The Jungle of the Mind: Notes on a Disfranchisement

I

A LITTLE patch of sunlight made a leaf transparent against the doorpost at the right of the porch. Its finely veined shadow was thrown across the page of my book, like some ghostly finger pointing the way among the close even letters of the print. The book was a story of peasant life in Italy — a story indelibly impressed on the memory because, right in the last chapters, it slipped very quickly from consciousness. So slight a thing it was, the straw that pointed the way to disfranchisement. The year had been one of stress, undeniably — a perfectly human year, such as is common to all who live actively; the last months a slight blur, a feverish fear of small duties looming large, and then a sudden sickening terror. Life all at once became unlivable without reason.

Two days before one had been ‘sent home to rest on a light diet, a slight temperature’; this afternoon, up again and reading, with every muscle relaxed, but attention strained to the utmost in order to focus on that book to the exclusion of business thoughts. One must not think of work at all. Just then, without attention relaxing in the least, the meaning slipped from the black, regular letters on the page, as if drawn out by some secret and malign exterior force, as definitely as if the book had been taken from my hands. I could no longer concentrate, or marshal the forces of mind even to a simple story. A kind of deterioration or disassociation had begun. I could no longer think. And slowly, with a nauseating certainty, I knew it.

That afternoon a little boy came home, bringing little cakes for the ‘temporary invalid.’ The sunlight was very bright on his shock of hair, not less yellow than it, and on the lady in gray beside him. Dinner-hour came. It was quietly served, cool, and with blue plates, and silver that had long, smooth, uncluttered surfaces. But the ‘temporary invalid seemed to be slipping away from it all into some gulf, and was holding on with an intensity so intense that it almost nullified itself.

The next day, back to a little house where two children were waiting for the usual vacation stories and games. But this time there were none. A wild rebellion had set in — I would not have a brain that refused to serve me; I would not — and yet, there it was. No beast of the jungle ever fought against his captivity more senselessly than the feverish occupant of that berth in a Pennsylvania Pullman did against that overpowering fact. The realization brought almost sheer madness on the heels of ‘a slight mental-nervous unbalance.’ Regard for those about me, for consequences, appearance, conventionalities such as hold between guest and hostess, even if the two are of one family, were gone. As a result, the only maid in the house where there were two children wisely fled at my approach.

One day there were dishes to wash. Conscience reasserted itself and I started in. I had done that before, many times, usually with a grim determination to ‘get the job done.’ As a little girl, I had attempted it with a secret loathing of my lowly state — did they want me to grow up to be a cook? Would that I had! Think of wages. Again, I had washed them with a blithe, debonair spirit, lots of hot water, and foamy soapsuds full of jewel-like bubbles; it was not half bad. And often I had scraped away the half-eaten meal with religious disregard of mundane affairs — committing Browning as I did it. But this time it was none of these.

I began. The plates felt big, slippery, and unfamiliar. What did you do with them? I could remember the process, but with each dish it had all to be thought through again, and things did not come out even. Each separate bit of china and silver seemed to arrive and stop in a different and aborted stage in its evolutionary progress from egg-and-bacon smeariness to pantry shelves. I could not wash dishes. I tried and I could not; and if I lost my job, which I certainly should, I could not even be a cook.

Just then, the little boy who was manufacturing music-rolls for the pianola, with yards of wrapping paper and a ticket-puncher, wanted flour-andwater paste for his business, please. It had too much water in it, and spilled all over the dining-room table. I could not make paste, either; and what would his mother think?

Next, the little girl wanted to start for Sunday School. A tiny, pale-blue, wash-silk dress about two feet long needed pressing. It would not be pressed. It grew instantly animate. It rolled and slid and crawled under the iron, like a hot fishing-worm. I could not press. Even the big darky laundress coming to-morrow was more adapted to life than I. I could n’t do anything.

II

Well, many a wiser person than I has taken the next step, and succeeded or failed as the fates decreed. They say it was all ‘bluff,’ hysteria — very likely. I hate the latter enough for it to have been. Certainly it was undeniably cheap, like the rusty, paper-backed novels one filched from the latest culinary newcomer when one was just twelve; or, worse, like Elsie Dinsmore. Then, too, it came at an adventure-seeking age, when one must have new experience, even if one has to pirate it from life with skull and crossbones on the sails. There were three trials. In the white medicine-chest was a large bottle marked ‘wood alcohol, poison.’ The ‘ poison ’ part of the label was what attracted my eye. I consumed it in its entirety — my first and last pre-Volsteadian experiment. I do not advise it — it’s hot, choking, and humiliating to the dust.

