He made that bitterly professional apology for his tears, speaking
quietly and unaffectedly, as he had spoken throughout. His tone and
manner, from beginning to end, showed him to be especially, almost
morbidly, anxious not to set himself up as an object of interest to me.
"You may well ask, why I have wearied you with all these details?"
he went on. "It is the only way I can see, Mr. Blake, of properly
introducing to you what I have to say next. Now you know exactly what
my position was, at the time of Mr. Candy's illness, you will the more
readily understand the sore need I had of lightening the burden on my
mind by giving it, at intervals, some sort of relief. I have had the
presumption to occupy my leisure, for some years past, in writing a
book, addressed to the members of my profession--a book on the intricate
and delicate subject of the brain and the nervous system. My work will
probably never be finished; and it will certainly never be published. It
has none the less been the friend of many lonely hours; and it helped
me to while away the anxious time--the time of waiting, and nothing
else--at Mr. Candy's bedside. I told you he was delirious, I think? And
I mentioned the time at which his delirium came on?"
"Yes."
"Well, I had reached a section of my book, at that time, which touched
on this same question of delirium. I won't trouble you at any length
with my theory on the subject--I will confine myself to telling you only
what it is your present interest to know. It has often occurred to me in
the course of my medical practice, to doubt whether we can justifiably
infer--in cases of delirium--that the loss of the faculty of speaking
connectedly, implies of necessity the loss of the faculty of thinking
connectedly as well. Poor Mr. Candy's illness gave me an opportunity
of putting this doubt to the test. I understand the art of writing
in shorthand; and I was able to take down the patient's 'wanderings',
exactly as they fell from his lips.--Do you see, Mr. Blake, what I am
coming to at last?"
I saw it clearly, and waited with breathless interest to hear more.
"At odds and ends of time," Ezra Jennings went on, "I reproduced my
shorthand notes, in the ordinary form of writing--leaving large spaces
between the broken phrases, and even the single words, as they had
fallen disconnectedly from Mr. Candy's lips. I then treated the result
thus obtained, on something like the principle which one adopts in
putting together a child's 'puzzle.' It is all confusion to begin with;
but it may be all brought into order and shape, if you can only find
the right way. Acting on this plan, I filled in each blank space on the
paper, with what the words or phrases on either side of it suggested
to me as the speaker's meaning; altering over and over again, until my
additions followed naturally on the spoken words which came before them,
and fitted naturally into the spoken words which came after them. The
result was, that I not only occupied in this way many vacant and anxious
hours, but that I arrived at something which was (as it seemed to me) a
confirmation of the theory that I held. In plainer words, after putting
the broken sentences together I found the superior faculty of thinking
going on, more or less connectedly, in my patient's mind, while the
inferior faculty of expression was in a state of almost complete
incapacity and confusion."