Chapter XV

There is a mirror over the mantel-piece in my study. For months I have tried not to look in mirrors, except when I have finished dressing, and then only to see if I am normally presentable. But this night the room grew chilly past midnight, and I arose and went to hold open my dressing gown before the red logs in the grate. Sandy went to bed over an hour ago, and I did not care to rouse him to build a huge fire.

As I was standing there, I leaned forward absent-mindedly on the mantel-piece and placed my head in the palms of my hands in such close proximity to the mirror that the fleshly features and the illusory features touched. I gazed upon my face intently.

The sight stirred the most profound depths within me, not for sorrow, not for pity, not for age, not for the changes, but the realization that it was I. Actually I! I, as I _am_. Look at these eyes, even they alone tell the story, a tale of trying to be what I was not to be; of trying to be good and pure and sinless, of wishing for a little success as other men succeed; of wanting a mate. My mate! to be by my side, she who could have steadied my passion, and have grown old as I grew old, she who could have kept me from all these wretched acts and thoughts; and then--then I lost! I slipped; I fell. And this face shows it. These eyes show it. They see failure, utter, bleak, barren failure. The Great Gambler gives us the dice to throw once, and only once. We lose or we win. I lost.

Ah God, must I once more be wakeful with hot tears? I think of the men and the women I know--of you--of you; how did the dice come up for you? What have the figures read?

As I am gazing thus in the mirror, my eyes wander to the other part of the reflection which shows the darkness of the opposite end of the room, for the lamp is beginning to flicker. Out of that darkness comes a boyish figure, and this new sight makes my eyes nearly start from their sockets.

But is he a new figure?

He advances a step out of the darkness. He is young and supple, about seventeen. I still have my eyes on him in the mirror. This moment he caught my glance! He steps nearer, keeping my eye and trying to laugh, and yet, oh, how wistful that look really is.

“Who the devil are you?” I asked, without turning from the mirror and half closing my eyes in an effort to search his countenance.

“Oh, I reckon you know who I am;” he said flippantly, with a Southern accent.

“Sit down, won’t you?” I said, without turning around to greet him. And then with impudence he sits himself down in the very chair which I had recently vacated. I still retain my position and watch him in the mirror.

Looking up at me, he began again:

“No one would think, from the manner in which you recognized me, that we are as closely related as father and son.”

“It’s a lie,” I answered, calmly, “why do you accuse me with a lie?”

“Oh, don’t excite yourself,” he came back, “I am the guilty party. I am the father and you are the son. Certainly you have often heard that the boy is father to the man?”

“Aye, and the child, sire to the boy.”

“Look at yourself. You are seeing you that are, while I am you that used to be. I reckon you know me now.”

I stared again at my misbegotten self in the mirror, the self that is, and I thought upon what had just been uttered by the self that was. A weird truth came to me, and I spoke this thought aloud:

“You have spoken correctly, for if the boy is father to the man, he may beget a legitimate self or an illegitimate self. You, damn you, you did not create the self that might have been, but begot me, a bastard self.”

“Well,” he said defiantly, “I admit it. What then?”

“Why did you do so--why did you ruin your future--why did you wish me to be a failure?”

“Why was I weak?--that is what you mean. Well, my son, I can not tell you. It was in me and it had to come out. Perhaps my ancestors were to blame; perhaps I alone was to blame. They say we are masters of our fate. I doubt it. Surely no more sensitive, passionate youth longed as actually as I did to make you noble and true and generous. Was there ever a grander wreck? Look at yourself. Gaze into the diorama of your mind, and what do you see?”

I looked and saw the dismal pomp unroll before my mental eyes. And I saw a mass of indecision.

“Behold! there come the Ghosts of Past Intentions. I was going to marry the love of my life--that is the saddest ghost of all. I intended to be industrious and win fame for her--and see what I have done--nothing--and my life is sailing away, growing dimmer and dimmer, until now my worthy craft is a weather-beaten derelict even before my prime. This ghost gets up with me in the morning, sits with me at meals, reads every book I hold in my hand, goes on all my walks, sips each glass of my sangaree, retires to bed with me at night. This ghost is Insomnia Incarnate.

“Here comes another procession--the Imps of Lost Opportunities. Why was I not able to grasp them? The next company of players tell the tale. They are the ever-present giants, tyrants--Weak Resolutions--weak, weak, weak--back to the word you spoke!”

