Part 56 (2/2)

”They did know it. After that, they never let it alone. They kept rubbing it into me all the time that I was different. As my father put it, I wore my cerebro-spinal system on the outside, and I had to grow a skin or two if I wanted to be a man and not an anatomical diagram. I'd got to prove that I _was_ a man--that I wasn't different after all.”

”Well--you proved it.”

”If I did my father never knew it.”

”And your mother?” she said softly.

”I believe she knew.”

”But wasn't she glad to know you were different?”

”I never let her know, really, how different I was.”

”You kept it to yourself?”

”It was the only way to keep it.”

”Your genius?”

”If you choose to call it that.”

”The thing,” she said, ”that made you different.”

”You see,” he said, ”they didn't understand that _that_ was where I was most a coward. I was always afraid of losing it. I am now.”

”You couldn't lose it.”

”I have lost it. It went altogether the time I was working for my medical. I got it back again out in India when I was alone, on the edge of the jungle, when there wasn't much cholera about, and I'd nothing to do but think. Then some officious people got me what they called a better berth in Bombay; and it went again.”

She was uncertain now whether he were speaking of his genius, or of something more than it.

”You see,” he continued, ”you go plodding on with your work for months and never think about it; and then you realize that it's gone, and there's the terror--_the_ most awful terror there is--of never getting back to it again. Then there'll be months of holding on to the fringe of it without seeing it--seeing nothing but horrors, hearing them, handling them. Then perhaps, when you've flung yourself down, tired out, where you are, on the chance of sleeping, it's there. And nothing else matters. Nothing else is.”

She knew now, though but vaguely and imperfectly, what he meant.

”And the next day one part of you goes about among the horrors, and the other part remains where it got to.”

”I see.”

Obscurely and with difficulty she saw, she made it out. The thing he spoke of was so inconceivable, so tremendous that at times he was afraid of having it, at times afraid of never having it again. And because, as he had said, the fear of not having it was worse than any fear, he had to be sure of it, he had to put it to the test. So he went down into life, into the thick of it, among all the horrors and the terrors. He knew that if he could do that and carry his vision through it, if it wasn't wiped out, if he only saw it once, for a moment afterwards, he would be sure of it. He wasn't really sure of it until then, not a bit surer than she was now.

No; he was always sure of it. It was himself he was not sure of; himself that he put to the test.

And it was himself that he had carried through it. He had lived face to face with all the corporeal horrors; he had handled them, tasted them, he, the man without a skin, with every sense, every nerve in him exposed, exquisitely susceptible to torture. And he had come through it all as through a thing insubstantial, a thing that gave way before his soul and its exultant, processional vision of G.o.d.

”The absurd thing is that after all I haven't grown a skin. I'm _still_ afraid of the sight of blood.”

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