The Eighth Day

by Thornton Wilder

  The practice of stuffing his ears with cotton he adopted from Clem, the oldest of the orderlies. Clem spent the larger part of his free time reading; he would have spent all of it so but for his failing eyesight. For every half hour he read he sat for a half hour with his hands covering his eyes in a pose that suggested prayer or desperation. He was a philosopher. In the limited space available to him in one corner of the dormitory he had built a hermit’s cell about his bed, made from packing cases marked “Jeyes’ Fluid” and “Jarvis’s HCHO”—walls and bookshelves. Many of the books were in Latin or in an English as impenetrable as Latin; some were in French and German: SPINOZA. . . ? DESCARTES. . . ? PLOTINUS. Hence the cotton in his ears. Roger’s eyes often rested speculatively on Clem’s lowered sound-proof head.

  Most of the patients left the hospital shaken, but cured. Roger received many gifts—cigars, religious medals, postcards of Chicago’s waterfront, suspenders, pocket combs, grocers’ calendars. (“Goodbye, Trent boy, thanks a lot,” “Goodbye, Trent, you’ve been awful good to my husband. Now don’t forget what I said: we have a room for you in our house, if ever you need it.”) He was loved and he loved no one. But Roger had much to do with death. He had made a resolve not to put to himself the questions that inevitably arise from a frequent contact with death, but certain resolutions are hard to keep.

  When a patient was entering on a difficult or protracted death he was lifted onto a wheeled table and rolled into a room reserved for the dying. The orderlies had an ugly name for this room that Roger never used. Priests came in and out. Relatives were permitted to stand a moment at the door. Orderlies were in the custom of dropping in and lighting a pipe. Conversation was not easy, what with all the whistling and rattling going on. Over half the patients called for their mothers—even men who appeared to be nearing a hundred. (A man’s first and last words are easy to say; that m recurs in all languages.) A bowl of filed-down pennies stood on a shelf. Roger came to recognize fairly well the moment of death. He watched with wonder. He liked the words “gave up the ghost.” (Query: where does it go?) He could look steadily into the eyes of his older patients. He averted his eyes from the young men. From time to time the weight of these experiences bore heavily on him, just eighteen. He would wait until nightfall, hoping for clear weather. In clear weather he would carry an armful of blankets to the roof of the hospital, clear away the snow, and lie down with his face to the sky. From the gorge in Coaltown one saw only a narrow portion of the heavens. It gave him a restful feeling to think that God who had made so many people had made so many stars, too. There was probably some connection. They were shining down on “The Elms” and maybe on his father, millions of them. He was becoming reconciled to the disturbing discovery of the human multitude.

  Against his will his thoughts returned often to a puzzling rigmarole told him by one of his fellow orderlies. Peter Bogardus had been a barber, but had given up the work because he was nervous; he couldn’t handle knives. He was pockmarked and totally bald. He didn’t drink, but he had bad habits. He was a better orderly than most—far better than Roger because he knew more. (“Quick as a fox in a crisis,” said Chief Nurse Bergstrom. “He saves twenty lives a year.”) He belonged to an association that made a study of the life after death and ghosts. He invited Roger to attend a meeting, but Roger refused; he was afraid he would be charged admission. Besides, he assimilated what he wanted from Peter Bogardus, free.

  One late morning they were idling in the room for the dying. Roger often dropped in there to see how things were going. He’d accompanied many a patient along the road. The other orderlies noticed that he had a sort of gift for quieting the patients just before they “kicked the bucket.”

  (“Trent, why do you always pick up the old geezers’ hands?” “I don’t know. Do I? I think maybe they like it.”)

  It was Bogardus’s day on duty there. He walked back and forth smoking long brown cigarettes. At intervals he shook off the ash into the bowl of pennies.

  “Trent,” he said, “all men lead as many lives as there are sands in the Ganges River.”

  Roger waited. Finally he had to ask, “What do you mean, Pete?”

  “We are born again and again. These three men here—look at them!” Roger didn’t have to look at what he had seen so often—the half-open suppliant eyes, the trembling chins and cheeks. “They will be dead in a few hours. But forty-nine days from now—seven sevens!—they will be born again. And they will be born again hundreds of thousands of times.”

