Book: Our Nervous Friends

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




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realized that their Fifth Avenue home was rapidly growing out of date,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.

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