Book: Our Nervous Friends

R >> Robert S. Carroll >> Our Nervous Friends




It was an exuberantly happy victor who returned from the Capitol City
with the elaborate gold medal, his name in full conspicuously engraved
upon its face--and the youthful society of his school-town was at his
feet. Every door was open. So almost without fault was he that few
mothers objected to his companionship with their daughters. Yes, here
was to be the flaw!--he was soon to find that it was easy for him to
have his way with a maid, a dangerous knowledge for a seventeen-year-
old boy who had already reached higher social levels than his own home
had known, who was much quicker of wit than his almost worshipful
father.

It was Eva Martin who had whispered the little prayer-message into his
ear that expectant afternoon at the station, and Eva Martin's ear was
destined to hear, in turn, whispered pledges of unending devotion, to
hear the relentless verdict of unquestioned dishonor.

High school was finished. A successful Freshman year--a Sophomore year
that was disappointing to his professors was passed. The fire of his
heart was heating many social irons. His earnings, so far, consisted
of one gold medal. The savings from the denials at home were about
exhausted. The boy had spent as much in the last two years as had been
hoped would carry him through college. Fifteen hundred dollars could
be raised by remortgaging the farm--it would take this to get him
through Law-school, and he was eager to go to Chicago. So a second
mortgage was placed. A good deal happened in Chicago which was not
written to the Squire nor to Eva. Waring craved being a popular "Hail
fellow," and with men, and especially with women, he knew no "No"
which would be displeasing. He corresponded with Eva regularly; they
would be married some day. He could not have chosen a more superior
woman. She lived simply, with her widowed mother, and continued for
years to conduct a private kindergarten. She was to save a thousand
dollars and he four thousand, then the wedding!

The gray-eyed girl from St. Louis came near saving Eva. Her steel-
gray-eyed father's knowledge of human nature alone intervened. It was
a chance introduction. She was pretty; she was wealthy. She ran up to
Chicago often. Finally the business-like father ran up to Chicago. He
invited young Waring to his club for dinner. There were tickets to the
"Follies." The younger man let no feature on the stage pass unnoted;
the elder remarked every change in the young man's face. There were
polite farewells, and a very positive twenty minutes which left the
daughter without a question in her mind that further relations with
young Waring held most threatening possibilities. Her eyes were not
gray without reason, as she proved discreet. There was a bundle of
uncomfortably fervid letters which he refused to return.

Warren was shifty with Eva about this affair, and others. He was
crooked, too, as the years passed, about his savings. It was
impossible to account for certain expenditures, to her. At twenty-
eight, she had her thousand dollars in the bank; his supposed four
thousand was a bare five hundred, most of which was spent on the
gorgeous wedding-trip which he said they both deserved. And shortly
after their return to the home, which, instead of being paid for in
full, was heavily mortgaged, explanations began which could not
explain. Clever as Waring was, his affairs were so involved that Eva
could not avoid the suspicion and, soon after, the revelation that her
wonderful husband's soul was without honor. It cannot be told, those
details of her devoted efforts to "put him right." To forgive
anything, everything, she was eager, but he never could come across
square, and as the years passed the horror of the uncertain "What
next?" enshrouded even her happiest days. Still the husband had
ability, and the wife's efforts helped immensely, and there were
profitable years. It was odd that, with his declamatory skill, he
rarely had a case in court, but proved unusually efficient in
developing a collection agency, and gradually represented the Bad
Accounts Department of more and more important concerns. At thirty-
five he was out of debt. They were living well--too well it proved,
for his nervous health. There must have been a neurotic taint, as
expressed in Aunt Fannie's asthma. Early that fall he had his first
attack of hay-fever. For years he had been self-indulgent; he always
drank when drinks were offered; he used much tobacco and rich food.
Athletic he had been; and, advocate of exercise as he was when he gave
talks to the boys, he took none himself. So toxins accumulated. He
stood this illness poorly. It was the first physical discomfort he had
ever known. The family doctor did not help much; patent medicines
brought relief. He was pretty hard to live with, these weeks. For a
number of years he used the threat of this disorder for a six weeks'
trip to Mackinac Island. "Finances" made it possible for the wife and
the little boy to spend only two of these weeks with him. During the
last four he always managed to keep pace with the fast set. The summer
he was forty, the combination of vacation, Mackinac, and fast set did
not ward off, in fact did not mitigate, his attacks. Waring returned
home "desperate," as he expressed it, and the family doctor succeeded
in getting him to a competent Chicago specialist who did some needed
nose and throat operations thoroughly and, in spite of careless
living, three years of immunity passed. He had become unquestionably a
clever handler of bad accounts, and could have made good, had he only
been good. A dry, dusty summer, his old enemy, hay-fever-and this time
a Chicago "specialist," the kind that advertises in the daily papers,
proved his undoing. He gave Waring a spray, potent to relieve and
potent to exalt him for hours beyond all touch of lurking
apprehension. Bottle after bottle he used; he would not be without it.
In a few weeks he realized that he could not be without it. And after
the hay-fever days were over he kept using it, furtively now, not only
for the exaltation it brought, but as protection from the hellish
depression it wrought.