But lo, as I spoke, the lad took his leave. He could stand the arraignment no longer, and hot tears welled his eyes.

“You were too hard on him,” a voice within me cried, “he did not mean to do what he did. It was not to his interest to ruin you. Do you not recall those lines he read in adolescence, and predicted that each syllable would come true of himself. He has not lied. He knew.”

“What were the lines?” I asked.

“Here they are:

‘Even so it was when I was young.
If ever we are nature’s, these are ours; this thorn
Doth to our rose of youth rightly belong;
Our blood to us, this to our blood is born.

It is the show and seal of nature’s truth,
Where love’s strong passion is impress’d in youth;
By our remembrances of days foregone,
Such were our faults--or then we thought them none.’”

DUNLEVY ABROAD?

It would do no good to give more extracts from Dunlevy’s manuscript, for my object is not to lay bare his entire work. If these fragments have afforded some insight into the character and opinions of this otherwise unknown man, then my purpose has been fulfilled.

Here would be the place, were I equal to it, to speak of him as a man and as a writer. After the manner of some biographers, perhaps I ought to see him standing alone, in lofty transports of thought and inspiring actions. On the contrary, I should much prefer to see him doing ordinary things. I would like to bring him near to us. I would like to make him more than a mysterious person. But both of these views are denied us. It is not as though Dunlevy were a statue which could be observed from any angle. I have had to take him as I found him.

In his life that has left behind it so few traces, I am at a loss for facts upon which to base any judgment. If I may speak for myself, I own that I have little intellectual sympathy with him in any way. I find nothing hopeful or inspiring in his writings. Somehow, he was always striving, and always failing, to go to the bottom of everything. He wished to give proof of more penetration and ethical intuition than he possessed. Are not his thoughts, after all, superficial? Does he get us anywhere? We, in this workaday age, must _get_ somewhere. Sometimes I think that the chief reason why certain novels have plots is to get us to the end of the book, and that _is_ somewhere.

“He teaches nothing, because he decides nothing; it is the very opposite of dogmatism. He is vain.--Hey! all men are, are they not? And those who seem modest, are not they doubly vain? The _I_ and the _me_ are on every line; but how should we ever have any knowledge except through the _I_ and the _me_?” So wrote Madame DuDeffand once in a letter to Horace Walpole.

Yet I feel even in these few fragments of his the presence of an earnest and attaching sensibility. They show us Dunlevy struggling with a life-long secret, whose nature it is as difficult to read as its influence upon the whole trend of his temperament it is impossible to deny. Way back at the time when he wrote me his letter, in which he confessed a weakness for drink, one can see what a despairing glance he casts upon his life. Whatever this youthful secret was, we can only conjecture. He never tells us. He never so far forgot his private dignity and his instincts as a gentleman as to publish the reason why he did not marry. Here, the reader, if he has the desire, must go the rest of the way himself. I have referred to it now for the last time, because by so doing it becomes easier to speak of his manuscript. “The physiology and hygiene of a writer have become one of the indispensable chapters in any analysis that is made of his talent.” So says Sainte-Beuve. The result was that this effort to conceal his trouble and yet speak openly of himself gives all of his papers their personal note. That is why he has to walk on that delicate line between the real and the supernatural, maintaining his balance and always seeming to know where he is. That is why at times he sounds as though a Theosophist were talking to his Mahatma. Hence the styles, the moods, the visions, of this sane or insane man.

That Dunlevy spent much of his time in idleness and apparent emptiness of mind can not be denied. He was indolent. He tells us so. He was born under the Southern sun at a period when indolence had recently been aristocratic and at a premium. This very inability to adapt himself to energetic work, constitutional though it was, seemed to haunt him with the idea that he was indeed a useless being. To call his little volume of scattered sheets literally the memoirs of a failure was no misnomer. And he knew it.

To be born indolent and to have also a delicate conscience is an unhappy birth even for normally healthy mortals who have a cheery home. But in addition to his physical inertia, to be at the mercy of an irritable temperament, and to be a wandering recluse, was enough to make Dunlevy go under. And I fear that he did so.

I imagine that Dunlevy kept going from one disappointment to another, trying to repair past errors by some new effort. He must often have asked: How is it that with intelligence and so much remorse, you are still so little master of yourself? “The sore of his whole life is there--unbelief and desire.”

