But A Man—ugh! I saw him first in a nightmare when I was six. He wore a black Prince Albert, and on his head three high hats jammed down one on top of the other. He stood on the cone of a hill, black as a coal against the red light of fires in the rear. From under his three hats he grinned at me, and on that black hill, against that lurid sky, he danced and danced and danced. He frightens me still. It is since then that Night and A Man have been my crown of terrors. A Man lurks in every darkened doorway, stretches an arm from every tree trunk, pursues me,—pat, pat, pat,—and fades into the common light of lamp and fire only when I am safely under my own roof-tree. Even in the daytime, A Man never deserts me: he haunts the solitary country lanes, lush and lovely with spring; he pops out upon me from mountain woods; on the stretches of beach he lurks just around the point. He is always there; at least, I suppose he is, for I never am—alone.
By day, A Man is a leering horror, but at night he becomes, like that figure in my dream, pure devil. I am a suburbanite, and as I said before, a lady, a laboring lady. This is why I find myself not infrequently alone at night. The alarm set a-quiver when I descend from the social, bright-lit, suburban car and plunge forth into the dark is something that custom cannot stale. Yet sometimes the spell of the night is as a buckler against fear, making me wonder if solitude is really terror, genuine solitude, solitude belonging to me, and not to A Man. I remember one early winter evening, white with a recent snowfall; there had been an ice storm, and our trees were all incased, each tiniest twig, and the full moon rode low: I forgot A Man, in every nerve I was glad to be alone, but hark, a step in the distance, and earth again!
It is worth some study, the sensation of that approaching step, that emerging shadow,—bifurcated or petticoated, two feet or four? I am never afraid of two men: neither actually nor grammatically can A Man be two. Joseph and the Babes in the Wood for precedent, dissension steps in between violence and its victim so soon as the aggressive party is multiplied by even two. And as for a group of men, whatever their caste or condition, however socially uncouth, by mere virtue of numbers they become a protection rather than a peril; by mere aggregate of protective instinct, A Man sufficiently multiplied equals Men (supra).
In addition to these distinctions in regard to the number of your potential aggressor, there are also distinctions geographic and geometric. I appeal to any lady of my sex and condition, whether there is not the greatest possible difference in amount of peril to be inferred between the man who is walking in front of you on a lonely street, and the man who is walking behind. If a man paces on soberly and regularly some few discreet rods ahead, straightway he is enhaloed with succor and salvation,—you are safe, you need only to call him in your need, and he will save. But should he go more slowly, fall behind, then in the very instant of passing you this same protecting saint becomes decanonized, and worse. There is nothing so suspicious as this dropping behind. True, you preserve a bold back, walk no faster,—note, sir, my valiancy, my unconcern,—but still your knee crooks for flight, and your vocal cords contract for that scream you wonder if you could ever really utter. A corresponding transformation in moral intention, blackguard and chevalier, is possible for the man in your rear. On a recent evening I was hurrying home along the solitary street—steps behind! Flying, pursuing steps! Nearer, nearer! Upon me, and my heart sickened and stopped beating! But past me, fleeting on and on, disappearing, oh, too swiftly! For as he left me so quickly again to solitude, I could hardly resist an impulse to gather up my skirts and scamper after, after my retreating protector. I think he made his train.
I have been at some pains to prove the second of my introductory assertions. The reason I have not tried to prove the first is explained by the difference between the essay and polite society. In polite society, one is under the obligation of confessing one’s virtues, not blatantly, but none the less persistently, wearily,—one’s dogging old virtues, as if it were not enough of a bore to live with them in private without having to be seen with them in public. In the essay one may have the exquisite pleasure of confessing one’s vices. In society I must be a lady; in the essay I may be, as here and now, a coward.