For years Waring's office assistant had been an efficient, devoted,
weak woman who had managed well much of the office detail. She now
realized that things were not "going straight," that collections made
were not being turned over to her, that she was being asked to falsify
records. She never could resist his personality, and soon became more
adroit than he in juggling figures. Everything went wrong fast. No one
suspected cocain--they thought it was whiskey till Eva was forced to
tell much to the good old doctor-details revealing her husband's
uncouth carelessness of habits, his outbreaks of cruelty to her and
the boy, his obvious and shameless lying, his unnatural coarseness of
speech. This friend in need spent a bad hour, a hard hour with Waring.
Calmness was ineffective, clear reasoning impossible. The accusation
of drug-using was vehemently denied, and it was only the doctor's
courageous threat to have him arrested and tried on a lunacy charge
that broke down the false man's defiance.

Two months of rigid treatment in a sanitarium did much to restore this
broken man, and during these weeks the clever office assistant kept
his over four-thousand dollar embezzlements from becoming known.
Physically and mentally, Waring was restored. The moral sickness was
only palliated. When he returned he did not clean house; he swept the
dirt into the corners. Frank-facedly he lied to his wife. He met the
most pressing of his creditors with a certificate of his illness, and
they accepted his notes and promises. He almost crawled out. In so
many ways, he was the winning, old "War" Waring again. Gradually, his
regime of diet and routine of exercise were replaced by periodic "big
eats," little drinks, and many smokes. Then came the warning sneezes
and the charlatan's bottle. Irregular living grew apace; the accounts
were again manipulated. A Chicago house, which had shown him clemency,
became suspicious, and sent a representative who found many
collections not reported. A warrant was sworn out, followed by a dozen
others after his arrest.

The dear old Squire, now eighty-six, sat beside the brave little wife
at the trial. Neither of them thought of forsaking him. As the
testimony was given, the old father bowed, mute--as one stricken. The
verdict, "Guilty," was returned, and Judge Jefferson had evidently
considered carefully his duty. In passing sentence he addressed the
criminal: "Warren Waring, the law leaves it with the trial Judge to
determine the sentence which shall be passed on you; it may be from
five to fifteen years of hard labor in the State Penitentiary. You
deserve the full extent of the law's punishment. I have known you from
boyhood. Father, wife, God himself, have given you the best they have:
an honorable name, a lifetime of devotion, the full ten talents. For
these, you have returned dishonor, unchastity and self-indulgent
hypocrisy. You have begged extenuation on the basis of nervous ill-
health and temporary irresponsibility, both of which you have brought
upon yourself by violating the laws of right-living. It is your soul
that is sick. You are not fit to live free and equal with righteous
men and women. You have had love and mercy-they have failed. Justice
will now be given a chance to save you. For the sake of your wife
whose noble heart, crushed, pleads for you, I reduce your deserved
sentence five years. In respect for your disgraced but honorable
father, five additional years are deducted. I pray he may live to see
you a free man, chastened. Warren Waring, I sentence you to five years
hard labor within the walls of the State Penitentiary."




