# Episodes Before Thirty/Chapter 20

CHAPTER XX
It was, perhaps, the undigested horror of those days, as also their unsatisfied yearnings after beauty, that tried to find expression fifteen years later in writing. Once they were over I hid them away, those dreadful weeks, trying to forget them. But nothing is ever forgotten, nor is anything finally suppressed in the sense that it is done with. Expression, sooner or later, in one form or another, inevitably crops up.
"Writing," declared the old doctor, after a talk about De Quincey, "is functional." He had many pet theories or hobbies on which he loved to expatiate. "Writing is as much a function of the system as breathing or excretion. What the body takes in and cannot use, it discards. What the mind takes in and cannot use, it, similarly, excretes. A sensitive, impressionable mind receives an incessant bombardment, often an intense, terrific bombardment of impressions. Two-thirds of such impressions are never digested, much less used. The artist-temperament whose sensitiveness accumulates a vast store, uses them; the real artist, of course, shapes them at the same time. The ordinary man, the Dutzend Mensch, made in bundles by the dozen, gets few impressions, and needs, naturally, no outlet . . . Writing is purely functional. . . . " It was one of his numerous pet theories.
I went to his house now every night; he gave me his professional care, he gave me sympathy, he gave me food. Pathetic, wonderful old German! His tenderness was a woman's, his temper a demon's. I felt a giant in him somewhere. At close daily quarters his alternate moods perplexed me utterly. He had an Irish wife, a kind, motherly, but quite uneducated woman of about forty-five, and a little girl of eight or nine, whose white face ​looked as old as her mother's, and whose diminutive figure seemed to me unusual somewhere. Was it not stunted? Her intelligence, her odd ways, her brilliant eyes captivated me. She called me "Uncle Diedel." She talked, like her mother, broken German. Supper, an extremely simple meal, but a feast to me, was always in the basement kitchen.
The tiny wooden house, owning something akin to squatter's rights which prevented its demolition, stood in the next block to my own, hemmed in by "brown-*stone fronts," but with a miniature garden. New York, that burns anthracite coal, has no blacks and smuts; the trees and shrubs were really green; the earth smelt sweet. The little house, standing back from the road, was a paradise to me. Its one ground-floor apartment was divided by folding doors into consulting- and waiting-rooms. But no patients came, or came so rarely that it was an event when the door-bell rang. The doctor had the greatest difficulty in keeping himself and family alive. At supper I used to eat as little as possible. He seemed a competent physician. I wondered greatly. As well as real human kindness, there was courage in that little building; there was also a great tragedy I sensed long before I discovered its solution. The strange innocence and ignorance of my up-bringing still clung to me.
The establishment, the poverty, the alternating moods, as I said, puzzled me; I was aware of a whole life hidden away from my observation. They were so poor that dinner was the meal of a workman, they could not even keep a servant. There were worrying debts as well. Often the doctor was so bearish and irritable that I dared not say a word, his wife got curses and abuse, he would almost kick the child, finding fault with such sneers and rudeness that I vowed to myself I would never eat his food again. Then, after a momentary absence in his workshop upstairs, where he kept a lathe and made beautiful chessmen, he would come slowly stumbling down again, and the door would open to a wholly different being. Bent, as always, but well poised and vigorous, with bright smiling eyes, ​benevolent yet rugged face, every gesture full of gentle kindness, he would pat his old wife on the shoulder and take the child upon his knee, and beg me to play the fiddle to him or to draw my chair up for an intimate talk. He would light his great meerschaum pipe and beam upon the world through the blue smoke like some old jolly idol. The change seemed miraculous.
His talk seemed, at the time, wonderful to me. He would discourse on Kant, Novalis, Heine, on music, science, astronomy--"when your troubles seem at their worst," he would say, "look up at the stars for half an hour, with imagination, and you'll see your troubles in a new perspective"--on religion, literature and life, on anything and everything, while downstairs his kindly old wife prepared the Frankfurters and sauerkraut and coffee.
Neither mother nor child, I noticed, paid much attention to his attacks. The little girl, who called her father "Otto," sat up with us night after night till two in the morning, and hated going to bed. She listened spellbound to the stream of talk. I still see the dingy, lamp-lit room in the heart of the roaring city, the white-haired old doctor, pipe in mouth, the operating chair in the middle of the floor, the little pale-faced child with her odd expression of maturity as she looked from him to me, then led me by the hand to our late meal in the gloomy basement. I often waited achingly for that meal, having eaten nothing since breakfast. Would he never stop talking...?
We talked of Boyde--his face. The doctor's reading of Boyde's face was that it was a bad, deceitful, clever face, evil, brutal and cruel. I mentioned the man's various acts of kindness. "Bait," he exclaimed, with a scornful snort, "mere bait! He wanted a free lodging. He had plenty of money all along, but the free bed gave him more--to spend on himself while you starved."
