A Ramble In Aphasia
My wife and I parted on that morning in precisely our usual
manner. She left her second cup of tea to follow me to the front
door. There she plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint
(the universal act of woman to proclaim ownership) and bade me
to take care of my cold. I had no cold. Next came her kiss of
parting--the lever kiss of domesticity flavored with Young Hyson.
There was no fear of the extemporaneous, of variety spicing her
infinite custom. With the deft touch of long malpractice, she
dabbed awry my well-set scarf pin; and then, as I closed the door, I
heard her morning slippers pattering back to her cooling tea.
When I set out I had no thought or premonition of what was to
occur. The attack came suddenly.
For many weeks I had been toiling, almost night and day, at a
famous railroad law case that I won triumphantly but a few days
previously. In fact, I had been digging away at the law almost
without cessation for many years. Once or twice good Doctor
Volney, my friend and physician, had warned me.
"If you don't slacken up, Belford," he said, "you'll go suddenly to
pieces. Either your nerves or your brain will give way. Tell me,
does a week pass in which you do not read in the papers of a case
of aphasia--of some man lost, wandering nameless, with his past
and his identity blotted out--and all from that little brain clot
made by overwork or worry?"
"I always thought," said I, "that the clot in those instances was
really to be found on the brains of the newspaper reporters."
Doctor Volney shook his head.
"The disease exists," he said. "You need a change or a rest.
Court-room, office and home--there is the only route you travel.
For recreation you--read law books. Better take warning in time."
"On Thursday nights," I said, defensively, "my wife and I play
cribbage. On Sundays she reads to me the weekly letter from her
mother. That law books are not a recreation remains yet to be
established."
That morning as I walked I was thinking of Doctor Volney's words.
I was feeling as well as I usually did--possibly in better
spirits than usual.
I woke with stiff and cramped muscles from having slept long on
the incommodious seat of a day coach. I leaned my head against
the seat and tried to think. After a long time I said to myself:
"I must have a name of some sort." I searched my pockets. Not
a card; not a letter; not a paper or monogram could I find.
But I found in my coat pocket nearly $3,000 in bills of large
denomination. "I must be some one, of course," I repeated to
myself, and began again to consider.
The car was well crowded with men, among whom, I told myself,
there must have been some common interest, for they intermingled
freely, and seemed in the best good humor and spirits. One of
them--a stout, spectacled gentleman enveloped in a decided odor
of cinnamon and aloes--took the vacant half of my seat with a
friendly nod, and unfolded a newspaper. In the intervals between
his periods of reading, we conversed, as travelers will, on current
affairs. I found myself able to sustain the conversation on such
subjects with credit, at least to my memory. By and by my
companion said:
"You are one of us, of course. Fine lot of men the West sends in
this time. I'm glad they held the convention in New York; I've
never been East before. My name's R. P. Bolder--Bolder & Son,
of Hickory Grove, Missouri."
Though unprepared, I rose to the emergency, as men will when put
to it. Now must I hold a christening, and be at once babe, parson
and parent. My senses came to the rescue of my slower brain.
The insistent odor of drugs from my compainion supplied one
idea; a glance at his newspaper, where my eye met a conspicuous
advertisement, assisted me further.
"My name," said I, glibly, "is Edward Pinkhammer. I am a
druggist, and my home is in Cornopolis, Kansas."
"I knew you were a druggist," said my fellow traveler, affably. "I
saw the callous spot on your right forefinger where the handle of
the pestle rubs. Of course, you are a delegate to our National
Convention."
"Are all these men druggists?" I asked, wonderingly.
"They are. This car came through from the West. And they're
your old-time druggists, too--none of your patent tablet-and-
granule pharmashootists that use slot machines instead of a
prescription desk. We percolate our own paregoric and roll our
own pills, and we ain't above handling a few garden seeds in the
spring, and carrying a side line of confectionery and shoes. I tell
you Hampinker, I've got an idea to spring on this convention--new
ideas is what they want. Now, you know the shelf bottles of tartar
emetic and Rochelle salt Ant. et Pot. Tart. and Sod. et Pot. Tart.--
one's poison, you know, and the other's harmless. It's easy to
mistake one label for the other. Where do druggists mostly keep
'em? Why, as far apart as possible, on different shelves. That's
wrong. I say keep 'em side by side, so when you want one you can
always compare it with the other and avoid mistakes. Do you
catch the idea?"
