Mummers in Mufti/Chapter 16

S had been the case the previous week, Bellsmith was again the last visitor of the afternoon, and Dr. MacVickar took out his black brier pipe without further ceremony. He looked for a minute whimsically at his patient.

"Well," he suggested quietly, "it looks to me as if this case had been rather taken out of my hands."

"Don't you believe it," said Bellsmith. "I need a darkened room and a soothing draught more than ever before."

"What's the matter?" asked the doctor, grinning.

"What's the matter?" retorted Bellsmith. "Don't you read the papers!"

"I see that you do," answered the doctor. "Do you still read them automatically, without even sensing the words, and suffer from intolerable boredom!"

"Oh, doctor, let up," begged Bellsmith. "I came to bury Nero, not to praise him. I'm cured of that particular form of ennui all right, but I could have cured myself in the same fashion by kicking the mayor's high hat or running away with a circus rider."

"Could you?" asked the doctor quietly. "Why did n't you ever do it?"

Bellsmith blushed. The point had gone home.

"Well, anyway, it's a rotten cure," he replied, and the doctor laughed.

"You look at it in the wrong light. Yon don't seem to realize that you are a national hero. Every sentimental girl in the city is dreaming about yon as a sort of dashing dragoon. Why don't you go over to the University Club and see how the men there are talking about you? You never did a thing in your life that set you so high in public esteem. Why, man alive! don't you realize that famous statesmen and prima donnas would envy the publicity that you are getting for nothing?"

"I am not a statesman," responded Bellsmith, "and, with your help, doctor, I never intend to be a prima donna. I don't like it, and that's all there is to it. I'd give my soul if it never had happened."

The doctor looked him humorously in the eye.

"Is that true?" he asked, quietly.

Bellsmith's eyes dropped. "I suppose it is n't—really," he confessed.

"You know very well that it is n't," replied the doctor. "You would n't undo that act for anything in the world. Now, would you—honestly?"

"No; I presume I would n't," confessed Bellsmith. "Just the same—"

The doctor dropped his bantering tone.

"What really did happen?" he asked.

Bellsmith told him, and he commented, "I understood that it was something like that. But why in the world did n't you come out and give the facts?"

"Would any one have believed them?" demanded Bellsmith. "Come, now. If I were an absolute stranger to you—all you knew of me was what you read in the papers—would n't you yourself have put your tongue in your cheek and believed the story just the same?"

The doctor nodded slowly. "I probably should. So you wisely decided just to say nothing and let the whole thing blow over?"

Bellsmith grinned ruefully. "I wish I could honestly say it was 'wisely.' The truth was that I just got huffy—got my back up."

"I imagine," said the doctor, "that more great deeds come about that way than any of us would suppose."

He suddenly changed his tone, as he always did when he wished to keep the control of the conversation in his own hands.

"Now let's get down to business," he said. "How have you really been getting along? How about that killing inertia of yours?"

Bellsmith grinned again in a way that was decidedly healthy. It suited his face like a coat of tan.

"Well, for one thing, I 've taken up music again. I find I have quite an interest in it."

A faint flicker of amusement lingered behind the doctor's eyes, but probably he decided that it would be wiser to check it and he replied simply:

"That's good."

"How about your little crotchety habits?" he added, a minute later. "Do you still have to open three doors and close two windows before you can read a book, or put on your right shoe before you put on your left!"

"Well," confessed Bellsmith, "I'm afraid that I'm not wholly cured in that line, but I have n't had time to think much about those things."

The doctor nodded. "That's usually about the way of it. When the executioner's ax is actually over your head you begin to lose interest in signs and omens. Things are too blamed definite as they are."

Bellsmith abruptly sat upright in his chair.

"Doctor," he demanded, you would n't tell me last week what was really the matter with me. Will you now?"

As he had done on the previous visit, the doctor thoughtfully picked up his fountain-pen, with the cap still on it, and began to move the dull round end slowly over the big, fresh blotter on his desk. As he himself would have recognized, there was probably some association of thought which suggested the movement. "I told you," he corrected, slowly, "that I would n't tell you because you would n't take it seriously enough."

He paused, then added: "When I was in college one of the foot-ball men elected a course in ethics. At the end of the first day he came out in great amazement and exclaimed, 'Why, ethics is nothing but what you know anyway, just put in other words!'

