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Our Nervous Friends — Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness

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Title: Our Nervous Friends — Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness

Author: Robert S. Carroll


        
Release date: June 1, 2004 [eBook #5994]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5994

Credits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR NERVOUS FRIENDS — ILLUSTRATING THE MASTERY OF NERVOUSNESS ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.





OUR NERVOUS FRIENDS
Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness

BY

ROBERT S. CARROLL, M.D.
Medical Director Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina

Author of "The Mastery of Nervousness," "The Soul in Suffering"

NEW YORK
1919



HEARTILY--TO THE HOST OF US



CHAPTER I

OUR FRIENDLY NERVES
Illustrating the Capacity for Nervous Adjustment

CHAPTER II

THE NEUROTIC
Illustrating Damaging Nervous Overactivity

CHAPTER III

THE PRICE OF NERVOUSNESS
Illustrating Misdirected Nervous Energy

CHAPTER IV

WRECKING A GENERATION
Illustrating "The Enemy at the Gate"

CHAPTER V

THE NERVOUSLY DAMAGED MOTHER
Illustrating the Child Wrongly Started

CHAPTER VI

THE MESS OF POTTAGE
Illustrating Nervous Inferiority Due to Eating-Errors

CHAPTER VII

THE CRIME OF INACTIVITY
Illustrating the Wreckage of the Pampered Body

CHAPTER VIII

LEARNING TO EAT
Illustrating the Potency of Diet

CHAPTER IX

THE MAN WITH THE HOE
Illustrating the Therapy of Work

CHAPTER X

THE FINE ART OF PLAY
Illustrating Re-creation Through Play

CHAPTER XI

THE TANGLED SKEIN
Illustrating a Tragedy of Thought Selection

CHAPTER XII

THE TROUBLED SEA
Illustrating Emotional Tyranny

CHAPTER XIII

WILLING ILLNESS
Illustrating Willessness and Wilfulness

CHAPTER XIV

UNTANGLING THE SNARL
Illustrating the Replacing of Fatalism by Truth

CHAPTER XV

FROM FEAR TO FAITH
Illustrating the Curative Power of Helpful Emotions

CHAPTER XVI

JUDICIOUS HARDENING
Illustrating the Compelling of Health

CHAPTER XVII

THE SICK SOUL
Illustrating the Sliding Moral Scale

CHAPTER XVIII

THE BATTLE WITH SELFIllustrating the Recklessness that Disintegrates

CHAPTER XIX

THE SUFFERING OF SELF-PITY
Illustrating a Moral Surrender

CHAPTER XX

THE SLAVE OF CONSCIENCE
Illustrating Discord with Self

CHAPTER XXI

CATASTROPHE CREATING CHARACTER
Illustrating Disciplined Freedom

CHAPTER XXII

FINDING THE VICTORIOUS SELF
Illustrating a Medical Conversion

CHAPTER XXIII

THE TRIUMPH OF HARMONY
Illustrating the Power of the Spirit




A REMARK


Vividly as abstractions may be presented, they rarely succeed in
revealing truths with the appealing intensity of living pictures. In
Our Nervous Friends will be found portrayed, often with photographic
clearness, a series of lives, with confidences protected, illustrating
chapter for chapter the more vital principles of the author's The
Mastery of Nervousness.




CHAPTER I

OUR FRIENDLY NERVES


"Hop up, Dick, love! See how glorious the sun is on the new snow. Now
isn't that more beautiful than your dreams? And see the birdies! They
can't find any breakfast. Let's hurry and have our morning wrestle and
dress and give them some breakie before Anne calls."

The mother is Ethel Baxter Lord. She is thirty-eight, and Dick-boy is
just five. The mother's face is striking, striking as an example of
fine chiseling of features, each line standing for sensitiveness, and
each change revealing refinement of thought. The eyes and hair are
richly brown. Slender, graceful, perennially neat, she represents the
mother beautiful, the wife inspiring, the friend beloved. Happily as
we have seen her start a new day for Dick, did she always add some
cheer, some fineness of touch, some joy of word, some stimulating
helpfulness to every greeting, to every occasion.

The home was not pretentious. Thoroughly cozy, with many artistic
touches within, it snuggled on the heights near Arlington, the close
neighbor to many of the Nation's best memories, looking out on a noble
sweep of the fine, old Potomac, with glimpses through the trees of the
Nation's Capitol, glimpses revealing the best of its beauties. It was
a home from which emanated an atmosphere of peace and repose which one
seemed to feel even as one approached. It was a home pervaded with the
breath of happiness, a home which none entered without benefit.

The husband, Martin Lord, was an expert chemist who had long been in
the service of the Government. Capable, worthy, manly, he was blest in
what he was, and in what he had. They had been married eight years,
and the slipping away of the first child, Margaret, was the only
sadness which had paused at their door. Mrs. Lord had been Ethel
Baxter for thirty years. Her father was an intense, high-strung
business man, an importer, who spent much time in Europe where he died
of an American-contracted typhoid-fever, when Ethel was ten. Her
mother was one of a large well-known Maryland family, fair, brown-eyed
too, and frail; also, by all the rights of inheritance, training and
development, sensitive and nervous. In her family the precedents of
blue blood were religiously maintained with so much emphasis on the
"blue" that no beginning was ever made in training her into a
protective robustness. So, in spite of elaborate preparation and noted
New York skill and the highest grade of conscientious nursing, she
recovered poorly after Ethel's birth. Strength, even such as she
formerly had, did not return. She didn't want to be an invalid. She
was devoted to her husband and eager to companion and mother her
child. The surgeons thought her recovery lay in their skill, and in
ten years one operated twice, and two others operated once each, but
for some reason the scalpel's edge did not reach the weakness. Then
Mr. Baxter died, and all of her physical discomforts seemed
intensified until, in desperation, the fifth operation was undertaken,
which was long and severe, and from which she failed to react. So
Ethel was an orphan at eleven, though not alone, for the good uncle,
her mother's brother, took her to his home and never failed to respond
to any impulse through which he felt he could fulfil the fatherhood
and motherhood which he had assumed. Absolutely devoted, affectionate,
emotional, he planned impulsively, he gave freely, but he knew not law
nor order in his own high-keyed life; so neither law nor order entered
into the training of his ward.

Ethel Baxter's childhood had been remarkably well influenced,
considering the nervous intensity of both parents. For the mother's
sake, their winters had been spent in Florida, their summers on Long
Island. Her mother, in face of the fact that she rarely knew a day of
physical comfort and for years had not felt the thrill of physical
strength, most conscientiously gave time, thought and prayer to her
child's rearing. Hours were devoted to daily lessons, and many habits
of consideration and refinement, many ideals of beauty, many niceties
of domestic duty and practically all her studies, were mother-taught.
Ethel was active, physically restless, impulsive, cheerful, fairly
intense in her eagerness for an expression of the thrilling activities
within. She was truly a high-type product of generations of fine
living, and her blue blood did show from the first in the rapid
development of keenness of mind and acuteness of feeling. Typically of
the nervous temperament, she early showed a superb capacity for
complex adjustments. Yet, with one damaging, and later threatening
idea, the mother infected the child's mind; the conception of
invalidism entered into the constructive fabric of the child-thought
all the more deeply, because there was little of offensively selfish
invalidism ever displayed by the mother. But many of the concessions
and considerations instinctively demanded by the nervous sufferer were
for years matters-of-course in the Baxter home; and these demands,
almost unconsciously made by the mother, could but modify much of the
natural expression of her child's young years.

Another damaging attitude-reaction, intense in its expression,
followed the unexpected death of Ethel's father. The mother, true to
the ancient and honorable precedents of her family, went into a month
of helplessness following the sad news. She could not attend the
funeral, and for weeks the activities of the household were muffled by
mourning; when she left her room, it was to wear the deepest crepe,
while a half-inch of deadest black bordered the hundreds of responses
which she personally sent to notes of condolence. She never spoke
again of her husband without reference to her bereavement. Then, a
year later, when the mother herself suddenly went, it seemed to
devolve on the child to fulfil the mother's teachings. Her uncle's
attitude, moreover, toward his sister's death was in many ways
unhappy, for he did not repress expressions of bitterness toward the
surgeons and condemned the fate which had so early robbed Ethel of
both parents.

Thus, early and intensely, a morbid attitude toward death, a
conviction that self-pity was reasonable, normal, wholesome, a belief
that it was her duty to publicly display intensive evidences of her
affliction, determined a lasting and potent influence in this girl's
life which was to alloy her young womanhood--disturbing factors, all,
which before twelve caused much emotional disequilibrium. She now
lived with her uncle in New York City and her summers were spent in
Canada. The sense of fitness was so strong that during the next two
vitally important, developing years she avoided any physical
expression of her natural exuberance of spirits; and habits now formed
which were, for years, to deny her any right use of her muscular self.
She read much; she read well; she read intensely. She attended a
private school and long before her time was an accredited young lady.
Mentally, she matured very early, and with the exception of the
damaging influences which have been mentioned, she represented a
superior capacity for feeling and conceiving and accomplishing, even
as she possessed an equally keen capacity for suffering.

She was most winsome at sixteen, a bit frail and fragile, often spoken
of as a rare piece of Sevres, beloved with a tenderness which would
have warped the disposition of one less unselfish; emotionally
intense, brilliancy and vivacity periodically burst through the habit
of her reserve. A perfect pupil, and in all fine things literary,
keenly alive, she had written several short sketches which showed
imaginative originality and a sympathetic sensitiveness, especially
toward human suffering. And her uncle was sure that a greater than
George Eliot had come. There was to be a year abroad, and as the
doctor and her teacher in English agreed on Italy, there she went. At
seventeen, during the year in Florence, the inevitable lover came.
Family traditions, parents, her orphanage, the protective surroundings
of her uncle's home, her instincts--all had kept her apart. Her
knowledge of young lovers was but literary, and this particular young
lover presented a side which soon laid deep hold on her confidence.
They studied Italian together. He was musical, she was poetic, and he
gracefully fitted her sonnets to melodies. Finally, it seemed that the
great Song of Life had brought them together to complete one of its
harmonies. Her confidence grew to love, the love which seemed to stand
to her for life. Then the awful suddenness, which had in the past
marked her sorrows, burst in again. In one heart-breaking, repelling
half-hour his other self was revealed, and a damaged love was left to
minister to wretchedness. Here was a hurt denied even the expression
of mourning stationery or black apparel--a hurt which must be hidden
and ever crowded back into the bursting within. Immediate catastrophe
would probably have followed had not, first, the fine pride of her
fine self, then the demands of her art for expression, stepped in to
save. She would write. She now knew human nature. She had tasted
bitterness; and with renewed seriousness she became a severely hard-
working student. But the wealth of her joy-life slipped away; the
morbid made itself apparent in every chapter she wrote, while
intensity became more and more the key-note of thought and effort.

Back at her uncle's home, the uncle who was now even more convinced
that Ethel had never outlived the shock of the loss of her parents,
she found that honest study and devotion to her self-imposed tasks,
and a life of much physical comfort and rarely artistic surroundings,
were all failing to make living worth while. In fact, things were
getting into a tangle. She was becoming noticeably restless. Repose
was so lost that it was only with increasing effort that she could
avoid attracting the attention of those near. Even in church it would
seem that some demon of unrest would never be appeased and only could
be satisfied by constant changing of position. Thoughts of father and
mother, and the affair in Florence, intensified this spirit of unrest,
and few conscious minutes passed that unseen stray locks were not
being replaced. It seemed to be a relief to take off and put on, time
and again, the ring which had been her mother's. Even her feet seemed
to rebel at the confinement of shoes, and she became obsessed with the
impulse to remove them, even in the theater or at the concert. A
sighing habit developed. It had been growing for years into an air-
hunger, and finally all physical, and much of mental, effort developed
a sense of suffocation which demanded short periods of absolute rest.
Associations were then formed between certain foods and disturbing
digestive sensations. Tea alone seemed to help, and she became
dependent upon increasingly numerous cups of this beverage. Knowing
her history as we do, we can easily see how she had become abnormally
acute in her responses to the discomforts which are always associated
with painful emotions, and that emotional distress was interpreted, or
misinterpreted, as physical disorder. Each year she became more truly
a sensitive-plant, suffering and keenly alive to every discomfort,
more and more easily fatigued by the conflicts between emotions, which
craved expression, and the will, which demanded repression.

Since the days in Florence there had been a growing antagonism to men,
certainly to all who indicated any suitor-like attitude. In her heart
she was forsworn. She had loved deeply once. Her idealism said it
could never come again. But her antagonism, and her idealism, and her
strength of will all failed to satisfy an inarticulate something which
locked her in her room for hours of repressed, unexplained sobbing.
Her writing became exhausting. Talks before her literary class were a
nightmare of anticipation--for through all, there had never been any
weakening of the beauty and intensity of her unselfish desire to give
to the world her best. The dear old uncle watched her with growing
apprehension. He persuaded her to seek health. It was first a water-
cure; then a minor, but ineffective operation; then much scientific
massage; and finally a rest-cure, and at the end no relief that
lasted, but a recurrence of symptoms which, to the uncle, spoke
ominously of a threatened mental balance. What truly was wrong? Do we
not see that this woman's nerves were crying out for help; that, as
her wisest friends, they were appealing for right ways of living; that
they were pleading for development of the body that had been only
half-trained; that they were beseeching a replacing of morbidness of
feeling by those lost joyous happiness-days? Were they not fairly
cursing the wrong which had robbed her of the hope and rights of her
womanhood?

A new life came when she was twenty-eight, with the saving helper who
heard the cry of the suffering nerves, and interpreted their message.
She had told him all. His wise kindness made it easy to tell all. He
showed her the wrong invalidism thoughts, the unhappy, depressing,
devitalizing attitude toward death. He revealed truths unthought by
her of manhood and womanhood. He pointed out the poisonous trail of
her enmity, and she put it from her. He inspired her to make friends
with her nerves, who were so devotedly striving to save her. Simple,
definite counsel he gave, for her body's sake. Her physical
development could never be what early constructive care would have
made it, but from out of her frailty grew, in less than a year of
active building-training, a reserve of strength unknown for
generations in the women of her line. Wholesome advice made her see
the undermining influence of her morbid, mental habits, and resolutely
she displaced them with the productive kind that builds character.
Finally, new wisdom and a truly womanly conception of her duty and
privilege replaced her antagonism to men, as understanding had
obliterated enmity. It would seem as though Providence had been only
waiting these changes, for they had hardly become certainties in her
life when the real lover came--a man in every way worthy her fineness
of instinct; one who could understand her literary ambitions and even
helpfully criticize her work; one who brought wholesome habits of life
and thought, and who could return cheer for cheer, and whose love
responded in kind to that which now so wonderfully welled up within
her.

Her new adjustments were to be deeply tried and their solidity and
worthiness tested to their center. Little Margaret came to make their
rare home perfect, and like a choice flower, she thrived in the glow
of its sunshine. At eighteen months, she was an ideal of babyhood.
Then the infection from an unknown source, the treacherous scarlatina,
the days of fierce, losing conflict, and sudden Death again smote
Ethel Lord. But she now knew and understood. There was deep sadness of
loss; there was greater joy in having had. There was an emptiness
where the little life had called forth loving attention; there was a
fulness of perfect mother-love which could never be taken. There were
no funeral days, no mourning black, no gruesome burial. There were
flowers, more tender love, and a beautified sorrow. Death was never
again to stand to Ethel Lord as irreparable loss, for a great faith
had made such loss impossible.

And such is the life of this woman, filled with the spirit of beauty
of soul--a woman who thrills husband and son with the uplift of her
unremitting joy in living, who inspires uncle and friends as one who
has mastered the art of a happy life, who holds the devotion of
neighbors and servants through her unselfish radiation of cheer. Ethel
Lord has learned truly the infinitely rich possibilities of our nerves
when we make them our friends.




CHAPTER II

THE NEUROTIC


For four heart-breaking years, the strife of a nation at war with
itself had spread desolation and sorrow broadcast. The fighting ceased
in April. One mid-June day following, the town folk and those from
countrysides far and near met on the ample grounds of a bride-to-be.
Had it not been for the sprinkling of blue uniforms, no thought of war
could have seemed possible that fair day. The bride's home had been
a-bustle with weeks of preparation for this hour, and nature was
rejoicing and the heavens smiling upon the occasion. Sam Clayton, the
bridegroom, was certainly a "lucky dog." A quiet, unobtrusive son of a
neighboring farmer, he and Elizabeth had been school-children
together. Probably the war had lessened her opportunity for choice but
the night before he left for the front, they were engaged--and her
family was the best and wealthiest of the county. "Lucky dog" and "war
romance," the men said. Nevertheless, six weeks ago he had returned
with his chevrons well-earned, and fifty years of square living later
proved his unquestioned worth. Elizabeth at twenty, on her bridal day,
was slender, lithe, fair-skinned; of Scotch-Irish descent, her gray
eyes bespoke her efficiency--to-day, they spoke her pride, though
neither to-day nor in years to come were they often softened by love.
But it was a great wedding, and the eating and dancing and merry-
making continued late into the night with ample hospitality through
the morrow for the many who had come far. "Perfectly suited," the
women said of the young couple.

Sam Clayton had nothing which could be discounted at the bank, but the
bride was given fifty fertile acres, and they both had industry and
thrift, ambition and pluck. The fifty acres blossomed--Sam was a good
farmer, but he proved himself a better trader, and before many years
was running a small store in town. They soon added other fifty acres--
one-hundred-and-fifty in fifteen years, and out of debt--then a
partner with money, and a thriving business. At forty-five it was: Mr.
Samuel Clayton, President of the Farmers' and Merchants' Bank, rated
at $150,000. Mrs. Clayton's ability had early been manifest. Before
her marriage she had taken prizes at the County Fair in crocheting and
plum-jell. In after years no one pretended to compete with her annual
exhibit of canned fruits, and the coveted prize to the County's best
butter-maker was awarded her many successive autumns.

Our real interest in the Claytons must begin twenty-five years after
the happy wedding. Their town, the county seat, had pushed its limits
to the skirts of the broad Clayton acres; theirs was now the leading
family in that section. Mr. Clayton, quiet, active, practical, was
capable of adjusting himself without disturbance to whatever
conditions he met. Three children had been born during the early
years--a girl and two younger boys. The daughter was of the father's
type--reserved, studious and truly worthy, for during the years that
were to come, with the man she loved waiting, she remained at home a
pillar of strength to which her mother clung. She turned from wifehood
in response to the selfish needs of this mother. She and the older
brother finished classical courses in the near-by "University," for
their mother, particularly, believed in education. The brother and
sister had much in common, were indeed much alike; he, however, soon
married and moved into the new West and deservingly prospered. Fred,
the youngest, was different. During his second summer he was very ill
with cholera infantum--the days came and went--doctors came and went--
and the wonder was how life clung to the emaciated form. The mother's
love flamed forth with intensity and the nights without sleep
multiplied until she, too, looked wan and ill. She did not know how to
pray. Her parents had been Universalists--she termed herself a
Moralist; for her, heaven held no God that can hear, no Great Heart
that cares, no Understanding that notes a mother's agony. The doctors
offered no hope. The child was starving; no food nor medicine had
agreed, and the end was near. A neighboring grandmother told how her
child had been sick the same way, and how she had given him baked
sweet potato which was the first thing he had digested for days. As
fate would have it, it was even so with Fred, and he recovered leaving
his mother devoid of faith in any one calling himself doctor, and
fanatically devoted to the child she had so nearly lost. From that
sickness she hovered over him, protecting him from the training she
gave her other children--the kind she herself had received. His wish
became her law; he was humored into weakness. He never became robust
physically, and early showed defects quite unknown in either branch of
the family. He failed in college, for which failure his mother found
adequate excuse. He entered the bank, but within a few months his
peculations would have been discovered had he not confessed to his
mother, who made the discrepancy good from her private funds. During
the next few years she found it necessary on repeated occasions to
draw cheeks on her personal account to save him from trouble--but
never a word of censure for him, always excuses. He was drinking,
those days, and gambling. In the near-by state capitol the cards went
his way one night. Hilarious with success and drink, he started for
his room. There was a mix-up with his companions. He was left in the
snow, unconscious--his winnings gone. The wealth of his father and the
devotion of his mother could not save him, and he went with pneumonia
a few days later. It was said that this caused her breakdown--let us
see.

