III
As sharply and quite as impersonally as he would have watched the crawling illness of an infected guinea pig, Martin watched himself, in the madness of overwork, drift toward neurasthenia. With considerable interest he looked up the symptoms of neurasthenia, saw one after another of them twitch at him, and casually took the risk.
From an irritability which made him a thoroughly impossible person to live with, he passed into a sick nervousness in which he missed things for which he reached, dropped test-tubes, gasped at sudden footsteps behind him. Dr. Yeo’s croaking voice became to him a fever, an insult, and he waited with his whole body clenched, muttering, “Shut up—shut up—oh, shut up!” when Yeo stopped to talk to someone outside his door.
Then he was obsessed by the desire to spell backward all the words which snatched at him from signs.
As he stood dragging out his shoulder on a subway strap, he pored over the posters, seeking new words to spell backward. Some of them were remarkably agreeable: No Smoking became a jaunty and agreeable “gnikoms on,” and Broadway was tolerable as “yawdaorb,” but he was displeased by his attempts on Punch, Health, Rough; while Strength, turning into “htgnerts” was abominable.
When he had to return to his laboratory three times before he was satisfied that he had closed the window, he sat down, coldly, informed himself that he was on the edge, and took council as to whether he dared go on. It was not very good council: he was so glorified by his unfolding work that his self could not be taken seriously.
At last Fear closed in on him.
It began with childhood’s terror of the darkness. He lay awake dreading burglars; footsteps in the hall were a creeping cutthroat; an unexplained scratching on the fire-escape was a murderer with an automatic in his fist. He beheld it so clearly that he had to spring from bed and look timorously out, and when in the street below he did actually see a man standing still, he was cold with panic.
Every sky glow was a fire. He was going to be trapped in his bed, be smothered, die writhing.
He knew absolutely that his fears were absurd, and that knowledge did not at all keep them from dominating him.
He was ashamed at first to acknowledge his seeming cowardice to Leora. Admit that he was crouching like a child? But when he had lain rigid, almost screaming, feeling the cord of an assassin squeezing his throat, till the safe dawn, brought back a dependable world, he muttered of “insomnia” and after that, night on night, he crept into her arms and she shielded him from the horrors, protected him from garroters, kept away the fire.
He made a checking list of the favorite neurasthenic fears: agoraphobia, claustrophobia, pyrophobia, anthropophobia, and the rest, ending with what he asserted to be “the most fool, pretentious, witch-doctor term of the whole bloomin’ lot,” namely, siderodromophobia, the fear of a railway journey. The first night, he was able to check against pyrophobia, for at the vaudeville with Leora, when on the stage a dancer lighted a brazier, he sat waiting for the theater to take fire. He looked cautiously along the row of seats (raging at himself the while for doing it), he estimated his chance of reaching an exit, and became easy only when he had escaped into the street.
It was when anthropophobia set in, when he was made uneasy by people who walked too close to him, that, sagely viewing his list and seeing how many phobias were now checked, he permitted himself to rest.
He fled to the Vermont hills for a four-day tramp—alone, that he might pound on the faster. He went at night, by sleeper, and was able to make the most interesting observations of siderodromophobia.
He lay in a lower berth, the little pillow wadded into a lump. He was annoyed by the waving of his clothes as they trailed from the hanger beside him, at the opening of the green curtains. The window-shade was up six inches; it left a milky blur across which streaked yellow lights, emphatic in the noisy darkness of his little cell. He was shivering with anxiety. Whenever he tried to relax, he was ironed back into apprehension. When the train stopped between stations and from the engine came a questioning, fretful whistle, he was aghast with certainty that something had gone wrong—a bridge was out, a train was ahead of them; perhaps another was coming just behind them, about to smash into them at sixty miles an hour—
He imagined being wrecked, and he suffered more than from the actual occurrence, for he pictured not one wreck but half a dozen, with assorted miseries … The flat wheel just beneath him—surely it shouldn’t pound like that—why hadn’t the confounded man with the hammer detected it at the last big station?—the flat wheel cracking; the car lurching, falling, being dragged on its side … A collision, a crash, the car instantly a crumpled, horrible heap, himself pinned in the telescoped berth, caught between seat and seat. Shrieks, death groans, the creeping flames … The car turning, falling plumping into a river on its side; himself trying to crawl through a window as the water seeped about his body … Himself standing by the wrenched car, deciding whether to keep away and protect his sacred work or go back, rescue people, and be killed.
So real were the visions that he could not endure lying here, waiting. He reached for the berth light, and could not find the button. In agitation he tore a matchbox from his coat pocket, scratched a match, snapped on the light. He saw himself, under the sheets, reflected in the polished wooden ceiling of his berth like a corpse in a coffin. Hastily he crawled out, with trousers and coat over his undergarments (he had somehow feared to show so much trust in the train as to put on pajamas), and with bare disgusted feet he paddled up to the smoking compartment. The porter was squatting on a stool, polishing an amazing pile of shoes.
Martin longed for his encouraging companionship, and ventured, “Warm night.”
“Uh-huh,” said the porter.
Martin curled on the chill leather seat of the smoking compartment, profoundly studying a brass washbowl. He was conscious that the porter was disapproving, but he had comfort in calculating that the man must make this run thrice a week, tens of thousands of miles yearly, apparently without being killed, and there might be a chance of their lasting till morning.
He smoked till his tongue was raw and till, fortified by the calmness of the porter, he laughed at the imaginary catastrophes. He staggered sleepily to his berth.
Instantly he was tense again, and he lay awake till dawn.
For four days he tramped, swam in cold brooks, slept under trees or in straw stacks, and came back (but by day) with enough reserve of energy to support him till his experiment should have turned from overwhelming glory into sane and entertaining routine.