“No!” cried Aunt Emma. “Don’t take off your evening clothes. I don’t want you to! What do you want to take them off for? Are they too good for me to see? Ain’t I as good as any one you’d see if you went out? Eh?”
“But, Aunt Emma, I meant—”
“I know what you meant( You meant to slip out and leave me alone, both of you! It’s lucky I caught you in time! It’s lucky I have money of my own. I’d be left alone, to starve, if I were poor! I’d die of hunger and neglect!”
Margaret and I looked at each other helplessly. Aunt Emma put her hands in front of her face and began to whimper. Margaret tried to soothe her, to take down her hands and pet her, but Aunt Emma resisted like a spoiled and spiteful child.
In the other room the man murmured:
“This is to be one of Aunt Emma’s truly pleasant evenings!”
The woman over there retorted with vehemence, “This sort of thing happens a dozen times a day!”
I looked over Aunt Emma’s shoulder at them. They were regarding Aunt Emma with a frowning intentness.
“She’s not really crying,” said the man.
“Pretense!” said the woman. “She works it up at will.”
“The old hell-cat!”
Aunt Emma lifted her head with a startled look, almost as if she had seen and heard; and a puzzled expression, confused and puzzled, flitted across Margaret’s countenance. But neither of them had quite got it; it was for me alone that the full perception of this phenomenon was reserved.
“Aunt Emma,” said Margaret, soothingly; “you know Harvey and I try to be good to you, don’t you?”
“You try to be good to my money!” said Aunt Emma. “But I may fool you! I may fool you yet! It’s not too late to change my will! It’s not too late yet to leave it all to charity!”
She spoke with a cunning leer. The man in the other room nudged the woman beside him and said, “The old cat’s capable of doing just that, too, Margaret!”
Aunt Emma lifted to me a disturbed and pitiable face. She took one of my hands, she took one of Margaret’s; she took them in both of hers, and she clung to us. For that moment, everything dropped from her except the expression of her dire need—her need to be loved. Her gestures, her manner, were infinitely pathetic. They were a plea for genuine affection. It was as if she had said that she was an isolated human spirit on the brink of the unknown, and that she dreaded the next step which she must take; dreaded it, and must have our understanding, our kindliness, to go along with her. What she really said was :
“Margaret . . . Harvey . . . you really do care for me, don’t you? It isn’t all on account of my money, is it?”
I was profoundly touched. All religion, all life, all art, all expression come down to this: to the effort of the human soul to break through its barrier of loneliness of intolerable loneliness, and make some contact with another seeking soul, or with what all souls seek, which is (by any name) God. She pleaded and she clung. She said:
“If you knew I hadn’t a cent, you’d still be good to me, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said eagerly. And, “Yes!” said Margaret. Eagerly and sincerely. And in that instant I know that both of us were grateful for the patience we had shown to the old woman through the years; grateful that we had been able to rise above our frequent exasperation, to trample it down, and act and speak from worthier impulses.
“If I lost it all . . . if I told you that I’d lost it all,” said Aunt Emma, “you’d both still be just the same, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said unhesitatingly, still shaken with the vibrations of my own emotion and thankful that I was conscious of nothing in me that did not move spontaneously with my answer. “Yes,” I said.
But the man in the other room said to the woman there:
“My God, you don’t suppose she’s really lost her money, do you?”
“No!” answered the woman. “This is just one of her cunning spells. She can be as crafty as a witch!”
This, while they looked out of their room at the old woman in her agony! I faced them sternly; I was minded to denounce them, these figures, whatever they were, that had stolen the outer aspects of me and of my wife and spoke from sentiments we had never acknowledged or acted upon! I was about to cry out to them that they did not represent us, that they were not we. But I did not cry out. Again they turned upon me that faintly satirical smile, those faces informed with an irony drawn from—from what? From some ulterior deep springs of knowledge? I became confused, and did not speak to them.
