XI
“Please be seated, Mr. Merrick,” the secretary had said, stiffly, twenty minutes ago. “Dean Whitley is busy now.”
A qualitative analysis of Mr. Merrick’s scowl as he sat fidgeting would have resolved it into two parts curiosity, three parts anxiety and the remainder annoyance … Of chagrin—a trace.
The note had said eleven, and he had entered while the clock was striking. It had not specified what the dean wished to see him about. That would have been too much to expect. Courtesy and consideration were against the rules governing the official action of deans.
Big universities, like monopolistic public utilities and internal revenue offices, enjoyed high-hatting their constituencies; liked to make an impressive swank with their authority; liked to keep people waiting, guessing, worrying; liked to put ’em to all the bother possible.
Mr. Merrick glowered. He glowered first at the large photograph of an autopsy suspended above the secretary’s desk in the corner … Seven doctors owling it over a corpse. All of the doctors were paunchy, their pendulous chins giving them the appearance of a covey of white pelicans. They were baggy under the eyes … a lot of fat ghosts swathed in shrouds. The corpse too was fat. Why conduct a post over this bird? Any layman could see at a glance what had ailed him—he was a glutton. Let these wiseacres take warning in the presence of this plump cadaver, and go on a diet of curds and spinach before some committee put them on a stone slab and rummaged in their cold capacious bellies to enhance the glory of materia medica … They were the bunk—the whole greasy lot of them!
Having temporarily finished with the autopsy, Dean Whitley’s impatient customer glowered over the titles of the big books in the case hard by … Simpson’s Nervous Diseases … the old sap. You had to read his blather in front of a dictionary; weren’t ten words in the whole fourteen pounds of wood-pulp with less than seven syllables … Mount’s Obsessions … Why was it that these bozos thought it unscholarly to be intelligible and undignified to be interesting? And as for obsessions, old Mount was a nut himself—one of these cuckoos that tapped every third telegraph pole with his cane and spat on fireplugs … If he missed one, he had to go back, it was said … About the same mentality as Fido’s. Well, Mount ought to be an authority on obsessions!
A tall, rangy medic came out of the dean’s sanctum, very red but with a jaunty stride, crossed the room in four steps and banged the door … Bet it was no new experience for that door!
Distracted from his invoice of the book shelf, Mr. Merrick glowered at the bony maiden who rattled the typewriter. Smug and surly she was; mouth all screwed up into an ugly little rosette, lashless eyes snapping, sharp nose sniffing … Easy to see what she was doing—writing a letter to some poor boob inviting him to come in at nine and see the dean … She ought to add a postscript that he would be expected to spend half of a fine June morning in this dismal hole waiting for his nibs to finish the Free Press and his nails, take his legs off the table, and push a buzzer to let the beggar in.
“Dean Whitley will see you now, Mr. Merrick.”
“Mr. Merrick,” said Dean Whitley, after Bobby had taken the chair recommended to him, “I must have a friendly chat with you. During the first few weeks of last semester, you gave promise, I am informed, of an exceptionally interesting career in the medical profession. Shortly after the mid-semester examinations, which I see you passed with the highest marks of your class, you began to slip. You quickly used up all your cuts. You became disinterested and disgruntled. What’s the trouble?”
“I think you’ll find I’ve been doing average work, sir.”
Dean Whitley shook a long, bony finger.
“Exactly! Average work! Do you hanker to be an average doctor?”
“Well—when you put it that way—of course not.”
The dean tilted back in his swivel-chair and clasped his hands behind his head.
“Your case is somewhat unusual, Merrick. You are the heir apparent to a large fortune. You did not have to seek a vocation. It was a surprise to all your friends that you came here. Your line of least resistance was polo. But you plunged into your work with an enthusiasm that put the whole first-year class on its toes and challenged the instructional corps to offer the best it had. Now—precisely what has happened to your spirit? Is there anything we can do to put you in the running again?”
Bobby twisted the links of a platinum watch-chain, head hanging.
“You’re quite right, Dean Whitley. I suppose it was the novelty kept me alive at first.”
“Yes—but see here!” The dean reversed a sheaf of tabulations and pushed it across the table. “Just follow that line from opening day to the Thanksgiving recess, and there isn’t a cut! You didn’t flick a class! … Pursue it the rest of the way and see what you did to your scholastic credit! … What happened to you on or about Thanksgiving? … Perhaps you should be treated for it—whatever it was. You’re too promising to lose if we can save you!”