As a girl, Elizabeth had lived in a home of plenty, in a home of local
aristocracy. She was perfectly trained in all household activities
and, for that period, had an excellent education, having spent one
year in a far-away "Female Seminary." Her mind was good, her pride in
appearance almost excessive. She said she "loved Sam Clayton," and
probably did, though with none of the devotion she gave her son, nor
with sufficient trust to share her patrimony which amounted to a small
fortune with him when it came. In fact, she ran her own business, nor
relied upon the safety of the "Farmers' and Merchants' Bank" in making
her deposits. She was a housewife of repute, devoted to every detail
of housewifery and economics. There was always plenty to eat and of
the best; perfect order and cleanliness of the immaculate type were
her pride. Excellent advice she frequently gave her husband about
finances and management, but otherwise she added no interest to his
life, and there was peace between husband and wife--because Sam was a
peaceable man. As a mother, she taught the two older children domestic
usefulness, with every care; they were always clad in good, clean
clothes, clad better than the neighbors' children, and education was
made to take first rank in their minds. Her sense of duty to them was
strong; she frequently said: "I live and save and slave for my
children." Fred, as we have seen, was her weakness. For him she broke
every rule and law of her life.

At forty-five she was thin, her face already deeply seamed with worry
lines, a veritable slave to her home, but an autocrat to servants,
agents and merchants. They said her will was strong; at least,
excepting Fred, she had never been known to give in to any one. We
have not spoken of Mary. Poor woman! She, too, was a slave--she was
the hired girl. Meek almost to automatism, a machine which never
varied from one year's end to another, faithful as the proverbial dog,
she noiselessly slipped through her unceasing round of duties for
twenty-three years--then catastrophe. "That fool hired man has
hoodwinked Mary." No wedding gift, no note of well-wishing, but a
rabid bundling out of her effects. Howbeit, Central Ohio could not
produce another Mary, and from then on a new interest was added to the
Claytons' table-talk as one servant followed another into the Mother's
bad graces. She was already worn to a feather-edge before Mary's
ingratitude. But the shock of Fred's death completed the
demoralization of wrongly lived years. For weeks she railed at a
society which did not protect its citizens, at a church which failed
to make men good, while she now recognized a God against whom she
could express resentment.

This woman endowed with an excellent physical and mental organization
had allowed her ability and capacity to become perverted. Orderliness,
at first a well planned daily routine, gradually degenerated into an
obsession for cleanliness. Each piece of furniture went through its
weekly polishing, rugs were swept and dusted, sponged and sunned--even
Mary could not do the table-linen to her taste--and Tuesday afternoon
through the years went to immaculate ironing. The obsession for
cleanliness bred a fear of uncleanliness, and for years each dish was
examined by reflected light, to be condemned by one least streak. The
milk and butter especially must receive care equaled only by surgical
asepsis. Then there were the doors. The front door was for company,
and then only for the elect--and Fred; the side door was for the
family, and woe to the neighbor's child or the green delivery boy who
tracked mud through this portal. No amount of foot-wiping could render
the hired man fit for the kitchen steps after milking time--he used a
step-ladder to bring up the milk to the back porch. Such intensity of
attention to detail could not long fail to make this degenerating
neurotic take note of her own body, which gradually became more and
more sensitive, till she was fairly distraught between her fear of
draughts and her mania for ventilation. It was windows up and windows
down, opening the dampers and closing the dampers, something for her
shoulders and more fresh air. Church, lecture-halls and theaters
gradually became impossible. Finally she was practically a prisoner in
the semiobscurity of her home--a prisoner to bodily sensation. Then
came the autos to curse. The Clayton home was within a hundred yards
of the county road, and when the wind was from the west really visible
dust from passing motors presumed to invade the sanctity of parlor and
spare rooms, and with kindling resentment windows were closed and
windows were opened, rooms were dusted and redusted until she hated
the sound of an auto-horn, until the smell of burning gasoline caused
her nausea--but each year the autos multiplied.

At last the family realized that her loss of control was becoming
serious, that she was really a sufferer; but her antagonism to
physicians was deep-set, so the osteopath was called. Had he been
given a fair chance, he might have helped, but her obsessions were
such that she resented the touch of his manipulations, fearing that
some unknown infection might exude from his palms to her undoing.
Reason finally became helpless in the grip of her phobias. Her stomach
lining was "destroyed," and into this "raw stomach" only the rarest of
foods and those of her own preparation could be taken. She had fainted
at Fred's funeral, and repeatedly became dazed, practically
unconscious, at the mention of his name. Self-interests had held her
attention from girlhood to her wreckage, and from this grew self-
study, which later degenerated into self-pity. Her converse was of
food and feelings and self. She bored all she met, for self alone was
expressed in actions and words.

Father and daughter finally, under the pretext of a trip for her
health, placed her in a Southern sanitarium. Much was done here for
her, in the face of her protest. Illustrative of the unreasoning
intensity with which fear had laid hold upon her was her mortal dread
of grape-seeds. As she was again being taught to eat rationally,
grapes were ordered for her morning meal. The nurse noticed that with
painful care she separated each seed from the pulp, and explained to
her the value of grape-seeds in her case. She wisely did not argue
with the nurse, but two mornings later she was discovered ejecting and
secreting the seeds. The physician then kindly and earnestly appealed
for her intelligent cooperation. She thereupon admitted that many
years ago a neighbor's boy had died of appendicitis, which the doctor
said was caused by a grape-seed. The fallacy of these early-day
opinions was shown her. Then was illustrated the weakness of her faith
and the strength of her fear. She produced a draft for one thousand
dollars, which she said she always carried for unforeseen emergencies,
and offered it to the doctor to use for charity or as he wished, if he
would change the order about the grapes. Suffice it to say she learned
to eat Concords, Catawbas, Tokays and Malagas. She returned home
better, but was never wholesomely well, and to-day dreads the death
for which her family wait with unconscious patience.

What is the secret of this miserable old woman's failure to adjust
herself to the richness which life offered her? A selfish self peers
out from every act. Even her generosity to Fred was the pleasing of
self. Given all that she had, what could she not have been!
Physically, with the advantages of plenty and her country life and the
promise of her fair girlhood, what attraction could not have been hers
had kindness and generosity softened her eyes, tinted her cheeks, and
love-wrinkles come instead of worry-wrinkles.

Her mind was naturally an unusual one. She lived within driving
distance of one of Ohio's largest colleges--only an hour by train to
the state capital. Fortune had truly smiled and selected her for
happiness, but from the first it was self or her family and no further
thought or plan or consideration.

Elizabeth Clayton was given a nervous system of superb quality, which
used for the good of those she touched would have hallowed her life;
misused, she drifts into unlovable old age, a selfish neurotic. She
could have been a leader in her community, a blessing in her
generation, a builder of faiths which do not die, but she failed to
choose the good part which neither loss of servant, death of child nor
advancing age can take away.




CHAPTER III

THE PRICE OF NERVOUSNESS


The price we pay for defective nerves is one of mankind's big burdens.
Humanity reaches its vaunted supremacy, it realizes the heights of
manhood and womanhood through its power to meet what the day brings,
to collect the best therefrom and to fit itself profitably to use that
best for the good of its kind. And these possibilities are all
dependent on the superb, complicated nervous system. The miracles of
right and wise living are rooted deep in the nerve-centers. Man's
nervous system is his adjusting mechanism--his indicator revealing the
proper methods of reaction. Nothing man will ever make can rival its
sensitiveness and capacity. But when it is out of order, trouble is
certain. Excessive, imperfect, inadequate reactions will occur and
disintegrating forms of response to ourselves and our surroundings
will certainly become habitual, unless wise and resolute readjustments
are made. The common failure of the many to find the best, even the
good in life, is apparent to all--so common indeed, that the search
for the perfectly adjusted man, physically, mentally, morally
adjusted, is about as fruitful as Diogenes' daylight excursions with
his lantern. The physical, mental and moral are intricately related
even as the primary colors in the rainbow. Our nerves enter intimately
into every feeling, thought, act of life, into every function of our
bodies, into every aspiration of our souls. They determine our
digestion and our destinies; they may even influence the destinies of
others. Let us turn a few pages of a life and see the cost of
defective nervous-living.

The Pullman was crowded; every berth had been sold; the train was
loaded with holiday travelers, and the ever interesting bridal couple
had the drawing-room. The aisle was cluttered with valises and
suitcases; the porter was feverishly making down a berth; while
bolstered on a pile of pillows, surrounded by a number of anxious
faces, lay the sick woman, the source of the commotion and the
anxiety. Sobs followed groans, and exclamations followed sobs--
apparently only an intense effort of self-control kept her from
screaming. She held her head. Periodically, it seemed to relieve her
to tear at her hair. She held her breath, she clutched her throat, she
covered her eyes as though she would shut out every glimpse of life.
She convulsively pressed her heart to keep it from bursting through;
she clasped and wrung her hands, and now and then would crowd her
forearm between her teeth to shut in her pent-up anguish. She would
have thrown herself from the seat but for the unobtrusive little man
who knelt in front to keep her from falling, and gently held her on as
she spasmodically writhed. His plain, unromantic face showed deep
anxiety, not unmixed with fear. He was eagerly assisted by the dear
old lady who sat in front. Hers was mother-heart clear through; her
satchel had been disturbed to the depths in her search for remedies
long faithful in alleviating ministration; her camphor bottle lay on
the floor, impulsively struck from her kind hand by the convulsed
woman. The sweet-faced college girl who sat opposite had just finished
a year in physiology and this was her first opportunity to use her new
knowledge. "Loosen her collar and lower her head and let her have more
air," she advised. "Yes," said the little man, "I'm her husband you
see, and am a doctor. I've seen her this way before and those things
don't help."

The drummer, who had the upper berth, had retreated at the first sign
of trouble to the safety of the smoking-room, and was apparently
trying more completely to hide himself in clouds of obscuring cigar
smoke. The passengers were all cowed into attentive quietude; the
sympathetic had offered their help, while the others found
satisfaction for their aloofness in agreement with the sophisticated
porter, who, after he had assisted in safely depositing the writhing
woman behind the green curtains and had been rather roughly treated by
her protesting heels, shrewdly opined to the smoking-room refugees
that "That woman sho has one case o' high-strikes." The berth,
however, proved no panacea--she was "suffocating," she must get out of
the smoke and dust, she must get away from "those people" or she would
stifle, and to the other symptoms were added paroxysms of coughing and
gasping which sent shivers through the whole car of her sympathizers.
Her husband explained that she was just out of a hospital, which they
had left unexpectedly for home, that she never could sleep in a berth,
and if they could only get the drawing-room so he could be alone with
her he thought he could get her to sleep, but he did not know what the
consequences would be if she did not get quiet. The Pullman conductor
was strong for quiet, and he and the sweet-faced college girl and the
dear old lady formed a committee who waited on the young bride and
groom. It was hard, mighty hard, even in the bliss of their happiness,
to give up the drawing-room for a lower. Had not that drawing-room
stood out as one of their precious dreams during the last year, as,
step by step, they had planned in anticipation of that short bridal
week! But the sacrifice was made, the transfers effected, and out of
the quiet which followed, emerged order and the cheer normal to
holiday travelers. A number were gratified by the sense of their well-
doing, they had gone their limit to help; others were equally
comfortable in their satisfied sense of shrewdness, they agreed with
the porter--they had sized her up and not been "taken in."

Mrs. Platt had been Lena Dalton. She was born in Galveston forty-five
years before. Her father was a cattle-buyer, rough, dissipated, always
indulgent to himself and, when mellow with drink, lavishly indulgent
to the family. He never crossed Lena; even when sober and irritable to
the rest, she had her way with him. The high point in his moral life
was reached when she was seven. For three weeks she was desperately
ill. A noted revivalist was filling a large tent twice a day; the
father attended. He promised himself to join the church if Lena did
not die--she got well, so there was no need. She remained his
favorite. "Drunk man's luck" forgot him several years later when his
pony fell and rolled on him, breaking more ribs than could be mended.
He left some insurance, two daughters, and a very efficient widow.
Mrs. Dalton had held her own with her husband, even when he was at his
worst. She was strong of body and mind, practical, probably somewhat
hard, certainly with no sympathy for folderols. Her common-school
education, in the country, had not opened many vistas in theories and
ideals, but she lived her narrow life well, doing as she would be done
by--which was not asking much, nor giving much--caring for herself
without fear or favor till she died, as she wished, at night alone,
when she was eighty. She possessed qualities which with the help of a
normal husband would have been a wholesome heritage to the children;
but it was a home of double standards, certainly so in the training of
Lena, who had never failed, when her father was home, to get the
things her mother had denied her in his absence. She was thirteen when
he died; at fifteen then followed her two most normal years. The
accident occurred which, was to prove fateful for her life, and
through hers, for others.

Lena was a good roller-skater, but was upset one night, at the rink,
by an awkward novice and fell sharply on the back of her head. She was
taken home unconscious and was afterward delirious, not being herself
until noon the next day, when she found beside her an anxious mother
who for several days continued ministering to her daughter's every
wish. Three months later she set her heart on a certain dress in a
near-by shop window; her mother said it was too old for her, and cost
too much. Day after day passed and the dress remained there, more to
be desired each time she saw it. The Sunday-school picnic was only a
week off. She made another appeal at the supper table; her sister
unwisely interjected a sympathetic "too bad." The emphasis of the
mother's "No" sounded like a "settler," but just then things went dark
for Lena. She grasped her head and apparently was about to fall--her
face twitched and her body jerked convulsively. The mother lost her
nerve, and feeling that her harshness had brought back the "brain
symptoms" which followed the skating accident, spent the night in
ministrations--and hanging at the foot of Lena's bed, when she was
herself next morning, was the coveted dress. To those who know, the
mental processes were simple; strong desire, an implacable mother,
save when touched by maternal fear, the association in the girl's mind
of a relationship between her accident and her mother's compliance, a
remoter association of her illness at seven with her father's years of
free giving. What was to restrain her jerkings and twitchings and
meanings? Many of these reactions were taking place in the semi-
mysterious laboratory of her subconscious self; but it was the
beginning of a life of periodic outbreaks through which she had
practically never failed to secure what she desired. To the end of her
good mother's life, Lena remained the only one who could change her
"no" to "yes."

The elder sister was a more normal girl. She studied stenography and
soon married a promising young man. They had two children. He made a
trip down the coast and died of yellow fever. The wife was much
depressed and spent a bad year and most of the insurance money,
getting adjusted. Then the Galveston storm with its harvest of death
and miraculous escapes--the mother was taken, the two children left.
Meanwhile Lena had finished high school, had taken a year in the
Normal and secured a community school to teach, near Houston. She was
now eighteen, her face was interesting, some of the features were
fine. Her bluish-gray eyes could be particularly appealing; there was
much mobility of expression; a wealth of slightly curling, light-
chestnut hair was always stylishly arranged; in fact, her whole make-
up caused the young fellows to speak of her as the "cityfied school-
marm." Then came the merchant's son and all was going well, so well
that they both pledged their love and plighted their troth. The
temporary distraction of her lover's attention, deflected by the
visiting brunette in silks, an inadvertently broken appointment (the
train was late and he could not help it), and the first attack of the
"jerks" among strangers is recorded. They hastily summoned old Jake
Platt's son, just fresh from medical college, who, helpless with this
suffering bit of femininity, supplied in attention and practical
nursing what he lacked in medical discernment and skill, to the end
that one engagement was broken and another formed in a fortnight. Old
Jake had some money; the young doctor was starting in well, and needed
a wife; she was still jealous, and young Dr. Platt got a wife, who
molded his future as the modeler does his clay.

Within the first month the bride had another attack. They had planned
a trip to Houston to do some shopping and to attend the theater. The
doctor-husband was delayed on a case and found his young bride in the
throes of another nervous storm when he reached home, nor did the
symptoms entirely abate until he had promised her that he would always
come at once, no matter what other duties he might have, when she
needed him. By this promise he handicapped his future success as a
physician and did all that devoted ignorance could do to make certain
a periodic repetition of the convulsive seizures. This was but the
first of a series of concessions which involved his professional,
social and financial future, which her "infirmity" exacted of him as
the years passed. Later old Jake died and the doctor's share of his
big farms was an opportune help. But Mrs. Platt had a certain far-
reaching ambition; therefore, they soon moved to Houston. He would
have done well where he started; his education, his medical equipment,
his personality were certain to limit his progress in a city. The
doctor's wife was superficially bright, capable of adapting herself
with distinct charm to those she admired. She formed intense likes and
dislikes--while often impulsively kind-hearted, she could cling to
vindictive abuse for months. Here was a woman who proved very useful
on church committees, in societies, in Sunday-school, who worked
effectively in the Civic Club. She sang fairly well naturally, of
course "adored music" and was an efficient enthusiastic worker when
interested. But Lena Platt was never able to work when not interested.
Periodically her "fearful nervous spells" would interfere with all
duties. The doctor was absolutely subsidized. Had any other
attractions appealed to him, his wife's early evidences of implacable
jealousy would have proven a sure antidote. He was an unconscious
slave. Her nervousness expressed itself toward him in other terms than
convulsively. She had a tongue which from time to time blistered the
poor man. He would never talk back, fearful as he ever was of bringing
on one of those storms which, in his inadequate medical knowledge,
were as mysterious and ominous as epileptic attacks.

For years the absence of children in the home was a sorrow from which
much affecting sentimentality evolved, being as well the pathetic
cause for days of sickness, when outside interests were less
attractive to this artful sufferer than the attentions elicited by her
illness. Then out of the great gulf surged the heroic Galveston
tragedy, and the two orphan children came to fill the idealized want.
At first they received an abundance of impulsive loving, but unhappily
one day, a few months after they came, the foster-mother overheard the
elder girl make an unfavorable comparison between her and the real
mother; and for years distinctions were made--the younger being always
favored, the unfortunate, older child living half-terrorized, never
knowing when angry, unfair words would assail her.

Lena Platt had confided to several of her bosom friends the tragedy of
her unequal marriage and that she knew she would yet find a "soul
mate." There was a Choral Society in Houston one winter, and following
a few gratuitous compliments from the dapper young director, she
decided she had found it. He left in the spring and this dream faded.
A few months later the new minister's incautious exaggeration that "he
didn't know how he could run the church without her" came near
resulting in trouble, for some of the good sisters unkindly questioned
the quality of her sudden excessive devotion and religious zeal. Mrs.
Platt was not vicious, but she craved excitement; hers was a life of
constantly forming new plans. Attention from any source was sweet and
from those of prominence it was nectar. Things were pretty bad in the
doctor's home after the preacher episode, and she was finally
persuaded to let her husband call in another physician. He was very
nice to her, and while he never pretended to understand her case, his
medicine and advice benefited her tremendously and she went nearly a
year without a bad attack. Her visits to his office and her
conscienceless use of his time were finally brought to a sudden close
when one day he deliberately called other patients in, leaving her
unnoticed in the waiting-room. Bad times again, then other new
doctors, other periods of immunity from attacks, with exaggerated
devotion to each new helper until she had made the rounds of the
desirable, professional talent of Houston.

