus overcome the necessity for personal propinquity.”
On that first trip around the world Uncle Peabody found one of his ideals, although he did not realize its vast importance until several years later. Japan appealed to him, and the longer he remained there the more impressed he became with certain of the national characteristics. First of all, he marvelled at the evenness of temper which the people displayed, at their endurance, their patience. He watched the carefulness with which they weighed the importance of each problem before accepting its responsibility, and their utter abandon in carrying it through when once undertaken. This was twenty years before the Russo-Japanese war, and he had come among them with the existing Occidental estimate of their paganism and barbarity. It may have been a species of incredulity leading to curiosity which induced him to remain among them, but as a result of his sojourn he discovered that they were philosophers rather than fatalists, geniuses rather than barbarians.
He questioned his new hosts, when he came to know them better, and was told quite seriously and quite naturally that they never became angry, because anger produced poison in the system and retarded digestion; that upon digestion depended health; that upon health depended happiness, and upon happiness depended personal efficiency and life itself. They explained that forethought was one of the cardinal factors of their creed, but added that its antithesis, fear-thought, was equally important as an element to be eliminated. They called his attention to the fact that they did not live upon what they ate, but upon what they digested, and that by masticating their food more thoroughly than he did they secured from the smaller quantity the same amount of nourishment without needlessly overloading their systems with undigested food which could not possibly be assimilated.
This last theory did not altogether appeal to Peabody Cartwright at first. His friends at the Somerset Club still held memories of his epicurean proclivities, and they were not weary even yet of recalling the time when he had won a goodly wager by naming, blindfolded, five different vintages of Burgundy and Bordeaux. But the more he thought it over the more convinced he became that the something to which he had promised to give a chance had really happened to him. He pondered, he experimented—but he still continued to eat larger quantities of food than the Japanese.
A year later he was in Italy, and in Venice Mr. Cartwright suddenly discovered that he had found the geographical centre of the civilized world. With Venice as the starting-point, one could reach London or Constantinople, St. Petersburg or New York, with equal exertion. Venice, therefore, became his adopted home, although it could claim no more of his presence than any one of a dozen other cities in the four quarters of the globe. During the twenty years, he had succeeded in making himself a part of each one—had become a veritable citizen of the world, but by no means a man without a country.
Italy served to drive home the truths which Japan had first shown him. Three years after his experience there, a dingy, second-hand book-store in Florence had placed him in possession of Luigi Cornaro’s Discorsi della Vita Sobria. He read it with amazement. Here in his hand, written by a Venetian nobleman more than three hundred years before, at the age of eighty-three, was the text-book of the theories of life which he had accepted from the Japanese as new and untried except among this alien people! It gave him a start, and he journeyed to Turin, Berne, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, London, St. Petersburg, and even back to Boston, seeking to interest the famous physiologists in his discovery, which he believed was destined to exterminate disease and to transform those practising the medical profession into hygienic engineers.
Mr. Cartwright’s name and personality preserved him from a sanitarium, but his theories as to self-control, forethought, and fear-thought received ample opportunity for personal experiment. He was as tenacious as if his future depended upon the outcome. A good-natured indulgence here, and an incredulous sympathy there, gave him his first opportunities for demonstration. He not only drew upon his fortune, but freely contributed himself as a subject for experiment. It had been slow, but he had learned patience from the Japanese. Disbelief gradually changed into doubt, doubt into question, question into half-belief, and half-belief into conviction. Quietly, surely, his own faith was assimilated by those high in the physiological ranks, and almost against their will, and before they realized the importance of their concessions, he had forced them to prove him right by their own analyses.