“You say he saw something—a horse, I understand.”
“A cross on a dead man’s breast.”
“Ah, you say he is dead. Well—”
“No. He has seen a cross that I have given to a dead man.”
“Ah, he has seen a dead man. I see by my notes that this interest in funerals is characteristic of the patient. I understand everything now. This glimpse of a dead man is most illuminating, missis.” Even while he was speaking he decided to write an account of Old Sergei’s case to the magazine of the medical school at which he had studied. He saw Anna through a sort of veil of anticipated printed words of flattery. … “Doctor K. Morimoto of the Chi-tao-kou hospital, Kanto. … Interesting observations by Japanese psychologist. … Notes of an illuminating case. … Doctor K. Morimoto’s new light on hysterical amblyopia. … Doctor K. Morimoto, the rising young psycho-pathologist. …” The doctor felt obliged to speak loudly to Anna through this happy fog of hopes and compliments which dazzled his goldrimmed glasses, she seemed to him so pleasantly dimmed. Yet he bowed automatically in her direction, feeling vaguely grateful to her for having an illuminating husband. “This matter bears out my first diagnosis, thus proving it to be perfectly correct. Your husband could, I am convinced, be cured of his pseudo blindness by psychoanalysis, if Chi-tao-kou could produce an analyst who shared some common language with the patient. Nothing, however, could be less helpful than the analysis in Japanese of a Russian patient who had no acquaintance with the Japanese language by an analyst who was unable to speak Russian. Your husband, when attacked by business and other misfortunes, and finding his position as independent merchant and paterfamilias threatened by the police and other dangers, takes refuge, unconsciously, in a reversion to the helplessness of the child, a claim for protection in this case established by blindness. Hysteria, you must remember, missis, is an affliction like any other affliction; it must not excite our contempt or irritation; it must be treated as a real affliction. Your husband is certainly not consciously deceiving us all; his Unconscious is simply tired of the responsibility of being the head of a family in such difficult circumstances, and, by wrapping itself in such a disability as blindness, claims the protection, so to speak, of his family—a protection that cannot be withheld from a blind man. I see, by referring to my notes, that your husband has long had an interest—amounting almost to an obsession—about the duty of honoring the dead of his own race. So, being brought into the presence—I think you said—of a dead Russian today, his Unconscious allowed itself—if I may so speak—a little holiday from its protective business of blindness, and gave him a glimpse—which he did not at once realize was a glimpse—of what so profoundly interested him. This craving to see the dead man being satisfied, the protective armor of pseudo blindness is resumed.”
“The old liar,” blurted Anna.
The doctor’s Unconscious wrapped itself in a protective armor of impenetrable Japaneseness. “Yes indeed, missis. You must simply consider your husband for the present as a genuinely blind man, though his physical sight is unimpaired. His Unconscious is determined not to see until it is safe for it to do so, as it were. It will not allow him to be thrust back into the ranks of well and hearty men who take charge of their own affairs.”
“The old coward,” snorted Anna.
“Indeed yes, a most interesting case,” mused the doctor. “It only needs to be rounded off by a cure.”
“It certainly does,” said Anna, ominously.
But on the way home she resolved to be more patient with her old coward. She heard with horror in her remembering ears her own rough harsh voice and his gentle martyred bleatings. “Did ever any woman commit so many sins as I?” she exclaimed, secretly, stamping and snorting along the street. “Never a minute passes without my having to be sorry for something I did the last minute. I must have been mad to treat my Old Sergei so—even if he had been the worst old husband in the world. And he’s not the worst—he’s only just an old fool—and he’s fond of me.” But her conscience could not let even this description of him stand. She began tenderly to remember him as he was when she married him—a thin, fanciful, conscientious bookkeeper in a Russian firm in London, a member of a high-thinking debating society, and interested in moths. He was always rather like a moth himself, she thought, but a nice, ivory-colored, clean one. He had been devoted to his gay, noisy Anna. He had always been ready to cover up her mistakes and comfort her conscience. She had married him—(Good God! was it possible?)—she had married him because she thought he was so wise. But the fact that he had proved not to be wise seemed to her now endearing. If he had been really wise he would not have remained devoted, she thought with a humble hiccup, to a fat blunderer like herself.
And so she went on thinking in remorseful circles until she got home, and then she heard her own voice saying, “I went to see the doctor and he says your blindness is all hysterical lies—all lies—do you hear? You needn’t trouble to lie to me any more, now that I know. Ah, tschah! I brought you a packet of English cigarettes to smoke, you old liar … !” And she threw the packet rudely on the floor at his feet. Old Sergei humbly crouched to grope for it, but Anna squatted down herself to pick it up. Their foreheads collided. “Devil take you, you old fool,” said Anna, and she helped him into a standing position and patted him, a little too hard, on the back, uncertain whether she did it in exasperation or friendliness.
In this precarious way the days went on, piled themselves heavily together to make a week—a fortnight. When Old Sergei had