  Roger remembered hearing something about this ridiculous idea before. In Coaltown his father had put money in the collection plate at church to send missionaries across the ocean to rid ignorant people of just such notions as that. But Roger was readier than he had been to listen to old and new ideas; Coaltown had some pretty ridiculous ones of its own.

  “There’s a mighty ladder, boy. In each new life a man may acquire merit that will permit him to step up a rung or two, or he may fall into error and slip back. Through the merit of Gautama Buddha himself and those who have followed him all men tend to rise. Finally, when they have lived as many lives as the sands of the Ganges, they will arrive at the threshold of supreme happiness. But—now mark my words!—arrived at that threshold, these men will not step over it. They will deny themselves supreme happiness. They will continue to be reborn. They will choose to wait until all men have reached that threshold—men as numerous as the sands of the Ganges—many of them cruel and wicked men. They move about among us now, in disguise, aiding us to ascend that mighty ladder. But even when all the men on this earth, as many as are the sands of the Ganges, have reached that threshold none of them will step over it into supreme happiness, for there are other inhabited stars, as many as the sands of the Ganges. We must wait until all the men on all the stars have purified themselves. No man can wish to be happy until everyone else in the universe is happy.”

  Roger stared at him, uncomprehendingly. His family had been happy at “The Elms.” Peter went on:

  “You can see that great staircase, Trent—that mighty staircase? Can you count all those human beings on it? Sometimes you can see a little flutter—someone has mounted four steps—Socrates or Mrs. Besant or Tom Paine or Abraham Lincoln. Sometimes there’s a moment of confusion—looks like an avalanche in the Rockies—a man—a Nero or a millionaire—has tumbled and lost fifty or a thousand of his lives. None ever stands still.” He continued to walk to and fro smoking his long brown cigarette. Suddenly he turned and shouted, “Free yourself of attachments! Wife and child—illusions! Your reputation among men, your honor, your dignity—vanity! Look at these men! Some men, at the moment of death, are given for half a second a memory of their former existences—a glimpse of their future existences. Boy, they lean for half a second over the vast abyss of time and see the long wretchedness of their past lives. Others look up and see the threshold in the far distance above them. They can see that someday there will be an end to living in this sorrowful world, this vale of tears.”

  Roger started. He had seen those lightning-quick returns to consciousness—those expressions of immeasurable horror, those visions of all consolation. Bogardus crossed and leaned toward him, lowering his voice. “Trent, know this: there is a limit even to the number of the sands of the Ganges. We shall be Buddhas when the last earthbound man and the last starbound man has sprung free.”

  Peter’s agitation had communicated itself to two of the patients. “Judge” Bartlett’s eyes were rolling imploringly from side to side. Roger could read the message of his agitated fingers on the blanket; he understood the guttural noises from his throat. He crossed the room and wiped the patient’s mouth with a towel. He shouted, “I can’t write a letter now, Judge. I haven’t got a pencil. I’ll do it tomorrow. Go to sleep. Yes, go to sleep. Get some rest.” There was the suggestion of a handshake.

  On another table a patient mutters. “Hab kei Gelt. . . . ? Mutti. . . . ? Hilf’. . . . ? Lu. . . . ? u. . . ?u . . . ? ft.”

  “
Alles gut, Herr Metzger!” cried Roger. “Schlaf a bissl! Ja!”

  Peter Bogardus continued: “You Christians can’t wait that long—no, siree. You want your supreme happiness next Tuesday. You can’t wait ten billion billion years—that’s Christ’s fault—impatience; always announcing the end of the world, next week, next month. And Christianity inherited his impatience—kill, torture, burn, divide. Baptize ’em or burn ’em! Believe in me or go to hell. That’s what hell is—impatience.” He wiped the perspiration from his forehead. “Look at me—getting excited! Look at me—attached to trying to make you understand something. Why should I care whether a little peanut like you in Chicago, Illinois, learns anything? That’s the damnable impatience I acquired when I was a Christian. Look at me—trembling!”

