A Man's World

II

The darkness came unexpectedly.

Sometimes my eyes had been tired, but I had not taken it seriously. One afternoon, as I laid out a sheet of paper on the desk, the page was suddenly obscured by a dancing spider-web – a dizzying contortion of black and white – growing denser and denser. I clapped my hands over my eyes and felt so sudden a relief I was afraid to take them away again.

I got up slowly and felt my way with my foot to an easy chair. How long I sat there, my hands pressed hard against my eyes, I do not know. I had read somewhere of a man going blind with just such symptoms. It was fear unspeakable, fear that made me laugh. When one feels that the gods are witty it is a bad sign.

I was suddenly calm. It was accepted. I thought for a few minutes, my eyes still shut, and then felt my way to the telephone.

"Central," I said, and I remember that my voice was calm and commonplace. "Will you give me the Eye and Ear Hospital? I can't look up the number. I'm blind."

"Sure," came back the answer. "It must be hard to be blind."

A clutch came to my throat. It comes to me now as I write about it, comes every time I hear people complaining that modern industry has robbed our life of all humanity, has turned us into mechanisms. Such talk makes me think of the sudden sympathy which came to me out of the machine. Whenever I am utterly blue and discouraged, I go into a telephone booth.

"Hello, Central," I say, "tell me something cheerful. I'm down on my luck."

It has never failed. Always some joking sympathy has come out of the machine and helped me to get right again.

When the doctor came, he looked a minute at my desk, at the whole eye-straining mass of faded print and notes. He snapped on the electric light.

"I suppose you work a lot in this fiendish glare?"

"I need a strong light," I said.

He grunted in disgust.

"This will hurt," he said, as he made me sit down near the electric light, "but you've got to bear it."

He fixed a little mirror on his forehead and flashed the cruel ray into my eye. Back somewhere in the brain it focussed and burned. The sweat broke out all over me.

"Now the other eye."

I flinched for a moment, holding my hand before it.

"Come, come," he said gruffly, and I took my hand away.

When the ordeal was over, he tied a black bandage over my eyes, laid me down on the lounge and lectured me. When he stopped for breath, I interrupted.

"What hope is there?"

He hesitated.

"Oh! Tell me the truth."

"Well – I guess the chances are even – of your seeing enough for ordinary work. But they will never be strong. You'll have to give up books. You must keep your eyes bandaged – complete rest – six weeks – then we can tell how much damage you've done. It is only a guess now."

We talked business. I had enough money saved for a private room and good treatment, so he put me into a cab and told the driver to deliver me at the hospital.

It was an appalling experience, that ride. Try it yourself. Ride through the streets with your eyes darkened: you will hear a thousand sounds you never heard before, even familiar sounds will be fearsome. Every jolt, every stoppage will seem momentous. I was glad the doctor did not come with me, glad that no one saw me so afraid.

At last we stopped and I heard the cabby call.

"Hey! there. Come out and take this man."

I revolted at my helplessness, pushed the door open and stumbled as I stepped out. I would have fallen heavily, if an orderly had not been there to catch me.

"You must be careful at first, Mister," he said. "You'll get used to it in time."

That was just what I was afraid of – getting used to the darkness!

However, his words jogged my pride. The ways of the gods seemed funny to me again, and I joked with him as he led me up some stairs and into a receiving room. The house surgeon, to me only a voice, was nervously cheerful. He kept saying, "It'll be all right." "It'll be all right." He seemed to be dancing about in all directions. My ears had not become accustomed to locating sounds. I suppose he moved about normally, but he seemed to talk from a different angle every time.

"This is Miss Barton," he said at last. "She is day nurse in your ward. She'll make you comfortable."

Mechanically I thrust my hand out into the darkness. It was met and grasped by something I knew to be a hand, but it did not feel like any hand I had ever seen.

"I'm glad to meet you," I said.

With some jest about people not usually being glad to meet nurses, she led me off to the elevator and my room.

"You've quite a job before you – exploring this place," she said with real cheer in her voice. "There are all sorts of adventures in this terra incognita. Everything is cushioned so you can't bang your shins, but watch out for your toes. At first you'd better stay in bed for a few days and rest. Have you all you need in your valise?"

"I don't know. A servant packed it."

"Well then. That's the first bit of exploring to do. I'll help you."

Her voice also jumped about surprisingly. There was something weird in being in a room with an utter stranger whose existence was only manifested by this apparently erratic voice and by hands which unsnarled my shoe laces, handed me my pajamas, and put me to bed.