"Now that is very much the case with most mental ailments. Technically, a man ought to know what is the matter with him far better than any physician,—the latter not being really a mind-reader, as you yourself suggested last week."

"That's curious," said Bellsmith. "I heard some one else say that very thing only to-day."

But the doctor was either too absorbed in his point or the reference had been too casual for him to see behind it with his usual quickness.

"The trouble is," he continued, without looking up, "that not one man or woman in ten thousand has sufficient perception, or sufficient character, or sufficient ruthlessness toward themselves to recognize or admit their own mental processes, even when they are pointed out to them. So we have to be very careful how we point."

"Is this psychoanalysis?" asked Bellsmith.

The doctor continued to draw small circles with the blunt end of his pen and spoke very slowly.

"I should prefer," he said dryly, "not to have the particular circus for which I work confused with the gamblers and side-shows that hang around its outskirts. It's psychology, certainly, and it is analysis, but the craze for psychoanalysis merely means another form of the weakness itself—a desire to blunt a simple idea with a baffling name. If you wish to call it common sense, human nature, or intuitive, logical thought, any psychiatrist will meet you more than half-way, and you will find that you and the medical profession have an amazing amount in common."

Having delivered himself of this slightly venomed dart, the doctor laid down his pen and looked squarely at Bellsmith.

"Mr. Bellsmith," he began, "your trouble is simply that of any wealthy young man who is neither exceptionally vigorous nor exceptionally vicious. You have simply followed the line of the least resistance until you have reached the end of it. You have reached the irreducible minimum. You have got down to things so elemental that even you can't avoid them. Any banker could tell you that as well as any physician.

"You are not," he continued, "like most young men in your position. I mean most of those who become fit subjects for my profession. With them, following the line of the least resistance means following the line of the greatest pleasure, gratifying every desire as soon as it occurs, throwing themselves into profligacy.

"Your case is the exact opposite. You have a natural sensitiveness which precludes anything of that kind. But what that sensitiveness has also done has been to cause you to draw away instinctively whenever anything offered the least rebuff, the least complication, the smallest unpleasant suggestion. The result has been that you have cut off every side of normal activity, one after another, until you have had nothing left but opening and shutting doors and holding your hand over cracks in the window. If I may coin a phrase, you are suffering from the peculiar mental poverty of the pious. And now even the trifles of your own household, which are all you have left, have begun to oppress you as much as genuine disasters would have done five years ago.

Bellsmith sighed ruefully. "Go on, doctor. I know what's coming."

The doctor looked up in surprise. "What is coming?" Bellsmith laughed. "You are about to say that what I need is some compelling interest in life."

"Well, there you are!" replied the doctor. "You knew it as well as I did. The fact that it is trite does n't make it any less true, does it?"

"No," said Bellsmith wearily; "neither does that fact make it any less trite."

The doctor was amazing in one thing, that he knew just when to stop.

"Well, drop that for a moment. Let's go back to cases. What have you been doing the past week—besides telling the public to go to hell?"

"You are not exact in your quotations," said Bellsmith. "Well, for one thing, I have subdued a mutiny."

He related the story of his domestic uprising, and the doctor chuckled throughout the whole narration. "Fine!" he repeated at intervals, "Fine!" but when Bellsmith had finished he sat in silence, his eyes fixed quizzically in the distance, his lips puffing meditatively at his pipe.

In Bellsmith, however, the old New England conscience still hung on. Quite without promoting, he felt forced to add guiltily:

"Then, for another thing, I went to a rehearsal this afternoon—with Miss Marshall."

The doctor turned slowly and looked at him, still puffing thoughtfully. Bellsmith could stand it no longer, and he burst out suddenly:

"Doctor, do you think I ought to get married?"

"What do you mean by that?" asked the doctor, guardedly. "Do you mean to ask whether or not you are a proper physiological subject for marriage?"

"As to that," replied Bellsmith, "I imagine that I'd do it, if I wanted to, whether I was or not. No, I mean as a general proposition—temperamentally, socially, economically, whatever you want to call it."

"I think it would be a very good thing for Miss Marshall," answered the doctor, dryly.

"Does that answer the question?" asked Bellsmith, thoughtfully.

"As far as I'd care to answer it," replied the doctor.

