Mummers in Mufti/Chapter 2

N fifteen minutes the door of the consultation-room opened and the girl came out, but this time she looked neither to right nor to left as she walked rapidly and self-consciously to the entrance door. The doctor appeared immediately and invited Bellsmith to reënter, closing the door behind him with an air of finality.

"Now sit down," he commanded genially, "and smoke as much as you please. That clears me up for the day."

Bellsmith sat down, drew from his pocket a pair of long, rich cigars, obviously of a private brand, and offered one to the doctor.

"No, thank you," said the doctor, shaking his head; but he watched Bellsmith's movements with more intentness than he seemed to show, as Bellsmith neatly clipped his cigar with a silver cutter from his waistcoat pocket, slowly replaced the instrument, then, with equal deliberateness, took a wax match from a platinum case.

His slow, precise, slightly halting movements told the physician more than his actual physical examination had told. They gave him a very fair picture of Bellsmith's story, a picture that was well rounded out by the rich, exquisite cigars which the patient drew out so naturally. Prosperous as he was in his practice and much more prosperous as he would inevitably be, the doctor knew that he himself would never be a man who could make such a rite of his smoking,—would, indeed, never learn to smoke "vintage" cigars at all hours of the day with the unconscious casualness that was inborn in the man before him. A lifetime devoted to petty things, a whole existence centered on the most minute and delicate trifles of genteel living, that was the picture which was as clearly portrayed in the man's every move as if he had been painfully acting a studied character rôle.

The slow rites over the long cigar did, however, have one effect on the doctor. The sight of them probably proved too enticing even for his professional self-restraint, for impulsively reaching into a drawer of his desk, he took out a brier pipe, very black and much smoked down at one side. He rapped it out on his heel, and a moment later the fragrant blue smoke of Kentucky tobacco was mingling itself with the thinner gray smoke of Bellsmith's cigar. It was a wise move on the doctor's part, for with his first puff Bellsmith's guilty self-consciousness began to relax.

"Before we take up my own case, doctor," he began socially, "I suppose that it would be wholly unethical to ask you the name of that girl who was in here just now." Put in words, the question did seem rather bald, and he added apologetically, "I had a vague feeling that I recognized her. Haven't I seen her somewhere?"

The doctor's lips twitched in a rather attractive Scotch smile around the stem of his pipe.

"You probably have," he replied.

An awkward silence followed and the doctor added, amused: "Really I don't suppose that there is any reason at all why I should not tell you. You 're likely to see her again any day, but, just the same, I presume I had better not."

It was hardly strange that his manner of putting it only increased Bellsmith's curiosity and he quite forgot himself.

"Is she a Leicester girl?" he pursued eagerly.

The doctor grinned, like an older man teasing a child.

"No, she is not," he replied. "I can tell you that much."

Bellsmith leaned back in his chair. He knew that he would get no more information, but his curiosity was still acute. He was certain now that he had seen the. girl somewhere.

"Did it ever occur to you, doctor," he suggested, "that people who meet in a physician's office always feel sort of chummy toward one another, like passengers on the same boat?"

"Yes," drawled the doctor, "I 've recognized that frequently. That's why I have to school myself not to talk."

The silence again was becoming awkward, and Bellsmith regretfully forced himself to remember that this was not merely a social smoke but a professional call. He was sorry to have to realize that fact for now, as the dusk began to fall and soften the brisk, offensively modern lines of the consultation-room, he began to feel more at ease than he had in months. Possibly that again was one of the very things that made Dr. MacVickar a huge success as a mental specialist.

Bellsmith tapped the ash from his cigar into a metal waste-basket.

"Well, doctor," he began, a little on the defensive, "I suppose that you are putting me down in your mind as merely one more ass who has so little else to worry about that he thinks he is sick."

To his surprise, the doctor held up his hand in strict protest. "Now, wait a minute, Mr. Bellsmith. I didn't say that there was nothing the matter with you. There is something very definite the matter with you. I mean to get at it before you go."

But Bellsmith was still determined to mock at himself. "Is there—is there any name for this terrible malady from which I am suffering, this disease for which there has never been any known cure?"

The doctor did not respond to his levity.

"There are," he replied, "plenty of names compounded of Greek and Latin by which your state could be roughly described by one medical man to another; but these names are merely sketchy. They more often describe the manifestation than the trouble itself."

