I am not writing an autobiography, and these things, not of importance in themselves, require only the briefest allusion. They will serve to explain the general cast of my life, which in turn may define the features of my story.
There are two kinds of solitary: he who is drawn by the inward, and he who chooses the outward life. To this latter class I had belonged. Circumstances, which it is not necessary to detail here, had thrust me into the one as a means of self-preservation from the other, while I was yet quite young.
I had been occupied more largely with the experiences of other people than with my own. I had been in the habit of being depended upon. It had been my great good fortune to be able to spend a part of my time among the sick, the miserable, and the poor. It had been, perhaps, my better chance to be obliged to balance the emotional perils of such occupations by those of a different character. My business was that of a school-teacher, but I had traveled somewhat; I had served as a nurse during the latter years of the war; in the Sanitary Commission; upon the Freedmen’s Bureau; as an officer in a Woman’s Prison, and had done a little work for the State Bureau of Labor among the factory operatives of our own town. I had therefore, it will be seen, been spared the deterioration of a monotonous existence. At the time I was taken ill I was managing a private school, rather large for the corps of assistants which I could command, and had overworked. I had been at home, thus employed, with my mother who needed me, for two years.
It may not be unsuitable, before proceeding with my narrative, to say that I had been a believer in the truths of the Christian religion; not, however, a devotee. I had not the ecstatic temperament, and was not known among my friends for any higher order of piety than that which is implied in trying to do one’s duty for Christ’s sake, and saying little about it or Him,—less than I wish I had sometimes. It was natural to me to speak in other ways than by words; that does not prove that it was best. I had read a little, like all thinking people with any intellectual margin to their lives, of the religious controversies of the day, and had not been without my share of pressure from the fashionable reluctance to believe. Possibly this had affected a temperament not too much inclined towards the supernatural, but it had never conquered my faith, which I think had grown to be dearer to me because I had not kept it without a fight for it. It certainly had become, for this reason, of greater practical value. It certainly had become, for this and every reason, the most valuable thing I had, or hoped to have. I believed in God and immortality, and in the history of Jesus Christ. I respected and practiced prayer, but chiefly decided what I ought to do next minute. I loved life and lived it. I neither feared death nor thought much about it.
When I had been ill a fortnight, it occurred to me that I was very sick, but not that I could possibly die. I suffered a good deal at first; after that much less. There was great misery for lack of sleep, and intolerable restlessness. The worst, however, was the continuity of care. Those who have borne heavy responsibilities for any length of time will understand me. The incessant burden pressed on: now a pupil had fallen into some disgraceful escapade; now the investments of my mother’s, of which I had the charge, had failed on the dividends; then I had no remittance for the boy at college; then my sister, in a heart-breaking emergency, confided to me a peril against which I could not lift a finger; the Governor held me responsible for the typhoid among the prisoners; I added eternal columns of statistics for the Charity Boards, and found forever a mistake in each report; a dying soldier called to me in piercing tones for a cup of water; the black girl to whom I read the Gospel of John, drowned her baby; I ran six looms in the mill for the mother of six children till her seventh should be born; I staked the salvation of my soul upon answering the argument of Strauss to the satisfaction of an unbelieving friend, and lost my wager; I heard my classes in Logic, and was unable to repeat anything but the “Walrus and the Carpenter,” for the “Barbara Celarent.” Suddenly, one day, in the thick of this brain-battle, I slipped upon a pause, in which I distinctly heard a low voice say,
“But Thine eternal thoughts move on,
Thine undisturbed affairs.”
It was my mother’s voice. I perceived then that she sat at my bedside in the red easy-chair, repeating hymns, poor soul! in the hope of calming me.
I put out my hand and patted her arm, but it did not occur to me to speak till I saw that there were masses of pansies and some mignonette upon the table, and I asked who sent them, and she told me the school-girls had kept them fresh there every day since I was taken ill. I felt some pleasure that they should take the trouble to select the flowers I preferred. Then I asked her where the jelly came from, and the grapes, and about other trifles that I saw, such as accumulate in any sick-room. Then she gave me the names of different friends and neighbors who had been so good as to remember me. Chiefly I was touched by the sight of a straggly magenta geranium which I noticed growing in a pot by the window, and which a poor woman from the mills had brought the day before. I asked my mother if there were any letters, and she said, many, but that I must not hear them read; she spoke of some from the prison. The door-bell often rang softly, and I asked why it was muffled, and who called. Alice had come in, and said something in an undertone to mother about the Grand Army and resolutions and sympathy; and she used the names of different people I had almost forgotten, and this confused me. They stopped talking, and I became at once very ill again.
The next point which I recall is turning to see that the doctor was in the room. I was in great suffering, and he gave me a few spoonfuls of something which he said would secure sleep. I desired to ask him what it was, as I objected to narcotics, and preferred to bear whatever was before me with the eyes of my mind open, but as soon as I tried to speak I forgot what I wished to say.