"I must run off now and attend to Mrs. Stickney, next door – she is very fussy. The night nurse, Miss Wright, comes on pretty soon, at six. She'll bring you your supper. When you wake up in the morning, ring the bell, here over your head, and I'll bring you breakfast. Good night."

It was when she had gone and I alone there in the strange bed, that I first felt the awful void of the darkness. I do not like to think of it now.

It was probably not many minutes, but it seemed hours on end, before Miss Wright brought me my supper. She sat on the edge of my bed and helped me find the way to my mouth. She was considerate, and tried to be cheering. But I did not like her. Always her very efficiency reminded me of my helplessness. And her voice seemed too large for a woman. It gave me the impression that she was talking to someone several feet behind me.

They had, I think, mercifully drugged my food, for I fell asleep at once. When I woke I had no idea of the hour. For some time I lay there in the darkness wondering about it. I did not want to wake anybody up. But at last I decided that I would not be so hungry before breakfast time. After much futile fumbling I found the bell above my bed. In a few minutes Miss Barton's voice – even after all these years, I think of it as the type of sunny cheerfulness – announced that it was near eleven. When the breakfast was finished, with joking cautions against setting the bed on fire, she filled my pipe and taught my hands the way to the matchbox.

In the weeks which followed, I lost all track of the sun's time. I came to figure my days in relation to her. During the "nights," when she was off duty, the darkness was very black.

It would be impossible for me to give in detail the evolution by which Miss Barton, my nurse, changed into my friend, Ann. It began I think when she discovered how utterly alone I was. The second day in the hospital I was given permission to have visitors, and I sent for my employer's man of law.

"Whom do you want to have come to see you to-morrow?" Miss Barton asked when he had gone.

I could think of no one.

"Do you want me to write some letters to your relatives?"

"No. I haven't any near kin."

"Well. Haven't you some friends to write to?"

In the three years I had lived at Mr. Perry's I had severed all social connections. I had not kept up my college friendships. Benson had been so opposed to my leaving what he called active life that I had lost all touch with him. My only relations with people had been technical, by correspondence. I did not want to trouble even Prof. Meer with my purely personal misfortunes. This seemed utterly impious to Miss Barton. What? I had lived several years in the city and had no friends? It was unbelievable! Unfortunately it was true. I could think of no one to ask in to relieve my loneliness. And there is no loneliness like the darkness.

The next week was the worst, for the nurses changed and Miss Wright, who was on day duty, was not companionable. However, Miss Barton, taking compassion on me, used often to sit with me by the hour at night. How fragmentary was my contact with her! No one who has not been deprived of sight can realize how large a part it plays in the relationships of life. I could only hear. There was always the creak of the rocking chair beside my bed and her voice, sometimes placid, sometimes tense, swinging back and forth in the darkness. It did not seem to have any body to it. Whenever her hands touched me, it startled me.

But from her talk I learned something of the person who owned the voice. She had been born in a Vermont village, where no one had ever heard of a professional woman, but as far back as she could remember, she had set her heart on medicine. Her father she had never known. Her mother, a fine needlewoman and embroidery designer had brought up the children. A brother was an engineer and the older sister a school teacher. But there had not been enough money to send Ann to medical college. Nursing was as near as she had been able to get towards her ambition. But what could not be given her she intended to win for herself. She had taken this position because the night duty was very light and every other week she could give almost the entire day to study. Her interest had turned to the new science of bacteriology. Her vague ambition to be a doctor had changed to the definite ideal of research work.

Somehow the voice, so calmly certain when it dealt of this, gave me an impression of integrity of purpose, of invincible determination, such as sight has never given me of anyone. I did not, any more than she, know how she was to get her research laboratory. But I could not doubt that she would. She had unquestioning faith in her destiny. I find myself emphasizing this phase of her. It impressed me most at the time.

But her conversation was by no means limited to her ambition. She had read a thousand things besides her medicine, and spoke of them more frequently. She was constantly referring to books, to facts of history and science, of which I was ignorant. She talked seriously of ethics and the deeper things of life. It woke again in me all the old questionings and aspirations of prep. school days – the things I had hidden away from in my book-filled library. She was the first person I had met since the doctor at school who showed me what she thought of these things. Benson had talked copiously about the objective side of life, but he had never referred to his inner life. The people I had known wanted to make this world a prayer meeting, a counting house or a playground. Ann was no more interested in such ideals than I was.

