A Tranced Life

HAVE we not all known men who miss their career in a way that seems, at the time, unaccountable, although, when we look back at it from the end, their failure takes on the aspect of a foregone conclusion ? Charming fellows, with all kinds of unmarketable talents: versatile often-times, able to do many things well, but nothing quite well enough. Perhaps they begin strongly, but before middle age, apathy overtakes them and they give up the game. Or a single blow of fate puts them to sleep, — a knock-down blow, to be sure, but one which would not keep a tougher fighter from getting on his feet again. Thenceforth their life is a somnambulism; and the world pronounces of such a one, with cruel finality, “Oh, he has got through.”

When I first knew Terence Vair, we were both serving apprenticeships to the law, — in separate offices, — and, happening to meet and to fancy each other, we clubbed our poverty and took rooms together — or rather a room with a double alcove which held our beds. Evenings we would drowse on opposite sides of the grate, each with a volume of reports or of the General Statutes open in his lap, till the tinkle of a coal dropping on the hearth would rouse one or the other of us to refill his pipe and to say yawningly to his room-mate, for the twentieth time, —

“If I were you, old man, I’d get into something else. I don’t believe you ’ll ever make a go of it at this business. You ’re not cut out for it, you know. You have n’t the temperament.”

The scene of our auscultation was an ancient inland city of the fourth grade, the county town of a prosperous farming region. It was an unprogressive community. A short-cut railroad branch had left it high and dry on a loop. Several manufacturing concerns had moved their plants to tide water, and the last census showed a gratifying decrease in population. Gratifying, that is, to Vair, who took a whimsical view of such calamities.

“I hate a growing place,” he would say. “Give me a little, old, sleepy, wormeaten town like Biddleton. If I’ve got to practice law anywhere, I want to practice it right here.”

Biddleton was in that stage of municipal development where the residence streets and shopping streets are undifferentiated. Most of the bar had offices in Chapin’s Block; but a few old lawyers still received clients in the wings of their dwelling-houses on shady streets, where the faded letters “Blank B. Blank, Attorney at Law,” lurked behind a screen of bitter-sweet or Virginia creeper veranda vines, and the upper half of a green door — swung open to let in the summer air — afforded a glimpse of a gray head bent over a deskful of papers.

It was not in Biddleton, however, but in the larger seaport city of Scarborough, that Vair, having passed his bar examination, finally hung out his shingle. I was not living in Scarborough during his brief legal career there; but common acquaintances have told me that, though an interesting talker on the metaphysics of his profession, as a practitioner he was “ the worst ever.” He was too polite to crossquestion the witnesses for the other side with the necessary fierceness: he was too absent-minded to get his own witnesses into court. He took an ironical tone with his clients, — most of whom he confidentially described as damned rascals, — and was apt to discourage them by assuring them that they had no case, appearing to sympathize, if anything, with the opposing counsel; and when the verdict went against himself, — as it usually did, — treating the disaster with disinterested amusement, like a mere amicus curiae.

As to the science of law, he approached it in the spirit of an antiquary and curiosity hunter, or of Sir Thomas Browne’s quibbler, who raised a point as to whether Lazarus’s heir might lawfully detain his inheritance — on the ground that Lazarus was judicially dead. He delighted in legal fictions and subtleties of a peculiarly sophistical kind: hair-splitting distinctions between a contingent and a vested remainder; black-letter lore about waifs and strays, flotsam and jetsam, riparian rights, the filum medium aquae, and other such out-of-the-way matters as come into court only once in a quarter-century. He used to hunt up queer cases in the old reports, and even dipped into Norman French and toyed with Bracton and Fleta. “The trouble with Vair was,” said Wilmerding to me long afterward, “that he was a 4 literary feller ’ trying to practice law, and he took the literary view of everything. His mind was too concrete. In his own cases, he never could dissociate the legal principles involved from the human, dramatic aspects. It was the personality of the litigants that interested him, and especially anything about them that was humorous, quaint, or picturesque. I remember how tickled he was by the plaintiff in an action de lunatico inquirendo being made to describe himself in all the pleadings as ‘I, a lunatic.’”

There was a story about Frank Carey, who had just got his first admiralty case, rushing around to Vair’s office in a great hurry and bursting in with the inquiry, —

“Say, Vair, do you know anything about admiralty practice?”

Vair turned slowly around on his swing chair, and replied dreamily, “I know they call us fellows proctors up there.”

“You go to hell!” shouted Carey, after a minute’s disgusted inspection of the trifler before him; then slammed the door and pounded down stairs in search of somebody with practical information.

