Abracadabra

by John Galsworthy

Our families occupied neighbouring houses in the country, and Minna used to hide in the bathroom whenever our governess took us round. She was to us but a symbol of shyness for months before she became a body—a very thin body, with dark, straggly hair, and dark eyes, and very long legs and arms for an eight-year-old. Looking back on her hardihoods from eight to fifteen, I find difficulty in assigning to the bathroom period its full significance, to realise that she actually used to make herself invisible because she could not face strange people even of her own age. She faced us so beautifully afterward, would steal up behind and pull our hairs, and bag our caps and throw them up on to the tops of wardrobes, and then, as likely as not, climb up, throw them down, and follow with a jump. Few were the tops of our trees that did not know her in her blue jersey and red cap, and stockings green at the knees and showing little white portions of her. She had a neck long as a turkey’s and feet narrow as canoes. She was certainly going to be tall. Though quite normal about sticking pins into a body, making the lives of calves and dogs burdensome, giving fizzy magnesia to cats, fetching stray souls down with a booby-trap, and other salutary pastimes, she would dissolve into tears and rush away if anybody played Chopin, or caught and killed a butterfly; and, if one merely shot a little bird[2] with a catapult, would dash up and thump him. When she fought she was like a tiger-cat, but afterward would sit and shake uncontrollably with most dreadful dry sobs. So there was no relying on her.

She could not have been called pretty in those days.

She became fifteen and went to school. We saw little of her for three years. At eighteen she came home, and out. Then we would meet her at dances, and picnics, skating and playing tennis—always languid, pale, dark-eyed; still not quite regular in her features, and with angles not perfectly covered; but, on the whole, like a tall lily with a dark centre. She was very earnest, too, and beginning to be æsthetic, given to standing against walls, with her dark-brown eyes immovably fixed on persons playing violins; given to Russian linen and embroidering book covers; to poetry and the sermons of preachers just unorthodox enough; dreamy, too, but puffing and starting at things that came too near. She was very attractive.

Going to college, one saw little more of Minna till she was twenty-two. She was working then at a “Settlement,” and looked unhappy and anæmic. Two months later we were told she had broken down. The work was too painful; her nerves had gone all wrong. She was taken abroad.

We did not see her again till she was twenty-six. She was then marrying a Quaker, a handsome, big fellow with reddish hair, ten years older than herself. More like a swaying lily than ever she looked in her long white veil. A tall, striking couple! The Quaker had warm eyes, and by the way he looked at her, one wondered.

Another four years had passed before I, at all events,[3] saw much of Minna again. She was now thirty, and had three children, two girls and a boy, and was evidently soon to have another. There was a pathetic look in her eyes. They said that the Quaker should have been a Turk, for his physique was powerful and his principles extremely strict. His wife had grown to have a shrinking, fagged-out air, and worried terribly over her infants. She was visibly unhappy; had gone off, too, in looks; grown sallow and thin-cheeked, and seemed not to care to hold herself up.

I recollect the Quaker coming in one day, full of health and happiness, and putting his affectionate hand on her shoulder. To me—not to the Quaker, from whom many things were hidden—it was apparent that she flinched, and when his back was turned I saw in a mirror that she was actually trembling all over, and on her face an expression as if she saw before her suffering from which she could not possibly escape. It was clear that the quivering, lilylike creature had been brought almost to her last gasp by the physique and principles of that healthy, happy Quaker. It was quite painful to see one for whom life seemed so terribly too much.

She was, I think, about thirty-two when one noticed how much better she was looking. She had begun to fill out and hold herself up; her eyes had light in them again. Though she was more attractive than ever, and the Quaker had abated no jot of either principle or physique, she had given up quivering and starting, and had a way of looking tranquilly through or over him, as if he were not there, though her amiability was obviously perfect, and from all accounts she fulfilled every duty better than ever. She no longer worried over her children, of whom there were now five. It[4] was mysterious. I can only describe the impression she made by saying that she seemed in a sort of trance, seeing and listening to something far away. There was a curious intentness in her eyes, and her voice had acquired a slight but not unpleasing drawl, as though what she was talking of had little reality. Every afternoon from three to four she was invisible.