There was naturally a silence for a moment, and then the doctor added:

"But even that would n't solve your problem forever, not even for as long as you'd think. I can't see why a fussy little married man would be your ambition any more than a fussy little single one."

Possibly the doctor thought that there was danger in going too far along those lines, for he suddenly burst out in a sort of good-natured impatience:

"Is n't there anything on earth that you want to do, as a regular occupation?"

Bellsmith shook his head. "Nothing on earth."

Although Bellsmith had not welcomed the diversion as much as had the doctor, yet for a moment they both slipped gaily enough over the surface of the deeper thing that they both had in mind.

"Have you ever thought seriously," suggested the doctor, "of taking over your own business affairs?"

"I have," answered Bellsmith, "but have you no regard at all for the harmless old Bellsmith estate? I shudder to think what would happen to that if left in my hands. Would n't you? I may be lazy, doctor, but I also have that maddening shrewdness of the solvent classes. I am shrewd enough to know that there are two things with which my brain will never be fitted to cope. One of them is the game of bridge as offered to me by willing hands at the University Club, and the other is the investment market. They are both black magic to me and they always will be. My partner can trump my ace ten times an evening for all I understand about it, and when a stock rises or falls three eighths of a point I can't get up the faintest thrill."

"You would if your whole fortune hung on those three eighths of a point," answered the doctor.

"Quite true," replied Bellsmith, "but is it your object to bring me to that unfortunate pass? Had n't I better die as I am, rich and silly?"

"There is something in that," admitted the doctor. "Still, there are other outlets for one's energy."

Bellsmith suddenly held up his hand.

"Doctor," he warned, "if you are going to suggest philanthropic work, please stop right now."

"As a matter of fact, I was n't," retorted the doctor, "but since you have, what is the matter with it?"

"Chiefly," answered Bellsmith, "the fact that every well-meaning dolt in Leicester has been suggesting that since my birth. Business and philanthropy! For years those two have been hammered into me as my only salvation. But, doctor, what a world, if the only things in it that can save a man from insanity are making money and giving it away again! I think my trick with the crack in the window is about as sensible as that, when you come to think of it. No, the time may come when I can sit through a monthly meeting of the average philanthropic committee with genuine ecstasy, but that time is not yet. I am still too weak a vessel."

The doctor's lips twitched humorously around the stem of his pipe. He continued to smoke thoughtfully with his eyes fixed absently on Bellsmith's feet. Bellsmith, becoming aware of the scrutiny, moved his feet nervously, and the doctor diverted his eyes to a point on the carpet.

"Mr. Bellsmith," he began, at last, slowly, "you are quite right about one thing. It is too much to face a man coldly with a certain thing—charity, business, or anything else—and order him deliberately to become interested in it. The human mind does not work that way. You might as well face a man with a certain heavy food and order him to like it—not merely to eat it but to like it."

"Exactly," said Bellsmith triumphantly. "Doctor, you are getting back to your old form. I was anxious about you for a moment."

The doctor acknowledged the sally only by a tightening of the little lines at the ends of his eyes, but Bellsmith pursued. "How do other people get interested in things? Most of them seem to be highly thrilled about something or other."

"That," answered the doctor, repaying him in his own coin, "is about as foolish a question as I ever heard, especially from you. Other people get interested in things by getting involved so deeply that they can't get out. They get in little by little. Necessity draws them in and then ties knots around them. Their money, their honor, their ambitions or their affections get so deeply involved in something that they can't let go, if they want to. They have got to be interested, because they have so much at stake. There are few active people in this world who do not find themselves, every day of their lives, in some corner so tight that the only way that they can get out is by staying in. Do you think I sit here all day wholly because I love it?"

He saw a chance to push in a peg where it would be remembered, and he added, "Do you think that Miss Marshall remains on the stage, as sick as she is, simply from will power—or ambition?"

Bellsmith looked away but was not diverted from the issue. "All that is quite true," he protested, "but can you call that 'interest'? Is n't that merely the instinct of self-preservation?"

"There are few times in the average life," replied the doctor, "when there is a great deal of difference. If a grizzly bear were chasing you along the top of a cliff, would n't you be 'interested' in the outcome of the race? Can you picture boredom under such circumstances?"

"No," laughed Bellsmith. "Then your advice is to go around throwing myself in front of wild animals or locomotives, simply to escape being bored?"

