Library Collections: Document: Full Text

III

A substantial looking middle-aged woman, she glanced around with caution, and urged us in a whisper to close the door. She showed no disposition to advise us about Rose, for it appeared that the girl was but the climax of all that she had been obliged to suffer recently from an unknown enemy, and she expected to have to move. So great was her concern that we joined her in a tour of her well-kept house, and viewed with her the depredations of her malignant visitors. Two spots on the window frame were solemnly pointed out. There was a loose spindle in the stair railing, and the hasp on the screen-door was bent.

But in the bathroom was the culmination of their vandalism. She led us to the tub, and to the porcelain faucet marked Hot. Bending over it, we viewed a speck, so minute that only by careful search could it be found. This, it seems, was their most recent attack. They had climbed through the cellar window after smudging the plaster by the coal-bin. They had crept to the bathroom and with a needle had attempted to pierce the hot water faucet -- for reasons as obscure as they were doubtless deadly.

"You can see," said Mrs. Pinkard with quiet triumph, "that Rose is crying because she knows about the plot. If you think it safe for her to stay here -she shrugged her shoulders-, all I ask is police protection.''

We agreed with her that it was hardly safe, and tiptoed out through what had come to seem a host of unseen enemies, pecking at plaster, and pricking faucets for their dreadful ends.

At this juncture appeared Jane, our last Neurotic, who, to preserve the dramatic unities, linked our two plots together. It turned out that Rose had been a previous admirer of Jane's, and although the latter had since married Ike, she maintained a careless interest in her old inamorata. Jane's conduct in the office was odd. She sat still for a moment, then paced the floor, laughed suddenly, looked out of the window at a blank brick wall, and then reseated herself, only to pace again. She acted as if under the influence of a powerful stimulant, although she was apparently neither drugged nor drunk. With a singular absence of any personal emotion save her peculiar restlessness, she remarked that she would like to take Rose in for old time's sake, except that she had been similarly kind to Mattie, and during one of her temporary absences from home Ike "had got Mattie into trouble," a catastrophe of which we now heard for the first time. Ike, it appeared, was still living with Jane, his wife, but now Maftie had sent word that she wanted to come back. "Shall I take in Rose and Mattie both?" asked Jane, staring fixedly at us for a moment, and then resuming her agitated inspection of the room.

Was her absence from home, by any chance, in a hospital for nervous patients, we inquired. It was. She confessed that she usually had to go once a year, and that it was now about her time. When she came out she earned a good living as a canvasser -- a trade that seemed well fitted to her restless habits. Ike, as soon as he heard of our interest, left town. We never met him, and almost with a sigh of relief we returned to cheerful Mattie, whose crisis was even more acute, than we had supposed, and who all unconsciously had dragged this drama to a stage. Unmarried, pregnant, simple, and satisfied with her lot! After so many obscure neuroses, how much less complicated was a mere Moron! No rancor toward anyone. No anxiety. No plan. She adjusted her little hat, enjoyed the spotlight, smiled at us all, and agreed to everything.

Seven Neurotics and a Moron accurately diagnosed by the bailiff in a swift aside as "a bunch o' nuts."

IV

If the plot seems heavily freighted with Neurotic characters, we are but in line with all the popular dramas of antiquity or today. Without delusions of grandeur, where are King Lear, Beau Brummell, or Merton of the Movies? Without "overvaluation of the sexual object," where are Titania and her Donkey, Beauty and the Beast, or the hero of "Seventeen"? Without "mother fixation," "inferiority complex," or "day dreams of the repressed," where are Hamlet, "The Hairy Ape," or the fascinations of "The Sheik"? It is my conviction that the dramatists no less than the police court depend upon citizens of Neurotica to keep them in material (always excepting the plays produced strictly for the Moron trade). For with characters dominated by common sense alone, surely the dramatic coil would insist upon unraveling in the first act. It takes Neurotics to keep it going till the third.

The dramatist can, however, leave his characters, or kill them off when he is finished. But what are the judge, the teacher, and the average parent to do? The only conclusion is apparently that at which the Chinese have arrived, on the question of binding feet. To best avoid the tortures of unbinding -- do not allow them to be bound.

When nervous young vagrants show signs of hankering to escape from the bracing air of Reality into the enervating climate of Delusion, let the guardians at the frontier turn them back before their souls are so relaxed in that morbid heat that they do not want to come. The hysterics, the perverted, the repressed, the over-fixated, the melancholies and the introverts are always beckoning a welcome to a land in which one need no longer face the facts, but can play forever with fairy tales. If the pickets at the border call too late, their voices find no listeners. The Neurotic hears them as we hear in dreams, and finally he hears them not at all. The Pied Piper of Delusion plays a song which grows more seductive as he turns his back upon the boundary-line, and makes for the deep thickets of Insanity, from which no traveler returns.