A Ramble in Aphasia

                                                          

                                                                A Ramble in Aphasia

My wife and I parted ways that morning in our usual manner. She left her second cup of tea to follow me to the front door. There, she plucked an invisible strand of lint from my lapel (the universal act of a woman proclaiming ownership) and reminded me to take care of my cold, which I didn't have. Next came her parting kiss—the familiar kiss of domesticity flavored with Young Hyson. There was no fear of spontaneity or variety in her routine; she stuck to her familiar customs. With the practiced touch of habit, she straightened my well-set scarf pin. 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, on a famous railroad law case that I had triumphantly won just a few days prior. In fact, I had been immersed in legal work for many years. A good doctor, Volney, my friend and physician, had warned me once or twice.

"If you don't ease up, Bellford," he said, "you'll suddenly fall apart. Either your nerves or your brain will give way. Tell me, does a week go by without you reading the case papers? Think of aphasia—of a man lost, wandering nameless, with his past and identity erased—all from a little brain clot caused by overwork or worry."

"I always thought," I replied, "that the clot in those cases could be found on the brains of the newspaper reporters."

Dr. Volney shook his head. "The disease exists," he said, "You need a change or a rest. Courtroom, office, and home—there is only one route you can take. For recreation, you should read law books. Better take the 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 Dr. Volney's words. I was feeling as well as I usually do, possibly in better spirits than usual. I awoke 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 piece of paper, or a monogram could I find.

But I found in my coat pocket nearly $3,000 in bills of large denomination. "I must be someone, 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 to have 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. A 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 I must 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 companion supplied one idea; a glance at his newspaper, where my eye met a conspicuous advertisement, assisted me further.

"My name," I said 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, filled with wonder.

"They are. This car came through from the west. And they're your old-time druggists, too—none of your patent tablet-and-granule pharma shootists 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 sideline of confectionery and shoes. I tell you, Ham pinker, I've got an idea to spring on this convention—new ideas are 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 them? Why, as far apart as possible, on different shelves? That's wrong. I say keep them side by side so that 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 who think they're the only lozenges on 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 magnesium carbonate or the pulverized glycyrrhiza 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," he said. "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—he doesn'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. Bellford, a prominent lawyer, has been 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 may be found in the fact that for some months he had been deeply absorbed in an important legal 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 dispatch. "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 as 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 permeate 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 on a clear road, such as an infant's, and I could set out upon it equipped with a man's learning and experience.

I thought the hotel clerk looked at me for 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 role.

"There is an important movement afoot among us Westerners," I said, "in regard to a recommendation to the convention that the bottles containing the tartrate of antimony 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 from the past.

It was a piquant and sparkling cup that the great island city held up to my lips. I drank it gratefully. The keys to 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 gold and silver. Edward Pinkhammer, yet counting back to his birth by hours only, knew the rare joy of having come upon such a diverting world, full-fledged and unrestrained. I sat entranced by the magic carpets provided in theaters and roof gardens that

transported one into strange and delightful lands full of frolicsome music, pretty girls, and grotesque, drolly extravagant parodies upon humankind. I went here and there at my own volition, bound by no limits of space.

Time or comportment. I dined in weird cabarets and at weirder tables d'hôte to the sound of Hungarian music and the wild shouts of mercurial artists and sculptors. Or, again, where the nightlife 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 a license, but the convention holds it. The community 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, and 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 the 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 shopgirls and 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 would have greeted me with offensive familiarity.

"Hallo, Bell ford!" he cried loudly. "What the deuce are you doing in New York? I didn't know anything could drag you away from that old book 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 Pink hammer. 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 bellboy 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 confident 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 alfresco in a tropical array of screening flora. Quiet, luxury, and perfect service made it an ideal place in

which to take lunch or refreshment. One afternoon, as I was there, picking my way to a table among the ferns, I felt my sleeve catch.

Here's a refined version addressing grammar and language issues:

"Mr. Bellford!" exclaimed an exquisitely sweet voice. I turned quickly to behold a lady seated alone - a woman of approximately thirty, with remarkably handsome eyes that gazed upon me as if I were her long-lost confidant.

"You were about to pass me," she accused. "Don't tell me you didn't recognize me. Why should we not exchange handshakes - at least once in fifteen years?"

Without hesitation, I extended my hand to hers. Taking a seat opposite her at the table, I subtly signaled a passing waiter with a raise of my eyebrows. The lady was indulging in an orange ice, while I opted for a crème de menthe. Her hair, with its reddish-bronze hue, commanded attention, yet it was her captivating eyes that held one's gaze. You couldn't look at her hair without being drawn back to the depths of her eyes, much like the allure of a sunset amidst the twilight shades of a forest.

"Are you certain you know me?" I ventured.

"No," she replied, her smile unwavering. "I was never entirely certain of that."

"How would you react," I inquired with a hint of apprehension, "if I were to inform you that my name is Edward Pinkhammer, hailing from Cornopolis, Kansas?"

"What would I think?" she repeated, with a merry glance. "Why, that you hadn't 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 into the crème 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, laughing 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 fell silent, beginning to crease patterns on the cloth with my thumbnail.

"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 crème 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, her eyes disdaining my words and traveling their own route directly to my soul. She laughed softly, with a strange quality in the sound—it was a laugh of happiness, yes, and of contentment, 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 afoot 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 I fear you would not understand. You will not concede Pinkhammer, and I really cannot at all conceive of the roses and other things."

"Goodbye, Mr. Bellford," she said, with her happy, sorrowful smile, as she stepped into her carriage.

I attended the theater that night. When I returned to my hotel, a quiet man in dark clothes who seemed interested in rubbing his fingernails with a silk handkerchief appeared, magically, at my

side. "Mr. Pinkhammer," he said casually, giving the bulk of his attention to his forefinger, "may I request that you 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 certain style and possessed coloring and features that were pleasing to my taste. 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 have 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, casting herself upon me, clinging 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.

He led her to the door.

"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 for 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 on 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 Pinkhammer. But when one christens oneself, 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's 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 in trying?" 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," he said, "I'll do everything in my power, and I will have done everything that science can do to cure you."

"Very well," I said. "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. Someone had set a vase of white roses on the center table—a cluster of white roses freshly sprinkled and fragrant. I threw them far out of the window, and then I laid myself on 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!"