"Is n't that just about what most young men in your circumstances do?" answered the doctor. "Why else do they own racing-cars and aëroplanes and hunt big game and usually get smashed up in the end?"

"Because they like those things in the first place," retorted Bellsmith, "and I don't."

The doctor shook his head sadly. "Mr. Bellsmith, you are the most hopeless patient I ever had. You don't offer one single corner to catch hold of, and the worst feature of the case is that you know you don't and take pride in the fact."

Bellsmith, enjoying it all, folded his arms in mock helplessness.

"Well, doctor, what am I going to do about it?"

For answer the doctor looked at him quizzically.

"I'm damned if I know," he confessed.

Bellsmith, however, was willing to make as many concessions as he was.

"Doctor," he said earnestly, "please don't misjudge my attitude. don't think that I am lying back supinely and blocking your efforts, but you yourself have stated the futility of it all. I have been over and over the same ground so many times before. What advantage am I going to gain by going out and making myself actively miserable over things that I don't enjoy, which give me no sense of reality, which are merely playing at being busy, when I am at least only passively miserable as I am?"

"You would gain nothing whatsoever," admitted the doctor, "in the way that you put it, but you must admit that there may be something in the world which can interest even you."

He put down his pipe and looked up sharply.

"Why don't you go into the theatrical business?"

He had scored, and he knew he had, although Bellsmith weakly tried to evade.

"What are you talking about?" he demanded.

The doctor brushed him aside impatiently.

"Now look here," he demanded. "There is something that you are interested in and you know it."

The doctor laughed a little self-consciously and added, "I shall probably be expelled from the medical profession for this, but let's get down to tacks. In another week that show—what's its name?—'Eleanor' will be gone and the livest chapter your life has had in years will be over. What may happen between then and now I won't undertake to say. Assume that it does or it does n't. In either case you will settle down just about where you were before. You will merely come to me again in a year, or five years. Why do it? When that show goes out of Leicester, why don't you go with it?"

"Run away with the circus?" suggested Bellsmith nervously, but he knew and the doctor knew that he was already enraptured with the idea.

"But how could I?" he added. "I'm not an actor. I could n't even count tickets."

Again the doctor brushed him aside. "Now you 're just quibbling."

He paused to let the idea sink in. Then he asked simply:

"Why don't you take a financial interest in the show? For that matter, why don't you buy it outright?"

"Wha-at?" demanded Bellsmith.

"Why don't you buy the whole show?" repeated the doctor, quietly. "What under heaven is there to prevent you? You are not an actor, as you say. You are not a manager, but you have money. If you will pardon my saying so, it is the one thing that you have got that is of interest to other men. It is your natural wedge for entering active life. You need n't worry. They 'll overlook your lack of experience if your bank-account is all right. What's to prevent you from walking out of this office now, going down to the Lyceum Theater, and buying that whole blooming show? I don't think that I should be bored with life if I could do things like that."

Bellsmith looked at him with dawning delight, but of course doubt at once began to cloud it.

"But doctor—," he began.

"No," insisted the doctor, "I really mean it. It's no more costly than a yacht and no more foolish than lots of things you might think of. Look here. You would n't hesitate a minute to endow a picture-gallery or finance an attempt to revive classic drama. Why not endow an established, self-respecting, professional show? Go on. Why not?"

Bellsmith watched him thoroughly aghast. Then slowly the gleams of delighted inspiration came back into his eyes.

"I wonder," he began, "I wonder how much a show would cost."

"Why ask me?" laughed the doctor. "I don't want to buy one. I did that sort of thing in college."

"Doctor," said Bellsmith slowly, "I begin to see why you understand my case so thoroughly. At heart you are madder than I am."

He rose slowly to his feet. "It would miss the whole magnificence of the thing," he mused, "if I did n't do it at once. I think I 'll go down there now."

"I would," laughed the doctor. "If you don't go now you never will."

"Oh, I'm going!" answered Bellsmith. "don't worry. I hope they 'll take a check for it, or be willing to charge it." He paused, then concluded: "But just the same, doctor, kindly look up from that blotter of yours. I don't want you to miss this—as a professional study. You now have before you a chance to study the facial expressions, gestures, and other reactions of a nervous invalid who has made up his mind to purchase a musical comedy."