An idea like this dangling before one in the sun, and through sleepless nights, must be pursued for the sake of the audience, if for nothing more. A double dose of sleeping powders followed next — a long, long sleep. One awakened. It was so wearying! And, bluff or not, the choice between a probable insanity and death is a queer thing to be given to toy with at twenty-four. I was going at it again.

There was a patch of blue sky outside my window — just sky, no trees. A robin and squirrel with flirting tail were holding converse on a telegraph wire. The air was hot and bright. It would be so nice to leave things like that and go on. I could throw away the bottle — they would n’t know what it was; an easy, cowardly thing. So it came, namely a sweet, hot taste, a humming in my ears, a quick blackness, too quick for me. The bottle was still clenched in my hand, so they found the antidote, all because somebody went upstairs to get some silk to make another dress for the little girl. A doctor came. He made holes in my arm with a hypodermic, as if he were doing punch-work embroidery, until, defeated, sick, self-condemning, and furiously protesting, I came back from eternity for another try at existence.

Then followed a long summer, under the care of nurses in a sanatorium. The lady whose little boy brought the cakes for the ’temporary invalid ’ came quickly, forgiving. But I loathed myself too much to care even for her. There was another who stayed live months. But she hardly penetrated the oncoming dreams and deliriums.

It was the time of the great war madness. Some little of it seemed to have lodged in my spent brain. We had all of us felt its clutch and looked with a sick dread, in spite of our better judgments, at the pink-cheeked children among whom we worked. What if it ‘got’ them, as it did those suffering mites in Serbia and Belgium? Without reason I secretly reached the conviction that it had. A certain large building, where I had worked, appeared to my distorted vision a veritable Blue Beard’s palace, the steps filled with the maimed and bleeding, children I knew with hands cut off.

How long this particular delusion lasted, I do not know; perhaps hours, perhaps weeks. It was intermittent and only a part of many. Actuality faded. Real letters came as from another world. The dead and the living seemed to mingle. Time ceased to count. Past, present, and future met in each sickening to-day. Then, one made atavistic journeys into ‘ pithecanthropian’ or caveman indecencies — sliding past grim New England ancestors and modern training with electric swiftness, on to the next experience, until at last autumn came.

III

Something had to be done. After much holding back, reluctantly it was done. The seal of the state was called in, and on the word of three competent physicians, the requisite number, I was adjudged a lunatic. It was what, in a way, I had expected from the first day when I was ordered home. An institution for the insane opened its doors to me. It was all those about me could do.

That first day is not remembered. It is photographed, no — etched, on the groundwork of my convolutions. I was lying in bed in Ward 10 of the hospital. A woman was sitting beside me, asking a great many questions in a quiet voice, a stenographer taking down the answers. They began with; —

‘ What year is this ? ’

I think I knew.

‘Have you ever been in love?’

Everyone has been seventeen, and ‘infatuation’ was the word stumblingly used to express this idea.

‘ Who is the President?’

Who was the President ? I knew there had to be a president,— it was Wilson’s administration, — but I could not remember his name, and I said so. Would anyone say that those three physicians judged me wrongly?

The quiet voice went on. Then behind its owner someone suddenly opened a door. It was late autumn. The sun had that thick, heavy quality peculiar to the time of year. It fell full on her hair, and played through its crispness like golden syrup, turning it to a warm, soft, amber glow. Through all that strangeness, confusion of mind, and weariness, Something Beautiful came. It came, — I say it, because the one asking the questions hardly seemed a personality for a long time, — and continued to come twice every day with calming regularity. And one looked forward to those hours wistfully. Finally, I was told she was the head physician and in charge of your ward.’

Days followed days and grouped themselves into weeks, weeks into months. One afternoon, late, a nurse came on the ward hurriedly, waving a paper and calling the news: ’Reims has been destroyed — the beautiful cathedral of Reims.’ For a time the world and its tragedy penetrated my fastness. Reims was but a torn sentinel, jagged against the sky; the girls I knew were making bandages at home or nursing ‘overseas’; the boys, some of them, already were Flanders mud. I wondered if the dead were ever so dead as I there in that place of protection. I doubted it. And after that, in times of lucidity, every little service proffered came with a whip-end of stinging reproach — to be waited on when fighting men were dying for those same kindly offices! It was too much.