“I just got tired of it. Too much drudgery.”
“It wasn’t drudgery before!”
“Well—I think I began to notice that it was, about that time.”
“Ever think of giving it up?”
“Oh—no, sir! I can’t do that!”
“Why not? You don’t aspire to be a mere second-rater, do you?”
“I suppose I’ll have to content myself with that. I’ll have plenty of company, won’t I?”
The dean fiddled with a paper-knife and looked down his nose glumly.
“This is very disappointing! … Sure you don’t want to give me your full confidence and let me try to help you?”
Bobby moved to the edge of his chair, and took up his hat.
“There’s nothing you can do, sir. Thank you for your interest. I’ll try to do better.”
On the front steps he met Dawson, a first-year medic with whom he had a mere nodding acquaintance. Dawson was a lean-faced, hollow-eyed, shabby chap, who had a desperate time of it trying to keep up. Slightly older than the average, more was expected of him than he was able to deliver. Not infrequently he was scornfully panned by his instructors who seemed to enjoy watching him wince under their satirical jabs.
A question, having been muffed by three or four, would be tossed at him in some such fashion as, “And of course you wouldn’t know, would you, Mr. Dawson?” Seven times out of nine, he wouldn’t. Bobby’s sympathy had been excited, occasionally … What were they trying to do to the poor devil? … Drive him into the river?
“Hello, Merrick! … Been deaning?”
“Oh yes,” said Bobby brightly. “But not in the way you probably suspect. You see, the dean and I meet frequently for a game of cribbage. He’s good too. I presume you’re having tea with him presently?”
Dawson was grim.
“Naw—I’m going in to tell him I’m through and that they can all go to hell!”
“That would be a great blunder, Dawson.” Bobby became owlishly didactic. “They might go—and where would that leave you? You see, my son, every time you send a man to hell, with whom you have had close personal contacts, he takes part of you along with him. And then, some fine day, when things are ever so much better with you, and you need to collect all there is of your scattered personality for some noble purpose, a considerable chunk of you is missing—and—and you have to go to hell after it.”
“What’s the big idea? Trying to kid me? If so, don’t! I’m in no mood for it … Up to the last ditch—if you don’t mind my weepin’ on your neck!”
“How about a bite of lunch together?” suggested Bobby, amazed at his own proposal of hospitality to this morose, threadbare fellow. “All you’re seeing him for is to tell him to go to hell. Put it off till tomorrow. He won’t object to the delay.”
Yielding with a crooked smile to Bobby’s persuasion, Dawson fell into step.
“Anything you’d like to get off your chest?” inquired his host, after their order had been given. “Perhaps you’d enjoy singing a few verses of your hymn of hate. If so, go to it—and I’ll join you in the chorus where the fancy damning comes in.”
“Thanks, Merrick. You’re a good sort. Perhaps it wouldn’t be bad for me to let off steam. I’ll tell you a little about it … I always wanted to be a surgeon … prattled about it as a child … never thought of anything else … thought of it as a novitiate in holy orders thinks of his vocation! … After college, I was out for three years trying to scrape up enough to bring me back … Got discouraged: gave it up; fell in love; married. The girl revived the old hope in me … Worked like dogs—both of us; she in an office, I selling bonds … So we came, last September … She found a job … Then the baby came … lot of expenses. Living was higher than we figured … I began to work down town nights in a bowling-alley … setting pins for freshmen to knock down one at a time … How’s that for your inferiority complex?”
“Well, it certainly wouldn’t drive a man into a state of hallucinatory omnipotence; that’s sure!”
“A woolly caterpillar! … That’s what it made of me! … No wonder I was a dunce! … And now—as if I hadn’t already enough to … But—hell—what’s the good of talking about it?”
“Drive on!” commanded Bobby. “It’s no farther through to the other side than to back out. Let’s have the rest of it. You were a caterpillar and a dunce—and now you’re something else again? … What’s happened lately?”
“My wife is sick. No—nothing acute. Just fagged and undernourished and neurotic; says she’s a dead weight on me and wishes she were dead. She’s brooding over it. I’m half afraid to go home for fear I’ll find that she has destroyed herself!”
“She should be out in the country for the summer,” advised Bobby. “Fresh air, good milk, sunshine.”
“Might as well suggest a trip to Europe,” muttered Dawson. “We’ve nothing.”
“Hasn’t she people she could go to for the summer?”