After sending me his box, he disappeared from America and apparently went into hiding. Stripped of the sparse details which I have been able to gather about him, Dunlevy’s life is lacking in outward incident; for the most part, it is a complete blank. We wonder how it is that we know so little about a Rabelais or a Shakespeare. What do we know of our nearest neighbor? In the present case but one thing seems certain: tragedy seemed to follow tragedy in the life of William Wirt Dunlevy. He lost his mother when he was a little child; he lost his father when he was not more than a grown boy; he lost his young betrothed on the very verge of approaching marriage; he lost his faith; he lost his health; and he lost his ambition--all before the age when most men have not felt even one of these sorrows.

There remain, and always will remain, many dark places in his experience. And it has seemed to me that it would be a breach of friendship for me to attempt to throw light upon either his family history or his private life, aside from what he gives in his own papers. It would savor too much of professional biography. I do not know the man’s age. I have never sought out even the full name of his father, nor his mother’s maiden name. It was sufficient for him to tell me in his own letter that he had neither kith nor kin. That closed further inquiry.

Perhaps it will not do for me to go no deeper into the meaning of Dunlevy’s documents, if I propose to offer them for public scrutiny, even though I personally feel that the moment one begins to analyze their meaning, the meaning disappears. So it is with pleasure. The moment you become conscious of pleasure and try to handle it and to label it, the pleasure vanishes, and you pursue a flying goal. Spontaneous happiness is never conscious. And the meaning of personal, spontaneous writing may be felt, but not epitomized.

What, then, does Dunlevy mean?

I repeat that I am unable to state his meaning, though I believe that the man had something to say. Perhaps if I should force myself to phrase a hypothetical meaning, I might say that the difference between happiness and unhappiness is the difference between positive and negative thoughts. Positive thoughts are constructive. And Dunlevy unconsciously illustrates by means of his own personality that he cherished negative thoughts, and was therefore a negative man. But Dunlevy does not allow us to dismiss him with the trite conclusion that because sentiments are personal, they are necessarily autobiographical. He makes us go further, and asks: “Why should I have been a failure? I admit that it was because I had a weak will. But how did it happen that my will was weak? Does the onus of the blame fall upon my ancestors and myself or upon civilization?” He makes both share the responsibility, but he brings his stronger indictment against our civilization; because he proves that he started out with clean instincts and a desire to do good. This is the only way that I can account for his writing two such papers as the one in which he introduces the Strange Professor, and the other in which he writes as a little child, side by side. In the former, he shows himself on the very verge of acute insanity, fighting to save the control of his reason; and in the latter, he shows that he had it also in him to lie awake in the dark and ponder that once he was not so, that once he was “a little brown-headed boy, unfettered with the knowledge of evil,” and with the potentialities of goodness and deep affection in him, and of a decent ambition to amount to some one. Two such papers as these were actually found by me written side by side in his manuscript book; and I noted that the calm, saner one was written after the other.

No, no, it will not do to dismiss Dunlevy as a bitter, bad-minded egoist. No, no, that will not do. The man was utterly dissatisfied with the outcome of his life. You can be no more disgusted with him than he is disgusted with himself. And if there be truth in the main drift of his contention, what boots it whether he was sane or insane? He believed in the Omnipotence of Truth, no matter how much we, transitory atoms, try to cloud Truth by befogging each other and hoodwinking ourselves.

* * * * *

One summer, not long since, I went to spend a part of my holiday at Narragansett Pier in Rhode Island. My room overlooked the ocean, and at night I used often to sit after the hotel went to sleep and watch the great red August moon rise out of the horizon. Now and then the fog would partly mask her, revealing the general outlines of her figure like a loosely fitting night-robe. Beneath this weird atmosphere of shifting mist over the silver column of light reflected upon the swaying surface of the waters, a dim steamer appeared in the vaguest shape. Her lights were all that could be distinguished, shining out like the eyes of wild animals upon the shore of a hidden continent.

“She is a phantom ship;” I said to myself.

Soon I saw that I was mistaken, for the vessel headed toward the beach and anchored immediately before my window. The moon sank, the wind rose, the waves beat against the rocks, and I fell asleep.

I thought no more of this familiar occurrence when I awoke the next day. I went down and had my swim, and when I came back, there stood my phantom ship. But oh, what a difference! She was in full dress, flags of all colors and designs hanging from her rigging. A noisy launch waited near her, and I saw by the raising of her blue flag that the owner was about to go ashore.

