No love in our heart, no humor in our head, there is another evil of savagery thrust upon us by illness. It is the sudden acquisition of personality by inanimate objects. What possibilities of abusive conduct lurk within the four walls of a room yesterday, in health, perfectly inoffensive! What malevolence in the wall-paper! Such a sneaking, underhand, leering pattern for curtains with any pretensions to respectability! How tipsy the books look, crowding and pushing themselves askew for very perversity! No amount of chastisement will make the pillows conduct themselves comfortably. There is something about the billows of that malicious counterpane that makes me think of the oozy, oily, shiny unpleasantness of the ocean when the sailboat is becalmed. I am as much at the mercy of my furniture as any Fiji before his fetish.
Thus sickness reduces us to cave-dwellers or gorillas rampant, by perhaps just a day of pain no greater in compass than one’s little finger-nail,—soulful, strenuous, high-stepping beings though we are! Sad enough to think about; yet on the other hand, of all insupportables, the people whom sickness makes saints are the most contemptible. I know men and ladies, in health normal, human, unworthy, likable,—but give them so much as a cold in the head, and at once their smile smacks of Heaven, and their eyes are uplift with the watery mysticism of those about to be canonized. When a small boy I know voluntarily allows his younger sister a canter on his rocking-horse, his nurse immediately applies red flannel and turpentine; generosity with him is a sure presage of sore throat. I have seen great strapping lads, full of sin, reduced to sudden and spurious saint-hood by a black eye. There is no more unfeeling conduct than patient suffering,—there is nothing more alarming to an anxious family than a course of virtuous endurance obstinately persisted in. So long as you rage and are unseemly your kinsfolk will never pipe their eye, but docility under the minor physical afflictions makes a stubbed toe as much a matter of apprehension as angina pectoris. This being good when sick is a bid for unmerited martyrdom. These gentle sufferers are likely to employ the emaciated voice of those who ail, knowing well that the bellow of rebellion is much too reassuring. I am glad I am not as one of these; sick, I throw things.
Thus all mankind and all woman and child kind, too, are divided, though unevenly, into those who are better in sickness and those who are worse. The marriage service on examination will be found to be a very canny document, and its compilers nowhere showed greater shrewdness than in just that little phrase which insures conjugal devotion in sickness and in health. For of some, sickness makes Mr. Hydes, and of others, Dr. Jekylls, and in the matter of spouses, how in the world can the contracting parties foresee, demon or angel, which will develop, or, having developed, which will be better company?
VIII
An Educational Fantasy
WHEN I look back upon a half-century of wasted life, I find that there are no years that accuse me of neglected opportunity more poignantly than those between five and twelve. If only I had had the foresight then to apply myself with earnestness to the tasks set before me! If only now I possessed those priceless stores of knowledge that I feel sure must then have been pumped into me! That I must have received abundant elementary instruction I feel confident, although I do not in the least remember receiving it. My purely academic activities at this period remain wrapped in obscurity, while other memories are lively enough. I distinctly recall the scientific invention displayed in our efforts to produce new shades and colors in the soapy water with which we cleaned our slates. It was I who discovered that the yolk of an egg well beaten made a more satisfactory admixture than butter, even though both are equally yellow to begin with. I remember how one may by judicious spooning out with a pin, extract the inner riches of a chocolate drop without visible disturbance of the outer crust. Despite my scholastic indifference, I can have been no sluggard, without spirit, for of my fifty coevals there was not one who could tag me in the open except Percy Dent alone, and that only (but in my wisdom I never let him discover the fact) when I would let him; well do I recollect with what éclat, with what flutter of petticoats and pinafore, I could execute a pas seul at hop-scotch. These attainments, the thrill of which still warms me, prove me not without ambition;—
“Not for such hopes and fears,
Annulling youth’s brief years,
Do I remonstrate,”
but for
“Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,”—
such as the multiplication table, and the capital of Arizona, and the difference between an adjective and an adverb,—questionings so obstinate that I am convinced that not even at ten years old did I know the answers; hinc illæ lacrimæ.
To some extent it is possible to go back and piece out the stitches dropped in the course of an education; only, one is not allowed to go back so far as I desire. Roughly speaking, I should say that life does not allow one to relearn what one has failed to learn before sixteen, whereas it is the knowledge belonging to eight years, and ten and twelve, after which I hunger and thirst. I wish some one would open a school for able-minded but ignorant grown-ups. Believe me, enough of us could be found to attend, enough of us glad to jump down from our college chairs, to leave our laboratories with their clutter of advanced research, our counting-houses with their problems, and gladly go to school, gladly learn once and forever how much nine times thirteen is, and build Vesuvius past and present out of clay, and follow out of doors some charming young lady who would tell us exactly what the birds and the wild waves are saying.