“Nobody … There’s a tight old stepfather who threw her out when she married me. He’d picked a yokel for her who lived in the neighbourhood … My mother is a widow, living with my sister, up state. They’re poor too and crowded.”
“How about a little loan? You’re not always going to be on your uppers. Almost anybody would consider that a safe investment, I should think.”
“I don’t know anyone I could approach with a proposition like that.”
Bobby’s guest ate hungrily. His hand trembled when he cut his meat.
“I have a little money that isn’t in use just now.”
Dawson shook his head.
“No!—By God, I didn’t tell you my story with the hope of panhandling some money out of you. You’re probably like all the rest of the medics—just scraping along … Thanks all the same, old man … It’s mighty generous of you … No—I’m going to give it up and get a job!”
“You didn’t understand me, Dawson. I didn’t mean to propose handing you the price of next week’s groceries. I’d like to lend you, say, five thousand dollars.”
Here was one chap that had accepted him as a pal in poverty … Natural enough, though. Dawson had had his nose to the grindstone; kept aloof from the others. He needn’t have heard that there was a wealthy student in the class … And this interview had not been of his seeking.
“You mean that?”
“Of course! … You didn’t think I’d joke with you about a business matter involving five thousand dollars, did you?”
Bobby would never have suspected the fellow of so much sparkle and spontaneous wit. He expanded as if some miracle had been performed on him.
“Merrick,” he said solemnly, as they reached the street. “You’ve come near saving a couple of lives today! … Mind if I run home now? … I’ve got to tell her! … I say—wouldn’t you like to come along?”
They were a shabby pair of rooms on the third floor of a third-rate apartment house over north of the big hospital, disorderly with the clutter incident to an attempt to make a bedroom, dining-room, nursery and kitchen of such cramped quarters.
Marion Dawson had no apologies to offer for the appearance of her house. Bobby liked her for that. He was instantly delighted with this pale, tawny-haired, hazel-eyed young woman who gave him a man’s handgrip and unloaded a chair for him without a flurry of embarrassment. The baby was dug up for inspection and greeted the visitor with big, blinking eyes, amusingly like his father’s. Having had no experience with babies, Bobby regarded this one with something of the same solemn interest it bestowed on him. Marion laughed.
“You can’t get acquainted with him that way,” she exclaimed. “You’ve got to boo at him, or something! He expects it, you know. He wouldn’t think of making a little ass of himself by booing at you; but he’ll be dreadfully disappointed if you don’t make some idiotic noises at him.”
Bobby knew he was going to like this girl.
“Marion,” said Dawson, with an unsteady voice, “Mr. Merrick is going to lend us some money. He says we’re a good risk. I’m not sure about me; but I know you are.”
She dropped her air of banter and stared at their guest for a long moment, trying to realize the significance of her husband’s announcement; then said, with deep feeling, “So—after all we’ve been through—Jack is to have his chance, at last!” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Dear boy! … It has been so long—so hard for you!”
She reached out her left hand to Bobby and clasped his with grateful fingers. “What a lovely thing for you to do!” she said.
“Oh—everybody has his troubles,” stammered Bobby, hoping the situation would be spared a debauch of sentimentality. “The least trouble in the world is a shortage of money.”
“Unless one hasn’t any,” chuckled Dawson.
Bobby arrived late in the little amphitheatre of the surgical clinic, that afternoon. The operation proved of exceptional interest. He found himself leaning far forward. That night, he almost enjoyed his Brill. Before he went to bed at one, he wrote to Nancy Ashford, to whom he had owed a letter for weeks.
“I had a very interesting visit today with a young medic and his wife—the Dawsons—” his second page began; but, after looking at the words critically for a moment, he crumpled the page and started a fresh one with no mention of the Dawsons.
“Have you ever deciphered the rest of the journal?”
He had sent it back to her with the brief statement that he didn’t care to bother any farther with it … He wasn’t the right type to pursue any such philosophy with hope of pleasure or profit, he said, and it really wasn’t sporting to read it for curiosity’s sake—especially after Doctor Hudson’s request that one stop when one’s personal interest had flagged.
“Perhaps you will tell me, at least in a general way, how it all came out if you completed it … I learn, in reading about unusual obsessions, that a marked mystical tendency occasionally shows up in the minds of very materialistic people who deal practically, otherwise, with all their interests. I dare say Doctor Hudson was a typical case.”
Two days later he had her reply.
