Not that any man could have overlooked Helen once he had seen her. She had a still, sharp beauty that made you notice and respect it, and a poise that had matured in her struggle to rise above the experience of her first marriage. When she was finally free of Ed Norton she arrived at a kind of compromise with herself and life that gave her tremendous control over herself, and deep simplicity of thought and feeling.
The statement that it was natural she should have preferred Julian to me needs amplifying. What made it so was her determination to found her life on something other than the heat and the insecure glory of young love. Julian needed her and, as she saw it, I did not. She could give him a life that would be richer than anything he had ever known and, if not the kind of love I wanted from her, at least a deep and sincere affection. Julian represented peace, security, and a tranquil future, and in those days he was far from the sort of person I have pictured, feeble and old, sitting in a broken-down armchair in the house on Setauket Point. He was a vigorous and distinguished-looking man of middle age then, the kind of man that exactly suited her need.
In the three years they were married, Helen made Julian’s narrow life over into something rich and warm. To watch him come out of his dry reserve, crack the brittle shell of his past routines, until he actually learned how to laugh and mix a cocktail was a delight to his friends. For me it was, I’ll admit, a painful pleasure. But for all my feeling that I had lost something which I should never find again, I was glad for both of them. It was a measure of her quality—and his, too, now that I think of it—that I never resented Julian.
In only one way Julian did not do better than I could have done myself. That was Anne. She had taken to me from the start and Helen was glad, I think, to have me around to make up for some of Julian’s deficiencies as a foster father. That was what it came to, for she had been almost a mother to her younger sister, and the idea of Julian as Anne’s brother-in-law was somehow ridiculous. She refused to call him anything more intimate than “Uncle Julian,” and though she was fond of him, it was I who played with her and bought her chocolate malteds.
Helen died, very suddenly, of pneumonia. Her death was merciful in its speed, but the very abruptness of it was too much for Julian. One week he was this new, richly happy person that Helen had made him. The next he was a widower overwhelmed with the despair that comes to a man who has loved late in his life and lost his happiness before he has grown accustomed to having it.
After the funeral service Mrs. Wallace had taken Anne home with her, but Julian wanted to walk and I was the logical person to go with him. He said nothing for a long time. Our feet splashed in the puddles of the curving walk and the rain slithered down the polished surfaces of the headstones on either side of us. There was nothing I could think of to say to him; we simply walked on together slowly and heavily.
When we turned down Jefferson Street he lifted his head and looked at me like a man returning to consciousness after an operation. “I do not see how I am going to live without her, Dick,” he said. His voice was steady and quite dead.
“She wouldn’t want you to feel that way,” I answered him gently “She wanted to make your life rich and happy. She did that. You mustn’t throw away what she gave you.”
He shook his head. “That part of it’s over now,” he remarked as if he were making an incontrovertible statement.
“You mustn’t let it be over. She wouldn’t like that. The way to feel about this is the way she’d want, I know. And that is to hang on to the things she gave you and make her memory something for joy, not sorrow.” It sounded pretty evangelical in my own ears, but it was the best I could do.
Julian hardly seemed to have heard me. He said, “No,” in a dull voice, but the word was addressed to something in his own mind, not to me. After that there was silence between us for several blocks, until he murmured something in a key too low for me to catch.
“What’s that?” I asked him.
“ ‘Stupid,’ I said. It is stupid that we should know so little about what happens when . . . when a person dies. I have never thought about that before. All this agony . . .”
“Yes.” The sorrow inside me made it difficult to follow what he was saying. I wanted to be alone, to remember Helen to myself, to get used to the fact that she was gone.
“If I knew I was going to see her again.”
“You will, Julian. Of course you will.”
He looked at me curiously. “Do you believe what you say, or are you just saying it?”
“People have always believed that,” I said.
“Do you?”
Miserably I had to tell him that I didn’t.
“You’re a psychologist,” he said finally. “Your science is supposed to deal with the human personality. And you understand no more than I about this thing.”
“I know.”
“You haven’t even any definite evidence that death is the end of everything?
“No.”
He struck his fist against the palm of the opposite hand. “Then I don’t see how you can believe anything about it, one way or the other. Belief must be founded on some sort of knowledge or else it’s superstition. Either you believe a thing because the evidence supports your position, or you are simply ignorant. In the dark.”
“I’m not so sure of that, Julian. There’s more than one way to know a thing.”
“There is only one way to know anything. Experiment, test, check. Collect data and verify them. If the data affirm your belief, then you know.”
“You can’t do that with things like death and the soul.”
“Have you tried?” He shook his head and walked on with lowered head. He was not looking at me or at anything else; his eyes were so wholly turned inward that I had to lead him down the sidewalk and across the streets. He was walking like a man asleep and I was hardly more aware of the physical world than he was. Each of us walled up in a private cell of grief and pain.
I left him at the door of his house. “Good-bye, Julian. I’ll be over this evening.” Then I remembered something. “Don’t forget that Edith is going to bring Anne over some time this afternoon, after lunch,” I said. “The kid will need a lot of comforting, Julian.”