“I’m hard on you at times,” said Aunt Emma. I have never found it very easy to face expressed sentiment, and now the old woman broke down into a mood that embarrassed me. “I’m unjust,” she said, and there was no doubt of the genuineness of her contrition. “I don’t mean to be spiteful, but I know I am spiteful. When you get old, you get suspicious of people.” I tried to avert my mind from her self-accusations; it is neither pleasant nor inspiring to witness any sort of dissolution, and she was dissolving into a self-pity that I found it harder and harder to face. “Suspicion makes us spiteful and unjust—and I’m suspicious of everybody,” she went on. “Oh, I know I’m not easy to live with, Margaret!”
There wasn’t anything to say to that—God knows she wasn’t easy to live with! The man and woman in the other room grinned at me with a touch of frank malice. My pity for her, momentarily clouded by my embarrassment at her own self-pity, returned. Presently Margaret said:
“Don’t you think you’d better go to bed now, Aunt Emma?”
At that she jerked herself up in the big chair she was sitting in, immediately all suspicion and meanness and snarling petulance again, and spluttered at Margaret:
“To bed? Why to bed? Why do you want to pack me off to bed? Oh, I know!” Her pinched countenance was a mask of cunning malignance as she went on: “I know why—so you can talk about me, talk me over! So you can speculate on how long I will live! I know you! I know what you talk about when I’m not around. I know what you’ve been waiting and hoping for the last ten years!”
She began to cry again. She stretched out her arms towards us. Once more there was that terrible appeal in her manner, terrible to witness, terrible to have directed towards one.
“Well, you won’t have long to wait now,” she whimpered. “The time’s almost come.” The tears ran down her cheeks in silence for a moment—those daunting, weak tears of the aged who accuse us and the gods because death cannot be delayed so very much longer—and then she said, “You’ll get the money soon enough.”
Distressed, Margaret said, “There, there, Aunt Emma; you mustn’t go on like this.”
“You’ll live ten years yet,” I added. It is one of the things one says.
“If I thought she’d live ten years—” began the man who was peering out from the other room.
“Well?” cut in the woman beside him. “If you thought she would—what?”
“My God—ten more years like the last ten!” he said.
The woman who looked like Margaret turned upon him fiercely and shot at him a tirade that mounted from step to step of bitterness:
“You see it mornings and evenings; but I have it all day long—and every day! I’ve had it for ten years. I go nowhere. I see no one. I have no pleasures. I have no friends. I’m losing my youth. I’m losing my looks. Harvey, I’m losing my very soul! I shed my life’s blood drop by drop to keep that querulous fool, that dying viper, alive—just merely alive! I’m tired of it—I’m sick of it—I’m wearied, wearied, wearied to the soul! I’m dying from her, I tell you, dying from her!”
She sank to a chair, shaken and pallid; and there came a silent moment. But something—a note that had been struck—the impulsion of occult wings . . . something . . . vibrated in the silence at that moment.
I say a moment. But what are moments? What is time? Some theologians, some men of science, say there is no such think as time; that we live, always, in eternitl. A moment is long, or it is short, beca
use of the stuff that is packed into it. Can we, somewhere in illimitable space, somewhere in the valleys of infinity, catch up with old moments and live them newly again? Well, I do not think we can ever again take out of a moment what we have put into it, even though we should catch up with it again. Am I speaking foolishly, Howard? I want to cling to the moment before . . . before it had occurred . . . before what happened. did happen. I want to . . .
Listen: for all the events of that night I can advance as good a theory as most psychologists. There are rational explanations for the phenomena I witnessed, and was a part of. I know them very well. The man in the other room—I can write you a thesis on who and what he was, and why I saw him and Margaret did not; I can discourse to you, as cleverly as any one, on every angle of this case.
But it isn’t the mechanism of this thing that concerns me now. I am concerned with the things that lie behind the mechanism.
I want to cling to the moment before . . . before it had happened: what did happen. To the moment before what we call the conscience had become involved.
Margaret said, “Come, come, Aunt Emma, you really should go to bed.”
“I won’t go to bed,” she said, with the pettishness of a small child. “I won’t go to bed until I’ve had my medicine. I want my sleeping tablets now.”