“What is the name of that yacht?” I asked of my hotel proprietor.

“She is the Festoon,” he answered, “she belongs to Commodore Crowther.”

“Crowther! What Crowther?”

“The Newport Crowther,” said he, “there is only one Crowther so far as I ever heard of. Surely you have heard of Crowther, the pickle man?”

No, I was sorry, but I had not heard of him. I had been in the far West a number of years and was quite ignorant.

“Well, well, that’s funny,” said he, “I thought everyone ate pickles. Look, that’s his cottage over there on the point.”

“You mean that building that looks like a court house?”

“Well, yes, it cost more than most court-houses;” said he, “and if you wait here long enough you may see the commodore, for that’s his oldest son there on that polo pony. He’s J. Chester Crowther, and he must be waiting for his father.”

And then my proprietor suddenly deserted me. I saw the reason for his quick departure. A huge automobile, puffing the announcement of important arrivals, had drawn up at the door. Reporters and photographers hovered about it.

The heavens might drop at my feet and I could better believe the sight than what now met my eyes. A portly gentleman, with the native swagger and sure mien of a thoroughbred aristocrat, mounted the hotel steps. A hush fell upon the surrounding chatter. And here came my shock. He was none other than Crowther, the football player, whom I had known a decade before at the University of Virginia. In those days of youthful cynicism, some students used to say that Crowther played football for money. No matter; here he was now, with a string of obsequious friends, ladies and gentlemen, following in his wake. Reporters to the right of him, photographers before him, lackeys behind him.

He held a levee on the porch steps for a few moments, and then came down the veranda where I was sitting, thus cutting off every means of escape. Not that I had the least idea that he would remember me, but still I did not care to give him the chance to forget me. He advanced cane in hand. From his walk, it was evident that the heavy society act had become Crowther’s long suit.

“Why, how do you do!” he said, holding out a tightly gloved hand.

“I am glad to see you, Mr. Crowther;” I said, lying in spite of myself, for which of us is not affected by contact with powerful wealth. He sat down on the porch railing, and naturally I aped his example.

“You ought to be a politician;” I said, laughing.

“How’s that?”

“Because you never forget a face. You have not seen me for over ten years.”

“Speaking of remembering faces,” said he, tapping me with his cane, “whom do you think I once ran into four summers ago just as I have met you here.”

“I can not imagine.”

“It may be you won’t even remember his name--that queer stick--a--why I have forgotten it myself--oh, yes--Dun--Dunlevy, don’t you remember he used to sit with us at college?”

“In the name of God tell me where he is.”

“Oh, that I don’t know--so you recall him? Well, I met him over in England--down at Richmond, in Surrey. Did you ever hear of that famous hotel there, the Star and Garter?”

“Yes,” I said, “Thackeray mentions it; and then I lived in Richmond once.”

“Oh, did you really? Very good; then you know the spot. It was there I saw Dunlevy, wheeled around by an old darky.”

“Wheeled about? Was he an invalid?”

“He was suffering from locomotor ataxia, so I was told. Really, the poor chap aroused my pity, and I left my party of friends and went over to speak to him. He had never heard of me nor I of him since we left college. Think of that! And when I told him that I had become the largest pickle grower in the world, what do you think he said?”

“Tell me?”

“He said, ‘Crowther, that’s why you used always to be saying, “Pass the pickles, please.”’ Ha, ha. That was the only time I saw him. He didn’t seem to want to talk; it seemed to tire him; and his old negro wheeled him away into the shade. Poor chap, what a mess he has made out of life! I don’t suppose you know that he came of one of our oldest Virginian families. I own an estate which adjoins what was once his father’s plantation. I hunt partridges down there every fall--you will pardon me, but I see that I am keeping my guests waiting. I must leave you. Be here long? Come to see me some time at my cottage. Mighty glad to have seen you.”

As he walked down to his automobile and thence drove to his launch, I said to myself, Crowther, a metropolitan man of affairs, a landed proprietor, a member of our noted society, an American millionaire, known wherever pickles are eaten; and--and--what was it he called the obscure exile whom he met--“a mess.”

Even the mad Lear asked: Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out.

Who was William Wirt Dunlevy? Where is he? What was he? A failure?