She used a phraseology which was new to me: "Individualism," "self-expression," "expansion of personality." She spoke of life as a crusade against the tyrannies of prejudice and conventions. Her viewpoint was biologic. All evolutionary progress was based on variations from the type. Efforts to sustain or conserve the type she called "reactionary" and "invasive." She insisted on the desirability of "absolute freedom to vary from the norm." The authority she quoted with greatest reverence was Spencer. This conversation, much of which I did not understand, showed me clearly one thing – a soul seeking passionately for truth. That she told me was her ideal as it had been the war-cry of Bakounine. "Je suis un chercheur passionné de la Vérité."

When any reference was made to my manner of life, she flared up. It was – and this was her worst denunciation – unnatural.

"I believe in individualism, egoism," she said. "But not in isolation. Man is naturally as gregarious as the ant. An ant that lived alone would be a non-ant. You've been a non-man. It's good your eyes went back on you – if it teaches you sense. Intercourse with one's kind is a necessary food of human life."

And while it was a God-send for me to find someone to talk to, it must have been also a pleasure for her. The stories she told me about the other patients showed that their relations to nurses were barren enough – when not actually insulting. After listening by the hour to Mrs. Stickney's endless little troubles, it was a relief for her, I think, to come to my room and talk of the things which interested her violently. She gave more and more time to me. During the third week, when she was again on day duty, she read me Lecky's "History of European Morals."

III

It is hard to write about the next week. I can no longer see it as it must have looked in those days. I cannot tell the "why" of it. It was.

There was immense loneliness – and fear. The few hundred dollars I had saved for studying in Oxford would pay the doctor's bill and keep me for some months. But what was there beyond, if my eyes did not come back? At best the chances were only even. In any case the one trade I knew was gone. A bookworm with weak eyes is a sorry thing. Of course I might have gone home. But I have never had much respect for the Prodigal Son. He must have been a poor spirited chap.

Well, in my utmost misery, Ann comforted me – as women have comforted men since the world began. In some inexplicable way, for some inexplicable causes, she loved me.

I try to arrange my memories of those days in orderly sequence. But it is all a blur. Day by day my need grew and day by day she met the need. The patients in that hospital did not require much attention, except in the day. Most of them slept well. They rarely rang for her after midnight. She gave me more and more of her time.

The stress between us grew rapidly, but by gradual steps, almost imperceptibly. Her hand rested in mine a trifle longer. The hand clasp became a caress – then a kiss. The kiss lingered…

So the voice took on a body. Touch came to the aid of hearing as a means of contact with this dear person of the darkness. It is strange in what a fragmentary way she took shape in my consciousness as something more than a paid nurse, more close and intimate than any friend I had known in the light.

In the darkness every other thing seemed strange. What I discovered by touch to be a table, did not fit into the old category of "tables." Even the pipe which I had smoked since college seemed to have undergone some fundamental change in its nature. Ann was the only thing which seemed natural. I had had no intimacy with woman of the light by which I could judge this experience. Coming to me as it did, it did not seem strange – it made subsequent things seem strange. When at last my eyes were opened, I blushed before Ann as before a stranger.

It all seemed so inevitable.

"It's late," she said one night, "I must go. If you want me, ring."

"Of course I want you."

"But you ought to sleep. I mean, ring if anything happens."

"It don't matter whether anything happens or not. I – "

"Don't ring unless you need me."

The door closed behind her. I lay there debating with myself whether or not I needed her. The bell was in reach of my hand. I got out of bed to be further from temptation. With awkward trembling hands, I filled and lit my pipe and sat down by the open window. My head ached with loneliness and desolation. Off somewhere in the night a church bell struck two, some belated footsteps rang sharp and clear on the sidewalk below me. I tried to interest myself in speculating whither or to whom the person was hurrying. But my thoughts swung back to my own loneliness. In all the world there was no one who knew of my blindness and cared except the tin-can merchant who was cursing that he must have the trouble to find someone to finish my work. No. There was Ann.

Quite suddenly a vision of my childhood came back to me, of the time I had been sick at Mary Dutton's, when she had taken me into the warm comfort of her bed. The vision brought quick resolution. I rang the bell. I stood up against the wall and waited – breathless. The door opened and from the darkness came her voice.

"Do you really want me?"

I do not think I spoke, but I remember reaching out my hands to her. My strained ears caught a faint rustle – then came touch – and my arms were about her.

So I was comforted.

IV

For the night there was rich forgetfulness. But the new day called me back from the Elysian Fields to the cold reality of this ordinary world of ours.

