The Open Question Part 68

"Yes," said Mrs. Gano; "it is when we are young that we think there could never have been anything to match our experience."

"Then do you think now that your life has been a replica of Mrs.

Otway's?"

Mrs. Gano smiled.

"Oh no," said Val, with a pleased confidence, "there was never anybody just like _us_ before."

They all laughed.

"No doubt we are 'the peculiar people," said Mrs. Gano, calmly deserting her first postulate, and seeming quite equal to facing "the comic laugh."

"I mean," said Val, "that if there never was any 'me' in the world before, the world's a different place now there's 'me' in it."

They laughed with less misgiving.

"You have Goethe on your side, my dear," said her father. "Goethe says Nature is always interesting because she's always renewing the observer."

"I like my way of putting it best," the girl maintained--"sounds more interesting."

"I've found out, Val," said Ethan, "that most people who make believe that human nature is everywhere the same, and that we're all as alike as pins in a row, usually except themselves. That shows they're wiser than their theories."

"No one denies," said John Gano, "that a slight difference in the conditions makes some difference in the result. We were speaking broadly of the main outlines of life. They are curiously common to us all."

"I don't see those 'common outlines,'" Ethan answered, "any more than I see the same pattern twice in a kaleidoscope. I see the same boundary walls--birth and death--and all between the two, endlessly different for each."

"Yes, yes; I believe it's like that," said Val.

"It would be much pleasanter to agree with you, uncle," Ethan remarked, as he got out the chess-board. "It's more comfortable--more companionable. I think there are few thoughts so overwhelming as what John Morley calls 'the awful loneliness of life'--the loneliness that there's no help for, that no one can reach, no one can ever share. Each one of us"--slowly, absently, he set the chessmen in their places--"each man sits apart, with his own soul and its unique experience forever incommunicable, forever different."

"No; not even incommunicable, if he have genius," returned his uncle.

"The odd thing is that in that case what he has to communicate is something we all recognize. We expect him to be different; we are amazed to find him just like ourselves, with the trifling addition of being able to say what the rest of us have only felt."

"You have more faith in the capacity and the veracity of genius than I have. In my opinion, not one of those who have tried to reveal themselves has been able to give us more than shreds and patches of reality. And they've discounted the fragments of truth by romancing, consciously or not--making themselves better, or making themselves worse than they were. The real revelations are the unconscious ones."

"St. Augustine," suggested John Gano.

His nephew laughed and shook his head.

"Well, Rousseau," he amended, looking in the table-drawer for a missing bishop.

"Rousseau, too--exactly a case in my favor. You can't see the forest for the trees, nor the man for his confessions."

John Gano shook his lion's mane.

"If you could project your notion of Rousseau, uncle, and I could do the same by mine, do you suppose they would be alike?"

"Possibly not; we are not in agreement about Rousseau."

"Exactly; and do you think if we could summon him from the shades he would own either your Jean Jacques or mine? Not he. And he'd be right.

There's more bound up in men than they've ever been able to liberate.

Even genius can do no more than make signals over the prison wall."

"Shakespeare, of course, never tried."

"No; think of it." Instead of beginning the game, Ethan stretched out his long legs under the table, and leaned back reflectively with his hands in his pockets--"think of it. Shakespeare, with all his knowledge, and his miraculous gift of expression, his vocabulary double that of the Bible, and greater than that of the Bible and Milton put together--even Shakespeare was too wise to try to do more than give a hint here, a little signal there, just as people do in real life." He looked up suddenly and caught Val's eye. She nodded faintly. "Reminds me of a talk I had with a fellow from Bengal who came over on the same Cunarder with me. He was telling me about the murder of the manager of a tea-garden in the Dooab--police a long time utterly at sea, till somebody discovered that, rummaging among his victim's belongings, the murderer had smudged a Bengali atlas with his thumb. This atlas was forwarded to the bureau where the thumb impressions of criminals are kept, and it was discovered that the impression on the atlas corresponded with the thumb recorded of a noted criminal then at large. The man was arrested on this fact alone.

Other evidence was brought to light, and when the game was up the murderer confessed."

"Oh yes," said John Gano, quite unimpressed, "it's a good many years now since Galton--"

"Exactly, but when it comes to verifiable differences in our thumb whorls, who shall guess at the hidden differences in our brains and nerve ganglia? No, no; we are not alike. We are terribly and wonderfully and forever different, and it's your first play."

The next afternoon Emmie, warmly tucked up on a sofa by the fire, had fallen asleep while her father read aloud. Mrs. Gano made her son a sign, and they went up-stairs to his room. Without preface she began to urge him to take the money he had been going to use in his journey to New York and go instead to the far South, as the doctor advised. She could put a little to it--enough to serve. No, no; he wouldn't. Why not?

At last he said it was because of Val. He had promised her they would go East in the spring. He doubted if he would ever be strong enough to carry out the plan, but Val must not think he had gone back on his word.

If he spent the money this winter, there would be nothing when the warm weather came.

"John," said his mother, "it is partly out of consideration for Val that I urge this."

John opened his eyes.

"I want you to go away for a change, and I don't want you to go alone. I want you to go with Ethan. I've already mentioned it to him. He knows of a place near Savannah."

John Gano seemed to be considering in a bewildered way.

"I must go back," said his mother, uneasily. "Emmie may wake and want--"

She seemed oddly nervous. "Pity Emmie should choose this particular time for one of her colds."

"Yes, poor child! she's missing all the festivity."

"Festivity!" echoed his mother. "Hump! Anyhow, it leaves those two young people a great deal alone."

John Gano blinked.

"Ethan and Val?" he said, absent-mindedly.

His mother nodded.

"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. He might be left to less entertaining people than Val."

"Precisely."

They looked at each other in silence for a moment.

"You don't mean--Val? Why, she's a child."

"She is older than my mother was when I was born."

"You don't think that Ethan--"