Meanwhile, impulsive extravagance had sadly reduced the Platt
inheritance, so when an acquaintance returned from St. Louis nervously
recreated by a specialist there, the poor doctor had to borrow on his
insurance to make it possible for her to have the benefit of this
noted physician's skill. The trip North meant sacrifice for the entire
family. Apparently she wished to be cured, and the treatment began
most auspiciously. After careful, expert investigation, assurance had
been given that if she would do her part, she could be made well in
six months. Her husband told the physician that he hoped he would
"look in on her often, for she will do anything on earth for one she
likes." The treatment was thorough-going; it began at the beginning,
and during the early weeks she was enthusiastically satisfied with the
skill of her treatment and the care of her special nurse, in whom she
found another "bosom friend," to whom she confided all. Her devotion
for the new doctor grew by leaps. Mistaking his kindness and thinking
perchance she might extract more beneficent sympathy by physical
methods, she impulsively threw herself into where-his-arms-would-have-
been had he not side-stepped. Her position physically and
sentimentally was awkward; the doctor called the nurse and left her.
Later he returned and did his best to appeal to her womanhood; he
analyzed her illness and showed her some of the damage it had wrought
both in her character and to others. He showed her the demoralization
which had grown out of her wretched surrender to impulsive desire. He
revealed to her the necessity for the effacement of much of her false
self and the true spiritualizing of her mind as the only road to
wholesome living. That same day Dr. Platt received a telegram
peremptorily demanding that he come for her. Upon his arrival he had a
short talk with the specialist who succinctly told him the problem as
he saw it. For a few minutes, and for a few minutes only, was his
faith in the helpless reality of his wife's sickness shaken; but faith
and pity and indignation were united as she told of her mistreatment
and how she had been outraged and her whole character questioned by
that "brutal doctor," who talked to her as no one had ever dared
before. She was going home on the first train and going home we found
her, having another attack in the Pullman. A collapse, her husband
told himself, from over-exertion and the result of her wounded
womanhood. "A plain case o' high-strikes" was the porter's diagnosis;
a sickness sufficiently adequate to have the sweet incense of much
public attention poured upon her wounded spirit--and to secure the
coveted drawing-room!

On her way home! She had spurned her one chance to be scientifically
taught the woefully needed lessons of right living-on her way to the
home which had become more and more chaotic with the passing of the
years and the dwindling of their means.

Who can count the price this woman has paid for her nervousness? At
fifty, with a scrawny, under-nourished body, the wrinkled remnants of
beauty, she suffers actual weakness and distress. Quick prostration
follows all effort, excepting when she is fired by excitement. All
ability to reason in the face of desire is gone; she is dominated by
emotions which become each year more unattractive; even the air-
castles are tumbled into ruins. Her husband is a slave--used as a
convenience. Her waning best is for those who attract her, her growing
worst for those who offend. One child's life is maimed by indulgence,
the other's by injustice. She has reached that moral depravity which
fails to recognize and accept any truth which is opposed to her
wishes. As she looks back over the vista of years, filled with many
activities, no monument of wholesome constructiveness remains; she has
blighted what she touched. Lena Platt, a wilful, spoiled, selfish
hysteric!




CHAPTER IV

WRECKING A GENERATION


The afternoon's heat was intense; it was reflecting in shimmering
waves from everything motionless, this breathless September day in
Donaldsville, Texas. Main Street is a half-mile long, unpainted "box-
houses" fringe either end and cluster unkemptly to the west, forming
the "city's" thickly populated "darky town." Near the station stands
the new three-story brick hotel, the pride of the metropolis. Not even
the Court House at the county seat is as imposing. Main Street is
flanked by parallel rows of one and two story, brick store-buildings,
from the fronts of which, and covering the wide, board-sidewalks,
extend permanent, wooden awnings; these are bordered by long racks
used for the ponies and mules of the Saturday crowds of "bottom
niggers" and "post oak farmers." The higher ground east of Main Street
is preempted by the comfortable residences of Donaldsville proper and
culminates in Quality Hill, where the two bankers and a select group
of wealthy bottom-planters lived in aristocratic supremacy. On this
particular afternoon, the town's only business street was about
deserted. On its shady side were hitched a few Texas ponies whose
drooping heads and wilted ears bespoke the heat--so hot it was that
the flies, even, did not molest them. Scattered groups of lounging,
idle men indicated the enervating influence of the sizzling 108
degrees in the shade.

But Donaldsville was not dead--perspiring certainly, but still
possessing one lively evidence of animation. From time to time peals
of boisterous laughter, boisterous but refreshing as the breath of a
breeze, a congenial, almost contagious laughter would roll up and down
Main Street even to its box-house fringes. Each peal would call forth
from some dusky denizen of the suburbs the proud recognition: "Dar's
Doctor Jim laughin' some mo'." Doctor Jim's laughter was one of
Donaldsville's attractive features. His friends living a mile away
claimed they often heard it--and everybody was Doctor Jim's friend. No
more genial, generous gentleman of the early post-bellum Texas South
could be found. His was an unfathomed well of good nature, good humor
and good stories. He knew all comers whether he had met them before or
not. For him, it was never "Stranger," it was always "Friend."

Let us take his proffered hand and feel the heartiness of its
greeting, feel its friendly shake, even to our shoe-soles. His good
humor beams from his deep-blue eyes; his shock of gray hair, which
knows no comb but his fingers, is pushed back from a brow which might
have been a scholar's, were it not so florid. A soft, white linen
shirt rolls deeply open, exposing a grizzled expanse of powerful
chest. Roomy, baggy, spotless, linen trousers do homage to the heat,
as does his broad, palm-fiber hat, used chiefly as a fan. Doctor Jim
McDonald, six feet in his socks, weighing 180 pounds, erect and manly
in bearing in spite of his negligee, is a remarkable specimen of
physical manhood at sixty-five. Even with the Saturday afternoon
crowds of the cotton-picking season, Main Street seems deserted if his
resounding laughter is not heard; but it takes something as serious as
a funeral to keep him away from his accustomed bench in front of
Doctor Will's drug-store, centrally located on the shady side of the
street. Doctor Will is Doctor Jim's brother, and is, according to the
negroes, a "sho-nuff" doctor.

Doctor Jim's life is comfortably monotonous. He had put up the first
windmill in the region roundabout and his was the first real bath-tub
in the county, and long before Donaldsville thought of water-works,
Doctor Jim's windmill was keeping the big cistern on stilts filled
from his deep artesian well. He started each day with a stimulating
plunge in his big tub, and never tired proclaiming that with this and
enough good whiskey he would live to be a hundred--and then Main
Street would stop and listen to the generous reverberations of his
deep-chested laugh. Three good meals, the best old Aunt Sue could cook
and Aunt Sue came from Mississippi with them after the war--were eaten
with an unflagging relish by this man whose digestion had never
discovered itself. Two mornings a week Doctor Jim drove leisurely out
to his big Trinity River plantation, a two-thousand-acre plantation,
where he was the beloved overlord of sixty negro families. This rich,
river-bottom farm, when cotton was at a good price, brought in so much
that Doctor Jim, with another of his big laughs, would say he was
"mighty lucky in having those rascally twins to throw some of it
away." One night a week he could always be found at the Lodge, and
once a day he covered each way the half-mile separating his generous,
rambling home on Quality Hill and Doctor Will's office. His only real
recreation was funerals. He would desert his shady seat and drive
miles to help lay away friend or foe--if foes he had. On such
occasions only, would he pass the threshold of a church. He
contributed generously to each of the town's five denominations and
showed considerable restraint in the presence of the cloth in his
choice of reminiscences, but it was always the occasion of a good-
natured uproar for him to proclaim, "The Missus has enough religion
for us both." Still the silence of his charity could have said truly
that his donation had constructed one-fifth of each church-building in
the town; in fact, it was his pride to double the Biblical one-tenth
in his giving.

Of his open-heartedness Doctor Jim rarely spoke but another pride was
his, to which he allowed no day to pass without some hilariously
expressed reference. He was proud of his whiskey-drinking. One quart
of Kentucky's best Bourbon from sun to sun, decade after decade! "I
have drunk enough whiskey to float a ship--and some ship too. Look at
me! Where will you find a healthier man at sixty-five? I haven't known
a sick minute since the war. If you drink whiskey right, with plenty
of water and plenty of eatin', it won't hurt anybody." This was the
law and the gospel to Doctor Jim; he never failed to proclaim it to
pale-faced youths or ailing mankind; and the Book of Judgment, alone,
will reveal the harvest of destruction which Time reaped through
Doctor Jim's influence in L---County. Yet, oddly, it was Doctor Jim's
principle and practice never to treat. He claimed he had never offered
a living soul a social drink.

"Drink whiskey right and it won't hurt anybody!" Did it hurt?

Doctor Jim and his two brothers spent their early life on a plantation
in Mississippi. The father wanted the boys to be educated. Two of them
took medical courses in New Orleans. Doctor Jim wished to see more of
the world, and literally did see much of it on a two-year cruise
around the Horn to the East Indies and China. He was thirty-five years
old in '60 when he married. Then he served as surgeon--"mighty poor
surgeon" he used to say, for a Mississippi regiment throughout the
four years of the Civil War. He and his two brothers passed through
this conflict and returned home to find their father dead, the negroes
scattered and the old plantation devastated. The three with their
families journeyed to Texas--the then Land of Promise! At twenty-five
cents an acre they bought river-bottom lands which are to-day
priceless, and the losses of the past were soon forgotten in the rapid
prosperity of the following years.

Mrs. McDonald represented all that high type of character which the
dark years of the war brought out in so many instances of Southern
womanhood. Patient, hopeful, uncomplaining she lived through the four
years of war-time separation, left her own people and journeyed to the
Southwest to begin life anew. She was particularly robust of physique,
domestic in a high sense, gentle and deeply kind. She passed through
hardship, privation and prosperity practically not knowing sickness.
Her children could not have had better mother-stock, and the scant
days were in the past, so they never knew the lack of plenty. There
were eight, from Edith, born in 1870, to Frank, in 1885, including the
twins.

Did whiskey-drinking hurt?

Edith grew into a slender, retiring girl, her paleness accentuated by
her black hair. She was quiet, read much, and took little interest in
out-of-door activities, entering into the play-life of the other
children but rarely. Her father insisted, later, on her riding, and
she became a fair horsewoman. She was refined in all her relations.
Edith went to New Orleans at seventeen. The spring after, she
developed a hacking cough and had one or two slight hemorrhages, but
at twenty was better and married an excellent young merchant. The
child was born when she was twenty-two; three weeks later the mother
died, leaving a pitiable, scrofulous baby, which medical and nursing
skill kept lingering eighteen months.

The first boy was named James, Jr., as we should expect, and, as we
should not expect, was never called "Jim." But James was not right. He
developed slowly, did not walk till over three, was talking poorly at
five; he was subject to convulsions and destructive outbreaks; he was
uncertain and clumsy in his movements, so provision was made that he
might always have some one with him. But even in the face of this
care, he stumbled and fell into the laundry-pot with its boiling
family-wash, was badly scalded and seriously blinded. James mercifully
died two years later in one of his convulsions.

Mabel was the flower of the family. Through her girlhood she was
lovable in every way, and beloved. She was blond like her father,
though not as robust as either father or mother, and in ideals and
character was truly the latter's daughter. She finished in a finishing
school, had musical ability and charm, and soon married and made a
happy home--an unusual home, until the birth of the first child. Since
then it has been a fight for health, with the pall of her family's
history smothering each rekindling hope. Operations and sanatoria,
health-resorts and specialists have not restored, and she lives, a
neurasthenic mother of two neurotic children. Happiness has long fled
the home where it so loved to bide those early days, before the strain
and stress of maternity had drained the mother's poor reserve of
vitality.

The history of Will and John, named for the two uncles, would prove
racy reading through many chapters. "The Twins" were the father's text
for spicy stories galore many years before their death. From the
first, they were "two young sinners." They both had active minds--
overactive in devising deviltry. Mischievous as little fellows, never
punished, practically never corrected by their father, humored by
sisters, house-servants, and the plantation-hands, feared and admired
by other boys, they seemed proof against any helpful influence from
the earnest, pained, prayerful mother. As boys of ten, they had become
"town talk" and were held responsible for all pranks and practical
jokes perpetrated in Donaldsville or thereabout, unless other guilty
ones were captured red-handed. Multiply your conception of a "bad boy"
by two and you will have Will at twelve; repeat the process and you
will have John. They possessed one quality--dare we call it virtue?--
which kept them dear to Doctor Jim's heart through their very worst.
They never lied to him, no matter what their misdeeds. They could lie
as veritable troopers, but from him the truth in its rankest boldness
was never withheld. As the years passed, they made many and deep
excursions into the old doctor's pocket. But he paid the bills
cheerfully and sent his reverberating laugh chasing the speedy
dollars, as soon as he got with some of his Main Street cronies. The
boys planned and worked together, protecting each other most cleverly.
Still they were expelled from every school they attended after they
were thirteen. A military academy noted for its ability to handle hard
cases found them quite too mature in their wild ways, and sent them
home. They may, for reasons best known to themselves, have been
"square with the old man," but they were a pair of thoroughgoing
toughs by twenty, not only fast but cruel, even brutal, in their evil-
doing.

Will was the first to show the strain of the pace. When twenty-two,
the warning cough sobered him a bit, and in John's faithful and
congenial company, he went first to Denver, then to New Mexico.
Doctors' orders were irksome, whiskey and cards the only available
recreation for the boys, and so they tried to follow their father's
example in developing a powerful physique on Kentucky Bourbon
("best"). John suddenly quit drinking. "Acute nephritis" was on the
shipping paster. Delirium tremens was the truth. Will was too frail to
accompany his brother's remains home. He was pretty lonely and
anxious, and miserable without John, but for several weeks behaved
quite to the doctor's satisfaction. It didn't last long, and within
the year tuberculosis and Bourbon laid him beside his brother.

May was a promising girl, "almost a hoiden," the neighbors said. She
rode the ponies bareback; she played boys' games, and at twelve looked
as though the problem of health could never complicate her glad, young
life. But cough and hemorrhage, twin specters, stalked in at sixteen
and the poor child fairly melted away and was gone in a year.

Annabel, the youngest girl, was a quiet child and thoughtful. Some
called her dull, but rather, it seems, she early sensed her fate. When
but a child she was sent to "San Antone" and operated on by a throat
specialist. After May's death she went to the mountains each summer
and spent two winters in South Texas. But she grew more and more thin,
and in the end it was tuberculosis.

Frank, the last child, was different from all the others. He seemed
bright of mind and active of body. He attended school as had none of
the other boys; he even went to Sunday-school. Physically and
mentally, he gave promise of prolonging the family line--but he proved
his father's only admitted regret. He lied and he stole. The money
which his father would have given him freely he preferred to get by
cunning. Doctor Jim could not tolerate what he called dishonesty, and
from time to time they would have words and Frank would be gone for
months. His cleverness made him a fairly successful gambler; that he
played the game "crooked" is probably evidenced by his being shot in a
gambling-joint before he was thirty.

We have thus scanned the-wreckage of a generation bred in alcohol.
Children they were of unusual physical and mental parentage, parents
who never knowingly offended their consciences, children reared in
most healthful surroundings with every comfort and opportunity for
normal development. Four of them showed their physical inferiority
through the early infection and unusually poor resistance to
tuberculosis; one was born an imbecile; one died directly from the
effects of drink; the only girl who survived early maturity, the best
of them all, spent twenty years a nervous sufferer, mothering two
nervously defective children; the physically best was the morally
worst and died a criminal.

Doctor Jim lived on with his habits unchanged, his laugh, only, losing
something in volume and more in infectiousness. Still proud of his
health he preached the gospel of good whiskey well drunk, never
sensing his part in the tragedy of his own fireside. He was nearly
eighty when the stroke came which bereft him of any possibility of
understanding, or of knowing remorse. He had laid his wife away some
years previously and for months he lingered on paralyzed, demented, in
the big, empty house, cared for by an old negro couple, hardly
recognizing Mabel when she came twice a year, but never forgetting
that, "Whiskey won't hurt anybody."




CHAPTER V

THE NERVOUSLY DAMAGED MOTHER


His name is not Lawrence Adams Abbott. The surname really is that of
one of America's first families. He, himself, is among the few living
of a third generation of large wealth.

It was an early-summer afternoon and Dr. Abbott--for he was a graduate
of Cornell Medical--was standing at one of the train gates of the
Grand Central Station in New York. As he waits apart from the small
crowd assembled to welcome, he attracts observing attention. His face
appears thirty; he is thirty-six. The features are finely cut, the
chin is especially good. The eyes are blue-gray, and a slight pallor
probably adds to his apparent distinction. His attitude is languid,
the handling of his cane gracefully indolent, the almost habitual
twisting of his chestnut-brown mustache attractively self-satisfied.
His clothing is handsome, of distinctive materials, and tailored to
the day. So much for an observing estimate. The critical observer
would note more. He would detect a sluggishness in the responses of
the pupils, as the eyes listlessly travel from face to face, producing
an effect of haunting dulness. Mumbling movements of the lips, a
slightly incoordinate swaying of the body, might speak for short
periods of more than absent-mindedness.

But the gates open and after the eager, intense meetings, and the more
matter-of-fact assumption of babies and bundles, the red-capped
porters, with their lucky burdens of fashionable traveling-cases,
pilot or follow the sirs and mesdames of fortune. Among these is one
whose handsome face is mellowed by softening, early-gray hair, and
whose perfect attire and tenderness in greeting our doctor at once
associate mother and son. She has just come down the Hudson on one of
the few seriously difficult errands of her fifty-six years.

Two weeks have passed. The room is stark bare, save for two
mattresses, a heap of disheveled bed clothes, and two men. The hours
are small and the dim, guarded light, intended to soften, probably
intensifies the weirdness of the picture. The suspiciously plain
woodwork is enameled in a dull monochrome. The windows are guarded
with protecting screens. One man, an attendant, lies orderly on his
pallet; the other, a slender figure in pajamas, crouches in a corner.
His hair is bestraggled; his face is livid; his pupils, widely
dilated; his dry lips part now and then as he mutters and mumbles
inarticulately or chuckles inanely. Now starting, again abstracted, he
is capable of responding for a moment only, as the attendant offers
him his nourishment. A few seconds later he is groaning and twisting,
obviously in pain, pain which is forgotten as quickly, as he reaches
here and there for imaginary, flying, floating things. Real sleep has
not closed his eyes for now nearly three nights. He is delirious in an
artificial, merciful semi-stupor, which is saving him the untold
sufferings of morphine denial. Before this unhappy Dr. Abbott stretch
long, wearisome weeks of readjustment, weeks of physical pain and
mental discomfort, weeks, let us hope, of soul-prodding remorse. His
only chance for a future worth spending lies in months of physical
reeducation, of teaching his femininely soft body the hardness which
stands for manliness; for him must be multiplied days of mental
reorganization to change the will of a weakling into saving
masterfulness; nor will these suffice unless, in the white heat of a
moral revelation, the false tinsel woven into the fabric of his
character be consumed. For months he must deny himself the luxuries,
even many of the comforts, his mother's wealth is eager to give. Yet
these weeks and months of development may never be, for in a short
time he will again be legally accountable, and probably will resent
and refuse constructive discipline, and return to a satin-upholstered
life--his cigarettes, his wine-dinners, his liquors, and his "rotten
feeling" mornings after--then to his morphin and to his certain
degradation. And why should this be? Time must turn back the hands on
her dial thirty-three years that we may know.

The fine Abbott home was surrounded by a small suburban estate near
Philadelphia, a generation ago; we have met the then young mistress of
the mansion, at the Grand Central Station. It was a home of richness,
a home of discriminating wealth, a home of artistic beauty; it was a
home of nervous tension. This neurotic intensity was not of the cheap
helter-skelter, melodramatic sort; there was a splendid veneer of
control. But all the mother's plans and activities depended on the
moods, whims and impulses of little Lawrence, the only child, then
glorying in the hey-day of his three-year-old babyhood. It was a
household kept in dignified turmoil by this child of wealth, who
needed a poor boy's chance to be a lovable, hearty, normal chap. It
was overattention to his health, with its hundreds of impending
possibilities; to his food, with the unsolvable perplexity of what the
doctor advised and of what the young sire wanted. More of
satisfaction, perhaps, was found in clothing the youth, as he cared
less about these details; still, an unending variety of weights and
materials was provided that all hygienic and social requirements might
be adequately met. Anxious thought was daily spent that his play and
playmates might be equally pleasing and free from danger. Almost
prayerful investigation was made of the servants who ministered, and
tense, sleepless hours were spent by this nervous mother striving to
wisely decide between the dangers to her child of travel and those
other dangers of heated summers and bleak winters at home. Frequent
trips into the city and frequent visitations from the city were made,
that expert advice be obtained. Consultations were followed by counter
consultations and conferences which but added the mocking counsel of
indecision. And the marble of her beauty began to show faint marrings
chiseled by tension and anxiety--for was not Lawrence her only son!