My familiarity with the frank openness of my good friend Chaucer and the early English writers had cleansed my mind of much nastiness. I never had any feeling of Biblical sin in regard to my sudden passion for Ann. It was too entirely sweet and natural to be anything so wrong. But conflicting with this early Renaissance attitude was a modern sense of personal responsibility. The implications of the thing troubled me desperately.

As I sat there in the darkness, thinking it out – with now and then Miss Wright coming in on the routine business of the day – I realized for the first time the difference between love and passion. There was no doubt that Ann loved me. But I did not love her.

She was as far removed from cheap sentimentality as any woman I have known. She was strangely unromantic. There was an impressive definiteness about everything she did. I knew from the first that the love she gave me was for always. It was to be the big human factor of her life, but it was not to be mutual. In my misery I wanted her comfort, in my loneliness I had need of her affection. I had grown greatly fond of her, dependent on her, but I knew from the first that she was not to be the center of my life.

Nevertheless my course seemed very clear. "The Woman Who Did" had not been written in those days. The idea, now so commonly expressed in literature, that sex life outside of marriage might be beautiful and dignified, was not familiar. Although I had no longing for a perpetual mating, no desire to marry her, my conscience told me very clearly that I ought to. I did not think that I could, with anything like decency, do less.

Since Margot had receded, I had not been given to romantic dreams. I was not counting on the grand passion, as a necessary part of life, so there was no especial self-sacrifice in closing the door on that possibility by marrying a woman I did not wholly love. Yet, threatened with blindness without money or a trade, what had I to offer her? The more I thought of these things the more humble I became. However her "fair name" seemed more important to me than any of these considerations. It was regrettable that I could not assure her ease and comfort. It was regrettable that I could not give her the love which should be the kernel of marriage, but all this seemed no reason not to offer her the husk.

When at last Ann came, she laughed at me. What? Get married? Nothing was further from her mind. She had her own work mapped out for her. Set up a home? Why as soon as she had saved a hundred and fifty dollars more she was going to Paris to study with Pasteur. People might laugh at his germs and cultures and serums. Let them laugh! The future was to bacteriology. Marry? Of course she loved me, but where did I get those two ideas mixed up?

She gave me a lecture on free love. It is hard to write about a theory to which I am so strongly opposed. Yet Ann's attitude in this matter is an integral part of my story.

The longer I live the more remarkable it seems to me, how limited is the field in which any of us does original thinking. One of my friends is an exceedingly able physician. Within his specialty he has been startlingly radical. His cures, however, are so amazing that his colleagues are accepting his methods. But in all other departments of thought he is hopelessly conservative. Another acquaintance, a painter, is a daring innovator in his use of colors, but has unquestioningly accepted all those beliefs which Max Nordau has called "The Conventional Lies of our Civilization." To one subject we seem to give all our mental energy, all our powers of original thinking, in other matters we believe what we are taught. It was so with Ann. Her specialty was bacteriology, her ideas on marriage she had inherited.

Her mother, whom I afterwards came to know and respect, was a remarkable woman. Mr. Barton, after a fairly upright younger life, had deserted her at thirty-five. Although neither Ann nor Mrs. Barton, ever spoke much of him, I learned that he had died, a hopeless drunkard. At first the mother had supported the children by nursing and sewing among the families of her Vermont neighbors. And everywhere, once she had entered the privacy of a household, she found the same repellent pretense, a carefully preserved outward show of harmony and affection, an inside reality of petty quarrels and discord. Often she found situations of more abhorrent tragedy, jealousy, hatred and strange passions, women heartbroken for lack of love, bodily broken from an excess of child-bearing. From considering her own misfortunes a horrible exception, she came to believe such sorrows were pitifully common. And everywhere women seemed to be the victims. However unhappy a man's married life might be, he found release in his work. To the woman, home was everything, if it went wrong, all life was awry.

By chance apparently, but I suppose inevitably, she had come in contact with some of the leaders of the early "Woman's Rights Movement." She corresponded with them ardently and at length came west to Cincinnati, having decided that she needed education. She supported herself and her children by needle-work and spent half the nights, after they were abed, over schoolbooks. She had to begin at the beginning. By herself, in her garret, she followed the grammar school course, crowding the work which takes a child two or three years, into the half nights of one. Gradually she worked her way up to the position of forewoman in a large embroidery establishment and so was able to send her children through high school, the older ones to college. But her health had given out before Ann's turn came.