Yet from moments or days like this one swung so cruelly far. A certain Sunday finally reached its end — a dull, sodden, breathless day, continuing on endlessly from six o’clock. The head physician came on the ward. I had strayed into the surgery, and was lolling against the table where she daily examined patients. She entered the room all in white, fresh and smiling, and asked simply: —

‘ What are you doing? ’

I had been doing nothing forever, or so it seemed. I faced her, and deliberately, without malice, picked up a small medicine-glass and threw it. My aim was good. The glass missed her head by about two inches and splintered on the floor. A quiet voice said, —

‘It is a miracle it did not kill me.’

And the doctor left the ward. Almost immediately the happening faded from my mind. At that time, it seemed to me no more unusual than the picking-up of a teacup at tea-time did to those at home. It was in line with the day, distorted, smouldering, yet dull to the point of stultification. I quite forgot the occurrence; yet it was to return upon me with that boomerang-like force which would almost imply in the world an eternal power of justice.

I had plenty of time to think, in so far as I was capable of it. My mind went back constantly to my very early childhood. As a little girl, I played free from school all day, in the wind, every day, much of the time in the top of a cherry tree. And when, flushed and breathless from play, I slipped indoors at evening, my mother could only look speechless at my play-worn clothes, my father remark laconically that my hair would make ‘a good blue-jay’s nest.’

How far away all that seemed! What a fascinating idea that — to have one’s hair be a blue-jay’s nest! Some use for it at last! A little bird would be tucked in every curl; and how carefully each lock of hair would be spread on the pillow, as the birds twickered drowsily while I went to sleep myself. Many times I heard it in my mind’s ear.

But here there were no pleasantries of thought like that. Days came when the air from cherry trees, full of bird notes, entered in reluctantly through iron bars. My hair would hardly have invited a magpie. It was brittle and burned with fever, I guess; and it was stiffly braided. My nails were split, skin rough and scaly. Feet were crossed and bound to the foot of an iron bed by a sheet skillfully twisted into a noose. There was a sense of rough cotton all about one. The upper part of the body was incased in a canvas jacket laced down the back, known as ’sleeves ’ — perhaps because it had no sleeves, only sewed-up ends, traps for hands. To these were attached long, strong tapes, line trunkstraps, which were in turn fastened to the iron supports beneath the bed. Movement was largely impossible, made so lest wild, disordered thinking should grow objective, as in the case of the glass, and result in fierce, unpremeditated action.

So that iniquitous-looking object, bound, almost dehumanized, certainly disfranchised, fed, cared for physically, yet mentally inaccessible and struggling— that was I. Still, through it all, every day someone spoke my name in a low voice, calling as if from an immeasurable distance. Every day, without fail, the head physician made her rounds. The effect was like that of some wholesome, natural phenomenon, regular and unaccusing, healing and calming, untouched, but touching with sure thought. Little by little, with incredible slowness and still more incredible perversity, the thing lying there moved toward the normal.

IV

One rainy day in November, word came that I was to be ‘transferred’ from the main building to A-Cottage, where convalescents were housed. ‘ You get home quicker from there ’ was the current report. The process of making the return from complete mental chaos to the usual semi-orderly state of mind known as sanity had so far progressed. But there was cruelly much yet to be done.

The one thing that stands out as an almost immediate result of that change was a reawakened interest in environment, particularly the human element therein. I got out of that closed door of myself a little. Perhaps that is one test of the normal — a keen sense of others. My world shifted, and gradually I began dimly to find a place there among those strangers, strange in many unfamiliar ways, and having known a mode of life, many of them, very different from mine.

The setting was a large house, with two large rooms at either end, little ones ‘ for visitors, ’ along a well-lighted hall opposite the dining-room, and upstairs, beds and clothes. There was more activity than I had known for months — a piano, sewing being done, a certain number of household duties regularly performed. There were patients who went each morning to the laundry, others afternoons; and there was a group that went to the ‘embroidery class’ every day in the main building.