He talked on about faces.... Handsome ones he either disliked or distrusted, handsome features like Boyde's were too often a cloak that helped to hide and deceive. Behind such faces, as a rule, lay either badness ​or vacuity; good looks were the most misleading thing in the world. Expression rarely accompanied good looks, good features. He was off on a pet hobby, he waxed eloquent. Beautiful women--he spoke of good features chiefly--were almost invariably wicked, or else empty. Of "Society Beauties" he was particularly contemptuous. "Regular features, fine eyes, perfect skin, but no expression--no soul within. The deer-like eyes, the calm, proud loveliness people rave about is mere vacancy. Pfui!"
His habit of staring into the mirror came back to me, and I ventured a question. He hesitated a moment, then got up and led me to the glass, where, without a word, he began to gaze at his own reflection, making the familiar grimaces, smiling, screwing up his eyes, stretching his lips, raising his eyebrows, pulling his moustache about until, at last, I burst into laughter I could control no longer.
He turned in astonishment. He examined my own face closely for some time. "You are too young still," he said. "You have no lines. In my face, you see, lies all my past, layer below layer, skin behind skin, my face of middle age, of early manhood, of youth, of childhood. It carries me right back."
He began showing me again, pointing to his reflection as he did so. "That's middle age ... that's youth.... Ach! and there's the boy's face, look!
I did not dare to look, for explosions of laughter were in my throat, and I should have hurt his feelings dreadfully. I understood what he meant, however.
"With the face of each period," he explained, "rise the memories, feelings and emotions of that particular period, its point of view, its fears, ambitions--hopes. I live again momentarily in it. I am a young man again, a boy, a child. I am, at any rate, no longer myself--as I now am." The way he spoke these four words was very grave and sad. "Now," he went on with a sigh, "you understand the charm of the mirror. It means escape from self. This is the ultimate teaching of all religion-​to escape from Self." He chuckled. "The mirror is my Religion."
During this odd little scene I felt closer to his secret than ever before. There was something fine and lovely in him, something big, but it lay in ruins. Had my attitude been a little different, had I not laughed for instance, I think he would have taken me into his confidence there and then. But the opportunity was lost this time. He asked, instead, for music, old, simple German songs being what he liked most. He would lean back in his big chair, puff his great pipe, close his eyes, and hum the melodies softly to himself while I played. It was easy to vamp a sort of accompaniment with double stopping. He dreamed of old days, I suppose; it was a variant of the mirror game. Tschaikowsky, Meyer-Helmund, Massenet he also liked, but it was Schubert, Schumann, even Mendelssohn he always hummed to. Of "Ich grolle-nicht, auch wenn das Herz mir bricht," he never tired. The little child would dart up from the basement at the first sound of the fiddle, show her old, white face at the door, then creep in, sit in a corner, and never take her eyes from "the orchestra." When it stopped playing, she was off again in a second.
One item, while speaking of the music, stands out--chanting to the fiddle a certain passage from De Quincey. The "Confessions" fascinated him; the description of the privations in London, the scenes with Anne when she first brought him out of her scanty money the reviving glass of port, her abrupt disappearance finally and his pathetic faithful search, the lonely hours in the empty house in Greek Street, but particularly his prolonged fight against the drug. It was the Invocation to Opium, a passage of haunting beauty, however, he loved so much that he chanted it over and over to himself. The first time he did this I invented a soft running accompaniment on the lower strings, using double stopping. The mute was on. My voice added the bass. It was a curious composition of which he never tired; it moved him very deeply; I have even seen tears trickling down his cheeks ​when it was over. He always left his chair for this performance, walking slowly to and fro while he chanted the rhythmical, sonorous sentences:
   "O just, subtle and mighty opium! that, to the hearts of rich and poor alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for the pangs of grief that tempt the spirit to rebel, bringest an assuaging balm;--eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath.... Thou buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples, beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles, beyond the splendours of Babylon and Hekatompylos; ... and hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle and mighty opium...!"
"Ach! wie prachtvoll!" he would cry a moment later, "wie wunderschoen!" and then would recite a translation he had made into his own tongue, and a very fine one too. Quite delighted, he would repeat the passage over and over again, pausing to compare the two versions, fixing me with his big eyes in order to increase his own pleasure in the music by witnessing the evidence of my own.
Truly he was a Jekyll and Hyde.
It was only during the Jekyll mood this kind of scene took place; in the Jekyll happy humour, too, that I had told him about my strange up-bringing. "Now I understand better," he said, "why you are still so young and know so little of life, and why you are so foolishly good to Boyde"--which annoyed me, because I considered myself now quite old and a thorough man of the world as well.