“Mrs. Hudson has the journal now, along with all the other things we kept for her in the office safe. I doubt if she has made any effort to discover what it’s about. Perhaps she hasn’t opened the box in which she received them. At all events, she has not queried me, as she might have done if she had been mystified by the code … I feel confident she would let you have the book, now that your interest in it is revived.
“Yes, I deciphered the rest of it … An amazing record! … If it were done into a book, it would sell a hundred thousand! People would pronounce it utterly incredible, of course; but they would read it—and heartily wish it were true. And I have a notion they would be sneaking off to make experiments, no matter how they might have giggled when discussing the theory with their friends.
“I wish I dared tell you … you know why I cannot … about the quite startling experiences I myself have had lately … It’s all true, Bobby. You do get what you want that way, if what you want contributes to the larger expression of yourself in constructive service … You even get letters that had been so long delayed you wondered if you’d been forgotten … Does that sound foolish?”
It sounded foolish.
“I’m sorry,” mused Bobby, folding the letter. “Nancy had such an interesting mind. Now she’ll be goofy for the rest of her life … Glad I stopped the bally nonsense before it got me.”
He smiled bitterly over Nancy’s suggestion that he ask Mrs. Hudson for the journal … His contrite note of apology, dated December first, had not been answered. For the first two weeks, he had shadowed the postman.
On the Sunday morning that young Mrs. Dawson and the baby were taken to the country, Bobby, on pressing invitation, joined the party.
The place they had chosen was a quiet cottage owned by a middle-aged widow, a few hundred yards from the shady shore of Pleasant Lake—an hour’s railroad trip to the north.
Relieved of his long anxiety, Jack Dawson had lost his pallor. His step was elastic; his shoulders were squared. As for Marion, she was radiant.
They made a picnic of it, and ate their lunch on the lake shore—Jack, junior, left in the custody of Mrs. Plimpton who, immediately on being alone with him, decided he would be all the better for a bit of old-fashioned rocking and a few Gospel songs.
“Now—none o’ that!” declared Marion, setting out the contents of their basket. “You two old doctors have plenty of chances to talk wisely about disabled gizzards, all through the week. It makes me sick to eat my meals off the operating table, anyway.”
Apparently they had known nothing of Bobby’s wealth before he had interested himself in them. Doubtless they knew now. But the Dawsons’ attitude toward him was unchanged. There was not a trace of shyness or sycophancy. Thoroughbreds—they were. He wished he had a sister exactly like Marion Dawson.
The men took a late afternoon train back to town, separating at the station.
“So long, Bobby,” said Dawson. “Thanks much for coming along. See you soon. Glad the stuff’s going better for you. You’ve certainly given me a shot in the arm!”
“It’s been good for both of us,” said Bobby.
That night he carried out a decision he had resolved upon the day before. Randolph had seemed able to get all the information he wanted from a certain important page of the Galilean report on the one man who apparently knew the principles imperative to an expanded personality. Bobby considered himself entirely capable of pursuing such research as Randolph had made.
He had never owned a copy of the Bible. Yesterday he had bought a testament. The salesman had laid out quite an assortment. Bobby had chosen a copy that looked more like an ordinary secular book than the black ones with limp leather covers. His choice was based upon his expectation of treating it as he would any other book.
He leafed in it, back and forth, for a long time before he came upon the particular thesis which the sculptor had considered important to a man’s quest of a dynamic personality. He read it with as much intensity of concentration as he might have studied the map of a strange country through which he expected to travel.
There was a certain quaintness of phrase that intrigued him and commanded his interest. On and on he read, far into the night, without weariness. The little book amazed him. When and if he had thought about it at all, he had considered this ancient document a jumble of soporific platitudes, floating about in a solution of Jewish superstitions, and accepted by simple-minded people as a general cure-all for their petty anxieties and a numbing narcotic to dull their sense of wanting what they couldn’t have.
It was rapidly becoming apparent to him that here was one of the most fascinatingly interesting things he had ever read. Not only was it free of the dullness he had ascribed to it; it kept hinting of secrets—secrets of a tremendous energy to be tapped by any man with sense enough to accept the fact of it as he would any other scientific hypothesis, and accord it the same dignity, the same practical tests he might pursue in a chemical or physical laboratory.
It was astounding to feel that he had in his hand the actual textbook of a science relating to the expansion and development of the human personality. How queer that people seemed bent upon setting it to music, and drawing long faces while they piously intoned it! How ridiculous! And how unfortunate! This wasn’t the libretto for grand opera, or epic stuff to metre into maudlin little hymns! This was a profound, scientific thesis! The very act of chanting it would be proof you didn’t know what it was about!