VII
In Sickness and in Health
I HAVE been sick, but not utterly,—a tooth. I am in the convalescent’s mood of confidence and confession; therefore, I write in haste, for in health I am buoyant and amiable, and not fluently penitent; indeed, there is little then to be penitent about. For a week I have been very unpleasant, and the circumstance leads to remarks on the moral disintegration attendant upon indisposition. I speak of petty disorders, for illnesses of dramatic magnitude, a run of typhoid for instance, sometimes tend to spiritual upbuilding,—at least, it is so demonstrated in fiction. Doubtless the pawing of the white horse in the dooryard has a soothing effect upon the patient’s nerves, but illnesses in which one has not the comfort of composing one’s epitaph are not composing to the soul. The lesser ailments make appalling holes in our integrity: myself last week threw a teaspoon at my most immediate forbear. Ferocious, but it was the elemental ferocity of suffering. It is a fact, belonging rather to the science of psychology than of medicine, that small sicknesses hurt more than big ones. I appeal to all connoisseurs in invalidism whether a tooth, an ear, an ankle, are not more direct in their methods of torture than pneumonia, smallpox, or appendicitis. Believing this, I have always had much sympathy for the vilified hero of a certain novelette of my acquaintance; in this romance, the husband has a tooth; the wife, a heart,—a literal heart, mechanical, physiological. Everybody knows which suffered more, and yet because the gentleman got a little crusty over a most outrageous molar, how joyously the author trounced him through page after page! I am hot with indignation. There ought to be a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Creations. Manufacturers of heroes and heroines should not be allowed to flay and burn and quarter so wantonly as they do; a humane reading public should take from them the prerogative of so unnatural a parenthood.
This one man should have been forgiven; he had a toothache, and non-fatal illnesses may make monsters of the meekest of us; but fortunately, the illness being temporary, so is the monster. Only the recollection is humiliating; I am recovered, but I shudder at the legion so recently cast out of me. Sickness sets free all the processes of atavism, and whirls us back into savagery at a breathless rate. The first bit of baggage we leave behind us on this rapid return journey is family affection. Last week my kin stood about my couch day and night with poultices and sympathy in their hands. I took the poultices and tossed back evil words out of my mouth. I looked upon my relatives with frankest loathing. Why? Their insulting forbearance, their aggressive meekness, their poor-sufferer-here-is-my-other-cheek attitude stirred the foundations of my bile. Their serene patience provoked my utmost effort to destroy it, and I was impotent; their invulnerability was an affront to my powers of invention. My own possibilities of vituperation were only less surprising to me than the endurance of the abused. And all the time that I listened to my own reviling tongue, my self-respect was ebbing from me most uncomfortably,—and it was all their fault.
A concomitant loss in this dissolving of our civilization is that of the sense of humor. Being so recently returned from barbarism and its beyond, I can confidently assert that the ape and the savage, while they may be laughable, do not laugh. In the sickroom of the not very sick, the brightest witticisms seem only studied banalities. There is no comedy in the incidents of ministration; it is all unrelieved tragedy. Yet it is not the humorous, but the humor that is lacking, for frequently the situations are appreciated at recovery, and furnish us amusement at intervals for a lifetime. I doubt whether this suspension of the processes of humor could be established in the case of serious illness, admitting of disastrous outcome. There are soldiers a-plenty who have jested at their wounds, and instances enough on record where a timely jest or a merry incident has saved the day. I cite one such situation. A husband lay at death’s door, and the door was ajar. It was midnight, and the wife watched. Suddenly the patient seemed to be sinking, slipping from her. She put the hartshorn bottle to his nostrils, but he could smell nothing. Both were terrified as they realized the import of this. Then the wife glancing down discovered that the bottle contained witch-hazel. The man laughed—and lived.
In serious illness there is perhaps sometimes a positive stimulus to the comic sensibilities; there is such a thing as dying game, or the fight for life may be worth some bravado. But imagine feeling gamy with tonsillitis or a felon on your finger; there is absolutely no histrionic appeal. If your sickness has no spice of fatality, you might just as well give up; you won’t see the light of humor again until you recover.