I joined none of these. In fact I could not, yet. It seems in retrospect that I simply sat and watched and answered a few questions now and then, and asked many. There is a little girl who sat beside me on the couch that first day. Her name is May. She is a child of ten, perhaps, mentally, whose birthdays number twenty, or maybe more: slight, pretty in a half-blonde way, and appealing. A wrist-watch and a locket constituted our first topic of conversation. She showed me a picture in the locket.

‘He had pneumonia in Germany,’ she told me, ‘the last time I knew of him. And there is another at home. He said he would take care of me, but he has n’t written lately. He said he would take care of me, well. I wonder why the doctor won’t let me go?’

She spoke in this vein frequently. Her mother is in another ward of the hospital. She lives only physically, never talking, just lying there day after day. May takes her fruit and things sometimes, but there is slight response. I noticed that she frequently cried quietly after these visits. Her father, a farmer, and a little sister, came twice. That is all.

But the weeks slip by, and small interests hold fast and little pleasures loom large in that place, for most of the patients. There are a number of diversions, like the weekly dances. Such hair-curling and powdering of noses — quite as at home! I never went, or almost never. The crowding together of so many inmates was overwhelming. It weighed one down with a hopeless sense of really tragic lives massed as one rarely sees them except in war-time — and that is quite different. Then there came choking memories of a few grand balls, with pink chiffon and of cotillions with favors. Why had one ever had them, if one had to be so far from the possibility of having them again?

Very different from May is Sally, who followed me with interest, curiosity making her brown eves snap. She, too, is a little girl grown large. She has a couple of children.

‘They are awful cute,’ she volunteered, ‘in Saint Elizabeth’s Home. When Charlotte was a baby, she was the fattest thing you ever saw, and she laughed till her toes dimpled. Did you ever have a baby?'

‘ Heavens, no! ’

‘Well, you don’t know what you missed.’

Still, to me who don’t know what I missed, very fortunately, it is unthinkable that maternity could fall so lightly on any human creature as on that child. How could one come out of that furnace of experience so utterly unsmelted, so unformed. But then she was very young, only seventeen.

‘I was working out,’ she talked with very little questioning, ‘and he said I could have a nice home. So I took all my money and bought clothes. Before we were married, he brought me lots of candy, and he just could n’t keep his hands off me. Liked me? Oh, gee! My sister went to the train with me. We were married in Kentucky.’

She wears her wedding-ring now.

‘But the next morning I told him I did n’t want to be married. He said I was married, though.’

Actually the child had not known, I think, the privileges the vows permitted him, any more than she understood the responsibilities they required of her.

‘We went to housekeeping — swell mahogany furniture and a nice rug and a lamp. He’s got ’em now. I don’t know, I just could n’t remember; burned the roast to cinders, and did all sorts of things like that before the baby came. Then afterward I could n’t even remember where I left off feeding her and dressing. Then I did n’t even know I had a baby. Then I came here. I was awful out of my head. But I am better now. I work in the laundry afternoons and go to the dances. The attendants dance with me, especially McKnight, and sometimes the Board of Administration.

‘Margie Blum irons next to me. She does the doctors’ clothes.’

I do not know how many times I fled, to escape Sally’s artless descriptions of all ‘hand-embroidered’ things not to be known about at all outside of families, save during that brief display of daintiness which comes with trousseaux. But such all-too-obvious distinctions are quite beyond Sally’s horizon.

Then there was Miss Sanderson, who half appropriated me, or I her. She had known nine languages. She still remembers some, and will not let you forget it. One time, when we were pursued by what seemed a real danger while out walking, she gave cries of alarm — in Greek! That was convincing. She read a great deal. Later I read to her, never satisfactorily. She took me, after a long time, for walks, when we found birds and wild flowers, especially white violets, and mud. We had a mutual genius for mud.

I am eternally grateful for those hours out in the sunlight. They were to count incalculably toward recovery, but they had a teasing, tantalizing quality of half freedom. One was ‘not allowed off the grounds,’ but they are very, very large. There is a brook in the meadow, and many hollow trees full of chipmunks with bewitching manners. Very often squirrels’ tails winked at you out from under this spring’s ferns and last autumn’s leaves. She really loved it all, and could communicate that love with a curious blurred intensity. In some ways she was a bit like other people I had known — perhaps that is why we were together so much.

V

There was always a crowding sense of people — people who stayed and those who came and went. I never went. I seemed eternally to watch suitcases come over from the main hospital, and their owners wave their hands at us and go — home. Hardly ever was one alone. Rows of people when one went to bed, three or four when one washed one’s face; dozens when a letter arrived, tens of dozens when candy came. There were actually about sixtyfive women in A-Cottage.