Her interest in the Woman's Movement had brought her into touch with all sorts of radicals and shortly after her arrival in Cincinnati she had met Herr Grun, a German Anarchist refugee. The friendship had grown into a beautiful love relationship which had lasted until his death.

Ann had accepted all the libertarian dogmas of her foster father. It seemed very wonderful to me to hear her speak about her "home." It was a barren enough word to me. But to her it meant a wealth of affection, a place of sure sympathy. I listened with sad and bitter envy to her stories of childhood. The loving kindness, the happy harmony which she had known at home, she had been taught to believe resulted from the free relationship between her mother and her lover. Ann had grown up in an atmosphere where free love was the conventional thing.

Persecution is the surest way of convincing a heretic that he is right. I have known a good many Anarchists and the most striking thing about them is their community interest. Whether or not they are seriously offensive towards society, they are all in a close defensive alliance against it. The hostility they meet on every hand forces them to associate with their own kind. Ann had grown up among the children of comrades.

To them love is an entirely personal, individual matter. The interference of the Church or State they regard as impertinent and indecent. They take this whole business of sex more seriously, and in some respects more sanely, than most of us. Their households, as far as I have seen them, are very little different, no better nor worse than the average home. Their advantage lies in the fact that most Anarchists are of kindly nature and that they are seldom cursed with money grubbing materialism. But this is a difference in the people, not in their institutions.

Marriage, for Ann, would have been a repudiation of her up-bringing and the people she loved, comparable to that of a daughter of a Baptist minister who became a Catholic nun or the third wife of a Mormon Elder. But Protestant women sometimes do marry Mormons or take the veil. And Anarchists are no wiser in bending the twig so it will stay bent than Baptists. If Ann had been this type of a woman, she might have kicked over the traces, and have left her people to marry me, as carefully reared daughters have done in similar crises since the world was young.

But she had a very definite theory that love should not be allowed to interfere with life. Each of us, she held, has been given a distinct personality, a special job to do in the world, and the development of this personality, the performance of this individual task, is the great aim of life. Love should not distract one from the race to the appointed goal. Love is an adornment of life. She spoke with biting scorn of a man she knew who "wore too many rings on his fingers." His taste was bad, he tried to over-decorate his life and so missed the reality of life. The goal she had set before her was bacteriology and she had not the faintest doubt that she had chosen it rightly. This was to be her life. If the fates granted her such joys as she called her love for me, it was something to be thankful for. But it must be subservient to – never allowed to interfere with – her career.

Certainly this is not the ordinary attitude of women towards love. But Ann was an exceptional woman, one of those unaccountable exceptions, which we label with the vague word "Genius."

A few months ago I picked up an illustrated French paper and opening it at random came upon a page containing photographs of half a dozen celebrated women. Ann's face was among them. There was an article by an eminent psychologist on "Women of Genius." His conclusions did not especially interest me, but I had never before seen so concise a statement of Ann's accomplishments, the learned societies to which she belongs, the scientific reviews she helps to edit, the brochures she has written, the noted discoveries she had made. It startled me to see on half a page so impressive a record of achievement.

It helps me now to a better understanding of the young woman, who puzzled me sorely twenty odd years ago. In those days I saw no special promise of distinction. I smile with a wry twist to my mouth when I recall my presumption in thinking that it was necessary for her to hide herself under the shadow of my name. I suppose that if she had consented to marry me, we would have somehow found a way to gain a livelihood. In my crippled condition I could not have done much – I have no knack for money making. The burden of supporting the home would have fallen considerably on her. Perhaps it would have been "better" for both of us, if her strange upbringing had not made marriage distasteful to her. She and I might possibly have been "happier" if she had not been filled by the consuming ambition which drove her to put love in a lesser place. Perhaps. But the race would have been poorer, would have lost her very real contributions to the elimination of disease.

I could not argue with her then about these things. My knowledge was so much less than hers. But although it was a relief to find that she would not marry me, there was still a feeling of deep injustice. There seemed a despicable cheat in taking from her so much more than I could give. It seemed ultimately unfair to accept a love I could not wholly return. But she brushed aside any efforts to explain. She ran to her room, and bringing a copy of the Rubaiyat, preached me quite a sermon on the quatrain about Omar's astronomy, how he had revised the calendar, struck off dead yesterday and the unborn tomorrow. Love, she said, was subjective, its joy came from loving, rather than from being loved. Then suddenly she became timorous. Perhaps she was being "invasive," perhaps I did not want her to love me…

My scruples went by the board with a rush. I surely did want her. And I was able to convince her of it.