CHAPTER XVIII

THE BATTLE WITH SELF


The room was bare of furnishings save a cot; no dresser, table, stand,
even chair, was there. The windows were of wire glass and guarded by
metal screens, the lights were in shielded recesses, the floor was
polished but without covering. No pictures, flowers, nor the dainty
things which normal women crave were to be seen. On the cot sat a
woman, Marie Wentworth, sullen and defiant, a worse than failure,
locked in this protected room of a special hospital. Isolated with her
caretaker, she was watched day and night-watched to save her from
successfully carrying out her determination of self-destruction, a
determination which had found expression in more than words, for only
the day before-the day of her admission--she had swallowed some
cleverly hidden, antiseptic tablets. The trained habits of observation
of the skilful nurse had saved her from death. Crafty, vindictive,
malicious, reckless, heartless! Her care demanded tireless watching--
hence this room, void of anything by which she could possibly injure
herself or others. Nor was she more attractive than her surroundings.
Her skin was sallow and unwholesome; yellow-gray rings added dulness
to her black eyes. Scrawny of figure, hard and repelling of features,
an atmosphere of malevolence seemed to emanate from her presence. She
took little note of what was happening, though occasional, furtive
glances gave intimation of her knowledge of the nurse's presence. When
stimulated to expression there were explosions of violent abuse,
directed chiefly against her older sister, explosions punctuated by
vicious flashes of profanity which left doubt in no mind of the hatred
which rankled-hatred of family, hatred of order and authority, hatred
of goodness however expressed, hatred of life and damnations of the
hereafter. An unholy picture she was of a demoralized soul in which
smoldered and from which flared forth a peace-destroying fire--the
rebellion of a depraved body and mind against the moral self. She had
been placed in this institution under legal restraint to be treated
for morphinism, and, according to her brother, "pure cussedness."

How did it happen? The Wentworths lived well, very well indeed, in a
bluegrass county-seat of fair Kentucky. The father was an attorney by
profession, a horse-fancier by choice, and for years before Marie's
birth relieved the monotony of office duties and race-track pleasures
by vivid, gentlemanly "sprees." Marie was only six when his last
artery essential to the business of living became properly hardened,
and Marie's mother was a widow.

Mrs. Wentworth was to the manor born. She took pride in her home and
thoroughly admired the brilliant qualities of her husband. Adorned
with old jewels and old lace, she regularly graced her table at the
periodic big dinners it was her pride to give. In fact, her pride
extended to the planning of three fine meals a day. An unsentimental
science suggests that her husband's arteries, as well as her fatal
cancer, might have been avoided had chronic proteid intoxication not
been the result of her menus. She also took pride in her family and
trained the two older children as well as she knew, instilling in them
both a loyalty to certain ideals which evolved into morality. But her
failing health left Marie much to the care of her sister, and more to
the tutelage of her own desires. Unhappily, there was little of beauty
in the mother's last months which made any appeal to her child's love,
or left much to inspire a twelve-year-old girl's devotion when but
memory was left.

When the insurance was collected and all settlements made, the
comfortable old home and the jewels sold, each of the three children
had five thousand dollars. The brother's success was limited. He
invested his all, together with many notes of promise payable to his
senior partner, in a dry-goods business, and while he carried most of
the details of the establishment, the everlasting interest on his
notes, and his wife's love of and demand for fine feathers, kept ends
from ever successfully meeting.

The sister, the eldest, was fine. The illness and death of her parents
laid grave responsibilities on her young life, and she met them
seriously, wholesomely, constructively. She early proved herself
capable of large sacrifices. She had finished her college course
before her mother's death, and after the home was sold she secured a
position in the local woman's college, where she continued to teach
and to merit a growing respect for many years. She was not perfect;
the Wentworth temper flashed out most inopportunely, and work and pray
and sacrifice and resolve as she would, her rule of Marie was
unfortunate-flint and steel strike fire. Probably she "school-manned"
rather than mothered the child.

