Book: Our Nervous Friends

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




Francis was large for his age, unusually active and remarkably direct
mentally, therefore little adjustment was needed as he entered that
usually leveling community--boy-school-life. He was generous and good-
hearted to a lovable degree and with such qualities and advantages he
early became, and remained, leader in his crowd. After his father died,
the boy, not unnaturally, placed him--the only one whose will he had
ever had to respect--high in his reverence. The father had been a
powerful young man, a boxer to be feared, oar one in the Varsity Crew;
a man who, through the force and brilliancy of his business life, had
won more than state-wide prominence, and had left many influential
friends who spoke of him in highest respect. It was to be expected that
the father's strong character would have deeply influenced his only son,
and like father like son, only more so, he grew. But the "more so" is
our tale.

"Rare, juicy tenderloin steaks go to muscle. You don't need much
else, and we didn't get much else at the training-table," the father
used to say, and they unquestionably formed the bulk of the boy's
naturally fine physique, for he developed in spite of much physical
misuse into a two-hundred-pound six-footer. Francis began smoking at
twelve. On his tenth birthday a small wine glass had been filled for
him and thereafter he always had wine at dinner, and he liked it--not
only the effects but the taste. The desire was in his blood--Before
he was eighteen he was brought home intoxicated and unconscious. No
law had ever entered into his training which suggested any form of
self-control. The principles of self-mastery were unthought; they had
been untaught. "Eat, drink and be merry" might express the sum of his
ideals. And so, physically or mentally, no thought of restraint
entered his youthful philosophy. There was nothing vicious, no strain
of meanness, much generosity; naturally kindly and practically devoid
of any spirit of contention, and peculiarly free from any touch of
the disagreeable, he was blessed with a spirit of good fellowship. He
never questioned the rights of his friends to do as they pleased, and
they quite wisely avoided questioning his right to do likewise; so,
desire was untrammeled and grew apace. It was in Francis Kent's
failure to bridle this power that the threads were first snarled.

The boy's fine body was trained in a haphazard way. Had his father
lived, it might have been different. Mentally, he was naturally
industrious and next to the joys of the flesh came his studies. It
was as toastmaster at his "prep-school" commencement-banquet that he
first drank to intoxication. The next fall he entered Yale, and there
is no question but those days this revered university had a "fast
set" that was emphatically rapid. But Francis Kent could go the
paces; in fact, none of the football huskies could put in a night out
and bring as snappy an exterior and as clear a wit to first class
next morning as young Kent. His heredity, his beefsteaks, the gods,
or something, certainly made it possible for him to be a "bang-up
rounder" and at the same time an acceptable student through four
college years.

He was almost gifted in a capacity for the romance literatures, and,
anomalous though it may seem, he majored and excelled in philosophy.
He was truly a popular fellow when he took his degree at twenty-two.
High living had given him high color; his eye was active and his face,
though somewhat heavy, was mobile with the sympathy of intelligence;
his physique was good; he dressed with a negligee art which was
picturesque. Big of heart, he had a wealth of scholarly ideas, and not
a few ideals; many thought he faced life a certain winner.

Practically every door was open to him, and he chose--Europe. Those
were two hectic years. Every gait was traveled; for weeks he would go
at top-speed, go until nerve and blood could brook no more. No
conception of the duty of self-restraint ever reached him till, at
last, the nervous system, often slow to anger, began to express its
objection to the abuse it was suffering. He was not rebounding as in
the past from his excesses. For a day or so following a prolonged
drinking bout he would be apprehensive and depressed, unable to find
an interest to take him away from the indefinite dread which haunted
him. Not till he could again stand a few, stiff glasses of brandy
could he find his nerve. A friend found him thus "shot up" one day and
suggested that he was "going the pace that kills," and hinted that
another path might be trod with wisdom. "What's the use?" Kent flung
back, "I'm fated to go with an alcoholic liver; it's in the family
strong--both sides. I saw my father go out with it. I know Mendel's
theory by heart, two black pigeons never parent a white one." And on
he went. His creed now might well have been: "For to-morrow I die."

