“Elvira. I suppose it never crossed that secluded mind of yours that she might grieve for her mother, that she might have loved her mother. No, you thought only of yourself. Did you ever really look at Elvira, or have you always thought of her as only the by-product of your marriage? She is a person in her own right, selfless, devoted, sacrificing, ready to give up all promises of the future just to serve you. What do you think will become of Elvira if you kill yourself this way?”
“I never thought,” said Elmo, and turned his face away. After a little he said, “You don’t know what it is to lose your wife, Doctor, especially a wife like mine. We were closer than breathing; we were truly one flesh. I never had a thought apart from her, nor she from me.”
“That’s very poetic,” said Jonathan. “But it just happens that it is not true. We live alone in our own flesh. Not even those closest to us can guess our inmost thoughts, and when I consider that, I think it’s damned fortunate for everybody.”
Again Elmo smiled that shadow of a smile, but it was more certain now.
“And keeps most of our minds comparatively clean. I am a surgeon, Dr. Burrows. I’ve been in dozens of operating rooms. It would astonish you to hear what the most gentle, most Christian, most genteel, most reserved and well-bred and soft-voiced ladies say when under ether. Quite edifying. At first I was shocked. But not now. Nothing shocks me any longer, not even when a woman murders her child, or a child a mother. We’re abominably human and I don’t know how God can stand us much longer.”
“Neither do I,” said Elmo. Then he relapsed in his melancholy again. “My life has gone to pieces. There’s no purpose in it, no goal, no promise, now.”
“I’m not going to dispute that,” said Jonathan. “My purpose, when I was younger and more zealous, was to save lives and cure pain. I’m still ah for stopping pain, but saving lives? I don’t know. What for?”
Elmo was surprised, and he pushed himself to a sitting position and regarded Jonathan keenly. “Isn’t a life worth saving, any life?”
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“It would seem to me,” said Elmo, “that a good man’s life is worth saving in this contemptible world! A good life is the only redeeming quality on earth, the only inspiration.” He had a very resonant and vital voice now, full of warmth and emphasis. “It is the only salvation. If that good life is also endowed with genius, or even with just talent, then we are rich indeed to have it among us. It is a faint picture of what men can truly be if they become more than men.” He hesitated. “With the grace of God,” he added in a quieter voice.
Jonathan let him think about that for several moments. Then he said, “Your wife was an inspiration to you. She was a good woman. You were an inspiration to her and to your daughter, who adores you. You are a good man. So, am I going to let you lie here and selfishly die, when the world needs you so much, that world you think is worth saving?”
Elmo tried to prevent a smile. “You are very eloquent, Doctor.” Then he sighed.
“Let us delude ourselves that there is a purpose, a higher purpose, in every life, which we don’t as yet know,” said Jonathan. “We live in delusions, anyway, and illusions. The world is a very mysterious place, and the more scientists reveal of it the more mysterious it becomes and the more unfathomable—and so more exciting. We are on the trail of something, though I can’t imagine what it is. Call it God, if you will. In the coming terrible days which many of us now foresee, we’d better keep a purpose firmly in our minds, and a knowledge of the mystery of life, and our faith, whatever it is—or all of mankind is certainly going to lose its mind. The point is, do you want to be part of the army of the sane?”
“I think I’d like another drink,” said Elmo. So Jonathan gave him another. Elmo sipped it, his eyes averted, his scholar’s face absorbed in his thoughts.
“What do you think your wife thinks of you now?” asked Jonathan.
“Grace?” Now Elmo looked up in astonishment. “But Grace is dead.”
“How do you know that?”
“Doctor! You are a physician and you can ask that? You and I aren’t children.”
“Well, let’s put it this way: We don’t know. No one ever returned from the dead to tell us, though it’s alleged there was One. We can’t prove that there is a God, but we can’t prove that there is not. The bad man fervently hopes there isn’t, and the good man just as fervently hopes there is. Whose hope do you prefer?”
Elmo smiled. “You are quite a Christian, aren’t you?”
