Book: Our Nervous Friends

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




Of course "Sweetness" was spoiled--and an autocrat she was, her
mother, only, denying herself the indulgence of being her subject.
Mother, however, was lovingly tactful, and exercised the discipline
she believed necessary for her child's good most wisely. And Mother's
memory has ever remained a hallowed one. Mammy Lou did much to
discredit all of the mother's conscientious care. For so long the poor
child "couldn't eat no thin'," and when at last Minta's appetite
returned, her loving black nurse would give her anything she wanted,
and if the fever hadn't hopelessly damaged the little one's digestive
glands, Mammy Lou's unfailing "l'il snacks for her honey-chile" would
have completed the wreckage. At first the trouble was not noticed.
Minta rarely spoke of suffering. She would be found lying with her
face from the light, and would always reply that she was "tired
playing," sometimes only, "my head hurts." The parents thought she did
play too hard, for she was developing into an intense little miss, who
entered into whatever she was doing with more than blue-eyed zest,
those blue eyes which snapped blue-black when her will was crossed.

The girls all had their early teaching at home, so when Minta was
thirteen, Miss Allison came from Washington to spend a year, as tutor,
to prepare her for school the next fall. That was the year Georgia ran
away. She had been visiting in Savannah several weeks, when she
disappeared, leaving a hurried note to her friends, stating that she
would write her people from New York, and begging them not to worry
about her. The note from New York was thoughtlessly written. She was
probably frightened by what she had done. She was safe in New York
with Randolph, where they would be for ten days. She was sorry. Would
they forgive her? She knew she had done wrong. Write her at --- East
Fourteenth Street, where they were boarding.

The outraged father called the two girls and their mother into his
office, and read them Georgia's letter, then tore it into bits. "Your
sister's name is never to be mentioned again in this house. She has
brought the first dishonor to the Southard name in America. She is
disowned, and may she be swallowed up in her own disgrace."

Nothing had ever so impressed Minta as her father's face that day. A
primitive savagery spoke, intensified by the refinements of Cavalier
blood. No one dared utter a word of protest. He was implacable as
adamant, they all knew. Mr. Southard was never the same. Some of his
genial tenderness was lost forever, and the family lived on with the
unmentionable name ever before them, like a grave which was never to
be filled. The father was away much more the following year. He never
drank at home. And, after his death, it was found that he had gambled
away many thousands-all of Georgia's part. Thus a father's pride of
family met a daughter's impulse.

The little mother, never strong, always patient and devoted and
lovable, seemed unable to rise above the shame and the sorrow of it
all, and could give less and less to Minta, who now found in Miss
Allison and Mammy Lou her most potent influences. Miss Allison was
worthy the responsibility and probably did much to decide the girl's
future. She had studied art, and had hoped to spend years abroad.
Financial disappointments had made this impossible. But her
imaginative pupil loved the art of which she spoke so often, and
begged to be taught to sketch. She early showed unusual skill and the
promise of talent; still the father would not consider her going North
with Miss Allison to school. Yet the seeds had been sown and an artist
she was to be. But the cost!

Two years she spent at Converse College. During the second summer-
vacation her father died, and as her mother's heart was gradually
weakening, Minta stayed at home the following year. A few weeks before
the dear mother slipped away, she talked with Minta about the older
sister, dutifully avoiding the mention of her name. "I have never felt
right about the way we treated her," she said. "Some time when you are
older, won't you try to find her and help her?"

The Cavalier was in the younger daughter too. "I certainly think she
has caused unhappiness enough. She made our home a different place,
and she shortened Father's life. I can't forgive her."

"But, Daughter, we don't know. There may have been some mistake."

Minta was decided. "She no longer belongs to the Southard family.
Father was right."

The mother did not insist, and only said, "She, too, is my child. She
is of your blood. We should forgive."

Her mother was with her but a few weeks after this conversation. And,
within two months after her funeral, an attack of pneumonia robbed
Minta's already frail body of strength which might have come at that
developing age. Much of the next eighteen months she spent in bed. It
was then decided that she consult a friend of her father's, a city
physician. Unfortunately, this ambitious surgeon had been but a
convivial friend. His professional development had reached only the
"operation" stage. Surgery to him was a panacea, and the operation,
which he promised to be her saving, was to be her tragedy. She did not
know till two years later that she had been robbed of her birthright.
Her headaches, far from being helped, were even worse, now blinding
and exhausting. She at last went East to a world-renowned specialist
who undid, as far as his great skill could, the damage of the first
operation, and who, great man that he was, had time not only to
operate but to comprehend. His cultivated instincts led him directly
to an intimacy with his patient's idealisms, and he was one to whom
every right-souled sufferer could trust his deepest confidence without
reserve.