“Where are they?” asked Margaret.
“In my bathroom,” said Aunt Emma. And Margaret went out of the room for them.
“See here,” I said to Aunt Emma, “didn’t Miss Murdock give you one of those tablets right after dinner?”
“No,” she said. And then, “I don’t remember. I want one anyhow! My nerves are on the jump. You’ve got my nerves to jumping! I’ll take one and nap here in the chair.”
The man in the other room said in a low, speculative tone:
“I suppose if one ever gave her the wrong medicine by mistake it would be called by some ugly name.”
The woman answered him:
“People like her never get the wrong medicine given to them by mistake, and never take it by mistake themselves. They live forever.”
I turned and spoke to them, “There is a volition in your words,” I said sternly, “that is not my volition nor my wife’s volition.”
“What did you say?” asked Aunt Emma, looking about in bewilderment.
“Nothing,” I answered. The two figures in the other room did not reply to me. They looked at me steadily, levelly.
Margaret returned with a small phial. I took it from her and examined it.
“I’m afraid she had one an hour ago,” I said. “I don’t think it is quite right to let her have another one so soon. They are what Dr. McIntosh prescribed, and they have a powerful, depressing effect on the heart if taken in excess.”
As you know, Howard, I did not treat Aunt Emma medically myself—you once had her case until you gave it up—and she has gone from doctor to doctor, always intimating to me that she had little faith in me. That was one of her ways of annoying Margaret and me; but it was no real annoyance, as she did not come within the limits of my specialty.
“You did have one right after dinner, didn’t you, Aunt Emma?” said Margaret.
“No! No!” said Aunt Emma. With a sudden monkeylike agility, for which I was not prepared, she reached and snatched the phial from me. She clutched it to her breast, in a childish triumph.
“I didn’t have one,” she said. “I will take one. You don’t want me to get to sleep! You don’t want me to get any rest! You want me to die!”
Her hands trembled as she hugged the bottle to her; her jaw chattered, and her lips shook; her victory in getting the bottle had made her all one tremor.
I took hold of her hands, and tried to take the phial away from her gently. She grasped it with her crooked claws until white spots showed on the knuckles, and rocked herself back and forth. Her fingers were interlaced about it.
“See here, Aunt Emma,” I said; “you mustn’t be stubborn about this. I think you did have a tablet right after dinner, and another one now might be dangerous.”
I used a certain amount of force, and she whimpered and actually gnashed her teeth at me. Margaret interposed:
“Don’t struggle with her, Harvey. Doctor McIntosh says the least strain is likely to prove fatal.”
I knew that was true and released her hands. She had had a dilated heart some years previously, from which she had never really recovered. Emotional strain as well as physical strain was dangerous.
“You want me to die so you can get my money,” she said, leering up at me from under her thin white eyebrows.
Tentatively, I reached my hand towards her again. She suddenly grasped it and sank her teeth into it. And then she pulled the cork from the phial.
I was in a quandary as to the right thing to do. If I struggled with her, I should almost certainly kill her. On the other hand, I was not absolutely certain whether she had taken one of the tablets previously or not. She had said she hadn’t. I had heard Miss Murdock speak of giving her one; but I hadn’t actually seen her take it. I wasn’t sure.
I didn’t know then what I should have done. And I did the wrong thing—I did nothing. It is easy enough now, Howard, to see that it was the wrong thing. It is easy enough now to say that I should have risked the struggle, risked killing her by the struggle. But I put it to you, man to man, how was I to know then that it was the wrong thing?
She shook two tablets from the bottle and put both of them into her mouth.
“Not two, Aunt Emma!” I cried. I actually tried to take them from her mouth, and I got myself bitten again.
The situation was now changed, in a way that no one could have foreseen.
Two tablets within the hour might not kill her; but three almost certainly would.
“Aunt Emma,” I said, “you didn’t have one before, did you?”