It was a home of double standards. The father was a wholesome,
serious-minded, essentially reasonable, Cornell man. His ideas were
manly and from time to time he laid down certain principles, and when
at home, with apparently little effort, exacted and secured a ready
and certainly not unhappy, obedience from his son. But business
interests and responsibilities were large and the bracing tonic of his
association with the boy was all too passing to put much blood-
richness into the pallor of the child's developing character.
Moreover, this intermittent helpfulness was more than counteracted by
the mother's disloyal, though unconscious dishonesty. Hers was an
open, if need be a furtive, overattention and overstimulation, an
inveterate surrender to the sweet tyranny of her son's childish whims.
There was probably nothing malicious in her many little plans which
kept the father out of the nursery and ignorant of much of their boy's
tutelage. The mother was only repeating fully in principle, and
largely in detail, her own rearing; and had she not "turned out to be
one of the favored few?"

The suburban special went into a crash, and all that a fine father
might have done through future years to neutralize the unwholesome
training of a nervous mother was lost. In fact, her power for harm was
now multiplied. The large properties and business were hers through
life, and with husband gone, and so tragically, there was increased
opportunity, and unquestionably more reason, for the intensification
of her motherly care. So the fate of a fine man's son is left in the
hands of a servile mother.

It now became a home of restrained extravagance. The table was fairly
smothered with rare and rich foods. Fine wines and imported liquors
entered into sauces and seasonings. The boy's playroom was a veritable
toy-shop, with its hundreds of useless and unused playthings. Long
before any capacity for understanding enjoyment had come, this
unfortunate child had lost all love for the simple. With Mrs. Abbott,
it was always "the best that money can buy"--unwittingly, the worst
for her child's character. It was a home of formal morality. Sunday
morning services were religiously attended; charities of free giving,
the giving which did not cost personal effort, were never failing. It
was a home of selfish unselfishness. All weaknesses in the son
throughout the passing years were winked at. Never from his mother did
Lawrence know that sympathy, sometimes hard, often abrupt, never
pampering, which breeds self-help.

Lawrence went to the most painstakingly selected, private preparatory-
schools, and later, as good Abbotts had done for generations, entered
Cornell. He had no taste for business. For years he had been
associated with gifted and agreeable doctors; he liked the dignity of
the title; so, after two years of academic work, he entered the
medical department and graduated with his class. These were good
years. His was not a nature of active evil. Many of his impulses were
quite wholesome, and college fraternity camaraderie brought out much
that was worthy. In the face of maternal anxiety and protest, he went
out for track, made good, stuck to his training and in his senior year
represented the scarlet and white, getting a second in the
intercollegiate low hurdles. Another trolley crash now, and he might
have been saved!

All through his college days a morbid fear had shortened his mother's
sleep hours with its wretchedness. Her boy was everything that would
attract attractive women. Away from her influence he might marry
beneath him, so all the refinements of intrigue and diplomacy were
utilized that a certain daughter of blood and wealth might become her
daughter-in-law. The two women were clever, and woe it was that his
commencement-day was soon followed by his wedding-day. No more
sumptuous wedding-trip could have been arranged-to California, to the
Islands of the Pacific, to India, to Egypt, then a comfortable
meandering through Europe. A year of joy-living they planned that they
might learn to know each other, with all the ministers of happiness in
attendance. But the disagreements of two petted children made murky
many a day of their prolonged festal journey, and beclouded for them
both many days of the elaborate home-making after the home-coming. And
the murkiness and cloudiness were not dissipated when parenthood was
theirs. Neither had learned the first page in Life's text-book of
happiness, and as both, could not have their way at the same time,
rifts grew into chasms which widened and deepened. Then the wife
sought attentions she did not get at home in social circles and the
husband sought comforts his wife and his home did not give, in drink
and fast living, later with cocain and morphin. The ugliness of it all
could not be lessened by the divorce, which became inevitable. By
mutual agreement, the rearing of the child was intrusted to the
father's mother, who to-day shapes its destiny with the same
unwholesome solicitude which denied to her own son the heritage of
wholesome living.

We met father and grandmother as she arrived in New York to arrange
for the treatment, which even his beclouded brain recognized as
urgent; and we leave him with a darkening future, unless Fate snatches
away a great family's millions, or works the miracle of self-
revelation, or the greater miracle of late-life reformation in the son
of this nervously damaged mother.




CHAPTER VI

THE MESS OF POTTAGE


"I know Clara puts too much butter in her fudge. It always gives me a
splitting headache, but gee, isn't it good! I couldn't help eating it
if I knew it was going to kill me the next day." The Pale Girl looks
the truth of her exclamations, as she strolls down the campus-walk
arm-in-arm with the Brown Girl, between lectures the morning after.

Clara Denny had given the "Solemn Circle" another of her swell fudge-
feasts in her room the night before, and, as usual, had wrecked sleep,
breakfast, and morning recitations for the elect half-dozen, with the
very richness of her hand-brewed lusciousness. They called Clara the
Buxom Lass, and they called her well. She was, physically, a mature
young woman at sixteen, healthy, vigorous, rose-cheeked, plump, and
not uncomely, frolicsome and care-free, with ten dollars a week, "just
for fun." She was a worthy leader of the Solemn Circle of sophomores
which she had organized, each member of which was sacredly sworn to
meet every Friday night for one superb hour of savory sumptuousness--
in the vernacular, "swell feeds."

Clara was a Floridian. Her father had shrewdly monopolized the
transfer business in the state's metropolis, and from an humble one-
horse start now operated two-score moving-vans and motor-trucks, and
added substantially, each year, to his real-estate holdings. Mr. Denny
let fall an Irish syllable from time to time, regularly took his
little "nip o' spirits," and ate proverbially long and often. Year
after year passed, with the hardy man a literal cheer-leader in the
Denny household, till his gradually hardening arteries began to leak.
Then came the change which brought Clara home from college--home,
first to companion, then to nurse, and finally through ugly years, to
slave for this disintegrating remnant of humanity. Slowly,
reluctantly, this genial, old soul descended the scale of human life.
He was dear and pathetic in the early, unaccustomed awkwardness of his
painless weakness. "Only a few days, darlin', and we'll have a spin in
the car and your father'll show thim upstarts how to rustle up the
business." The rustling days did not come, but short periods of
irritability did. He wanted his "Clara-girl" near and became impatient
in her absence. He objected to her mother's nursing, and later became
suspicious that she was conspiring to keep Clara from him, and often
greeted both mother and daughter with unreasonable words. His
interests narrowed pitiably, until they did not extend beyond the
range of his senses, and the senses themselves dulled, even as did his
feelings of fineness. He grew careless in his habits, and required
increasing attention to his beard and clothing. Coarseness first
peeped in, then became a permanent guest--a coarseness which the
wife's presence seemed to inflame, and which could be stilled finally
only by the actual caress of his daughter's lips. And with the slow
melting of brain-tissue went every vestige of decency; vile thoughts
which had never crossed the threshold of John Denny's normal mind
seemed bred without restraint in the caldron of his diseased brain.
His was a vital sturdiness which, for ten years, refused death, but
during the last of these he was physically and morally repellent.
Sentiment, that too-often fear of unkind gossip, or ignorant
falsifying of consequences, stood between this family and the proper
institutional and professional care, which could have given him more
than any family's love, and protected those who had their lives to
live from memories which are mercilessly cruel.

Clara's older brother had much of his father's good cheer and less of
his father's good sense. He, too, had money to use "just for fun," and
Jacksonville was very wide open. So, after his father's misfortune had
eliminated paternal restraint, the boy's "nips o' spirits" multiplied
into full half-pints. For twelve years he drank badly, was cursed by
his father, prayed for by his mother, and wept over by Clara. The
wonderful power of a Christian revival saved him. He "got religion"
and got it right, and lives a sane, sober life.

The older sister had married while Clara was at school, and lived with
her little family in Charleston. Her "duty" was in her home, but this
duty became strikingly emphasized when things "went wrong" in
Jacksonville, and she frankly admitted that she was entirely "too
nervous to be of any use around sickness"; nor did she ever come to
help, even when Clara's cup of trouble seemed running over. And this
cup was filled with bitterness when, suddenly, the mother had a
"stroke," and the care of two invalids and the presence of her
periodically drunk brother made ruthless demands on her twenty years.
The mother had been a sensible woman, for her advantages, and most
efficient, and under her teaching Clara had become exceptionally
capable. The two invalids now lay in adjoining rooms. "Either one may
go at any time," the doctor said, and when alone in the house with
them the daughter was haunted with a morbid dread which frequently
caused her to hesitate before opening the door, with the fear that she
might find a parent gone. As it happened, she was away, taking
treatment, unable to return home, when grippe and pneumonia took the
mother, and the candle of the father's life finally flickered out.

Clara had handled the home situation with intermittent efficiency.
When she entered her father's sick-room, called suddenly from the
thoughtless hilarities of the Solemn Circle and fudge-feasts, and saw
him so altered, and, for him, so dangerously frail, in his invalid
chair, something went wrong with her breathing; the air could not get
into her lungs; there was a smothering in her throat and she toppled
over on the bed. It seemed to take smelling-salts and brandy to bring
her back. She said afterwards that she was not unconscious, that she
knew all that was happening, but felt a stifling sense of suffocation.
Later after one of her father's first unnatural outbreaks, she
suffered a series of chills and her mother thought, of course, it was
malaria; but many big doses of quinin did not break it up, and no
matter when the doctor came, his little thermometer revealed no fever.
She spent three months at Old Point Comfort and the chills were never
so bad again. Other distressing internal symptoms appeared closely
following the shock of her mother's sudden paralysis. An operation and
a month in a northern hospital were followed by comparative relief.
But her nervous symptoms finally became acute and she was spending the
spring and early summer on rest-cure in a sanitarium when her parents
died. The Jacksonville home was then closed.

Soon after, Clara was profoundly impressed at the same revival in
which her brother was converted. While she could not leave her church
to join this less formal denomination, she entered into Home
Missionary activities with much zest. At this time a friendship was
formed with a woman-physician who, as months of association passed,
attained a reasonably clear insight into her life and encouraged her
to enter a well-equipped, church training-school for deaconesses. The
spell of the religious influences of the past year's revival was still
strong; this, and the stimulation of new resolves, carried her along
well for six months. In her studies and practical work she showed
ability, efficiency and flashes of common sense. Then she became
enamored of a younger woman, a class-mate--her heart was empty and
hungry for the love which means so much to woman's life. Unhappily,
she overheard her unfaithful loved one comment to a confidante: "It
makes me sick to be kissed by Clara Denny." Another damaging shock,
followed by another series of bad attacks--the old spells, chills and
internal revolutions had returned. She rapidly became useless and a
burden. The school-doctor sent her a thousand miles to another
specialist.

We first met Clara Denny effervescent, winning, almost charming--a
sixteen-year-old minx. Let us scrutinize her at thirty-six. What a
deformation! She weighs one hundred and seventy-three--she is only
five-feet-four; her face is heavy, soggy, vapid; her eyes, abnormally
small; her complexion is sallow, almost muddy; her chin, trembling and
double; strongly penciled, black eye-brows are the only remnant
apparent of the "Buxom Lass" of twenty years ago. Her hands are pudgy;
her figure soft, mushy, sloppy; her presence is unwholesome. The
specialist found her internally as she appeared externally. While not
organically diseased, the vital organs were functionally inert. Every
physical and chemical evidence pointed to the accumulation in a
naturally robust body of the twin toxins--food poison and under
oxidation. She was haunted by a fear of paralysis. She confused
feelings with ideas and was certain her mind was going. The spells
which had first started beside her invalid father were now of daily
occurrence. She, nor any one else knew when she would topple over. She
found another reason for her belief that her brain was affected in her
increasingly frequent headaches. For years she had been unable to read
or study without her glasses, because of the pain at the base of her
brain. When these wonderful glasses were tested, they were found to
represent one of the mildest corrections made by opticians; in fact,
her eyes were above the average. Her precious glasses were practically
window-glass.

Much of each day had been spent in bed, and hot coffee and hot-water
bottles were required to keep off the nerve-racking chills which
otherwise followed each fainting spell. Her appetite never flagged.
She had been a heavy meat eater from childhood. There never was a
Denny meal without at least two kinds of meat, and one cup of coffee
always, more frequently two--no namby-pamby Postum effects, but the
genuine "black-drip." In the face of much dental work, her sweet tooth
had never been filled. She loved food, and her appetite demanded
quantity as well as quality. Of peculiar significance was the fact
that throughout the years she had never had a spell when physically
and mentally comfortable, but, as the years passed, the amount of
discomfort which could provoke a nervous disturbance became less and
less. She was a well-informed woman, quite interesting on many
subjects, outside of herself, and had done much excellent reading.
Unafflicted, she would mentally have been more than usually
interesting. When her specialist began the investigation of her moral
self, he found her impressed with the belief that she was a "saved
woman," ready and only waiting health that she might take up the
Lord's work. But as he sought her soul's deeper recesses, he uncovered
a quagmire. Resentment rankled against the sister who had left her
alone to meet the exhausting burdens of their parents' illness and
brother's drinking--a sister who had taken care of herself and her own
family, regardless. Worse than resentment smoldered against the
father, a dull, deadening enmity, born in the hateful hours of his
odious, but helpless, dementia. Burning deep was an unappeased protest
that, instead of the normal life and pleasures and opportunities of
other girls, she had been chained to his objectionable presence.

Treatment was undertaken, based upon a clear conception of her moral,
mental and physical needs. Seven months of intensive right-living were
enjoined. The greatest difficulty was found in compelling restraint
from food excesses. The love for good things to eat was theoretically
shelved, but, practically, the forces of desire and habit seemed
insurmountable. Her craving for "good eats" now and then discouraged
her resolutions and she periodically broke over the rigid hospital
regimen. But she was helped in every phase of her living. The skin
cleared; a hint of the roses returned; twenty-five pounds of more than
useless weight melted away and weeks passed with no threat of spell or
chill. She was renewing her youth. A righteous understanding of the
lessons which her years of sacrifice held, appealed to her judgment,
if not to her feelings, and, as a new being, she returned to the
church training-school.

Most fully had Miss Denny been instructed in principle and in practice
concerning the, for her, vital lessons of nutritional right-living.
Each step of the way had been made clear, and it had proven the right
way by the test of practical demonstration. The outlined schedule of
habits, including some denials and some gratuitous activity, kept her
in prime condition--in fact, in improving condition, for six highly
satisfactory months. Never had she accomplished so much; never did
life promise more, as the result of her own efforts. She had earned
comforts which had apparently deposed forever her old nervous enemies.
Victorious living seemed at her finger-tips. Then she sold her birth-
right.

She was feeling so well; why could she not be like other people?
Certainly once in a while she could have the things she "loved." It
was only a small mess of pottage--some chops, a cup of real coffee,
some after-dinner mints. The doctor had proscribed them all, but "Once
won't hurt." Her conscience did prick, but days passed; there was no
spell, no chill, no headache. "It didn't hurt me" was her triumphant
conclusion; and again she ventured and nothing happened--and again,
and again. Then the coffee every day and soon sweets and meats,
regardless; then coffee to keep her going. The message of the
returning fainting spells was unheeded, unless answered by
recklessness, for fear thoughts had come and old enmities and new ones
haunted in. Routine and regimen had gone weeks before, and now a
vacation had to be. She did not return to her work, but deluded
herself with a series of pretenses. Before the year was gone, the imps
of morbid toxins came into their own and she resorted to wines, later
to alcohol in stronger forms--and alcohol usually makes short work of
the fineness God gives woman.

We leave Clara Denny at forty, leave her on the road of license which
leads to ever-lowering levels.




CHAPTER VII

THE CRIME OF INACTIVITY


A half-century ago the Stoneleighs moved West and located in Hot
Springs. The wife had recently fallen heir to a few thousand dollars,
which, with unusual foresight, were invested in suburban property. Mr.
Stoneleigh was a large man, one generation removed from England,
active, and noticeably of a nervous type. He was industrious,
practically economical, single-minded; these qualities stood him in
the stead of shrewdness. From their small start he became rapidly
wealthy as a dealer in real estate. Mr. Stoneleigh was a generous
eater; his foods were truly simple in variety but luxurious in their
quality and richness. Prime roast-beef, fried potatoes, waffles and
griddle-cakes supplied him with heat, energy and avoirdupois. He
suddenly quit eating at fifty-eight--there was a cerebral hemorrhage
one night. His remains weighed one hundred and ninety-five.

The wife was a comfortable mixture of Irish and English. Her people
were so thrifty that she had but a common-school education. She was
the only child, her industrious mother let her go the way of least
resistance, and were we tracing responsibility of the criminality
behind our tragedy, Mrs. Stoneleigh's mother would probably be cited
as the guilty one. The way of least resistance is usually pretty easy-
going, and keeps within the valley of indulgence. Therefore, Mrs.
Stoneleigh worked none, was a true helpmate to her husband, at the
table, and like him, grew fat, and from mid-life waddled on, with her
hundred and eighty pounds. She was superstitiously very religious,
with the kind of religion that shudders at the thought of missing
Sunday morning service or failing to be a passive attendant at the
regular meetings of the Church Aid Society. Practically, the heathen
were taught American civilization, and she herself was assured
sumptuous reservations in Glory by generous donations to the various
missionary societies.

The only real ordeal which this woman ever faced was the birth of
Henry, her first child; she was very ill and suffered severely. The
mother instinct centered upon this boy the fulness of her devotion--a
devotion which never swerved nor faltered, a devotion which never
questioned, a devotion which became a self-forgetting servility. John
arrived almost unnoticed three years later, foreordained to be this
older brother's henchman as long as he remained at home. John
developed. Education was not featured in the Stoneleighs' program, so
John stopped after his first year at high school, but he was
energetic, and through serving Henry had learned to work. At twenty he
married, left the family roof, and starting life for himself in a
nearby metropolis became a successful coal-merchant.

Little Henry Stoneleigh would have thrilled any mother's heart with
pride. He had every quality a perfect baby should have, and grew into
a large handsome boy, healthy and strong; his disposition was the envy
of neighboring mothers; nor was it the sweet goodness of inertia, for
he was mentally and emotionally quick and responsive above the
average. Indulged by his mother from the beginning and always
preferred to his brother, he never recognized duty as duty. This young
life was innocent of anything which suggested routine; order for him
was a happen-so or an of-course result of his mother's or John's
efforts; the details necessary for neatness were never allowed to
ruffle his ease nor to interfere with his impulses. The Stoneleighs'
home was a generous pile, locally magnificent, but our young scion's
fine, front room was perennially a clutter. From his birth up, Henry
was never taught the rudiments of responsibility. His boyhood,
however, was not unattractive. He had inherited a large measure of
vitality and was protected from disappointments or irritations by the
many comforts which a mother's devotion and wealth can arrange and
provide. His memory was superior. The boy inherited not only an
exceptional physique, but mental ability which made his early studies
too easy to suggest any objection on his part. In fact, he was
actively interested in much of his school work and did well without
the conscious expenditure of energy. Little discrimination was shown
in the arrangements for his higher education; still he arrived at a
popular Western Boy's Academy, rather dubious in his own mind as to
just how large a place he would hold in the sun, with mother and John
back home. Rather rudely assailed were some of his easy-going habits,
and considerable ridicule from certain sources rapidly decided his
choice of companions. It was young Stoneleigh's misfortune that at
this epoch in his development he was situated where money could buy
immunities and attract apparent friendships. He was of fine
appearance, and should by all rights have made center on the Academy
football team, being the largest, heaviest, strongest boy in school.
But one day in football togs is the sum of his football history.
Academy days went in good feeds, the popularity purchased by his
freedom of purse and easy-going good fellowship, and much reading,
which he always enjoyed and which, with his good memory, made him
unusually well-informed. Finals even at this Academy demanded special
effort, which, with Henry, was not forthcoming, so he returned home
without his diploma. This incident decided him not to attempt college,
so for a year he again basked in the indulgences of home-life. His
father's business interests had no appeal for him, but the personal
influence of a young doctor, with his vivid tales of medical-college
experiences, and the struggling within of a never recognized ambition,
with some haphazard suggestions from his mother, determined him to
study medicine.