One day I got a room of my own — true privilege. It had a bed in it and sometimes a chair, and heavy wire over the window — no bars. The door, or the controlling of it, belonged to anybody else but the occupant, for the door-knob was a half door-knob, and that half on the outside. It was hardly a lady’s boudoir, but it was a room, warm and comfortable — and I was a few æons away from the state of mind that occupies a boudoir. I never have reached that state, financially or otherwise. I have always slept in a very simple bedroom, except when on a couch in an apartment house, when there was company and there was not space.

At night, on one side of me a woman moaned for her daughter sometimes; on the other, a ponderous, quiet person, who, during the day, was monosyllabic, occasionally erupted into violent nocturnal vituperations, cannonlike in their weight, swordlike in their keenness. Pestilence, slow torture, sudden death were exploded in some unknown mortal’s direction. Across the hall, another woman nakedly cursed the doctors and obscenely commented upon them, because they had the poor judgment to keep her where she undoubtedly belongs. And over and under all this, sleep came, and oh, how we welcomed it!

Those nights in that little room were to continue for almost three years, I traveled home there — a long journey. I waded out through senseless tears; came up often in the morning, ash-gray with fatigue arising from even more senseless, flaming anger; kept myself back with sheer mulishness — I sometimes fear my ears might have grown long like that animal’s, just from similarity of temperament—and locked myself away from freedom, with dull inactivity and the lack of that lift in life that we call trying.

Yet all through those years, more and more the acute consciousness of emotional states faded, and people came nearer and nearer, with all their complexities and queer simplicity. I became less and less a projecting piece of human furniture.

One twilight in July, a little woman came over from the main hospital, accompanied by a nurse, as we all had been. Her black hair was piled high, her voice filled with cosmopolitan smoothness, and her manner full of ease. Yet, even in those first few moments, unconsciously she seemed to be desiring to become the centre of attention — that unconscious demand of so many women who possess real charm.

She told me long afterward that her father was a great man in his country. He was a statesman, and diplomatic circles had been open to her in her girlhood. Diplomatic circles had also clamped an unwelcome marriage upon her over thirty years ago. She had escaped it overseas. A new country offered her its complex pleasure and troubles, never quite understood by her, but always varied and richly plentiful. There was no wonder that she was the magnet of that little group at A-Cottage, and continued to be for some time.

She related to me many stories of her early girlhood in that distant southern country. This one I liked, and remembered perhaps better than the rest. She gave it to me in about the following manner. We called it the ‘Story of the Fifty-Cent Tree’: —

‘In accordance with the rules of a well-ordered household, each morning my mother inspected us after the nurse had finished our toilet. One day, a terrible and unforeseen thing occurred. My brother and I were running down the hall; he jostled me, and I fell against my mother’s door. It responded instantly to the pressure of my small and impetuous body, opened, and unceremoniously I was thrust in upon my mother without knocking. That was an unforgetable offense — to enter a room without a rap at the door. My mother told me quite plainly that, if such a thing happened again, to the convent I should go, and not see her face for a year.

‘About seven months later, my nurse and I were having a tussle over a sash. It had come untied. She wanted to make the bow properly. I was grown up, I thought, and wanted to do it myself, whether properly or not. I pulled away from her, and a second time fell into my mother’s room without a knock at the door. My mother kept her word, and at the age of nine I went next morning to the convent, a two days’ journey from home, for a year’s stay.

‘Often my mother came and watched me at play with the other children in the old, old garden among the olive trees, or hid in some ancient niche in the cloister as I passed; but she was firm. I did not see her face. The only certain knowledge of her visit that came to me was that conveyed by the sweets and dainty clothes she left behind her.

‘One person I did see was an old friend of the family — almost like a guardian. He came every Friday. On one of these visits, I distinctly remember, he asked me if I had ever heard of the ancient miracles of my country. I knew very little of the current peasant lore. He told me a few tales, and then, in order to inculcate economy, a trait that was sadly lacking, in a joking way, never dreaming the extent of my credulity, he said: —

‘“If you will give me fifty cents of your allowance every week, I will plant it; it will grow into a tree; and when you leave the convent, you will be very, very rich.”

