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The blue wall — A Closer Reading

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In Category - Psychological Domestic Love Stories

Authors: Child, Richard Washburn, 1881-1935, Cue, Harold James, 1887-1961 [Illustrator] Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2008 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Physicians -- Fiction; Psychological fiction Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 86,915

Reading time 378 min

Text sections 10

The blue wall — A Closer Reading can be approached with a clearer sense of reading commitment from its source measurements: 86,915 words, 6 hr 18 min estimated reading time, and 10 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 16.0 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Physicians -- Fiction,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #24451

Richard Washburn Child's 1912 novel uses a surgeon's first-person narration and a female servant's vernacular testimony to explore unseen influences between neighbors, framed by the metaphor of a wall. The narrative shifts between clinical detachment and emotional rawness.

Editorial Edition Score 4.8/5

★★★★★ ★★★★★

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Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg24451

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She did not speak. She seemed in doubt 372

From drawings by Harold J. Cue.

THE PROBLEM OF MACMECHEM

What's behind this wall?

As I write, here in my surgeon's study, I ask myself that question. What's behind it? My neighbors? Then what do I know--really know--of them? After all, this wall which rises beyond my desk, the wall against which my glass case of instruments rests, symbolizes the boundary of knowledge--seemingly an opaque barrier. I am called a man of science, a man with a passion for accuracies. I seek to define a part of the limitless and undefined mysteries of the body. But what is behind the wall? Are we sensitive to it? You smile. Give your attention then to a narrative of facts.

How little we know what influence the other side has upon us or we upon the human beings beyond this boundary. We think it is opaque, impassable. I am writing of the other wall. _There_ was a puzzle! The wall of the Marburys!...

Here I risk my reputation as a scientific observer. But that is all; I offer no conclusions. I set down in cold blood the bare facts. They are fresh enough in my memory. All seasons are swift when a man slips into age and it was only four short years ago that this happened--so marvelous, so suggestive of the things that we may do without knowing--mark me! the things we may accomplish--_beyond the wall!_

You will see what I mean when I make a record of those strange events. They began when poor MacMechem--an able practitioner he was, too--was thrown from his saddle horse in the park and died in the ambulance before they could get him to the Matthews Hospital. I inherited some of his cases, and Marbury was one of those who begged me to come in at the emergency. It was meningitis and it is out of my line. Perhaps the Marbury wealth influenced me; perhaps it was because the banker--of course I am not using the real names--went down on his knees on this very rug which is under my feet as I write. There is such a thing as a financial face. You see it often enough among those who deal with loans, percents, examiners, and the market. It's the face of terror peering through a heavy mask of smugness, and it was dreadful to see it looking up at me.... I yielded.

The Marburys' house faces the group of trees which shade the very spot where MacMechem's horse went insane. It is one of a block where each residence represents a different architect--a sort of display of individuality and affluence squeezed together like fancy crackers packed in a box. My machine used to wait for me by the hour in front of the pretentious show of flowers, tub-evergreens, glass and bronze vestibules, and the other conventional paraphernalia of our rich city successes.

It was their little girl. She was eight, I think, and her beauty was not of the ordinary kind. Sometimes there rises out of the coarse, undeveloped blood of peasants, or the thin and chilly tissue of families going to seed, some extraordinary example like my little friend Virginia. The spirit that looks out of eyes of profound depth, the length of the black lashes lying upon a cheek of marvelous whiteness, the delicate lines of the little body which delight the true artist, the curve of the sensitive lips, the patient calm of personality suggesting a familiarity with other worlds and with eternity, makes a strong impression upon a medical man or surgeon who deals with the thousands of human bodies, all wearing somewhere the repulsive distortions of civilization. The ordinary personality stripped of the pretense which cannot fool the doctor, appears so hysterical, so distorted by the heats of self-interest, so monkey-like!

Oh, well,--she was extraordinary! I was impressed from the moment when, having reread MacMechem's notes on the case under the lamp, and then having crossed the blue-and-gold room to the other wall, I drew aside the corners of an ice pack and gazed for the first time upon little Virginia.

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The novel opens with a surgeon addressing the reader directly from his study, posing a question that becomes the book's central metaphor: "What's behind this wall?" The wall against which his instrument case rests symbolizes the boundary of knowledge, an opaque barrier between himself and his neighbors, the Marburys. He insists he is a man of science, a seeker of accuracies, yet he is drawn to record "in cold blood the bare facts" of events that challenge his rational worldview. This framing establishes a tension between empirical observation and the inexplicable, setting the stage for a narrative that will oscillate between clinical detachment and emotional involvement.

A Surgeon's Confessional Voice

The narrator's voice is that of a man accustomed to precision, yet he admits he risks his reputation as a scientific observer by telling this story. He describes the events as "so marvelous, so suggestive of the things that we may do without knowing—mark me! the things we may accomplish—beyond the wall!" This phrasing reveals a fascination with the unconscious or the supernatural, tempered by a need to maintain credibility. His language is measured, almost legalistic, as he promises to set down facts without conclusions. Yet the very act of narrating suggests a compulsion to confess, to unburden himself of a mystery that defies his professional training. The reader is positioned as a confidant, invited to judge the evidence.

A Second Voice: Vernacular and Vulnerability

Midway through the excerpts, the narrative shifts abruptly to a woman's first-person account, marked by colloquial diction and raw emotion. She describes her fall from a life of "paint and powder" to near-destitution, her voice carrying the cadence of oral storytelling: "It grabbed me by the neck and bent my pride." Her observations are sensory and immediate—the "alligator bag that was left out of the wreck of old elegance," the "prominent bone sticking out at the back of her neck" of her employer. This section contrasts sharply with the surgeon's controlled prose, introducing a perspective grounded in bodily experience and social vulnerability. The woman's gratitude toward her employer, who never asked about her past, hints at a moral complexity that the surgeon's clinical gaze might miss.

Pace and the Architecture of Suspense

The novel's structure alternates between reflective passages and tense, action-driven scenes. The surgeon's opening is meditative, almost philosophical, but the chapter titles—"The House Next Door," "A Moving Figure," "The Torn Scrap"—promise plot-driven developments. The excerpts show a pattern of slow accumulation of detail followed by sudden revelations: a figure glimpsed, a shadow on a curtain, a scratching sound. The wall itself becomes a device for withholding and disclosing information. The narrator's insistence on "cold blood" and "bare facts" paradoxically heightens the suspense, as the reader senses that the rational framework will eventually crack. The inclusion of a second narrator further complicates the pace, introducing a voice that is less controlled and more immediate, creating a rhythmic tension between analysis and emotion.

Readers should attend to the shifts in narrative voice and the way each speaker's language reveals their social position and psychological state. The wall metaphor operates on multiple levels—literal, epistemological, and emotional—and its meaning evolves as the story progresses. The novel rewards attention to small details: a torn scrap of paper, a moving figure, a shadow on a curtain. These are not mere plot devices but clues to the novel's deeper inquiry into what lies beyond our ordinary perceptions.

Reading about that surgeon’s detached voice brought back a summer I spent alone in my grandmother’s house, listening to the neighbor’s radio through the wall—their laughter something I could feel but never see. Another book once gave me that same ache of being just outside a story: The Making of Bobby Burnit Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man — Text and Context, where ambition feels equally close and unreachable. Thin borders, thick lives.