Paul Patoff Part 14

"Of course we are rather barbarous."

"Hermione! How can you say I ever said such a thing!" interposed Miss Dabstreak, with a deprecating glance at Paul. "I only said the Russians were such a young and manly race, so interesting, so unlike the inhabitants of this dreary den of printing-presses and steam-engines, so"----

"Thanks, aunt Chrysophrasia," said Paul, "for the delightful ideal you have formed of us. We are certainly less civilized than you, and perhaps, as you are so good as to believe, we are the more interesting.

I suppose the unbroken colt of the desert is more interesting than an American trotting horse, but for downright practical use"----

"There is such a tremendous talk of usefulness!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Chrysophrasia, a faint, sad smile flickering over her sallow features.

"Usefulness is so remarkably useful," I remarked.

"Oh, Mr. Griggs," exclaimed Hermione, "what an immensely witty speech!"

"There is nothing so witty as truth, Miss Carvel, though you laugh at it," I answered, "for where there is no truth, there is no wit. I maintain that usefulness is really useful. Miss Dabstreak, I believe, maintains the contrary."

"Indeed, I care more for beauty than for usefulness," replied the aesthetic lady, with a fine smile.

"Beauty is indeed truly useful," said Paul, with a very faint imitation of Chrysophrasia's accent, "and it should be sought in everything. But that need not prevent us from seeing true beauty in all that is truly useful."

I had a faint suspicion that if Patoff had mimicked Miss Dabstreak in the first half of his speech, he had imitated me in the second portion of the sentiment. I do not like to be made game of, because I am aware that I am naturally pedantic. It is an old trick of the schools to rouse a pedant to desperate and distracted self-contradiction by quietly imitating everything he says.

"You are very clever at taking both sides of a question at once," said Hermione, with a smile.

"Almost all questions have two sides," answered Paul, "but very often both sides are true. A man may perfectly appreciate and approve of the opinions of two persons who take diametrically opposite views of the same point, provided there be no question of right and wrong involved."

"Perhaps," retorted Hermione; "but then the man who takes both sides has no opinion of his own. I do not like that."

"In general, cousin Hermione," said Paul, with a polite smile, "you may be sure that any man will make your opinion his. In this case, I submit that both beauty and usefulness are good, and that they need not at all interfere with each other. As for the compliment my aunt Chrysophrasia has paid to us Russians, I do not think we can be said to have gone very far in either direction as yet." After which diplomatic speech Paul dropped his eyegla.s.s, and looked pleasantly round upon all three of us, as much as to say that it was impossible to draw him into the position of disagreeing with any one present by any device whatsoever.

IX.

Professor Cutter and I walked to the village that afternoon. He is a great pedestrian, and is never satisfied unless he can walk four or five miles a day. His robust and somewhat heavy frame was planned rather for bodily labor than for the housing of so active a mind, and he often complains that the exercise of his body has robbed him of years of intellectual labor. He grumbles at the necessity of wasting time in that way, but he never omits his daily walk.

"I should like to possess your temperament, Mr. Griggs," he remarked, as we walked briskly through the park. "You might renounce exercise and open air for the rest of your life, and never be the worse for it."

"I hardly know," I answered. "I have never tried any regular method of life, and I have never been ill. I do not believe in regular methods."

"That is the ideal const.i.tution. By the by, I had hoped to induce Patoff to come with us, but he said he would stay with the ladies."

"You will never induce him to do anything he does not want to do," I replied. "However, I dare say you know that as well as I do."

"What makes you say that?"

"I can see it,--it is plain enough. Carvel wanted him to go and shoot something after lunch, you wanted him to come for a walk, Macaulay wanted him to bury himself up-stairs and talk out the Egyptian question, I wanted to get him into the smoking-room to ask him questions about some friends of mine in the East, Miss Dabstreak had plans to waylay him with her pottery. Not a bit of it! He smiled at us all, and serenely sat by Mrs. Carvel, talking to her and Miss Hermione. He has a will of his own."

"Indeed he has," a.s.sented the professor. "He is a moderately clever fellow, with a smooth tongue and a despotic character, a much better combination than a weak will and the mind of a genius. You are right, he is not to be turned by trifles."

"I see that he must be a good diplomatist in these days."

"Diplomacy has got past the stage of being intellectual," said the professor. "There was a time when a fine intellect was thought important in an amba.s.sador; nowadays it is enough if his excellency can hold his tongue and show his teeth. The question is, whether the low estimate of intellect in our day is due to the exigency of modern affairs, or to the exiguity of modern intelligence."

"Men are stronger in our time," I answered, "and consequently have less need to be clever. The transition from the joint government of the world by a herd of wily foxes to the domination of the universe by the mammoth ox is marked by the increase of clumsy strength and the disappearance of graceful deception."

"That is true; but the graceful deception continues to be the more interesting, if not the more agreeable. As for me, I would rather be gracefully deceived, as you call it, than pounded to jelly by the hoofs of the mammoth,--unless I could be the mammoth myself."

"To return to Patoff," said I, "what are they going to do with him?"