"But," interrupted Bellsmith impatiently, "they can, in plain English, be covered by the single term of damn foolishness?"

"If you thought that that covered your case," suggested the doctor quietly, "why did you ever come to me?"

Bellsmith was instantly as rueful as a school-boy.

"Doctor," he said, "I didn't mean to speak flippantly but, for more than three years, I have been trying to laugh myself out of this state of wretchedness, I have been calling my trouble just what I have called it now—damn foolishness. I have tried exercise. I have tried"—he smiled "—I have tried calomel. Most of all I have tried will power. None of them have done me the slightest atom of good. In a day or two I always am back where I was before—in a sort of dull, hopeless melancholia."

The doctor was listening intently, faintly nodding his head, and Bellsmith was increasingly reassured, encouraged to go on with what he had been afraid every moment would be dismissed as sheer nonsense.

"Now, just a minute, Mr. Bellsmith," interrupted the doctor at last. "You have evidently given a great deal of honest thought to your own case. Just how do you yourself describe your condition, in your own mind—if you try to describe it at all?"

"I suppose if I told you," began Bellsmith haltingly, "you would say that it was merely a symptom."

"Possibly not," encouraged the doctor.

"Well, then," continued Bellsmith, "it all comes down to this: I am, so far as I can see, a normal, healthy, intelligent sort of man, yet the fact remains that I cannot, week in or week out, year in or year out, get up one single atom of interest in any man, woman, or child or in anything else under the sun. I seem to be in a chronic state of utter indifference. I continue to live in the world, but, for all practical purposes, the world for me has ceased to exist. Everything, big and little, that other people are doing, seems to me silly and futile. I am not interested in anything myself, and it irritates me to see other people interested in anything. That is hardly the proper state for a man to be in."

He looked up fearfully to see how his amateurish and faltering explanation had been received but the doctor was nodding sympathetically. Encouraged, Bellsmith went on:

"If that state were merely temporary, I should consider it just weariness or plain, old-fashioned boredom, but I don't know whether you will believe, doctor, the lengths to which it has gone."

"I have seen such cases before," remarked the doctor, reassuringly.

"The strange part of it is," continued Bellsmith, "that I have never been the type of man who easily gives in to boredom. I have always hoped that I had too much brains for that."

He stretched out his arms as if to give the doctor a view of his whole body. "I am certainly not the type that is commonly known as 'a burnt-out man.'"

The doctor did not need to glance again at Bellsmith's quiet, fastidious dress, his precise, exact attitude, his intellectual, sensitive face, to agree with him on that point.

"No," he said with a smile, "you certainly do not look like a man who has gone the pace."

"Thank you for that," laughed Bellsmith, but immediately his face settled again into its habitual expression of worried languor. "Am I boring you?" he asked suddenly.

"Assuredly not," said the doctor. "Let me ask you one thing. I understand, Mr. Bellsmith, that you have never engaged in any profession or business?"

The question was wholly a formal one. What the doctor really meant to say was, "Have you ever done a stroke of work in your life?"

That Bellsmith understood this to be the real question he showed by his answer. He laughed outright.

"Doctor," he exclaimed, "you are spoiling my story. I suppose, in the back of your mind, you are aching to tell me that if I would go out and get a job shoveling dirt my worries would dear up like magic."

The doctor grinned. He picked up his fountain-pen and screwed on the cap.

"As a temporary expedient," he replied, "that would n't be bad advice, but the trouble is that you can't keep on shoveling dirt forever. I can't quite feel that my duty would be completed by turning you permanently into a day-laborer.

"Just let me ask you a question or two," he continued. "You are not fond of social life?"

"On the contrary," protested Bellsmith, "I have always been very fond of it—until the last three or four years. I used to like people. I used to like to talk. I went to dinners and dances three or four nights a week. Then, slowly, for no apparent reason—"

The doctor interrupted him. "Shall I tell you what happened?"

"Why—why, yes, if you can," replied Bellsmith.

"I should like to try," answered the doctor, with a quiet smile. "Well, then, was this about what happened in your social life? One day you began to feel that the dances were not as lively, not as interesting as they had been in previous years. The girls were not as pretty and those who were fairly pretty you found to be childish and silly. You formed the habit of going late to the dances and spending your time largely at the smoking-room door. You began to look eagerly for fresh faces, for new girls from out of town; and then you found even those to be a dull lot. You got to the point where you would spend fifteen minutes making up your mind to ask any special girl to dance, and then, the moment you had asked her, you wished that you hadn't.