"I fear, little girl, your ambitions are only for those of
unquestioned strength. You are but a pigmy. Certain organs, essential
to the conversion of food into energy, were injured beyond all repair
in your first illness. Other damage which neither time nor skill can
make good was inflicted by your first operation. Your eyes are
entirely inadequate for the merciless exactions of a life of art. You
are at best but a delicate hot-house plant-beyond human power to
develop into sufficient hardiness to be transplanted into the world of
Bohemia, or into much of any world save a sheltered one. You can never
be more than a semi-invalid."

This sentence the great doctor pronounced only after his own opinion
had been re-enforced by a conference of experts. And every word was
true, as far as he and the experts had investigated.

But there was the spirit of a Cavalier with which they had not
reckoned. "I'll not have it so. Life, the life that you give me, isn't
worth living. I shall have my two years in Europe with my art, if it
takes all those other years you say I can have by saving myself."

And she had them! One year first in New York in preparation, then two
years in Rome. Three weeks she worked; one week she suffered. And how
wonderfully she did suffer! She had been warned of the danger of drug-
relief. And when doctors came and began filling their hypodermic
syringes, her indignation blazed up. "If that's all you have for me,
you needn't come. I could give that to myself." She learned that quiet
and darkness, and, it seemed, fasting, dulled the edge of the pain and
shortened its duration, and that nothing else did as much.

There was another art student in Rome-a fine, poor American who, too,
was studying art because he loved it. How they could have helped each
other! They both knew it. It was as natural as life, after they had
worked together a few months, for him to ask if she could wait while
he earned, and made a name. She knew that waiting was not necessary;
that she had plenty for them both and that she could help him, as few
others, to more quickly win the fame which he was sure to attain. And
she knew, too, that she could not so love another-there was never a
doubt of that. But this time love was bitterly cruel. It came in all
its affection and beauty only to sear and rend. She "must not marry,"
the great surgeon had told her. So gently and fatherly he had said it,
that she did not realize its full import till now. Husbandless,
childless, a chronic, incurable sufferer, she must tread the wine-
press alone!

The man had gone. She could give him no reason. She could not remember
what she said to him. The world went black, and consciousness fled.
For weeks she lay in an Italian hospital. Etta and her husband came,
and the only rational words they could hear were her pleadings to be
taken back to Dr. Kingsley.

Somehow the trip was made. But it was a desperately sick girl, the
mere shell of a life, that they returned to America. It was weeks
before she realized where she was and other weeks before she was able
to tell Dr. Kingsley so that he could understand it all--not only of
sorrow's final revelation, but this time, what she had not mentioned
before, of Georgia--the family disgrace. She did not know the
wonderful power of Christian counsel and ideals to save from the so-
often misinterpreted sufferings of wrong spiritual adjustments. She
had not realized the healing power of the love of God expressed in the
lives of good men and women, and how it can sweeten the bitterness and
dissipate even the paralyzing loneliness of an impossible human love.

Dr. Kingsley's eyes had welled with tears when she told the story of
Georgia. How impellingly gentle was his voice when he said, "You'll
forgive her now, I know." Forgive her! What else to do, when he made
it so noble and beautiful and right. So when she was strong enough,
she began looking for the sister who had so complicated the years,
and, through an old school-friend, traced her to a little flat. And it
was even as her mother had thought. Georgia had married, "beneath the
family," she told Minta, the Georgia who was too proud to ever write
again. She was living in Brooklyn, the wife of Randolph, an assistant
engineer on an ocean steamship. And Etta came to visit Georgia, and a
great load, a load of which she had, through the years, been
unconscious, slipped away as Minta let go her enmity. "In all things,"
she said to Dr. Kingsley, "I am your obedient patient-all things but
one. I will work, and I shall work."

And she does work. No one understands how. Seventy-odd pounds of
frailty, with eyes which are ever resentful of the use to which she
puts them; with the recurrence of suffering which wrings every ounce
of physical strength, which for days holds her mind writhing as on the
rack, which tortures her to physical and mental surrender, but which,
through the lengthening years, has been impotent to daunt her regal
spirit.

And she gives, gives on through the days of relative comfort, gives of
her cheer which comes from, no one knows where; gives, spontaneously,
kindness which has multiplied her lovers, both men and women; and
gives of her ability which is unquestioned. There are a few publishers
who know her skill. There is a touch of pathos in all she draws,
pathos-never bitterness, never ugliness-always the breath of beauty.

Minta Southard, hopelessly defective in what we call health, has
triumphed through the harmony of a brave adjustment to her pitiless
limitations-a harmony realized by few, even though rich, in resource
of mind, powerful, in reserve of body.

Can we ignore the omnipotence of the spiritual?

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