‘I gave him my fifty cents each week, and oh, my dreams! I could see that tree as your children do a Christmas tree in anticipation. I told all my schoolmates of the tree. My emphatic belief was such that they too acquired confidence. We planned together. It was the complete fulfillment, for each of the youngest children in that convent, of her most cherished desire. Even the peasant children in the village knew — I was to be rich, rich. They should no longer be hungry. Alvarez was to have new shoes, his brother a coat, and so on endlessly.

‘When I went to sleep, homesick and lonely for my mother’s face, it was the thought of the fifty-cent tree that stayed my tears.

‘At last, the year was ended. I was home. Was I glad to see my mother? Yes, but—And see how my little brother had grown. He could say my name. It was very wonderful; still I wanted to see the fifty-cent tree. I clutched my old friend’s hand. We went into the warm sunlight of the garden.

‘“Look, the rosebush! They planted it just for you, and how the orange trees gleam with great golden balls! You saw none like that when you were with the sisters, I am sure.”

‘“But,” I cried, “my fifty-cent tree; where is my fifty-cent tree? ”

‘“Oh, that,” he laughed. “You are too old for that; and besides it did not develop very well.”

‘In a second of stunning realization I understood.

“‘You lied to me. There is n’t any fifty-cent tree. There never was any fifty-cent tree.”

‘Slowly the truth burned in.

“‘I would like to kill you because you lied to me.”

“‘Would you?” he said with genuine penitence. “The gardener there has a hatchet.”

‘He put the shining thing into my hands. His own exquisitely formed one was lying on the garden wall, all flecked over with leafy sun and shadows. I lifted the hatchet. There was a horrible spurt of blood, but no outcry. Years later, in my country, you might have seen a great general who always wore a glove on his left hand because he had lost two fingers. As for me, I was ill in bed for weeks over what I had done. And not being able to face my friends in the convent, or the village children, because of my inability to carry out my plans, I was sent, at my own passionate request, to another convent. The next year I continued my education in France.’

VI

That was all; but this and similar stories opened the gates into another life. It was a wholesome thing for me. A more subjective happening was to come, which made me particularly keen, and awake to my relations with others. As I was preparing to go to sleep one night, out of the dark, like a cutting flash of light, a memory assailed me. I suddenly recalled that Sunday on which I threw the medicine-glass at the doctor in a moment of sheer madness. Other similar scenes followed it. I threw a glass at the doctor! I threw a glass at the doctor! I — but how could I? How could anyone? Each day I saw her, tactful and patient . She was like a balance wheel for us all. It missed her eyes by about an inch. They are very blue.

Over again, day after day, the thought followed me — a horror. Yet, at the same time, it was a strengthening one. I knew I could not do it again, and that I was feeling what any normal person would feel at such an outrageous act. There were times, however, when the affair became an obsession. Every sharp sound seemed like something brittle smashing. I slept restlessly for some weeks. It was a distinct relief to see the doctor each morning, well and whole, though I knew, of course, that I had not hurt her, physically at least.

I even went to a dance one night to rid myself of the idea’s reoccurrence. Then, one spring day, I stepped out with the doctor as she went to her duties in the main hospital, and told her. She said: ‘Why do you bring it to my consciousness?’ and then, seeing my need, ‘You were very sick!’

The sharing of that haunt flowed through me with an instantly healthful effect. The impersonal explanation, along with a little personal forgiveness, sealed my loyalty and devotion to the doctor — feelings aroused the first time she had sat by my bed, in the receiving Ward 10, nearly four years before.

All through these years my thoughts wandered frequently back to my very little girlhood, back to that first twilight of consciousness, and to the quaint ideas and misconceptions babyhood holds for me. My childhood companioned me often.

Of all the childishly profound questions that I had asked about the universe, as all children do, this one seemed to cling to my memory with greatest clearness.

The question: ‘Why are flowers here at all?’

The answer: ‘Because the One who made the world thought them.’

I was thrilled — ‘thought them!’ Often I had held a flower in my hand, the very quality of beauty caught and made tangible, a quiet thing, delicious to all senses, so good to smell! How would it feel to think a flower, to think a world, to think a star, a sun, a universe, a system of suns, above all, to evolve a human being? I still wonder.

