Philip Van Doren Stern (ed)

by Travelers In Time

  Mr. Bradegar again stretched a little, to be quite sure. Yes, there wasn't a shadow of doubt—that illusion of being restricted, of touching the foot of the bed, could mean only one thing. He knew he couldn't actually be doing so, because, as it happened, he'd had that bed built to make impossible precisely that horizontal nocturnal ambulation. As a boy he'd hated a too-short bed in which he'd been made to go on sleeping when he'd outgrown it—really a child's cot—and he'd made a promise to himself, which he'd kept, that when he grew up he'd have a footless bed and one in which, stretch as you would, you just couldn't touch the end. Mabel had laughed at him and, later, had been annoyed. He'd grown to be a tall man. She'd said a seven-foot bed was nonsense—looked positively unbalanced. He'd replied that a bed was balanced if it stood steady on its four feet and, anyhow, it wasn't for looks but for closing your eyes in. Of course, she'd replied that, at least as long as they were up and about, she didn't see why her mouth should be shut by his snapping. It was one of those useless, fruitless, but fecund quarrels. They'd found by then that they could quarrel over anything, by the time he was making enough money for her always to be wanting more, and he without any time but to make it.

  He felt with his foot once more. Not a doubt of it. Well, he'd like to see Mabel's face when she heard the news—remorse for a moment, then relief—until his lawyer, whom she'd ring up quick enough, gave her the will in brief.

  Thinking of Mabel's face reminded him to repeat the visual check-up. He opened his eyes again, which had closed as he felt about with his feet under the bedclothes. True enough, eyes answered to toes, repeating the first message that they'd given him at the clock's summons. His eyes confirmed the numbed constricted feeling of his legs, interpreting the general condition in their particular terms. He was seeing as blurredly as he felt numbly. He'd face the music: those starts in the night, he knew now exactly what they were. One, two, three, the little lesions had taken place. He'd had a serial stroke: he was quite extensively paralyzed.

  He pulled himself together inwardly, as outwardly he must leave himself sprawled—"As the tree falls, so shall it lie." He was alone in the house (he began his summary of his situation), not in pain—well, that was a reasonable expectation. But, more, he felt wonderfully light and fresh. Indeed, if he hadn't known beyond a doubt that he was extensively paralyzed and perhaps on the verge of death, he would actually—funny thought (he began actually to chuckle), he would have thought he was wonderfully well—indeed, years younger than when he had crawled under the sheets to begin the night.

  He wished a moment that he'd troubled to ask his other friends who'd had strokes whether they'd felt this lightness, freshness, this absurd sense of being free and careless. Perhaps they had all felt it. He'd often heard doctors say that many of the insane are happier than when they had their wits. Consumptives, too, they're peculiarly optimistic just before their final hemorrhage. So it would be that when your brain is wrecked you have illusions of being young, a sort of mental face lifting—he chuckled again, and the thought floated out of his mind. He felt so careless and so easy that it wasn't worth thinking about anything very long. That was perhaps the funniest part about it all—to be so completely at one's ease, to feel so well in one's body that one didn't care about anything else, when, as a matter of fact, everything, mind, body, and estate were gone.

  Yes, everything: for he now realized that not only was he helplessly paralyzed and his sight blurred but his mind was rapidly going. That was it—the brain hemorrhage must be spreading rapidly. He couldn't think now of what he'd last been thinking, only a moment ago! What was that thing he meant to ask old sick men about? Something to do with what they felt when they were ill. Oh, well, it didn't matter. What would he be wanting to do, bothering old wrecks about what they felt or didn't feel! His mind was so light and gay that he couldn't keep it more than a moment on anything. And that, too, he found rather fun. Still, as things ran through his mind, it was jolly just to run after them, as it were. To keep track of the carnival, he began to talk aloud to himself as a sort of comment on his thoughts. Evidently his speech was left, or at least it seemed so.

  But, before he'd time to check up on that, his voice was joined by another, or rather was collided into by it. "Don't keep on murmuring to yourself like that," it said.