“Of course. Of course. I won’t forget.” But his attention was not on what I had said. “Good-bye, boy. Don’t come this evening unless you want to. I shall be busy. I’ve got to think about this thing.”
“No, Julian. Don’t go over it in your mind any more. It won’t do any good. She wouldn’t want you to do that.”
There was impatience in his tone. “I shall not be brooding. I must plan what I am going to do. There is no time to lose. I can’t tell how long . . .” He went up the front steps of his house, stumbling once, and let himself in. I turned away with a sense of foreboding added to the misery in my heart.
Of course I had gone to the house that evening. I was so desperately lonely myself that I might well have gone simply because misery seeks company, but all through the afternoon I had found myself thinking about Julian and concerned over him. What I found when Anne let me in was unexpected. Julian was working. He was sitting at the long table which he used for a desk with a litter of papers around him and a stack of books beside his chair. It looked as if he had been there for hours.
“Hello, Julian,” I said. “Don’t let me interrupt you.”
“That’s all right,” he replied without even raising his head.
I looked at Anne. Her white face with the dark circles under her eyes was puzzled. “He’s been doing that all afternoon,” she said, with a despairing break in her voice. “He wouldn’t even eat any supper.”
“How about you?” I asked. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she said in a small voice. “I’m all right. I’m fine.” Then she broke away from me and went out of the room, almost running. There was desperation in the pound of her feet on the stairs.
Perhaps it would be best to let her cry it out by herself, but Julian’s absorption
in what he was doing while a youngster like Anne was in need of comfort and love made me angry. He hadn’t even looked up when she ran out of the room.
“I must say, Julian, that this is a curious time to be doing whatever it is you’re working at. Don’t you think Anne needs us more than—”
“No!” he interrupted in a harsh voice, turning in his chair to look at me with eyes that were too bright. “The child’s grief will have to run its course. We can do nothing for her. Nothing immediate, that is.” He struck his hand down on the table top. “Year after year, century after century, people have been feeling as she does—as we all do—this evening. Bitter and aching with grief. They comfort each other with empty, meaningless words, with prayers, with all the rigmarole of religion. It seems to me stupid and cowardly. If they had more courage and vision, more confidence in themselves, they would not take this fact of death so supinely. Long before this they would have done something about it.”
“There isn’t anything they can do.”
He gave me a look of contempt. “How do you know that? Have you ever tried to find out, one way or the other? You, a psychologist, who ought to be more concerned with it than any other scientist? No, of course you haven’t. You leave the whole question to mediums, quacks, crystal gazers.” He looked at his papers. “My own colleagues are no better. Sir Oliver Lodge!” The scorn in his voice was acid. “And a man like Arthur Conan Doyle with his pictures of fairies! It’s disgusting, almost the whole lot of it.” His voice dropped to a more normal level. “Let me tell you something, Richard. I am a man of science. And science doesn’t let things go by default. It investigates. That’s what I’m going to do.”
“Investigate what? God, Julian, you sit there and talk like this the very day that . . .” The sentence was better left unfinished.
He stood up and began to pace back and forth across the rug. I remembered thinking for the first time that he was looking his age. “I’m going to find out. This day of all days is the one to begin. This morning you said that people have always believed that we saw again those whom we have . . . lost. Presumably, you meant by that, after we ourselves have died?”
“Yes. Something like that.”
“Well, I’m not going to wait for death.” His voice was calm, but there was purposefulness behind it. “It will take time, but I think I shall succeed.”
His attitude troubled me. The bitterness that was driving him into this project was all too apparent. “Listen, Julian,” I began quietly, “I admit what you say as to the desirability of this thing you have in mind. But as a psychologist, even if I can’t tell you anything about what you want to know, I can say positively that you are starting on it at the wrong time, when your emotion is obsessing your mind. Wait a while before you begin. Rest for a month. Perhaps take a trip somewhere with Anne. Then come back to it if you want to, with a reasonable amount of detachment.”
He shook his head. “Waste a month? Every day will be a month in itself, without her.” He sat down at the table again and picked up his pencil. “I have been making a survey to see how much reputable scientific work has been done. Apparently even less than I had supposed and none of it leading to any useful conclusions. I don’t expect I shall find much of value in the whole background of the subject . . .” His voice trailed off in the intensity of his concentration.
Obviously there was no more use talking to him. After waiting a few minutes to see if he would remember that I was still there, I went upstairs to find Anne. She was in her room, face down on the bed, not even sobbing. When I touched her, I discovered that she was rigid all over, so tight with grief and loneliness that she hardly knew for a while that I was there. I shan’t describe what happened between us in that dim room, but when I left she had cried herself out and was almost asleep. All the while I was comforting her, I felt a bitterness against Julian for letting the girl suffer alone as he had. I promised her everything I could think of to make her feel less lonely, and she clung to me desperately. It was horrible, and I don’t remember it in any detail.
The clearest picture in my memory of that night is the one of Julian, gray-faced and oblivious of his surroundings, still working at his desk when I came down and let myself out of the house. I did not speak to him. I could not trust myself to suppress the anger I was feeling.
