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Chancellor Dollfuss lay dead with a bullet in his neck and the purged people were excited about another Putsch and matters political, but pretty soon even that became monotonous and, on my last day in town, I decided to look up old Dr. H. I knew H regarded me as an American mass-produced personality, a fruit of the condition he called “la misère psychologique” of groups. But when I walked over to his Klinik in Vienna IX that afternoon, he seemed glad to see me. And he told me a story.
A young professor consulted his family physician. The professor, on the faculty of one of our New England colleges, was depressed, believed that his “enemies” on the school staff were trying to discredit him, suspected his wife of being unfaithful, reckoned that worry about these matters was ruining his health. The physician promptly prescribed a vacation, told his patient to go on an outing of some sort. Accordingly, the professor went on a fishing trip.
Of what occurred on the fishing trip—whose outcome is hereinafter, with H's help, described—H had little more to say. He made few detached observations, medical, philosophical, or metaphysical He merely said something about that prescription's being a bad thing. “It is a procedure,” he said, “which is seldom followed any more.”
The night was black dark. Through the deep woods an absolute silence veered piercingly with a keen, keen reedy ring that hurt his ears, its timbre oboewise, its high pitch but humanly hearable, its steel like a hatpin's needling his hot brain. The cunning hurt relieved the candid soft crunch of their boots on the kinder pine needles. And so the two men made their way through the dark forest.