Before long Vair abandoned the law, or the law him, —

and, after drifting about for a while, and filling one or two temporary positions, married a nice girl with some money. He had a bit of his own, — inherited; and putting this and that together, he bought out a very decent little book and stationery business, in which he prospered reasonably the next half-dozen years. It was toward the end of these that I came to Scarborough to live, and renewed my acquaintance with my quondam fellow auscultator.

Vair’s book-selling was of a special kind. His wife’s people were high-church; and the business had been formerly carried on by an uncle of hers who had extensive Episcopal connections and was solid with the clerisy. The new proprietor was, as has already been hinted, something of a literary person, though his literature was of a secular tendency. But he had the prudence to maintain the traditions of the shop, which continued under his management to be a headquarters for Bibles, prayer-books, hymnals, manuals of devotion, catechisms, Sunday-school lesson-books, and the like. The windows displayed engraved Madonnas and Holy Families, Christmas and Easter cards, rosaries, crucifixes, illuminated Gothic texts, hand-painted Lent lilies, photographs of Phillips Brooks and the Archbishop of Canterbury, silken book-marks with ivory pendents of crosses, hearts, keys, chalices, and similar ecclesiastical gimcracks. You would hardly go to Vair’s to turn over the latest publications, but you would naturally go there if you wanted to make your aunty a birthday present of an illustrated edition of The Christian Year; and you would meet there the ladies of St. James’s, out shopping for Anglican paper weights, pencil cases, monogrammatic note-paper, or patterns for embroidering altar cloths.

When I presented myself at Vair’s bookstore, I fancied a certain blushfulness under his cordial greeting, — whether he was a trifle shamefaced at having relinquished a profession for a trade, or whether he was merely conscious of a shade of absurdity in his relation to “singular old rubrics and the four surplices at Allhallowtide.” The parallax is disturbing when one recognizes in the new bishop a schooldays’ confederate in the robbery of melon patches.

Be this as it may, Vair made me heartily welcome both to his shop and his house. I used to think him at that time a perfectly fortunate man. He had an occupation suited to his tastes, a pleasant circle of friends, a lovely wife and two interesting children who made his home life an ideally happy one.

Suddenly, in his thirty-third year, all this changed. His household was visited by diphtheria of a malignant type. His wife and both children died; and he himself, after lying at the point of death for many days, recovered from the disease only to succumb for a time to a mental ailment which attacked him in the weakness of convalescence and the anguish of his loss. He was sent to an asylum, from which, after several months of judicious treatment, he came out with reason regained, and health in great part restored, to take up the broken threads. But it soon became evident that it would be “danger to make him even o’er the time he had lost.” Whatever reminded him of his late happy years, with their tragic catastrophe, was a peril to his sanity. He himself avoided mention of them. That way madness lay. Rather did his mind, in an instinctive effort to heal itself, take refuge in earlier recollections. Something had snapped in the machinery of his brain, so that he would plainly be incapable of carrying on his business, at least for the present. And as this was intimately associated with the memory of his family life and bereavements, it was decided, after consultation with his physicians, to sell out the good-will and stock in trade, and find something else for him to do. The matter was arranged for him by his friends, and the proceeds invested in his behalf.

Meanwhile it was proposed that he should travel for a year in Europe. But the proposal was wisely overruled. A celebrated alienist, whose advice was sought, thought that the idleness of a European tour would give dangerous leisure for brooding; while the shock of novel sensations would irritate, rather than soothe, a nature thus enfeebled by grief. What was needed was not the creation of wholly new conditions, but the revival of old ones. To make him forget the recent past, the best means would be to get the patient back into a remoter past and reunite him to some once familiar round of occupation.

It happened that just at this time a position fell vacant which Vair had once filled for the greater part of a year, before he married and commenced bookseller. This was the post of librarian at St. Mark’s Rest, a semi-ecclesiastical, semieducational foundation, dating from the early thirties. Its nucleus was an endowed grammar school, the chapel of which served on Sundays as a place of worship for a dozen old pensioners who dwelt in a wing of the building; and as a parish church for a few Episcopal families of the neighborhood, descendants of benefactors, with hereditary rights to designated pews and the privilege of voting for trustees.

Here I found Vair sitting at his desk, precisely as he had sat eight years before, in a long, narrow library room, with Gothic alcoves, tall, mullioned windows, and galleries to which one mounted by a little iron staircase. The windows on one side gave upon Linden Place, a sheltered mews where the aged pensioners sat upon benches in the sunshine of the spring afternoon, smoking their pipes, nodding asleep, or talking slowly together of old, old things. The windows on the other side opened on an inner court or quadrangle, with a fountain in the centre that had long gone dry, where the boys gathered at recess to play games or walk up and down the gravel paths like monks in a cloister. A few ancient shrubs and flower-beds gave semblance of a garden. “In all the time I’ve been here,” said Vair, “I have n’t seen a blossom on one of those plants. I asked the janitor what kind of plants they were, anyway, and he said, ‘Oh, no kind in particular; just plants.”’

