'It is the first time since the dawn-days of Creation that a Voice has gone crashing through space with such placid and complacent confidence and command.'
IThis last summer, when I was on my way back to Vienna from the Appetite-Cure in the mountains, I fell over a cliff in the twilight and broke some arms and legs and one thing or another, and by good luck was found by some peasants who had lost an ass, and they carried me to the nearest habitation, which was one of those large, low, thatch-roofed farm-houses, with apartments in the garret for the family, and a cunning little porch under the deep gable decorated with boxes of bright-coloured flowers and cats; on the ground floor a large and light sitting-room, separated from the milch-cattle apartment by a partition; and in the front yard rose stately and fine the wealth and pride of the house, the manure-pile. That sentence is Germanic, and shows that I am acquiring that sort of mastery of the art and spirit of the language which enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.
There was a village a mile away, and a horse-doctor lived there, but there was no surgeon. It seemed a bad outlook; mine was distinctly a surgery case. Then it was remembered that a lady from Boston was summering in that village, and she was a Christian Science doctor and could cure anything. So she was sent for. It was night by this time, and she could not conveniently come, but sent word that it was no matter, there was no hurry, she would give me 'absent treatment' now, and come in the morning; meantime she begged me to make myself tranquil and comfortable and remember that there was nothing the matter with me. Ithought there must be some mistake.
'Did you tell her I walked off a cliff seventy-five feet high?'
'Yes.'
'And struck a boulder at the bottom and bounced?'
'Yes.'
'And struck another one and bounced again?'
'Yes.'
'And struck another one and bounced yet again?'
'Yes.'
'And broke the boulders?'
'Yes.'
'That accounts for it; she is thinking of the boulders. Why didn't you tell her I got hurt, too?'
'I did. I told her what you told me to tell her: that you were now but an incoherent series of compound fractures extending from your scalp-lock to your heels, and that the comminuted projections caused you to look like a hat-rack.'
'And it was after this that she wished me to remember that there was nothing the matter with me?'
'Those were her words.'
'I do not understand it. I believe she has not diagnosed the case with sufficient care. Did she look like a person who was theorising, or did she look like one who has fallen off precipices herself and brings to the aid of abstract science the confirmation of personal experience?'
'Bitte?'
It was too large a contract for the Stubenmadchen's vocabulary; she couldn't call the hand. I allowed the subject to rest there, and asked for something to eat and smoke, and something hot to drink, and a basket to pile my legs in, and another capable person to come and help me curse the time away; but I could not have any of these things.
'Why?'
'She said you would need nothing at all.'
'But I am hungry and thirsty, and in desperate pain.'
'She said you would have these delusions, but must pay no attention to them. She wants you to particularly remember that there are no such things as hunger and thirst and pain.'
'She does, does she?'
'It is what she said.'
'Does she seem o be in full and functional possession of her intellectual plant, such as it is?'
'Bitte?'
'Do they let her run at large, or do they tie her up?'
'Tie her up?'
'There, good-night, run along; you are a good girl, but your mental Geschirr is not arranged for light and airy conversation. Leave me to my delusions.'
II
It was a night of anguish, of course--at least I supposed it was, for it had all the symptoms of it--but it passed at last, and the Christian Scientist came, and I was glad. She was middle-aged, and large and bony and erect, and had an austere face and a resolute jaw and a Roman beak and was a widow in the third degree, and her name was Fuller. I was eager to get to business and find relief, but she was distressingly deliberate. She unpinned and unhooked and uncoupled her upholsteries one by one, abolished the wrinkles with a flirt of her hand and hung the articles up; peeled off her gloves and disposed of them, got a book out of her hand-bag, then drew a chair to the bedside, descended into it without hurry, and I hung out my tongue. She said, with pity but without passion:
'Return it to its receptacle. We deal with the mind only, not with its dumb servants.'
I could not offer my pulse, because the connection was broken; but she detected the apology before I could word it, and indicated by a negative tilt of her head that the pulse was another dumb servant that she had no use for. Then I thought I would tell her my symptoms and how I felt, so that she would understand the case; but that was another inconsequence, she did not need to know those things; moreover, my remark about how Ifelt was an abuse of language, a misapplication of terms--'One does not feel,' she explained; 'there is no such thing as feeling: therefore, to speak of a non-existent thing as existent as a contradiction. Matter has no existence; nothing exists but mind; the mind cannot feel pain, it can only imagine it.'
'But if it hurts, just the same--'
'It doesn't. A thing which is unreal cannot exercise the functions of reality. Pain is unreal; hence pain cannot hurt.'