"The same way with dinners. There was a time when a formal dinner seemed like a chapter out of a novel, an act in a play. The candles, the wines, the talk made you feel that you were an actor in some subtle drama. Then—it was three or four years ago, you say—there came a time when you would sit down to the soup and wonder how under heaven you were ever going to get through it. Am I on the right track?"

"Your description is uncanny," said Bellsmith, with a nervous laugh; "but, doctor, are n't you simply describing the symptoms of old age?"

"Thirty-five is not old," replied Dr. MacVickar. "Men, as a rule, do not curl up in a chimney-corner simply because they are thirty-five."

"Very well," answered Bellsmith. "Continue with your inquisition. I want to see how far you can go."

"Of course I can merely suggest," said the doctor. "Now, aside from a regular business, have you never had any definite occupation? Have you never been interested in any organizations? Any hobbies or studies?"

"Music," replied Bellsmith. "I am very much interested in music. At least I used to be."

"Used to be?" queried the doctor. "It seems to me that you are using that phrase with a dangerous frequency. What happened to your music?"

Bellsmith shrugged. "Oh, I don't know. I just seem to have drifted out of it. I went into it deeply once. It ran in the family. My father had the most accurate ear I have ever known. I even composed a whole light opera once and a couple of suites. But I seem to have lost heart about it." "Shall I tell you why?" retorted the doctor. "You had high hopes for your suites and your opera. You took them to one or two critics, possibly a publisher. They didn't seem to go wild about them right off the bat. They possibly even patronized you or snubbed you, and, at the first hostile word, you drew back into your shell and laid your manuscripts on the shelf. You probably took a high and mighty resolve never to compose another note and felt that you were doing something heroic and noble. Was that about it?"

"I suppose so," replied Bellsmith, wearily. There was a guilty look in his eye, and the doctor knew that he had not been far wrong.

"How about sport?" he suggested. "Ever do anything in that line?"

"Doctor!" exclaimed Bellsmith, "I hate sport. Between the two I'd rather be sick. Once I tried riding horseback every day. That horse in the stable simply became a nightmare to me. I used to long for a rainy day, so that I would n't have to exercise." The doctor laughed. "But what do you honestly like to do?" he demanded. "There must be something. You look to me like a student. I would have said that you were the kind of man who would ask nothing better than a well-stocked library and an undisturbed evening. Aren't you fond of reading?"

"Passionately fond of it," replied Bellsmith. "At least I once was—" But the doctor saw that he was merely going to repeat the same formula and broke in with one of his own suggestions which seemed to Bellsmith almost clairvoyant.

"But even there you find the same restlessness," he suggested. "You face a whole roomful of books yet cannot find one that you feel the slightest desire to read. You sit down with two or three books at once, read a page in one, look at the pictures in another, until you have four or five of them open on the table beside you. The book you haven't got is always the one you want. I venture to suggest that you have not actually read a book this year from cover to cover. Is that true?"

Bellsmith nodded and the doctor continued.

"Do you also find yourself reading one paragraph over and over, just getting the rhythm of the words but none of their meaning, and then, hours later, when you go off on some errand about the house, find yourself still reciting, over and over, some insignificant sentence, as if it were a sort of religious rite?"

Bellsmith half started out of his chair.

"Doctor!" he exclaimed, "you 're a wizard!"

The doctor smiled deprecatingly but was not ill pleased with the success of his venture.

"I merely wished to comfort you," he said, "by the proof that you are not the first victim of this curious state of mind."

"Oh, I never thought that I was," replied Bellsmith. "Tell me some more, doctor. This is rather fun—like going to a fortune-teller."

Possibly the doctor did not care for the simile, or possibly he felt that he had learned enough on that line. He changed his tone to one less social and more professional.

"Now, Mr. Bellsmith, all that you have told me bears on the case, but this was not what you came here to tell me. Frankly what was it?"

He looked at Bellsmith sharply and the latter hung his head. It was a long time before he replied, and then it was in a low voice that was suddenly shaky.