All through the drowsy school sessions, the drone of classes reciting lessons came through the open casements; the shadows shifted from the eastern to the western wall of the quad; the clock on the bell-tower told the hours with lingering stroke. There is not in this hurrying land such another haunt of ancient peace, nor such a sinecure, as Vair enjoyed. At intervals a boy came into the library to return a text-book, or one of the school faculty to consult a classic, or a pensioner who was consuming his evening of life in slowly reading through the catalogue from A to Izzard, or perhaps a lady from one of the privileged families to draw a volume of a standard author; — nothing more modern than 1850 enlivened the shelves of St. Mark’s Rest. But for the greater part of the day, that hushed solemnity, — as though the corpse were in the next room, — which rebukes the intruder in all libraries, was unbroken by human footfall. Once in central Massachusetts, near the Connecticut River, I passed a tollgate where two graybeards sat, placid, ruminant, and kept the pike, meditatively whittling, now and then exchanging a syllable, now and then collecting a toll, when the velvet dust of August was stirred by the rare wheel. I was reminded of this pair of philosophers, retired from the world to the contemplative life, whenever I visited Vair in his library. He had drifted out of the current into a back eddy. The hand had turned back upon the dial plate, and stopped at a point which it had passed long ago.

I had been away from Scarborough during the year which included his bereavement, his illness, and recovery; and was uncertain as to the psychology of the situation. But friends had cautioned me not to speak to him of anything in his personal history between the times of his first and second incumbency of the librarianship. There was a blank spot on the map of his life, where all paths ended, beginning again on the opposite border. Not that there was any definite lapse of memory. It seemed to me, on the contrary, that he had forgotten nothing, and that his consciousness brooded continually over the scenery of this forbidden tract. But he had conformed instinctively to the treatment prescribed, and there was a tacit avoidance between us of any allusion to late events. Once or twice, when I blundered into some reference to his children or his stationer’s business, his unresponsive silence hid a flutter of distress which flew a warning signal. En revanche, his “ desolation did begin to make a better life” in years farther back. He was copious of reminiscences, not only of the old Biddleton days, but of the time before I had known him at all, and told me much that I had never heard about his boyhood and first youth. Superficially, he did not appear to have changed very greatly. In particular, the whimsical humor, and that disinterested and sympathetic view of affairs which had made him so agreeable as a companion and so impossible as a practicing attorney, had, in great part, survived his misfortunes. He was simple about himself, too, and confidential as in the old days, speaking freely of his intimate feelings and thoughts, save only those related to his recent experience. Yet, upon longer acquaintance, it grew evident that the spring was broken. Having gone back, he had lost care to go forward. There was no question of beginning any fresh career. Life was over, and St. Mark’s Rest seemed likely to be Vair’s rest to the end.

But I come now to the most curious feature of the case. This hurt mind, deprived of hope and outward activity shrinking even from the exercise of memory where memory was most insistent, built itself a house of refuge founded on the recollections of childhood, roofed with imaginations and timbered with dreams. More and more I came to discover in Vair a mental disturbance which I can describe only by saying that his sense of reality had been unsettled. He had become a mystical somnambulist, unable to draw a sharp line between waking and sleep. His dreams had for him a singular vividness and importance, and he would repeat them with an air of belief. One, in particular, of early date, was much in his thoughts, as having, in some way, a symbolic or prophetic significance. “When I was about nine years old,” he narrated, “I dreamed, or thought, that I was in the kitchen one day, — the large, old-fashioned kitchen of our home in the village of Sudbury, — when I heard a great cry out of doors. I ran to the west door and saw all the people looking up. I looked up, too, and there was a beautiful girl on horseback galloping over the housetops. The people were calling, ’The lovelight — the lovelight! ’ Then I ran to the front door and out into the street, but she had disappeared. Next I found myself in a large room like a schoolroom. A man was sitting at a desk on a platform, and in front of him were rows of girls on benches. One by one they came up and stood before him, and he touched each with a wand; whereupon her head turned to a fox’s head, and she went and sat down on another bench at the side of the platform, with a number of other girls who had fox heads. Among the maidens waiting to be changed was the one I had seen on horseback, — the lovelight. She was just standing up to come forward and be touched with the transforming rod. A pang of grief and horror — I can feel it now — shot through my heart. But how the vision ended, — whether she was touched and changed like the rest, or whether my wild remonstrance broke the spell of sleep and I woke with the dream still unfinished,—I cannot remember. But I do remember the intense impression of reality that the whole thing left in me, and how for many days after I puzzled my elders by questioning them as to what a ‘ lovelight ’ was. A kind of shyness, however, made me keep the dream to myself. A boy of nine, I loved that dream maiden with a consuming passion. I recall distinctly the insolent grace with which she sat her horse as it bounded over the roofs, and the beauty of her face as she sat with the other girls on the benches. It appears that I had walked in my sleep that night; for I remember stumbling, half awake, half asleep, part way up the dark garret stairs, and finally fumbling my way into a spare chamber where I lay down on an unmade bed, with only one cold sheet over the mattress. And there I was found by some member of the family, shivering and whimpering in the chill dawn.”