“I? No one has ever accused me of that yet. I’ve never met a Christian except, perhaps, for one or two. Still, it would be a nicer and safer world, wouldn’t it, if there were about two or three million honest Christians in it? Granting that it would be a nicer and a safer world, then Christianity has considerable to recommend it, hasn’t it? Perhaps you could explore it at odd times—when you aren’t eulogizing Chaucer or battling the feeble minds in your study rooms. A scholarly research and exploration, from the vantage point of skepticism and without passion or prejudgment.”
Elmo clasped his thin hands behind his head and thought, his eyes and hps sorrowfully drooping. Then he said, “You’ve opened an exciting vista for me, Doctor, or maybe it is quite puerile after all. Still, it’s worth pursuing. All the ancient and modern religions. There must have been an original source to faith— Or something spontaneous in our nature. Personally, I shouldn’t like to contemplate a world without the idea of God. As Voltaire said—”
“Yes, I know. A bright old boy. I have sad news for you, Dr. Burrows. We are rapidly approaching a time when men will utterly banish God. That’s been evident for over two hundred years, and the pace is accelerating. Did you ever wonder why?”
“No. Why?”
“Now, that’s something I don’t know, either.” Jonathan stood up. “I’m going to call Elvira in, your very efficient young daughter. She will be pleased.”
He went out and came to the room where he had left Elvira. She was talking earnestly with Robert, and when she saw Jonathan, she started up and said, “How is Papa?”
“Come and see for yourself,” said Jonathan, and he took her hand and led her like a child into her father’s room.
Elmo had removed himself from his bed. He was sitting in a chair with his dressing robe and slippers on. Elvira stopped on the threshold, disbelieving, struck.
“Papa!” she cried, and then her face dissolved and shook, and she was only a bereaved girl now and not a young lady with opinions and convictions.
“Dear little Elvira,” said Elmo, and held out his arms to her, and, sobbing, she ran to him and knelt beside him, and he took her in his arms. They began to cry together, and Jonathan shut the door silently and went back to Robert.
“Talk about raising Lazarus,” he said. “And this one, too, had already begun to stink in his grave clothes.”
“Just hysterical?” said Robert, as they went down the stairs to join Mr. Kitchener and Maude.
“Aren’t we all, one way or another?” asked Jonathan. “Poor, damned world. And I don’t use that expression advisedly, either.” He added, “Somehow, I don’t think our Elvira is going to be so devoted to health food any longer, and,
I
hope, she won’t remain emancipated.”
“A really fine girl,” said Robert. “A good mind.”
Jonathan stopped on the landing. “Now, that’s a despicable thing to say about a nice young lady! The very worst.”
As the doctors drove back to their offices Jonathan said,
“Burrows exactly illustrates what I earlier said: That it is only the financially secure who suffer uncontrollably from ‘psychic distress.’ Oh, the poor have their worries, but those worries are concerned with bread and shelter and clothing and survival—honest things. If Burrows, after his wife’s death, had had to scrounge to pay her doctor’s and undertaker’s bills and hire a woman to care for several children, and then had had to continue, no matter how grieved, to work hard for a living, he’d have soon been, if not reconciled, too pressed to sorrow much. He just would not have had the time. But because he had money and had inherited a great deal more, he had the leisure to indulge his selfish grief, and the hell with his daughter and the hell with everything else, including his own life. It’s a strange thing, too: Those who truly enjoy living are those who work sweatily to make that living and have small leisure, but those who work little and have much leisure, and need not worry where their next dollar is coming from, are generally the ones who find life unbearable and joy nonexistent. They are also the ones who appreciate gloomy poetry, gloomy plays, and desperate—and revolutionary—philosophies.
“It wasn’t the working man of France, or the farmer, or the miner, or the artisan, who started and maintained the French Revolution of 1795. It was not the hungry. It was the idle men, restless and discontented and envious and bored, the men with gold francs in their pockets, the men of education and philosophy—in short, the men who had nothing to do and nothing to worry about, and so could harbor pains in their souls.