At this time a medical degree could still be obtained in a few schools
at the end of two years' attendance. Henry chose a Tennessee college
which has, for reasons, long since ceased to exist, an institution
which practically guaranteed diplomas. Here after three very
comfortable years, he was transformed into "Doc" Stoneleigh. At
twenty-five, "Doc" weighed two hundred and forty, and returned home
for another period of rest. He did not open an office, nor did he ever
begin the practice of his profession. During the next five years he
lived at home, sleeping and reading until two in the afternoon, his
mother carrying breakfast and lunch to his room. The late afternoons
and evenings he spent in hotel-lobbies and pool-rooms, where he was
always welcomed by a bunch of sports. Popular through his small
prodigalities, he, at thirty, possessed a more than local reputation
for the completeness of his assortment of salacious stories--his
memory and native social instinct were herein successfully utilized.
"Doc" now weighed two hundred and eighty-five, ate much, exercised
none, and was the silent proprietor of a pool-room, obnoxious even in
this wide-open town.

At twelve he had begun smoking cigarettes; at twenty he smoked them
day and night. The entire family drank beer, but, oddly, the desire
for alcohol never developed with him. Yet at thirty he began acting
queerly, and it was generally thought that he was drinking. Often now
he did not go home at night and was frequently found dead asleep on
one of his pool-tables. He had fixed up a den of a room where they
would move him to "sleep it off." A fad for small rifles developed
till he finally had over twenty of different makes in his den and
spent many nights wandering around the alleys, shooting rats and stray
cats. Eats became an obsession. They invaded his room and he would
frequently awaken suddenly and empty the first gun he reached at their
imaginary forms, much to the disquiet of the neighbors. One night he
burst out of his place, began shooting wildly up and down the street
and rushing about in a frenzy. No single guardian of the peace
presumed to interfere with his hilarity, and two of the six who came
in the patrol-wagon had dismissed action for deep contemplation before
he was safely locked up as "drunk." The matter was kept quiet, as
befitted the prominence of the Stoneleighs.

To his mother's devotion now was added fear, and she freely responded
to his demands for funds. There were no more outbreaks, but he was
obviously becoming irresponsible, and influences finally secured his
mother's consent to take him to a special institution in another
state. This was quietly effected through the cooperation of the family
physician, who successfully drugged poor "Doc" into pacific inertness.
He was legally committed to an institution empowered to use
constructive restraint, and for four months benefited by the only
wholesome training his wretched life had ever known. Here it was
discovered that he had been using quantities of codein and cocain,
against the sale of which there were then no restrictions. Unusual had
been his physical equipment, his indulgences unchecked by any
sentiment or restraint, the penalty of inactivity was meting a
horrible exaction--an exaction which could be dulled only by dope. In
the early prime of what should have been manhood, this unfortunate's
mind, as revealed to the institution's authorities during his days of
enforced drugless discomfort, was a filthy cess-pool; cursings and
imprecations, vile and vicious, were vomited forth in answer to every
pain. His brother, his doctors, his mother were execrated for days,
almost without ceasing. Here was a man without principle. As he became
more comfortable, physically, he became more decent, and later his
natural, social tendencies began to reappear attractively.

At the end of four months the patient was perforce much better. He
then succeeded in inducing his mother to have him released "on
probation." Many fair promises were made. For months he was to have an
attendant as a companion. His mother, believing him well, consented,
after securing his promise in writing to return for treatment should
there be a relapse into his old habits. As evidencing the decay of his
character, these fair promises were made without the slightest
intention that they would be kept. The first important city reached
after crossing the state-line saw his demeanor change. Beyond the
legal authority of the state in which he had been committed, he was
free, and he knew it. With a few words he consigned his now helpless
attendant to regions sulphurous, and alone took train in the opposite
direction from home. For several months he went the paces. With his
medical knowledge and warned by his recent experiences he was able to
so adjust his doses as to avoid falling into the hands of the
authorities. The weak mother never refused to honor his drafts. Six
months later a serious attack of pneumonia caused her to be sent for,
and when he was able to travel she took him back to the home he had
forsworn.

For over ten years "Doc" Stoneleigh has lived with his mother, a
recluse, a morphin-soaked wreck. Sometimes he may be seen in a park
near their home, sitting for hours inert, or automatically tracing
figures in the gravel with his cane, noticing no one, unkempt, almost
repellent. He is still sufficiently shrewd to secure morphin in
violation of the law. Sooner or later the revenue department will cut
off his supply. He drifts, a rotting hulk of manhood, unconsciously
nearing the horrors of a drugless reality.

The depth of this man's degradation may tempt us to feel that he was
defective, but an accurate analysis of his life fails to reveal any
deficiency save that reprehensible training which made possible his
years of physical and mental indolence.




CHAPTER VIII

LEARNING TO EAT


It was three in the early July afternoon. The large parlor, which had
been turned into a bedroom, was darkened by closely-drawn shades; a
dim, softened light coming from a half-hidden lamp deepened the dark
rings around the worn nurse's eyes--eyes which bespoke sleepless
nights and a heavy heart. A wan mother stood near the nurse, every
line of her face showing the pain of lengthened anxiety. Tensely one
hand held the other, the restraint of culture, only, keeping her from
wringing them in her anguish. Dr. Harkins, the village physician,
stood at the foot of the bed, his honest face set in strong lines in
anticipation of the worst. Many scenes of suffering had rendered him
only more sympathetic with human sorrow, sympathetic with the real,
increasingly intolerant of the false. At the bed-side stood the
expert, who had come so far, at so great an expense-long, rough miles
by auto that a few hours might be saved-who had come, they all
believed, to decide the fate of the beloved girl who lay so death-like
before them.

Ruth Rivers was the only one in the room who was not keenly alert or
distressingly tense. Even in her waxy whiteness and unnatural
emaciation, her face was good. The forehead was high and, with the
symmetrical black eyebrows and long, dark lashes, suggested at a
glance the good quality of her breeding. The aquiline nose was pinched
by suffering, the finely curving lips were now bloodless and drawn
tight from time to time, as though to repress the cry of pain; these
marks of suffering could not rob her countenance of its refinement.
Her breathing was shallow; at times it seemed irregular; and wan,
almost inert, the fragile figure seemed nearing the eternal parting
with its soul. The silence of the sick-room was fearsomely ominous.

Three weeks before, Ruth, her mother, and ever-apprehensive Aunt
Melissa had come from the heat of coastal Georgia to the invigorating
coolness of the Southern Appalachians. They had come to Point View
several weeks later than usual this year, as spring was tardy and the
hot days at home had been few. Ruth had been most miserable for weeks
before they left home, but had stood the trip well, and Judge Rivers
had received an encouraging, indeed a hopeful report from the invalid.
But a few days later a letter telling of another of Ruth's attacks was
followed immediately by an urgent, distressed telegram which caused
him to adjourn court and hasten to his family.

For many years Dr. Harkins had driven through the mountains eight
starving months, serving and saving the poorly housed and often
destitute mountaineers. The tourist flood from the burning, summer
lowlands to the mountains' refreshment gave him his living. Dr.
Harkins was as truly a missionary as though he were on the pay-roll of
a denominational society. He had always helped, or the mountains had
helped, or something had helped Ruth before, but this time nothing
helped. The doctor had already called a neighboring physician; they
were both perplexed, and each feared to say the word which, in their
minds, spelled her doom. For nearly three days Ruth had been
delirious, this gentle, sensible, reserved girl, tossing and calling
out. A few times she had even screamed, and her mother always said
that she had been "too fine a baby to even cry out loud." For five
nights there had been no sleep save an unnatural stupor produced by
medicine. Mother and nurse had taxed their strength keeping her in bed
during the paroxysms of her suffering, which, hour by hour, seemed to
grow in intensity and to defy the ever-increasing doses of quieting
drugs. She had recognized no one for days. Even her mother's voice
brought back no moment of natural response. "It must be meningitis,"
Dr. Harkins finally said, and the other doctor nodded in agreement.
And Aunt Melissa informed the neighbors that it was "meningitis" and
that her darling Ruth could last but a few days. The mother's anxiety
reiterated "meningitis," and good, levelheaded Martha King, the nurse,
knew that the three cases of meningitis which she had nursed had
suffered the same way before they died. When Judge Rivers came, he
spent but one minute in the sick-room. It was days before he dared
reenter. Ruth did not know him. For the first time in her twenty-seven
years, she had failed to respond happily to his hearty, rich-voiced
love-greeting. The Judge's small fortune had grown slowly. Only that
year had the mortgage been finally lifted on their comfortable Georgia
home. But in that minute at the sufferer's bedside all he had was
thrown into the scales. Ruth must be saved. She was the only daughter;
she was a worthily beloved daughter. "No, she cannot be moved to Johns
Hopkins; the trip is too rough and long; she is too weak," decided Dr.
Harkins, and the consultant agreed. "Our only hope for her is to get
the 'brain expert' from the next state." Five days had passed since
the patient had retained food. For twenty-four hours the tide of her
strength seemed only to ebb. They all counted the minutes. The summer-
boarders in the little town, so many of whom knew the sick girl,
counted the hours, for Ruth was much quieter--too quiet, they felt. An
hour before, Aunt Melissa had tiptoed in to see her darling; the
finger-tips seemed cold in her excited palm, the nails looked bluish
to her dreading eyes, and she retreated to the back porch-steps, threw
her apron over her head and sat weaving to and fro, inconsolate; nor
would she look up even when the big motor panted into sight out of a
cloud of dust, and stopped. "It is too late, too late," moaned Aunt
Melissa. Dr. Harkins and Judge Rivers met the neurologist. The former
reviewed the case in a few sentences. The Judge simply said: "Doctor,
my whole savings are nothing. I would give my life for hers."

In the sick-room tensity had given place to intensity, as with deft,
skillful directness the doctor made his examination. He had finished;
the light had again been dimmed, and in the added shadow the haggard
face seemed ashen. Motionless, thoughtful, interminably silent, the
expert stood, holding the sick girl's hand. The nurse first saw him
smile. It was a serious smile; it was a strangely hopeful smile--a
smile which was instantly reflected in her own face and which the
mother caught and Dr. Harkins saw. Each one of them was thrilled with
such thrills as become rare when the forties have passed, thrilled
even before they heard his words: "It is not meningitis. Your daughter
can get well."

In the conference which followed, Dr. Harkins felt that his confidence
had been well placed. It is surprising how much the expert had
discovered in forty minutes,--and how carefully considered and
relentlessly logical were his reasons for deciding that it was an
"auto-toxic meningismus, secondary to renal and pancreatic
insufficiency," which, translated, signifies a self-produced poison
due to defective action of the liver and pancreas, resulting in
circulatory disturbance in the covering of the brain. Most clearly,
too, he revealed that several of the most alarming symptoms were the
result of the added poison of the drugs which had been given for the
relief of the intolerable pain. Each step of the long road to recovery
was outlined with equal clearness, and the light of hope burst in
strong on Dr. Harkins first, then on Martha King. The crushing load
was lifted from off the Judge's heart. The promise seemed too good to
be true, to the mother, who had seen her daughter go down through the
years, step by step. It never penetrated the shadow of Aunt Melissa's
pessimism.

What forces had been at work to bring ten years of relentlessly
increasing suffering, even impending death, to Ruth Rivers at twenty-
seven, when she should have been in the glory of her young womanhood?
"Her headaches have always been a mystery," her mother had said again
and again, and this saying had been accepted by family and friends.
Let us join hands with Understanding, step behind this mystery, and
find its solution.

Judge Rivers' father had been Judge Rivers, too. The war between the
States had absorbed the family wealth; still, our Judge Rivers showed
every evidence of good living: he was always well-dressed, as befitted
his office, portly and contented, as was also befitting, fine of color
and always well. His daughter's illness had been practically the only
problem in the affairs of his life which he had not solved to his
quite reasonable satisfaction. His love for Ruth held half of his
life's sweetness.

Mrs. Rivers was tall, active, almost muscular in type. Her brow, like
her daughter's, was high. The quality of her Virginia blood had marked
her face. She had always been unduly pale, but never ill. Controlled
and reasonable, she had ministered to her home with efficiency and
pride.

Aunt Melissa, her sister, five years the senior, was tall and strong,
but her paleness had long been unhealthily tinted with sallowness. For
years she had been subject to attacks of depression when for days she
would insist upon being let alone, even as she let others alone. Ruth
was the only bright spot she recognized in her life, and her
morbidness was constantly picturing disaster for this object of her
love.

Ruth's babyhood was a joy. Plump, cooing and happy, she evinced, even
in her earliest days, evidences of her rare disposition. At eighteen
months, however, she began having spells of indigestion. She always
sat in her high-chair beside Aunt Melissa, at the table, and rarely
failed to get at least a taste of anything served which her fancy
indicated. Her wise little stomach from time to time expressed its
disapproval of such unlawful liberties, but parents and aunts and
grandmothers, and probably most of us, are very dull in interpreting
the protests of stomachs. So Ruth got what she liked, and what was an
equal misfortune, she liked what she got; and no one ever associated
the liking and the getting with the poor sick stomach's periodic
protests. As a girl Ruth was not very active. There was a certain
reserve, even in her playing, quite in keeping with family traditions.
Mother, Aunt Melissa and the servants did the work--still Ruth
developed, happy, unselfish, kindly and sensitive. There was rigid
discipline accompanying certain rules of conduct, and her deportment
was carefully molded by the silent forces of family culture. They
lived at the county-seat. The public schools which Ruth attended were
fairly good. As she grew older, while she remained thin and never
approached ruggedness, her digestive "spells" were much less frequent,
and during the two years she spent away from home in the Convent, she
was quite well, and one year played center on the second basket ball
team. Two years away at school were all that the Judge could then
afford. And so at eighteen she was home for good. That fall she began
having headaches. She was reading much, so she went to Mobile and was
carefully fitted with glasses. The correction was not a strong one,
but the oculist felt it would relieve the "abnormal sensitiveness of
her eyes, which is probably causing her trouble."

Throughout her years of suffering, Ruth had always maintained the rare
restraint which marks fineness of soul. No one ever heard her
complain. Even her mother could not be sure that another attack was
on, until she found Ruth alone in her darkened room. Acquaintances,
even friends, never heard her mention her illness.

The midsummer months in Southern Alabama drive such as are able to the
relief of the mountains of Tennessee and the Carolinas. The Judge had
always felt that he should send his family away during July and
August; they often went in June when the summers were early. And these
weeks of change proved, year after year, the most helpful influences
that came to Ruth. She always improved and would usually remain
stronger until after Thanksgiving. But with irregular periodicity the
blinding, prostrating headaches would return--a week of pain, nausea
and prostration. Yet Ruth never asked for, nor took medicine, unless
it was ordered by the doctor, and then more in consideration of the
desires of her family, for the unnatural sensations, produced by most
of the remedies she was given, seemed but the substitution of one
discomfort for another. The only exercise that counted, which this
girl ever had, was during her weeks at Point View. The stimulation of
the invigorating mountain air seemed to get into her blood, and after
a few weeks with her friendly mountains she could climb the highest
with little apparent fatigue. At home, the country was flat, the roads
sandy, and even horseback riding uninteresting. She had never been
taught any strengthening form of daily home-exercise, and so she
suffered on. While the glasses brought comfort, they lessened, for but
a short time, the number and the intensity of her attacks. Several
physicians were consulted and several varying courses of treatment
undertaken, but no betterment came which lasted, and the headaches
remained a mystery, not only to her mother, but to others who
seriously tried to help. As we are behind the scenes, we need no
longer delay the mystery's solution. It was not eyes, they were
accurately corrected; it was not stomach, as much stomach treatment
proved; it was not anaemia, or the many excellent tonics that had been
prescribed would have cured; it was not displaced vertebrae nor
improperly acting nerves, or the manipulations and vibrations and deep
kneadings of the specialists in mechanical treatment would have
rescued her years before. It was, and here is the secret--her mother's
wonderful table!

The war had brought ruinous, financial losses to most Virginia
families. As a result, Ruth's mother had been taught, in minute
detail, the high art of the best cookery of the first families of
Virginia. And how she could cook, or make the colored cook cook! The
Rivers' table had, for years, been the standard of the county-seat.
Mrs. Rivers' spiced hams, fig preserves, brandied plum-pudding,
stuffed roast-duck, fruit salads, all made by recipes handed down
through several generations, could not be excelled in richness and
toothsomeness. No simple dishes were known at the Rivers' table;
these, for those poor mortals who knew not the inner art. Double
cream, stimulating seasonings, sauces rarely spiced, the sort that
recreate worn-out appetites, were never lacking at a Rivers' meal.
Ruth had been overfed, had been wrongly fed since babyhood.

The expert said hope lay in taking her back to babyhood and feeding
her for days as though she were a four months' child. He said she must
be taught to eat; that her salvation lay in a few foods of plebeian
simplicity, foods which almost any one could get anywhere, foods which
did not involve long hours of preparation according to priceless
recipes. He said also that certain other foods were vicious, such
matter-of-course foods on the Rivers' table, foods which Mrs. Rivers
would have felt humiliated to omit from a meal of her ordering, and he
insisted that these must be lastingly denied this young woman with
prematurely exhausted, digestive glands. The process of her
reeducation, succinctly expressed as it was in a few sentences, called
for tedious months of care, of denial and of effort. It demanded that
which was more than taxing in many details. So for Ruth Rivers long
weeks were spent in a hospital-bed. She was fed on the simplest of
foods, each feeding measured with the same care as were her few
medicines, for now truly her food was medicine, and her chief medicine
was food. Massage seemed at last to bring help, for even in bed she
gained in strength.

It was several weeks before her mind was entirely clear, but she was
soon being taught the science of food; this included an understanding
outline of food chemistry, of the processes of digestion, of food
values, of the relation of food to work, of the vital importance of
muscular activity and the relation of muscle-use to nervous health.
Her beloved sweets and her strong coffee, the only friends of her
suffering days, were gradually buried even from thought in this
accumulation of new and understood truths--most reasonable and sane
truths. Forty pounds she gained in twelve weeks. She had never weighed
over one hundred and twenty-five. She has never weighed less than one
hundred and forty-five since, and, as she is five feet eight, her one
hundred and forty-five pounds brought her a new symmetry which, with
her high-bred face, transformed the waxen invalid into an attractive
beauty. She learned to do manual work. She learned to use every muscle
the Lord had given her, every day she lived. An appetite unwhipped by
condiments or unstimulated by artifice, an appetite for wholesome
food, has made eating a satisfaction she never knew in the old days.

This was ten years ago. Many changes have come in the Rivers'
household, the most far-reaching of which is probably the revolution
which shook its culinary department from center to circumference. What
saved daughter must be good for them all. Father is less portly, more
active, less ruddy. Some of the color he lost was found by the mother.
Aunt Melissa disappears into her gloom-days but rarely, and has
smiling hours unthought in the past. And Ruth has proven that the
mystery was adequately solved. She married the kind of man so
excellent a woman should have, and went through the trying weeks of
her motherhood and has cared for her boy through the demanding months
of early childhood without a complication. And all this in the face of
Aunt Melissa's reiterated forebodings!