She had closed her eyes and sunk back into the chair, after swallowing the two tablets, as if thoroughly exhausted by such struggle as there had been. Now she opened them again, and looked up at me with a look indescribably impish—impish and foolish, and puerilely triumphant. She rocked herself from side to side, and she said:
“Yes!” And then, “I’ve had three, now, and I’m going to sleep—you hate me—you both hate me—but you can’t keep me from going to sleep.”
And she leaned back in the chair again.
“I don’t believe she did have three of them,” said Margaret. “She’s only saying that now to worry us.”
“She says she did,” I returned; “but she doesn’t know. I think you’re right—she’s probably only saying it to irritate us. I know she didn’t.”
She opened her eyes a little, opened and closed them, with a blink of cunning.
“You know I did!” she murmured.
“I hadn’t known it—hadn’t been sure of it—but evidently the man and woman in the other room had been sure of it.
“She did have one before,” said he.
“Yes,” said the woman; “I know she did.”
Margaret and I stood and looked down on the old woman, whose shaking agitation was now leaving her, who had now begun to breathe quite quietly, in a condition that was strangely helpless; in a sort of suspension of the will-power. I can think now of several things that I should have done. But I give you my word, I could think of nothing then; the only thing that filled my consciousness then was the desperate, working hope that she would not die. And while I looked down on Aunt Emma’s silent and shrunken figure I heard the man and woman in the other room speaking. Their voices were cool and quiet; they came to me clearly enough, but they seemed to come from a distance, too.
“Will she die?” said the man. “Shall I see her die?”
“I should hate to look on while she died,” said the woman. “But she will die; she is dying and I am looking on.”
“She was very old.”
“She was very old. She will be better dead.”
“She has not died yet.”
“
She is breathing very quietly. Old people breathe very quietly.” “Old people die very quietly.”
“And she is dying.”
I heard this monstrous litany, and every fiber in my being was in revolt against it. But, for a time, it seemed impossible for me to speak or to move. I tried to combat, in my own mind, what they were saying in the other room.
Aunt Emma stirred, feebly. Her eyes said that she wanted to say something. Margaret and I bent over her, and she whispered faintly :
“Margaret .. . Harvey . . . you . . . you really love me . . . don’t you? You really .. . really . . .”
She relapsed, relaxed. Her head was slightly on one side. She did not speak or move again.
Margaret said, with a note of alarm, “Harvey, she’s scarcely breathing! She does not seem to be breathing at all!”
“If I had struggled with her,” I said, “it would have killed her.”
The man in the other room spoke, “And now she’s dead because there was no struggle!”
Margaret cried out, “Phone for Doctor McIntosh! I’m alarmed!”
“Too late for any doctor,” said the man in the other room; and the woman there echoed, “Too late!”
Margaret said to me, “Harvey, I’m afraid . . . I’m afraid that Aunt Emma has left us!”
“Thank heaven,” I answered, “that we’ve always tried to be good to her. You’ve been like an angel to her, Margaret, and I’ve tried to do my best. Poor Aunt Emma!” For the pathos of her last words clutched at my heart. “Poor Aunt Emma!” I said. Somehow I could not stop saying it for a moment; I chattered it over and over again, “Poor Aunt Emma! Poor Aunt Emma! Poor Aunt Emma!”
“Fifteen thousand a year! Fifteen thousand a year! Fifteen thousand a year!” chattered the man in the other room.
I turned angrily and faced him. I wanted to have it out with him.
For he was not I! Oh, I know what had happened—any man in my profession knows what had happened! In that other room I was seeing my other self. The part we all hide and deny, the ungenerous part, the selfish part, the hideous part if you will, had come up out of the caves of the underworld, out of the realm of the unexpressed, out of the repressed subconsciousness, and met me face to face. I need not dwell, in talking with you, on the mechanism of it—as I have said, the mechanism interested me far less than the things behind the mechanism. The man in the other room was compounded of all the unuttered things in my nature which I consciously disavowed, which I fought down, which I never permitted to get into the field of fact and deed. We have all fought them down or there would be no such thing as civilization to-day, not even the imperfect semblance of it which exists.
A Treasury of Doctor Stories Page 45