In the months that followed, Julian and I did not see each other a great deal. That was largely my own fault and choosing; I did not want to be reminded by seeing him of the fact that she was lost to both of us. I thought about Helen a good deal in those days, and much of it was stuff of a self-conscious morbidity which shames me when I remember it. Once or twice I even went so far as to blame Julian, in my thoughts, for her death. That was wildly irrational, I knew, and stupid. All the same, the sight of him woke something in me that I did not want to feel. So I stayed away from the house except when I called to take Anne out. Even then, as far as possible, I put Julian out of my thoughts.
That accounts, I suppose, for the fact that I did not pay much attention to the idea that he was still interested in the problem of immortality. I was too busy licking my own wounds to wonder much about his. When he resigned at the end of the year, it did occur to me to wonder whether he had got over that tragic notion, but I did not ask him about it. That would have made an awkward moment intolerable. Julian was set-faced, quiet, almost indifferent at that last meeting of ours. He spoke to me absently, as if he didn’t care whether I had come or not.
The house was sold that summer. Anne, as I have said, had gone abroad. Julian began to fade into the background of his friends’ thoughts, even those of us who had been closest to him. We wondered why he did not answer our letters. We learned, at last, that he had moved from the house in Scarsdale to which we had been writing, and we could not discover where he had gone.
Until that letter of his had arrived to stir the memory, I don’t suppose I had thought seriously about that ignis fatuus of a project of his more than once or twice. He had become a figure which existed wholly in my past; I felt about him as much a sense of a final separation as I had about Helen. More and more, too, I had come to recall Julian as the man with whom I had once worked; the genius who stood for something superb in science. Perhaps that was because Arthur Wallace and some of the others felt that his leaving the university was an irreparable loss. Julian’s work, his achievements as a research scientist and discoverer, were the things we talked about at the Faculty Club on the rare occasions when we did discuss him.
9.
ALL THE time that I was answering Julian Blair’s questions there in the house at Barsham Harbor, I was struggling to realize that the greatest man in his field had devoted five long years to this madness; that the words he had spoken that night long ago had not been simply the expression of a distracted sorrow. It was bitterly sad to think of this man, my friend—and more than that a great and important person in his own way—mired in such a swamp of emotion and mis-directed aspiration. That affirmation of his about having proved immortality stuck in my consciousness. It was the pathetic index of how far his mind had wandered from reality.
“Julian,” I said, “if you have really proved immortality—”
He interrupted me. “I must have spoken somewhat imprecisely on that point, Richard. The truth is that with the data you have given me, I shall be able to prove it.”
“Then you haven’t . . .?” I let the question taper off in midair because I couldn’t bring myself to end it. To go on, to say, “spoken with Helen?” was so fantastic that it gave me a feeling of revulsion. Even as it was I found myself looking away from him and embarrassed.
He seemed to understand what I was getting at. “It takes time to get accustomed to the idea, my boy. I know that. No, I have not talked to her, but I know that she is there, waiting. Yesterday, while I was experimenting, I thought for a minute . . . but it was not so. Merely certain epiphenomena which I find slightly puzzling.” His voice lost some of its confidence; there was a note of indecision in it whic
h came close to uneasiness.
Listening to him had given me a sense of despair. The very directness of his emotion, the intensity of the excitement behind his eyes frightened me. He must be lost beyond recovery; the certainty of it settled in me like a lump of cold iron. To hear the Julian Blair whose lecture on “The Scientific Nature of Proof” was one of the events of the university year talking like a faith healer or a swami was a nightmare. I told myself that of course he was deranged, that his mind was sick and that he was not to be judged, but that didn’t exorcise the feeling of miserable finality with which I looked at him. He had wandered far down this private road of his, and I wondered whether I or anyone else could turn him back.
Finally I said, “Julian, I don’t know what to tell you about this. I’d rather think it over before I say anything more. Only, take it easy.” I forced myself to go over to his chair and pat him on the shoulder. There was still enough loyalty and affection left in me for that.
He stood up and smiled at me as if I were his son. “Richard, you are a good friend and a kind one. By all means take time to think this over. But you cannot seriously expect me to ‘take it easy,’ as you put it. When a month’s work—perhaps less, much less—will put the whole thing right in my hand?” His tone was amused and yet remote. We walked together to the hall and he turned and patted my arm. “Don’t worry about me, Dick. I know what I’m doing.” He did not look back as he went up the stairs, taking them a step at a time and with his long-fingered hand, serpented with blue veins, sliding up the banister beside him. Slowly as he went, with his physical weakness obvious in every step, there was something triumphant in that ascent of his.
For a minute or two after he had left me I did nothing, simply staring after him up the stairs with my thoughts in chaos. I could hear his footsteps overhead, going along what must have been an upper hall, and then the sound of a door closing. It was not a loud noise, and yet the house quivered slightly as if from the moving of a heavy weight, and I wondered briefly about that. Afterward, nothing but silence.
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