CHAPTER IX

THE MAN WITH THE HOE


In the early years of the eighteenth century, a hardy family lived
frugally and simply on a few, fertile Norman acres. Their home was but
a hut of stone and clay and thatch. It was surrounded by a carefully
attended vineyard and fruit trees which, in the springtime, made the
spot most beautiful. On this May day the passerby would have stopped
that he might carry away this scene of perfect pastoral charm. The
blossoming vines almost hid the house, the blooming trees perfumed the
morning breeze, and it all spoke for simple peace and contentment. But
at this hour neither peace nor contentment could have been found
within. Pierre, the eldest son, was almost fiercely resenting the
quiet counsel of his father and the tearful pleadings of his mother.
Pierre loved Adrienne, their neighbor's daughter. The two had grown up
side by side, each had brought to the other all that their dreams had
wished through the years of waiting. Pierre had long worked extra
hours and they both had saved and now, nearing thirty, there was
enough, and they could marry. But the edict had gone forth that
Huguenot marriages would no longer be recognized by the state; that
the children of such a union would be without civil standing. So
Pierre and Adrienne had decided to leave France, nor did the protests
of their elders delay their going. It was a solemn little ceremony,
their marriage, a ceremony practically illegal in their land. Rarely
are weddings more solemn or bridal trips more sad, for to England they
were starting that same day, never to see their dear France again,
never to prune or to gather in the little vineyard, never again to
look into the faces of their own kin.

It was not a worldly-wise change. Wages in England were very low and
there were no vineyards in that chilly land, and Pierre worked and
died a plain English farm-hand, blessed only with health, remarkable
strength, and a wretched, but happy home. Much of their parents'
sturdiness and independence was passed on into the blood of their four
children, two boys and two girls, for in 1748, after long saving, they
all left England for America, "the promised land," and sailed for New
Amsterdam. Husbandmen they were, and for two generations painfully,
gravely, they tilled the semi-productive soil of their little farm,
west of the Hudson. Land was cheap in the New World. Their vegetables
and fruit grew, the market in the city grew, and the van der Veere
farms grew, and peace and contentment abode there.

After the War of 1812 two healthy, robust van der Veere brothers
tramped into New York City each carrying in his bundle nearly
$1000.00, his share of their father's recently divided farm. They
started a green-grocery shop. One attended the customers, the other,
through the summer months, worked their little truck garden away out
on the country road, a road which is to-day New York's Great White
Way. They prospered. One married, and his two boys founded the van der
Veere firm of importers. From the East this company's ship, later its
ships, brought rare curios, oriental tapestries and fine rugs to make
elegant the brown-stone front drawing-rooms of aristocratic,
residential New York of that generation. The sons of one of these
brothers to-day constitute the honorable van der Veere firm. The other
brother left one son, Clifford, and two daughters, Dora and Henrietta.
It is into the life-history of Clifford van der Veere that we now
intrude. He was a sturdy youth, with no illnesses, save occasional
sore throats which left him when he shed his tonsils. His father was a
reserved, kindly man, a quietly efficient man. His competitors never
understood the sure growth of his success--he was so unpretentious in
all that he did. Clifford's mother was a sensible woman, untouched by
the pride of wealth and the snobbery of station. Their home, facing
Central Park, stood for elegance and restraint. There were no other
children for ten years after the son's birth, then came the two
sisters, which domestic arrangement probably proved an important
factor in deciding the rest of our story. From early boyhood Clifford
was orderly, obedient, studious and quietly industrious. He made no
trouble for parents or teachers--other mothers always spoke of him as
"good." He was thirteen when his only sinful escapade happened. Some
of the Third Avenue boys shared the playgrounds in the park with
Clifford's crowd. They all smoked, some chewed and the more self-
important of them swore, and thereby, one day, our Fifth Avenue young
hopeful was contaminated. It was a savory-smelling wad of fine-cut. It
burned, a little went the wrong way and it strangled, but the joy of
ejecting a series of amber projectiles was Clifford's. Another
mouthful was ready for exhibition purposes when some appreciative
admirer enthusiastically clapped our boy between the shoulder-blades
and most of his mouth's contents, fluid and solid, was swallowed.
Somehow Clifford got home, but landed in a wilted heap on the big
couch, chalk-white, and sick beyond expression. The doctor was called
and, discovering the cause, made him helpfully sicker. The next
morning Clifford's father gravely offered to give him $500.00, when he
was twenty-one, if he would not taste tobacco again until that time.
Either the memory of first-chew sensations or the doctor's ipecac, or
the force of habit, or something, kept him from ever tasting it again.

Later, Clifford went to Columbia and was quietly popular with the
quieter fellows. It would seem that had any little devils not been
strained out of his blood by his long line of Huguenot ancestry, they
had followed the fate of the fine-cut, for no one who knew Clifford
van der Veere was ever anxious about the probity of his conduct. He
did not take to the importing business, while his cousins early showed
a natural capacity for the work of the big firm in all its branches.
Clifford's parents, too, seemed to feel that it was time that there be
a professional member of their honorable family. Moreover the property
was large, and the younger sisters would require a guardian, and the
estate an administrator. So Clifford finished the law-course. Nor was
it many years until the family fortune of approximately one million
dollars in real estate, securities and mortgages was left him to
administer for himself and the two sisters. Thus before thirty the
responsibility of these many thousands swept down upon him. Limited in
practical contact with the world, geographically, politically,
socially, having learned little of the play-side of life, he was by
inheritance, training and inclination a conservative. He had never
practiced law. He never tried a case, but he now opened a downtown
office where he punctually arrived at ten o'clock and methodically
spent the morning, carefully, personally managing all the details of
the entailed estate. He was essentially conscientious and, as the
years passed, there was no lessening of interest in his devotion to
each transaction, large or small. There were no losses, though his
conservatism turned him away from many golden opportunities which
knocked at the door of his wealth, the acceptance of which would have
doubled the estate in any ten-year period of these days of New York's
magnificent expansion. He was nearly forty when he married a quiet,
good woman who added little that was new, who most conscientiously
subtracted nothing of the old, from his now systematic life. They both
realized that their Fifth Avenue home was rapidly growing out of date,
so for nearly five years they spent their spare hours daily, in the,
to Clifford, vital and seemingly unending details of modernizing the
old house. It was during those days when the plans so carefully
considered were being realized in granite and marble and polished
woods, that Mrs. van der Veere felt the first distressing touch of
anxiety. Her husband seemed unduly particular. At times he would be
painfully uncertain about minute and minor details of construction and
on a few occasions unprecedentedly failed to get to the office at all,
delayed by protracted discussions of the advisability of certain
changes, long since decided upon, discussions which shook the
confidence of architect and contractor in both his sagacity and
judgment. Fortunately Mrs. van der Veere proved a wholesome counselor
and her opinions often settled details her husband, alone, apparently
could not have decided. At last the great new house was finished; it
was such a home as the van der Veeres should have. Indecision largely
disappeared for three quite normal years, office details only now and
then ruffling the smooth normality of Mr. van der Veere's life. Then
with the early spring nights came an unexplained insomnia. He would
waken at five, four, even three o 'clock, and, unable to get back to
sleep, would read until morning. The doctor found little to excite his
apprehension, but prescribed golf, so three afternoons a week all
summer and fall two hours were reserved for the links. He was better,
still the doctor insisted on three months, that winter, in Southern
California where he could keep up his play. Here he did eighteen holes
a day for weeks at a time, yet some of the nights were haunted by
scruples about neglecting his administrative duties. They returned
home in the spring, and a moderately comfortable year and a half
followed. Then things went wrong rapidly and badly. Peremptorily he
was ordered away from all "work" to Southern France, later to Italy
for the winter and to Switzerland for the next summer. And as the Alps
have given of their strength to other needing thousands, so they
ministered to him. He began climbing. His wife thought it was a new
interest. Certainly that was a factor, but he became ambitious and
went wherever he could find guides to take him. He returned home very
rugged the fall he was fifty. Still with reason, Mrs. van der Veere
was anxious, an anxiety shared by the family doctor. Between them they
planned for him a sort of model life, truly a circumscribed life, and
for five years wife and associates protected him from any possible
strain, and for five years it worked successfully. Then in less than a
month, almost like a bolt from the blue, all former symptoms returned,
aggravated in form, bringing most unwelcome new ones in their trail.
The family doctor called in a neurologist who, after examining the
nervous man, spoke seriously of serious possibilities, and advised
serious measures.

Mr. van der Veere was now fifty-five years old, short, almost stocky
in build, dark-skinned, with steel-gray hair and mustache. He was
depressed in mien though always well-bred in bearing. He was not
excitable and outwardly showed little of his suffering. Clifford van
der Veere had always taken life and his duties seriously. For years
his fear of making mistakes had been a chronic source of energy
leakage-now it was a nightmare. All he did cost an exhausting price in
the effort of decision. Duty and fear had long made a battle-ground of
his soul, and when he realized that he had broken down again from
"overwork," as they all expressed it, the depression of melancholy was
added to the weight he so quietly bore. Yet this man of many
responsibilities and interests had never truly worked. Since he left
college he had played at work. Effort had been expended never more
conscientiously. He was ever ready to give added hours of attention to
problems referred to him. His intentions were true, but he did not
know how to work. He did not know how to separate the serious from the
unimportant, and he had never added the leaven of humor to the day's
duties. An unusually well-equipped man, physically and mentally, he
should have found the responsibilities of his administratorship but
play. Had he been living right, he could have multiplied his
efficiency three-fold and been the better for the larger doing. His
wife felt he must "rest," and so did the family doctor; he himself was
practically past arguing or disagreeing.

But the rest-cure which the neurologist prescribed was certainly
unique. It may have been wrongly named. Mr. van der Veere was a man of
unusually strong physique. Nature had equipped him with a muscular
system better than nine-tenths of his fellowmen possess, but he had
never utilized it. For many generations his forbears had wrung food
and life and, unconsciously, health from the soil. He was three
generations from touch with mother earth, and back to the soil he was
sent. He was taught to work increasing hours of common, manual labor.
For weeks he did his part of the necessary drudgery of the world. He
shoveled coal, he spaded in the garden, he worked on the public roads,
he transplanted trees, he hoed common weeds with a common hoe, he
tramped, he toiled and he sweat. The need for physical labor was in
his blood. He needed his share of it, as do we all. And his blood
answered exultantly, as good blood always does, to the call of honest
toil. Within a month he realized a keenness for the work of the day.
His fine muscles took on hardness, they seemed to double in size, and
strength came, and with it not only a willingness but an eagerness
which transformed that strength into productive effort. With the
willingness to do what his hands found to do came sleep, for his
nerves--bred as they had been in good stock--rejoiced when they found
him living as they had for years begged him to live. A fifteen-year-
old appetite came to the fifty-five-year-old man, and transformation
wrought happy changes in his face and bearing. Indecision faded,
introspection disappeared, and a decision came which was to forever
put indecision out of his way. A decision which brought the peace and
contentment to the van der Veere Fifth Avenue home, which religious
intolerance had robbed from the van der Veeres in their stone-thatched
hut in far-away Normandy, a simple decision, not requiring brilliance
nor a college education, nor a professional training, nor even a
loving helpmate to accomplish: "Six days shall I labor not only with
my brain but with my hands, and the seventh day shall I rest."




CHAPTER X

THE FINE ART OF PLAY


It was her earliest recollection, and parts of it were not clear.
There were those big men carrying in her father, and her mother's face
looking so strange, and her father looking so strange with the white
cloths about his head, and the strange faces of doctors and neighbors
she had not seen before. Then the strange stillness and the strange
new fear when her father did not move and they all were so quiet.
These memories were rather blurred; she was not always sure which were
memories of the events or which had grown from what she had afterwards
heard. But of the funeral she was very sure, for she could never
forget those beautiful silvered handles on the shining wooden coffin,
or her resentment toward the women dressed in black who would not let
her touch these--the prettiest things she had ever seen. The colts had
run away, frightened, when an empty sap-barrel fell off the sled, and
her father had been thrown against a tree and brought home with a
fractured skull, to live unconscious two days, and to be buried in the
shiny coffin with the silver handles.

There had been an older child who died as a baby of eight months, and
so Widow Gilmore was left at thirty-five with her only child, Hattie,
and a hundred-and-forty-acre farm, with the house in town. Mrs.
Gilmore had good business sense. She lived alone with Hattie, ran the
farm, and soon her interests degenerated into a slavery to household
and farm details.

The widow had taught school until she was nearly thirty. She was not
handsome, and the meager sentiment of her soul easily disintegrated
into morbidness. She wore black the rest of her days, and for the rest
of her days church services were hours of public mourning. The Gilmore
"parlor" was closed after the funeral, and Hattie never got a glimpse
within its almost gruesomely sacred walls, save as she timidly peeped
in during cleaning days or, rarely, when her mother tearfully led her
in and they stood before the life-size crayon portrait of the
departed. Even in her quiet play, Hattie must keep on the other side
of the house.

Hattie Gilmore was a sober child and lived a sober childhood. She was
not strong; nothing had ever been done to make her so. Play and
playmates were always limited. She and her mother belonged to
Coopersville's "better class," most of the town children living below
the bridge where the homes of the factory people crowded. Boys were
"too rough," and the other girls were "not nice enough"; so she played
much alone--such play as it was, with her two china dolls and the tin
stove and tin dishes, which made up her toys. There was little to
stimulate her imagination and nothing to develop comradeships and
friendships. For hours of her play-time she sat inertly on the front
stoop and watched the passersby, for there had never been any thought
of training her in the art of play. Instead, she was warned to keep
her dress clean and rather sharply reprimanded if, perchance, dress or
apron was torn. So she stood and watched the school-play of the other
children, never knowing the thrills of a game of "tag," nor the
reckless adventures of "black man"; even "Pussy wants a corner"
disarranged her painfully curled curls and was rarely risked. "Hop-
scotch," when the figure was small and lady-like, was practically the
limit of Hattie's "violent exercise." So she did not develop-how could
she! She remained undersized. Moreover, her play-days were sadly
shortened, for they early merged into work-days. Housekeeping cares
were many, as her mother planned her household. According to York
State traditions Hattie was early taught domestic details, and for
over a generation seriously, slavishly followed the routine
established by her mother who doggedly, to the last, knew no shadow of
turning, and went to her honestly earned long rest within a week after
she took to her bed. Hattie finished the town high school, and had
taken her school-work so seriously that she was valedictorian--being
too good to soil your dress ought to bring some reward. Her teacher
proudly referred to her as an example of the fine work a student could
do who was not disturbed by outside influences. Commencement night,
the same summer she was seventeen, she was almost pretty. The natural
flush of success and of public recognition was heightened by the
reflected flush from the red roses she wore; and Ben Stimson, the old
doctor's son, carried the image of this, her most beautiful self, in
his big heart for many years. He was then twenty, a sophomore at
college, and a wholesome fellow to look upon. He took Hattie home that
night. It was early June, and they dallied on the way. She was so
nearly happy that her conscience became suspicious. She felt something
awful was going to happen!--and she almost did not care. They had
reached the front steps of her home. Ominously, silence fell. Suddenly
impulsive Ben crushed her to him and--must it be told?--kissed her,
kissed Hattie Gilmore's unsullied lips. For a moment her heart leaped
almost into wanton expression. A moment more--another kiss, and she
might have been compromised, she might have responded to the thrilling
love which was calling to her heart, but the goddess of her destiny
willed otherwise. The front door opened; an angular form appeared; an
acrid voice fairly curdled love-thoughts as it assailed the impetuous
lover. Within a minute he was slinking away and the rescued maiden was
safe in the indignant, resenting arms of her mother--safe, but for
years to be tempted and troubled by remorse and wishes, to be haunted
by unaccepted hopes. "Ben Stimson is a free lance. He can't help
being, for his father's a free thinker and the boy never went to
Sunday-school a dozen times in his life. Let him join the church and
show folks he wants to live right; then, if he courts you regular, I
won't mind, but he is too free and easy. I call that kind dangerous,"
her mother said.

Ben Stimson wrote Hattie a note the next day, which she did not
answer, but kept for years. Two summers later he drove up to the
house, looking mighty fine in the doctor's new runabout, driving the
high-stepping bay, natty in a "brand-new" tan harness--the first
Hattie had ever seen. He asked her to come with him for a drive, and
again her mother's nipping negative influenced her decision against
the pleadings of a yearning, lonely heart.

Mrs. Gilmore finally died an exclusive, matter-of-fact, joyless death,
even as she had lived. Ben came to the funeral. He called on Hattie
the next day. Inconstancy was not one of his weaknesses, and the veil
of her Commencement beauty had clung to her through these many years,
in her old lover's eyes. He was again impetuous and offended every
conservative propriety of Hattie's dutiful melancholy by asking her to
marry him--and this actually in the room where her mother's funeral
was held the day before! What could Hattie do but burst into tears and
leave the room--and Ben, and the secretly cherished hopes of many
years, and a real home with a cheerily happy husband and those
children which might have been hers--to leave all these and more in
homage to the sacredness of her mother's memory.

Ten gray years dragged by. Hattie kept a few boarders so as not to be
alone in the house. She would take no children. They were too noisy
and kept the place in disorder. Ben's patience had finally exhausted,
though he finished his medical course and had been practicing nearly
ten years before he married. No other one for whom she could care even
called.

The farm did well. The lone woman had over $20,000 in the bank and the
property was worth as much more. But the brightest days were gray. At
forty-five she weighed ninety-four. She ate barely enough to keep
going. Her digestion was wretched. Her pride and her will alone made
her able to sit through meals or through the occasional neighbors'
calls. She spent hours alone in her room, dumb, dark-minded, with an
unrelenting heartache and pains which racked every organ. Her sleep
was fitful and she dreamed of Ben downstairs in a casket, again and
again, until she fairly feared the night. When she took her nerve
medicine, she seemed tied, bound hand and foot in that parlor of
death, held by a sleep of terror. Then Ben would move about in the
casket and make tortured faces at her, and some horrible times he
accused, even berated her. Finally an awful dream, two caskets, her
mother in one, Ben in the other, each railing and both showering abuse
upon her. She was in bed for weeks. Another doctor came and then-
praise be! her deliverer.

Jane Andrews was the old Presbyterian minister's daughter. She had
lived in Coopersville until she was twenty-four, giving her father an
efficient, devoted daughter's care through his long, last illness. The
family means had always been limited, and when the earner was laid
away, she at once responded to the practical call. There were no
hospitals near; so she left home and went into training in a small
institution on the Hudson. This is a hospital where sickness is
recognized as more than infections and broken, mangled members. Here
she learned well the saving balm of joy in making whole wretched
bodies with their more wretched souls. For five years she had lived in
the midst of benefits brought by the inspiration of right-feeling
attitudes. She knew full well the healing potency of the play-spirit.
Her insight into life was already deep, her outlook upon life high and
heartful. Then her mother failed; she came home and for three months
had been beautifying the final weeks, This more than wise woman now
came to nurse poor Hattie, came to companion her back to health, came
as a revelation to this mistaken and wearied one, of a better way.
After forty-five years of the playless life of a serf to blighting
seriousness, the wonder is that sourness had not entered to hopelessly
curdle all chances for joyous living.

Hattie Gilmore had to be taught to play. During the weeks of her rest-
treatment the stronger woman took the weaker back to girlhood. She
brought some dolls. They made clothes for them. They dressed and
undressed them and put them to bed. They taught them to say their
prayers and prepared their little meals, teaching them "table
manners," and they made them play as children should play. A sunshine
scrapbook was made. It was a gorgeous conglomeration of colors, of
fairies and children, of birds and flowers, and of awkward, but
telling, hand-illustrations of the joys of being nursed and,
prophetically, of the greater joys of being well. They played
"Authors," "Flinch," and even "Old Maid." Splendid half-hours were
spent in reading gloriously happy lives. Stories were told--happiness
stories, and jokes and conundrums invented. One day Hattie laughed
aloud, for which heartlessness her morbid conscience at once wrung
forth a stream of tears; but that wondrously artful nurse held a
mirror before a woefully twisting face, and her tactful comments
brought back the smiles. That laugh was the first warming beam of a
summer of happiness which was to golden the autumn of a bleak life
made blest. Then Hattie Gilmore learned to play a score of out-of-door
games and to understand sports. She learned to see the beauties in the
roadside flowers-"weeds" her mother had called most of them. She
learned to read glorious stories in the ever-transforming clouds. The
neighbors' children were invited, timidly they came at first, later
they were eager to come and play at "Aunt Hattie's." Three fine,
determining events happened that fall to complete the salvation of
this woman who was so fast learning happiness-living.