"It seems to me a very good one," I said.
"All right! When I spring it on the convention you back it up.
We'll make some of these Eastern orange-phosphate-and-massage-
cream professors that think they're the only lozenges in the market
look like hypodermic tablets."
"If I can be of any aid," I said, warming, "the two bottles of--er--"
"Tartrate of antimony and potash, and tartrate of soda and potash."
"Shall henceforth sit side by side," I concluded, firmly.
"Now, there's another thing," said Mr. Bolder. "For an excipient
in manipulating a pill mass which do you prefer--the magnesia
carbonate or the pulverised glycerrhiza radix?"
"The--er--magnesia," I said. It was easier to say than the other
word.
Mr. Bolder glanced at me distrustfully through his spectacles.
"Give me the glycerrhiza," said he. "Magnesia cakes."
"Here's another one of these fake aphasia cases," he said,
presently, handing me his newspaper, and laying his finger upon
an article. "I don't believe in 'em. I put nine out of ten of 'em
down as frauds. A man gets sick of his business and his folks and
wants to have a good time. He skips out somewhere, and when
they find him he pretends to have lost his memory--don't know his
own name, and won't even recognize the strawberry mark on his
wife's left shoulder. Aphasia! Tut! Why can't they stay at home
and forget?"
I took the paper and read, after the pungent headlines, the
following:
"DENVER, June 12.--Elwyn C. Belford, a prominent lawyer, is
mysteriously missing from his home since three days ago, and all
efforts to locate him have been in vain. Mr. Bellford is a well-
known citizen of the highest standing, and has enjoyed a large and
lucrative law practice. He is married and owns a fine home and
the most extensive private library in the State. On the day of his
disappearance, he drew quite a large sum of money from his bank.
No one can be found who saw him after he left the bank. Mr. Bellford
was a man of singularly quiet and domestic tastes, and seemed to find
his happiness in his home and profession. If any clue at all exists
to his strange disappearance, it my be found in the fact that
for some months he has been deeply absorbed in an important law case
in connection with the Q. Y. and Z. Railroad Company. It is feared
that overwork may have affected his mind. Every effort is being made
to discover the whereabouts of the missing man."
"It seems to me you are not altogether uncynical, Mr. Bolder,"
I said, after I had read the despatch. "This has the sound, to me,
of a genuine case. Why should this man, prosperous, happily
married, and respected, choose suddenly to abandon everything?
I know that these lapses of memory do occur, and that men do find
themselves adrift without a name, a history or a home."
"Oh, gammon and jalap!" said Mr. Bolder. "It's larks they're after.
There's too much education nowadays. Men know about aphasia,
and they use it for an excuse. The women are wise, too. When it's
all over they look you in the eye, as scientific as you please, and
say: 'He hypnotized me.'"
Thus Mr. Bolder diverted, but did not aid, me with his comments
and philosophy.
We arrived in New York about ten at night. I rode in a cab to a
hotel, and I wrote my name "Edward Pinkhammer" in the register.
As I did so I felt pervade me a splendid, wild, intoxicating
buoyancy--a sense of unlimited freedom, of newly attained
possibilities. I was just born into the world. The old fetters--
whatever they had been--were stricken from my hands and feet.
The future lay before me a clear road such as an infant enters,
and I could set out upon it equipped with a man's learning
and experience.
I thought the hotel clerk looked at me five seconds too long. I had
no baggage.
"The Druggists' Convention," I said. "My trunk has somehow
failed to arrive." I drew out a roll of money.
"Ah!" said he, showing an auriferous tooth, "we have quite a number
of the Western delegates stopping here." He struck a bell
for the boy.
I endeavored to give color to my r^ole.
"There is an important movement on foot among us Westerners," I
said, "in regard to a recommendation to the convention that the
bottles containing the tartrate of antimoney and potash, and the
tartrate of sodium and potash be kept in a contiguous position on
the shelf."