But with all environment favorable, Marie would have proven a
"proposition." The sporting blood and Bourbon high-balls of the father
and the mother's love of the good things of life more than neutralized
the latter's Methodism. Marie was a healthy, well-built, lithe lassie,
with raven-black hair and eyes which snapped equally with pleasure or
with wrath. Impulsive, intense, wilful, tempestuous, bright and
possessing capacity, pleasure-loving and ever impatient of restraint,
we see in her the highly developed nervous temperament. She feared
nothing save the "horrible nightmares" which frequently followed the
big dinners-a child who could have been led to Parnassus, but who was
driven nearly to Hell! She went through the public schools without
conscious effort, but her buxom figure, the rich flush of health, her
vivacity, her bearing, were irresistible to the youth of the
community, and a series of escapades culminated in her dismissal from
college; her indiscretions cost her the respect of the one man she
loved. At twenty she had spent two thousand of the five thousand left
her, while she and the sister failed to find harmony together. She had
little sympathy with her sister's plodding life, but realized the need
of preparing herself to earn, so entered a Cincinnati hospital. She
had many qualities which made her a valuable student-nurse, with
propensities which kept her in hot water. She had completed her second
year of training when she was dismissed. The interns could not resist
her, nor she them, and only so many midnight lunches on duty can be
winked at, even in a hospital needing nurses. For nearly a year she
was spasmodically occupied as an experienced nurse. The end of this
year found her one thousand dollars poorer, while her heritage was
becoming more manifest. In the place of her father's periodic
alcoholism, it was periodic headaches. She was thoroughly impatient of
personal suffering, or of any hygienic restraint, and so took heavy
doses of headache-powders and, if these did not relieve, opiates. By
falsifying her record, she succeeded in entering another training-
school, a smaller one, in her own state. For a year she was careful-
she was anxious to graduate-and developed real cunning in the use of
drugs; but dependence upon these steadily undermined her reserve until
she was almost daily using something for the "tired feeling" which was
now so chronic. Nearly two years had passed before her drug-taking
habit was discovered. Prompt dismissal necessarily followed. Her
sister was informed, and insisted upon her going to an institution to
be cured. Five hundred dollars were spent, and three months of
treatment, directed to the withdrawal of her drug, gave no insight
into her need for seriously altering her habits of life and feeling,
brought no least conception of her defects of character without change
of which there could be, for her, no safe living.

During the next ten years her physical and mental deterioration
increased apace. Other courses of treatment were taken with no lasting
benefit. Her misfortunes seemed to culminate when she voluntarily
entered a "drug-cure" institute which was practically a resort for
drug-users. There are in every country unworthy places of this kind,
where no real effort to cure patients is made. Sufferers with means
are kept comfortable by being given drugs whenever they demand them,
thus satisfying their consciences that they are being "treated," while
vainly waiting till they are sufficiently strong to get entirely off
"dope." In such a house of quackery Marie stayed two years. Her
remaining fifteen hundred dollars and a thousand of her sister's went
for fake treatment. She learned to smoke cigarettes with the young
doctor; she played cards, gossiped, ate, slept and was never refused a
comforting dose whenever she couldn't "stand it a minute longer."
Worse than wasted years these, for even the remnants of her pride
faded, and she lived a sordid life of the flesh. The sister, when she
finally realized the gravity of the situation, lost all hope whatever
for any restoration and, acting under the advice of the old family
physician, had her committed to the State Hospital for the Insane as
an incurable narco-maniac. Here she was rudely but promptly deprived
of all narcotics, nor by any hook nor crook, cunning though she was,
could she secure a quieting, solacing grain. The wise superintendent,
believing that there was little chance for her true regeneration in
the surroundings of even his best wards, advised that she be sent to a
hospital where she would receive special care. The sister's funds
alone could make this possible, and her genuine worth is shown in her
willingness to spend a quarter of her entire savings that Marie might
have this chance. Here, thirty-three years old, we found her the day
after she had been transferred, the day after she had vainly tried to
carry out her vow to end things if she were ever "forced into another
treatment."

Throughout the years the primitive self had been pitted against her
own soul. She had always rebelled at her misfortunes, though they were
largely of her own making. She blamed others for her hardships, and
through the intensity of her resentment but made things harder. Not
the least expression of her depravity was her hatred for all who had
interfered with her wilful desires, particularly the sister, whose
sacrifice she ignored, but whom she took a malicious delight in
proclaiming to be the one who had forever ruined her chances in life
by committing her to an insane asylum. But her delight was malicious,
and all that she got out of her hate and maligning was deeper misery.
The bitter dregs of twenty years of soulless living were all the cup
of life now held for her--all the more bitter because of the finer
qualities of her nature. There were possibilities in this highly
organized girl which could have led her into an unusual wholeness of
living.