It was in this mood, too, that we discussed my own theories and beliefs ... a life in the woods as well. Kay, himself and his family, Boyde and I were to settle in the backwoods ... perhaps I was as eloquent as I was earnest; he listened attentively; sometimes he seemed almost ready to consent; he understood, at any rate, the deep spell that Nature had for me. But he only smiled when I said I was a failure and an outcast. My life had hardly begun yet! No man was a failure who ​had an object and worked for it, even though he never got within miles of accomplishment. "A life for a man is a life among men," he would say with emphasis. "The woods are all right as an interlude, but not as a career." He was very sympathetic, but he shook his head violently. "In action lies a man's safety in life," he growled at me. "The world needs men of action, not dreamers," he repeated and repeated, "and Buddhism has never yet produced a man of action. Do something, even if it prove the wrong thing. Dreaming, without action, is the quickest way of self-corruption I know." And he would then urge me again to become a doctor, after which he would proceed to dream himself for an hour or two ... showing that all his life he had been far more of a dreamer than a man of action....
It was chance that suddenly led me into the doctor's secret. He became for me, from that moment, the most pathetic and tragic of human beings. My own troubles seemed insignificant.
One afternoon early in December, gloomy, very cold, a studio appointment failed, and I decided to go to the wooden house. It was that or the public library, but I wanted a talk, I wanted also to get really warm. I had no overcoat; the doctor's room was always like an oven. The vermin I had grown accustomed to and hardly noticed them. An idea of food, too, was in my mind, for the free lunch glass of beer and salt chip-potatoes was all I had eaten since breakfast. Seven o'clock, however, was my usual hour of visit, I had never been in the afternoon before. A memorable visit; we were alone; he told me his secret very quietly.
I found him in his most awful mood, rude, his nerves unbearably on edge. He said he had not expected me, but when I tried to go, he became angry and begged me to stay, saying that I helped him more than I could ever know. Had I brought the fiddle? I said I would run up the street and get it. "No," he implored, "don't go now. You can go later--before supper. Please do not leave me--please!" He then said he would tell me ​something no one else knew, no one except his wife. I wondered what was coming, and felt strangely touched and moved at his treating me with such confidence. His manner was so pathetic, and he seemed suddenly to have become weak and helpless, and somehow or other it was in my power to do him a service. I was thrilled and full of expectation.
But, before he began to tell me, he went up to a little cabinet with a glass door and took out a small bottle full of a white powder, bearing the word, the magical word "Majendie"--a word I can never forget as long as I live--and took some of the powder and made a solution and then sucked some of it up with a needle and turned to me. His face was swollen and looked terrible, for the eyes glowed so hotly, and the skin was so red and white in patches. Then he began to open his waistcoat and shirt till his chest was bare. "Look," he said, for I half moved aside, and when I looked I saw he was covered with hundreds of small red sores.
Evidently my face betrayed shrinking and horror, for the old man laughed and said "Oh, I'm not a leper. They're only blisters," and then finding a little clear space on his skin, put the needle of his syringe through the flesh and injected the fluid into his body. He next quickly put his finger over the spot and rubbed to and fro for about a minute, staring steadily at me while he did so.
"That's morphine," he said in a dead voice, "and the rubbing is necessary to prevent a blister forming."
I knew nothing about morphine except the name, and I was disappointed rather than thrilled, but the next minute he gave me all the thrill I wanted, and more besides:
"I've been fighting it for two years," he said quietly in German, still rubbing the spot and staring hard at me, "and I am slowly getting the better of it. If I don't succeed, it means I die." A cold grim smile that made me shudder stole over his swollen face. "Death," he added. ​ I felt his despair, the despair of doubt, as he said this, and in his eyes blazed suddenly all the suppressed depths of suffering and emotion that he usually kept hidden. Such a flood of sympathy for the old man rose in me that I did not know what to say. Of drugs and their power I knew nothing. I stood and stared in silence, but his voice and manner made me realize one thing: that here was an awful battle, a struggle between human courage, will and endurance, on the one hand, and some tremendous power on the other--a struggle to the death. The word "morphine" seemed to me some sort of demon.
He sat down in his armchair, lit his pipe, pulled up the operating chair for me to lie on beside him, and then told me very quietly why he took it. Already his face looked different, as the morphine circulated through the blood, and he smiled and wore a genial happy air of benevolence that made him at once a different man.
"I shall have peace now for several hours," he said, "but I don't take morphine for pleasure. I take it because it is the only way to keep myself alive and to keep my wife and child from starving. If I can gradually wean myself from it I shall live for years. If not, and I cannot make the dose less and less, it will kill me very soon. I am old, you see."
