A DANGLING MAN
435
leave her to Dolly, Etta and Amos, I climbed to the third floor. There,
in what had once been an attic, Dolly had furnished a music room.
One entire side of it was taken up by a large monster of a piano
which crouched on bo·wed legs, awaiting use. It was, however, seldom
touched, for it had been replaced downstairs by a more jaunty and
stylish instrument that showed its teeth like a darky entertainer. On
the opposite side there was a phonograph with a shelf of albums
above it. I began to look for a record I had
boug~t
Etta a year ago,
a Haydn divertimento for the cello played by FeuermJan. To find it I
had to hunt through half a dozen alburn.s. Here Dolly •and Etta for
all their sense of property were careless; there were numerous broken
records. But I found mine whole and, thankfully,-my dejection
would have doubled if I had found it cracked-! started it and sat
clown facing the piano.
It was the first movement, the adagio, that I cared most about.
Its sober opening notes, preliminaries to a thoughtful confession,
showed me that I was still an apprentice in suffering and humiliation.
I had not even begun. I had, furthermore, no right to expect to avoid
them. So much was immediately clear. Surely, no one could plead
for exception; that was not a human privilege. What I should do
with them, how to meet them, was answered in the second declaration
with grace, without meanness. And though I could not as yet apply
this answer to myself I recognized its rightness and was moved by it
vehemently. Not until I was myself a whole man could it be my
answer, too. And was I to become this whole man alone, without
aid? I was too weak for it, I did not command the will. Then
in what quarter should I look for help, where was the power? Grace
by what law, under what order, by whom required? Personal, hu–
Jlljllil
or universal, was it? The music named only one source, the
universal one, God. But what a miserable surrender that would be,
born of disheartenment and chaos; and out of fear, bodily and
imperious, that like a disease asked for a remedy and did not care
how it was supplied. The record came to an end: I began it again.
No, not God, not any divinity. That was an anterior, not of my own
deriving. I was not so full of pride that I could not accept the
existence of something greater than myself, something, perhaps, of
which I was an idea, or merely a fraction of an idea. That was not
it. But I did not want to catch at any contrivance in panic. In my
eyes, that was a great crime. Granted the answer I was hearing that
went so easily to the least penetrable part of me, the seldom
disturbed thickets around the heart, was made by a religious man.
But was ·there no way to attain that answer other than to sacrifice the
mind that sought to be satisfied? From the very antidote another
disease would spring. It was not a new JI!latter, it was one I had
frequently considered. But not with such a desperate emotion or