It may have been the impulsion of an unrecognized fear--he said it was
philosophic interest--which had attracted him to study the various
theories of heredity. He had been particularly impressed by Mendel's
"Principles of Inheritance," and its graphic elucidation of the
mathematical recurrence of the dominant characteristics had grasped
him as a fetish. With such forebears as his, there was no hope. The
die had been cast before he was born. Why struggle against the laws of
determinism? He was what he was because forces beyond his control had
made him so. Scientific certainty now seemed to add its weight of
evidence to his accepted fatalism, when, at twenty-eight, instead of
the accustomed days of depression, a period of particularly heavy
drinking was followed by a serious attack of delirium tremens. For
several days he was cared for as one dangerously insane. After reason
had been restored, the doctor, in his earnest desire to help, warned
him that he must live differently and, knowing the father's ending,
thought to frighten him into a change of habits by stating that his
drinking would kill him in a few years if he kept it up. "You are
already in the first stages of cirrhosis," he told him. As it turned
out, no warning could have been less wise; it simply assured Kent the
certainty of the fate which pursued, and soon he was at it again.
Before thirty he had suffered two attacks of alcoholic delirium, had
been a periodic drinker for fifteen years, a regular drinker for five
years, often averaging for weeks two quarts of whiskey a day, and
always smoking from forty to fifty cigarettes. Life had become more
and more unlivable when he was not narcotized by alcohol or nicotine,
and he was fast becoming a pitiful slave to his intoxicated and
damaged nervous system.

He was living at home now, nominally secretary of a strong
corporation--practically eating, smoking, drinking, theater-going,
lounging at the Varsity Club, and playing with his speedy motorboat.
He enjoyed music and, when in condition, occasionally attended
concerts. Barely he went to the Episcopal service, then only when
special music was given. The faithful will discern the hand of
Providence in his first seeing Martha Fullington in one of these rare
hours at church. She was truly a fine, wholesome woman. The daughter
of a small town Congregational minister of the best New England stock,
she had always been healthy in body and mind. She possessed an unusual
contralto voice, and came to Buffalo at twenty-two for special
training. Helpful letters of introduction, with her pleasing self and
good voice, rapidly secured her friends and a position in a
fashionable church-choir. Here Kent heard her in a short but
effectively rendered solo. Unsusceptible as he had been in the past,
the sacredness of her religiously inspired face appealed to him
strangely. Within a fortnight a new and profound element was to
complicate his life, for he met Miss Fullington and took her out to
dinner at the home of a classmate, whose mother was befriending the
young singer. The spell of her charm wakened the power of his desire.
Whether it was from the stimulation of her inherent difference to
other women he had known, or whether deep within, and as yet
untouched, there was a fineness which instinctively recognized and
responded to fineness, we may not say with certainty. He was remote
from her every standard, she thought, and her seeming indifference was
a conscious self-defense. But she inspired him with a sincerity of
purpose he had not known before. He was frank; he was potently
insistent and "hopeless," he told her, "unless you save me." Thus
unwittingly he appealed to the mother sympathy, the strongest a good
woman can feel.

They were engaged and the wedding was all that any bride could have
desired. Then ten weeks abroad, beautiful, revealing weeks, for
Francis Kent, sober and in love, was much of a man. Still it was only
ten weeks before the formal social function, with its inevitable array
of wines, turned this kindly, genial lover, in an hour, into a coarse,
inconsiderate drunkard. Confined for a week in their state-room on the
steamer home with her husband, now a beast in drink, this poor, pure,
uninitiated wife realized purgatory. Dark days were those next three
years for them both. When sober, he was self-abased by the knowledge
of the suffering of this woman he so truly loved, or was restlessly
striving against desires which only alcohol could sate; while she was
alternately fearing the debauch or fighting to keep her respect and
love intact through the debauchery. For him, the battle waged on
between love and desire, his love for her--his one inspiration, while
desire was constantly reenforced by the taunts of his godless fatalism
and the dead weight of his hopelessness.

Then came the day which is hallowed in the lives of even the ignorant
and coarse, the day in which the young wife gladly suffers through the
lengthening hours and goes down to the verge of the Dark River, that
in her nearness to death she may find that other life, the everlasting
seal of her marriage. In all the beauty of eagerly desired motherhood,
Martha Kent bore her baby-boy. The father was not there. She did not
then know all. They shielded her. He had been taken the night before
to a private asylum, entering his third attack of delirium tremens,
and while his wife in pain and prayer made life more sacred, he,
struggling and uncontrolled, beast-like, was making life more
repulsive. The pain of her motherhood never approached the agony of
her wifehood, when she knew, while the pride of fatherhood was utterly
submerged in the poignancy of his self-abasement, when he realized.