Having in those days a certain interest in psychology, one used to concern oneself to account for the extraordinary change in her that was becoming more marked every year. By the time she was thirty-five it really seemed impossible that she could ever have been a sensitive, high-strung creature, hiding in the bathroom, thumping us for killing butterflies, sobbing afterward so uncontrollably; suffering such tortures from the “Settlement,” and the Quaker, and her children, whose ailments and troubles she now supported with an equanimity which any one, seeing her for the first time, would surely have mistaken for callousness. And all the time she was putting on flesh without, however, losing her figure. Indeed, in those days she approached corporeal perfection.

And at last one afternoon I learned the reason.

She no longer believed she had a body!

She told me so, almost with tears of earnestness. And when I pointed out to her humbly that she had never had more, she insisted that I saw nothing really sitting there except the serene and healthy condition of her spirit. Long she talked to me that afternoon, explaining again and again, in her slightly drawling voice, that she could never have gone on but for this faith; and how comforting and uplifting it was, so that no one who lacked it could be really happy! Every afternoon—she told[5] me—from three to four she “held” that idea of “no body.”

This was all so startling to me that I went away and thought it over. Next day I came back and said that I did not see how it could be much good to her to have no body, so long as other people still had theirs; since it was their bodies, not hers, which had caused her pain and grief.

“But, of course,” she said, “they haven’t.”

I had just met the Quaker coming in from golf, and could only murmur:

“Is that really so?”

“I couldn’t bear, now,” she said, “to think they had.”

“Then, do you really mean, Minna, that when they are there they are not there?”

“Yes!” And her eyes shone.

I thought of her eldest boy, who happened to be ill with mumps.

“What, then, is Willy’s mumps,” I said, “if not an affection of the fleshy tissue of his cheeks and neck? Why should he cry with pain, and why should he look so horrid?”

She frowned, as if reflecting hard.

“When you came in,” she said, “I’d just been holding the thought that he has no body, and I don’t—I really don’t feel any longer that he has mumps. So I don’t worry. And that’s splendid both for him and me.”

I saw that it was splendid for her; but how was it splendid for him? I did not ask, however, because she looked so earnest and uplifted, and I was afraid of seeming unkind.

The next day I came back again, and said:

[6]“I’ve been thinking over your faith, Minna. Candidly, I’ve never seen any one improve so amazingly in health and looks since you’ve had it. But what I’ve been wondering is, whether it’s in the nature of fresh air, hard work, and plain living, or in the nature of a drug or anodyne. Whether it’s prevention, or cure. In fact, whether you could hold it, or ever have held it, unless you had been sick before you held it?”

She evidently did not grasp my meaning. I could, of course, have made it plain enough by saying: “Suppose you had not been a self-conscious, self-absorbed, high-strung, anæmic girl, like so many nowadays, quivering at life and Quakers with strong physique and principles; suppose you had been an Italian peasant woman or an English cottage lass, obliged to work and think of others all her time; suppose, in a word, you had not had the chance to be so desperately sensitive and conscious of your body—do you think you would ever have felt the necessity for becoming unconscious of it?” But she looked so serene and puzzled, so corporeally charming on her sofa, that I hadn’t the heart to put it thus brutally; and I merely said:

“Do tell me how the idea first came to you?”

“It was put there. It could never have come of its own accord.”

“No doubt; but what exactly?”

She grew rather pink.

“It was one evening when Willy—he was only four then—had been very naughty, and Tom” (this was the Quaker) “insisted on my whipping him. I was obliged to, you see, for fear he would do it himself. Poor Willy cried so that I was simply in despair. It hurt me awfully; I remember thinking: ‘Ah! but it’s not really me;[7] not me—not my arm.’ It seemed to me that there was a dreadful unreality about myself; that I was not really doing it, and so I surely could not be hurting him. It was such a comfort—and I wanted comfort.”

I felt the sacredness and the pathos of that; I felt, too, that her despair, before that comfort came, had been her farewell to truth; but I would not for the world have said that, nor asked what Willy’s tears had really been, if not real tears.