Weltschmerz,
to shift to German for a moment, is the sole possession of those who have uncallused hands, who never knew a plow or a sail or a machine or the reins of a workhorse. Karl Marx is the prime example of this modern age. You will notice that those who are most enthusiastic about him are those who never dirtied their little pinkies with honest work. Woodrow Wilson, professor of jurisprudence and political economy at Princeton University, is noted for his peculiar revolutionary and socialistic philosophies, and the nearest he ever came to an honest element of the world is ink. If I had my way, I’d never let a man teach a class or write a book or be elected to even as lowly a post as garbage superintendent who hadn’t worked with his hands—by necessity—on a farm or in a mill or in a mine. It is those who scream the loudest about ‘justice to the working man’ who despise him, and it was the abolitionists of the North, who had never seen a Negro or employed one, who shouted the most vociferously for an end to slavery. These people love what they call ‘ideas,’ which lack the power to deduct one cent from their pockets. But let them be asked to pay for those ideas, out of their own purse, and they have a change of heart. Ideas, they maintain, are not to be confused with something they designate as ‘filthy lucre.’ It would hurt their purity.”
“Yet,” said Robert, “you were sorry for Miss Elvira.”
“I’m always sorry for the victims of the men of ideas. I must get her away from her eminent father, who is doubtless the soul of nobility and therefore not to be trusted.”
Robert laughed and shook his head. “I don’t understand you.”
“You don’t understand anybody, and no one else ever did, either.”
He seemed in high good humor, and Robert, who did not know of the intervening events between the uneasy holiday of yesterday and the reality of today, thought that Jonathan was a very volatile man whose moods could shift like the shadows of clouds racing over a range of hills. Mercurial, thought Robert, who had never been accused of having a totally original conception of anything. In his turn Jonathan thought that Robert would be an excellent physician and a careful, conservative surgeon but would never introduce a novel method of treatment or dare a unique operation. He would never be reckless but he would also never initiate. A good sound man, young Robert, but no genius, no innovator. He would save the lives of many through care and devotion but would never rescue the almost moribund through boldness. The middle way had a lot to recommend it, even if it never opened a new world or lifted the horizons of men or brought the stars nearer, and never considered if there was another dimension to man not yet discovered by the philosophers or the scientists.
The waiting room was crowded when they returned, and Jonathan greeted old patients with affection and smiled at the new. “We are in business again,” he said to Robert when they went into the office. “It’s like old times. Hear my cliches! I will leave you to it all and make my rounds at St. Hilda’s,” and he went out whistling.
Everything, now, to his eye looked fresh and new and interesting, and those who encountered him at St. Hilda’s thought that they had never seen him in such good spirits, not even before his marriage to Mavis Eaton. He was actually affable, a very rare thing. He could be heard humming. When he encountered a young gynecologist—a new breed —in a hall, he stopped him. But young Philip Harrington said first, “Jon, may I congratulate you on your operation on young Mrs. Nolan? I hear you performed a miracle. You know I refused to intervene after I heard what old Schaefer did to her?”
“I tried to get out of it myself,” said Jonathan. He looked at Dr. Harrington with a reflective eye. “Phil, you aren’t married. And you’re thirty, thirty-one? Yes. You once told me that you’d never marry unless you found a woman young and handsome and rich and with intelligence and independence, and who had some original ideas. Correct?”
“Correct,” said the young doctor, smiling. He was a tall, somewhat beefy and very blond young man, with a cheerful face and a light manner.
“I’ve found just the girl for you,” said Jonathan. “Keen as horseradish, tart as a good old wine, devoted as Penelope, patient a Griselda, innocent as an angel, pretty as Venus, rich as Croesus’ daughter, smart as turpentine, not strong-minded but strong-principled, limpid as honey, and with a figure that would grow a eunuch a second pair of testicles. How is that for a combination?”
Dr. Harrington laughed. ” ‘Why don’t you speak for yourself, Jon?’” he asked.