"Gentleman to three-fourteen," said the clerk, hastily. I was
whisked away to my room.
The next day I bought a trunk and clothing, and began to live
the life of Edward Pinkhammer. I did not tax my brain with
endeavors to solve problems of the past.
It was a piquant and sparkling cup that the great island city held
up to my lips. I drank of it gratefully. The keys of Manhattan
belong to him who is able to bear them. You must be either the
city's guest or its victim.
The following few days were as gold and silver. Edward
Pinkhammer, yet counting back to his birth by hours only, knew
the rare joy of having come upon so diverting a world full-fledged
and unrestrained. I sat entranced on the magic carpets provided in
theatres and roof-gardens, that transported one into strange and
delightful lands full of frolicsome music, pretty girls and grotesque
drolly extravagant parodies upon human kind. I went here and
there at my own dear will, bound by no limits of space, time or
comportment. I dined in weird cabarets, at weirder _tables
d'h^ote_ to the sound of Hungarian music and the wild shouts of
mercurial artists and sculptors. Or, again, where the night life
quivers in the electric glare like a kinetoscopic picture, and the
millinery of the world, and its jewels, and the ones whom they
adorn, and the men who make all three possible are met for good
cheer and the spectacular effect. And among all these scenes that I
have mentioned I learned one thing that I never knew before. And
that is that the key to liberty is not in the hands of License, but
Convention holds it. Comity has a toll-gate at which you must
pay, or you may not enter the land of Freedom. In all the glitter,
the seeming disorder, the parade, the abandon, I saw this law,
unobtrusive, yet like iron, prevail. Therefore, in Manhattan you
must obey these unwritten laws, and then you will be freest of the
free. If you decline to be bound by them, you put on shackles.
Sometimes, as my mood urged me, I would seek the stately, softly
murmuring palm rooms, redolent with high-born life and delicate
restraint, in which to dine. Again I would go down to the
waterways in steamers packed with vociferous, bedecked,
unchecked love-making clerks and shop-girls to their crude
pleasures on the island shores. And there was always Broadway--
glistening, opulent, wily, varying, desirable Broadway--growing
upon one like an opium habit.
One afternoon as I entered my hotel a stout man with a big nose
and a black mustache blocked my way in the corridor. When I
would have passed around him, he greet me with offensive
familiarity.
"Hello, Bellford!" he cried, loudly. "What the deuce are you doing
in New York? Didn't know anything could drag you away from
that old book den of yours. Is Mrs. B. along or is this a little
business run alone, eh?"
"You have made a mistake, sir," I said, coldly, releasing my hand
from his grasp. "My name is Pinkhammer. You will excuse me."
The man dropped to one side, apparently astonished. As I walked
to the clerk's desk I heard him call to a bell boy and say something
about telegraph blanks.
"You will give me my bill," I said to the clerk, "and have my
baggage brought down in half an hour. I do not care to remain
where I am annoyed by confidence men."
I moved that afternoon to another hotel, a sedate, old-fashioned
one on lower Fifth Avenue.
There was a restaurant a little way off Broadway where one could
be served almost _al fresco_ in a tropic array of screening flora.
Quiet and luxury and a perfect service made it an ideal place in
which to take luncheon or refreshment. One afternoon I was there
picking my way to a table among the ferns when I felt my sleeve
caught.
"Mr. Bellford!" exclaimed an amazingly sweet voice.
I turned quickly to see a lady seated alone--a lady of about thirty,
with exceedingly handsome eyes, who looked at me as though I
had been her very dear friend.
"You were about to pass me," she said, accusingly. "Don't tell me
you do not know me. Why should we not shake hands--at least
once in fifteen years?"
I shook hands with her at once. I took a chair opposite her at the
table. I summoned with my eyebrows a hovering waiter. The lady
was philandering with an orange ice. I ordered a _cr`eme de
menthe_. Her hair was reddish bronze. You could not look at it,
because you could not look away from her eyes. But you were
conscious of it as you are conscious of sunset while you look into
the profundities of a wood at twilight.
"Are you sure you know me?" I asked.
"No," she said, smiling. "I was never sure of that."