  He stopped and listened. Another sound broke on his ear. It was a sort of breathless howl. A breathless howl? Why, of course, that was a yawn/ Someone was in the room and was waking up. Mr. Bradegar raised his head—so that, too, wasn't paralyzed. And that movement discovered something else for him—his eyes hadn't suddenly failed; fact was, they were as fresh as his mind. He laughed. He'd fancied he was going blind because his nose almost had been touching the raised wooden sidepiece of the bed head—that silly boy's bed in which he was still made to sleep though he was far too big for it and could never stretch his legs. He flung them over the edge. What was that dream about his not being able to move? The sort of nightmare one would get in a suffocating little bunk like this. But he'd dreamed a lot more than that. If he could catch the whole spiel before it slipped away, he'd remember all sorts of odd things. Gosh! it was a dream as long as David Copperiield; longer, by gum—all about all sorts of things: being a success and arguing people down, far better than at the school debating club, and meeting a wonderful girl.

  But, somehow, she didn't, he recollected faintly, turn out to be so wonderful after all. And other girls, small girls, small girls that he'd liked because they were small. But that was getting out of one's depth. How could one like little girls! He couldn't think up much more incident—only a general impression remained that he'd had a crackerjack dream—not so nice in its way, but wonderful just because it had seemed so confounded real, as real as one's own life, as real as oneself in this little old sleeping room and Uncle Andy still snoozing in the big bed by the window.

  Uncle Andy yawned again, snuffled, and remarked, "You been talking in your dreams jest like one of them thar Edison sound boxes I've jest been hearing of. You've gotten indigestion—eating all that punkin pie las' night."

  "It's this silly little bed. It gives me cramps. I was somehow fixed so I got dreaming I couldn't ever move again." "Indigestion; overdistended stummuck. You get a move on." "Well, I feel fine this morning."

  "Then get up and don't sit there yarning at me and complaining of your good bed that's held you well enough these twelve years."

  Uncle Andy was always a little sore in the mornings, Nick Bradegar remembered. Still, as he got out to fetch his towel and to go into the yard to splash under the pump, he felt, suddenly, that he must stop and ask a question. Why? It was the sort to make Uncle Andy sore. Still, something in the back of his mind made him feel it worth the risk.

  "Uncle, what's it like really to be grown up, to be as old as you are?"

  Over the crumpled sheet of the big bed a rheumy eye regarded him. He thought he was going to be bawled out. But no voice came. Only the old, tired, inflamed eye kept on looking at him—first, fiercely, next, defiantly, then, pathetically—that was worst. Or was it? For suddenly it didn't seem Uncle Andy's eye any longer. It seemed somehow a picture of some sort, a kind of mirror, or as though you were looking down the wrong end of a telescope. Ever so small and distant, but quite clear, he saw an old man lying with fixed, open eyes on a long bed. The light was still faint, as though the window had a curtain over it. The old man lay stiffly still, all save the lid of his eye, which seemed to flicker a bit as he lay on his side looking toward Nick. He was awful like Uncle Andy, and yet, somehow, he wasn't Uncle. The bed, too, looked far richer, just as the man in it looked even more tired than Andy.

  The old, harsh clock began to strike, but it seemed more soft than usual. Still, it was enough to rouse Uncle. "You get along, you young lazy scamp. There's the half-hour gone and you still not even washed. You leave me alone with all your dam questions. You'll know soon enough what it is to be old—the heck you will! And, I'll lay it, you'll not have made the hand at living
I've made when time comes to take a stretch, as I've a right to take. Get along and don't disturb me till you've the coffee ready and the bacon cooked!"

  He nipped out of the room. If you didn't clear quickly when Uncle blew like that, you'd have his boots flying at your head a moment after, and, though old and lying down, Uncle had scored more hits than misses with those old hobnails of his, which were always close at hand when off his feet.