  He sat down on the floor, cross-legged. “I must do my breathing exercises and calm myself. No! I’d better stand on my head. That’s best.”

  Peter flung his heels to the ceiling. Roger was accustomed to this. He was still thinking about the ladder of rebirth.

  “You don’t really believe that, do you, Peter?”

  Peter, upside down, rested his pale watery eyes on Roger and waited. “Never ask a man what he believes. Watch what he uses. ‘Believe’ is a dead word and brings death with it.”

  A new patient, purple of face, was rolled in.

  “Hello, Trent. Hello, Pete,” said the orderly.

  “Hello, Herb.”

  “Y’know him?”

  “Yes,” said Roger. “First name’s Nick. Night watchman in the Fletcher Building.”

  He had come to know Nick well, having served and washed him for weeks. If there was anything in the Great Ladder idea, Nick was high up, high up. Roger had never seen a patient who so made himself at home—so to speak—in the hospital and in his pain. Though dependent upon others for humiliating aid, though his bed stood among those of noisy, foul-mouthed, furious sufferers, he gazed tranquilly at the ceiling. A stag would die so. He asked for nothing. When Roger offered to write a letter for him, he dictated some words to his daughter in Boston, requesting only that the letter be mailed a week after his burial. He told her that his Mormon brothers would put his body under the ground when he was freed of it. Roger turned his chair and sat with his back to Old Nick. Nick would not wish a friend to witness his animal struggles; they were not important. And suddenly it came to Roger that his father, too, was high, high up. Throughout that long trial in Coaltown—the “Hyena trial”—his father had conducted himself just so: out of reach of curiosity and malice and to all appearances at home in the courtroom and his extremity.

  Roger went out of the door and out of the building. He stood in the sunlight at the hospital’s rear entrance, shivering in his white suit. He had no questions to put to his father. He had no wish to sit down at a table and talk with him; but Roger would have given much of the little he possessed to see him pass along the street. He would have followed him for blocks simply to rest his eyes on someone who was so high up.

  He wanted to watch him closely too, because someday he—Roger—would have children of his own. He would leave them behind him. He would die.

  He was being drawn to the human community by thoughts of the dying, the banished, and the unborn.

  It was from another aspect of his family’s slowness to mature that Roger suffered crushingly from homesickness. A glimpse of a woman in the distance would evoke his mother; an object, a girl’s voice, a smell would recall “The Elms.” Everything would go dark before his eyes. He would be obliged to put out his hand to a lamp-post or a wall and to wait until the pain subsided. From time to time, in order to suffer more intensely—that is to embrace “The Elms” more passionately—he went to the railway station from which trains departed for Coaltown. The station was near the lake. He had never seen a body of standing water larger than a pond. The view of those innumerable waves calmed him. “When you think of all the people in the world and all the thousands of years that have gone by, I bet there must have been a lot of fellows my age who had to leave their homes for one reason or another—like going to war, for instance.”

  Questions, the torment of questions.

  There is no true education save in answer to urgent questioning. Unease and deprivation awaken the young mind to inquiry. Roger did not realize that he and his sisters had acquired that habit of mind in their earliest years: they had struggled to survive. Like plants in a parched soil, they had sent down deep roots. From infancy they had groped hither and thither, asking “What?” and “why?” and “how?” Beata Ashley was an admirable mother; she gave her children much; she gave them everything except the essential. As we have seen (and as a result of a starvation in her own childhood) she must love only one human being. John Ashley could give his children the essential—and much besides—but he was late-maturing; the flowering of his imagination was still to come. The children did not turn in on themselves. They were saved from fruitless introspection by their father’s joy in them. Lily became the princess sleeping in the cave; Sophia entered into her ministry to animals. Constance—knowing no mother—prepared herself for that extraordinary life in which she would see herself as the mother of millions, more than half of them older than herself. Roger barely escaped some obscure shipwreck. A puzzling event took place in the summer of 1891. He was six and a half. He was well known in Coaltown as a model boy—so bright, so well behaved. His parents were out of the house. Seizing his youngest sister’s chair he broke five windows in the living room. He then ran away from home, weeping as from some unfathomable abandonment. He stopped only to pick up Sophia’s kitten to comfort him on his long walk to China. His parents tendered scarcely one word of rebuke. Roger never gave vent to his frustration again. A change came over him. The small adventurer and babbler became taciturn. He became a listener (“what?” “why?”). The expression on his face varied little. He became the school’s best student and athlete. He was liked by everyone in town and ignored their liking. He had one friend, Porky. He accepted one person’s love, Sophia’s. He was strengthened by confidence in his father and isolated by his passionate love for his mother.