He told me very simply, but very graphically, speaking in German as he loved to do, that three years ago he had enjoyed a good and lucrative practice. But he had embarked upon some experiments in his leg--I never understood exactly what and did not dare to ask--and to observe these properly he was obliged to use the knife without taking any anæsthetic. His wife stood beside him and staunched the blood, but the pain and shock proved more than he was equal to, being an old man, and a collapse followed. All his patients left him, for he could not attend to them, and in order to be in a fit condition to see even chance callers he had to inject morphine. Thus the habit began, and before he knew where he was the thing had him by the throat. He was a man of great natural strength of will and he began to stop it, but the ​fight was far harder than he had imagined, and his nerves seemed to have gone to pieces. Unless he had the support of a dose, he was so brutal, irritable and rude that no one could stay in his presence, and no patient would come near him. He never got his practice back again, and whenever a stray patient called now he had to take an injection, or he would be sure to behave in such a way that the man or woman would never return. He used atropine to mix with his morphine, and thus tried gradually to cure himself, and lately had succeeded in reducing the quantity very considerably, but it was an awful fight, and he admitted the end was uncertain. He said I helped him to bear the strain. My presence, he said, the music too, gave him some sort of comfort and strength, and he was always glad to see me. When I was there he could hold out longer than when he was alone, and one reason he was telling me all this intimate history--telling it to a comparative stranger--was because he wished me to try and help him more.
I stammered some words in broken German about being eager and willing to help, and he smiled and said he thanked me and "we would make the fight together."
"The charm is very powerful," he went on, "especially to a nature like mine, for when I take this stuff the world becomes full of wonder and mystery again, just as it was for me sixty years ago when I was a boy with burning hopes and high dreams. But far more than that, I believe in people again. That makes more difference in your life than anything else, for to lose faith in men makes life unbearable. Bitter experiences have shaken my trust and belief in my fellow creatures. But with this stuff in me I find it again and feel at peace with the world."
"That is why you sometimes approve and at other times disapprove of my attitude towards Boyde?"
"Yes," he said, with a most benign and delightful expression in his eyes. "Give him every chance. There's lots of good in him. He feels, no doubt, that everyone who knows about him distrusts him. Weak men will ​always try more or less to live up to what is expected of them, for they are easily hypnotised. If they feel every one expects only evil from them their chief incentive is lost."
"Then I ought never to let him think I've lost belief in him?"
"Never. Frighten him, kick him, urge him along with violence, anything to make him move of himself towards being decent; but never suggest he cannot be, and is not, decent and straight."
How we talked that night--and how I suffered from hunger, for when morphine was in him the old doctor ate little, and this time he was full of ideas and ideals, and had so sympathetic a listener, that he forgot I might want food, and it was not till after one in the morning that he began to flag and thought of coffee. We went down into the kitchen, and there we found the patient wife dozing on the wooden chair, and the child reading a book--"Undine"--on the deal table, with her eyes so bright I thought they were going to shoot out flame. She looked up and stared at us for a long time before she got herself back from that enchanted region of woods and pools and moonlight.... Strange supper parties they were, in that quiet, basement-kitchen between one and two of the winter mornings of December, 1892....
Otto Huebner, having broken the ice, told me much of his own life then. Owing to family disputes he left the manufacturing town in Northern Germany where he was born and brought up, and came to New York as a young man. He never saw his parents again, and took out naturalization papers at once. For years he was employed by Steinway's piano factory, as a common workman at first, then as a skilled man. He was unmarried, he saved money, be[**P1: he] began to study at night; the passion for medicine was so strong in him that he made up his mind to become a doctor. He attended lectures when he could. It was a life of slavery, of incessant toil both day and night. He was over forty when he began studying for the examinations, and it took him seven years to attain ​his end. His health had suffered during this strenuous time. He had married well after fifty. . . .
Dear, lovable, much-to-be-pitied old man, my heart went out to him; I was determined to do everything I could to help. I owed him much for counsel, sympathy and kindness, to say nothing of medical attendance and food besides, at a time, too, when I believed myself a complete failure and thought my life was ruined. England, my family, all that I had been accustomed to seemed utterly remote; I had cut myself off; I had tumbled into quite another world, and the only friend I had, the only being I trusted, even loved as well, was the old German morphine victim.
Meanwhile, it had been very wonderful to me to see an irritable, savage old man change in a few minutes into a kindly, genial, tender-hearted being, and I began to feel an absorbing curiosity about this fine white powder labelled "Majendie." I invariably now rubbed in the dose, finding with increasing difficulty a clear space of skin in the poor worn old body. I watched the change steal over him. It seemed to me pure magic. It began more and more to fascinate me.