"You are quite right," he confessed. "To tell the truth, doctor, I am terrified by the fear that I am going insane."

"So?" asked the doctor, quietly and without alarm. "What makes you think so?"

"The little things," replied Bellsmith, slowly.

For a moment he found it impossible to go on but sat in silence, his eyes on the floor, his lips twitching oddly. The doctor made no effort to prompt him but at the same time avoided the slightest gesture which might distract him.

"It seems so foolish," blurted out Bellsmith at last, "when I try to put it into words. I—I don't know where to begin."

"Begin with anything," suggested the doctor. "Don't mind if it seems only a trifle."

"Well," began Bellsmith, "here's an example: Last night I was sitting in my library when I noticed a crack in the glass of one of the long French windows which open into the garden. It let in a tiny current of air and ruffled the curtains. Now, instead of making a note to call up a glazier and get it fixed in the morning, I sat and brooded over that crack until it had monopolized my whole evening. I went upstairs and got papers and pasted over it. Then I would keep going back and holding my hand in front of it. I lighted matches and held them above it to see if there was still a faint draft. I must have spent an hour in that idiotic pastime, and even then I could n't keep my mind off it. I still tossed and worried about it after I was in bed."

The doctor nodded gravely, and at last Bellsmith had found the gates of confession.

"That's typical of how I spend half my time," he hurried on angrily, "but that's not the worst of it by any means. For one thing, I seem to have, these days, a curious horror of being called on to make the simplest decision. I want to put everything off even the most trivial things. I hate to face a day knowing that I have the slightest obligation. I dread hearing my butler coming to ask me what I will have for dinner. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to make up my mind. It is the hardest thing for me to bring myself to answer a letter. When I receive a letter that calls for an answer I will put it in a certain pigeonhole in my desk and feel somehow that that disposes of it for the time being. My desk is crammed with such pigeon-holes.

"I seem to have almost a physical dread of being lured into engagements. I will promise anything to anybody, so long as it is left vague and far in the future, but when any one tries to pin me down to a definite day I suddenly become reluctant and hostile. It irritates me to come home and find a message asking me to call up a certain number on the 'phone. I will deliberately go about something else and try to forget it. If I go to the telephone of my own accord and don't immediately get the number I call for, I hang up and never do anything more about it—welcome the excuse that I couldn't get the person for whom I called."

"From which I gather," suggested the doctor, with a smile, "that your social engagements tend to become fewer and fewer."

"They do," confessed Bellsmith.

The doctor sat for a moment in thought.

"Do you mean by that," he began tentatively, "that you have a distaste for people in general?"

"No," replied Bellsmith, slowly, "it is very funny about that. I am horribly lonely. I still seem eager to be with people, but I never seem to find just the right people."

"There are no such people in the world," laughed Dr. MacVickar.

Bellsmith joined nervously in his laugh. "I suppose there are n't but I am vaguely always hunting. I am always wandering around the clubs and places like that, looking for company—"

"Seeking the eternal adventure," suggested the doctor.

"Oh, I don't ask for adventure," replied Bellsmith. "All I want is some one, not too stupid, to talk to."

"And when you get him you don't want him."

"Exactly. I will be sitting at home, frantically lonely, but if any one comes in to see me the chances are that after he has been there a minute or two I will begin to fret and wish he would go. Sometimes when I am at my worst, if I see people I know coming toward me on the street, I will actually cross to the other side to avoid meeting them, simply because I am afraid that they will stop me to talk."

The doctor relit his pipe and for a moment sat twirling the match in his fingers.

"Since we are both loyal citizens and voters," he began with a whimsical smile, "I can ask whether that applies merely to residents of Leicester or to people in other places. Do you ever go anywhere else? Do you ever travel?"

"Not now," confessed Bellsmith. "I used to. I don't any more."

"Why not?" asked the doctor bluntly. "Afraid of trains?"

Bellsmith started and looked at him with a shame-faced expression that told its own story.

"No," he replied, reluctantly, "not really. Yes, I suppose that I am, in a way. That is to say, I am not afraid of wrecks or things like that, but I am foolishly nervous—"

"About time-tables and impertinent ticket-agents and making connections and things of that kind," supplied the doctor.