They, Jane and Hattie, friends now rather than nurse and patient, made
the daintiest possible cap and cloak for Dr. Ben's last baby, and sent
it with a hearty, merry greeting. This was a peace-offering to the
past, more efficient probably than much blood which has been shed on
sacrificial altars. Then they made a trip which came near being a
solemn occasion, it was so portentously important. They went to the
church-orphanage, remained several days and brought home a lusty
three-year-old bunch of mischief, who was forever to wreck all the
gloom-sanctity of that old home. Hereafter even the parlor of mourning
was to be assailed with shouts of glee; some things planted in
Hattie's flower beds were foredoomed not to come up; no longer could
the front lawn look like a freshly swept carpet. Roy was legally
adopted by Hattie and became her proudest possession. Finally, her
eyes were opened to that rarely sighted, fair vista of the sacred
play-life, the play-life so long denied this good woman. Never again
were housekeeping worries to be mentioned. They were not recognized.
When things went wrong, they went merrily wrong. What could not be
cured was joked about. The whole business of home-making became a
gladsome game.

Life for Hattie Gilmore, for Roy, for the neighbors' children, and for
some of the mothers of dull old Coopersville came to be lived as the
Father intended His children to live, when one almost old woman found
the Fountain of Youth revealed by the fine art of play. A blessed
revelation it is to every life when the joy of play robs the working
hours of their tedium and weariness. He lives as master who makes play
of his work.




CHAPTER XI

THE TANGLED SKEIN


Warm balls of comfort, a thousand sheep feed on the hillside, turning
herb and green growing things into food and wool. After the shearing
and the washing, ten thousand soft strands are spun into a single
thread, and each length of thread is a promise of warmth and
protection for years to come. Then the wool-white yarn is dyed in
colors symbolizing the strength of the navy, the loyalty of the army
or the honor of the alma mater. Reeled into a skein, the wool is now
all but ready for the fingers of the knitter; it has but to be wound
in a ball. Yet here danger lurks. An inadvertent twist or a simple
tangle quickly knots the thread, unless thoughtful patience rescues.
Recklessness means hopeless disarray, and the soft fluff of warming
color becomes unkempt disorder, a confused mass from which the thread
broken again and again is extracted. The work of careful hands has
been reduced to lasting defect.

Francis Weston was reared in one of the prosperous, middle-Western
cities, on the northern bank of the Ohio. The family had succeeded
well and represented large manufacturing interests. All burdens which
money could lift were removed, from his shoulders. He finished college
in the East and entered business, never having felt a hand's weight of
responsibility. As vice-president and director in one of the banks
organized largely by the family's capital, he was free to follow his
impulses. No details demanded his attention; other minds in the bank
cared for these.

Across the river a southern town nestled in cozy comfort, having for
generations maintained a conscious superiority to its smoking,
northern neighbor. Several handsome daughters of Kentucky aristocracy
gave tangible evidence of the tone of the community, and Francis
Weston's impulses made his trips across the river increasingly
frequent. And, as it should have been, North and South were joined
closer by one more golden link, when an only daughter of Kentucky
wealth became Mrs. Weston. The marriage contract held but one
stipulation: their home was to be in the bride's village. It looked as
though one of Love's best plans had succeeded. The husband proved
deeply devoted to his wife and the new home. The bank continued to
take most excellent care of itself, and his trips north, across the
river, were but occasional. The Weston mansion and estate in every way
befitted the combined wealth of the two families, and the wife gave
much time to making it increasingly attractive, and to the training of
her good servants. The husband read much, exercised little, and the
only reason for gentle protest from the wife was his excessive
smoking.

A little daughter came, but as though Fate would say, "I am Master,"
she lived but a few days. The shock was cruel, and the father seemed
to suffer the more intensely. Mrs. Weston took her sorrow in a fine
way; she seemed to realize that she, of the two, must turn away the
threat of morbidness. But the touch of Fate was not to be denied.
Still, three years later, it would seem that nothing but thankfulness
and abounding joy should have filled the Weston home--a son came. They
named him Harold. The father's solicitude for the little fellow's life
was as pathetic as it was abnormal. The bank was now unvisited for
months by its first vice-president. As the boy grew the father gave
him more and more of himself. He was his companion in play, and
personally taught him, seriously taking up study after study, until at
sixteen Harold was well prepared for college--scholastically prepared,
we should amend--for unconsciously the father had kept him from the
normal comradeship with boys of his age. Much of excellent theory the
youth had, some wisdom beyond his years, but no knowledge of denials,
no spirit of give and take, no thought of the other fellow--his rights
and wrongs. In spite of their long walks and rides on gaited Kentucky
thoroughbreds, Harold was not physically robust, so it was decided to
send him to a southern college, and he went to Vanderbilt. During his
second year the father had a long siege of typhoid, and recovery was
pitiably imperfect. His mentality did not return with his body
strength--he remained a harmless, weak-minded man. Much care was
exercised to keep the details from Harold, though both families were
unwilling to have the broken man sent to an institution, and for four
years professional nurses attended him at home. In spite of the
mother's best efforts to distract and neutralize, the son could but
feel the unnaturalness of the home atmosphere and profoundly miss the
devotion of his father. Still from what little he did see of the
invalid, it was a relief when, four years later, an accident took him
away.

Harold Weston's college life held true to his training. Quietly
friendly, he mixed poorly; mentally well-equipped, he was an excellent
student--brilliant in some classes, good in all. Athletics and
fraternities, feeds and "femmies" dissipated none of his energies, nor
added aught to the fulness of his living. He continued his college
work until he had received both Bachelor's and Master's degrees. The
spring he was twenty-three, he returned home for the summer, an
attractive young man. A classmate had interested him in tennis, for
which he showed some natural aptitude. The year's work had taxed him
lightly. The skein of yarn gave promise of a perfect fabric.

Mother and son had a happy summer. She saw to it that the home was
alive with young folks, and one week-end party followed another.
Harold had decided to study law, and nothing indicated that he would
meet any obstacles during his course at Law School. All believed he
was sufficiently strong to take this at Yale. There were brilliant
minds in his classes--he was accustomed to lead. He dropped his
tennis, he studied hard. In his second year he began losing weight
after the holidays, and found difficulty in getting to sleep; his
appetite became irregular, and his smoking, which had been moderate
for some years, became a dependence. His nervous system was pretty
well "shot up"--it had never been case-hardened. A weight of
apprehension had become constantly present, and he let its burden
depress him miserably. One of his professors, noting his appearance,
talked with him earnestly, and with lay acumen decided his digestion
was "out of fix" and told him of a "fine New York doctor." The stomach
specialist worthily stood high in his profession. The examination was
painstaking and exhaustive; the diagnosis seemed ominous to the morbid
patient; the whole process was a revelation to him of organs and
functions and laws of eating and drinking unheard in his years of
study. "Chronic intestinal indigestion with food decomposition and
auto-intoxication, augmented by nicotine," the doctor said. There had
been a distinct lessening of efficiency in his law-school work. Study
for the first time in his life required wearying effort. He did not
feel himself, he was facing his first test, he was meeting his first
strain. For the first time the skein was being mussed.

Harold Weston began reading, indiscriminately, literature on food and
digestion and diets. The doctor had given him a strict regimen. He
began to note minutely the foods he ordered and to question the
wholesomeness of their quality and preparation. Caution and over
emphasis on details of food and habits of eating rapidly developed.
Later not only the food in the dish, but most unhappily the foods he
had swallowed were scrutinized by every alertness of sensation and
imagination, and most damagingly did he become a victim of the
unwholesome symptom-studying habit. Within two months his discerning
physician recognized that the self-interest which had started in the
physical damage of rapid eating of rich foods was developing into an
obsession more detrimental than the original physical disorder, and
thought it wise for him to discontinue study and return home to rest
for the summer. The thread was tangled.

The home-coming was not happy. From the first meal, the specialist's
warnings were in conflict with the home diet, and resentments were not
withheld from the good old dishes which had for a generation bedecked
the home table. The delicacy instinctive to the family and to his
earlier life was cast aside, and the subjects of food and its
digestion, of food-poisoning and its consequences, made unpleasant
every meal. Innocently and seriously the mother pointed to her good
health and to rugged ancestors who had lived long and hale,
unconsciously superior to food and drink. He brooked none of her
suggestions, and finally when she honestly could not see it all his
way, in the heat of his intensity he accused her of being to blame for
all his trouble: she had fed him wrong from the first; she had fed his
father wrong; the New York doctor had told him that certain mental
diseases could be caused by food-poisoning, and his father would not
have been a mental wreck, nor his own career cut short, had she only
known what wives and mothers of this generation should know, and set a
table which was not a laboratory of poison. These ideas, once
accepted, never left him. They formed a theme which, after finding
expression, recurred with ominously increasing frequency. A year
before, Harold Weston was a kindly fellow, almost retiring, but with a
peculiar lighting of his face in response which endeared him to
feminine hearts. On a variety of subjects he was well-informed, his
professors bespoke for him a high and honorable standing in the
judiciary, but, from the mass of this fine mind's possibilities, a
second wretched choice was now made. "Father's typhoid affected his
mind, his brain must have been defective; my heredity is imperfect; my
first illness damages my class work. I can never go on in my
profession, there is no future for me but suffering." From this
wrecking thought it was an easy step to condemnation of his father for
his fatherhood, which, with his near-enmity toward his mother for her
"criminal ignorance" in rearing him, introduced a sordidly
demoralizing element into his mind which forever viciously tinctured
memories and relations which should have been his sacred helpers. The
normal mind can select well its world--miserably his mind lived with
these dregs of his own choice. The power of normal selection will, in
the best mind, be gradually lost through habitual surrender to the
morbid.

For the next year he lived unhappily in a home which he made unhappy.
Naturally thoughtful, he daily took long walks, brooding over his
wrongs--walks which brought him little benefit physically, as he
considered himself unable to put into them sufficient effort to wring
perspiration from his brow or toxins from his muscles. False
interpretation of his own symptoms increased with the abnormal
closeness of his scrutiny of them. His superficial knowledge he
accepted as final. Ignorant of the limitations of heredity, will and
judgment became subservient to pessimism, and the days marked a
gradual, deepening depression. The skein was asnarl.

A relative physician responded to the mother's call of distress and
spent a week in the home, then took Harold under his personal care to
a series of specialists--but not stomach specialists. Serious
treatment was carried out at home with a young physician as companion.
Two institutions offered the best help of their elaborate equipments
and perfected methods. Three years of badly discounted usefulness
passed. Long since had any call of responsibility ceased to elicit
response. Toward the end of this time he seemed better, and was
spending the summer at a health-resort, living a relatively normal
life. Fate then seemed to smile--dainty fingers appeared from the
nowhere, which promised gently, patiently, surely to loosen each
tangled snarl.

Eva Worth was another only child of affluence. She, too, was
recuperating, spending the summer at the same resort as Harold.
"Overwork at college," it was said. Petite of person, pleasing in
manner, sweetly spoiled, with sympathies quickly born but usually
displaced by fresher interests, she was bright and responsive in mind,
and her attraction to Harold Weston gave promise of being the touch
needed to complete his restoration. Providence only knows the
possibilities latent in a union of these poor children of wealth. For
him there was an unquestioned awakening. The somber clouds of his
moods seemed destined to be transformed into delicate pastels by the
promises of love. It was more than an infatuation for them both, and
an understanding which was virtually an engagement left them happy
even in their parting. But happiness was not a word for Harold
Weston's conjuring. Throughout the weeks of his association with this
fair girl, the first woman for whom he had ever cared, the thought had
repeatedly come that he owed her a full and explicit explanation of
his illness and of his "defective heredity." At home where the
brooding habit had grown strong and fixed, this idea became so
insistent, within two weeks, that he relieved the tension of its
demands by a long letter of details, which even to the sympathetic ear
of love were more than disquieting. The letter ended with a question
of her willingness to indicate a final decision in her response. The
appeal of his fine eyes was not there to help--other eyes were nearer.
Eva Worth was but twenty-two. Home training, the reading of much fine
literature, a college education, her own poor little heart, all failed
to bespeak for her wisdom in this crisis. An impulsive, almost
resentful refusal was sent. Second thoughts held more wisdom, for
woman's pity was now wisdom, so another day saw another letter, one
with a few saving words of hope. The first reply was handed to Harold
after luncheon. Quietly he left the house, apparently for one of his
afternoon walks. By morning he had not returned and a general alarm
went out. Some days later two boys, fishing in the river from an old
log, saw a cap in an eddy. No more has been seen or heard of Harold
Weston. A hasty hand, a hasty touch had broken the thread.

Two women were left to suffer. The elder, haunted by the re-echoings
of an only son's condemnation, lives out her years in a loneliness
which will not break, harrowed by questions of the wisdom of her
mother-love, the best she had to give. Some mother's son she may yet
help save, for she knows the vital error which shielded and guarded
her boy till he reached his majority, never having met trial,
hopelessly untrained in coping with adversity. The younger, sobered by
the voice of self-accusation, ever feels the weight of the
consciousness of a grave duty slighted; she was made more wise in a
day of deep reality than by twenty years of conventional training.
Tested again she would give as she has never known giving, give that
she might protect.




CHAPTER XII

THE TROUBLED SEA


A young woman, of rather striking appearance attired in her street
clothing, is standing beside her dresser. She has just returned from
town. She is of medium height, trim of figure, weighing about one
hundred and forty, with skin of a soft ivory tint and cheeks showing a
faint flush of health--or of excitement. Her dark hair waves
gracefully and the scattering strands of gray quite belie her youth.
The eyes are well placed, nearly black, and can sparkle on occasion.
Her rather poorly formed hands of many restless habits, are the only
apparent defect in this, externally attractive, young woman. She has
just broken the seal of a heavy vellum envelope addressed in a strange
feminine hand. It is an engraved announcement which reads:

"Mrs. Pinkney Rogers announces the marriage of her daughter, Pearl
May, to Mr. Lee Burnham"--

She never read the rest. She never saw the--"on Tuesday, May thirtieth
nineteen hundred and one. At Home, Rome, Georgia, after July fifth."
Her sister, Addie, coming up the stairs, thought she heard a moan and
hurried in to find Stella lying in a crumpled heap. Addie's quick eye
noticed the announcement. She read it all, and destroyed it, and
through the years it was never mentioned by either of them. She,
alone, knew its relation to her sister's collapse, but with proverbial
southern pride never voiced her opinion of the tragic cause of her
older sister's years of nervous ill-health.

Mr. Beckman, Stella's father, was at this time about fifty-five. He
was the brunette parent from whom many of her more attractive physical
qualities had been inherited. He was proprietor of the best men's
furnishing store of the county's metropolis. His business was
moderately successful, built up, he felt, entirely through years of
his personal thought and attention, and it was practically his only
interest. Even his interesting family was a matter of course--though
the amount of the day's sales never became so. Mr. Beckman had a
single diversion. The store closed at ten o'clock Saturday nights;
between twelve and one its proprietor would reach home in an exalted
state, and for two hours poor Mrs. Beckman would hear his plans for
developing the biggest gent's clothing-business in the state, for
becoming a merchant-prince, emphasized with many a hearty slap on her
back. This weekly relaxation was always followed by a miserable Sunday
morning, invariably referred to by every member of the family as
"another of Papa's sick headaches." Mrs. Beckman never lisped the
details of those unhappy Saturday nights, and the loyal deception was
so well carried out, with such devoted attention and nursing, that by
early afternoon, Sunday, the invalid was quite restored and any
possible self-reproach had been melted away. Headaches of the real
kind did come later, and, as his habits changed not, the Brights which
first appeared at fifty-eight progressed without interruption to his
death at sixty.

Mrs. Beckman was a blonde, but for many years had been a badly faded
one. She was as singleminded in regard to her household as her husband
to his store. Neither had developed more than family and local
interests. She was the same age as her husband and had, without
question, worked faithfully, long hours, through the long years, in
homage to her sense of housekeeping duties. The coming of the
children, only, from time to time, kept her away from kitchen and
parlor for a few weeks. She had been to Atlanta but once during the
last ten years, not that Mr. Beckman willed it so--she could have had
vacations and attractive dresses, though for some reason, possibly the
"fading" which has been mentioned, he never urged her to go with him--
and she needed urging, for she honestly believed there was "too much
to do" at home. The habit of industry can become as inveterate as
habits of pleasure.

The two Beckman boys had the virtues of both father and mother. They
finished at the city high school, and at once went to work in the
store with such earnestness of purpose that they were quite prepared
to conduct the business, even better than the father had done, when he
became incapacitated.

We met the sister, Addie, in Stella's room and realized from her
discretion, manifested under stress, that she possessed elements of
character. She was a clear-skinned, high-strung blonde--thin-skinned
too, probably, for from childhood her hands rebelled at household
duties. The family thrift was hers, however, and from the limited
opportunities of the home town, she prepared herself for, and filled
well, for years, a position with a successful law firm. She later
married the senior member--a widower. His children and her high-strung
thin-skinnedness and lack of domestic propensities have not made her
as successful a home-builder as she was a stenographer.

Stella Beckman's early life was deeply influenced by many of the
surroundings which we have glimpsed. Hers was not a home of fine
ideals. Much that was common was always present. The table-talk was
almost competitive in nature, as, with the possible exception of the
mother, each one used "I" almost insistently, as a text for converse,
the three times a day they sat together. Even mutual interests were
largely obscured, much of the time, by personal ones, barring only the
subject of sickness. All forms of illness were themes commanding
instant and absorbing attention. Inordinate anxiety was felt by all
for the ills of the one; and for days the "I" would be forgotten if
any member of the home-circle was "sick." And the concerns of the
patient, whether suffering from a cold, sore eyes, a sprained ankle,
or "had her tonsils out," were discussed with minuteness of detail
worthy an International Conference. How the patient slept, what the
doctor said, the effect of the new medicine, how the heart was
standing the strain, what the visiting neighbors thought of the case,
in fact the whole subject of sickness held a morbid interest for each
member of the family. Sickness, no matter how slight, was with the
Beckmans ever an excuse for changing any or all plans. We might speak
of the discussion of illness as the Beckman family avocation.

Stella was a bright child, who, wisely directed and influenced, would
have taken a good education. She could have developed into a
particularly pleasing, capable, useful, possibly forceful woman. But
the emotional Stella was over-developed, until it obstructed the
growth of the reasoning Stella. Still we should call her a normal
small-town child, certainly until her last year in grammar-school. She
had some difficulty with her studies that spring because of her eyes.
Her lenses, fitted in Atlanta, seemed to make them worse. It was only
after she went to a noted specialist in Charleston that she was
relieved. It is significant that later these expensively obtained
glasses were discarded as "too much trouble."

The summer Stella was thirteen, Grandmother Beckman came to spend her
last days in her son's home. The granddaughter had been named for her,
and Grandmother was frail and old and needed attention. Grandmother
also had some means. For over a year the young girl gave much of her
time to the old lady, and for over a year she was able to lead the
Beckman table-talk with her wealth of details about Grandma's
sickness. Stella's care of her charge was excellent, entirely lacking
in any selfish element. Death hesitated, when he finally called, and
for nearly a week the dying woman lay unconscious. These "days of
strain" and the death and funeral were, always after, mentioned by
Stella and her people as her "first shock." For a time she was so
nervous and restless and her sleep so disturbed that the doctor gave
her hypnotics and advised her being sent away. She went to Atlanta for
two months, boarding in the home of a Methodist minister, who some
years before had been stationed in Rome. It was Stella's first
experience in a religious home. She had never been accustomed to
hearing the "blessing" said, and food referred to as "God-given"
seemed, at first, quite too sacred to swallow. And the effect of
morning worship--the seriously read Bible chapter, the earnest prayer,
with the entire family kneeling--affected her profoundly, and gave to
this godly home a sanctity which, at susceptible not-yet-fifteen,
awakened emotions so powerful that for days she walked as one in a
dream, one attracted by some wonderful vision which was drawing her,
unresisting, into its very self. Each day was a step closer, and at
prayer-meeting the Wednesday night before she returned home, she
announced her conversion, with an intensity of earnestness which could
but impress every hearer.