  Under the yard pump the cold water on the top of his head made his brain tingle. Like rockets, thoughts shot through his mind. He wouldn't be a failure, like Uncle, or just conk out, the way he'd heard his parents had. He'd get through and make good. Why, he could always win in discussions at school, already. He was always twice as quick at answering back or thinking up a wisecrack. Yes, and some of those big hulks and lubbers who could kick him over a fence, they were afraid of his tongue, he knew—the way things he said would stick to the person he said 'em about. He saw himself getting on. What did one do? Law, of course. As he rubbed his red, thin body with the coarse towel, he saw himself on his feet in court, winning big law cases, first here and there and then right and left; then marrying, of course, an admiring wife and having a large family that'd look up to him, because he was clever, rich, powerful.

  He went in and started cooking the breakfast in the old squalid kitchen. But he hardly smelled the bacon and coffee, so strong was the daydream on him. Only the sound of Uncle's boots on the stairs, now, fortunately, on his old lame feet and not in his still flexible hands, roused him.

  "Now, go and make the beds, you lazy fellow. I know you! If you have your breakfast first, then you never have time. You've got to go off to that darned school! Where they only teach you what you were born doing and do in your sleep and'll be doing when you die in the poorhouse—talk, talk, talk. Get along with you!"

  Nick Bradegar cut out of the kitchen and ran up the stairs into the frowzy bedroom. On the big bed he swung the old frayed stale sheets, worn blankets, and tattered coverlet into some sort of uneasy order. When he came to his cot, however, he paused, looking with a sort of helpless anger at the queer little cramped bed.

  "Well, all I know," he remarked to himself with vicious resolution, "if ever I make even a hundred bucks, I'll have a decent bed. First thing I'll have, I promise myself that. You spend nearly half your life on that one thing. Gum, if I could have a fine decent bed, I don't think I'd mind anything else much. You'd always be able to stretch yourself in that to your heart's content. And in a fine bed you can have fine dreams. That nightmare last night—what was it? It's all gone, but the taste. I know the cause, though—that blasted little bed!"

  "Here, you come down! What ye doing all this while?" holloed Uncle Andy from below. "And wash up 'fore you go to that darned school!"

  The Past Revisited

  From Many Inventions, copyright 1893, by Rudyard Kipling; re« printed by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc., Macmillaq & Co. Ltd., and Mrs. George Bambridge.

  "The Finest Story in the World"

  By RUDYARD KIPLING

  "Or ever the knightly years were gone With the old world to the grave, I was a king in Babylon And you were a Christian slave."

  —W. E. Henley

  His NAME WAS CHARLIE MEARS; HE WAS THE ONLY SON OF HIS MOTHER who was a widow, and he lived in the north of London, coming into the City every day to work in a bank. He was twenty years old and suffered from aspirations. I met him in a public billiard-saloon where the marker called him by his given name, and he called the marker "Bullseyes." Charlie explained, a little nervously, that he had only come to the place to look on, and since looking on at games of skill is not a cheap amusement for the young, I suggested that Charlie should go back to his mother.

  That was our first step toward better acquaintance. He would call on me sometimes in the evenings instead of running about London with his fellow-clerks; and before long, speaking of himself as a young man must, he told me of his aspirations, which were all literary. He desired to make himself an undying name chiefly through verse, though he was not above sending stories of love and death to the drop-a-penny-in-the-slot journals. It was my fate to sit still while Charlie read me poems of many hundred lines, and bulky fragments of plays that would surely shake the world. My reward was his unreserved confidence, and the self-revelations and troubles of a young man are almost as holy as those of a maiden. Charlie had never fallen in love, but was anxious to do so on the first opportunity; he believed in all things good and all things honorable, but, at the same time, was curiously careful to let me see that he knew his way about the world as befitted a bank clerk on twenty-five shillings a week. He rhymed "dove" with "love" and "moon" with "June," and devoutly believed that they had never so been rhymed before. The long lame gaps in his plays he filled up with hasty words of apology and description and swept on, seeing all that he intended to do so clearly that he esteemed it already done, and turned to me for applause.