Bellsmith looked at him in wonder. "To tell the truth, that's just about the size of it. It sounds ridiculous, but subways and transfers and reservations and things of that kind always appall me. I never go to New York now unless I have to. They 're always changing the methods of doing things down there, and I have a horror of doing things wrong. I hate to ask questions, doctor. I can't bear to stand in line. If I can't get tickets for the theater at my hotel I don't go at all. I will walk from Forty-second Street to the Park rather than try to get on one of those damned surface-cars. They always seem to stop at a different corner every time I go to New York."

The doctor smiled. "You don't suppose that you are alone in those particulars, do you?"

Bellsmith grinned, ruefully. "I hope not."

The doctor apparently decided that it was time to pursue another tack.

"How about your personal habits?" he asked. "Do you find that you have grown lax or extremely fussy?"

"Fussy beyond belief," replied Bellsmith. "I have got to a state where I can hardly do a single thing without a certain elaborate formula. For instance, if I go into a wash-room at a hotel or club I cannot wash my hands without first taking a towel and dusting my shoes. If I don't, I don't feel clean. When I am dressing for dinner, even if I am in a hurry, I never take off my coat and waistcoat together, the way most men do. I must take them off separately and hang them up on separate hangers. I can't bear to leave a pair of shoes even an hour without putting trees in them. If I can't find any trees, I stuff them full of newspaper. I always clean my nails before I brush my hair. If I brush my hair first it makes me feel queer and unsettled. I sometimes go back and do it over again in order to 'feel right.'"

"I understand," nodded the doctor, sympathetically, and Bellsmith found it increasingly easy to go on.

"When I sit down in the evening to read," he explained, "I have to have a certain door open two inches and all the other doors tight shut. I can't feel settled until they are just that way. Originally the reason for that was that the fireplace would not draw with the doors in any other position."

"In the beginning there usually is a reason for most of these things," commented the doctor.

"But now," continued Bellsmith, "I have to have the doors that way even where there is no fire. If some one comes into the room and leaves one of the other doors open I am perfectly miserable. I fuss and fidget until I can get up and shut it. Before I light a cigarette I always have to tap it three times on my thumb nail, even though some one may be waiting with a lighted match. Anything upside down always makes me nervous, such as a sheet of music on a piano or a doily on the table. I am physically unhappy until I have set it right. It has got beyond a matter of simple neatness. There seems to be something like a hypnotic force compelling me to do all these things."

"I see," said the doctor in a low voice, and his face was more grave than it had been the whole afternoon. "But about bigger things?" he asked. "Do you feel a constant sense of abasement! Do you find that your conscience has become abnormally tyrannical?"

"I am not sure that I know just what you mean," replied Bellsmith, "but I do know that I can get perfectly miserable over the most futile things. For instance, when I am sitting alone in the evening a line in a book will remind me of some silly thing that I did years ago, perhaps some trivial social blob that I made when I was a boy, and I will flush hot with embarrassment, as if it were yesterday. It will make me unhappy all the evening. I will keep living the scene over and over again and try to justify myself in my own mind. If it passes out of my mind, I will force it back in again. Then there are certain phrases that fill me with a queer repugnance for no apparent reason. For instance I cannot read the name 'Catullus' without the feeling of having run into something that I had rather keep out of, although what the connection is I honestly haven't the faintest idea. The name of 'Carr Street' affects me the same way. There must be some unpleasant association although I have never been able to trace it."

"Do you dream?" asked the doctor, simply.

"Yes," said Bellsmith, "frequently. But, curiously, all my dreams are rather pleasant, although they are sort of pleasantly sad, if you know what I mean, a sort of delicious melancholy. As I wake up I feel as if I were losing something. I lie in bed and try to throw myself back into the atmosphere of the dream."

"And all of your dreams," suggested the doctor, "are of persons and incidents some time in the past—three or four years at least!"

Bellsmith again looked up startled. "How the deuce did you knew that?"

The doctor laughed. "Every sentence that you have been saying has told me that."

The doctor straightened back in his chair as if he had heard enough, but he did not speak at once. Instead he sat toying with his fountain-pen, gazing down at his big, immaculate sheet of desk-blotter.

"Mr. Bellsmith," he said at last, "I will tell you this, for your comfort, that you are not going insane. Just the same you have got to take care of yourself, and at once."

"I want to," said Bellsmith woefully, "but what am I going to do?"

"Ah," said the doctor, "that is the question."