Well, I won’t.”
Startled, she asked, “What speech?”
“The ‘one about my duty to humanity. It comes in two phases and many textures. Phase one has to do with my duty to humanity and really means we could make a classic buck with it. Phase two deals solely with my duty to humanity and I don’t hear that one very often. Phase two utterly overlooks the reluctance humanity has to accept good things unless they arrive from accepted and respectable sources. Phase one is fully aware of this but gets rat shrewd in figuring ways around it.”
She said, “I don’t” but could get no farther.
“The textures,” he overrode her, “are accompanied by the light of revelation, with or without religion and/or mysticism. Or they are cast sternly in the ethical-philoso-phy mold and aim to force me to surrender through guilt mixed—to some degree all the way up to total—with compassion.”
“But I only”
“You,” he said, aiming a long index finger at her, “have robbed yourself of the choicest example of everything I have just said. If my assumptions had been right and you had gone to your friendly local sawbones—and he had diagnosed cancer and referred you to a specialist and he had done likewise and sent you to a colleague for consultation and, in random panic, you had fallen into my hands and been cured—and had gone back to your various doctors to report a miracle, do you know what you’d have gotten from them? ‘Spontaneous remission,’ that’s what you’d have gotten. And it wouldn’t be only doctors,” he went on with a sudden renewal of passion, under which she quailed in her bed. “Everybody has his own commercial. Your nutritionist would have nodded over his wheat germ or his macrobiotic rice cakes, your priest would have dropped to his knees and looked at the sky, your geneticist would have a pet theory about generation-skipping and would assure you that your grandparents probably had spontaneous remissions, too, and never knew it.”
“Please!” she cried but he shouted at her..
“Do you know what I am? I am an engineer twice over, mechanical and electrical—and I have a law degree.
If you were foolish enough to tell anyone about what has happened here (which I hope you aren’t—but if you are I know how to protect myself) I could be jailed for prac-ticing medicine without a license. You could have me up for assault because I stuck a needle into you and even for kidnapping if you could prove I carried you in here from the lab. Nobody would give a damn that I had cured your cancer. You don’t know who I am, do you?”
“No. I don’t even know your name.”
“And I won’t tell you. I don’t know your name either”
“Oh! It’s”
“Don’t tell me! Don’t tell me! I don’t want to hear it. I wanted to be involved with your lump and I was.
I want it and you to be gone as soon as you’re both up to it. Have I made myself absolutely clear?”
“Just let me get dressed,” she said tightly, “and I’ll leave right now.”
“Without making a speech?”
“Without making a speech.” And in a flash her anger turned to misery and she added: “I was going to say I was grateful. Would that have been all right, sir!”
And his anger underwent a change too, for he came close to the bed and sat down on his heel, bringing their faces to a level, and said quite gently, “That would be fine. Although you won’t really be grateful for another ten days, when you get your ‘spontaneous remission’ reports—or maybe for six months or a year or two or five, when examinations keep on testing out negative.”
She detected such a wealth of sadness behind this that she found herself reaching for the hand with which he steadied himself against the edge of the bed. He did not recoil but he didn’t seem to welcome her touch either.
“Why can’t I be grateful right now?”
“That would be an act of faith,” he said bitterly, “and that just doesn’t happen any more—if it ever did.” He rose and went toward the door. “Please don’t go tonight,” he said. “It’s dark and you don’t know the way. I’ll see you in the morning.”
When he came back in the morning the door was open.
The bed was made and the sheets were folded neatly on the chair, together with the pillow slips and the towels she had used. She wasn’t there.
He came out into the entrance court and contemplated his bonsai.
Early sun gold-frosted the horizontal upper foliage of the old tree and brought its gnarled limbs into sharp re- lief, tough brown-gray creviced in velvet. Only the companion of a bonsai (there are owners of bonsai but they are a lesser breed) fully understands the relationship.
There is an exclusive and individual treeness to the tree because it is a living thing and living things change— and there are definite ways in which the tree desires to change.
A man sees the tree and in his mind makes certain extensions and extrapolations of what he sees and sets about making them happen. The tree in turn will do only what a tree can do, will resist to the death any attempt to do what it cannot do or to do in less time than it needs.
The shaping of a bonsai is therefore always a com-promise and always a cooperation. A man cannot create bonsai, nor can a tree. It takes both and they must understand one another. It takes a long time to do that. One memorizes one’s bonsai, every twig, the angle of every crevice and needle and, lying awake at night or in a pause a thousand miles away, one recalls this or that line or mass, one makes one’s plans. With wire and water and light, with tilting and with the planting of water-robbing weeds or heavy, root-shading ground cover, one explains to the tree what one wants. And if the explanation is well enough made and there is great enough understanding the tree will respond and obey—almost.
Always there will be its own self-respecting highly individual variation. Very well, I shall do what you want, but I will do it -my way. And for these variations the tree is always willing to present a clear and logical explanation