"The question is much more likely to be what he will do with them, I should say," answered the scientist, looking straight before him, and increasing the speed of his walk. "I am not at all sure what he might do, if no one prevented him. He is capable of considerable originality if left to himself, and they follow him up there at the Place as the boys and girls followed the Pied Piper."

"Is he at all like his mother?" I asked.

"In point of originality?" inquired the professor, with a curious smile.

"She was certainly a most original woman. I hardly know whether he is like her. Boys are said to resemble their mother in appearance and their father in character. He is certainly not of the same type of const.i.tution as his mother, he has not even the same shape of head, and I am glad of it. But his father was a Slav, and what is madness in an Englishwoman is sanity in a Russian. Her most extraordinary aberrations might not seem at all extraordinary when set off by the natural violence he inherits from his father."

"That is a novel idea to me," I remarked. "You mean that what is madness in one man is not necessarily insanity in another; besides, you refused to allow this morning that Madame Patoff was crazy."

"I did not refuse to allow it; I only said I did not know it to be the case. But as for what I just said, take two types of mankind, a Chinese and an Englishman, for instance. If you met a fair-haired, blue-eyed, sanguine Englishman, whose head and features were shaped precisely like those of a Chinaman, you could predicate of him that he must be a very extraordinary creature, capable, perhaps, of becoming a driveling idiot.

The same of a Chinese, if you met one with a brain shaped like that of an Englishman, and similar features, but with straight black hair, a yellow skin, and red eyes. He would have the brain of the Anglo-Saxon with the temperament of the Mongol, and would probably become a raving maniac. It is not the temperament only, nor the intellect only, which produces the idiot or the madman; it is the lack of balance between the two. Arrant cowards frequently have very warlike imaginations, and in their dreams conceive themselves doing extremely violent things. Suppose that with such an imagination you unite the temperament of an Arab fanatic, or the coa.r.s.e, brutal courage of an English prize-fighter, you can put no bounds to the possible actions of the monster you create.

The salvation of the human race lies in the fact that very strong and brave people commonly have a peaceable disposition, or else commit murder and get hanged for it. It is far better that they should be hanged, because n.o.body knows where violence ends and insanity begins, and it is just as well to be on the safe side. Whenever a given form of intellect happens to be joined to a totally inappropriate temperament, we say it is a case of idiocy or insanity. Of course there are many other cases which arise from the mind or the body being injured by extraneous causes; but they are not genuine cases of insanity, because the evil has not been transmitted from the parents, nor will it be to the children."

The professor marched forward as he gave his lecture on unsoundness of brain, and I strode by his side, silent and listening. What he said seemed very natural, and yet I had never heard it before. Was Madame Patoff such a monster as he described? It was more likely that her son might be, seeing that he in some points answered precisely to the description of a man with the intellect of one race and the temperament of another; and yet any one would scoff at the idea that Paul Patoff could go mad. He was so correct, so staid, so absolutely master of what he said, and probably of what he felt, that one could not imagine him a pray to insanity.

"What you say is very interesting," I remarked, at last, "but how does it apply to Madame Patoff?"

"It does not apply to her," returned Professor Cutter. "She belongs to the cla.s.s of people in whom the mind has been injured by extraneous circ.u.mstances."

"I suppose it is possible. I suppose a perfectly sound mind may be completely destroyed by an accident, even by the moral shock from a sorrow or disappointment."

"Yes," said the professor. "It is even possible to produce artificial insanity,--perfectly genuine while it lasts; but it is not possible for any one to pretend to be insane."

"Really? I should have thought it quite possible," said I.

"No. It is impossible. I was once called to give my opinion in such a case. The man betrayed himself in half an hour, and yet he was a very clever fellow. He was a servant; murdered his master to rob him; was caught, but succeeded in restoring the valuables to their places, and pretended to be crazy. It was very well managed and he played the fool splendidly, but I caught him."

"How?" I asked.

"Simply by bullying. I treated him roughly, and never stopped talking to him,--just the worst treatment for a person really insane. In less than an hour I had wearied him out, his feigned madness became so fatiguing to him that there was finally only a spasmodic attempt, and when I had done with him the sane man was perfectly apparent. He grew too much frightened and too tired to act a part. He was hanged, to the satisfaction of all concerned, and he made a complete confession."

"But how about the artificial insanity you spoke of? How can it be produced?"

"By any poison, from coffee to alcohol, from tobacco to belladonna. A man who is drunk is insane."

"I wonder whether, if a madman got drunk, he would be sane?" I said.

"Sometimes. A man who has delirium tremens can be brought to his right mind for a time by alcohol, unless he is too far gone. The habitual drunkard is not in his right mind until he has had a certain amount of liquor. All habitual poisons act in that way, even tea. How often do you hear a woman or a student say, 'I do not feel like myself to-day,--I have not had my tea'! When a man does not feel like himself, he means that he feels like some one else, and he is mildly crazy. Generally speaking, any sudden change in our habits of eating and drinking will produce a temporary unsoundness of the mind. Every one knows that thirst sometimes brings on a dangerous madness, and hunger produces hallucinations and visions which take a very real character."