"What would you think," I said, a little anxiously, "if I were
to tell you that my name is Edward Pinkhammer, from Cornopolis,
Kansas?"
"What would I think?" she repeated, with a merry glance. "Why,
that you had not brought Mrs. Bellford to New York with you, of
course. I do wish you had. I would have liked to see Marian."
Her voice lowered slightly--"You haven't changed much, Elwyn."
I felt her wonderful eyes searching mine and my face more closely.
"Yes, you have," she amended, and there was a soft, exultant note
in her latest tones; "I see it now. You haven't forgotten. You
haven't forgotten for a year or a day or an hour. I told you you
never could."
I poked my straw anxiously in the _cr`eme de menthe_.
"I'm sure I beg your pardon," I said, a little uneasy at her gaze.
"But that is just the trouble. I have forgotten. I've forgotten
everything."
She flouted my denial. She laughed deliciously at something she
seemed to see in my face.
"I've heard of you at times," she went on. "You're quite a big
lawyer out West--Denver, isn't it, or Los Angeles? Marian must be
very proud of you. You knew, I suppose, that I married six months
after you did. You may have seen it in the papers. The flowers
alone cost two thousand dollars."
She had mentioned fifteen years. Fifteen years is a long time.
"Would it be too late," I asked, somewhat timorously, "to offer you
congratulations?"
"Not if you dare do it," she answered, with such fine intrepidity
that I was silent, and began to crease patterns on the cloth with
my thumb nail.
"Tell me one thing," she said, leaning toward me rather eagerly--
"a thing I have wanted to know for many years--just from a woman's
curiosity, of course--have you ever dared since that night to touch,
smell or look at white roses--at white roses wet with rain and
dew?"
I took a sip of _cr`eme de menthe_.
"It would be useless, I suppose," I said, with a sigh, "for me to
repeat that I have no recollection at all about these things. My
memory is completely at fault. I need not say how much I regret
it."
The lady rested her arms upon the table, and again her eyes
disdained my words and went traveling by their own route direct
to my soul. She laughed softly, with a strange quality in the
sound--it was a laugh of happiness--yes, and of content--and of
misery. I tried to look away from her.
"You lie, Elwyn Bellford," she breathed, blissfully. "Oh, I know
you lie!"
I gazed dully into the ferns.
"My name is Edward Pinkhammer," I said. "I came with the
delegates to the Druggists' National Convention. There is a
movement on foot for arranging a new position for the bottles of
tartrate of antimony and tartrate of potash, in which, very likely,
you would take little interest."
A shining landau stopped before the entrance. The lady rose. I
took her hand, and bowed.
"I am deeply sorry," I said to her, "that I cannot remember. I could
explain, but fear you would not understand. You will not concede
Pinkhammer; and I really cannot at all conceive of the--the roses
and other things."
"Good-by, Mr. Bellford," she said, with her happy, sorrowful
smile, as she stepped into her carriage.
I attended the theatre that night. When I returned to my hotel,
a quiet man in dark clothes, who seemed interested in rubbing his
finger nails with a silk handkerchief, appeared, magically, at my
side.
"Mr. Pinkhammer," he said, giving the bulk of his attention to his
forefinger, "may I request you to step aside with me for a little
conversation? There is a room here."
"Certainly," I answered.
He conducted me into a small, private parlor. A lady and a
gentleman were there. The lady, I surmised, would have been
unusually good-looking had her features not been clouded by an
expression of keen worry and fatigue. She was of a style of figure
and possessed coloring and features that were agreeable to my
fancy. She was in a traveling dress; she fixed upon me an earnest
look of extreme anxiety, and pressed an unsteady hand to her
bosom. I think she would have started forward, but the gentleman
arrested her movement with an authoritative motion of his hand.
He then came, himself, to meet me. He was a man of forty, a little
gray about the temples, and with a strong, thoughtful face.
"Bellford, old man," he said, cordially, "I'm glad to see you again.
Of course we know everything is all right. I warned you, you
know, that you were overdoing it. Now, you'll go back with us,
and be yourself again in no time."
I smiled ironically.
"I havae been 'Bellforded' so often," I said, "that it has lost its
edge. Still, in the end, it may grow wearisome. Would you be
willing at all to entertain the hypothesis that my name is Edward
Pinkhammer, and that I never saw you before in my life?"