  I fancy that his mother did not encourage his aspirations, and I know that his writing-table at home was the edge of his washstand. This he told me almost at the outset of our acquaintance; when he was ravaging my bookshelves, and a little before I was implored to speak the truth as to his chances of "writing something really great, you know." Maybe I encouraged him too much, for, one night, he called on me, his eyes flaming with excitement, and said breathlessly:

  "Do you mind—can you let me stay here and write all this evening? I won't interrupt you, I won't really. There's no place for me to write in at my mother's."

  "What's the trouble?" I said, knowing well what that trouble was.

  "I've a notion in my head that would make the most splendid story that was ever written. Do let me write it out here. It's such a notion!"

  There was no resisting the appeal. I set him a table; he hardly thanked me, but plunged into the work at once. For half an hour the pen scratched without stopping. Then Charlie sighed and tugged his hair. The scratching grew slower, there were more erasures, and at last ceased. The finest story in the world would not come forth.

  "It looks such awful rot now," he said, mournfully. "And yet it seemed so good when I was thinking about it. What's wrong?"

  I could not dishearten him by saying the truth. So I answered: "Perhaps you don't feel in the mood for writing."

  "Yes I do—except when I look at this stuff. Ugh!"

  "Read me what you've done," I said.

  He read, and it was wondrous bad, and he paused at all the specially turgid sentences, expecting a little approval; for he was proud of those sentences, as I knew he would be.

  "It needs compression," I suggested, cautiously.

  "I hate cutting my things down. I don't think you could alter a word here without spoiling the sense. It reads better aloud than when I was writing it."

  "Charlie, you're suffering from an alarming disease afflicting a numerous class. Put the thing by, and tackle it again in a week."

  "I want to do it at once. What do you think of it?"

  "How can I judge from a half-written tale? Tell me the story as it lies in your head."

  Charlie told, and in the telling there was everything that his ignorance had so carefully prevented from escaping into the written word. I looked at him, wondering whether it were possible that he did not know the originality, the power of the notion that had come in his way. It was distinctly a Notion among notions. Men had been puffed up with pride by notions not a tithe as excellent and practicable. But Charlie babbled on serenely, interrupting the current of pure fancy with samples of horrible sentences that he purposed to use. I heard him out to the end. It would be folly to allow his idea to remain in his own inept hands, when I could do so much with it. Not all that could be done indeed; but, oh so much!

  "What do you think?" he said, at last. "I fancy I shall call it 'The Story of a Ship.' "

  "I think the idea's pretty good; but you won't be able to handle it

  for ever so long. Now I"----

  "Would it be of any u
se to you? Would you care to take it? I should be proud," said Charlie, promptly.

  There are few things sweeter in this world than the guileless, hotheaded, intemperate, open admiration of a junior. Even a woman in her blindest devotion does not fall into the gait of the man she adores, tilt her bonnet to the angle at which he wears his hat, or interlard her speech with his pet oaths. And Charlie did all these things. Still it was necessary to salve my conscience before I possessed myself of Charlie's thoughts.

  "Let's make a bargain. I'll give you a fiver for the notion," I said. Charlie became a bank-clerk at once.

  "Oh, that's impossible. Between two pals, you know, if I may call you so, and speaking as a man of the world, I couldn't. Take the notion if it's any use to you. I've heaps more."

  He had—none knew this better than I—but they were the notions of other men.

  "Look at it as a matter of business—between men of the world," I

  returned. "Five pounds will buy you any number of poetry-books.

  Business is business, and you may be sure I shouldn't give that price

  unless"-----

  "Oh, if you put it that way," said Charlie, visibly moved by the thought of the books. Tire bargain was clinched with an agreement that he should at unstated intervals come to me with all the notions that he possessed, should have a table of his own to write at, and unquestioned right to inflict upon me all his poems and fragments of poems. Then I said, "Now tell me how you came by this idea."

  "It came by itself." Charlie's eyes opened a little.

  "Yes, but you told me a great deal about the hero that you must have read before somewhere."