I was sure that the doctor, had she been with me when I was little, could have answered that question better than anyone I had ever known. That is what she does — thinks human beings, thinks them back to original fineness and confidence. She takes tattered, nebulous bits of intelligence, and welds them whole; ragged souls, and mends them with true feminine patience. She re-creates.

Suppose one had slipped out of earthly touches in a swift moment, would there have been a sufficiently active consciousness to proceed with immortality, provided there be such? If I, among hundreds, had lived on there without just that help, would there ever have been keenness enough to savor existence anywhere? One might almost dare believe that eternal life hung in the balance there many times. Who knows?

VII

One force was working steadily toward recovery, namely, the influence of out-of-doors. The last spring there was poignant to a degree expressed by nothing so much, perhaps, as those vivid lines of Stevenson’s: —

It was my privilege to carry the preceding day’s report over to the main hospital each morning, very early. Those dawns cut clean into one with an almost surgical keenness. To feel it again was sometimes overpowering. The stars’ pale gleam over a last fall of snow, seemingly reluctant to be the last; a new moon above the April fringe of an elm tree — things like these fairly made poems in one’s corpuscles. My body again reacted to the touch of earth’s ‘renewal.’ Life surged in.

There is a little woman who works there, in a garden set on a hill. It is fragrant against dark trees, and overlooks the road and distant tilled fields. Hepaticas and snowdrops are planted early, inviting the freshly swarming bees. It and the little woman’s whiteclad figure added no little to the charm of a newly perceived Nature.

Unconsciously, for some months, I had been preparing myself for a very definite and positive form of appreciation of all this. A half-year or less before, I had with much difficulty got around an inflexible hospital rule. All were required to retire at eight. That meant lying there in my little room, without a light, at least ten hours. It was healthful, no doubt, but boredom raised to the nth power. One could not sleep all that time. I began to rise as soon as it was light, before it was permitted, and stealthily and surreptitiously to plaster myself against the window, book in hand.

These books were, many of them, reminders of a lost epoch of leisureHazlitt, Montaigne, De Quincey, a bit of Dickens, Carlyle, Emerson, and some of the longer and less well-known Irvings. With them came a revivified sense of the spell words may weave, and a desire to use them.

Instead of counting sheep to put myself to sleep, until my flocks exceeded the fondest dreams of Solomon, I began, for the first and last time in my life, to rhyme. The rhythm and soft meeting, in sound, of words soon sent me quietly away from active consciousness. In the morning, I wrote down the lines, so as to continue the next night. The results of this effort would undoubtedly have the same effect on a reader that they had on me, that of somnolence. But these small scraps of paper were invaluable in the outlet they gave and the peace they provided each evening. So for me spring translated itself very positively into words, a few of them my own, but mostly those of the authors I was reading. It was a concrete thing by which to make a connection.

One of the brightest of these May days the doctor said I might go home. This was after several ’trial visits.’ I went swiftly. I found the same house, with the two children. This time there were plenty of stories and games, but four years older, to fit the more discerning ears and lengthened legs. Following in amusing, confusing succession came skirts shockingly short to unaccustomed eyes, Main Street, Lime-house Nights, the latest Galsworthy, a three-year-old Ibáñez, new to me, nothing close to one’s feet but silk stockings, and all the baths I wanted at irregular intervals, and no state soap.

States may be able to make laws, educate citizens, regulate traffic in liquor and Henry Fords, and do various other wonderful things, but they can’t make soap. Like Bre’r Rabbit, I cry—

‘Skin me, . . . snatch out my eyeballs, t’ar out my years by de roots, en cut off my legs. Roas’ me, . . . and hang me just as high as you please, but don’t’ — cause me to use state soap again, I could not face the possibility.

Later, there came a position in the same large building, where there is a ‘new person’ to direct one, who says this is going to be a ‘highly diverting winter.’ That I can well believe, since she is to be so large a part of it. The little boy who brought cakes to the ‘temporary invalid’ is mostly legs,— all that is not smiles, — and is preparing for college. His mother is still forgiving. I like her so much that I can no longer spare the time to hate myself.

And in the midst of all this I am climbing a sheer wall of readjustments, a little breathless, now and then slipping ridiculously. To balance myself, I may get on the train and see the doctor sometimes. And occasionally I get letters from her. I shall use them carefully, and make a firm handle of them, by which I may hold on to the lovely things she has given me again — a whole world. Thus I, who had the fortune to be both a woman and a lunatic am reënfranchised.