One of Merrick’s most important discoveries, that night, was the fact that unlike the usual scientific dissertation, which would be accessible only to the trained mind, there was enough of simple counsel in the book to be of high advantage to the least sophisticated. It was not a treatise intended for highbrows. But it was plain to see that the potential constituency of the book was sharply classified into groups. With the utmost candour, the Galilean had postulated three types of general capacity related to one another as 5:2:1. He had been entirely frank about saying to his intimates, in an intensive seminar session, that there were certain mysteries he could and would confide to them which he had no intention of discussing before the general public for the reason that the majority of people would be unable to understand.
He noted, also with keen interest, the numerous occasions when the Galilean, having performed a service for someone, would ask him, as a special favour, not to tell anybody about it.
“Practising his own theories, all right!”
It was clear, from the record, that men became interested in this strange, uncanny power by various processes of introduction to it. One man would see the remarkable power and beauty of it in the hands of another, and would resolve to have it for himself if it cost him his last dime. The matter was stated pictorially in a fable concerning a man who saw a pearl in another man’s hands and sold everything he had to buy it. It was further stated that occasionally a man came upon this almost incredible thing by sheer accident. There was a story of a traveller who, while taking a shortcut across a field, stumbled upon a treasure chest. The book did not say what was in the chest. It just reported that the traveller gave up his journey, went home, converted everything he had into funds, came back, and bought that field.
But nothing struck Bobby more forcibly than the constantly reiterated advice to approach life audaciously. Anything a man really wanted, he could have if he hammered long enough at the doors behind which it was guarded. If he didn’t get it, it was because he hadn’t wanted it badly enough! No matter how patently futile it was to continue battering the door, any man who wanted anything earnestly enough could open any kind of a door!
“Got to have bloody knuckles,” reflected Bobby, “before you can say you tried it and it wouldn’t work!”
The fable accompanying this proposition told of a poor widow, with no influence at all, who wanted justice from a rich man. The judge was an utter rascal. The woman had no attorney, no friends, and no case; but she kept coming until she wore the judge out.
He found himself entering more and more confidently into the mood of the man who had proposed these principles of what he called a more abundant life, particularly struck by the poise and audacity.
At length, he closed the book and closed his eyes. He was not conscious of formulating a definite request. Had anybody told him he was praying, he would have been greatly surprised. He was endeavouring to construct a mental image of the kind of a man who might be likely to have proposed such a philosophy.
The thing that happened to him came quite without further invitation than that.
As he attempted to analyse it, later, the sensation he experienced—the most vivid and vital experience he had ever had—was as if a pair of great double-doors, somewhere at that far end of a dark corridor in his mind—in his heart—in his soul—somewhere inside of him—had quietly parted, shedding a soft, shimmering radiance upon the roof, walls and pavement of the long hall. The walls were covered with maps, charts, diagrams, weapons, and glittering instruments and apparatus in glass cases.
It was only a fleeting glimpse. The doors parted but a very little way. They quickly closed, and left the corridor so dark he could no longer tell where it was.
Rousing, bewilderedly, he became conscious of a curious sense of exultation. Had he been asleep? He did not think so.
He rose and walked unsteadily about the room, trying to recover as much as possible of his momentary illusion.
“Doors! … Light behind doors! … Light shining through! … I wonder if the corridor was always there waiting my discovery! … Perhaps I can do something to open those doors wider … I must! … Well, one thing is sure: I’ve seen it! It’s there! It’s real! … Maybe I’ll never get very far with it—but—it can be done! … Randolph wasn’t as crazy as I thought!”
Next morning, as he was starting to the dean’s office to arrange for his summer course in the face of old Nicholas’ urgent request that he knock off until September and return to Windymere, he received a note from Nancy Ashford.
“Perhaps you’ve read it in the papers, but I’ll make sure, for I know you will be interested. Friday night, Joyce Hudson and Tom Masterson slipped over to Toledo and were married. Mrs. Hudson expects to sail, on Saturday the tenth, for Europe. She just called up to inform me of her plans … Leviathan … I thought you’d want to know.”
At intervals, all day, he debated the advisability of sending flowers to the ship, and decided against it. She would probably consider it an impertinence. No—he had irretrievably cut himself off … All that he had left now was his mounting interest in his work, into which he plunged with renewed enthusiasm.