Stella Beckman went back to Rome filled with a zeal for the new
religious life which commanded the respect of even her religiously
careless father. Nor was it a flash in the pan. She joined the church.
She made her sister join the church, and to the church she gave four
years of remarkable devotion. Church interests were first, and one
Sunday the pastor publicly announced that for the twelve months past
Stella Beckman had not missed a single service in any branch of the
church's activities. She taught a Sunday-school class. She sang in the
choir. She was president of the Epworth League, and not only attended,
but always "testified" at mid-week prayer-meeting. Her church
interests took all her time. The foreign-missionary cause later laid a
gripping hold upon her, and arrangements were made, four years after
she went into the church, for her to go to a Missionary Training-
School.

Somehow things went wrong here. She had expected an almost sanctified
atmosphere. She was accustomed to being regarded as essentially
devout, but there was a sense of order in the school which she felt
was mechanical, class-room work seemed to be counted as important as
religious services, and her fervidly expressed religious experiences
appeared to reflect chill rather than the accustomed warmth of the
home prayer-meetings. Moreover, real lessons were assigned which no
amount of religious feeling or no intensity of personal praying made
easy. She hadn't studied for years; in fact, she had never learned to
do intellectual work studiously. And even these good religious
teachers did not hesitate to demand accurate recitations. She had been
accustomed for years to have preference shown, and here she was
treated only as one of many, and, humiliatingly, as one who was
failing to maintain the standards of the many. She fell behind in the
two most important studies, nor was her classwork in general good.
Whether she would have later proven capable of getting down to rock
bottom and meeting the demands of reason on a rational basis, we
cannot say, for the family hobby abruptly terminated her missionary
career. "Mother dangerously sick with inflammatory rheumatism. Come at
once," the telegram said--and she hastily returned home to be met
with, what her history records as, "my second shock." Her mother
WAS sick, and truly and genuinely suffering. The house was in
disorder. Weeks followed in which Stella's best strength was needed.
Her mother slowly mended, but never regained her old activity. The
doctor said a heart-valve was damaged, and the family thereafter were
never quite certain when the sudden end would come--an uncertainty
which was proven legitimate ten years later, when she died, almost
suddenly. Stella had met shock number two very well. The home-love and
welcome and the warmth of feeling she experienced in the home-church
were a never-admitted relief from the rigid exactions of the training-
school life, and did much to neutralize, for the time, her anxiety
about her mother and the "strain of her care." It was a family which
ever advertised home-devotion, and so this call of home illness
completely obscured all other plans for three years. But home
responsibilities quite wrecked her church-going record. In fact, it
was unkindly whispered that Stella was "backsliding." And these same
whispers found audible expression the summer she was twenty-two, when
attractive Lee Burnham, the judge's son, spent his summer vacation at
home, and "took her buggy-riding every Sunday evening for over two
months."

Lee was only twenty-one, but his was a very romantic twenty-one, and
he filled Stella's ears with so many sweet nothings that she no longer
heeded the call of duty. And why shouldn't she be in love and have a
lover? Had she not already given the best years of her youth to
others? Had she not waited without a thought of rebellion for the
coming of the right one? And Love, and Love's mysterious touch,
wrought fantastic changes in Stella Beckman's affairs. She and Lee
read poetry. She had never known how beautiful poetry was nor how much
of it there was to read. He knew the good novels and sent her all that
he himself read, and these were plenty! Then, when he was away, he
wrote and she wrote, and now and then he wrote some verses to her.
There was no real engagement. They never spoke much of the future; the
present was too full. Home duties and church interests flagged badly
during these two years, and the summer she was twenty-four, it became
town talk that this young couple would marry. The Beckmans were very
willing. But one day the judge called Lee into his office and wanted
to know what these "doings" all meant, asking him if he was "going to
marry his mother," and making some rather uncomplimentary Beckman-
Burnham comparisons. Lee rather sheepishly told his father there was
nothing to worry about. He had much respect, possibly awe, for the old
gentleman. The next week Lee left for his final year in law-school.
His letters to Stella continued, though he plead his studies as an
excuse for their diminished frequency. He did not come home that
spring, at Easter. "Work," he wrote Stella. Nor was he ever square to
this poor girl, for he never mentioned his relations with Miss Pearl
May Rogers. And "shock number three" came, as unhappy Stella read the
announcement of his marriage, addressed in the hand of his June city-
bride. A lastingly damaging shock it proved to be.

Stella was put to bed; for days she lay in deep apathy. Feeding became
a problem of nurses and doctors. She cared for nothing--nothing
"agreed" with her, and she lost weight rapidly. Chills and flushes,
sweatings and shakings came in regular disorder, and for hours she
would be apparently speechless. Somebody--not the doctors--reported
that Stella Beckman had typho-malaria. Abnormal sensitiveness to
surroundings, to sounds, sights and smells, especially a dread of
unpleasant news, were to complicate her living for years to come. For
the remainder of her life she was to confound sensations normal to
emotional reactions with sensations accompanying physical diseases;
and sensations came and went in her now tense emotional nature like
trooping clouds on a stormy day. Stella's illness was so prostrating
that her weakened mother and busy sister could not care for her
adequately, and an aunt came to help. Recovery was slow and imperfect;
she remained a semi-invalid for two and a half years. Physical
discomforts were so constant that a surgeon was finally consulted who
did an exploratory operation and removed some unnecessary anatomy.
This man's personality was strong, his desire to help, genuine, and he
had considerable insight into the emotional illness of his patient.
The influence of the operation, with the surgeon's encouragement and
the atmosphere of confidence pervading the excellent, small surgical
hospital, combined to make Stella very much better for the time. But
within less than three years, her father died. She calls this "the
fourth shock," and it resulted in another period of nervous illness.
She cried much at the time. Work was impossible--as was all exercise
--because of her rapid fatigue. One day she slipped on the front steps
and, apparently, but bruised her knee. Her doctor nor the X-ray could
discover more serious damage. Still, walking was practically
discontinued, as she could not step without pain. At last, almost in
desperation, her brother took her to a hospital noted for its success
in reconstructing nervous invalids. At this time she weighed but one
hundred and four, and the list of her symptoms seemed unending. A
desire to be helped, however, was discerned and with rest-treatment
she gained rapidly in weight, appetite returned, digestive
disturbances disappeared, and massage, or a new idea, fully restored
her walking powers. She became eager for the more important half of
her treatment--the out-of-door work-cure. During these weeks she had
certainly been given much physical and mental help. Expert and
specialized counsel and nursing had been hers.

At the end of five months Stella returned to Georgia--restored--a
health enthusiast. It now became her joy, in and out of season,
whenever she could secure hearers, to relate the details of her
illness and the miracle of her restoration. The methods of the special
hospital that wrought such wonders for her were reiterated in detail,
and for years she made herself thoroughly wearisome by her talk of
diet and exercise, special bathing, out-of-door work and prescribed
habits. She kept herself constantly conspicuous in her efforts to
reform others to her new ways of living. For over four years, she
sedulously adhered to the routine outlined by the hospital, with such
devotion to, and augmentation of, details that she had little time for
church and practically no time for household affairs. As had been her
habit in past experiences her enthusiasm was causing her to overdo,
and the business of keeping well seemed now her only object in life.
This could not go on interminably. Something had to happen, and her
mother's rather sudden death proved the shock which was to relieve her
from the overenthusiastic slavery to an impracticable routine.

Stella Beckman at forty-five is sadly less fine and worthy than the
Stella Beckman of eighteen. Religion, Love and Science have each
entered her life deeply to enrich it, but all of these built upon the
sands, the shifting sands of an emotional nature which had never laid
the granite foundation of reason. Since the mother's death, the logic
of her feelings has become more and more crippled by false valuations.
She lives at home keeping house for the boys, recounting each mealtime
the endless list of her feelings; bringing herself, her sickness, her
hospital experiences wearisomely into the conversation with each
caller. The emotional stability and the will to persevere even at
considerable cost, which marked youth, are gone. At forty-five her
life is objectlessly spasmodic, the old family-habit of talking of
self and the family-fetish of discussing sickness have honeycombed her
character and made her hopelessly tiresome. And her feeling-life is as
restless as a troubled sea.




CHAPTER XIII

WILLING ILLNESS


Mr. Harrison Orr lived till he was twenty-five in Indianapolis, the
town of his birth, excepting the years spent in Chicago pursuing his
literary and law courses. He inherited a small fortune and, after two
years spent in "seeing the world," located in Memphis, Tennessee.
Here, as an attorney and later as an investor, he was professionally,
financially and socially successful. His father had been liberal in
the use of wines and cordials, and young Orr himself always remained a
"good fellow," just the kind of a man to attract a vivacious, socially
proud daughter of the South. He was thirty-five when he married--
accounted an age of discretion. His experience with womankind was so
ample that he should have made no mistake in his final, irrevocable
choice, and, be it said to his honor, no one, not even the wife
herself, ever knew by word or act of his, to the contrary. He and his
Mississippi bride spent thirty years in apparent domestic
tranquillity, until he died at sixty-five from a heart which refused
longer to have its claims for purposeful living eternally answered by
gin rickeys and nips of "straight Scotch."

Mrs. Harrison Orr is unconsciously the unhappy "villain" of our tale.
Her girlhood home was on a large sugar-plantation where she, as an
only child, was reared to dominate her surroundings, while her parents
made particular effort that she might shine socially. Parts of many
years she lived in Washington in the home of a political relative, and
attended a select girls' school. After her debut she spent the social
winters at the Capitol where social niceties were developed with much
attention to detail, and at home and while in Washington she was
gratifyingly popular. "A brilliant conversationalist," she had heard
herself called when fifteen, and the art of conversation, hitherto far
from neglected, became by choice and practice her forte. Brilliancy in
speech ever remained her only seriously attempted accomplishment.
Clever of speech, from childhood, she had early learned to utilize
this ability to attain any desired end. And talk she could, and talk
she did, and as she grew older, by sheer talking she domineered every
situation. It was her opinion when she married that at any time, with
any listener, she could talk cleverly on any subject. As the years
passed, during which she added little to her asset of knowledge, this
art of fine speech gradually, but relentlessly, degenerated, and step
by step she slipped down the paths of delicacy and fineness, through
the selfishness of her insistent talkativeness. Harrison Orr never
intimated that his evenings at home were hours of boredom, but in
later years spent much time in the comparative quiet of his club. Few
intellects can be so amply stored as to continue brilliant through
decades of much speaking, and the sparkle of Mrs. Orr's conversation
was gradually shrouded in the weariness of what a blunt neighbor
termed her "inveterate gabble." As it must be, this woman of
exceptional opportunities early lost true sensitiveness, and, both as
guest and hostess, ignored the offense of inconsiderate and self-
seeking interruptions. She broke into the speech of others with crude
abandon. The itch to lead and preempt the conversation became
uncontrollable. Finer natures thrown with her could but tolerate her
"naive" discourtesy, while dependents had to dumbly endure. Mrs. Orr
but stands as a type illustrating far too many mortally wearisome,
social pretenders, prominent only through the tireless tiresomeness of
their much speaking.

The wreckage which may follow a single unthought crudity, in a home
otherwise exceptional, is signally illustrated in the life of Mrs.
Orr's only child, Hortense, born two years after their marriage. From
the first she was sensitive and high-strung, nervously damaged
probably in her early years by her mother's restless, unwise overcare.
When Hortense was five she was sharply ill for several weeks with
scarlatina. During these days she was isolated with Mrs. Place, her
nurse, in a wing of the home. As fortune would have it, Mrs. Place was
the daughter of a rural English clergyman. After the death of her
husband, who left her limited in means, she came to America, where she
trained. Her wholesome influence over Hortense, her general demeanor
in the home, and her many excellent qualifications as nurse and woman
attracted Mr. Orr's discerning attention, and he induced her to remain
as governess to his daughter. Mrs. Place proved a most excellent
addition to the Orr household. Always deferential, she was never
servile; always reserved, she ever faced duties large and small,
promptly, quietly and efficiently. Never, through her nearly ten years
as daily companion of Hortense, did her speech or conduct betoken
aught but refinement. More and more Hortense retreated to her
wholesome companionship in face of the assaults of her mother's trying
volubility. In many ways this most unusual nurse protected her charge
from the greater damage of poor mothering than actually occurred. The
differences between these two women were reflected in the sensitive
child's life. Unconsciously at first, later in certain details,
ultimately without reserve, she approved the standards of the one and
repudiated those of the other. In contrast to her mother she grew into
an abnormal reserve.

Hortense never attended the public schools but was regularly taught by
Mrs. Place until she was fifteen, when she went East and entered her
mother's old school, in Washington. The years of her careful tutoring
had failed to accustom her to competition of any kind, and this first
year of school work was taxing and but indifferently successful.
During the spring term she had measles which left her with a hacking
cough, and she did not regain her lost weight. The school-doctor sent
her home, "for the southern climate," where she remained for a year,
rather frail and the object of much detailed, maternal solicitude. It
was probably this same solicitude which finally became so wearying
that she returned to school for relief. Hortense was now a year
behind, but resented the rather superior airs of some of her old
classmates so effectively that she got down to business, made up her
back work, and graduated reasonably well up in her entrance class. Of
light build, and always frail in appearance, she did commendable work
in school athletics. She took private instruction in hockey, for she
was determined "to make the team," and her success in accomplishing
this is significant of her ability to do, when she willed. At one of
the later inter-scholastic games she met a handsome, manly, George
Washington University student. She was nineteen, he twenty-three, and
on his commencement day he honored her by offering his hand. Her
southern love was aglow. Her lover was practically making his own way,
but his prospects were excellent, his character superior, and they
both cared very much.

Unhappily, Mrs. Place had returned to England, or Hortense would have
confided in her and some futures might have been different. But the
warmth of the new love seemed at the time to dissipate the chilliness
toward her mother, which, unexpressed to herself, had through the
years been increasing in the daughter's heart. So she wrote a long
letter full of the beautiful story of the growing happiness, with
pages of fervid descriptions of a certain fine young fellow, and
importuned her mother to come East at once and to bring her blessing.
No such filial warmth had Mrs. Orr ever before known. No such
opportunity for a beneficent expression of the high privilege of
motherhood had ever been entrusted to her. She responded without
hesitation. She did not even wait to read their daughter's letter to
her husband. When she reached Washington she summoned the young suitor
to her hotel, and succeeded in one masterful quarter of an hour in
arousing his violent dislike and lasting contempt. Through diplomacy
she got Hortense on the Memphis-bound train. She was determined that
her "darling child" should never marry beneath her station, and she
talked and talked, drowning her daughter's protests, appeals and
objections, in her merciless flow of words. Night after night she
would stay with her till after twelve, leaving the poor girl tense,
distracted and sleepless. And the habit of sleeplessness developed and
with it a painfully abnormal sensitiveness to noises. The cruelly
disappointed girl rapidly went to pieces. She craved a woman's
sympathy, she longed for a mother's comprehending love, but she soon
came to dread even her mother's presence, and formed the habit of
burying her ears in the pillows to shut out the sound of that voice
which could have meant the sweetest music of all, yet which to her
distraught nerves had become an irritating, repelling, hated noise.
Then special nurses came; the hot months were spent in the Rockies;
several sea-trips were made; twice patient and nurse went East to
forget it all in weeks of concerts and theaters in New York. But her
inability to sleep was but temporarily relieved, while her antagonism
to noises increased. She was then in Philadelphia for six months under
the care of a noted neurologist, where she slowly gained considerably,
physically, and was sufficiently well to spend a short, social "coming
out season" with her parents. Yet the "at homes" and tea-parties and
functions in which her mother reveled, never more than superficially
interested her.

Rather strangely, father and daughter had not been as close as their
similar natures and needs would suggest. While Mrs. Orr may not have
been jealous, she preempted her husband's home hours mercilessly; but
in her father's death Hortense came to know that one of the few props
of her stability had been removed. Moreover, her mother's incessant
reiteration of her loneliness and sorrow, and the endless discussion
of the details of her depressing widow's weeds, and of her taxing,
exhausting widow's responsibilities, brought on a return of the old
symptoms, with the antipathy to noises even intensified. We may think
of Hortense Orr as inherently weak. This is not so. Save as influenced
in her girlhood by Mrs. Place, and while stimulated during her last
three years at school by personal ambition, she had known no duties
nor responsibilities. There had never been any necessity for specific
effort or sacrifice. After her great disappointment she had
surrendered to depression of spirit, and she reacted in the same way
after her father's death. And this surrender was early followed by
weakness of her disused body. She also surrendered to the weakness of
self-pity, that craven mocker of self-respect. She was not a will-less
girl, but life had brought her small chance to develop that will which
masters, while wilfulness, that will which demands selfishly for self,
grew out of the soil so largely of her mother's preparing. This
wilfulness, first asserted in small things, grew and grew.

The family doctor saw more than tongue and liver and thin blood and
bodily weakness. He realized the helplessness of Hortense in finding
her stronger self in the home atmosphere, and advised a year in
Europe--to get away from her sorrow, he said, to get away from her
mother's wearying discussion of details, he knew. For nearly a year
she was treated in Germany at different cures without benefit. It was
always the "noise" that kept her from sleeping. It was the "noise"
which she had learned to hate and to revile. To get away from noise
became her fixed determination. And to this end a small mountain-
cottage was secured, secluded from the haunts and industries of man,
in the remoteness of the Tyrolean Alps. Here with her nurse and a
servant she remained three years. For the first months she seemed
happier, and took some interest in the inspiring views and rich flora
of her surroundings. But the night did not bring the silence she
willed. She sensed the heavy breathing of her nurse, the movements of
the servant as she turned in her bed, and sometimes even snored, she
knew it! She would spend hours of strained, sleepless attention, alert
to detect another instance of the heartless repetition of this
incriminating sound. She must be alone. She feared nothing so much as
the hated sounds of human activity. So a one-room shack was built a
hundred yards away from her companions, in the deeper solitude of the
forest. Here she slept alone, month after month. But the winters, even
in the Tyrolean foot-hills, are severe at times, and the deadly
monotony of this useless life, and the improvement which she "knew"
would come with the perfection of her sleeping arrangements, combined
to decide her to return home, though still an enemy to the unbearable
sounds of the night. Twenty-eight years she had lived with no true
interest in life; neither home, attractions in New York or in Europe,
nor treatment offered by competent and kind specialists had influenced
her one thought away from her willingness to be ill. The nurse, who
had buried herself so long with this poor girl in Europe, was quite
appalled at Mrs. Orr's inconsideration of her daughter's "sensitive,
nervous state." Nurse and mother soon had words; nurse and daughter
left promptly for the East, where two hours from New York they spent
another year in semi-isolation together.

A New York broker owned the place adjoining the invalid's cottage.
Walter Douglas, then but twenty-six, was his private secretary. Walter
and Hortense met in the quiet, woodland paths. It is difficult to know
just what the mutual attractions were. She had received many
advantages which had not been his, still life was certainly a lonely
thing for her. He was her first real interest since she had left
Washington, and love reawakened and blew into life the embers she
thought were gray-cold. It was never to be the flaming love-fire of
ten years before, but it was bright enough to decide her to marry,
which she did without writing any letter of confidence to her
unsuspecting mother.

Mr. Orr had left the property in his wife's control, and she had been
unquestionably most generous in supplying her daughter with funds.
When she received the brief note telling of the little wedding and
inviting her to meet them in Washington, on their simple wedding-trip,
she found herself for the first time in her life--speechless! There
were no words to express this "outrage." The disability was short-
lived, but her letter to the bridal couple was shorter. They had taken
things into their own hands; they had ignored her who had every right
to be at least advised, and they could take care of themselves. Hardly
had this letter been mailed when she consulted her attorney as to ways
and means to annul this "crazy marriage."

The young couple had more pride than dollars, and bravely started
house-keeping in a small flat. Few had been more inadequately trained
for household duties than this self-pampered woman who pluckily at
first, then grimly, went to the limit of her poorly developed strength
in an effort to make homelike their few, plain rooms, and to prepare
their unattractive meals. Still it all might have worked out had the
noises of the street not attained an ascendancy. In less than four
months the youthful husband, through a sense of duty, wrote the mother
details of his bride's "precarious condition." Mrs. Orr promptly sent
money, and the mother in her soon brought her t

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