Another physician had treated him during this attack. He, too, wished
to help. He talked with the humiliated man most earnestly, insisting
that he had never truly tried, that in the past he had depended on his
weak will and the inspiration of his devotion. He had not had
scientific help. He assured him that he did not have incurable
hardening of the liver and expressed, as his earnest belief, that
there were places where the help he needed could be given--that there
was hope. Plans were made and Francis Kent gave his pledge, expressed
in a voluntary commitment, to carry out a six months' system of
treatment. "Not," as he assured the physician-in-charge, "that I can
be saved from the effects of what has gone before. I know my heredity
is too strong for that. But by every obligation of manhood I owe my
wife and boy five years of decent living. If you can make that
possible, I shall be satisfied." The professional help Kent received,
physically, was deep-reaching. It accurately adjusted food to energy
expended. Forty self-indulgent cigarettes were transformed into three
manly cigars, and he was put to work with his hands--those patrician
hands which had not made a brow to sweat, for serious purpose, in
three generations. His physical response in six weeks completely
altered his appearance. The snap of healthy living reappeared; the
pessimism of his fatalism was displaced by much of quiet cheer. Life
was again becoming a good thing. But the professional help he received
mentally was what untangled the snarl. His advisor was fortunately
able to go the whole way with him as he discussed his hereditary
"inevitables"--the whole way and then, savingly, some steps beyond--
and for the first time Kent's understanding, now reaching for higher
truths than would satisfy the fatalist, was wisely, personally
conducted through a wholesome interpretation of the distinction
between the heritage of germinal and of somatic attributes, that vital
distinction: that it takes but two ancestors to determine the species
of the offspring, but that the individual's personal heritage is the
result of, and may be influenced by, a thousand forerunners; that
dominant characteristics, compelling though they seem, may be
neutralized by obscure, recessive characteristics. More than this, his
new counselor was able to convince him that the real damage he had to
overcome was not a foreordained physical fate, for that was in a
peculiar way largely in his own hands, now that he was properly
started, but was the mental tangle of his unholy fatalism which
absolutely did not represent truth; that he and all rational, normal
men have been given wills and are as free as gods to choose, within
certain large limitations. Francis Kent's mind had been well trained.
Selfish desire had made of him a fatalist. A more beautiful desire led
him into a constructive optimism. He thought deeply for a week,
perchance he prayed, for he knew that she was praying from the depths
of her soul. He outlined for himself a new, thoroughly wholesome mode
of life, and in half an hour's heart-to-heart conference convinced his
doctor-friend that more had been accomplished in two months than could
have been promised at the end of the six months planned. So the new
Francis Kent was told to go back and make a new home for his wife and
the new baby. Years have passed--blessed years in the old mansion.
There is no hint of cirrhosis of the liver. There has never been a
drop of anything alcoholic served in that house since his return.
There are two healthy chaps of boys; there is a wonderfully happy
woman; there is a fine, manly man, the respected and efficient
president of an influential bank. Patient, wise hands carefully
untangled the knotted snarl. The thread was unbroken.




CHAPTER XV

FROM FEAR TO FAITH


Thirty some years ago a baby girl came into a Virginia home. Her birth
was a matter of family indifference; not specially needed, she was not
particularly wanted. Her father, reared in a small town, having
attained only moderate success as combination bookkeeper, cashier and
clerk in a general store, could not enthuse over an arrival which
would increase the burden of family expense. He was a man of good
Virginia stock, not fired by large ambitions. An ubiquitous cud of
fine-cut, flattening his cheek and saturating his veins, possibly
explains his life of semicontent--for tobacco is a sedative. The
mother was a washed-out, frail-looking reminder of youthful
attractions, essentially of the nervous type. She was not without
pride in her Cavalier stock and the dash of Cavalier blood it brought.
The elder sister had none of her mother. Aspiring socially, she was
reserved, pedantic, platitudinizing, thoroughly self-sufficient. She
finished well up in her class in a small, woman's so-called "college"
and lived with such prudence and exercised such foresight that, in
spite of her Methodist rearing, she wedded the young, local, Episcopal
rector, and, childless but still self-sufficient, "lived happy ever
after."