Six months passed, months of sullen, dogged resistance-resistance to
the returning health which was again rounding her form and glowing her
cheeks, resistance to proffered kindnesses of fellow-patients and
nurses, resistance to any appeal to pride, honor, ambition, right.
Sick of soul, she abjured the interest of the hospital workers, the
love of her sister whose weekly letters she left unopened, the
wholesome atmosphere of her surroundings, the personal appeal of those
whose hearts were heavy with desire to help.

Then the miracle!-for one came who cast out devils. She was not only a
nurse, she was one of those divinely human beings who, with a nurse's
knowledge and training, attain practical sainthood. She, too, had
frequently been repelled in her hours of contact with this unhappy
creature, but she believed that under all this unholiness there was a
soul. She was a busy, hard-worked nurse, but in time Marie became
aware that she was spending part of her limited off-duty hours to
minister to her, that she had requested a special assignment of duty
which would throw them together. Marie's four years of training made
her recognize the rareness of this giving. Curiosity at least was
aroused, and she began asking personal questions. An unconscious self-
pity impelled her to discuss the grievances of the life of nursing,
the unfairness common in training-schools, the injustices of long
hours and inadequate appreciation, with scores of other quarrels which
she had with life. Each of these was met squarely by her nurse-friend,
who, free from platitudes and cant, ever saw the ideal above it all,
who, loving her profession and loving humanity and promised to a life
of service, gently, beautifully, firmly stood by her principles. For
three months they were in daily contact--three thankless months for
the nurse, three months of cunning, evil-minded, suspicious testing by
the patient. Finally the very goodness of her friend seemed
intolerable, and a paroxysm of rage and resentment broke loose, in
which she cursed and abused her helper beyond sufferance. The nurse
suddenly grasped the unhappy woman's arms to shake some sense of
decency into her warped nature, one would have thought, but in truth
that eye might meet eye, and in this look the rare love, which can
persist through such provocation, awakened a soul. That look was at
once the revelation of the worth of the one and the worthlessness of
the other. A flood of tears drowned, it would seem forever, the evil
which was cursing. In a day, in an hour, the change was wrought, that
miraculous change which enters every life when the soul comes into its
own.

There were months in which the battle of self ebbed and flowed, but
never did defeat seem again imminent, and the final victory was found
in a high resolve which took her back home a quiet, subdued woman,
forgetful of self in her sense of debt to the sister whose goodness
she had never before admitted. For years they lived together, she
keeping the simple home and keeping it well, saving, industrious,
devoted, even loving. She has largely avoided publicity, though always
ready to nurse in emergencies. Nobly she is expiating the past, and
has long since worthily won the "well-done" of her moral self.




CHAPTER XIX

THE SUFFERING OF SELF-PITY


Alac MacReady was not much of an oarsman. Big and strong, and
heretofore so successful that his large self-confidence had never been
badly jolted, he was quite at a disadvantage, this June afternoon, as
he attempted to row pretty Annette Neil across the head of the lake to
where she said the fishing was good. Twice already he had splashed her
dainty, starched frock, ironed, he knew, in the highest perfection of
the art, by her own active, shapely, brown hands. And each awkward
splashing had been followed by flashing glances which shriveled self-
esteem even as they fascinated. They had planned to spend the sunset
hour fishing, then land in time to meet the crowd and be driven on to
Border City to a neighboring dance, and all come back to Geneva
together.

Alac's rural North-England training had developed in him many
qualifications of worth but, among these, boating was not one. Had he
told the truth when this little trip was planned, he would have
admitted that he had never rowed a boat a half-mile in his life.
Annette could do it tip-top; why not he? But things were
unquestionably perverse. The boat wouldn't go in a straight line-in
fact, it didn't go very fast anyway. The black eyes before him framed
by that impudently beautiful face, so pert, so naive, so
understandingly aware--so "damned handsome" he said to himself,
prodded him to redoubled effort. He was swinging his two hundred
pounds lustily, unevenly--an unusually vicious jerk, and snap went the
old oar! Off the seat he tumbled, and, with land-lubber's luck,
unshipped the other oar and away it floated, and a mile from land,
they drifted.

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