  Questions. Questions. Now—like his father, thousands of miles away—he had no vocabulary and no grammar for reflection. What unity could be found in the increasing diversity of his existence: the catastrophe in Coaltown; his mother walking beside him imperturbedly to the courthouse; the mystery of his father’s rescue; the noontime crowd on LaSalle Street; the deaths he was witnessing daily; God’s responsibility for the suffering of children, horses, dogs, and cats; Eugene V. Debs in prison scarcely a mile away; his happiness when he looked at the waves and the stars; his fellow orderlies’ views on women; his resolve to achieve a great lifework? And the working world—injustice everywhere: employers cheated the workers; workers cheated the employers and one another? He’d done some cheating himself.

  One day he stopped by Old Clem’s cell.

  “Clem, those books you’re reading—do students study them in college?”

  “Yes, some of them.”

  “Did you go to college?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “What does a college education do for you?”

  “It ties together the things you see.”

  Roger drew back as though he had been struck.

  “Can a person educate himself, Clem?”

  “One in a million, maybe.”

  “Does most of an education come out of books?”

  “A man who tried to understand anything without knowing THOSE BOOKS would just be a feathered kangaroo. Like Pete Bogardus. You’re wasting my time.”

  “Thank you, Clem.”

  He had no wish to go to any of those colleges, or—for a time, at least—to read any of those famous books. He had walked the streets of Chicago at all hours. He had listened to scores of life stories. Man is cruel to man and even those who are kind to those nearest them are inhuman to others. It’s not kindness that’s important but justice. Kindness is the stammering apo
logy of the unjust. The whole world’s wrong, he saw. There’s something wrong at the heart of the world and he would track it down. Many of those books and colleges had been around for hundreds of years—with very little effect.

  The few serious books he had looked into seemed windy, slow-moving, filled with padding—like political addresses and sermons. Like all Ashleys, he wanted no help. We shall see later how his father “invented” marriage and paternity. Roger wanted to invent the explanation for existence and the rules whereby men could live rationally side by side—to be the first philosopher, the first planner of the just community. Independence of mind (most men boast of possessing it) cannot rest. Roger had already entered on this great task. His head was full of notions and he was driven to write them down. At the Carr-Bingham Hotel he had collected wastepaper. During the long nights there, and later at the hospital, he wrote thousands and thousands of words on the backs of old account books, bills, announcements, and calendars—notions. He had never had a friend of his own age, except Porky, even more taciturn than himself. He had never, like other young men, built and unbuilt God, society, morals in conversation. He now drew up an explanation of the nature of things; he derived ethics from the order in the cosmos; he designed the constitution of an ideal state. One day his feverish resort to writing came to an end as abruptly as it had begun. He carried the armfuls of scrap paper to the incinerator. He had come to a dead end, not in discouragement but as the result of an insight: he discovered that he knew nothing and that he was ill equipped to learn, but that learning was possible. He was ripe for reading. We shall see how he entered reading by the back door.

  After three months of hospital life Roger returned to the Carr-Bingham Hotel, promoted to day clerk. He was anxious to make more money and he had arrived at a conclusion about medicine. He had become aware of that never-ending line—from the beginning of time to the end of time—of patients waiting at the door. No bed was empty for longer than three hours. To his eyes medicine appeared to be a business of patch and shore and bolster—the temporary repair of unsalvageable vessels. He was an ignorant country boy; he had no idea that medicine could take a different view of itself.