Our little Virginia's home surroundings gave her all material
necessities, many comforts and occasional luxuries, but it was a home
of narrow interests. Its own immediate affairs, including big sister's
successes; critically, the doings of the neighborhood, and
unquestioningly, the happenings of the church circle, comprised the
themes of home discourse. Markedly lacking in beauty was that home--no
music, a few perfunctory pictures, a parlor furnished to suit the
local dealer's taste and stock, a few sets of books--the successful
contribution of unctuous book agents. All converse was lacking in
ideals save the haphazard ones brought home by the children from
school. There was no pretense of unselfishness, the conception was
foreign to that home's atmosphere. The religious teaching was of
formalism and fear. The services of the church were regularly
attended, and from time to time the children's discipline was
augmented by references to the certain wrath of God. Into this home
came Virginia to be reared under most irregular training, dependent on
a combination of her mother's feelings and her sister's conventions--
the father's influence was negative, his was a well-bred nicotine
indifference. In the little girl's life, every home appeal was
emotional. During the mother's more rare, comfortable days, she
exacted few restrictions, but much more often fear methods marked her
use of authority: fear of punishment, fear of the Invisible, and, from
her sister, fear of "what folks will say" were the chief home
influences molding this young life. Such appeals found in her
sensitive nature a rich soil. No single consistent effort was ever
made to substitute reason for emotional supremacy, as she developed.
At times her feelings would run rampant--what was to keep them in
order but disorganizing fear?--while too often her mother weakly
rewarded Virginia's most stormy outbreaks by acceding to her erratic
desires.

In one element did this home take pride. As true Virginians, the good
things of the table were procured at any cost. Good eating was a
pride--and rapid eating became the child's habit. Yet with all the
sacrifices of time and effort, the richness of their table cost, and
in spite of the fact that eating was ever in the forefront of family
plans and efforts, no conception of the true art of dining was ever
theirs.

At sixteen Virginia was attractive, with remarkably clear, olive skin,
with hair, eyes and eyebrows a peculiarly soft chestnut. Fun-loving,
thoughtless, vivacious, spasmodically aggressive, naturally athletic,
capable of many fine intuitions, she finished the local high school
with a good record, for she was mentally alert. Still most of her
thinking was of the emotional type, and smiles were quick and tears
were quick, and upon a feeling-basis rested her decisions. The tender-
heartedness of a child never left her, and when trusted and encouraged
she had always shown an excellent capacity for good work. She was
essentially capable of intense friendships, under the sway of which no
sacrifice was questioned, but her stormy nature made friendships
precarious. Pervading her life was a large conscientiousness. Her
fear-conscience was acute--never an unwholesome impulse but fear-
conscience rebuked and tortured. Few bedtimes were peaceful to her,
because at that quiet hour remorse, entirely disproportionate to the
wrong, lashed her miserably. Her love-conscience, too, was richly
developed, and for love's sake she would have become a martyr. Her
duty-conscience was yet in its infancy and held weak council in her
plans and rarely swayed her from desire.

After a year of normal-school training, she secured a primary grade in
a near town school, and at nineteen, when she became an earner, there
were two Virginias; the beautiful Virginia was a woman of appealing
tenderness--body, heart and soul yearned for some adequate return of
the richness of devotion which she felt herself capable of giving.
Sentiment and capacity for love were unconsciously reaching out for
satisfying expression, and the beauty of this tenderness shone forth
to make appealing even her weaknesses. The other Virginia was a
conglomerate of unhappy and harmful emotions--impatient in the face of
small irregularities, frequently irritable to unpleasantness, and
dominated by the false sensitiveness of unmerited pride. Under
provocation, anger, quick-flaming, unreasonable and unreasoning,
burned itself out in poorly restrained explosions--a quarter-hour of
wrath, a half-hour of tears and a half-day of almost incapacitating
headache. She was ambitious and had rebelled at her limitations,
especially as she grew to realize the smallness and emptiness of the
home-life. She resented her sister's superior attitude, her officious
poise, her college-education authority. But the damning defect was the
remorseless grip of fear on mind, body and spirit. Through ignorant
training, she was afraid in the dark, even afraid of the dark; a
morbid, cringing terror possessed her when she was alone in the night.
Even the protecting safety of her own bed could not save her from the
jangle of false alarms with which her imagination peopled the shadows.
A second gripping dread--one all too common with harmfully taught,
southern girls--was fear of negroes; a horrible, indefinite, haunting
apprehension chilled her veins, not only when associated with them,
but even more viciously when she was alone with her thoughts. And when
added to these was her superstitious fear of the Lord, magnifying the
evil of her ways, threatening, pervading, bringing no hint of Divine
love, the preparation was ample for the forthcoming emotional chaos.