This dream was not repeated, though the impression of it had never faded. But there were recurring dreams, some of which came back so often that they had established a sort of claim to actuality. There was one, for instance, of cruising on and on through endless archipelagoes in the South Sea,—islands and island groups in an infinity of ocean, unmarked on any map of Polynesia. Another persistent dream was of opening a door previously unnoticed in the wall of the parlor or library, and walking through it into a suite of strange rooms, all furnished and ready for occupancy, but manifestly vacant for years; saying to himself, “Why, either I did n’t know that these rooms were here, or else I had forgotten them. Now how lucky! We’ll open them up again, and ‘ inhabit lax.’”

Vair told me that his parents had died when he was very young, and he had been brought up by his grandfather, a country banker, accounted rich until he failed, somewhat discreditably, and died soon after, leaving a widow, two maiden daughters, and this one grandson, in straitened circumstances. Now in Vair’s dreams, — echoes of a boyhood spent in the sombre, decent poverty of a household of elderly women, — this bankrupt ancestor refused to stay dead. Always he kept returning, a king of sleep, — rex quondam et rex futurus, — bringing back the lost prosperity. Sometimes Vair would fall in with him living in an obscure corner of a neighboring city, shabby and furtive, having started again in business in a small way, with hopes of recovering a competency from the wreck of his fortune. Sometimes he would reappear at his old home, affectionately confiding to his grandson that he was once more a rich man, having made a larger salvage than was generally believed, and having multiplied it exceedingly since his failure by cunning investments.

Whether Vair’s lost wife and her children ever haunted his sleep, I never knew; but I guessed that they did, and that increasingly he lived with the dead. For once he said to me, with a look of deeper hopelessness than usual, —

“Once I would have liked to live a hundred lives, every one’s life, such a fresh, inexhaustible variety there seemed in human experience. But nowadays it tastes stale, — the same thing over again. You know how it is with me. My ghosts have been with me so vividly of late, so substantially, overpoweringly present, that I had come to hope — almost to believe — that it meant something, that I was visited, that tokens — messages — Oh, well ” — breaking off with a half laugh — “the doctor says my kidneys are out of order. Illusions—phantoms —apparitions, the only things worth while, of course they don’t exist. Only some dirty little material fact exists, — indigestion, liver, kidneys!”

The last time I saw Vair was in front of the post office at high noon on a day of January thaw, — one of those days of weakening heat when every fibre is re laxed, winter garments are a burden, and the sweat trickles down the back unseasonably. The sun dazzled in a sky of violent blue; clocks and factory whistles clanged and shrieked; clerks, shop girls, mechanics were hurrying to dinner; a thousand shovels were scraping the slush from the sidewalks; melted snow puddles smoked in the sun; gutters overflowed, catch basins roared, icicles crashed from leaders and cornices, sleigh runners grated over the bare pavement with the agonizing noise of a knife edge on a tin plate. Everything dripped, steamed, glared, blared.

Vair looked confused, tired, ill. “ Kirkham,” he said, as we parted after a few words, “if I ever kill myself it will be in a January thaw.” Yes, I could well understand that, for a soul which sought the shadows, the unwinking, public light of such a noonday was far more disheartening than the visionary midnight with its voices of winds. On such a day the tyranny of the actual is at its height, matter oppresses spirit, life clamors inflamed, and the only escape seems to be into the cool, dark emptiness of death. Into that kindly darkness, at all events, Vair presently departed; whether by his own act or not, who shall say? “An accidental overdose of morphine. ” Oh, yes, an overdose certainly.

Among the scraps in the portfolio which the trustees of St. Mark’s Rest handed over to me, were some verse beginnings, — Vair never finished anything latterly, — which witnessed to his habits of mental somnambulism. Here is a fragment, for example, perhaps suggested by the well-known saying of Novalis, —

The image was varied somewhat in a solitary stanza entitled Animula Vagula, —

Still another bit, which employs a line from a Scotch poem, — The e’en brings a’ hame, — appears to have been inspired by that falling back to his starting point at St. Mark’s which I have described, —

And finally his habit of living in his reminiscences was recalled to me by a few homely lines, —