Before the man could reply a wailing cry came from the woman.
She sprang past his detaining arm. "Elwyn!" she sobbed, and cast
herself upon me, and clung tight. "Elwyn," she cried again, "don't
break my heart. I am your wife--call my name once--just once. I
could see you dead rather than this way."
I unwound her arms respectfully, but firmly.
"Madam," I said, severely, "pardon me if I suggest that you accept
a resemblance too precipitately. It is a pity," I went on, with an
amused laugh, as the thought occurred to me, "that this Bellford
and I could not be kept side by side upon the same shelf like
tartrates of sodium and antimony for purposes of identification.
In order to understand the allusion," I concluded airily, "it may
be necessary for you to keep an eye on the proceedings of the
Druggists' National Convention."
The lady turned to her companion, and grasped his arm.
"What is it, Doctor Volney? Oh, what is it?" she moaned.
"Go to your room for a while," I heard him say. "I will remain and
talk with him. His mind? No, I think not--only a portion of the
brain. Yes, I am sure he will recover. Go to your room and leave
me with him."
The lady disappeared. The man in dark clothes also went outside,
still manicuring himself in a thoughtful way. I think he waited
in the hall.
"I would like to talk with you a while, Mr. Pinkhammer, if I may,"
said the gentleman who remained.
"Very well, if you care to," I replied, "and will excuse me if I take
it comfortably; I am rather tired." I stretched myself upon a couch
by a window and lit a cigar. He drew a chair nearby.
"Let us speak to the point," he said, soothingly. "Your name is not
Pinkhammer."
"I know that as well as you do," I said, coolly. "But a man
must have a name of some sort. I can assure you that I do not
extravagantly admire the name of Pinkhammer. But when one
christens one's self suddenly, the fine names do not seem to
suggest themselves. But, suppose it had been Scheringhausen
or Scroggins! I think I did very well with Pinkhammer."
"Your name," said the other man, seriously, "is Elwyn C. Bellford.
You are one of the first lawyers in Denver. You are suffering from
an attack of aphasia, which has caused you to forget your identity.
The cause of it was over-application to your profession, and,
perhaps, a life too bare of natural recreation and pleasures. The
lady who has just left the room is your wife."
"She is what I would call a fine-looking woman," I said, after a
judicial pause. "I particularly admire the shade of brown in her
hair."
"She is a wife to be proud of. Since your disappearance, nearly
two weeks ago, she has scarcely closed her eyes. We learned that
you were in New York through a telegram sent by Isidore Newman,
a traveling man from Denver. He said that he had met you in a
hotel here, and that you did not recognize him."
"I think I remember the occasion," I said. "The fellow called me
'Bellford,' if I am not mistaken. But don't you think it about time,
now, for you to introduce yourself?"
"I am Robert Volney--Doctor Volney. I have been your close friend
for twenty years, and your physician for fifteen. I came with
Mrs. Bellford to trace you as soon as we got the telegram. Try,
Elwyn, old man--try to remember!"
"What's the use to try?" I asked, with a little frown. "You say you
are a physician. Is aphasia curable? When a man loses his memory
does it return slowly, or suddenly?"
"Sometimes gradually and imperfectly; sometimes as suddenly as
it went."
"Will you undertake the treatment of my case, Doctor Volney?" I
asked.
"Old friend," said he, "I'll do everything in my power, and wil have
done everything that science can do to cure you."
"Very well," said I. "Then you will consider that I am your patient.
Everything is in confidence now--professional confidence."
"Of course," said Doctor Volney.
I got up from the couch. Some one had set a vase of white roses
on the centre table--a cluster of white roses, freshly sprinkled and
fragrant. I threw them far out of the window, and then laid myself
upon the couch again.
"It will be best, Bobby," I said, "to have this cure happen suddenly.
I'm rather tired of it all, anyway. You may go now and bring Marian
in. But, oh, Doc," I said, with a sigh, as I kicked him on the shin
--"good old Doc--it was glorious!"
-THE END-
[William Sidney Porter]O Henry's short story: A Ramble In Aphasia
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