At twenty-eight she was a sick woman. Through devotion to the kindly
principal of her school, a devotion not unmixed with sentiment, she
had worked intensely; quick, interested, almost capable, she had
worked and worried. School-discipline early loomed large as a rock
threatening disaster, dragging into her consciousness a sinister fear
of failure. Thirty little ones, from almost as many different homes,
representing a motley variety of home-training, looked to her to mold
them into an orderly, happy unit. Some of her little tots were as
thorns in her flesh--she couldn't keep her arms from around others;
while some afternoons the natural restlessness of them all set her
head to throbbing wretchedly. Her own emotional life not having found
order or calm, she from the first failed to develop either in her
charges. Visitors became a dread. Her only solace was the short
conferences she had with the principal after school. But to hear his
step approaching during class-time frightened her cruelly. Her order
was poor. He knew it. The visitors saw it. And the more she struggled
to master the problem of school-discipline, the greater grew the
menace of her own unorderly training. Within a few months she was
translating her emotional exhaustion into terms of overwork. The
penalty of unmerited food had produced an autotoxic anaemia, and she
was pale and weepy, easily fatigued, sleeping poorly, with the boggy
thyroid and overactive tendon reflexes so common in subacidosis. She
had to give up her school. After six months' ineffectual resting at
home, she entered a special hospital where, after some weeks of
intensive treatment, her physical restoration was remarkable. The
marriage of her sister and death of her mother closed the home, and
she went to live with a widowed aunt, the aunt who had managed her
household and her ministerial spouse to perfection. It was probably
Paul's injunction alone which kept her from taking her complacent
husband's place in the pulpit and delivering the sermons she had so
literally inspired. Here was an atmosphere of sanctity, but still no
hint of true, personal giving, no expression of willing sacrifice, and
Virginia felt keenly this lack, for in the hospital she had had a
vision. There she had seen suffering softened by gentleness, there
empty lives were filled from generous hearts, and men and women
inspired to make new and better starts. She had visioned the nobleness
of giving--and the unanswered call of her mother-nature had responded.
She was not fully well, she was not deeply living, she had never
fulfilled the best of self, and she hungered for the hospital. Her
aunt's conventional pride was echoed by the laws and the in-laws, and
positive, later peremptory objections were urged against her entering
nursing. Again the headaches returned, the physical expression of her
emotional unhappiness, and finally, almost in recklessness, certainly
in desperation, she cast her lot in the self-effacing demands of a
student-nurse's life in a city hospital, far from family and friends.

How shall we tell of the next three years? Training, reeducation,
evolution?--some of all perhaps. They were years of much travail.
Physical wholeness was won promptly through the wholesome habits of
active, daily effort, routine, regularity and rational diet. There was
suffering--months of suffering, under correction, for rebellion had
long been a habit, and hospital discipline is military in character.
But she had given her pledge, and fear-conscience and love-conscience
were later augmented by duty-conscience, and she never seriously
thought of deserting. Cheer expression is demanded in the nurse's
relations with her patients, and irritability and impatience slowly
faded through hourly touch with greater suffering; and the cheer habit
grew into cheer feeling. The old storms of anger seemed incongruous in
the imperturbable atmosphere of the hospital, moreover her dignity as
a nurse could not be risked. Thus was she helped till the solidity of
self-control made her safe. Her truly formidable battle was with fear
--no one can know what she faced alone on night duty. Her dread of the
dark was overcome painfully when through helpful counsel she gained an
intelligent insight into her defect, and was inspired to apply for
night duty in excess of her regular schedule. Later, at her own
request, she performed alone the last duties for the dead, that she
might put fear under her feet. Her dread of negroes gradually gave
place to a better understanding of the race through the daily
association of ministration on the ward, reenforced by personal
confidence in her own strength and skill, growing out of a wholesome
training in self-defense--a training her love for athletics and her
growing understanding of her fear-weakness moved her to take on her
off-duty time. She became competent; anxious to help, her fineness of
intuition and her capacity for devotion with her vision of service
made her in every way worthy. And finally her fear of the Lord was
lost in a wholesome faith in His "Well-done!"

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