“Yes,” I murmured; “and after that?”

“After that—I tried every day, and gradually the whole beauty of it came to me—because, you know, there are so many things to fret one, and it’s so splendid to feel uplifted above it all.”

They tell me the morphia habit is wonderful! But I only said:

“And so you really never suffer now?”

“Oh!” she answered, “I often have the beginnings; but I just hold that thought and—it goes. I do wish—I do wish you would try!”

“Yes, yes,” I murmured; “yes, yes!” She looked so pathetically earnest and as if she would be so disappointed. “But just one thing: Don’t you ever feel that the knowledge that people have no bodies and don’t really suffer——” and there I stopped. I had meant to add—“blunts sympathy and dries up the springs of fellow-feeling from which all kindly action comes?” But I hadn’t the heart.

“Oh! do put any questions to me!” she said. “You can’t shake my faith! It’s religion with me, you know.”

“You certainly seem fitter and stronger every day. I quite understand that you’re being saved by it. And that’s the essence of religion, isn’t it?”

[8]She drew herself up and smiled. “Tom says I’m getting fat!”

I looked at her. I must say that, for one who had no body, she was superb.

After that I again left London and did not see her for two years.

A few days after my return I asked after her at my sister’s.

“Oh! haven’t you heard? The most dreadful tragedy happened there six weeks ago. Kitty and Willy” (they were the two eldest children) “were run over by a motor; poor little Kitty was killed on the spot, and Willy will be lame for life, they say.”

Thinking of Kitty blotted out like that—a little thing all shyness, sensibility, and pranks, just as Minna had been at her age—I could scarcely ask: “How does poor Minna take it?”

My sister wrinkled her brows.

“I was there,” she said, “when they brought the children in. It was awful to see Tom—he broke down utterly. He’s been quite changed ever since.”

“But Minna?”

“Minna—yes. I shall never forget the expression of her face that first minute. It reminded me of—I don’t know what—like nerves moving under the skin. Dreadful! And then, ten minutes later, it was quite calm; you’d have thought nothing had happened. She’s very wonderful. I’ve watched her since, and I don’t—I really don’t believe she feels it!”

“How is she looking?”

“Oh! just the same—very well and handsome. Rather too fat.”

It was with very curious feelings that I went next day[9] to see Minna. Truly she looked magnificent in her black clothes. Her curves had become ampler, her complexion deeper, perhaps a little coarse, and her drawl was more pronounced. Her husband came in while I was there. The poor man was indeed a changed Quaker. He seemed to have shrivelled. When she put her hand on his shoulder, I noticed with surprise that he jibbed away and seemed to avoid the gaze of her rather short-sighted, beautiful brown eyes that had grown appreciably warmer. It was strange indeed—his body had become so meagre and hers had so splendidly increased! We made no mention of the tragedy while he was there, but when he had left us I hazarded the question:

“How is poor little Willy?”

Her eyes shone, and she said, with a sort of beautiful earnestness:

“You mustn’t call him that. He’s not a bit unhappy. We hold the thought together. It’s coming wonderfully!”

In a sudden outburst of sympathy I said:

“I’m so sorry. It must be terrible for you all.”

Her brow contracted just a little.

“Yes! I can’t get Tom—if only he would see that it’s nothing, really—that there’s no such thing as the body. He’s simply wearing himself away; he’s grown quite thin; he’s——” She stopped. And there rose up in me a kind of venom, as if I felt that she was about to say ‘—no longer fit to be my mate.’ And, trying to keep that feeling out of my eyes, I looked at the magnificent creature. How marvellously she had flourished under the spell of her creed! How beautifully preserved and encased against the feelings of this life she had become! How grandly she had cured her sensitive[10] and neurasthenic girlhood! How nobly, against the disease of self-consciousness and self-absorption, she had put on the armour of a subtler and deeper self-absorption!

And suddenly I pitied or I envied her—Ah! which? For, to achieve immunity from her own suffering, I perceived that for the suffering of others she had become incapable of caring two brass buttons.